Lindsey Davis - Graveyard of the Hesperides

“No, you swine, I did.”

“You’re a gem! And eminently-”

“Don’t say it.”

“Talking to you was much more fun before you were a bride.”

“Not for me,” I replied bluntly. “Cut it out, Titus sunshine. I bet your Pullia is looking forward to my wedding. You don’t want me spoiling it for her by mentioning that smart woman from the Street of the Plane Trees you tangled with.”

Morellus failed to look ashamed. “Not me.”

“You were seen! The full carnality.”

“Who told you that?”

“I have my spies.” He was seen by Tiberius and me. “The word is, you didn’t bother to shag her; you just lay back and let the grand lady do the work.”

“People tell such lies,” Morellus disagreed demurely. “Do you want to hear what I found out or not?”

We decided to perch on a stone bench outside someone’s house. I felt revived after my bath and supper, but Morellus badly needed to sit down. I did repent; I went to a bar and fetched him a beaker of mulsum. While I was doing that, he lit a couple of lamps someone had blown out, ordering all the evening loafers to move on. Two pickpockets were cruising that part of the Vicus Longus. “Trot off and rob somewhere else!” shouted Morellus. They could tell he was from the vigiles. Without complaint they did as they were told.

A porter put his head out aggressively from the house whose bench we were using. Morellus gave him a smiling nod, as we had every right to be there. The porter shrugged and went back inside.

“Watch out for pots being emptied from upstairs,” I said. “Now what have you to impart, sordid Fourth Cohort snoop?”

He had to spin it out, of course. “I know what you think, Flavia Albia! I could tell it with Macer the other day. You don’t believe we ever look into anything, or open a case file, or keep records.”

I nodded. That was what I thought. Why pretend?

“Well, you are wrong.” He dug a finger into me. “And this is why. I’ll tell you, then I’ll enjoy hearing you apologize.”

“Better be good then. Speak, Morellus!”

He sipped his mulsum annoyingly. He smacked his lips, wiped his chin, had a drop more, gazed up and down the street. I folded my hands, waiting patiently. I wouldn’t ask again. If his information had any worth, he had not marched all this way from the Aventine only to go home without thrilling someone with it.

“Those five men. You said they were salesmen.”

“That’s what I was told. Now it’s old news. The supposed salesmen were marble-suppliers, who seem in the clear for the bodies. By virtue of them still being alive.”

The joke was lost. Morellus was having none of it. “You said salesmen, so I proceeded on that basis, woman.”

“They might have been,” I agreed. “The marble lads have been ruled out, so those corpses could have been anyone.”

“You said salesmen. Foreign salesmen.”

“All right.” I was being quiet with him now. “Foreign isn’t definite, though it seems a possibility. What’s your point?”

“You said-”

“I know what I said. So what?”

“So I thought, where do salesmen congregate? Especially foreign buggers? Whatever they are selling?” I let him take his time. Anyone with a good story should be allowed to gauge their moment. “They all come upriver to the Emporium.”

I nodded.

“Think about it, woman.”

I nodded again, still unable to see why this was so significant.

The Emporium, otherwise called the Porticus Aemilius, lies on the bank of the Tiber, below the Aventine, beside the Marble Embankment. It is a stupendous collection of warehouses for unloading and storing imports. It is noisy, chaotic, full of dealers and swindlers, wharfingers and wholesalers, plus absolutely endless piles of merchandise from all over the world, much of it high range, every kind of desperately valuable commodity and material. Yes, salesmen would go there. No question.

“So this is what I decided,” said Morellus. “Those five men, nobody around here knew who they were, nobody in the High Footpath missed them ever. Macer’s never going to be able to tell you anything about them. If they were lodging near here, the landlord just thought they had bunked off without paying. He stole their luggage as compensation and never said anything. Usual practice. But here’s the winning dice for you, Albia. If anyone connected to those dead men wanted to find out what happened to them, they would not come here to inquire. They would start in the one place they knew any salesmen were bound to have gone to. If they wrote from abroad, they would contact the cohort which oversees that place. So,” he said, with his emphasis portentous, “the missing-persons report wouldn’t be sent anywhere near bloody Macer and the cruddy Third. The Emporium is our beat. It would come to us, come to the Fourth.”

I reminded him it was a decade past. He said, so what? I laughed.

Morellus thought about his information. “Now this is where your injustice about our working practices are going to let you down, young woman.” He drained his beaker in a long, slow draft.

Our conversation was proceeding on the usual lines for us: a mix of horrible and useful. Each of us thought the other was a social menace, yet we gave one another credit for reliable work.

I said I apologized.

“Accepted.”

“The Fourth Cohort is always professional and wonderful. So now tell me.”

“This is what I think. Suppose,” said Morellus, leaning toward me confidingly, “salesmen at the Emporium who deal in anything high quality are going to have people who will raise merry Hades if they don’t come home. They could be so well off they are persons of standing in their own society. Their people might even, if they had enough push, persuade high-ups in their province to get involved officially. Even a provincial governor, if they bribed him, might write to Rome asking questions about their mysterious disappearance. Governors love stirring with their big sticks.”

“Agreed. At least if his bribe was big enough … So then the vigiles or even the Urban Cohorts, gods deliver us, would certainly be instructed to investigate. But, Morellus, it was still ten years ago.”

“So what? You are speaking not about the ingrates in the Urbans or those loons in the Third, but us, the glorious Fourth. Our patch. Our interest. Our investigation. And with a governorial query, it struck me there would be a scroll concerning this. I had a look for it,” he uttered proudly.

“You big fat darling!” I was genuinely impressed. “So did you find it?”

“I looked,” stated Morellus, “in the special place we keep for old scrolls that may be required for embuggerance avoidance in years to come.”

“Where is that?”

“On a shelf in the clerk’s office, right at the back with all the horrible spiders, behind the giant beaker we keep for when the tribune visits.”

“Does he?”

“Not if he can help it. But when he does, we can give him his own special cup, can’t we? He loves us for that. He’s not to know the doctor mixes laxatives in it with a big spurtle, when the lads are all bunged up with constipation.”

“They need to eat more beans.”

“Too farty. You ever been in a station house surrounded by mass flatulence?”

I duly shuddered but let him see my impatience. “So come on, you swine. Did you, or did you not, find a scroll with old missing-persons records?”

Morellus gazed at me, almost sadly, to think I had doubted. He reached into his tunic and pulled out a scroll, which he handed to me. It was not as sweaty as it might have been.

“Of course I did, Flavia Albia. Ten years ago, we were horribly badgered over five missing men. They were foreigners. Procedures were put in place. That is to say, our duty inquirer went along to the warehouses and asked questions-smart, expertly phrased ones. There was no trace, we never found them. Our verdict was anything could have happened to them; most likely they fell off the boat home and were all drowned. But for twelve months our man kept being asked for further developments, of which naturally there were none. You can see where he has initialled his scroll every time he was asked, very patiently. And he put it away on our special shelf behind the tribune’s beaker, so here it is, for you to read.”