John Roberts - The Year of Confusion

“Then we’re just in time.” Balesus hauled out a sack and set it before me and opened it. “Here, Senator. Give it a try.”

I took a handful of grain from the top and looked at it in the light that streamed in through a window. These looked like healthy grains to my eye. “Looks fine.”

“Now dig deep, like I just did,” he said, grinning.

I stuck my hand down in as far as it would go and closed my fingers around a fistful and drew it out. This I examined as well. The grains were shriveled, showed signs of mold, and were laced with unpleasant black flakes. They even smelled foul.

“You see? You have to be careful in this business. The man should have known better than to try this trick in Rome, but he did. Tried to sell it out there in the great market at the peak of the harvest, thinking buyers wouldn’t look close when they had so many tons to move. Well, he was wrong. We hauled him before the curule aedile but he can only levy fines and judged this too serious and passed it to the praetor’s court. The man’s property was confiscated and he was sold as a slave. I hope he works shoveling other people’s grain for the rest of his miserable life.”

We went back outside and walked back toward his office. “You seem to know your business.” I said.

“That I do. Well, these star-men have their own schemes, and I wish I knew as much about them as I do about the grain business.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“I didn’t try to take Polasser to court just because he’d gulled me with a false horoscope. I’d just look like a fool then, wouldn’t I? I learned he’d advised half a dozen other merchants, and probably others who wouldn’t admit it. Some he told to buy, like he told me. Others he told to sell. Any way it came out, he’d have a string of merchants who thought he’d given them a proper fortune. What do you want to bet he’d charge more for his services the next year?”

“Very clever,” I said. “Why didn’t the other men you mentioned join you in pressing for this suit?”

He snorted. “Not buggering likely, not after I told them who his patron was. Nobody’d touch it then.”

Hermes was bursting to say something, and he’d held his silence long enough, so I nodded to him

“Who recommended Polasser to you?”

“A patrician lady who was selling off the produce from her dead husband’s estate last year. Name was Fulvia.”

I had been very afraid that he was about to speak another name. This was bad enough, but it still came as a relief. “Did she advise the others as well?”

He shrugged. “I suppose so. They must’ve found out about the fraud from somewhere.”

“Well, I thank you, you’ve been very helpful. And now I know what to do when somebody tries to sell me grain in bulk.”

“Anything for the Senate and people. And, Senator?”

I was turning to go but turned back. “Yes?”

“There was nothing wrong with our old calendar. Why did you have to saddle us with this new one? It’s caused me no end of trouble. Contracts have dates on them, you know.”

We made our way back toward the Forum. “Fulvia, eh?” Hermes said.

“Well, I knew she was part of Servilia’s little group. So what has this told us? It could be nothing. She must have wanted to sell off the produce from Curio’s estates before his other relatives could lay hands on them. I don’t know what the disposition of those estates has been, now that she’s married to Antonius.” Curio had been a remarkable man, at first a conservative, then an adherent of Caesar and a tribune of the people, and very successful in every role. He’d had a brilliant future ahead of him and had married Fulvia, who always furthered her husbands’ careers to the best of her ability, which was saying something. Then he had gone to Africa in Caesar’s cause and had been killed in some obscure skirmish, a sad end for such a man.

“It could be nothing,” I said. “She may have been besotted with these astrologers and babbled about them to anyone who would listen. I’ve known others like that.”

“And Polasser may have looked at how the grain business works and decided that there was a killing to be made. Still, Balesus seems like a hard-headed man, not likely to be taken in by such a fraud.”

“You never can tell. I’ve known many men to be sensible and no-nonsense in their own line of work, but gullible fools when out of their depth. A fraud artist I once knew said that a self-made man was often the easiest victim.”

“Why should that be?” Hermes wanted to know.

“He said it’s because they think they know everything. Starting with nothing they build great fortunes and they think they have perfect judgment. They won’t consult with more knowledgeable people because they think they’ve made it where they are by always knowing exactly what they are doing. In fact, they often succeeded because they were lucky, or just hard-working or shrewd in a very narrow field. So they will trust a transparent fraud when a five-minute conversation with someone like Cicero or Sosigenes or Callista would show them the error of their ways. They have too much confidence in themselves.”

“Like the ones who come out from Rome and think they’re great natural military leaders because they’re born into famous families?” He was remembering some bad experiences we’d had in Gaul.

I shuddered. “Exactly. The world is full of people who have perfect confidence in themselves for all the wrong reasons. They cause no end of trouble.”

Still, this was another name that had come up more than once in all this business: Fulvia. I had known her slightly for a long time and avoided closer acquaintance. She was one of those bad women to whom Hermes had hinted I was too attracted. The first time I had seen her she was in the house of Clodia. In Clodia’s bed, in fact. She’d been no more than fifteen and even then had struck me as some sort of anthropophagous creature. We had had a few encounters in the years since, none hostile but always tricky. Fulvia plus Antonius made a combination I was particularly anxious to avoid, especially now that I no longer had the protection of a family of enormous political importance. I had not realized what an advantage I had had being a Caecilius Metellus until the family fortunes had collapsed in the civil war.

We went among the throng of afternoon frequenters in the Forum, taking hands and trading political gossip in the immemorial Roman fashion. All the time I was pondering what I had learned and how it all fitted together. Surely Polasser had not just hit upon his grain scheme in a fit of inspiration. I ran through my mind a list of Roman rogues, villains, and lowlifes I numbered among my acquaintance, and I found depressingly many.

“Hermes,” I said at last, “I think we need to call on Felix the Wise.”

“Him?” Hermes said, unbelieving. “I’m all for it. I hear he holds court at the Labyrinth these days.”

“Then let’s go there. Julia will be attending the evening sacrifice at the Temple of Vesta, then going on her mysterious errand with Servilia. So we have the evening all to ourselves. Let’s go to the Labyrinth.”

The establishment thus named was at that time Rome’s largest, most fabulous, and most successful brothel. It was located in the trans-Tiber, which gave it both more space and less oversight from the aediles. People visiting Rome for the first time always made it a point to visit the Labyrinth. It attracted more of them than the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter.

We made the long, leisurely walk across town and across the river into the trans-Tiber and got to the Labyrinth just as the sun was going down. The building towered five stories high and was as large as any of the apartment blocks in Rome. Before it stood its infamous sign, a larger than life-sized sculpture of Pasiphae and the bull rendered in excruciating anatomical detail. The queen was depicted as splayed quadrupedally, the cow disguise devised by Daedalus merely hinted at with hoofed boots and gloves. The bull was well endowed even for a bull.