Two For The Lions (12 page)

XXII

POMPONIUS URRICA LIVED on the Pincian. His mansion lay up on the high ground to the east of the Via Flaminia, way out past the Mausoleum of Augustus. Nice district. Patrician open spaces, with panoramic views that were interrupted only by tall, elderly pine trees where doves cooed. Beautiful sunsets over the Tiber. Miles from the racket of the Forum. Clean air, peaceful atmosphere, stunning property, gracious neighbours: wonderful for the smart elite who inhabited that fine district--and miserably inconvenient for the rest of us if we came visiting.

Urrica himself had it easy. When he needed to travel down to conduct public business he would be carried in a big litter borne by well-matched, well-tempered slaves with unfaltering steps. He never had to get his boots dirty in the dust and donkey droppings, and he could while away the hour the journey took each way with a little light reading as he reclined on downy cushions. He may have been equipped with a hip-flask and a packet of sweet toast. For added entertainment no doubt he sometimes squashed in some flirty flutegirl with a big bust.

I walked. I had nothing and no one to sustain me. Winter had turned the dust in the roads to mud, and the donkey droppings had mingled with the mud, leaving loose lumps among the slurry like half-stirred polenta in a caupona that the aediles were about to close down.

I found the lush praetorian abode. It took some time since all the ostentatious Pincian spreads were pretty much identical and all were sited up extremely long approach roads too. At Urtica's I was told by the door porter that his master was away from home. This was no surprise. The slave did not say, though I readily deduced, that even had his master been there (which was perfectly possible) I would not have been allowed in. My fine informer's intuition told me that an order had been given to reject any tired lag who called himself Didius Falco. I did not cause offence at that elegant mansion by proffering my Palace pass. It had been a long hard day already. I spared myself the embarrassment.

I walked all the way back into town. I bought myself a hot pancake and a cup of flavoured wine, but on that nippy winter's afternoon companionship was hard to find. All the flirty flutegirls seemed to be visiting their aunties in Ostia.

XXIII

WELL, BACK TO reality. I went to the baths, got warm again, was insulted by my trainer, met a friend, took him home for a bite.

You know how it is when you have moved into a new apartment and invite an important guest home with you. If you don't own a slave to send on ahead, you arrive, playing suave, and just hoping not to be greeted by an embarrassing scene. That evening I brought home a senator--an infrequent occurrence, I have to say. Naturally we found something extremely embarrassing as soon as we walked in: my wife, as I now forced myself to call her, was painting a door.

"Hello!" exclaimed the senator" "What's going on, Falco?"

"Helena Justina, daughter of the illustrious Camillus, is painting a door," I replied courteously.

He gave me a sideways glance" "Is that because you cannot afford a painter," he mused anxiously. "Or because she likes doing it?" The second suggestion seemed worse than the first.

"She likes it," I admitted. Helena went on painting as if neither of us were there.

"Why do you allow this, Falco?"

"Senator, I have not yet discovered how to stop Helena doing what she likes. Also," I said proudly, "she does it much better than any hired painter would."

This was why she had not spoken to us. Helena paints her doors with great concentration. She was sitting crosslegged on the floor, with a pannikin of evil dark red liquid beside her, slowly laying off the paint with relaxed, regular strokes, leaving a perfect even finish. It was one of my life's great pleasures to watch this. I explained that to the senator and when I pulled up a stool he did the same.

"Notice," I murmured, "That she starts at the bottom. Most painters start at the top; half an hour after they walk away, spare paint oozes down and forms a line of sticky drips all along the lower edge. They set hard before you notice. Then you never get rid of them. However, Helena Justina leaves no drips."

In fact, it was not the way I would have done it, but Helena made her method effective, and the senator looked impressed. "Yet what do your people think, Falco?"

"Oh they are horrified, of course. She was a respectable girl from a very good background. My mother is particularly shocked. She thinks Helena has suffered enough through living with me." Helena, who had just risen to her knees as she worked upwards, paused in the action of reloading her paintbrush to look around at me thoughtfully" "she is allowed to tell people that I make her do it."

"And what do you say, Falco?"

"I blame the people who brought her up."

Helena at last spoke: "Hello, Father," she said. The lead in the paint was affecting her, so she sniffed. I winked at her, knowing that when she was painting she normally wiped her nose on her sleeve.

The senator Camillus Verus, her father, my dinner guest, offered politely, "I could pay for a painter, Marcus, if you're pushed."

I deferred to my wife. I was a good Roman. Well, I knew what was good for me.

"Don't waste your money, dear Papa." Helena had reached the level of the door handle which I had previously removed for her, at which point she stood up so she could reach the upper half of the door. Camillus and I moved our stool... back slightly, giving her more room. "thanks," she commented.

"She does make a good job of it," her father remarked to me. He seemed uneasy speaking directly to his singleminded child.

"I taught her," I said. He gave me a look.

"I made him, of course," Helena added. He turned the look on her. Where I had deemed it good-mannered to appear rather diffident, Helena carried on, ignoring him. "What is there to eat for our guest, Marcus?"

Her father accused me roundly, "Now I suppose you will make her prepare our dinner too?"

"No," I told him very gently. "I am the cook here."

Having reached the door's top rail, Helena stepped back and consented to kiss her father, albeit rather distantly for she was busy inspecting her work for snibs of dust. The light was too poor for her. December was the wrong time for such work, but household maintenance has to be done when the mood strikes. She drew her brush over some minute bubbles near the top, frowning. I smiled. After a moment her father smiled too. She turned around to look at us, both still sitting on our stools and both still smiling because we loved to see her happy in her life. Suspicious of our motives, Helena suddenly gave us her full attention, defiantly smiling back at us.

"She hates cleaning the paintbrush," I said to her noble papa. "So do I." Nonetheless I took it from her, kissing her hand (avoiding the paint splodges). "Cleaning up is one of the small tasks I undertake for her." I gazed into her eyes. "In return for the many generosities she gives to me."

It would have been unseemly to add that on occasions when her father was not present I liked to enjoy myself rather wickedly cleaning up the painter too. Helena's one fault was that she tended to get paint on herself everywhere.

Luckily the senator was easily sidetracked; we sent him into another room to play with his granddaughter, leaving us to snatch some fun.

Later, when I had fed everyone, our illustrious visitor confided the reason why he had so keenly accepted my invitation to our tiny apartment when he could have been dining on richer cuisine and in comfort at his own home. It was some time since we had walked over the Aventine to the slightly run-down Camillus mansion near the Capena Gate to visit Helena's family. We had never been formally debarred, but since Justinus absconded with the girl that we two had introduced as a suitable (that is, rich) bride for his elder brother, there had been a cool atmosphere. Nobody blamed Helena for the family troubles. On the other hand, I made a good target. The jilted Aelianus had been particularly ribald.

"What's this?" demanded the senator; he had found a parchment on which I had drawn a large onion-like plant."

"A botanical sketch of a silphium plant," I said neutrally.

Helena, who had been feeding the baby, handed Julia to me. This meant I could occupy my attention with patting up the baby's wind. Helena herself was keeping her eyes down, refixing her dress brooches.

"So you've heard from my son too!" Camillus looked from one to another of us. He could read the omens from a skyful of rooks.

While we admitted it shiftily, pretending we had of course been planning to mention it, the senator laid aside my botany and brought out a map. I realised that meeting him at Glaucus' baths had been no coincidence; he had come prepared. He must have been intending to discuss the missing couple with us. Although I believed that his relationship with his wife Julia Justa was as open and confiding as it traditionally ought to be, a disloyal thought did cross my mind that her husband might not yet have told her that Justinus had written home. Julia Justa had taken the elopement pretty hard. For one thing, the missing girl's elderly grandparents had arrived in Rome all the way from Spain only two days afterwards, intending to celebrate Claudia's betrothal and marriage; Julia Justa had had to endure a tricky period with the furious old couple as house guests before they left in a hut}:

"He's got as far as Carthage." The senator spread the mapskin from his home library "Clearly has no idea of geography."

"I expect they fled on the first boat going south." Acting the peace-keeper was not my natural style. "Carthage is a short hop from Sicily."

"Well, now he knows," said Camillus, placing one forefinger on Carthage and the other virtually at arm's length away on Cyrene, "That he's in the wrong province, with a ships' graveyard between him and his purported goal."

Yes. There was Carthage, Rome's ancient enemy, west of Sicily, high on the tip of the proconsular sector of the province of Roman Africa. Right around the double curves of the dangerous Syrtes, eastwards past the Tripolitanian sector of Africa, into Cyrenaica, and almost as far as Egypt in fact, lay the town of Cyrene which had once been the resplendent entrepot for the sought-after silphium The troubled waters of the great bays Syrtis Minor and Syrtis Major, across which our traveller would now have to transport himself on his mad quest, had sunk quite a few ships.

"Could he travel by land?" asked Helena, in an unusually meek voice.

"It's about a thousand miles," I mentioned. She knew what that meant.

"Much of it desert. Check with Sallust," her father said crisply. "Sallust is
very
good on the burning wind that rises in the desert and swirl... sandstorm, that fill your eyes and mouth with dust."

"We need a nice plan to keep him in Carthage then," suggested Helena.

"I want him home!" snapped her papa. "Did he tell you what they are doing for money?"

Helena cleared her throat. "I believe they may have sold some of Claudia's jewellery." Claudia Rufina was an heiress of the best quality; she had possessed a great many jewels. That was why we had thought she was such a catch for the elder son of the family. Aelianus had hoped to boost his standing in the Senate elections with this financially adept marriage; instead, shamed by the scandal, he had now stood down altogether and was loafing at home with no career for another year. Meanwhile Claudia's dowry was being spent by his brother on Carthaginian hospitality.

"Well, they won't have to sell themselves into slavery as camel-drovers then."

"Afraid they might have to, sir," I admitted. "Justinus tells us they accidentally left the main jewellery chest behind."

"In the excitement, no doubt!" Camillus senior gave me a sharp look. "So, Marcus; you're the horticulture expert." I refrained from protesting that my only connection was one grandfather who ran a market garden where I had sometimes stayed in childhood. "I've been told the crazy story about looking for silphium. What chance is there that Justinus will actually rediscover this magic herb?"

"Slim, sir."

"Thought so. I gather it was all grazed out years ago. I shouldn't imagine the shepherds who have let the silphium be eaten will welcome an offer to reclaim their grazing fields and turn them back into a big herb garden. I don't suppose you fancy a trip across the Internal Sea?"

I looked sorrowful. "I'm rather too busy tied up with my Census work, I'm afraid" As you know, it's very important that I do well and establish myself."

He held my gaze rather longer than I found comfortable but then his expression changed to a more indulgent one. He rolled up the mapskin briskly. "Well! I expect it will be sorted out."

"Leave the map," Helena offered. "I'll make a copy and send it to Quintus when we write. At least he'll know where he is then."

"He knows where he is," her father quipped bitterly. "In deep trouble. I can't help him; it would be insulting to his brother. Perhaps I should send my gardener to look after him. When Claudia's emeralds run out he's going to have to be damned quick with his search for the precious herb cuttings."

To change the subject, I introduced the story of Leonidas Helena wanted to know whether I had succeeded in meeting Rumex after she and Maia were turned away.

"Turned away?" asked her father.

I rushed into how I had met Saturninus and his prizefighter, hoping to avoid worrying the senator with his daughter's scandalous attempt to meet a gladiator. "Rumex is a typical hulk: immaculate body and brain like an ox, but he speaks slowly and carefully, as if he thinks himself a philosopher. The trainer, Saturninus, is a more interesting character--" I decided not to mention that Helena and I were to dine with the lanista the next day. "Incidentally, sir, Saturninus has given an alibi for Rumex by saying that when Leonidas was killed they were together at the house of an ex-praetor called Pomponius Urtica. Have you come across the man?"

Camillus smiled. "His name is in the news these days."

"Anything I should know?"

"He is being touted as the man to organise the opening of the new amphitheatre."

I sucked my teeth. "Convenient!"

"Improper for him to favour a particular lanista, though." "When did impropriety stop a praetor jumping in? Do you know what kind of man he is?"

"Keen on the Games," said Camillus, adding in his dry way, "within respectable limits, naturally! In his year of office there were no complaints about his magistracy, nor about how he ran the shows he organised. His private life is only slightly soiled," he said, as if we assumed that most senators were famous for rampant debauchery. "He's been married a couple of times, I believe; some time ago perhaps, because his children are grown up. At present he leads a single life."

"Meaning? Women? Boys?"

"Well, one of the other reasons his name features publicly is that he hooked himself up recently with a girl who has a rather wild reputation."

"You're a demon for gossip, Papa!" marveled Helena. Her father looked endearingly pleased with himself: "I can even tell you she's called Scilla."

I grinned. "And what form is Scilla's wildness supposed to take?"

This time Camillus Verus reddened a little. "Whatever form is usual, no doubt! I'm afraid I lead too quiet a life to know."

He was a lovely man.

After her father had gone Helena Justina unrolled his map again.

"Look!" she said, pointing part way between Carthage and Cyrene, to a spot on the Tripolitanian coastline. "Here's Oea and here's Lepcis Magna." She gazed at me disingenuously. "Aren't they the two towns where Saturninus and Calliopus have their roots?"

"How lucky for me," I commented, "That neither of them lives there any longer, so I can pursue my enquiries in comfort, here in Rome!"