Robert Harris - Pompeii

To attain the luxury he demanded, Ampliatus was employing the most modern techniques, the best materials, the most skillful craftsmen in Italy. There were Neapolitan glass windows in the dome of the laconicum—the sweating room—as thick as a man’s finger. The floors and the walls and the ceilings were hollow, the furnace that heated the cavities so powerful that even if snow lay on the ground, the air inside would be sweltering enough to melt a man’s flesh. It was built to withstand an earthquake. All the main fittings—pipes, drains, grilles, vents, taps, stopcocks, shower nozzles, even the handles to flush the latrines—were of brass. The lavatory seats were Phrygian marble, with elbow rests carved in the shape of dolphins and chimeras. Hot and cold running water throughout. Civilization.

Attilius had to admire the vision of the man. Ampliatus took so much pride in showing him everything that it was almost as if he was soliciting an investment. And the truth was that if the engineer had had any money—if most of his salary had not already been sent back home to his mother and sister—he might well have given him every last coin, for he had never encountered a more persuasive salesman than Numerius Popidius Ampliatus.

“How soon before you’re finished?”

“I should say a month. I need to bring in the carpenters. I want some shelves, a few cupboards. I thought of putting down sprung wood floors in the changing room. I was considering pine.”

“No,” said Attilius. “Use alder.”

“Alder? Why?”

“It won’t rot in contact with water. I’d use pine—or perhaps cypress—for the shutters. But it would need to be something from the lowlands, where the sun shines. Don’t touch pine from the mountains. Not for a building of this quality.”

“Any other advice?”

“Always use timber cut in the autumn, not the spring. Trees are pregnant in the spring and the wood is weaker. For clamping, use olive wood, scorched—it will last for a century. But you probably know all that.”

“Not at all. I’ve built a lot, it’s true, but I’ve never understood much about wood and stone. It’s money I understand. And the great thing about money is that it doesn’t matter when you harvest it. It’s a year-round crop.” He laughed at his own joke and turned to look at the engineer. There was something unnerving about the intensity of his gaze, which was not steady, but which shifted, as if he were constantly measuring different aspects of whomever he addressed, and Attilius thought, No, it’s not money you understand, it’s men—their strengths and their weaknesses; when to flatter, when to frighten.

“And you, aquarius?” Ampliatus said quietly, “What it is that you know?”

“Water.”

“Well, that’s an important thing to know. Water is at least as valuable as money.”

“Is it? Then why aren’t I a rich man?”

“Perhaps you could be.” He made the remark lightly, left it floating for a moment beneath the massive dome, and then went on, his voice echoing off the walls: “Do you ever stop to think how curiously the world is ordered, aquarius? When this place is open, I shall make another fortune. And then I shall use that fortune to make another, and another. But without your aqueduct, I could not build my baths. That’s a thought, is it not? Without Attilius, no Ampliatus.”

“Except that it’s not my aqueduct. I didn’t build it—the emperor did.”

“True. And at a cost of two million a mile! ‘The late lamented Augustus’—was ever a man more justly proclaimed a deity? Give me the Divine Augustus over Jupiter any time. I say my prayers to him every day.” He sniffed the air. “This wet paint makes my head ache. Let me show you my plans for the grounds.”

He led them back the way they had come. The sun was shining fully now through the large open windows. The gods on the opposite walls seemed alive with color. Yet there was something haunted about the empty rooms—the drowsy stillness, the dust floating in the shafts of light, the cooing of the pigeons in the builders’ yard. One bird must have flown into the laconicum and become trapped. The sudden flapping of its wings against the dome made the engineer’s heart jump.

Outside, the luminous air felt almost solid with the heat, like melted glass, but Ampliatus did not appear to feel it. He climbed the open staircase easily and stepped onto the small sundeck. From here he had a commanding view of his little kingdom. That would be the exercise yard, he said. He would plant plane trees around it for shade. He was experimenting with a method of heating the water in the outdoor pool. He patted the stone parapet. “This was the site of my first property. Seventeen years ago I bought it. If I told you how little I paid for it, you wouldn’t believe me. Mark you, there was not much left of it after the earthquake. No roof, just the walls. I was twenty-eight. Never been so happy, before or since. Repaired it, rented it out, bought another, rented that. Some of these big old houses from the time of the republic were huge. I split them up and fitted ten families into them. I’ve gone on doing it ever since. Here’s a piece of advice for you, my friend: there’s no safer investment than property in Pompeii.”

He swatted a fly on the back of his neck and inspected its pulpy corpse between his fingers. He flicked it away. Attilius could imagine him as a young man—brutal, energetic, remorseless. “You had been freed by the Popidii by then?”

Ampliatus shot him a look. However hard he tries to be affable, thought Attilius, those eyes will always betray him.

“If that was meant as an insult, aquarius, forget it. Everyone knows Numerius Popidius Ampliatus was born a slave and he’s not ashamed of it. Yes, I was free. I was manumitted in my master’s will when I was twenty. Lucius, his son—the one you just met—made me his household steward. Then I did some debt-collecting for an old moneylender called Jucundus, and he taught me a lot. But I never would have been rich if it hadn’t been for the earthquake.” He looked fondly toward Vesuvius. His voice softened. “It came down from the mountain one morning in February like a wind beneath the earth. I watched it coming, the trees bowing as it passed, and by the time it had finished this town was rubble. It didn’t matter then who had been born a free man and who had been born a slave. The place was empty. You could walk the streets for an hour and meet no one except for the dead.”

“Who was in charge of rebuilding the town?”

“Nobody! That was the disgrace of it. All the richest families ran away to their country estates. They were all convinced there was going to be another earthquake.”

“Including Popidius?”

“Especially Popidius!” He wrung his hands, and whined, “ ‘Oh, Ampliatus, the gods have forsaken us! Oh, Ampliatus, the gods are punishing us!’ The gods! I ask you! As if the gods could care less who or what we fuck or how we live. As if earthquakes aren’t as much a part of living in Campania as hot springs and summer droughts! They came creeping back, of course, once they saw it was safe, but by then things had started to change. Salve lucrum! ‘Hail profit!’ That’s the motto of the new Pompeii. You’ll see it all over the town. Lucrum gaudium! ’Profit is joy!’ Not money, mark you—any fool can inherit money. Profit. That takes skill.” He spat over the low wall into the street below. “Lucius Popidius! What skill does he have? He can drink in cold water and piss out hot, and that’s about the limit of it. Whereas you”—and again Attilius felt himself being sized up—“you, I think, are a man of some ability. I see myself in you, when I was your age. I could use a fellow like you.”