Venus in copper

'I know I can trust you to run after anything in a pair of silly sandals and a string of tawdry beads!'

I touched her cheek with one finger. 'Eat your sticky cake, feather.'

Helena distrusted compliments; she looked at me as if some Forum layabout on the steps of the Temple of Castor had tried to lift up her skirt. I found myself mentioning a subject I had told myself I would let lie: 'Thought any more about what I suggested yesterday?'

'I've thought about it.'

'Think you'll ever come?'

'Probably.'

'That sounds like "Probably not.'

'I meant what I say!'

'So are you wondering whether I mean it?'

She smiled at me suddenly with vivid affection. 'No, Marcus!' I felt my expression alter. When Helena Justina smiled like that, I was in imminent danger of overreacting...

Luckily her father came out to join us just then. A diffident figure with a sprout of straight untameable hair; he had the vague air of an innocent abroad-but I knew from experience he was nothing of the kind; I found myself sitting up straighter. Camillus shed his toga with relief, and a slave took it away. It was the Nones of the month so the Senate had been in session. He touched on today's business, the usual wrangles over trifles; he was being polite, but eyeing our open cake basket. I broke up the must cake I had purchased as a present for my sister, and we handed it round. I had no objection to going back to Minnius' stall another day to buy something else for Maia.

Once the basket was empty, Helena tried to decide what she could do with it; she settled on making a gift for my mother, filling it with Campania violets.

'She ought to like that,' I said. 'Anything that sits in the house serving no useful purpose and gathering a layer of fluff reminds her of my father...'

'And someone else!'

I said to the Senator, 'I like a girl who speaks her mind. Was your daughter always so cantankerous?'

'We brought her up,' he answered between mouthfuls, 'to be a gentle, domestic treasure. As you see.' He was a likeable man, who could handle irony. He had two sons (both on foreign service), but if Helena had been less strong-minded she would probably have been his favourite. As it was, he viewed her warily but I reckoned their closeness was why Camillus Verus could never bring himself to send me packing; anyone who liked his daughter as much as I did was a liability he had to tolerate. 'What are you working on nowadays, Falco?'

I described my case and the Hortensius freedmen. 'It's the usual story of the wealthy and self-possessed, fighting off an adventurous newcomer. What makes it so piquant is that they are nouveaux riches themselves. I'll take the commission, sir, but I must say, I find their snobbery intolerable.'

'This is Rome, Marcus!' Camillus smiled. 'Don't forget, slaves from important households regard themselves as a superior species even to the freeborn poor.'

'Of which you're one!' Helena grinned. I knew she was implying Sabina Pollia and Hortensia Atilia would be too finicky to tangle with me. I gave her a level stare, through half-closed eyes, intending to worry her. It failed as usual.

'One of the things I find interesting,' I mentioned to the Senator, 'is that these people would probably admit they rose from next to nothing. The man who owned them polished marble. It's a skilled job-which means the piecework rates hardly pay enough to keep a snail alive. Yet now the ostentation of his freedmens' mansion suggests their fortunes must be greater than a consul's birthright. Still; that's Rome too!'

'How did they overcome their unpromising origins?'

'So far that's a mystery...'

While we talked I had been licking honey off the vine leaves from the cake basket; it suddenly struck me a senator's daughter might not wish to associate with an Aventine lout whose happy tongue cleaned up wrappings in public. Or at least, not associate with him in her father's townhouse garden, amongst the expensive bronze nymphs and graceful bulbs from the Caucasus, especially while her noble father was sitting there...

I need not have worried. Helena was making sure no currants from the must cake were left behind in the basket. She had even found a way of forcing the corners open so she could recapture any crumbs that had worked themselves among the woven strands of cane.

The Senator caught my eye. We knew Helena was still grieving for the baby she had lost, but we both thought she was starting to look healthier.

Helena glanced up abruptly. Her father looked away. I refused to be embarrassed, so I continued to gaze at her thoughtfully while Helena gazed back, in peaceful communion about who knows what. Then Camillus Verus frowned at me, rather curiously I thought.

ChapterX

Although I had given up for the day, other folk were still labouring, so I popped along the Vicus Longus to see whether the letting agent Hyacinthus had mentioned was open for business. He was.

Cossus was a pale, long-nosed individual, who liked to lean back on his stool with his knees apart; luckily his green and brown striped tunic was sufficiently baggy to allow it without indecency. He clearly spent most of his day laughing loudly with his personal friends, two of whom were with him when I called. Since I wanted a favour, I stood by looking diffident while these orators dissected the various perverts who were standing in the next elections, discussed a horse, then hotly debated whether a girl they knew (another hot tip) was pregnant or pretending. When my hair had grown half a digit waiting, I coughed. With little attempt at apology the clique slowly broke up.

Alone with the agent, I found an excuse to drop the name of Hyacinthus as if I had known him since he cut his teeth on an old sandal strap, then I explained my yen for upmarket real estate. Cossus sucked in his breath. 'August, Falco-not much shifting. Everyone's away...'

'Plenty of death, divorce and default!' Since my father was an auctioneer, I knew property moves at all seasons. In fact if I had wanted to buy something outright, my own papa could have put some ramshackle billet my way; but even he kept his hands clean of the rented sector. 'Still, if you can't help me, Cossus -'

The best way to screw activity from a land agent is to hint that you are taking your custom somewhere else. 'What area are you looking at?' he asked.

All I needed was lavish space at a small rent, anywhere central. The first thing Cossus offered was a boot cupboard beyond the city boundary stone, right along the Via Flaminia, an hour's walk out of town.

'Forget it! I must be near the Forum.'

'How about a well-established condominium, no snags, small out-goings, extremely appealing outlook, on the Janiculan Ridge?'

'Wrong side of the river.'

'It comes with shared use of a roof terrace.'

'Can't you understand Latin? Even if it comes with Julius Caesar's riverside gardens, Cossus, it's not my area! I'm not some damned itinerant matchseller. What else do you have?'

'Courtyard outlook, shaded by pine tree, opposite the Praetorian Camp -'

'Rats! Find a tenant who's deaf.'

'Ground floor, by the Probus Bridge?'

'Find one who can swim in the spring floods...'

We worked through all the dreary dumps he must have had on the stocks for ages, but eventually Cossus acknowledged he would have to shift those onto some raw provincial visitor. 'Now this is just the thing for you-a short lease in the Piscina Publica. Someone else has expressed an interest, but seeing as it's you, Falco -'

'Don't make a drama. Tell me what it offers?'

'Four good rooms arranged conveniently on the third floor -'