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  ROME, AD 90: AVENTINE, CAELIAN AND FORUM ROMANUM

  PLAINTIFFS AND AGENTS

  Some of the Usual Suspects

  Flavia Albia

  honest debt collector and investigator

  Tiberius Manlius

  her husband, an ambiguous contractor

  Gaius and Lucius

  dear little nephews

  Their household: Gratus the smooth steward; Dromo the dim slave; Paris the cheeky runabout; Fornix the celebrity chef; Suza the hopeful beautician; Barley the shy dog; Mercury the placid donkey; Glaphyra the diligent nurse; Rodan the seedy door-keeper

  Marcia and Corellius

  difficult visitors

  Falco and Helena

  renowned parents

  Julia, Favonia and Postumus

  interesting siblings

  Tullius

  a rich uncle

  Junia

  a hopeless aunt

  Aelianus and Justinus

  lovable uncles with specialist knowledge

  Mygdonius

  a wills expert

  In the Catering Industry

  Junillus and Apollonius

  at the Stargazer (previously Flora’s)

  Rufus

  at the Valerian (ex the Colossus)

  Rumpus and the skivvy

  at Nobilo’s

  A bunch of lying rascals

  at the Comet

  Thymellus

  at the Little Caelian Caupona

  Titus

  on the Aventine bread round

  At the Basilica Julia

  Honorius

  a legal hound

  Mamillianus

  a principal lawyer (not in evidence)

  Hermeros

  his office manager

  Crispinus

  a Mamillianus Associate, freely associating

  Nincundio

  a very angry man

  Felicula

  looking for a good lawyer

  The Tranquilli and the Prisci

  See family trees

  Slaves or freedmen used as collateral, etc: Philodamus the book-keeper, Erotillus the archive clerk, Dindius the basket-seller, Dindius’s son the helpful boy

  I

  According to my old note-tablets, the Tranquillus case began with Spanish rabbits. They were widely traded so there must have been money in it. That was always good news when, as a private investigator, I took on new clients.

  This key item in the Roman food chain was certainly known to anyone who frequented the Stargazer. Our family’s greasy spoon was managed by my aunt Junia, wife to the most boring man on the Aventine, Gaius Baebius. She used to hide rabbit bones and other inedible parts in the evening hotpots she sold over the counter to the dimmer kind of Aventine workers—those who had never realised that better bars were available. Junia’s stew was no favourite, even among her crazily compliant customers. Apart from the danger of choking on unseen ribs, sometimes whole furry ears plopped out into serving bowls and splashed people’s tunics. The ears could be tossed out into the street, but local laundries had started to be difficult when asked to tackle stains caused by the liquor that Junia called gravy. As was regularly pointed out, it was worse than axle grease.

  People who dared challenge my aunt were few. However, it had been suggested that her stewing meat was not even rabbit, but some creature of similar size that had been offered at the back door by a rat-catcher. Nobody said this more than once. When Junia had stopped raving, they had to go and eat at the Valerian. The Valerian was to feature in my case too, along with Nobilo’s, the Comet, and the Little Caelian Caupona.

  My work for Aunt Junia began mundanely enough, with not a bunny in sight. One chilly lunchtime in January, two people chose to have a meet-and-eat at the Stargazer. They were a man and a woman, both married, though not to each other. The caupona waiters, Apollonius and Junillus, immediately spotted that: their customers wore wedding rings, yet the way they held hands and the intensity of their conversation gave away that they were philandering. Waiters always know.

  The visiting duo ordered from the muzzy chalked board, which showed they were new customers. Whatever they had asked for, they were served hard-boiled eggs, the dish of the day. It was the only dish of every day, at lunchtime. Sometimes a few flakes of mackerel were scattered on top, generally not. Anyone who hated fish had to pick it off. The Stargazer did not confuse its customers with menu choice.

  The waiters were an elderly man and a lad. It was over-staffing for their level of trade in winter, though typical for a bar that did not offer waitress service. I mean by that what my husband calls a garlicky tryst upstairs, with a dose of warts as afters. The Stargazer was so hopeless it had never managed to organise its upper rooms for such a purpose. That failure could be why our place was struggling.

  The two waiters were busy—not whizzing about serving, but heads together over a geometry problem they had drawn on the counter, using lines of garum sauce. Once the new customers had been supplied with food bowls, along with their bill in a saucer, they were left to their own devices. They had not seemed to mind, as they stared into each other’s eyes and barely talked.

  The geometry hobby gripped our waiters. Apollonius had once been a teacher. Rome’s most recent emperors were said to value education, but he had found it impossible to earn a living at his street-corner school. Ours was a rough district. Learning was a low priority; it came well after gambling and wasting money on evil-eye amulets or, if you absolutely could not avoid it, paying your rent. Reduced to pessimistic begging, Apollonius had been given work by the Stargazer’s previous manager to stop him blocking the pavement in front of her bar. After twenty years of serving gut-rot here, he still mentally believed he would one day resume teaching. He disciplined the Stargazer’s customers with well-tried teaching methods, like sternness and sarcasm, although he was discouraged from beating them with a stick unless they seriously misbehaved.

  Nowadays he shared both serving and geometry with my cousin Junillus. Aunt Junia’s eighteen-year-old son was deaf, though he tackled it cheerfully. A bright soul, he enjoyed problem-solving with Apollonius; cheeky by nature, Junillus loved the fact that mathematics was viewed as politically suspect. All our family kicked back at the government, a trait he had absorbed even though he was adopted. As a baby, he had been dumped in a skip, no doubt because of his disability; my father had found him whimpering among the building rubble and lacked the heart to walk away.

  My childless aunt and her husband had then decided that it would be best if they took this scrap and taught him to cope with life, even though two people with less understanding of life would be hard to find. All the rest of us thought Junia and Gaius Baebius were ghastly, yet in their way they loved him, so the easy-going Junillus shrugged and truly loved them back. By some dedicated process, they had helped him to lip-read and even to talk, so I suppose they weren’t all bad.

  Once he was old enough, Junillus enjoyed his work at our family bar. He improved the Stargazer as much as he could, however hard Junia tried to make the place the worst takeaway on the Aventine. It only survived because it was on a good route for passing labourers; busy times were just after dawn and in the early evening. My husband and I had been known to rendezvous there during the day, but we could claim a family discount; it offered few attractions for courting couples.

  Apollonius and Junillus had let the pair who came on that particular day have an inside table. Perhaps the lovers had deliberately chosen an empty caupona so they could smooch in private. They certainly hadn’t come for the ambiance or conversation. They allowed themselves to be fobbed off with rubbery eggs and they poured their own nips from a very small flagon. Given the poor menu, they stayed quite a long time.

  When they wanted to leave, they stood up, slid into their cloaks, then waved their bill at the “busy” waiters to indicate agreement in the traditional way—No need to come over, we are leaving the money on the table.

  Junillus, being deaf, only noticed the gesture. Apollonius heard the chink of what he assumed to be coins rattling into the pottery saucer. But when he went to pick up the money, it was the old scam: three metal rivets.

  * * *

  That evening, when his mother came to cash up, Junillus confessed. Furious, Aunt Junia immediately banned these customers, who were unlikely to return in any case. She raved that there had been much too much cheating lately; all the bars were suffering after Saturnalia. Most other proprietors were lackadaisical wimps, but the queen of the Aventine planned to act. It was the second day of January, so not too late for a New Year Resolution, even a doomed one. Junia would penalise punters who left without paying—or, in other words, she would instruct Junillus and Apo
llonius to stop it happening. (They received her edict with hidden grins.) Undeterred, Junia hung up a notice that henceforth all defaulters would be named, shamed and prosecuted.

  Who would file a court claim, especially for such a puny amount as a bar bill? She soon decided against the legal costs but remained dead set on recovery. Since her brother, the informer, was still holidaying at the coast (I knew Falco was back, but he had deliberately not told her), Junia decreed that the other investigator she knew, her niece—that was me, worse luck—must track down the two culprits.

  So I, Flavia Albia, had to recover the money, did I? After stressing that the Stargazer was a family business, therefore it was my duty, Junia applied more pressure. Like Junillus, my personal history had involved being an abandoned child, discovered by Falco and his wife, who were always rescuing sad little mites. I had been about fourteen when they ran across me: unwashed, untaught and surly. In my case no one else came forward to take me in so they had to bring me up themselves. Junia now explained how I ought to be grateful that I had been adopted from hideous Britain by generous Romans, when nobody could guess how awful my origins were or how badly I might turn out. She managed not to imply I had turned out badly, because even Junia could produce fake tact when it affected her own interests. But she claimed this favour was the least I could do as thanks.

  The people I really thanked were Falco and Helena. They took it as their reward that I was alive, sane, cheerful, useful to the community and even rather well married to a man they approved of. None of that impressed Junia. She would always see me as the dangerous product of a vile province. At my wedding to a magistrate, she had been first in the queue to complain about the catering and to prophesy that our marriage wouldn’t last.

  It would, dammit. He was lovely. I was determined. Anyway, we had bought a house.

  Now Junia needed me. I could have said no; I should have done. But I was fond of Junillus. While his mother pressurised me, he was giving me his doe-eyed look: if the reckoning remained unpaid, he would have trouble at home …

  I caved in. “Give me their bill and those rivets. That’s evidence. I will need a fee, Auntie, though of course it goes down as an expense for you.”

  Junia found accountancy too complicated, despite us all explaining how to assign her deductibles. Falco had worked on the Census once so he knew all the tricks about tax. Although Junia appeared intelligent, she could not grasp that if I traced the absconders I would add my fee to their bill. Then her husband could deduct this genuine business expense from his notifiable income. Gaius Baebius would like that; he had worked in the customs service, so he was hot on withholding money from the treasury, as he had seen so many other people do.

  Junia sniffed in her charmless way. She was a middle-aged woman who had never enjoyed life, even though hers had been relatively comfortable. It was too late now for her to fool around with concepts like making herself endearing. “I hope you’ll get a move on, Albia. I am not intending to pay you until you bring the cash—and I don’t want to hear about any of your horrible Druidic methods. My caupona has a reputation.”

  Too right, it had. Though not the one she pretended.

  Thanks to my excellent Roman education from Falco and Helena, I knew magic was a forbidden practice. Unless you could evade arrest by hiding in a mystic cloud when the troops came for you, in Roman law the penalty was death. I needed to stop Junia shouting in that abrasive voice of hers that my work involved the occult. Being an informer caused enough confrontations with the authorities.

  “I shall recover your money,” I assured her patiently. Clients need you to sound confident. “It won’t require a bunch of mistletoe.”

  I never understood why people in Rome liked thinking I was a Druid. Even back in Britannia, Druids were banned. Despite that, I had met one once: a smelly, long-haired old poseur from the west, as most were. He had said he liked little girls—then tried to back me against a log-store and interfere with me. His second sight had failed to forewarn him that I would kick him below the tunic belt and race for freedom, like a streak of moonlight.

  I had been a Londinium street urchin, so I had learned a few survival tricks—but I knew no spells. Soon I would regret that. Sorting out the Tranquillus family would have been so much easier with supernatural powers. And among their complicated troubles, our unpaid bill was only the start.

  II

  My first need was to identify the defaulters, so I had to question the witnesses. “You were doing your puzzle on the counter,” I tackled them in a professional tone, “but please try to recall what they looked like.” Since they knew me, Apollonius and Junillus shuffled gormlessly, each waiting for the other to speak. “Was anybody else here who might remember these cheats?” They shook their heads. “No other customers?”

  “Oh, we are always much too popular at lunchtime!” butted in Junia, to whom self-delusion came naturally. “People must have stayed away because they thought they would have a problem finding space.” Junillus screwed the tip of one forefinger into his temple, the classic gesture to tell me his mother was mad. “Naughty boy!” she chided. She mouthed the words carefully, but he knew he could get away with cheek so he did not bother to look.

  I pretended to put the two waiters under hypnosis. “I am taking you back … You are completely relaxed, feeling warm and sleepy…”

  “This is normal for us.” Apollonius must have been over seventy, but he could play-act as annoyingly as the infants he had once taught. He leaned on the counter and pretended to snooze.

  “Drop it! Let us remember the scene. It is lunchtime again. A gloomy old morning, just two days into the fresh consulship of those top tribunal heroes, Domitian and Nerva, that’s God-on-earth, our paranoid Emperor, and his junior colleague, widely known as Who-the-doodah-is-he? Got it now? It’s Mercury day. Fine drizzle and oppressive government. Now two soppy lovers come wandering by, and as they are looking for somewhere to drool over each other, they decide this is the most romantic bar they can find.”

  Junillus repeated his “crackpots” gesture. Though loyal, he accepted that the Stargazer was a sorry hole. Only able to agree, I gazed around at its cracked plaster walls, the blackening spiders’ webs, the emaciated cat, the counter pots where yesterday evening’s congealed hot food had hardened into sludge around their chipped rims. “I suppose the hand-holding couple must have tried all the better bars on other days.”

  “What ‘better bars’?” snapped Junia, tensing up so much her skinny ringlets bounced.

  Following my rule not to fight with my client in the first few hours of being hired, I restrained myself. “The bars they can’t go back to because they have already cheated the waiters once.” She gave me her sniff again. “Have you got a cold, Aunty?” She hated to be called that. Her preferred address would have been “Augusta,” like an empress who had impressed the Senate and won extreme honours. One who was known to poison people who crossed her.

  “Junillus, buck up. Describe the man.”

  “I am deaf. I do not understand.”

  “No, you are a clever boy, goofing about.” I grabbed him by the shoulders, pointing to his own features and exaggerating my words. “Marcus Baebius Junillus: you yourself are average height, brown eyes, need a haircut, stubble botched by your barber. You are wearing a short-sleeved grey tunic with part of its braid loose—you must be perished, but it’s to show off these dashing wristbands—and your apron needs to go to the laundry, not tomorrow but today.”

  “Red cloak,” he offered, batting rather beautiful lashes over big, dark brown eyes. My younger sisters were starting to adore him a little too much. “Man’s. Not really red. Squashed plum. Too long.”

  “Very helpful. More clues, please.” Even though he could lip-read, I made further arm movements to illustrate. “Tall? Brawny? Wide face? Long chin? Bearded?”