Ode To A Banker (12 page)

Lysa said nothing to this philosophical speech.

'So,' Helena sprang on her in the same deceptively quiet tone, 'if Vibia inherits the scriptorium - who gets the rest?'

Lysa was well up to her. 'Oh, that will have to be confirmed when the will is read.'

'Smart get-out,' I sneered. 'I'm sure you know what it says.'

Lysa knew how to be a reed before the wind. 'Oh, there can be no need for secrecy... the main business will be divided. One of my husband's freedmen, a devoted servant of many, many years, whom we trusted absolutely to manage our affairs, is bequeathed a part of it.'

'I shall need his name,' I said. Lysa made a gracious gesture - though she did not volunteer it. 'Where does that leave Diomedes?' I then asked.

'My son will receive some money. Enough for him to live well.'

'By his standards?' I asked dryly. I bet they had had plenty of harsh words over his spending, but his mother looked offended that I commented. I suspected he was a wastrel, and she may have gathered what I thought. 'Is he happy with his share?'

'Diomedes has been brought up to expect the arrangements my husband has made.'

'And you, Lysa?' asked Helena.

'My contribution to the business will be recognised.'

'What happens to it now?' I pressed. Lysa was hedging and I was determined to break her reticence.

'Chrysippus has taken care of it.' The woman spoke as if for Chrysippus, the future of his business was more important than making happy heirs of people. 'It will be passed on in a way that is traditional in Greece.'

'What kind of business are we talking about?' I demanded. It must be something good, to be spoken of with the reverence Lysa used.

'The trapeza, of course.'

'The what?' I recognised the Greek. It sounded like something domestic. For a second its meaning escaped me.

She looked at me, wide-eyed, as if I ought to know. I had a bad feeling. When she answered, it was not dispelled.

'Why, the Aurelian Bank.'

XVIII

LATER, IN BED, I asked Helena, 'Do you ever yearn to be a "woman of independence" like Junia?'

'Running a caupona?' she chuckled. 'With the solemn approval of Gaius Baebius?'

I shifted my feet, with an effort. Nux, who was supposed to sleep in our third room guarding Julia, liked to sneak in and lie on the foot of our bed. We sometimes sent her back, but more often Julia moutaineered her way out of the cradle and came toddling after the dog so we just gave in. 'Running anything. You could certainly match Lysa and found your own bank.'

'We'll never have that much money, Marcus!'

'Ah, to quote an excellent Greek philosopher: "Why do bankers lack money, even though they have it? - They just have other people's!" That's Bion.'

'Naturally your favourite - Bion who said, "All men are bad". I'm not sure he was right about bankers lacking money... So - a little business of my own,' she mused. In the darkness I could not make out her expression. 'No; I have a full life with your affairs to run.'

'That makes me sound like Pa, with a female secretary constantly keeping him where he ought to be.'

'Flora ran her own caupona at the same time. And not badly. You must admit, Marcus, it has its own gruesome character. It has lasted for years. People regularly return there.'

'Dogs like peeing on the same column.'

'Don't think your father fails to notice your orderly life,' Helena said, ignoring my uncouthness as if she knew informers were not worth chastising. 'Even though you do your best to escape my efforts.'

'I'm just a lump of wet clay on your potter's wheel ... What about Pa?'

'I went to see him today. He asked me to take over Flora's inventories and accounts. I said no - but it made me think of Maia. I didn't tell her that he had asked me first, because both of them will enjoy believing they took the initiative. Geminus won't reveal that he asked me; it's not his style. He is as devious as you are -'

'Oh thanks!'

'Maia does not want to be the second runner in anything - in so far as even she knows what she wants.'

'What is she uncertain about? That sounds as if something is going on?' Helena did not answer me. I tightened my grip on her. 'I detect a mystery. What has she told you in your girly chats?'

'Nothing.'

'Nothing, eh?' Using my stylish knowledge of women, I made a note to look out for whatever it was. 'And what do you want in life, fruit?' This was a serious question. Helena had deserted a world of senatorial luxury and ease to be with me; I never lost sight of that. 'Apart from a handsome dog with poetic sensitivities, who is very good in bed?'

Then Helena Justina, refined daughter of the most noble Camillus, gave a loud snore and pretended my efforts at marital companionship had put her to sleep.

XIX

NEXT DAY my first stop was the Forum Romanum. Avoiding the Clivus Publicius and the scriptorium for the moment, I went down off the Aventine by the Trigeminal Gate, then through the meat market and around the bottom of the Capitol. Leading up towards the Temple of Juno Moneta - Juno of the Mint - running parallel with the overspill Forum of Julius, was the Clivus Argentarius - Silver Street. I rarely walked that way. I loathed the smell of bastards making money out of other people's needs.

The Clivus Argentarius had the exchange tables, with the hunch-backed slaves who assayed currency on hand-held balances. They would rob you, though not as mercilessly as the eastern deviants away at the Greek end of the Mediterranean. It was enough for these Roman small-change fiddlers to prey gently on dopey provincials who did not know the difference between a dupondius and an as (both brass, but on a dupondius the Emperor wears a radiate crown instead of a wreath - of course you knew that!) The coin-biting practitioners changing staters and obols into decent denarii were not my real quarries, however. I was considering the world of heavy finance; I needed to be where the big backers and brokers lurk. Those who secretly fund city enterprises at enormous interest rates during civil wars. Shipping guarantors. Investors in luxury trades. Criminals' dinner guests and Senate facilitators.

Since Chrysippus was a supporter of the arts - and supposedly rolling in money - I was surprised to discover that he did trade under the sign of the Golden Horse, right here. His Aurelian Bank, which I naturally viewed as a serious inheritance issue, appeared no more than a modest currency exchange. It had the usual lopsided table where a hangdog in a dingy tunic presided over a few battered coin boxes, gloomily swinging his creaky hand-balance from one finger as he waited for custom.

Was that all there was, though? I had noticed that all the stalls in the Clivus Argentarius, this well-placed and prestigious street, looked like one-man trinket-sellers under the cypress trees at some provincial shrine. Here, they all presented the most basic money-changing tables, apparently staffed by down-at-heel slaves. Was it a deliberate front? Bankers like to operate with bluff and secrecy. Perhaps every one had an enormous back office with marble thrones and Nubians wielding ostrich fans if you cared to sniff for it.

I presented myself at the Aurelian table and made an innocent enquiry about today's rate for Greece. 'What's that they call their coins?'

'
Drachmas.' The counter-hand was brutally indifferent. Not knowing that I could have talked to him of Palmyra and Tripolitania, Britain and unconquered Germany, all from personal experience, he identified me as a lummock who had never been east of the Field of Mars. He quoted me a medium-to-high exchange rate. A bad deal, yet no worse than most of the toothy sharks here would offer.

I applied a shifty look. Well, even more embarrassed than my usual suspicious lurking act. 'Er - do you ever do loans?'

'We do loans.' He looked at me as if I were a flea on a goddess's bosom.

I told myself I had just made a pile from the Census and could look anyone in the eye. Besides, this was a professional enquiry, a legitimate test. 'What would I need to do then, to get a loan from you?'

'Agree it with the chief '

It seemed impolite to mention that I had seen his chief yesterday lying prone and bloody, with a scroll rod up one nostril and gooey cedar oil all over him. Apparently the bank was continuing to trade as if tragedy had never struck. Had nobody told the staff yet that their proprietor had been taken out, or were they busy maintaining commercial confidence with false calm?

'Agree it?'

'Reach an accommodation.'

'How does that work?'

He sighed. 'If he likes you enough, an agreement is drawn up. In the consulship of Blah and Blah-blah, on the Whatsit day before the Ides of March - Let's do one - what do you call yourself?'

'Dillius Braco.'

'I Ditrius Basto -' Times were tough. People even messed up my aliases now - 'I certify I have received a loan from Aurelius Chrysippus, in his absence through Lucrio his freedman, and owe to him a hundred million sesterces - that's a notional figure - which I shall repay him when he asks. And Lucrio, freedman of Aurelius Chrysippus, has sought assurance that the hundred million sesterces mentioned is properly and rightly given - so you are not defrauding us or using the money improperly - and I, Ditrius Basto, give as my pledge and security - what do you have?' He was sneering more than ever. Looking at me in my third best streaky red tunic and the boots that I hated with the frayed straps, and still unbarbered, I could not blame him.

'What is usual?' I squeaked.

'Alexandrian wheat in a public warehouse. Chickpeas, lentils and legumes, if you're a cheapskate.' I could tell which he thought applied to me.

'Arabian pepper,' I boasted. 'Bonded in the Marcellus warehouse in Nap Lane.'

'Oh yes! How much?'

'I haven't counted recently. Some has been sold, but we are hanging back so as not to flood the market ... Enormous quantities.'

He did start to look uncertain, though disbelief still figured strongly.

'Arabian pepper, which I own, deposited in the Marcellus warehouse, which I have maintained in a secure condition, at my risk. Something like that,' he said politely, 'sir.'

Frauds have it easy. (The pepper had once existed, but even then it was owned by Helena, a bequest from her first husband, the loathsome Pertinax; she had long ago sold all of it.)

Believing I was wealthy, his attitude changed completely: 'Can I make you an appointment with Lucrio? When would be most convenient?'

I reckoned I would be meeting Lucrio, freedman and perhaps heir to the dead proprietor - on my own terms and in my own time. 'No, that's all right; I was just asking for a friend.' I slipped him a half as I had picked up at a frontier fort in Germania Inferior, where coppers were in short supply and they had to cut them up. It was an insulting tip for anyone, even if it had been whole currency. I skipped off down the street while he was still cursing me as a mean-spirited time-waster.

I walked into the Forum.

A short hop from the end of the Clivus Argentarius and across the front of the Curia brought me to the magnificent Porticus Aemilius, one of the finest public buildings of the Augustan Age. It was fronted by and joined to the Porticus of Gaius and Lucius, a two-storey colonnade of shops which was where my own frowsty banker lurked nowadays. His gorgeous squat was probably illegal in fact, but the aediles for some reason don't move bankers on.

His chained deposit chests stood in the main aisle of the Porticus on massive slabs of marble in various shades: Numidian yellow, Carystian green, Lucullan black and red, Chian pink and grey - and the purple variegated Phrygian from which the table supports at the Chrysippus house were made, and which I had seen yesterday stained with the dead man's blood.

My banker's chests, along with a folding stool and an unmanned change-table, were on the lower level of the Porticus, overlooked by a frieze showing scenes from Roman history, and shaded by a larger-than-life sized statue of a barbarian. Apt, if you believed money had played its sinister part in our noble past and would affect the future of the untamed areas of the world. (I was raving internally. My encounter with the Aurelian Bank's changer had left me overwrought.) The billet was also incongruous, if you believed bankers were merely men with dirty hands from shuffling coinage - that is, if you had failed to notice just how many elegant artworks most bankers own in their private homes.

I went upstairs to see Nothokleptes. If he was not in sight at his business location, he was to he found at his barber's between a couple of delicate acanthus-scrolled pillars in the upper colonnade. More beauteous decor. And the elevation gave him a good view of who was approaching.

He was seedy and suspicious, just about convincing as a Roman citizen, yet by birth probably Alexandrian and originally tutored in money matters by Ptolemaic tax-collectors. A heavy man, with jowls that were designed for pegging a napkin under his chin. He spent a lot of time at his barber's, where you could find him at ease as if the shaving chair were an extension of his business premises. Since his premises downstairs were so public, and usually guarded by a very unpleasant Pisidian thug, the barber's had an advantage. While you begged to overdraw on your already empty bankbox, you could send for a cold drink and have your fingernails manicured by a sweet girl with a lisp.