"Sure you won't have some smoked ostrich?"
"You are too generous. But duty calls."
"Good day to you, then."
I hurried back to the embassy and browbeat a scribe into composing a document making me official investigating officer for Ptolemy. That is the good thing about dealing with a king if he's favorable to you: He doesn't have to justify himself to anybody. If the Flute-Player wanted to name a foreign embassy official investigator in a murder, he could do it and nobody could contradict him.
I took the document personally to the chamberlain's office. That functionary, the eunuch named Pothinus, looked at it skeptically.
"This is most irregular." He was a Greek wearing, Asiatic jewelry and an Egyptian wig, not an uncommon Alexandrian combination.
"I have yet to see anything regular at this court," I said. "Be so good as to append the king's lesser seal. He has agreed to this arrangement."
"It is unethical to approach his Majesty so early in the morning. It is not the hour of his most discriminating discernment."
"I found his Majesty to be most perspicacious and in fullest command of his mental faculties," I said. "You speak disloyally, sir."
"I: I: I protest, Senator!" he sputtered. "Never would I offer the slightest disloyalty to my king!"
"See that you don't," I said coldly, and no one can speak as coldly as a Roman Senator. One must always maintain a firm hand with eunuchs. He appended the seal without further back talk and I left with it clutched happily in my fist. I was official now.
I found Julia and Fausta waiting for me in the courtyard of the embassy. I held up my royal commission triumphantly. Julia clapped her hands.
"You got it! Don't take full credit. I talked to Berenice and she went to the king when he rose this morning."
"He had very little memory of the event, but enough stuck in his mind to accomplish my ends," I said.
Fausta arched a patrician eyebrow. "Do you think that if you find the murderer, that will put Ptolemy in your debt?" Being who she was, Fausta could only assume that I sought some sort of political advantage.
"When did the gratitude of a Ptolemy ever do anyone any good?" I asked. "He barely knew who Iphicrates was, and I doubt he cares who the murderer might be."
"Why, then?" She was genuinely puzzled.
"Just being in Alexandria I have caught the fever of philosophy," I explained. "I am now developing my own school of logic. I propose to demonstrate the validity of my theories by uncovering the culprit."
She turned to Julia. "The Metellans are such a dull, plodding lot as a whole. It's good that they have a madman to lend them a bit of color."
"Isn't he amusing? He's better than Berenice's entourage."
I was outnumbered. "Jest as you will," I said, "but I am going to be doing something infinitely more interesting than sorting out the problems of a pack of brainless Macedonian bumpkins who masquerade as the royalty of Egypt." I stalked off haughtily, bellowing for Hermes to show himself. He came running.
"Here are the things you asked for," Hermes said. I took my dagger and caestus and tucked them inside my tunic. My sightseeing idyll was over and I was ready for serious business.
"Where are we going?" he asked.
"To the Museum," I said.
He looked around. "Where's the litter?"
"We are going to walk."
"Walk? Here? You'll cause a scandal!"
"I can't set my mind to serious work if I'm being carried around like a sack of meal. It's all right for decadent, inert foreigners, but a Roman should have more gravitas."
"If I could be carried about, I'd never wear out another pair of sandals," Hermes said.
Actually, I wanted a closer look at the city. Prowling the streets and alleys of Rome had always been one of my choicest amusements, but I had as yet had no opportunity to do the same in Alexandria. The attendants and guards at the Palace gate stared in amazement to see me walking out attended only by a single slave. I half expected them to come chasing after me, begging to carry me wherever I wanted to go.
It was a strange, disorienting experience to walk in a city made up of straight lines and right-angled intersections. Merely crossing one of the wide streets gave me an odd sensation of exposure and vulnerability.
"It must be hard to elude the nightwatch in a city like this," Hermes observed.
"They might have been thinking something of the sort when they designed it. A bad place for a riot, too. See, you could line up troops at one end of the city and sweep through the whole town. You could herd rioters down the side streets, separate them into little groups or crowd them into one place, wherever you want."
"It's unnatural," Hermes said.
"I agree. I can see the advantages, though."
"All made of stone, too," Hermes said.
"Timber is scarce in Egypt. It's comforting, knowing you aren't likely to be incinerated while you sleep."
The people who thronged the streets were of all nations, but the bulk of them were native Egyptians. The rest were Greeks, Syrians, Jews, Sabaeans, Arabs, Galatians and people whose features and dress I did not recognize. There were Nubians and Ethiopians in every shade of black, most of them slaves but some traders. Everyone spoke Greek, but other languages formed a subcurrent beneath the predominant Greek tide, especially Egyptian. The Egyptian language actually sounds the way those hieroglyphs look. At every street corner there were mountebanks to be seen, dancing, tumbling and performing magic tricks. Trained animals went through their paces, and jugglers kept unlikely objects in the air with uncanny skill. Hermes wanted to gawk at all of these, but I tugged him past them, my mind set on greater matters.
We could have entered the rear of the Museum complex from the Palace itself, but I preferred to get a feel of the city. One raised in a great city has a feel for cities, as a peasant has a feel for arable land and a sailor for the sea. I had grown up in Rome and had urban bones. These people were foreigners, but they were city-dwellers, and all such have certain things in common.
My bones told me that this was a fat, happy, complacent populace. Whatever discontent there might be was minor. Had there been a riot or insurrection brewing, I would have known it. Alexandrians were known to riot from time to time, even killing or expelling a king or two, but these people were too busy making money or otherwise enjoying themselves to represent a threat. Civil discontent is always a menace in polyglot cities like Alexandria, where tribal antipathies sometimes override respect for law and authority. Not that Rome has place of pride in that respect. Our civil disorders tend to involve class rather than national divisions.
"Don't even think it, Hermes," I said.
"How do you know what I'm thinking?" he said, all wounded innocence. I knew when he said it that I was right.
"You're thinking: 'Here's a place where a presentable lad can fade into the population, and who's to notice? Here I can pass myself off as a free man, and no one will know I was ever a slave.' Isn't that what you were thinking?"
"Never!" he said vehemently.
"Well, that is good to hear, Hermes, because there are many cruel, brutal men in this city who do nothing but look for runaways to haul back to their masters for the reward, or to sell off to new masters. Should you disappear some morning, I would only have to pass the word and you would be back before nightfall. This is a large city, but the accents and inflections of the Roman streets aren't at all common here. So forget such fantasies and apply yourself to my service. I'll free you one of these days."