Scandal Takes a Holiday

by Lindsey Davis

  “Marcus, tell Maia Favonia to leave that big daft friend of yours and come home to look after her poor old father’s business,” he wheedled.

  “I’ll tell her you said so. Maia will do what she wants, Pa.”

  “I don’t know where she gets her attitude.”

  “I can’t think either! So now you’re here, when are you leaving?”

  “Don’t be so unfriendly, lad. I heard you were in Ostia. Did your mother turn up?” My parents had not spoken to each other for nearly thirty years, since Pa ran away with a redhead. Nonetheless, each always knew what the other was up to.

  “Arrived yesterday. Galla’s Gaius brought her; he’s a right little barbarian. I wasn’t with Ma long enough to work out what diddles she’s planning.”

  Pa, who was a wide-bodied, gray-haired old trickster full of deviousness himself, looked pleased. “Oh, I know. She heard her brother has slunk ashore at Portus.”

  “Who—Fabius or Junius?” My two uncles from the family farm took it in turns to abscond in a huff, often over woman troubles, always due to some huge slight involving the other brother. They each liked to hone grand, embarrassing schemes for a new life, mad ideas like becoming a gladiator or running a cuttlefish firm. (That was Fabius—ignoring the fact that shellfish brought him out in a rash.)

  “Neither of them.” Pa dropped this news, and waited for my amazement.

  I gasped. “Not … the one no one ever talks about?”

  Helena came in behind me. “Hello, Geminus; this is a surprise.” She was excellent with irony. “Who do you not talk about, Marcus?”

  “Much too long a story!” Pa and I replied, with rare unanimity.

  Helena Justina smiled and let our enigma pass her by, knowing she could pull the answer from me like a splinter in the finger later.

  She coiled herself gracefully on the couch beside my father and helped herself to his oozing snack. It smelled delicately of saffron; he could afford luxuries. Strands of green vegetation dangled from the piece of bread she pulled off. Helena managed these with elegant long fingers, while Pa just sucked his up like an enthusiastic blackbird gulping bits of live worm.

  “Geminus, now that we have you here …” Helena managed to make this sound inoffensive, yet Pa looked at her sharply. “Do you know a man called Damagoras?”

  Pa was the one person I would not have asked. Still, Helena saw him as a man with useful contacts. He answered at once, “Big old brigand? I have bought things off him.”

  “What things?” I barked.

  “Rather good things, normally.” “Rather” meant exceedingly good. And “normally” meant always.

  “Is he an importer?”

  My father laughed coarsely.

  “You mean he peddles stolen goods?”

  “Oh, I imagine so.” My father was an auctioneer and art dealer; the size of his profits signaled to me that he accepted goods for sale with little regard for provenance. Rome had a flourishing repro market, and Pa was adept at pretending he really believed a bare-faced copy was original Greek marble. In reality he had a good eye, and plenty of genuine statues that had evaded their real owners must have gone under his hammer too.

  I explained that Damagoras had told me he was too elderly to venture from his villa. My father spelled out for me, as if to a priest’s little altar boy, that wicked people sometimes lie. He saw Damagoras as pretty active still.

  “Active in what, Papa?”

  “Oh—whatever he does.”

  Helena toyed with an olive bowl. Annoyed, I recognized the olives. It looked as if Pa had opened up the Colymbadian giant queens that I was saving for special occasions. My shameless father would now take big scoops of the luscious green gems back to his own house. I would be lucky to find a lick of marinade at the bottom of an empty amphora.

  “Geminus, we think Damagoras is a pirate.” Helena gazed sternly at my father. For her, he always pretended to be a reformed character. He was right; people lie. “If pirates still exist, that is.”

  “He’s a bloody Cilician,” retorted my father. “What more do you need to know?”

  “You regard all Cilicians as pirates?”

  “It’s the only life Cilicians know.”

  And why should they abandon it, so long as crooked auctioneers in Rome would fence their plunder? I resented all my father stood for, but if he had information, I wanted it. “I regret to say I need your help, Pa. Might Damagoras or his close associates be connected to a kidnapping racket that seems to be centered on Portus?”

  “Oh, that!” exclaimed Pa.

  He might be bluffing, but my father always had an ear to the ground. He now said he had heard of people being held to ransom, though he was unable to link these kidnaps to Damagoras. He swore he knew the old villa-owner only as the seller of a particularly fine “Aphrodite Surprised,” a couple of years back. “Beautifully modeled drapery!”

  “Wearing a wet chiton, you mean?”

  “Not wearing much of it!” Pa smacked his lips.

  When I produced my list of the kidnap victims, the first result was depressing: Pa knew for sure that one man called Isidorus, an olive oil merchant, had left Rome about a month ago. The other names were strangers to him, apart from a certain Posidonius, whom Pa said he could probably find for me. He already knew Posidonius had been a victim; the man had been moaning all around the Emporium about having to ransom his daughter—and my father added the detail that Posidonius believed one of her captors had interfered with the girl. Forewarned about this, Helena Justina came with me next day, after Pa did provide contact details and I went to interview the victims.

  Posidonius was a timber merchant who specialized in exotic woods from the eastern end of the Mediterranean. He shipped in the baulks for manufacture in Rome, where they were used to make enormous tables for millionaire show-offs with palatial homes. There was a high returns rate, owing to the fact that eager purchasers forgot that the heavyweight tables had to be delivered and installed. Fine art mosaic floors had crumbled under the massive display pieces, and slaves in two different households had suffered heart attacks while trying to lift tabletops through doorways. One had died. Posidonius was now trapped in Rome, awaiting the outcome of a compensation claim against him. But it had done him good. The publicity had brought in new business.

  His daughter, called Rhodope, was about seventeen. She traveled around with her father, who was a widower. He had brought up Rhodope single-handed since her birth. He seemed intelligent and cosmopolitan, much annoyed with himself for being caught out by an old routine. She looked quiet; not that that meant much.

  Helena took the girl aside while I discussed the abduction with her father. Pa had described him talking freely to Emporium colleagues, but with us he clammed up. Perhaps he had now realized the risks. He would only confirm to me that what had happened fitted the case-notes Brunnus had drawn up. Mention of the Illyrian, the sinister go-between, made Posidonius shudder. He was reluctant to discuss his fears for Rhodope, perhaps because if she had been seduced it might affect her marriageability. Besides, he complained that she refused to talk to him.

  Helena had more luck. She told me afterward that in her view, the girl had definitely lost her heart and all that traditionally goes with it. Helena had found her extremely naïve. My glimpse of Rhodope had been of a wide-eyed teenager with that guileless look that usually means a young girl is hiding dangerous secrets from her worried parents. I should know; I had been the secret sometimes, in my younger days. While Rhodope pretended to be preoccupied with eye paint, she was probably hoarding her dress allowance for a flight from home. Helena had discovered that the girl, completely infatuated, believed that the captor who had paid her attention was coming back to find her, so they could elope.

  “His name is Theopompus. Apparently he is virile, dashing, and very exciting to know.”

  I said, “I bet his breath stinks and he already has three wives.”

  “If you point that out,” replied Helena sadly, “R
hodope won’t hear you.”

  “So how did you persuade the loopy lummock to talk?”

  “Oh …” An uncharacteristic vagueness afflicted my beloved. “She’s sweet, and perhaps rather lonely.” It could have been Helena herself when I met her—though in her case I would add: furious with men, ferocious with me, and extremely bright. Among the girls I knew at the time, she shone. If I had had any wives, I would have socked them all with divorce notes. “That was what made her vulnerable, I suppose, Marcus. She may have opened up to me because I confessed I had once fallen in love with a handsome brigand myself.”

  I gazed at her benignly. “Helena Justina, what brigand would that be?”

  Helena smiled.

  Retailers of fashionable household goods are not my favorite citizens, but as a father of girls, a deep chasm of sympathy for Posidonius opened in my heart. I left him a note of how he could contact Camillus Justinus in Rome if he needed professional help; I did not say, if Rhodope ran away. With luck she would just mope, and by the time she realized Theopompus was never coming, some other appalling fellow might be hanging around to take her mind off it.

  Rhodope had been ransomed some weeks before, during the period when Diocles was still staying at his lodgings in Ostia. I checked and no approach for information had been made by the scribe to this family, either at the time or since.

  Diocles could have been in Ostia for some completely different purpose, or else he knew about the kidnaps but had been prevented from following up the story. The way the mysterious “Illyrian” always stressed that the kidnappers were violent worried me. If Diocles had dabbled in this, I started to feel anxious about the missing scribe’s fate.

  XXV

  All the other names on my list were dud throws of the dice. Pa introduced me to people who knew some of them, but the men I needed to talk to, the husbands who had paid up ransom money, had all left town. Most originated overseas, and had gone back there. Perhaps now they would never return.

  To the kidnappers these victims were just faces in the throng, but if traders were rich enough to fleece, they had had something to offer Rome. The city was losing valuable commerce. I was more angry about the human cost, though. People at the Emporium all spoke of pleasant, knowledgeable commodity traders, good family men, which was why they traveled with their wives. When Helena and I chased up addresses, we felt the victims had left a strong aura of distress and fear behind them.

  After some thought and discussion with Helena, I walked over the Aventine to the Twelfth District to the vigiles headquarters of the Fourth Cohort. I went alone. Petronius Longus would not thank me: I was going to see Marcus Rubella. Rubella was the cohort tribune, Petro’s loathed superior. I generally found him not so bad, if you could ignore a few flaws: he was an ill-qualified, overfastidious, self-serving rule-stickler who tidied his desk and ate raisins all day. Rubella was a fellow Petro and I never wanted to go for a drink with—which was just as well, because he never asked us.

  I was better-known among the rankers from the other half of the cohort, those who patrolled the Thirteenth, my home district, but even in the Twelfth my face was familiar. Barracking met me; I returned the banter, then I was allowed in to see the tribune at once. Rubella never had much going on in his office and he knew I only went to see him if there was some big event I could not handle by myself. He was aware that if Petro had been here in Rome I would have consulted him instead.

  “Marcus Rubella, I have been working in Ostia. I believe the Fourth is off there soon.”

  “On the Ides. So what can’t wait, Falco?”

  “I’ve stumbled on a scam. It must have been going on for some time; the other cohorts have failed to get a grip—” Rubella bared his teeth, shark-like, as if he saw through my flattery. He enjoyed thinking his lads had an opening to show up their rivals.

  I outlined the kidnappings, never suggesting they went back in time too far. Pardon me for sounding like a schoolboy’s arithmetic problem, but if seven cohorts are working four-month shifts in rotation, then they must each return to the outstation every two years and four months. I happened to know that Rubella had joined the Fourth, as a new appointment by Vespasian, three or four years ago, so I had to create a pretty panorama where all members of the glorious Fourth had kept their ugly noses blown the last time they served at Ostia and no hint of these kidnaps could have reached their tribune then. The whole point of me being here in Rubella’s office was to stir him to action now.

  It worked. After I described the situation, Rubella decided to implement the officers’ answer to everything: a special exercise. In order to lend it gravitas and impetus (and in order to escape the burning heat of Rome in August) Rubella would head up this exercise himself.

  Hades. Rubella was coming to Ostia. Now Lucius Petronius would really hate me.

  I carried out one last task during my flying visit to the city. I was supposed to meet Helena at our house, but after I left Rubella, I took a long detour and made my way down to the Forum. I checked the Daily Gazette column; of course it told me Infamia was still on holiday. Then I went to see Holconius and Mutatus in the Gazette office.

  Neither was there of course. Most of the Gazette’s readers are away in July and August. Nothing of note happens. Everyone is at the coast. Everyone with any money goes into the hills for cooler air, or south to the sea.

  “You could create a special edition called the Neapolis Exciter,” I fantasized to the slave who was slowly plying a damp sponge around the otherwise deserted rooms. “Seaside gossip. Sandy Surrentum secrets. Baiae bathing-pool outrages. Hints that there may soon be a shortage of scallop omelets, unless senators on holiday curb their maritime villa banquets.”

  “Market day in Pompeii is Saturn day,” replied the slave glumly. It sounded as if a Campanian Companion had already been considered—and rejected as too boring. “In Nuceria it’s Sun day, in Atella it’s Moon day—”

  I told him I took the point. As I was leaving he revived suddenly. “Falco, how is Diocles? Is he still at his auntie’s?”

  I paused. This was unexpected. The gentle Fates had handed me a bonus. “Holconius and Mutatus gave me the impression that was just a ruse. I thought Diocles didn’t really have an auntie.”

  The slave looked scornful. “Of course he does. He goes to see her every year.”

  “How come you know?”

  The slave looked swanky. “People talk to me.” He probably wanted to be an investigator when he was freed. If I failed to find Diocles, there might be a job going.

  “So—Auntie what?”

  “Auntie Vestina.”

  “Know where she lives?”

  “Near a temple.”

  “Portus or Ostia itself?”

  “Ostia.”

  “Ostia is a very religious town, my friend; any clue to which temple?”

  All the slave could come up with was that water had something to do with it. Well, that should be easy in a town on a river mouth, down at the coast.

  I gave him a half-denarius. He didn’t know he could have just put an end to my nice little summer commission. Infamia was no longer missing; he was swanning on a sunbed while a loving relative plied him with cool drinks and homemade olive pâté. All I had to do now was locate the right temple, collect Diocles from his Auntie Vestina, and bring him home again.

  Ah, if only it had been that easy.

  XXVI

  I had told the slave the truth: Ostia had always been very religious. There were temples absolutely everywhere, some spanking new, some that harked back to when the town was just a cluster of salt workers’ huts in a marsh. If the Ostians had space for any sort of dedicated enclosure, they whipped a wall around three sides and put up a podium in a pillared shrine. Their motto was: why build one when there is room for four? A cluster of altars was better than a solo. When they ran out of gods, they threw honors at allegorical concepts; near our apartment stood a row of four little temples, dedicated to Venus and Ceres, plus Hope and Fortune to
o. I for my part had no time for love, and with two very young children under my feet in a small apartment I was dead set against any further fertility. As I failed to track down Diocles, I was soon cursing my bad fortune and running out of hope.

  On my return, the quest for the scribe’s aunt took me all over town. I reckoned I could omit the giant temples to Jupiter and to Rome and Augustus which dominated the Forum; anyone who lived there would describe their house as near the Forum. Pompous types might call it the Capitolium. Vague ones would say they lived in the middle of town.

  Otherwise, I had to visit the lot. I became adept at scenting out smoke from sacrificial offerings. I also became a real nymphaeum bore. The Ostians liked gracing wayside walls with water-troughs, and though some were plain drinking points for beasts of burden, many were set up as decorative shrines to water gods. Helena had to listen to me counting up each day’s haul as temples became my obsessive collecting fad, worse than the time I tried to explore all the Seven Hills of Rome when I was only eight years old and not supposed to leave the Aventine by myself. Now I would be death at a party: I kept note-tablets jotted with details of temples I had spotted, like some ghastly tourist’s diary. At the slightest encouragement I showed people my sketch map with shrines marked in red.

  My mother, who was staying with Maia, became very excited when she thought Helena had begun sacrifices to the Good Goddess. (I was absolved from taking part; men are too Bad.) Bona Dea was for a while our favored divinity in the conundrum, as her neat sea-view temple lay outside the Marine Gate. We did wonder if Diocles had chosen lodgings in an area he knew—though if his auntie was in that vicinity we could not explain why he went into lodgings … We failed to track down Vestina near the Bona Dea, so my search moved back to the center of town.

  Top deity here was Vulcan. A straightforward anvil god with a fetching limp. Helena and I spent a pleasant day at his ancient complex; we took Albia and the children, making it an excuse for a picnic, which was just as well because as a work exercise our trip was pointless. We could only associate Vulcan with water via a long-winded link involving the vigiles dousing fires. Tenuous. For reasons nobody knew anymore, the fire god’s high priest was the most important man in Ostia, lording it over the cult’s own praetors and aediles; it was a lifetime appointment of ancient derivation which carried, as far as I could see, no advantage nowadays except being groveled to by sycophantic town councillors, all hoping that the current pontifex of Vulcan would quickly drop dead so they could jostle for his post.