"Falco! Does your mother let you play with little girls?"
"Ornamental eh?" I adopted a suave expression. "Bargain I picked up in the Forum."
"Don't chip her pretty glaze!" Lenia scoffed. "Smaractus left a hint: pay up, or his fisher boys will be poking their tridents up your delicate parts."
"If he wants to wring out my arm-purse, he should render a written account. Tell him-"
''Tell him yourself!"
Lenia, whose instinct must have been to favour me, kept well clear of my tussle with the landlord. Smaractus paid her certain attentions which at present she was resisting because she liked her independence, but as a good businesswoman she kept her options open. He was foul. I thought Lenia was mad. I had told her what I thought; she had told me whose business I could mind.
Her restless gaze flickered again towards my companion.
"New client," I boasted.
"Really! She paying you for the experience or you paying her for the treat?"
We both turned to survey my young lady.
She wore a fine white under tunic fixed along the sleeves with blue enamel clasps, and over it a sleeveless gown so generous in length it was bunched up over her girdle of woven gold threads. Apart from the wide bands of patterned embroidery at her neck, and hem, and in broad stripes down the front, I could tell from the narrowing of Lenia's watery eyes we were admiring a quality cloth. My goddess had wire hoops threaded with tiny glass beads in each neat little ear, a couple of chain necklaces, three bracelets on her left arm, four on her right, and various finger rings in the form of knots, serpents or birds with long crossed beaks. We could have sold her girlish finery for more than I earned last year. It was best not to consider how much a brothel keeper might pay us for the pretty wench.
She was blonde. Well, she was blonde that month, and since she was hardly from Macedonia or Germany, dye must have helped. It was cleverly done. I would never have known, but Lenia informed me afterwards.
Her hair had been curled into three soft fat ringlets tied in a clump with a ribbon at the nape of her neck. The temptation to untie that ribbon niggled me like a hornet bite. She painted her face of course. All my sisters turned themselves out spanking with colour like newly gilt statues, so I was used to that. My sisters are amazing, but blatant works of art. This was much more subtle, invisibly achieved, except that running in the heat had left one eye very faintly smudged. Her eyes were brown, set wide apart, and sweetly without guile.
Lenia tired of looking long before I did.
"Cradle snatcher!" she told me frankly. "Tinkle in the bucket before you take her up!"
This was not a request for a medical sample because cradle snatching made Lenia diagnose me as unwell; it was a straight hospitable offer, with business overtones.
I shall have to explain about the bucket and the bleach vat.
A long time afterwards I described all this to someone I knew well, and we discussed what launderers use for whitening cloth.
"Distilled wood ash,'' my companion suggested doubtfully.
They do use ash. They also use carbonate of soda, fuller's earth, and pipe clay for the brilliant robes of election candidates. But the pristine togas of our magnificent Empire are effectively bleached with urine, obtained from the public latrines. The Emperor Vespasian, never slow to light on brisk new ways of squeezing out cash, had slapped a tax on this ancient trade in human waste. Lenia paid the tax, though on principle she increased her supply for nothing whenever she could.
The woman I had been telling the story to commented, in her cool way, "I suppose in the salad season, when everyone's eating beetroot, half the togas in the Forum are a delicate hue of pink? Do they rinse it out?" she enquired.
I shrugged in a deliberately vague way. I would have skipped this unsavoury detail but as it turned out eventually, Lenia's bleach vat was critical to the tale.
Since I lived six floors up in a block that was no better equipped than any other slum in Rome, Lenia's bucket had long been my welcome friend.
Lenia offered my visitor, not unkindly, "Girlies go behind the carding rails, dear."
"Lenia, don't embarrass my dainty client!" I was blushing on her behalf.
"Actually I left home rather suddenly."
Dainty but desperate, my client shot behind the rods where the dried clothes were hung on poles through the shoulders to be scratched down with teasels to bring up the nap. While I waited, I topped up my usual bucket and talked to Lenia about the weather. As one does.
After five minutes I ran out of weather.
"Get lost, Falco!" a carding-girl greeted me as I peered around the rails. No sign of my client.
Had she been less attractive, I might have let her go. She was extremely attractive and I saw no reason to part with that sort of innocence to anybody else. Cursing now, I barged past the giant screw clothes-presses and out to the laundry yard.
There was a furnace heating the well water used in the wash. There were garments spread over wicker frames above braziers of burning sulphur, which through some mysterious chemistry smokes in additional whiteness. There were several youths scoffing at my fury, and there was a dreadful smell. There was no client. I hopped over a handcart and set off fast down the lane.
She had scampered past the dyer's lampblack ovens, braved the midden, and was halfway along the poultry cages where some footsore geese and a drooping cerise flamingo rested for market the next day. As I approached she pulled up short, her way blocked by a rope maker who was unbuckling his belt from his eighteen stone girth, to ease the task of raping her with that casual brutality which passed in these parts for appreciation of the female form. I politely thanked the rope maker for looking after her, then before either of them could haggle I brought her back.
This was one client whose contract would need to be enforced by tying her to my wrist with a long piece of string.
III
After the hum of the Forum and the hurly-burly of the Roman squares, the Falco apartment was blessedly still, though faint noises rose from the street below and occasional birdsong could be heard across the acres of red tiled roofs. I lived right at the top. We arrived, as did all comers, wearily gasping for breath. The girl stopped to read my ceramic finger plate A finger plate was unnecessary since no one climbs six flights unless they know who lives upstairs, but I had taken pity on a travelling salesman who flogged up to persuade me it would help business to advertise. Nothing helps my business, but never mind.
"M Didius Falco. M for Marcus. Shall I call you Marcus?"
"No," I said.
We went in.
"More steps, less rent," I explained wryly. "I lived on the roof until the pigeons complained I was lowering the tone of their pan tiles…"
I lived halfway to the sky. The girl was entranced. Used only to desirable spreads at ground floor level, with their own gardens and access to the aqueducts, she probably missed the disadvantages of my eagle's nest. I dreaded that the foundations would collapse and six layers of habitation collapse in a puff of plaster dust, or that one blazing night I would sleep through the fire watchers' alarm and fry in my own fat.
She made a beeline for the balcony. I gave her a moment and then went out to join her, genuinely proud of my view. The view, at least, was fabulous. Our block stood high enough on the Aventine to see over its neighbours towards the Probus Bridge. You could spy for miles, out across the river and the Transtiberina Sector to the laniculan Mount and the west coast countryside. It was best at night. Once the delivery carts stopped their racket, sounds became so intense you could hear the water lapping on the Tiber's banks, and the Emperor's sentries grounding their spears behind you on Palatine Hill.