Lindsey Davis - Scandal Takes a Holiday

'So you see, Falco,' Holconius declared self-righteously, 'I cannot tell you anything about how the money will be handed over, because I don't know!'

I ordered him to go to the vigiles station house and confess to Rubella. I made Holconius tell me which temple was their bank.

Then I set off there.

I stood on the steps of the Temple of Rome and Augustus, thinking.

This temple must have been one of the earliest symbols of imperial power. Built by Tiberius in honour of his stepfather and of our lucky city, it was entirely composed of marble. Six fluted columns adorned the front area, which had a platform whence political speakers could bore the luckless crowds on festive days. A couple of extra columns turned around each side to entrances where stone stairs led to the interior. To call the edifice triumphalist would be an understatement. Not only did Victory fly her stuff on tiptoe from forty feet up on the top pinnacle of the fancy frieze, but indoors the cult statue was Roma Victrix, a large lass dressed up in an Amazon costume.

She had a figure like Helena, though Helena would kick me for saying so. Let's say, Roma Victrix was in good shape, but as the incarnation of the Golden City she headed up a great new trading empire which imported titbits from every part of the world, and quite clearly she enjoyed her food.

Roma was shown as an Amazon, with one extremely round, awkwardly prominent breast, revealed naked among her curiously full draperies. Amazons are usually famous for wearing nothing but a short skirt and a snarl. Roma mainly dressed sensibly. Her other breast was properly covered up, and seemed less well developed. It may have been amputated, as is supposed to happen in the best Amazonian circles, for purposes of avoiding her bowstring. She had one sturdy foot steadying a little globe and looked as if she were about to kick off at the start of a ball game.

I had had plenty of time for these musings. I had been inside, but now I was outside again.

Indoors, I had glimpsed a priest of the cult, a snooty flamen who thought I was about to steal the ritual vessels and donated treasure. Once I was spotted by this haughty factotum, the temple-keeper, an ex-town slave who did all the work around there – was sent to ask if he could assist me. That meant, assisting me back outside on to the front podium.

Now I stood there, pretending I was a little boy who wanted to be an orator. I surveyed the Forum.

It was a long rectangular area, with the tall Capitolium at the far end, the statutory Temple of the Capitoline Triad. That was where Rubella and Petro had been trapped the other day, when they watched the builders' guild stamp around in their marching display. I could see a shrine, which I knew was dedicated to the city Lares. Midway across the Forum ran the Decumanus Maximus.

To my left, I had the Basilica and Curia. To my right and behind me were baths, public latrines and shops. Ahead, on the far right-hand corner though more or less out of my vision, stood the house of Privatus where Petronius lodged. Things here were not progressing. If Mutatus was on the premises, he must be downstairs in the strongrooms beneath the temple podium.

The keeper had refused to let me down there. Saying I wanted to talk to a visitor who was making a withdrawal had failed to impress him. The keeper was doing his job, protecting money on deposit. He might already know that Mutatus and Holconius had had some of their cash stolen, for all he knew, by thieves who had followed them after they came here and made a withdrawal.

The temple-keeper had courteously promised he would let me know when Mutatus came up from the strongrooms. To his credit, he did give me the nod, though he waited until the scribe had left.

I knew Mutatus had not passed through the Forum. I would have seen him.

The piazza was packed with people, the late afternoon surge of pedestrians going to the baths and workmen walking home, but I was on a vantage point and I had the whole Forum area in plain sight. Mutatus must have gone out at the back, and on the Basilica side; from my position, which was on a corner, I had been watching the other exit.

I walked down the steps and went to the rear of the temple. At a street corner caupona no one could tell me anything. I crossed the back of the temple. Here began the main road to the Porta Laurentina. This was a seriously important part of town, and although light industry, cornmills and laundries, lurked among the private houses, the neighbourhood lacked the proliferating bars and brothels that clustered around the Marine Gate and the riverfront.

It was not the kind of area the 'Illyrian' had favoured for meetings. This convinced me that someone else had muscled in. The ransom demand for my scribe was a new scam.

My scribe. He was mine by now. I was determined not to give up on him until I knew his fate.

'Spare a copper for a bath!' In the littered shade at the back of the most prestigious buildings, there are beggars.

This wit knew how to suggest his request should be granted urgently; he was filthy. In fact he was so filthy he looked as if he had covered himself with grime on purpose. Anyone charitable would shoo him to hot water and a strigil. [Anyone who then thought twice would remember that most towns offer free public baths. This beggar was dirty from choice.]

I held up a coin. Then I gave it to him. There was no point holding back; he would just say what I wanted to hear in order to obtain the money.

'Seen anyone leave the temple just before I came around the corner? Which way did he go?' A grimy arm, swathed in dreadful rags, waved vaguely down the Cardo Maximus, towards the far Laurentine Gate. The man was probably drunk. He looked too verminous to question at close quarters. I had to decide whether I believed him. With nothing else on offer, I set off up the road.

'I'm Cassius!' he croaked after me.

'I'll remember!' I lied, fleeing. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck with a madman with dangerous politics. Having a bust of Cassius in your house still counts as treason. On the birthdays of Brutus and Cassius, all sensible men are very careful not to hold dinner parties that could look like memorials.

Compared with the Decumanus, the Cardo was a narrow little street, gently sloping downhill and deeply shadowed by the buildings alongside it.

I had been here before, though I was riding not walking, as I went to see Damagoras. One of the houses near the Temple of Rome and Augustus had been a smoking ruin, the morning Gaius Baebius and I first encountered the fire-fighting bullies of the builders' guild.

I had also come here during my temple hunt. The road to the Laurentine Gate had become a motif of this mission.

Cassius did not let me down. I was halfway to the Gate when the traffic coming towards me thinned and ahead of me I saw a boy. I recognised the slight figure. Zeno.

Zeno, from the gatehouse, that thin little street rascal whose mother was Pullia, the Cilician kidnappers' drugs queen.

Walking alongside Zeno and talking to him earnestly was a well-built elderly man. I knew him too. It was my Uncle Fulvius.

Fulvius had one hand on Zeno's shoulder. The boy looked up at him with a trusting expression.

Pullia had been in custody now for several days. Lygon was only captured today, but he had never himself lived at the gatehouse, and he had appeared indifferent to Pullia's child. Without his mother, Zeno would have had to fend for himself. Fulvius must have befriended him. Maybe they knew one another even before Pullia's arrest.

If Caninus was correct in identifying my uncle as the negotiator, the 'Illyrian' used a young boy as his runner.

All along, little Zeno could have been that boy. Now, if the Diocles ransom demand did, after all, come from the Cilician gang, the pair could be going to meet Mutatus.