Lindsey Davis - Ode to a Banker

I presented myself at the Aurelian table and made an innocent enquiry about today's rate for Greece. 'What's that they call their coins?'

'Drachmas.' The counter-hand was brutally indifferent. Not knowing that I could have talked to him of Palmyra and Tripolitania, Britain and unconquered Germany, all from personal experience, he identified me as a lummock who had never been east of the Field of Mars. He quoted me a medium-to-high exchange rate. A bad deal, yet no worse than most of the toothy sharks here would offer.

I applied a shifty look. Well, even more embarrassed than my usual suspicious lurking act. 'Er – do you ever do loans?'

'We do loans.' He looked at me as if I were a flea on a goddess's bosom.

I told myself I had just made a pile from the Census and could look anyone in the eye. Besides, this was a professional enquiry, a legitimate test. 'What would I need to do then, to get a loan from you?'

'Agree it with the chief '

It seemed impolite to mention that I had seen his chief yesterday lying prone and bloody, with a scroll rod up one nostril and gooey cedar oil all over him. Apparently the bank was continuing to trade as if tragedy had never struck. Had nobody told the staff yet that their proprietor had been taken out, or were they busy maintaining commercial confidence with false calm?

'Agree it?'

'Reach an accommodation.'

'How does that work?'

He sighed. 'If he likes you enough, an agreement is drawn up. In the consulship of Blah and Blah-blah, on the Whatsit day before the Ides of March – Let's do one – what do you call yourself?'

'Dillius Braco.'

'I Ditrius Basto -' Times were tough. People even messed up my aliases now – 'I certify I have received a loan from Aurelius Chrysippus, in his absence through Lucrio his freedman, and owe to him a hundred million sesterces – that's a notional figure – which I shall repay him when he asks. And Lucrio, freedman of Aurelius Chrysippus, has sought assurance that the hundred million sesterces mentioned is properly and rightly given – so you are not defrauding us or using the money improperly – and I, Ditrius Basto, give as my pledge and security – what do you have?' He was sneering more than ever. Looking at me in my third best streaky red tunic and the boots that I hated with the frayed straps, and still unbarbered, I could not blame him.

'What is usual?' I squeaked.

'Alexandrian wheat in a public warehouse. Chickpeas, lentils and legumes, if you're a cheapskate.' I could tell which he thought applied to me.

'Arabian pepper,' I boasted. 'Bonded in the Marcellus warehouse in Nap Lane.'

'Oh yes! How much?'

'I haven't counted recently. Some has been sold, but we are hanging back so as not to flood the market… Enormous quantities.'

He did start to look uncertain, though disbelief still figured strongly.

'Arabian pepper, which I own, deposited in the Marcellus warehouse, which I have maintained in a secure condition, at my risk. Something like that,' he said politely, 'sir.'

Frauds have it easy. (The pepper had once existed, but even then it was owned by Helena, a bequest from her first husband, the loathsome Pertinax; she had long ago sold all of it.)

Believing I was wealthy, his attitude changed completely: 'Can I make you an appointment with Lucrio? When would be most convenient?'

I reckoned I would be meeting Lucrio, freedman and perhaps heir to the dead proprietor – on my own terms and in my own time. 'No, that's all right; I was just asking for a friend.' I slipped him a half as I had picked up at a frontier fort in Germania Inferior, where coppers were in short supply and they had to cut them up. It was an insulting tip for anyone, even if it had been whole currency. I skipped off down the street while he was still cursing me as a mean-spirited time-waster.

I walked into the Forum.

A short hop from the end of the Clivus Argentarius and across the front of the Curia brought me to the magnificent Porticus Aemilius, one of the finest public buildings of the Augustan Age. It was fronted by and joined to the Porticus of Gaius and Lucius, a two-storey colonnade of shops which was where my own frowsty banker lurked nowadays. His gorgeous squat was probably illegal in fact, but the aediles for some reason don't move bankers on.

His chained deposit chests stood in the main aisle of the Porticus on massive slabs of marble in various shades: Numidian yellow, Carystian green, Lucullan black and red, Chian pink and grey – and the purple variegated Phrygian from which the table supports at the Chrysippus house were made, and which I had seen yesterday stained with the dead man's blood.

My banker's chests, along with a folding stool and an unmanned change-table, were on the lower level of the Porticus, overlooked by a frieze showing scenes from Roman history, and shaded by a larger-than-life sized statue of a barbarian. Apt, if you believed money had played its sinister part in our noble past and would affect the future of the untamed areas of the world. (I was raving internally. My encounter with the Aurelian Bank's changer had left me overwrought.) The billet was also incongruous, if you believed bankers were merely men with dirty hands from shuffling coinage – that is, if you had failed to notice just how many elegant artworks most bankers own in their private homes.

I went upstairs to see Nothokleptes. If he was not in sight at his business location, he was to he found at his barber's between a couple of delicate acanthus-scrolled pillars in the upper colonnade. More beauteous decor. And the elevation gave him a good view of who was approaching.

He was seedy and suspicious, just about convincing as a Roman citizen, yet by birth probably Alexandrian and originally tutored in money matters by Ptolemaic tax-collectors. A heavy man, with jowls that were designed for pegging a napkin under his chin. He spent a lot of time at his barber's, where you could find him at ease as if the shaving chair were an extension of his business premises. Since his premises downstairs were so public, and usually guarded by a very unpleasant Pisidian thug, the barber's had an advantage. While you begged to overdraw on your already empty bankbox, you could send for a cold drink and have your fingernails manicured by a sweet girl with a lisp.

Although often overcommitted, as it happened I had never tried my banker for a large formal loan. That would obviously involve – as a courtesy to his associates – investment in a pumice scrape and full hair trim; the peculiar Egyptian way Nothokleptes himself was coiffed, had always put me off.

Nothokleptes was not his real name; it was given him by Petronius Longus when we two first shared a bankbox for a year after we came home from the army. Once he acquired a job in the vigiles, Petro made sure he kept his salary and his prissy wife's dowry locked out of my grasp, but the name he had stuck on our first banker had lasted, to the point that the public now used it, believing it real. Civilised bilinguists will recognise that it means approximately thieving bastard although, despite the strong whiff of slander, long usage would probably now bar the man from suing us.

'Nothokleptes!' I always enjoyed calling him by name.

He looked at me curiously, as he always did. I could never decide if this was because he suspected my part in renaming him, or whether he was simply amazed that anyone could survive on my income. My half-year working on the Census had eventually brought a huge upsurge in my savings, but when Vespasian allowed my name to go forward to the equestrian list, the qualification rule immediately forced me to invest cash in land. The money had flowed straight out of my box, and Nothokleptes now seemed to feel doubtful that he ever really saw it. I felt the same myself.