Nemesis

'No!' Call me a cynic, but I believed it all too sourly.

Aulus would have been an easy mark. He thought himself astute, but that just put him in more danger.

I saw it all. Albia, however, was taken aback. After one wild glance, she wrenched her hand free from mine and tore from the room.

Nobody commented on Albia running out. I thought Aulus jumped, but he stayed put.

Helena continued bleakly, 'The wedding happened in a rush, because of Aulus coming home. Minas is delighted -'

Minas must have set it up. However big a rissole Minas of godforsaken Karystos was in Athens, the glory of Greece had passed away. Rome was the only place for any ambitious professional. Marrying off his sombre daughter to a Roman senator's son must have been in the mind of the unscrupulous law teacher from the moment he grabbed his new pupil, fresh off the boat, and promised to make him a master of jurisprudence.

Demonstrating to the newly-weds how a good husband arrives home, whatever shocks await, I crossed the room sedately, then bent and kissed my dear wife's cheek. In the style of a good Roman marriage, she was the companion who shared my closest secrets, so to demonstrate our private affection to Aulus and his bride, I murmured a love greeting in Helena's neat ear. I managed not to nibble her lobe, though I considered it, which may have shown in my face.

'Seems Albia may want to leave town,' I then muttered. 'I could vanish to Pa's villa maritima for a few days. Call it executor business. Shall I take her away for some breathing space?'

Helena kissed me back formally like a matron who knows the father of the family is up to no good. 'Let's talk later, darling.'

In the style of a good Roman marriage, I took that as settled.

VIII

Towards nightfall, to escape the tantrums that were rattling shutters in my house, I went out to see Petronius Longus. He was on duty with the vigiles, at the Fourth Cohort's secondary patrol house. It was a calm, masculine environment where only the grunts of criminals being brutally thrashed ever disturbed the tranquillity. July and August were always quiet. Members of the public used fewer oil lamps and cooking fires, so they set fewer of their tenements on fire. For the vigiles, nights became tedious. Patrols could be stood down. While they waited for emergencies, the firefighters liked to sit in their exercise yard telling one another moral fables. Well, that was one way to describe it. They were ex-slaves, a rough lot.

Petronius sat apart in a small office, wrestling with his latest unsolved case. Drink was barred on these premises, but he gave me a slurp from the beaker he had under the table. He hid it again in case the tribune dropped in, then we swapped gossip.

'Helena is hopping mad at her brother, and our girlie is distraught.'

'Albia's how old? Seventeen? – - Thundering Jove, was it that long ago you and I were in Britain during the Rebellion?' That was when she must have lost her parents. 'Did Aelianus touch her?' We were fathers. We were paranoid with good reason. We had been lads in the army together, then dirty bastards about town. We knew what happens.

'Albia is bound to deny it.' I had not asked her. Why invite tears? Indeed, why give your daughter a reason to hurl abuse at you? 'He's been away a lot, which is one good thing,' I went on gloomily. 'We ran into him a couple of times 'when we were travelling, but as far as I know, they just wrote to each other.'

'Oh letters!' scoffed Petro darkly. He did not have my literary leanings. 'Soulmates, eh? Falco my friend, you are in deep donkey shit.' He handed me his beaker again, though it was a joyless panacea. 'What's his new wife like? A looker?'

'A spender.'

'And a Greek prosecutor's daughter?'

'Guilty until proven innocent. We met her father in Athens. As a boozer he makes Bacchus look restrained.'

'Jupiter and Mars!' Petronius Longus viewed all lawyers as pests. Lawyers so easily demolished the criminal cases he put together; he ignored the fact that this feat was achievable because the vigiles' definition of proof was simply a man whose face they did not like who walked down a street where they happened to be. 'How are the senator and his wife taking this?'

I laughed drily. 'Considering all three of their children have now, without permission, taken a spouse who is either foreign or plebeian, Helena says Decimus and Julia are calm. They have to be careful showing opinions, because not only is the Hellenic bride living in their house with the captured Aulus, but her go-getting, influence-seeking, hard-drinking Athenian father came to Rome too. Of course he would do. A niche among the ruling class, with access to a wine cellar? His sole purpose in fixing up the marriage.'

'The bastard!'

I shared Petro's curse, then put my troubles aside and let him tell me his. He was stumped on a peculiar case: a family who went to their mausoleum to hold a funeral discovered that someone had broken in and dumped an unknown body. Foul play among the tombs was commonplace. Some people would have just chucked out the corpse for the crows, but this family was sensible enough to notice disturbing elements. It was the body of a well-kept man of mature age, not the usual young rape or mugging victim, and he was laid out in an odd ritual position.

'Violence. Someone really enjoyed it.' Petronius was very experienced. He knew when death had been caused by an unexpected drunken fury and when it had a perverted smell.

'You think there will be other victims?'

'Dreading it, Falco.' He dealt with atrocity all the time, but never became inured to humans' absence of humanity.

I told him if anyone could solve this case it was him, and I meant it. Then I went home to be ready for an early start next morning on the trip to my father's villa.

'Is this the future?' Petronius joked. 'You swan off to your extravagant holiday home – while I get stuck here with a sordid serial killer?'

I grinned and told him to get used to it. He ought to know I wouldn't change.

Albia and I went down to the sea on the Via Laurentina. All the best people have villas north of where that road hits the coast, turning towards Ostia. My father had his place a little to the south. He said he liked the privacy. There were reasons. They were mostly commercial, relevant to his dedicated avoidance of paying import tax.

Pa had left me a litter and bearers but I had forgotten I owned it. Automatically, I hired a donkey cart, which gave me an excuse to concentrate on driving. Albia sat bolt upright beside me. Throughout her childhood she had been a scavenger for both food and affection; she still had stick-thin arms and, when she was unhappy, a gaunt look. No fancy ringlets today; she had let her hair dangle loose, though Helena had run with a bone comb and tidied her up for the trip. Even though there was bright sun beating on the highway, the girl hunched in a shawl, making herself suffer.

We rode twenty miles in silence then Albia could no longer keep it up. She was bursting to accuse me of cruelty. 'Why do I have to be dragged along with you? Am I forced to work in your business, like some horrible slave?'

'No, I have a posse of grateful slaves and freedmen for that now. They may be Paphlagonian poltroons but unlike you, Flavia Albia, they are meek.'

'I hope they all cheat you.'

I was the villain. Nothing new. 'Bound to. So cheer up, will you?'

We drove on for a while.

'I'd like to rip his head off.' Aelianus deserved all he got, but I owed it to the senator and Julia Justa to preserve his well-barbered bonce. So I merely said Helena and I hated to see Albia so unhappy; we had thought she might appreciate a chance to avoid Aulus. 'Yes,' agreed Albia thoughtfully. 'Then I'll rip his head off- – when he thinks he's got away with it.'

Helena Justina had taken in our British waif because she was so spirited, so torn with grief and loneliness, and had been so unjustly served by fate. Found as a baby in the ruins of Londinium, no one knew or would ever know whether Albia was a Briton or some half-and-half little bun, a dead trader's offspring born to a local woman, maybe. She could even be fully Roman, though it was unlikely. When we offered to adopt her, we had wormed a certificate of citizenship out of the British governor, who owed me favours. We now gave Albia education, sustenance, security and friendship, though not much more was feasible. In the snobbery of Rome, she would have a hard fight. I was middle-class now, with the Emperor's approval, but since I had plebeian origins, even my own daughters would need more than elocution lessons if they were to be accepted. I lived with a senator's daughter but that was Helena's choice. It was legal, but eccentric.