Scandal Takes a Holiday Read online

  In Rome I worked from an office at my own house on the Embankment, just under the cliff side of the Aventine Hill. At this period of my informing career, I had two younger assistants nominally, Helena’s brothers, Aulus and Quintus. Both had their own preoccupations, so I was on my own with the Gazette inquiry. I felt relaxed; it had all the signs of a nice little escapade that I could handle blindfolded.

  That fine day two weeks ago, therefore, after my usual lunch with Helena, I had taken a pleasant walk to the Forum. There I did some preliminary homework. Most jobs came to me without warning; this time, it was good not to have to make the usual snap decision about accepting the work.

  At the column where the news is hung up daily, a handful of idlers were telling one another utter nonsense about chariot-racing. These time-wasters could not decide which way four horses were facing, let alone work out the odds on the Blues making a comeback with that snotty driver they unwisely bought and their new quartet of knock-kneed grays. In front of the column, a solitary slave stood copying headings, using big letters for his extracts so it would fill his tablet and look good. His master was most likely an overfed slug in a palanquin who never read the stuff anyway. When I say “read,” I mean “had it read to him.”

  It was late in the day for perusing the column. People who needed to keep up to date would have acquired the news hours ago. Fashionable politicos would want to start outmaneuvering their rivals before the rivals were up and networking. Adulterers would have to invent a good alibi before their spouses were awake. Even innocent householders liked to be abreast of the edicts: Helena Justina’s father always sent along his secretary in time for him to bury himself in his copy over breakfast. That, I was sure, had nothing to do with Decimus Camillus wanting to avoid conversation with his noble wife as he blearily ate his nice white morning rolls.

  I checked today’s familiar list. Most just made me yawn. Who cares about the number of births and deaths recorded in the city yesterday, or money paid into the Treasury and statistics relating to the corn supply? The election lists stink. Occasionally I found an intriguing nugget among the magistrates’ edicts, wills of famous people, and reports of trials—though not often. The Acta Diurna was instituted to list the doings of the Senate—tedious decrees and toadying acclamations; automatically I skipped that. I sometimes consulted the court circular, if I needed to see the Emperor and did not want to waste time hanging around on the Palatine only to learn he had gone to his granny’s villa for a festival.

  Now I skipped to the end, the most popular section. Here would be: prodigies and marvels (the usual lightning strikes and calves born with three heads); notice of the erection of new public buildings (hmm); conflagrations (everyone loves a good blaze in a temple); funerals (for the old women); sacrifices (ditto); the program of any public games (for everyone; the most consulted section); and privately submitted advertisements from snobs who wanted the whole world to know they had a daughter newly engaged to a tribune (boring! well, boring unless you had once flirted with the daughter) (or with the tribune). At last I reached the best bit: what the scribes discreetly call “amatory adventures.” Scandal—with the names of the parties robustly revealed, because we are an open city. Deceived husbands need to be told what is going on, lest they be charged with condoning it, which is statutory pimping. And the rest of us like a bit of fun.

  I was disappointed. Where the gossip should be was just a note that Infamia, the columnist, was on holiday. He often was “on holiday.” Everyone always joked about it. Let’s be blunt: it was thought that senators’ wives whose affairs he discovered sometimes gave him a free ride to shut him up, but the senators who knew about it then hired thugs to track down Infamia—and the thugs sometimes caught him. “On holiday” meant our scandalmonger was laid up with wounds again.

  With no juicy stories to delay me further, soon I was being interviewed by the rather dour scribes who run the news service. Or so they thought. I had more experience. In reality, I was interviewing them.

  There were two: Holconius and Mutatus. They looked about fifty, worn-out by years of deploring modern life. Holconius, the elder and presumably senior, was a seamy, thin-featured stylus-pusher who last smiled when the story came in about the Empress Messalina plying her trade in a brothel. Mutatus was still more po-faced. I bet he never even chuckled when the Divine Claudius pronounced his edict that farting was legal at dinner parties.

  “Let’s go through your problem,” I probed, fetching out a note-tablet. It made them nervous so I held the waxed pages upon my knee, with the stylus at rest. They told me they had “lost contact” with one of their number whose name, they said, was Diocles. I nodded, trying to give the impression I had heard, and of course solved, such mysteries before. “How long has he been missing?”

  “He is not exactly missing,” Holconius demurred. I could have scoffed, Well why call me in then? But those who work for the Emperor, putting an imperial gloss on events—skewing everything to look good—have a special way with words. Holconius had to send everything he wrote for Palatine approval, even if it was a simple list of market days. He then had every pearly phrase redrafted by some idiot until its impact was killed. So I let him be pedantic—this time. “We do know where he went,” he murmured.

  “And that was?”

  “To stay with a relative in Ostia. An aunt, he said.”

  “That’s what he told you?” I assumed “aunt” was the new term for fancy woman, but I thought no worse than that. “And he never came back?” So the fancy woman was tasty. “Is this unusual?”

  “He is a little unreliable.”

  Since no details were supplied, I embroidered it myself: “He is lazy, drunk, feckless, he forgets to be where he should be, and he’s always letting people down—”

  “Why—do you know him?” interrupted Mutatus, sounding surprised.

  “No.” I knew plenty like him. Especially scribes. “So the job for me is: go to Ostia, find the bonny Diocles, sober him up if he’ll let me, then bring him back?” Both of the scribes nodded. They seemed relieved. I had been gazing at my note-tablet; now I looked up. “Is he in trouble?”

  “No.” Holconius still hardly raised a sweat.

  “Any trouble,” I repeated quietly. “At work, involving work, trouble with women, trouble with money, health worries?”

  “None that we know of.”

  I considered possibilities. “Was he working on a particular story?”

  “No, Falco.” I reckoned Holconius was telling me the big fibs. Well, he was the political hack; Holconius, I knew, took the shorthand notes in the Senate, so untruths were his stock-in-trade. Mutatus just listed this month’s program for the games. He could do stupid inaccuracy with effortless grace, but he was weaker on pure lies.

  “And what section of the Gazette would Diocles normally produce?”

  “Does it matter?” asked Mutatus quickly.

  I deduced it was relevant, but I said sweetly, “Probably not.”

  “We do want to be helpful.” Reluctance filled his tone.

  “I would like to be fully informed.” Innocent charm filled mine.

  “Diocles writes the lighthearted items,” stated Holconius. He looked even more somber than before. As the edict reporter, he disapproved of anything light.

  I could tell that before I arrived today Holconius and Mutatus had held detailed conversations about how much to confide in me. I worked out what that meant. “So your absentee writes the shock-and-horror society news?”

  The two scribes looked resigned. “‘Infamia’ is the pseudonym of Diocles,” Holconius confirmed.

  Even before they admitted it, I wanted the job.

  V

  In my first week of inquiries in Ostia, I made a slow start. I reported my lack of progress to Helena, the morning after she arrived.

  “If Diocles’ landlady is his real aunt, I’m the back legs of a Syrian camel.”

  Helena and I were eating fresh bread and figs, sitting on a bale near
a ferry that took workers to and fro between the main town and the new port. We had risen fairly early. We were entertained by a stream of loaders, negotiators, customs men, and sneak thieves going to the port for their morning’s work. Eventually a host of newly landed merchants were ferried in, along with other foreigners in multicolored hues, looking bemused. The merchants, fired with know-how, raced straight for the hired mules. Once they realized all the transport had been taken, the general travelers milled around aimlessly; some asked us the way to Rome, which we pretended we had never heard of. If they were persistent we pointed out the road to take, and assured them they could easily walk it.

  “You are being childish, Marcus.”

  “I’ve been sent on fifteen-mile hikes by horrible locals in foreign parts.” I had been deliberately misdirected by roadsweepers in Rome too. “You thought of it first.”

  “Let’s hope we never see them again.”

  “Don’t fret. I’ll explain you are a senator’s daughter, brought up in ignorance and luxury, and have no idea of distance, direction, or time.”

  “And I’ll say you’re a swine!”

  “Oink.”

  Our room nearby came with neither a breakfast menu nor a slave to serve it up. The accommodation had a bucket for the well and a couple of empty lamps, but not so much as a food bowl. One reason we were out and about was to buy basics for picnics before Albia and the children arrived. My little daughters might be fobbed off with “Let’s all go hungry for fun on this holiday!” but Albia was a ravenous teenage girl; she turned nasty unless fed every three hours.

  At least we were in the commercial hub of the Empire. That helped with the shopping. Imported goods were piled in mounds everywhere and helpful negotiators were only too happy to drag items from the bales and sell them cheaply. Some actually had a connection with that cargo; one or two might even pass the price to the owner. I had already bought some winecups an hour ago, and thus considered my part done. There was no need to order up amphorae; provision had been put in hand by me. Helena pointed out that after a mere week on my own I had reverted to the classic informer. I now reckoned a room was fully furnished if it contained a bed and a drink, with a woman as an optional extra. Food was something to snatch at a street caupona while on watch.

  So far I had nobody to watch. My case was going nowhere.

  “You found out where Diocles was living, though?” Helena asked, after finishing a mouthful of fresh bread.

  I picked olives from a cone of old scroll papyrus. “A hired room near the Marine Gate.”

  “So staying ‘with his aunt’ was a fiction. He is not with his family?”

  “No. Commercial landlady of the forbidding kind.”

  “And how did you discover her?”

  “The scribes knew the street name. Then I knocked on doors. The landlady soon popped out of her hidey-hole, because Diocles had left owing rent and she wanted it. Her story matches what the scribes already told me—Diocles arrived here about two months ago, seemed set to stay for the summer season, but vanished without warning after about four weeks, abandoning all his stuff. It came to light because the Gazette had an arrangement to send a runner once a week to pick up copy. The runner couldn’t find Diocles.”

  Helena gurgled happily. “A weekly runner? So is there plenty of scandal at Ostia?”

  “I’d say Diocles just sits at the seaside and giggles as he makes it up. Half the people he libels are away themselves and never hear about it, luckily for him.”

  Helena licked her fingers. “You paid the rent he owed and obtained his baggage?”

  “No chance! I’m not paying some truant’s rent, especially for a room he hasn’t occupied.”

  “The woman has not relet the room?”

  “Oh, she relet all right. I refused to pay, and I’ve sent to the Gazette.”

  “For the money? She shouldn’t be paid twice.” I explained to Helena that port landladies traditionally double-charge, under an edict that dates back to when Aeneas first landed and was put up at a ludicrous rate in a fisherman’s spare room. Helena still looked disapproving, but now she disapproved of me. “Be sensible. I am trying to take an interest in your work, Marcus.”

  I gazed at her. I loved her very much. I pulled her closer, paused, carefully wiped olive oil from my lips, then kissed her tenderly. “I have sent for a very stern docket which will say I am to be allowed to take away Diocles’ property as it belongs to the state.”

  “The landlady will already have searched it; she knows it is dirty undertunics,” Helena demurred. She was still clasped to my chest. Passing stevedores whistled.

  “Then she will be impressed that the state is so interested in this man’s underwear.”

  “You think there may be something more useful in his luggage?”

  “I was brought up rough,” I said, “and I confess to some fetishes, but so far I have not sunk so low that I go sniffing at people’s old tunic stains.”

  “You want note-tablets.” Helena Justina snuggled against my shoulder and was silent for a while, watching the ferry. “Pages of helpfully scribbled clues.”

  Eventually, because she knew I was waiting for it, she murmured with polite curiosity, “My darling—what fetishes?”

  VI

  The arrival of our children occupied the rest of the morning. Aulus and I had a jocular chat about his planned trip to Athens while Helena and Albia talked gravely about why the dog seemed off-color. The girls toddled and crawled around on their own, looking for things to destroy in their new home. The dog, Nux, raced with them for a while then tired of the frenzy and hid under a bed.

  There was a lot to unpack. Everyone tried to avoid being the fool who ended up doing it. The person who sorts out the luggage on arrival always gets blamed for everything other people have left behind.

  Yes, of course it is unfair. Life is unfair. After ten years as an informer, that was the one philosophical certainty I still held.

  For Aulus, two hours in a hot cart with a cantankerous mule, supervising my retinue, had used up all his reserves. A fit and thickset young fellow who should have had endless energy, he soon put his feet up on a window ledge and fell asleep. Before he dropped off, he handed me the docket from the scribes, which gave me authority to obtain Diocles’ possessions. Aulus declined to take an interest in reclaiming the loot.

  I would have thought he was staying behind because he had taken a fancy to Albia, but she was far too young for him, and had a past too full of uncertainties for a conservative like Aulus. She came from Britain; she had been found in a gutter as a baby, during the Rebellion. She might be graced with Roman parentage—but equally might not. No one would ever know, so in society she was damned. As for Aulus, he had lost an heiress when his onetime fiancée, Claudia Rufina, married his brother instead; he was now determined only to cast his big brown eyes on a gilt-edged virgin with a line of pickled ancestors and moneybags to match.

  Albia might have had a crush on him, had she not suffered serious abuse before we rescued her. She avoided men now. Well, that was what I told myself, though, for all we knew when we took her in, her past might have made her promiscuous. Helena had faith in the girl. That was good enough for me.

  Domestic anxieties would once not have troubled me. Once, I had no ties. My only worries were how to pay the rent and whether my mother had spotted my new girlfriend. Becoming a husband and father had doomed me to respectability. Single informers are proud to have a racy reputation, but I was so domestic now that I could not leave two unmarried persons alone without soul-searching.

  Helena had no qualms. “If they were going to sleep together, they would have managed it on the way here.”

  “What a shocking thought.” I hid a grin.

  “Marcus, you are just startled that I still remember what you and I would have done.”

  I reminisced nostalgically. Then I consoled myself, “Well, Albia hates men.”

  “Albia thinks she hates men.”

  I could f
oresee trouble in that.

  “He is too fat,” commented Albia herself, coming in unexpectedly. How long had she been listening? She was a slender teenager with dark hair that could be Mediterranean and blue eyes that could be Celtic. Her Latin needed polish but Helena had that in hand. Soon Albia would pass for a freedwoman and the questions would stop. With any luck we could find her a husband with a good trade and she might even end up happy. Well, the husband might be happy. Albia had lost her childhood to isolation and neglect; that would always show.

  “Who is?” asked Helena disingenuously.

  “Your brother!” quipped Albia.

  “My brother just has a heavy frame.”

  “No.” Albia had reverted to her normal wounded seriousness. “And he is not serious about his life. He will come to a bad end.”

  “Who will?” asked Aulus, appearing in the same doorway in turn.

  “You will!” we all chorused.

  Aulus showed his teeth. He drank too much red wine and he tried to eliminate the stains by scraping his fangs with emery powder. The teeth would fall out, but he no doubt believed they would look very pretty in the dentist’s discard dish. He had all the normal vanity of a lad-about- town—and enough cash to be a fool every time he went into an apothecary’s shop. At the moment he reeked of cassia. “A bad end? I hope so”—he leered salaciously—“with any luck in Greece!”

  When he bothered to smile, Aulus Camillus acquired sudden good looks. It could have worried me, in relation to Albia. But we left them together anyway. For Helena and me, having someone to look after the children while we went out in tandem was too good a chance to miss.

  It was a hot day and the walk to the Marine Gate took us plenty of time. We stayed in the shade, dodging off the Decumanus and down shady side streets wherever possible. For a pre-republican town, Ostia possessed a good grid system and we found our way through its quiet alleys easily. It was afternoon, siesta time. A few lunchtime bars were still serving extended snacks to regulars, with furtive sparrows pecking at leftovers from previous clients. Thin dogs slept against doorsteps and tethered mules stood with their heads down at water troughs, tails flicking listlessly as they pretended their owners had left them abandoned. The owners, like most people, were indoors. They were enjoying normal lunchtime life: a quick bread and sausage snack, or a fast hump with their best friend’s wife; aimless conversation with a pal; a game of draughts; asking for more credit from a loan shark; or a daily visit to an elderly father.