She was wearing a red dress hemmed with damson braid. It emphasized the paleness of her skin beneath the artificial colours she applied. Leaning towards me with a pinched and troubled face, she was for a moment a wan little creature. She seemed apologetic on behalf of her family, though as she tried to win me over she became more earnest than I had ever seen her. Somebody at sometime had taught her how to stand her ground.
"I overheard. Falco, you can't let Vespasian be murdered; he's going to be a good Emperor!"
"I doubt it," I said.
"He's not cruel; he's not mad. He leads a simple life. He works hard. He's old, but he has a gifted son This came out with spirit; she believed it, though I knew such a theory could not originate with her. I was surprised to find the Emperor could claim such support, for he lacked all the traditional advantages. None of Vespasian's family had ever held high office. I did not blame him for that; neither had any of mine.
"Who stuffed you with this horsehair?" I raged.
"Helena."
Helena. The cousin she had mentioned. The senator's daughter, the one some poor sap of a husband with a great deal of luck had managed to divorce.
"I see… So what's she like, this Helena of yours?"
"She's wonderful!" Sosia exclaimed at once, but then she decided with equal certainty, "You wouldn't like her much."
"Why's that?" I laughed.
She shrugged. I had never met her cousin, yet my instinct had been to resent the woman ever since Sosia first tried to use her name as a disguise when she would not trust me. In fact my only real grudge against Helena was that I could see she wielded considerable influence over Sosia Camillina. I preferred to influence Sosia myself. I reckoned Sosia was wrong anyway. I normally liked women. But if this Helena felt protective towards her younger relative, as I gathered she did, the chances were that she would not like me.
"I write to her," Sosia explained, as if she read my thoughts.
I said nothing. I was leaving. There was no longer anything to say. I stood, half aware of the clean scents of summer flowers and the lazy warmth beating off the stones.
"I tell Helena everything."
I stared at her more kindly, smitten with unease. It is an odd fact, you feel more ashamed when you have nothing to answer for than when you are disguising some brazen act of scandal.
Since I was still silent, Sosia continued to talk. It was her one annoying habit; she never could sit quiet.
"You're really going away? I won't see you again? There's something I want to say. Marcus Didius Falco, I've been wondering for days how to"
She had used my formal name. No one ever did that. Her respectful tone was more than I could bear. I had stumbled into a real emergency. My anger fled.
"Don't!" I exclaimed urgently. "Sosia, believe me, when you need to spend days composing your script, the reason is it's best to say nothing at all!"
She hesitated.
"You don't know"
I was a spare-time poet; there were many things I would never know, but I recognized this. "Oh Sosia – I know!"
For one fantastic moment I flashed into a dream where I took Sosia Camillina into my life. I flashed back. Only a fool tries to step across the barriers of rank in that way. A man may buy himself into the middle class, or have the gold ring donated to him for services to the Emperor (especially if the services are of a dubious kind), but so long as her father and her uncle knew what they were about and her uncle must, he was a millionaire then even with that queer problem of having no mother to name, Sosia Camillina would be disposed of in some way to enhance her own position and their family bank account. Our two lives could never converge. At heart she understood, for despite her brave attempt she stared at her toes in their knotted gold sandals, biting her lip but accepting what I said.
"If I need you she began in a subdued tone.
I replied briskly, for my own sake. "You won't. In your sweet, sheltered life you have no need of anyone like me. And Sosia Camillina, I really don't need you!"
I left quickly so I should not see her face.
I walked home. Rome, my city, which had been until then a never failing solace, lay before me like a woman, secretive and beautiful, demanding and rewarding, eternally seductive. For the first time in my life, I refused to be seduced.
XVII
I did see Sosia Camillina again. She asked me to meet her. Of course I went. I went as soon as I could.
By then summer was nuzzling autumn's neck. The days seemed equally long and hot, but towards dusk the air began to cool more quickly. I went out to the Campagna for a grape gathering holiday, but my heart was never in it and I came home.
I had not been able to shift the silver pigs from my mind. This puzzle had gripped my interest; no amount of raging at the way I had been teased along by Decimus Camillus could alter that. Whenever I saw him, Petronius Longus asked after my progress. He knew how I felt, but was too enthralled for tact. I started to avoid him, which depressed me even more. In addition, the whole world was watching our new emperor Vespasian. There was no possibility of gossiping at the barber's or the baths, the racetrack or the theatre, without an awkward twinge because I could not forget what I knew.
For six weeks or longer I lay low. I bungled divorce cases, failed to serve writs, forgot the dates of court appearances, tore ligaments at the gym, insulted my family, dodged my landlord, drank too much, ate too little, gave up women for good. If I went to the theatre I lost the thread of the plot.
Then one day Lenia cornered me.
"Falco! Your girlfriend's been."
Out of habit I demanded which? I still liked to imply I was harassed by half-naked Tripolitanian acrobats every afternoon. Lenia knew perfectly well I had given up women; she missed the clip of their little sandals and the giggles on the stairs when I brought them in. She also missed the shrieks of indignation when my mother swept them out with the dust next day.
"Little miss dainty with the pedigree and bangles. I let her pee in the bleach vat, then she wrote a note upstairs…"
I took the stairs in a rush. I reached the apartment all asplutter with a hacking throat. My mother had been: a pile of mended tunics, a picture of a chariot drawn on a slate by my niece, a mullet in a covered dish. I flung these aside as I searched.
The note was in my bedroom. An odd pang caught me, to imagine Sosia there. She had pegged her message on my pile of poetry under the jet bracelet that I knew. I wondered if she noticed that "Aglaia, Radiant Goddess', was really about her. All the girls in my odes are called Aglaia, a poet needs to protect himself.
Sosia had left me a wooden tablet, unlaced from one of those four-page pocketbooks and then inscribed deeply with a stylus in a round hand that had never done serious writing:
Didius Falco, I know a place where they may keep the silver pigs. If I show you, you can claim your bonus. Will you meet me at the Golden Milestone in two hours? If you are too busy, I will go for you and see…
I pounded back downstairs in a blind panic.
"Lenia! Lenia, what time was she here"
They were waiting for me calmly, at the foot of the last flight.
Smaractusl
Below me, shadows moved, their bare feet noiseless on the stone steps: my landlord's gladiators, after my unpaid rent.
I have an arrangement with the cloak maker who lives on the second floor that in an emergency I can run through his room, fling myself over the balcony onto the fire-fighting porch, then drop into the street. I had passed the cloak maker door. I half turned back. The door opened. Someone who was not the cloak maker came out.
They were straight from Smaractus' insanitary gym and in full fighting rig. Below me, the type called myrmillons, glistening with oil above their body-belts, their right arms padded and ringed with metal from collarbone to fist, their solid high-crested helmets shaped like curling, sneering fish. Above me, when I whirled round, two light, laughing men in tunics only, but each with a fiendish net coiled on his arm his fishermen.