Pompeii (20 page)

His quarry was already halfway out of the window, presumably tipped off by the whistle from the elderly whore. But the engineer was across the room and had him by his belt before he could drop down to the flat roof below. He was light and scrawny and Attilius hauled him in as easily as an owner might drag a dog back by his collar. He deposited him on the carpet.

He had disturbed a party. Two men lay on couches. A Negro boy was clutching a flute to his naked chest. An olive-skinned girl, no more than twelve or thirteen, and also naked, with silver-painted nipples, stood on a table, frozen in mid-dance. For a moment, nobody moved. Oil lamps flickered against crudely painted erotic scenes—a woman astride a man, a man mounting a woman from behind, two men lying with their fingers on each other’s cocks. One of the reclining clients began trailing his hand slowly beneath the couch, patting the floor, feeling toward a knife that lay beside a plate of peeled fruit. Attilius planted his foot firmly in the middle of Africanus’s back, Africanus groaned, and the man quickly withdrew his hand.

“Good.” Attilius nodded. He smiled. He bent and grabbed Africanus by his belt again and dragged him out of the door.

“Teenage girls!” said Ampliatus, as the sound of Corelia’s footsteps died away. “It’s all just nerves before her wedding. Frankly, I’ll be glad, Popidius, when she’s your responsibility and not mine.” He saw his wife rise to follow her. “No, woman! Leave her!” Celsia lay down meekly, smiling apologetically to the other guests. Ampliatus frowned at her. He wished she would not do that. Why should she defer to her so-called betters? He could buy and sell them all!

He stuck his knife into the side of the eel and twisted it, then gestured irritably to the nearest slave to take over the carving. The fish stared up at him with blank red eyes.
The emperor’s pet,
he thought:
a prince in its own little pond. Not anymore.

He dunked his bread in a bowl of vinegar and sucked it, watching the dexterous hand of the slave as he piled their plates with lumps of bony gray meat. Nobody wanted to eat it yet nobody wanted to be the first to refuse. An atmosphere of dyspeptic dread descended, as heavy as the air around the table, hot and stale with the smell of food. Ampliatus allowed the silence to hang. Why should he set them at their ease? When he was a slave at table, he had been forbidden to speak in the dining room in the presence of guests.

He was served first but he waited until the others had all had their golden dishes set in front of them before reaching out and breaking off a piece of fish. He raised it to his lips, paused, and glanced around the table, until, one by one, beginning with Popidius, they reluctantly followed his example.

He had been anticipating this moment all day. Vedius Pollio had thrown his slaves to his eels not only to enjoy the novelty of seeing a man torn apart underwater rather than by beasts in the arena, but also because, as a gourmet, he maintained that human flesh gave the morays a more piquant flavor. Ampliatus chewed carefully yet he tasted nothing. The meat was bland and leathery—inedible—and he felt the same sense of disappointment that he had experienced the previous afternoon by the seashore. Once again, he had reached out for the ultimate experience and once more he had grasped—nothing.

He scooped the fish out of his mouth with his fingers and threw it back on his plate in disgust. He tried to make light of it—“So, then! It seems that eels, like women, taste best when young!”—and grabbed for his wine to wash away the taste. But there was no disguising the fact that the pleasure had gone out of the afternoon. His guests were coughing politely into their napkins or picking the tiny bones out of their teeth and he knew they would all be laughing about him for days afterward, just as soon as they could get away, especially Holconius and that fat pederast, Brittius.

“My dear fellow, have you heard the latest about Ampliatus? He thinks that fish, like wine, improves with age!”

He drank more wine, swilling it around in his mouth, and was just contemplating getting up to propose a toast—to the emperor! to the army!—when he noticed his steward approaching the dining room carrying a small box. Scutarius hesitated, clearly not wanting to disturb his master with a business matter during a meal, and Ampliatus would indeed have told him to go to blazes, but there was something about the man’s expression . . .

He screwed up his napkin, got to his feet, nodded curtly to his guests, and beckoned to Scutarius to follow him into the tablinum. Once they were out of sight he flexed his fingers. “What is it? Give it here.”

It was a
capsa,
a cheap beechwood document case, covered in rawhide, of the sort a schoolboy might use to carry his books around in. The lock had been broken. Ampliatus flipped open the lid. Inside were a dozen small rolls of papyrus. He pulled out one at random. It was covered in columns of figures and for a moment Ampliatus squinted at it, baffled, but then the figures assumed a shape and he understood. “Where is the man who brought this?”

“Waiting in the vestibule, master.”

“Take him into the old garden. Have the kitchen serve dessert and tell my guests I shall return shortly.”

Ampliatus took the back route, behind the dining room and up the wide steps into the courtyard of his old house. This was the place he had bought ten years earlier, deliberately settling himself next door to the ancestral home of the Popidii. What a pleasure it had been to live on an equal footing with his former masters and to bide his time, knowing even then that one day, somehow, he would punch a hole in the thick garden wall and swarm through to the other side, like an avenging army capturing an enemy city.

He sat himself on the circular stone bench in the center of the garden, beneath the shade of a rose-covered pergola. This was where he liked to conduct his most private business. He could always talk here undisturbed. No one could approach him without being seen. He opened the box again and took out each of the papyri, then glanced up at the wide uncorrupted sky. He could hear Corelia’s goldfinches, chirruping in their rooftop aviary and, beyond them, the drone of the city coming back to life after the long siesta. The inns and the eating houses would be raking it in now as people poured into the streets ready for the sacrifice to Vulcan.

Salve lucrum!

Lucrum gaudium!

He did not look up as he heard his visitor approach.

“So,” he said, “it seems we have a problem.”

Corelia had been given the finches not long after the family had moved into the house, on her tenth birthday. She had fed them with scrupulous attention, tended them when they were sick, watched them hatch, mate, flourish, die, and now, whenever she wanted to be alone, it was to the aviary that she came. It occupied half the small balcony outside her room, above the cloistered garden. The top of the cage was sheeted as protection against the sun.

She was sitting, drawn up tightly in the shady corner, her arms clasped around her legs, her chin resting on her knees, when she heard someone come into the courtyard. She edged forward on her bottom and peered over the low balustrade. Her father had settled himself on the circular stone bench, a box beside him, and was reading through some papers. He laid the last one aside and stared at the sky, turning in her direction. She ducked her head back quickly. People said she resembled him: “Oh, she’s the image of her father!” And, since he was a handsome man, it used to make her proud.

She heard him say, “So, it seems we have a problem.”

She had discovered as a child that the cloisters played a peculiar trick. The walls and pillars seemed to capture the sound of voices and funnel them upward, so that even whispers, barely audible at ground level, were as distinct up here as speeches from the rostrum on election day. Naturally, this had only added to the magic of her secret place. Most of what she heard when she was growing up had meant nothing to her—contracts, boundaries, rates of interest—the thrill had simply been to have a private window on the adult world. She had never even told her brother what she knew, since it was only in the past few months that she had begun to decipher the mysterious language of her father’s affairs. And it was here, a month ago, that she had heard her own future being bargained away by her father with Popidius: so much to be discounted on the announcement of the betrothal, the full debt to be discharged once the marriage was transacted, the property to revert in the event of a failure to produce issue, said issue to inherit fully on coming of age . . .

“My little Venus,” he had used to call her. “My little brave Diana.”

. . . a premium payable on account of virginity, virginity attested by the surgeon, Pumponius Magonianus, payment waived on signing of contracts within the stipulated period . . .

“I always say,” her father had whispered, “speaking man to man here, Popidius, and not to be too legal about it—you can’t put a price on a good fuck.”

“My little Venus . . .”

“It seems we have a problem.”

A man’s voice—harsh, not one she recognized—replied, “Yes, we have a problem right enough.”

To which Ampliatus responded: “And his name is Marcus Attilius.”

She leaned forward again so as not to miss a word.

Africanus wanted no trouble. Africanus was an honest man. Attilius marched him down the staircase, only half listening to his jabbering protests, glancing over his shoulder every few steps to make sure they were not being followed. “I am an official here on the emperor’s business. I need to see where Exomnius lived. Quickly.” At the mention of the emperor, Africanus launched into a fresh round of assurances of his good name. Attilius shook him. “I haven’t the time to listen to this. Take me to his room.”

“It’s locked.”

“Where’s the key?”

“Downstairs.”

“Get it.”

When they reached the street he pushed the brothel-keeper back into the gloomy hallway and stood guard as he fetched his cashbox from its hiding place. The meretrix in the short green dress had returned to her stool: Zmyrina, Africanus called her—“Zmyrina, which is the key to Exomnius’s room?” His hands were shaking so much that when finally he managed to open the cashbox and take out the keys he dropped them and she had to stoop and retrieve them for him. She picked out a key from the bunch and held it up.

“What are you so scared of?” asked Attilius. “Why try to run away at the mention of a name?”

“I don’t want any trouble,” repeated Africanus. He took the key and led the way to the bar next door. It was a cheap place, little more than a rough stone counter with holes cut into it for the jars of wine. There was no room to sit. Most of the drinkers were outside on the pavement, propped against the wall. Attilius supposed this was where the lupanar’s customers waited their turn for a girl and then came afterward to refresh themselves and boast about their prowess. It had the same fetid smell as the brothel and he thought that Exomnius must have fallen a long way—the corruption must have really entered his soul—for him to have ended up down here.

Africanus was small and nimble, his arms and legs hairy, like a monkey’s. Perhaps that was where he had got his name—from the African monkeys in the forum, performing tricks at the ends of their chains to earn a few coins for their owners. He scuttled through the bar and up the rickety wooden staircase to the landing. He paused with the key in his hand and cocked his head to one side, looking at Attilius. “Who are you?” he said.

“Open it.”

“Nothing’s been touched. I give you my word.”

“Which is valuable, I’m sure. Now open it.”

The whoremonger turned toward the door with the key outstretched and then gave a little cry of surprise. He gestured to the lock and when Attilius stepped up next to him he saw that it was broken. The interior of the room was dark, the air stuffy with trapped smells—bedding, leather,
stale
food. A thin grid of brilliant light on the opposite wall showed where the shutters were closed. Africanus went in first, stumbling against something in the blackness, and unfastened the window. The afternoon light flooded a shambles of strewn clothes and upended furniture. Africanus gazed around him in dismay. “This was nothing to do with me—I swear it.”

Attilius took it all in at a glance. There had not been much in the room to start with—a bed and thin mattress with a pillow and a coarse brown blanket, a washing jug, a pisspot, a chest, a stool—but nothing had been left untouched. Even the mattress had been slashed; its stuffing of horsehair bulged out in tufts.

“I swear,” repeated Africanus.

“All right,” said Attilius. “I believe you.” He did. Africanus would hardly have broken his own lock when he had a key, or left the room in such disorder. On a little three-legged table was a lump of white-green marble that turned out, on closer inspection, to be a half-eaten loaf of bread. A knife and a rotten apple lay beside it. There was a fresh smear of fingerprints in the dust. Attilius touched the surface of the table and inspected the blackened tip of his finger. This had been done recently, he thought. The dust had not had time to resettle. Perhaps it explained why Ampliatus had been so keen to show him every last detail of the new baths—to keep him occupied while the room was searched? What a fool he had been, holding forth about lowland pine and scorched olive wood! He said, “How long had Exomnius rented this place?”