I slipped him the proverbial coin that loosens tongues. Though a public official, he took it. They always do. "Well, if you do see the man who wasn't here, please tell him Falco needs to speak to him urgently."
He gave me a cheerful tilt of the head. I was not encouraged.
"What's your name?"
"Firmus." We were on moneyed terms. I thought it fair to ask. "Handy to know. I may want to list your sweetener in my accounts."
He opened his palm and looked at the coins. "This is business, then? Thought you said he was a friend."
"He is. The best. He can still go on expenses." I grinned. Conniving always makes new pals.
"So what business are you in, Falco?"
"Government food regulations," I lied, with yet another friendly wink. "In fact, I'll ask you, Firmus: some of the hotpot hawkers up back of the stores seem to be having trouble. Have you seen any evidence of the local bars being threatened?"
"Oh no, not me," Firmus assured me. "I never go to bars. It's home straight after work for Chicken Frontinian and an early night."
If his habits were so abstemious, I was surprised he had put on so much flab. "Frontinian has too much aniseed for me," I confided. "I like a good Vardarnus. Now Petro, he has disgusting taste. He's happy as a sandflea sitting down to braised beets or beans in the pod… What's the word on the docks about that Briton dead in the well?"
"He must have upset someone."
"Anybody suggesting who he upset?"
"Nobody's saying."
"But everybody knows, I bet!"
Firmus gave me a knowing head tilt, indicating assent. "Lot of questions about this stuff lately."
"Who's asking? Long-haired Britons from the south?"
"What?" Firmus looked surprised. The team King Togidubnus had sent out could not yet have worked this part of the wharves.
"Who, then?" I drew up short. "Surely not that old friend of mine, the one you haven't seen?" Firmus made no reply. Petronius must have given him a bigger sweetener than I did. "So what would you have told this invisible person, Firmus?"
"It's supposed to be out-of-towners," said Firmus, almost matter-of-factly, as if I should know it already. "I mean a long way out of town. There's some group taking an interest in the Londinium social scene."
"Where do they hail from? And who's the big meatball?"
"What?"
"The man in charge." But Firmus clammed up. Even though he had been enjoying the attention as he held forth as the expert on the local situation, something now proved too much for him.
He might know the answer to my question about who ran the rackets, but he wasn't going to tell me. I recognized the look in his previously friendly eyes. It was fear.
XX
I walked back past the warehouses and into the unpromising interior streets where the racketeers seemed to operate. I had agreed with Hilaris: this happened everywhere. Yet that big-time frighteners would try taking over the commercial outlets in Britain still seemed unlikely.
There was so little here. Retail outlets selling staples: carrots, spoons, and firewood bundles, mostly in rather small quantities. Oil, wine, and fish-pickle sauce, all looking as if their crack-necked amphorae, with dusty bellies and half the labels missing, had been unloaded from the boat several seasons before. Dim eating houses, offering amateur snacks and piss-poor wine to people who hardly knew what to ask for. One obvious brothel that I saw yesterday; well, there must be more of those. A respectable husband and father-well, a husband with a scathing wife who missed nothing-had to be careful how he looked for them. What else? Oh, look! Between a sandal-seller and a shop full of herbal seeds (buy our exciting borage and caress away care with curative coriander!), here was a placard scrawled up on a house wall that advertised a gladiatorial show: Pex the Atlantic Thrasher (really?); the nineteen-times-unbeaten Argorus (clearly some old frowsty fox whose fights were fixed); a clash of bears; and Hidax the Hideous-apparently the retiarius with the niftiest trident this side of Epirus. There was even a furious female with a cliche name:
Amazonia (advertised in much smaller letters than her male counterparts, naturally).
I was too grown-up to be lured by nasty girls with swords, though they might be sensational for some. Instead, I was trying to remember the last time I had had any borage that was more than mildly interesting. Suddenly I became aware of excruciating pain. Somebody had jumped me.
I never saw him coming. He had slammed my face against a wall, pinioning me with such brutal force that he nearly broke the arm he had twisted up my back. I would have cursed, but it was impossible.
"Falco!" Hades, I knew that voice.
My fine Etruscan nose was squashed tightly against a wall that was so deeply rough-cast it would imprint me for a week with its hard pattern; the daub was bonded with cow dung, I could tell.
"Petro-"I gurgled.
"Stop drawing attention!" He might have been bullying some thief he had caught fingering women's bustbands off a laundry drying line. "You sapheaded blunderer! You interfering, imbecilic rat's bane-" There were more hissed insults, all meticulously spittable, some obscene, and one I had never heard before. (I worked out what it meant.) "Get this, you flakewit-leave it, or I'm a dead man!"
He released me abruptly. I nearly fell over. When I staggered around to tell the swine he had made himself quite clear enough, he had already gone.
XXI
I was having a frustrating time: when I retraced my steps to the Swan, Albia had disappeared too.
"Went off with a man," the proprietor enjoyed telling me.
"You should be ashamed if people are using your bar as a pickup point. Suppose she was my darling little daughter and you had let her be dragged off by a pervert!"
"But she's not your darling, is she?" he sneered. "She's a street child. I've seen her around for years."
"And was she always with men?" I asked, nervous now about what type of bad influence Helena had imposed on the children at the residence.
"No idea. Still, they all grow up."
Albia was fourteen, if she really was an orphan of the Rebellion. Old enough to be married off, or at least politely betrothed to a poxy tribune, if she were a senatorial brood mare. Old enough to get pregnant by some layabout her father hated, if she were a plebeian needed in the family business. Old enough to be wise in ways I could not think about. Yet she was childishly slight, and if her life had been hard as I suspected, she was young enough to deserve a chance, young enough to be capable of being saved-if she had stayed with us.
"She'll be at it all over the forum soon, even if she's a virgin now."
"Sad," I commented. He thought I had cracked. And I did not like the way he watched me walk away down the street.
I had no plan when I set off walking, just a need to get out of there. I felt there were too many eyes watching me, from people in doorways or even people unseen.
I had gone about three streets. I was starting to be aware that there was more activity in Londinium than most Romans would expect. All the regular commodities were sold. The dark little shops were open in the day; life in them just had a duller pace than I was used to. Buyers and sellers lurked inside, just as they always did; even when the sun was so hot that I was sweating after fifty strides, people here forgot they were allowed to sit in the open air. Otherwise I felt at home. In the daily markets, selling fresh veg and sad-eyed dead game, the traders' shouts were vibrant and their wives' jokes were coarse. The men could have been tricky barrow boys around The Temple of Hope back home in the Tiber-side Vegetable Market. The stench of old fish scales is the same anywhere. Walk your boots around a newly sluiced butchers' street, and the faint odor of animal blood will haunt you all day afterward. Then pass a cheese stall and the warm, wholesome waft will draw you back to buy a piece-until you are sidetracked by those remarkably cheap belts on the stall next door that will fall apart when you get them home…