Ruth Downie - Caveat emptor

“It was in the box with the money,” explained Tilla.

“If it is of no use to you,” said Camma, “I will throw it away.”

He turned it over and held it toward the window, squinting along the edges for some sort of clue. Whatever it was, if Asper had hidden it in the box with his savings, it must be significant. He peered again at the side with the holes, then poked at a small green speck with one finger. “Is that copper?”

Camma had lost interest in it. She picked up the baby, wrinkling her nose at the smell. “Another cloth!”

Tilla was silent. He knew she could tell from his expression that something had changed. “The bronzesmiths next door,” he said, slapping the clay tile against the palm of his hand. “Can they be trusted?”

Grata shrugged. “As much as any man can be trusted.”

“Good,” he said, ignoring the insult. “Tilla, come with me. We’re going next door for a chat.”

The elderly man who was sweeping the clay floor of the bronzesmiths’ shop put the broom aside as soon as he saw them. He eyed Ruso’s Gaulish clothes, assessed the shaggy remains of his foreign haircut, then greeted them in Latin. “Good afternoon, sir and lady! What can we do for you? We have quality lamps, beautiful brooches… A nice figure of Venus for the lady? Take a look. We can make anything to order on the premises.”

Tilla, as they had agreed, went to distract the guards with a message of thanks to Dias for his help with the funeral.

“I’m working for the procurator’s office,” explained Ruso, stepping into the workshop so the tile could not be seen from the street. “I’ve just been given this. I wondered if it was yours.”

The man took one look and backed away, clutching at the little bronze phallus hung around his skinny neck as if Ruso had just offered him poison. “Oh, no, sir! Nothing like that. You must be misinformed. This is a respectable workshop.”

“I’m not informed at all,” said Ruso, taken aback. “I don’t know what it is.”

The man retreated so fast that he bumped into his display and sent a couple of lamps and a six-inch high miniature of Mercury tinkling to the floor. As he did so a second man of similar vintage emerged from the back of the shop, wiping his hands on a cloth. There was a hurried conversation in British, most of which Ruso could not catch.

The second man stepped forward. “What you have there must be very old, sir. Nobody we know has used one of those since our grandfather’s day. Even if we had one, we would never use it. They make all the coins in Rome these days.”

Ruso blinked. “It’s for making money?”

“In the days of the old kings, sir, yes. To make the blanks for stamping into coins. But nobody alive has ever seen it done, I promise you.”

A slack-faced lad with lank hair about his shoulders came forward and grabbed the man by the arm, pointing at Ruso and saying something in British. The man was trying to reassure him.

Ruso backed away, conscious that he was frightening them all. The lad repeated his question. The man said the same thing again, assuring him there was nothing to worry about.

He switched back into Latin. “I am sorry. He doesn’t understand. He thinks you are angry with us.”

“I’ll go,” said Ruso, sorry for them.

“Sir, whoever told you to ask about that mold-”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Ruso assured him, turning to call across the street to Tilla. “I told you it was rubbish, wife. We’ve been swindled.”

The women were surprised to see him back. They were even more surprised when he laid out all of Asper’s coins on the kitchen table Grata had just wiped clean. First he pushed aside the bronze sestertii, which were much too big to fit in the holes of the mold. He sorted the rest into denominations, turned them all face up, and peered at the profiles of various and mostly dead emperors. Some of the emperors, he now saw, were not stamped very clearly. Some of them had worn flat and others had never been quite in the middle in the first place. The designs on the reverse sides were even more confusing. Some of the backs aligned with the fronts while others did not.

He heard Camma whisper to his wife in British, “What is he looking for?”

“You said Asper was trying to find a way out,” said Tilla as Ruso tried a juggling motion, weighing one coin against another in his hands. “Perhaps this was it, whatever it is.”

He peered at the edges of the coins. He tried stacking like for like on top of one another to check for size: an exercise that proved futile because very few of them were really round. He even attempted a tentative bite on one or two, trying not to recall the screams of a patient whose molar had been cracked by the very same exercise.

After the third or fourth attempt to sort them into piles that shared one particular odd characteristic or another, he concluded that either the official mint was not terribly fussy about the standard of its coins, or that most of these were fakes. Or more likely he didn’t know what he was doing. How foolishly overoptimistic he had been when he had walked along that street in Londinium telling himself that you didn’t need to know much to be an investigator.

He arranged the coins into a grid and counted them. “You said there were forty-seven denarii?”

“We spent one of them today,” said Tilla.

He scooped the grid across the table with one hand and slid it toward the edge. “I’ll need to borrow all of this.”

Camma shot a look at Tilla.

“It is all right,” Tilla assured her. “He is honest.”

As he got up to leave, he reflected on the very Britishness of that exchange. At home, he would have needed to offer a written receipt.

“I’ll bring it back as soon as I can,” he promised.

Tilla said, “I will walk toward the mansio with you. I must say hello to Serena before we go.”

“We won’t be leaving early,” he told her. “I may have one or two things to finish off tomorrow.”

Her face brightened. When she said, “So we can stay a little longer?” he knew she was not thinking of the inquiry, but of the baby.

As Ruso approached, the money changer’s eyes went straight to the clenched fist that was hiding Asper’s bag of cash, then flicked away as if he had noticed nothing. Satto propped his elbows on the counter, clasped both hands together, and rested his chin on them. “Welcome back, investigator. Congratulations. I hear the murderer stands accused and the tax will be paid. So what else can I do for you?”

When they were alone Ruso said, “I’m just weaving in a few loose ends.”

“And would that have something to do with what’s hidden in your hand?”

Ruso was not sure how far the man could be trusted. On the other hand, if he went to Londinium to consult the procurator’s officials, he might not be allowed back. He brought his fist up over the counter and straightened his fingers. The little bag landed on the surface and slumped sideways.

Satto smiled.

Moments later Ruso watched in awe as the trick he had pretended to perform at the Blue Moon was enacted in front of him. Satto was sorting the coins into two piles, muttering, “Yes,” and “No,” and occasionally, “Hm,” as he pondered a coin, peered at it, weighed it against another, and even held it up to his nose and sniffed it. Eventually there were thirty-nine coins in the “Good” pile, seven classed as “No,” and one about which he seemed unable to decide. Reaching under the counter, he produced a small hammer and some sort of awl. He flipped the coin over. “Better not make a hole in the emperor,” he observed before tapping the awl into the surface.

He handed the result across the counter. Where the damage was done, Ruso could see a glint of something beneath the surface that was not silver. That made eight fakes out of forty-six. He wondered which sort of coin Tilla had spent this afternoon, and how Camma would take the news that a sizeable chunk of Asper’s savings had just disappeared.