Poseidon s Gold

This was not my fault. It was not even Pa's.

That would not stop Carus and Servia.

'Are you taking us to court?'

'Litigation is not our philosophy.'

I managed not to comment, No; only thuggery. 'Look, I only recently came upon this problem,' I began again. 'I am trying to investigate what happened. After five years it is not easy, so I ask you to be sympathetic. I give you my word I will endeavour to illuminate the issue. I ask you to cease harassing my elderly father-'

'I'll take care of myself!' scoffed the elderly Didius, ever to the fore with a pointless quip.

'And give me time.'

'Not after five years!' Carus said.

I wanted to fight. I wanted to storm out, telling him he could do his worst and we would resist everything he did.

There was no point. I had already discussed it with Father on the way here. We could provide muscle at the auctions. We could barricade the office and the store. We could guard both our homes and never step outside without a train of armed guards.

We could not do all those things, however, every day and every night, for years.

Carus and Servia had the grim insistence of people who would persist. We would never be free of the worry, for ourselves, our property-our women. We would be smothered by the cost of it all. We would never escape the inconvenience, or the public doubt that soon attaches to people who are trailing disputed debts.

And we could never forget Festus.

They were growing tired of us. We could see they were about to have us thrown out.

My father was the first to acknowledge the deadlock. 'I cannot replace the Phidias; no similar piece is known. As for finding half a million, it would wipe out my liquidity.'

'Realise your assets,' Carus instructed him.

'I'll have an empty storehouse, and a naked house.'

Carus just shrugged.

My father stood up. With more dignity than I expected, he simply said, 'Selling everything I have, Cassius Carus, will take time!' He was no longer requesting favours, but laying down terms. They would be accepted; Carus and Servia wanted to be paid. 'Come along, Marcus,' Pa ordered quietly. 'We seem to have plenty of work to do. Let's go home.'

For once I abandoned my insistence on stating in public that he and I honoured different versions of 'home'.

He strode out with a set face. I followed. I was equally in despair. Half a million was more than I had already failed to assemble for my own most cherished purposes. It was more money than I really hoped to see. If I ever did see it, I wanted the cash so I could marry Helena. Well I could kiss goodbye to that idea for ever, if I became embroiled in this.

Yet even if it broke me for ever, I realised I could not leave my father to shoulder the whole burden of my feckless brother's debt.

XLIV

We had walked to the collectors' house. We walked back.

Well not quite: my father strode, at a ferocious pace. I hate to intrude upon another man's trouble-and when a man has just failed to escape paying out half a million sesterces, he is certainly in trouble. So I marched along beside him, and since he wanted to fume in complete silence, I joined in loyally.

As he steamed down the Via Flaminia my father's visage was as friendly as Jove's thunderbolt, and my own may well have lacked its usual winsomeness.

I was thinking hard as well.

We had almost reached the Saepta when he wheeled up to a wine-bar counter.

'I need a drink!'

I needed one too, but I still had a headache.

'I'll sit here and wait.' Monumental masons were removing my skull on a tombstone hoist. 'I spent last night oiling two painters' vocal chords.'

Pa paused in the midst of ordering, unable to decide which of the wines listed on the wall was sufficiently strong to create the oblivion he needed. 'What painters?'

'Manlius and Varga. ' I paused, too, though in my case there was no real wrench to the brain cells; I had only been applying my elbow to the counter and staring vaguely round me like any son accompanying his father out of doors. 'Festus knew them.'

' I know them! Go on,' urged my father thoughtfully.

On I went: 'Well, there's a disappearing sculptor who used to lodge with them-'

'What's his name?' asked my father.

The barman was growing anxious. He could sense a lost sale approaching.

'Orontes Mediolanus.'

My father scoffed. 'Orontes never disappeared! I ought to know; I use that idle bastard for copies and repairs. Orontes lodged with those loafers on the Caelian until at least last summer. They took your drink and twisted you!' The barman lost his sale.

We raced off to find Manlius and Varga.

We spent most of the afternoon on the chase. My father dragged me round more sleepy fresco artists-and more of their burgeoning models-than I could bear to think about. We toured horrid hired rooms, freezing studios, teetering penthouses, and half-painted mansions. We went all over Rome. We even tried a suite at the Palace where Domitian Caesar had commissioned something elegant in yellow ochre for Domitia Longina, the dalliance he had snatched from her husband and installed as his wife.

'Nothing like it!' muttered Father. There was plenty like it actually; the Flavian taste was predictable. Domitian was only toying at that stage; he would have to wait for both his father and his brother to die before he could launch into his master plan for a new Palatine. I said what I thought about his decorating cliches. 'Oh you're right!' agreed Pa, grovelling to the inside knowledge of an imperial agent. 'And even adultery with the pick of the smart set is a convention nowadays. Both Augustus and that repulsive little Caligula acquired wives by pinching them.'

'That's not for me. When I grabbed a senator's daughter, I chose one who had divorced herself in readiness for my suave approach.'

'Quite right!' came a rather sardonic reply. 'You would hate to be publicly criticised:'

At last someone told us the address where our quarries were working. We made our way there in silence. We had no plan this time. I was angry, but saw no need to elaborate. I never enquired what Father felt, though I did find out quite soon.

The house in question was being done over completely. Scaffold hung threateningly over the entrance where old roof-tiles were flying down from the heavens into a badly placed skip. The site foreman must be a dozy swine. We clambered in, through a mess of trestles and ladders, then tripped over a tool-bag. Pa picked it up. When the watchman raised his head from a game of draughts scratched in the dusty base of a half-laid tessellated floor, I called out, 'Have you seen Titus anywhere?' and we rushed past, pretending to follow his vaguely raised arm.

There is always a carpenter called Titus. We used him several times to bluff our way around. Even a fat fusspot in a toga, who was probably the householder, let us evade questions, merely frowning fretfully when we barged past him in a corridor. His property had been in the hands of louts for months. He no longer complained when they knocked him aside, peed on his acanthus bed or took naps in their filthy tunics on his own favourite reading-couch.

'Sorry, governor!' my father beamed. He had the knack of sounding like an unskilled pleb who had just put his pick through a water-pipe and was shuffling off out of it quickly.

I knew Manlius would be working near the atrium, but there was too much going on there when we first arrived. We left him, and started working through the dining-rooms, looking for raped Sabines. It was a big house. They had three different feeding areas. Varga was touching up his Sabine ladies in the third.

The plasterer had just left him with a new section. For frescos, the trick is to work extremely fast. Varga was facing a huge new stretch of smooth wet plaster. He had a sketch, with several writhing bottoms on it. He had a kettle of flesh-tone paint already mixed. He had a badger-hair brush in his hand.

Then we came in.