Shadows in Bronze

I owed our introduction to my brother-in-law the plasterer; it took the form of that death's head phrase, Just mention my name… His name was Mico. I mentioned it extremely cautiously.

‘Mico's name,' I admitted, 'sends even hard-bitten foremen with thirty years' experience rushing off to the nearest fountain to drown themselves – I dare say you remember him?'

'Oh, I remember Mico!' observed the plumber, through gritted teeth.

'I reckon,' suggested Petronius, who knew my cackhanded brother-in-law and despised him as we all did, 'that after enduring a riot and an earthquake, being visited by young Mico proves the proverb that disasters come in threes!'

Mico's plumber, whose name was Ventriculus, was a quiet, calm, honest-looking type who managed to give the impression that if he said you needed a new cistern it might almost be true. 'He was pretty bad,' agreed the plumber.

'Torture!' I said, starting to smile for the first time this trip. Heaping abuse on my brothers-in-law always cheers me up. 'A painter in Latium lost an eye when his brush bounced off a tumulus in Mico's bumpy skin. He received no compensation; the judge said, if he knew he was following Mico around he should have been prepared for hummocks.'

I stopped, then we all grinned. ‘So you're a friend of Mico's?'

'Isn't everyone?' murmured Ventriculus, and we all grinned again. Mico is convinced anyone who meets him loves him. The fact is, they just stand there trapped by his awful great-heartedness while he buys them drinks (he does buy the drinks – he buys plenty; once Mico gets you stuck in a tavern he keeps you squirming there for hours). 'Why,' Ventriculus teased me, 'would any loving brother give his sister to this Mico?'

'My sister Victorina gave herself!'

I could have added that she gave herself to anyone with the bad taste to have her, usually behind the Temple of Venus on the Aventine, but that cast a slur on the rest of the family which we did not deserve.

The thought of my relations was upsetting me so badly that I launched into what I wanted Ventriculus to do. He listened with the mild demeanour of a man who had waited eight years for his town council to draw up a specification for emergency repairs. 'We do have spare capacity; I can take on a foreigner…'

So we all trooped back through Pompeii and out to the port. The plumber plodded along in silence, like a man who has learned to be polite to lunatics through dealing with civil engineers.

Thinking about my nephew, I had forgotten to check my ship's arrival, but when the Emperor says a vessel will be moved from Ostia to the Sarnus you can reckon that the sailors will set off immediately and not stop to dice for any sea nymphs on the way.

The ship called the Circe was waiting in the harbour. This was one of the Tarentum galleys built for Atius Pertinax – a huge, square-sailed merchantman, thirty foot deep in the hold, with two great steering paddles either side of a high stern which curled up and over like the slim neck of a goose. She was sturdy enough to have braved the Indian Ocean and float back with sweet cargoes of ivory, peppercorns, gum tragacanth, rock crystal and luminous sea pearls. But since her maiden voyage she had led a harder life; Pertinax had been using her last year to thrash round Gaul. Now she was laden to the gunwales with a cold Atlantic shipment – long, four-sided ingots of British lead.

Ventriculus whistled admiringly when we all piled on board.

'I told you what they were,' I said as he inspected the ingots in amazement.

'I do hope,' he queried bluntly, 'these are not lost Treasury stocks'

'Just separated out from the system,' I replied.

'Stolen? '

'Not by me.'

'What's their history?'

'They were part of a fraud I investigated. You know how it is. They might have been useful for evidence so they were parked in a yard while the higher-ups all wondered whether they wanted a court case or a cover up.'

'What's the decision?

'Nothing; interest faded out. So I found them still lying around… There's no documentation attached to them, and the Treasurer at the Temple of Saturn will never spot the loss.' Well; probably not.

'Any silver still in these?' Venticulus asked, and he looked disappointed when I shook my head.

Petronius was gazing into the open hold with the grey face of a man who bitterly remembered being posted to a frontline fort in a province at the end of the world: Britain, where whichever way you turned, somehow the filthy weather always met you in the face. I saw him square his shoulders, as if they still felt damp. He hated Britain almost as much as I did. Though not quite. He still reminisced about the famous east coast oysters, and his eye sharpened keenly after women with red-gold hair.

‘Does Vespasian know you've palmed this stuff?' he muttered in an anxious tone. He had a responsible job with a respectable salary; his wife liked the salary almost as much as Petronius loved his job.

‘Special franchise!' I assured him cheerfully. 'Vespasian enjoys making a quick denarius on the side.'

‘Did you ask him to chip in with you?'

'He never said no.'

'Or yes either! Falco, I despair of you-'

‘Petro, stop worrying!'

‘You've even pinched the ship!'

'The ship,' I stated firmly, 'is due to be returned to the indulgent millionaire who bought it for his son; when I've finished I'll inform the old duller where his nautical real estate is berthed. Look, there's a fair weight to be shifted here; we had better get on… Oh, Parnassus! Where's that lad?'

With a sudden pang of fright I sprang out on deck, scanning the harbour for Larius, who had disappeared. Just then the half-baked lunatic came roaming along the quayside with his characteristic lope and a vacant expression, gawping at the other ships. I caught sight of him – not far from a wrinkly stevedore with what looked like ninety years of sunburn lacquering his features, who was sitting on a bollard watching us.

XXVI

We had a hard day of it.

We spent the morning unloading ingots into our ox cart. Ventriculus rented a workshop in the Theatre quarter; the Stabian Gate was nearest but so steep that instead we trundled along to the Nuceria Road Necropolis, chipped off the corners of a few marble tombs, and turned into town there. Our ox, whom we called Nero, soon looked sick. He had a charitable nature but evidently thought hauling great baulks of lead went beyond the call of duty for a beast on holiday.

Ventriculus started work at once. I wanted him to turn the ingots into water pipes. This meant they had to be melted down, then rolled out into narrow strips about ten feet long. The sheet lead was cooled, then curved around wooden battens until the two edges could be pinched together and soldered with more melted lead. (Making this seam is what gives pipes their pear-shaped section if you look at them end on.) Ventriculus was willing to provide various widths, but we concentrated on a regular-sized bore: gnarls, about a digit and a quarter in diameter – the handy household size. Water pipes are unwieldy objects: even a ten-foot quinaria weighs sixty Roman pounds. I had to keep warning Larius, who was short on concentration, that he would know all about it if he dropped one on his foot.

As soon as we had transferred all the ingots to the workshop and the plumber had produced a batch of pipes, we sent the cart back to Oplontis; Ventriculus threw in gratis a sack of bronze taps and stopcocks, which shows what kind of profit he was making on the deal. The plan was that I should take round samples and make on-the-spot sales, but wherever possible I would fix up major contracts for Ventriculus to carry out at a later date. I wanted to take a large instalment back to Oplontis now, which meant only one driver and no passengers; Petronius would drive the load. He was big enough to protect himself, and got on well with Nero. Besides, although he had never complained I knew Petro wanted to speed back early, to placate his wife. I felt a real public benefactor when I sent him off.