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  'Surely you need a priest?'

  Lenia shrieked with outrage. 'I wouldn't trust one of those sleazy buggers! Don't forget I've washed their underwear. I'm in enough trouble without having my omens mucked up. You're a citizen. You can do it if you're prepared to be a par.

  'A man's duty is to honour the gods for his own household,' I intoned, suddenly becoming a master of informed piety.

  'You're scared of the job.'

  'I'm just trying to get out of it.'

  'Well, you live in the same building.'

  'No one ever told me it meant peering into a sheep's liver for the damned landlord! That's not in my lease.'

  'Do it for me, Falco!'

  'I'm not some cranky Etruscan weather forecaster.' I was losing ground. Lenia, who was a superstitious article, looked genuinely anxious; my old friendship with her was about to take its toll. 'Oh I'll think about it. I told you from the start, woman, you're making a big mistake.'

  'I told you to mind your own,' quipped Lenia, in her brutal, rasping voice. 'I heard you were back from your travels – though this is the first time you've bothered to call on me!'

  'Having a live-in.' I managed to beat her to a leering grin.

  'Scandalous bastard! Where've you been to this time, and was there profit in it?'

  'The East. And of course not.'

  'You mean you're too tight to tell me.'

  'I mean I'm not giving Smaractus any excuse to bump my rent up!' That reminded me of something. 'This deadly dump is getting too inconvenient, Lenia. I'll have to find somewhere more salubrious to live.'

  'Oh Great Mother!' Lenia exclaimed immediately. 'He's pregnant!'

  Taken aback by the shrewdness of her guesswork, I blushed-losing any chance of disguising my plight. 'Don't be ridiculous,' I lied as brazenly as possible. 'I know how to look after myself.'

  'Didius Falco, I've seen you do a lot of stupid things.' That was true. She had known me since my bachelor days. 'But I never thought you'd be caught out in the old way!'

  It was my turn to say mind your own business, and Lenia's to laugh seditiously.

  I changed the subject. 'Does your slimy betrothed still own that decrepit property across the court?'

  'Smaractus never disposes of a freehold.' He never bothered to redevelop a wrecked tenement either. As an entrepreneur, Smaractus was as dynamic as a slug. 'Which property, Falco?'

  'The first-floor spread. What's he call it? "Refined and commodious self-contained apartment at generous rent; sure to be snapped up." You with me?'

  'The dump he's been advertising on my wall for the past four years? Don't be the fool who does snap it up, Falco. The refined and commodious back section has no floor.'

  'So what? My shack upstairs hardly has a roof. I'm used to deprivation. Mind if I take a look at the place?'

  'Do what you like,' sniffed Lenia. 'What you see is all there is. He won't do it up for you. He's short of loose change.'

  'Of course. He's getting married!' I grinned. 'Old Smaractus must be spending every day of the week burying his money bags in very deep holes in faraway fields in Latium. If he's got any sense, he'll then lose the map.'

  I could tell Lenia was on the verge of advising me to jump down the Great Sewer and close the manhole after me, but we were interrupted by a more than usually off-putting messenger.

  It was a grubby little girl of about seven years, with large feet and a very small nose. She had a scowling expression that I immediately recognised as similar to my own. She was one of my nieces. I could not remember which niece, though she definitely came from the Didius tribe. She looked like my sister Galla's offspring. They had a truly useless father, and apart from the eldest, who had sensibly left home, they were a pitiful, struggling crew. Someone had hung one of those bull's-testicle amulets around this one's neck to protect her from harm, though whoever it was had not bothered to teach her to leave her scabs alone or to wipe her nose.

  'Oh, Juno,' rasped Lenia. 'Take her out of here, Falco. My customers will think they'll catch something.'

  'Go away,' I greeted the niece convivially.

  'Uncle Marcus! Have you brought us any presents?'

  'No.' I had done, because all my sisters' children were in sore need of a devoted, uncomplicated uncle to ruin their characters with ridiculous largesse. I couldn't spoil only the clean and polite ones, though I had no intention of letting the other little brats think me an easy touch. Anyone who came and asked for their ceramic Syrian camel with the nodding head would have to wait a week for it.

  'Oh Uncle Marcus!' I felt like a heel, as she intended. 'Cut the grizzling. Listen, what's your name – '

  'Tertulla,' she supplied, without taking offence.

  'What are you after, Tertulla?'

  'Grandpa sent me.'

  'Termites! You haven't found me then.'

  'It's urgent, Uncle Marcus!'

  'Not as urgent as scratching your elbow – I'm off!'

  'He said you'd give me a copper for finding you.'

  'Well he's wrong.' Needing to argue more strongly, I had to resort to blackmail. 'Listen, wasn't yesterday the Ides?' One good thing about helping Petronius at Ostia was that we had missed the Festival of the October Horse – once a savage carnival and horse race, now just a complete mess in the streets. It was also the end of the official school holidays. 'Shouldn't you be starting school now? Why are you loose today?'

  'I don't want to go.'

  'Tertulla, everyone who has a chance to go to school should be grateful for the privilege.' What an insufferable prig. 'Leave me alone, or I'm telling your grandma you've bunked off.'

  My mother was helping with the fees for Galla's children, a pure waste of money. Ma would have stood for a better return gambling on chariot races. What nobody seemed to have noticed was that since I gave my mother financial support, it was my cash being flung away.

  'Oh Uncle Marcus, don't!'

  'Oh nuts. I'm going to.'

  I was already feeling gloomy. From the first moment Tertulla mentioned my father I had begun to suspect today might not be all I had been planning. Goodbye baths; goodbye swank at the Forum

  …'Grandpa's in trouble. Your friend Petronius told him to get you,' my niece cried. Persistence ran in the family, if it involved telling bad news.

  Petro knew what I felt about my father. If Pa was in such trouble Petro reckoned even I would help him out, the trouble must really be serious.

  IX

  The emporium is a long, secure building close to the Tiber. The barges that creep up from Ostia reach the city with Caesar's Gardens on their left, and a segment of the Aventine district, below the Hill, to their right. Where they meet the left-hand city boundary at the Transtiberina, with a long view upriver towards the Probus Bridge, they find the Emporium lying to their right, a vast indoor market that includes the ancient Aemilian Portico. You can smell it from the water. A blind man would know he had arrived.

  Here, anything buildable, wearable or edible that is produced in auy province of the Empire comes to be unloaded at the teeming wharves. The slick stevedores, who are renowned for their filthy tempers and flash off-duty clothing, then crash the goods on to handcarts, dump them in baskets, or wheel about with great sacks on their shoulders, ferrying them inside the greatest indoor market in the world. Cynical sales are conducted, and before the importer has realised he has been rooked by the most devious middlemen in Europe, everything whirls out again to destinations in workshops, warehouses, country estates or private homes. The moneychangers wear happy stinks all day.

  Apart from a few commodities like grain; paper and spices, which are so precious or are sold in such quantities that they have their own markets elsewhere, you can buy anything at the Emporium. Through his profession, my father-was well known there. He no longer involved himself in general sales, for his interest had narrowed to the kind of fine-art trade that is conducted in quieter, highly tasteful surroundings where the purchaser submits to a more leisurely screwing and the
n pays a more gigantic premium to the auctioneer.

  Pa was a character people noticed. Normally I could have asked anybody if they had seen Geminus, and pretty soon someone would have told me which hot-wine stall he was lurking at. I should have been able to find him easily – if only the fierce patrolmen of the Fourth Cohort of vigiles had been letting people in.

  The scene was incredible. Nothing like it could ever have happened before. The Emporium lay in the area included by Augustus when he redrew Rome's boundaries because habitation had expanded. I had made the mistake of coming out from the old part through the city walls, using the Lavernal Gate – a spot always busy but today almost impassable. Down in the shadow of the Aventine approaching the Tiber, I had found chaos. It had taken me an hour to force a passage through the people who were clogging up the Ostia Road. By the time I really made it to the wharves beside the river, I knew something highly peculiar must have gone wrong. I was prepared for a scene – though not one evidently caused by my sensible friend Petronius.

  It was midmorning. The gates to the Emporium, normally closed at night for security but flung open at first light and kept that way well into the evening, now stood barred. Red-faced members of the watch were drawn up with their backs to the doors. There were a lot of them: five hundred men formed the half-cohort that patrolled the river side of the Aventine. A proportion were dedicated to fire-watching, and with the special dangers of darkness they were mostly on duty at night. That still left ample cover to combat daylight crime. Now, Petronius must have drawn up all the day roster. The line was holding, but I was glad I was not part of it. A huge, angry crowd was milling about insulting the watch and calling for Petro's head. Occasionally a group rushed forwards, and the line of patrolmen had to link arms and face them out. I could see a small cluster at the far end of the building where Porcius was handing out shields from a waggon.

  Petro was nowhere in sight. It seemed wise.

  With a spurt of anxiety I shoved my way to the front. 'Great gods, what's this? Am I supposed to believe that Petronius Longus, notorious for caution, has suddenly decided to make his name in history as the Man Who Stopped Trade?'

  'Shove off, Falco!' muttered Fusculus, who had been trying to argue with four or five score merchants and workmen, many of them foreign and all of them spitting fire.

  'Petro sent for me.' It was worth a try.

  'Petro's not bloody here!' Fusculus told me through bitterly clenched teeth as he pushed back a furious Gallic wine merchant by the simple means of lifting one leg and applying his boot sole firmly to the man's belt buckle. The Fourth Cohort were slightly more sophisticated than others in Rome, but no one argued with them twice. 'Petro's in shit. A Praetorian Guard dragged him off to the Palace to explain this mess.'

  'I may as well get back to bed then!'

  'You do that, Falco…'

  The vigiles had their hands full. With so large a crowd, in such an ugly mood, I did not fancy helping them. Luckily they did not demean themselves by asking. I had a let-out anyway, for I heard my name roared by an unmistakable foghorn, and turned to be greeted by my papa. He clapped me in his arms affectionately. This was not his normal greeting, just showing off before a crowd of foreigners. I shook myself free angrily.

  'Marcus! Let's get out of this stew – we've things to discuss!'

  I had nothing to discuss with my father. I experienced the usual sense of dread.

  He hauled me into a more-or-less quiet corner around the back of the old Galban granaries. Needless to say, the corner was in a wine bar. After my exhausting passage through the streets I did not object to that, though in an equal world since he had issued the summons, I would have preferred that he paid the bill. Somehow the chalked piece of tile landed on the table in front of me. -

  'Oh thanks, Marcus. Your health!'

  My father was a sturdy character of sixty-odd, with a greying thatch of marauding curls and what passed for a twinkle in his untrustworthy dark brown eyes. He went by the name of Geminus, though his real name was Favonius. There was no point in the change; that was typical. Not tall, he was still a commanding presence; people who wanted to annoy me said we looked alike. In fact he was heavier and shiftier. His belly supported a money belt whose weight told its own story. His dark blue tunic was now old enough to be used when he was lifting furniture around warehouses, but the wrecked braid on it, still with traces of silver thread, gave a clue to the style he could afford when relaxing socially. Women liked his grin. He liked most things about women. He had run away with a red-haired one when I was a child, after which he and I could hardly exchange a civil word.

  'Your mad crony's caused a bit of a pickle!' One of the few paternal routines he still honoured was criticising my friends.

  'He would have had his reasons,' I said coldly. I was trying to think of any possible reason for what Petronius had done. 'This can't just be a reprisal because some stallholder forgot to pay his market dues.'

  I have to admit, the thought had struck me that maybe Petro was so proud of himself for capturing Balbinus that he had become a power-crazed maniac. This had always been a Roman trait, at the first hint of success to dream of being deified. It seemed unlikely in Petro's case, however. He was so rational he was positively staid.

  'Tertulla said you'd spoken to him,' I prodded.

  'Oh you've seen Tertulla? That little mite needs looking after. You're her uncle. Can't you do something?'

  'You're her grandfather! Why me?' I felt myself going hot. Trying to instil a sense of duty into Father, who had already abandoned one generation, was hopeless. 'Oh Jupiter! I'll see Galla about it sometime… What's the tale here, Pa?'

  'Disaster.' My father enjoyed a spot of misery.

  'Well, that's clear! Can we be more specific? Does this disaster involve a major defeat for the legions in a prestigious foreign war – or just the lupin crop failing in two villages in Samnium?'

  'You're a sarcastic trout! It's this: a gang of robbers burst in last night and cleaned out half the Emporium.' Pa leaned back on his stool watching the effect on me. I tried to look suitably horrified, while still telling thoughtfully on my own fancy rhetoric. He scowled. 'Listen, you dozy bastard! They obviously knew exactly what they wanted – luxury items in every case. They must have been watching for weeks, until they knew they could snatch an exquisite haul – then they whipped in, snatched the goods to order, whipped out and vanished before anything was noticed.'

  'So Petronius has shut the building while he investigates what happened?'

  'I suppose so. But you know him; he wasn't saying. He just looked solemn and closed it.'

  'So what did he say?'

  'Stallholders and wharfingers would be let in one by one, with his man Martinus – '

  'Mother master of tact!' Martinus, with his high opinion of himself, was especially dour when dealing with the public.

  'To make a list of what was missing.' Pa completed his sentence doggedly. -

  'Well that's fair,' I said. 'Surely those idiots can see that their best chance of getting their property back will be if Petronius knows what to look for?'

  'Too subtle,' replied Pa with the famous flashing grin that had laid barmaids on their backs from here to the Flaminian Gate. It only caused irritation in me.

  'Too organised!' Petronius had my sympathies. Presumably he had come back from Ostia expecting a short stretch of peace after his Balbinus coup, only to be dragged from bed that very night to face one of the worst heists I could remember, in the most important building on his patch… Instead of enjoying a glorious rest as a community hero, he now faced working at full stretch for months. Probably with nothing to show at the end: it sounded as if this robbery had been scrupulously planned.

  One aspect was still niggling me. 'Just as a matter of interest, Pa – why did Petronius tell you to send for me?'

  My father put on his reliable look – always a depressing portent. 'Oh… he reckoned you might help me get back my glass.' He had slipped it in as del
icately as a fishmonger filleting a mullet.

  'They stole your glass?' I could not accept this. 'The glass Helena bought for you? That I nursed all the way back from Syria?' I lost my temper. 'Pa, when I left it with you, you told me you were carting the whole lot straight back to the Saepta!' The Saepta Julia, up by the Plain of Mars, was the jewellery quarter where Pa had his office and warehouse. It was very well guarded.

  'Stop roaring.'

  'I will not! How could you be so damned careless?'

  I knew exactly how. Traipsing to the Saepta with a waggon would have taken him an hour or two. Since he only lived two minutes from the Emporium he had gone home and put his feet up instead, leaving the glass that we had nursed so carefully to look after itself for the night.

  Pa glanced over one shoulder and lowered his voice. 'The Emporium should have been safe enough. It was just temporary.'

  'Now it's temporarily lost!' There was something shifty about him. My lava eruption checked in midflow. 'I thought you said this lift was planned? That they knew just what they were going for? How could anybody know that you had half a treasury in Syrian dinnerware, coincidentally brought home by me that very evening and locked up there for only one night?'

  Pa looked offended. 'They must have found it by chance.'

  'Oh donkey's balls!'

  'There's no need to be coarse.'

  I was doing worse than that: I was taking a stand. 'Now listen, Pa, let's get something straight. This loss is your affair. I don't want to hear any nonsense like you'll not pay Helena because you never took delivery-'

  'Stuff you!' scoffed Pa. 'I'd never cheat that girl, and you know it.' It was probably true. He had a sickening reverence for Helena's rank, and a wild hope she would make him a grandfather of senators one day. This was not the moment to tell him he was halfway home on that one. In fact, that was when I started hoping we would have a girl. 'Look son, I know how to shrug off a reverse. If the glass is gone for good I'll have to carry the loss and keep smiling. But after you buzzed off last night, I looked through the boxes. It was beautiful quality-'