Lindsey Davis - Time to Depart

'I don't want to go.'

'Tertulla, everyone who has a chance to go to school should be grateful for the privilege.' What an insufferable prig. 'Leave me alone, or I'm telling your grandma you've bunked off.'

My mother was helping with the fees for Galla's children, a pure waste of money. Ma would have stood for a better return gambling on chariot races. What nobody seemed to have noticed was that since I gave my mother financial support, it was my cash being flung away.

'Oh Uncle Marcus, don't!'

'Oh nuts. I'm going to.'

I was already feeling gloomy. From the first moment Tertulla mentioned my father I had begun to suspect today might not be all I had been planning. Goodbye baths; goodbye swank at the Forum

…'Grandpa's in trouble. Your friend Petronius told him to get you,' my niece cried. Persistence ran in the family, if it involved telling bad news.

Petro knew what I felt about my father. If Pa was in such trouble Petro reckoned even I would help him out, the trouble must really be serious.

The emporium is a long, secure building close to the Tiber. The barges that creep up from Ostia reach the city with Caesar's Gardens on their left, and a segment of the Aventine district, below the Hill, to their right. Where they meet the left-hand city boundary at the Transtiberina, with a long view upriver towards the Probus Bridge, they find the Emporium lying to their right, a vast indoor market that includes the ancient Aemilian Portico. You can smell it from the water. A blind man would know he had arrived.

Here, anything buildable, wearable or edible that is produced in auy province of the Empire comes to be unloaded at the teeming wharves. The slick stevedores, who are renowned for their filthy tempers and flash off-duty clothing, then crash the goods on to handcarts, dump them in baskets, or wheel about with great sacks on their shoulders, ferrying them inside the greatest indoor market in the world. Cynical sales are conducted, and before the importer has realised he has been rooked by the most devious middlemen in Europe, everything whirls out again to destinations in workshops, warehouses, country estates or private homes. The moneychangers wear happy stinks all day.

Apart from a few commodities like grain; paper and spices, which are so precious or are sold in such quantities that they have their own markets elsewhere, you can buy anything at the Emporium. Through his profession, my father-was well known there. He no longer involved himself in general sales, for his interest had narrowed to the kind of fine-art trade that is conducted in quieter, highly tasteful surroundings where the purchaser submits to a more leisurely screwing and then pays a more gigantic premium to the auctioneer.

Pa was a character people noticed. Normally I could have asked anybody if they had seen Geminus, and pretty soon someone would have told me which hot-wine stall he was lurking at. I should have been able to find him easily – if only the fierce patrolmen of the Fourth Cohort of vigiles had been letting people in.

The scene was incredible. Nothing like it could ever have happened before. The Emporium lay in the area included by Augustus when he redrew Rome's boundaries because habitation had expanded. I had made the mistake of coming out from the old part through the city walls, using the Lavernal Gate – a spot always busy but today almost impassable. Down in the shadow of the Aventine approaching the Tiber, I had found chaos. It had taken me an hour to force a passage through the people who were clogging up the Ostia Road. By the time I really made it to the wharves beside the river, I knew something highly peculiar must have gone wrong. I was prepared for a scene – though not one evidently caused by my sensible friend Petronius.

It was midmorning. The gates to the Emporium, normally closed at night for security but flung open at first light and kept that way well into the evening, now stood barred. Red-faced members of the watch were drawn up with their backs to the doors. There were a lot of them: five hundred men formed the half-cohort that patrolled the river side of the Aventine. A proportion were dedicated to fire-watching, and with the special dangers of darkness they were mostly on duty at night. That still left ample cover to combat daylight crime. Now, Petronius must have drawn up all the day roster. The line was holding, but I was glad I was not part of it. A huge, angry crowd was milling about insulting the watch and calling for Petro's head. Occasionally a group rushed forwards, and the line of patrolmen had to link arms and face them out. I could see a small cluster at the far end of the building where Porcius was handing out shields from a waggon.

Petro was nowhere in sight. It seemed wise.

With a spurt of anxiety I shoved my way to the front. 'Great gods, what's this? Am I supposed to believe that Petronius Longus, notorious for caution, has suddenly decided to make his name in history as the Man Who Stopped Trade?'

'Shove off, Falco!' muttered Fusculus, who had been trying to argue with four or five score merchants and workmen, many of them foreign and all of them spitting fire.

'Petro sent for me.' It was worth a try.

'Petro's not bloody here!' Fusculus told me through bitterly clenched teeth as he pushed back a furious Gallic wine merchant by the simple means of lifting one leg and applying his boot sole firmly to the man's belt buckle. The Fourth Cohort were slightly more sophisticated than others in Rome, but no one argued with them twice. 'Petro's in shit. A Praetorian Guard dragged him off to the Palace to explain this mess.'

'I may as well get back to bed then!'

'You do that, Falco…'

The vigiles had their hands full. With so large a crowd, in such an ugly mood, I did not fancy helping them. Luckily they did not demean themselves by asking. I had a let-out anyway, for I heard my name roared by an unmistakable foghorn, and turned to be greeted by my papa. He clapped me in his arms affectionately. This was not his normal greeting, just showing off before a crowd of foreigners. I shook myself free angrily.

'Marcus! Let's get out of this stew – we've things to discuss!'

I had nothing to discuss with my father. I experienced the usual sense of dread.

He hauled me into a more-or-less quiet corner around the back of the old Galban granaries. Needless to say, the corner was in a wine bar. After my exhausting passage through the streets I did not object to that, though in an equal world since he had issued the summons, I would have preferred that he paid the bill. Somehow the chalked piece of tile landed on the table in front of me. -

'Oh thanks, Marcus. Your health!'

My father was a sturdy character of sixty-odd, with a greying thatch of marauding curls and what passed for a twinkle in his untrustworthy dark brown eyes. He went by the name of Geminus, though his real name was Favonius. There was no point in the change; that was typical. Not tall, he was still a commanding presence; people who wanted to annoy me said we looked alike. In fact he was heavier and shiftier. His belly supported a money belt whose weight told its own story. His dark blue tunic was now old enough to be used when he was lifting furniture around warehouses, but the wrecked braid on it, still with traces of silver thread, gave a clue to the style he could afford when relaxing socially. Women liked his grin. He liked most things about women. He had run away with a red-haired one when I was a child, after which he and I could hardly exchange a civil word.

'Your mad crony's caused a bit of a pickle!' One of the few paternal routines he still honoured was criticising my friends.

'He would have had his reasons,' I said coldly. I was trying to think of any possible reason for what Petronius had done. 'This can't just be a reprisal because some stallholder forgot to pay his market dues.'