The Forum was rubble and ruins, mainly because the townsfolk had made the mistake of commissioning their architects to rebuild it on a grander scale. As usual, given this excuse, the architects dreamed and spent their fees, oblivious of the years that passed. A freed slave who was out to make a name for himself reconstructed the Temple of Isis and the citizens had propped up their amphitheatre in case they ever wanted to beat up their neighbours again. But the Temples of Jupiter and Apollo stood shrouded in scaffolding with their statuary stored in the crypt, and it was hard work forcing a path round the contractors’ wheelbarrows to get ourselves up past the provision markets, under one of the ceremonial arches, and on into town.
This seemed an educational spot for Petronius and me to bring young Larius. Having Venus as their patroness, the town councillors wanted her to feel at home. Once they rebuilt her own Temple it would dominate the Marine Gate, but she hardly needed that. The fashionable marker for every Pompeian’s elegant vestibule was a wall painting of Priapus with his tireless erection; the richer they were, the more immense the welcome the god of procreation extended at their door. It was none too easy for strangers to distinguish the commercial brothels from private homes. (Judging by the town’s racy reputation, it might not matter if you got it wrong.)
Spotting my nephew staring about with his sweet air of astonishment, a prostitute outside a genuine bordello grinned at him through her few blackened teeth. ‘Hello, sonny! Want to meet a pretty girl?’
In a chalk sketch on their wall the lord of fertility, visibly virile yet again, demonstrated what was required of a lad, though the madam did not inspire much confidence. She was quite revolting under the clogging layers of kohl.
‘We’re just looking round at the moment,’ I apologized sociably as Larius dodged back under my wing. ‘Sorry, grandma -‘ For some reason the old bag of bones started shrieking abuse. Petronius grew flustered so we dived into the safety of an open-air winery.
‘Don’t expect me to lead you into bad ways,’ I muttered to Larius. ‘Your ma thinks I’m looking after you. Ask your father when you get home.’
My sister Galla’s husband was a lazy river boatman whose main advantage was the fact he was never at home. He was a hopeless womanizer.
We could all have coped if my sister had not minded, but Galla was unusually fastidious and she did. Sometimes he left her; more often Galla threw him out. Occasionally she relented ‘for the sake of the children’ (that tired old myth); the family’s father stayed with her a month if she was lucky, then he drifted off after his next shortsighted garlandseller, my sister produced another unhappy baby, and the whole brood were left on their own again; when they were stuck, the poor things were sent to me.
Larius was looking morose as usual. I could not decide if it was being stuck, or being sent to me.
‘Cheer up!’ I chivvied. ‘If you want to waste your pocket money ask Petro what to pay. He’s a man of the world-‘
‘I’m happily married!’ Petronius protested - though he then revealed to my nephew that he understood a fairly basic service could be had for a copper as.
‘I wish,’ Larius pronounced haughtily, ‘people would stop ordering me to cheer up!’ He stalked off to lean over the fountain at the crossroads, scooping up an abstemious drink of water by himself. A pimp spoke to him and he scuttled back; Petro and I pretended we had not seen.
I leaned on the counter with my nose in my beaker, facing up to the fact that I had half a score of nephews, of whom Galla’s gloomy Larius was only the first to throw off his boyhood tunic at fourteen. Thanks to my own elusive father, I was acting head of our family. Here was I, meddling with high politics, scouring the coast for a renegade, dodging a murderer, booted into oblivion by the woman I had set my heart on - yet I had also promised my sister that sometime during this trip I would enlighten her boy on whichever facts of life he had failed to pick up already from his dreadful friends at school… Petronius Longus is always kind to a man in a crisis; he clapped me on the shoulder and treated us by paying for the wine.
As we went out I found myself glancing behind, afraid I might be followed by a grim wraith in a green cloak.
XXV
We had come to meet a man. As usual in these circumstances we suspected he would lead us a merry dance then rob us blind. Since he was a plumber, it was a virtual certainty.
We found our way north past the Temple of Fortuna Augustus towards the water tower beside the Vesuvius Gate. The Pompeians provided sensible raised walkways but at the hour we turned up they were using all the pavement space themselves, so we three honest strangers traipsed through their rubbish in the road. While we concentrated on planting our sandals out of the stickiest mule dung it was difficult to inspect the street scenery, but from the back alleys we could glimpse the tops of trellises and walnut trees above high garden walls. Fine, spacious, two-storeyed houses faced onto the main thoroughfares, though there seemed to be a depression: so many were being converted into laundries and warehouses or let out piecemeal as apartments over shops.
Until the earthquake, the town’s water system had relied on the aqueduct which brought water from Sermum to Neapolis, a handsome artefact with a subsidiary branch which came in here to a big square tower which had three arches of brickwork decorating its outer walls. Large mains used to lead off, one for the public fountains and two others for business premises and private homes, but the quake had cracked the cistern and broken up the distribution pipes. The man we wanted was tinkering with the reservoir halfheartedly. He wore the usual one-sleeved workman’s tunic, two little warts beside his chin, and the whimsical, slightly tired expression of a man who is much brighter than his job requires.
‘Been at it long?’ I asked, trying to hide my amazement that in the country it took eight years to cement a leaky tank.
‘Still waiting for a town-council order.’ He clanked down his basket of chisels and wrenches. ‘If you’re buying a house in Pompeii, sink a deep well in your garden and pray for rain.’
I owed our introduction to my brother-in-law the plasterer; it took the form of that death’s head phrase, Just mention my name… His name was Mico. I mentioned it extremely cautiously.
‘Mico’s name,’ I admitted, ‘sends even hard-bitten foremen with thirty years’ experience rushing off to the nearest fountain to drown themselves - I dare say you remember him?’
‘Oh, I remember Mico!’ observed the plumber, through gritted teeth.
‘I reckon,’ suggested Petronius, who knew my cackhanded brother-in-law and despised him as we all did, ‘that after enduring a riot and an earthquake, being visited by young Mico proves the proverb that disasters come in threes!’
Mico’s plumber, whose name was Ventriculus, was a quiet, calm, honest-looking type who managed to give the impression that if he said you needed a new cistern it might almost be true. ‘He was pretty bad,’ agreed the plumber.
‘Torture!’ I said, starting to smile for the first time this trip. Heaping abuse on my brothers-in-law always cheers me up. ‘A painter in Latium lost an eye when his brush bounced off a tumulus in Mico’s bumpy skin. He received no compensation; the judge said, if he knew he was following Mico around he should have been prepared for hummocks.’
I stopped, then we all grinned. ‘So you’re a friend of Mico’s?’
‘Isn’t everyone?’ murmured Ventriculus, and we all grinned again. Mico is convinced anyone who meets him loves him. The fact is, they just stand there trapped by his awful great-heartedness while he buys them drinks (he does buy the drinks - he buys plenty; once Mico gets you stuck in a tavern he keeps you squirming there for hours). ‘Why,’ Ventriculus teased me, ‘would any loving brother give his sister to this Mico?’
‘My sister Victorina gave herself!’
I could have added that she gave herself to anyone with the bad taste to have her, usually behind the Temple of Venus on the Aventine, but that cast a slur on the rest of the family which we did not deserve.
>
The thought of my relations was upsetting me so badly that I launched into what I wanted Ventriculus to do. He listened with the mild demeanour of a man who had waited eight years for his town council to draw up a specification for emergency repairs. ‘We do have spare capacity; I can take on a foreigner…’
So we all trooped back through Pompeii and out to the port. The plumber plodded along in silence, like a man who has learned to be polite to lunatics through dealing with civil engineers.
Thinking about my nephew, I had forgotten to check my ship’s arrival, but when the Emperor says a vessel will be moved from Ostia to the Sarnus you can reckon that the sailors will set off immediately and not stop to dice for any sea nymphs on the way.
The ship called the Circe was waiting in the harbour. This was one of the Tarentum galleys built for Atius Pertinax - a huge, square-sailed merchantman, thirty foot deep in the hold, with two great steering paddles either side of a high stern which curled up and over like the slim neck of a goose. She was sturdy enough to have braved the Indian Ocean and float back with sweet cargoes of ivory, peppercorns, gum tragacanth, rock crystal and luminous sea pearls. But since her maiden voyage she had led a harder life; Pertinax had been using her last year to thrash round Gaul. Now she was laden to the gunwales with a cold Atlantic shipment - long, four-sided ingots of British lead.
Ventriculus whistled admiringly when we all piled on board.
‘I told you what they were,’ I said as he inspected the ingots in amazement.
‘I do hope,’ he queried bluntly, ‘these are not lost Treasury stocks’
‘Just separated out from the system,’ I replied.
‘Stolen? ‘
‘Not by me.’
‘What’s their history?’
‘They were part of a fraud I investigated. You know how it is. They might have been useful for evidence so they were parked in a yard while the higher-ups all wondered whether they wanted a court case or a cover up.’
‘What’s the decision?
‘Nothing; interest faded out. So I found them still lying around… There’s no documentation attached to them, and the Treasurer at the Temple of Saturn will never spot the loss.’ Well; probably not.
‘Any silver still in these?’ Venticulus asked, and he looked disappointed when I shook my head.
Petronius was gazing into the open hold with the grey face of a man who bitterly remembered being posted to a frontline fort in a province at the end of the world: Britain, where whichever way you turned, somehow the filthy weather always met you in the face. I saw him square his shoulders, as if they still felt damp. He hated Britain almost as much as I did. Though not quite. He still reminisced about the famous east coast oysters, and his eye sharpened keenly after women with red-gold hair.
‘Does Vespasian know you’ve palmed this stuff?’ he muttered in an anxious tone. He had a responsible job with a respectable salary; his wife liked the salary almost as much as Petronius loved his job.
‘Special franchise!’ I assured him cheerfully. ‘Vespasian enjoys making a quick denarius on the side.’
‘Did you ask him to chip in with you?’
‘He never said no.’
‘Or yes either! Falco, I despair of you-‘
‘Petro, stop worrying!’
‘You’ve even pinched the ship!’
‘The ship,’ I stated firmly, ‘is due to be returned to the indulgent millionaire who bought it for his son; when I’ve finished I’ll inform the old duller where his nautical real estate is berthed. Look, there’s a fair weight to be shifted here; we had better get on… Oh, Parnassus! Where’s that lad?’
With a sudden pang of fright I sprang out on deck, scanning the harbour for Larius, who had disappeared. Just then the half-baked lunatic came roaming along the quayside with his characteristic lope and a vacant expression, gawping at the other ships. I caught sight of him - not far from a wrinkly stevedore with what looked like ninety years of sunburn lacquering his features, who was sitting on a bollard watching us.
XXVI
We had a hard day of it.
We spent the morning unloading ingots into our ox cart. Ventriculus rented a workshop in the Theatre quarter; the Stabian Gate was nearest but so steep that instead we trundled along to the Nuceria Road Necropolis, chipped off the corners of a few marble tombs, and turned into town there. Our ox, whom we called Nero, soon looked sick. He had a charitable nature but evidently thought hauling great baulks of lead went beyond the call of duty for a beast on holiday.
Ventriculus started work at once. I wanted him to turn the ingots into water pipes. This meant they had to be melted down, then rolled out into narrow strips about ten feet long. The sheet lead was cooled, then curved around wooden battens until the two edges could be pinched together and soldered with more melted lead. (Making this seam is what gives pipes their pear-shaped section if you look at them end on.) Ventriculus was willing to provide various widths, but we concentrated on a regular-sized bore: gnarls, about a digit and a quarter in diameter - the handy household size. Water pipes are unwieldy objects: even a ten-foot quinaria weighs sixty Roman pounds. I had to keep warning Larius, who was short on concentration, that he would know all about it if he dropped one on his foot.
As soon as we had transferred all the ingots to the workshop and the plumber had produced a batch of pipes, we sent the cart back to Oplontis; Ventriculus threw in gratis a sack of bronze taps and stopcocks, which shows what kind of profit he was making on the deal. The plan was that I should take round samples and make on-the-spot sales, but wherever possible I would fix up major contracts for Ventriculus to carry out at a later date. I wanted to take a large instalment back to Oplontis now, which meant only one driver and no passengers; Petronius would drive the load. He was big enough to protect himself, and got on well with Nero. Besides, although he had never complained I knew Petro wanted to speed back early, to placate his wife. I felt a real public benefactor when I sent him off.
I treated the plumber and Larius to a splash in the Stabian baths. Then before our hike home the lad and I trooped off via the harbour so I could have a last word with the captain of the Circe. I showed him the notebook I had brought home from Croton, and told him my theory that the list of names and dates referred to ships.
‘Could be, Falco. I know Parthenope and Venus of Paphos as Ostia corn transports…’
While we were talking I lost sight of my nephew yet again.
I had left him mooning on the quayside. Scratched graffiti of two gladiators gave witness to where he had been amusing himself last: instead of the pimply kneed rabbits we had seen adorning tavern walls in town, my scallywag’s doodles had powerful lines; he could really draw. But artistic talent is no guarantee of sense. Keeping track of Larius was like housetraining a chameleon. Ships exerted a special fascination; soon I was dreading that he had slipped aboard one as a stowaway…
Suddenly he sauntered back in sight: gossiping with the well-tanned crow’s-nest type I saw spying on us with such interest earlier.
‘Larius! You flea-brained young punk, where in Hades have you been?’ He opened his mouth casually to answer, but I cut him short. ‘Stop dodging off, will you? It’s bad enough looking over one shoulder for some manic assassin, without constantly scouring the horizon for you?’
Perhaps he intended to apologize, but my fright had made me so annoyed I just nodded to the curious stevedore then dragged my nephew away by one ear. Remembering Barnabas brought another cold sweat under my tunic. Snatching a final glance around the port as if I feared the freedman might be watching us, I stormed off in the direction of the hole we were calling home.
Oplontis was a way station on the road to Herculaneum. It was not far, though more than anybody wanted to traipse after a day of lugging lead to and fro. Pompeii was sited on rising ground (an ancient lava field I suppose, though we had no reason to guess that then); as we turned north in the warm twilight a complete panorama of the shor
e confronted us. We stopped.
It was almost July. The nights grew dark without ever growing old. It was dusk now, with the steep cone of Vesuvius just vanishing from view. All along the beautiful Bay, from Surrentum to Neapolis, where the tycoons of Campania and various important Romans had built their seaside villas over the past fifty years, twinkled the lanterns that lit their fanciful porticos and romantic colonnades. At this time of year most were in residence. The entire sweep of the coastline was dotted with dancing yellow lights from bonfires on the beach.
‘Very picturesque!’ Larius commented wryly. I had paused for breath: allowing myself a moment of enrapturement. ‘Uncle Marcus, this seems s good chance to have our embarrassing chat. “Larius,” he mimicked, “why does your daft mother say you’re being difficult?” ‘
He was half my age and twice as despondent but when he stopped being miserable he had a wonderful sense of fun. I was very fond of Larius.
‘Well, why does she?’ I grunted, irritated at being interrupted in a fit of reverie.
‘No idea.’ In the second it took me to bring out the helpful question he had reverted to being a morose lout.
While my nephew gazed at the scenery, I scrutinized him.
He had an intelligent brow under an unkempt swath of hair that drooped into solemn, deep brown eyes. Since I saw him throwing nuts at his little brothers last Saturnalia he must have shot up three digits in height. His body had stretched so fast it had left his brain trailing behind. His feet, and ears, and the parts he was suddenly too shy to talk about, were those of a man halt a foot taller than me. While he was expanding into them, Larius had convinced himself he looked ridiculous; in all honesty he did. And he might fill out handsomely-or he might not. My Great-uncle Scam looked like a listing amphora with out-of-proportion jug handles all his life.
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