Poseidon's Gold

by Lindsey Davis

  ‘I’ll keep sober if I’m working.’

  ‘You sound like a prig.’

  ‘I sound like a man who stays alive.’ I reached out and grasped his wrist, preventing him from lifting the cup. ‘Now tell me what the job is.’

  ‘You aren’t going to care for it!’ he assured me contentedly.

  ‘I’ll deal with my emotions. Now feel free to elaborate!’

  ‘I should never have got you into this.’

  ‘Agreed. You should have shown restraint when those bastards were applying their boots to the apples of your Hesperides-‘ I was losing my temper (yet again). ‘What’s the wrinkle, Pa?’

  Finally he told me, though even then extracting the details was like squeezing olives through a jammed press.

  ‘This is how it is. Things take time in the fine-art world. When people are commissioning creative works, they don’t expect quick deliveries, so the fashion is to let problems ride.’

  ‘How long ago did this marathon start?’

  ‘Couple of years. I received an enquiry; I put the people off. I said it wasn’t my problem; they didn’t believe me. This year they must have remembered to do something about it, and they came back. More insistent.’

  I was grinding my teeth. ‘More aware, you mean, that they were losing cash? On whatever it is,’ I added, though I knew.

  ‘Exactly. They became aggressive, so I threw my javelin.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking?’

  ‘Well I told them to push off.’

  ‘With spicy phraseology?’

  ‘They might have thought so.’

  ‘Jove! Then what?’

  ‘It went quiet for a bit. Next the auctions were invaded. Last night it was the warehouse-and me, of course.’

  ‘You may have been lucky last night. Read the dead sheep’s liver, Pa. If these people are not soon satisfied, somebody may end up damaged even more severely. From what you mentioned earlier, these bruisers may bash me?’

  ‘You’re tough.’

  ‘I’m not a demigod! And actually, I don’t enjoy spending my life looking over one shoulder for large types with nails in their cudgels who want to practise hunt-the-decoy through the streets.’

  ‘They don’t want bloodshed.’

  ‘Thanks for the reassurance, and tell that to your kicked ribs! I’m not convinced. There was a dead soldier at Flora’s Caupona who may have inadvertently stepped in these people’s way. That worries me-‘

  ‘It worries me,’ cried my father. ‘If you’re right, there was no need for that!’

  ‘I’d rather not have people standing round a pyre next week saying the same thing over me! In a minute I’m going to start demanding names from you-but first I have a crucial question, Father.’ He looked pained at my tone, as if I were being insensitive. I forced myself to keep my voice level. ‘Just tell me: does this problem of yours have anything to do with big brother Festus and his missing Phidias?’

  Our father found an expression of amazement from his skilled repertoire. ‘However did you realise that?’

  I closed my eyes. ‘Let’s stop acting the farce, shall we? Just come clean!’

  ‘It’s quite simple,’ Pa acquiesced. ‘The people who want to talk to you are called Cassius Carus and Ummidia Servia. A couple. They don’t socialise in a vulgar way, but in the trade they regard themselves as persons of influence. They have a big house with a private art gallery, nice place off the Via Flaminia. They collect statues. They had been lined up by Festus to acquire his Poseidon.’

  I was already groaning. ‘How closely lined up?’

  ‘As tight as they could be.’

  ‘And persons of influence don’t like to be diddled?’

  ‘No. Especially if they intend to go on collecting-which carries some risks, as you know. People want a reputation. They don’t like their mistakes to be publicly known.’

  I asked, ‘Were they diddled?’

  ‘I reckon they think so. Carus and Servia were certainly expecting to receive the property. But then Festus lost his ship, so he failed to deliver it.’

  ‘Had they actually paid for the goods?’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  I pulled a face. ‘Then they were definitely diddled-and we are rightly being chased. How much-if it’s not a saucy question-are we two honest brokers being asked to find?’

  ‘Oh… call it half a million,’ muttered Pa.

  XXXVII

  When I left the Saepta Julia, the air was thin and cold. I nearly went into the Agrippan Baths, but could not face a long walk home on a winter evening after I had let myself be made happy and warm. Better to do the heavy work, then relax.

  Pa had offered me a lift in his ornamental litter back to the Thirteenth Sector, but I elected to walk. I had had enough. I needed to be alone. I needed to think.

  Helena was waiting. ‘Just a quick kiss, my darling, then we’re going out.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m really getting grown-up work! First my mother employs me to prove Festus is not a criminal; now my father has hired me because Festus probably is.’

  ‘At least your brother brings in jobs,’ said my beloved, ever the optimist. ‘Am I coming to help?’

  ‘No. The irrepressible Geminus has fingered me for the Phidias. Some quick-tempered creditors may be coming here to look for me. You’ll have to be stowed somewhere safer until the heat’s off. I’ll take you to the relation of your choice.’

  She chose going back to Ma again. I took her; ducked the maternal enquiries; promised to see them both when I could; then trudged off through the gathering darkness towards the Caelian.

  I was now determined to track down my brother’s friends, the loathsome wall painters.

  I tried the Virgin, without luck.

  I tried all the other places where Varga and Manlius were supposed to hang out, but they were not there either. This was tiresome, but par for the course in my work. Investigating consists mainly of failure. You need thick boots and a strong heart, plus an infinite capacity for staying awake while parked in a draughty pergola, hoping that that strange scuttling sound is only a rat, not a man with a knife, though all the time you know that if the person you are watching for ever does turn up, they will be a dead loss.

  Helena had asked, ‘Why don’t you go straight to the art collectors and explain?’

  ‘I will go. I hope to have something to offer them first.’

  As I stood watching an extremely nasty doss-house in the worst area of a bad district in this heartless city, it did seem unlikely that a rare old Greek statue would be standing around here with its toes as cold as mine, waiting for a lift in a waggon to a more refined environment.

  I must have been there on surveillance for four hours. On a cold March Thursday, that’s a long time.

  The street was pitch-dark. It was short, narrow, and stinking; an easy touch for comparisons with life. The night-life was plentiful: drunks, fornicators, more drunks, cats who had learned from the fornicators, even drunker drunks. Drunken cats, probably. Everyone round here had been at an amphora, and I could understand it. Everyone was lost. The dogs; the cats; the humans. Even the fire brigade, wandering up with half-empty buckets, asked me the way to Oyster Street. I gave them correct instructions, then watched their smoky flare disappear in the wrong direction anyway. They were going to a tavern for a quick one; the fire could just blaze.

  A whore offered me a quick one of the other sort, but I managed to plead poor plumbing. She cackled and launched into medical theories that made me blush. I told her I was one of the vigiles, so with a vicious curse she staggered off. Beyond the corner, where the streets were wider, even the normal night-time rumble of delivery carts seemed slack tonight. Beyond that, sharp on the frosty air, I heard the call of a Praetorian trumpet sounding the watch over their great camp. Above my head, where the stars should be, only blackness loomed.

  Eventually the passers-by thinned out. My feet were frozen. My legs were too exhausted to
stamp. I was wearing two cloaks and three tunics, but the chill had slid right under them. This was some way from the river, but even here the Tiber fog seeped into my lungs. There was no breeze; just that still, deceptive coldness like an animal that eats your heart while you stand.

  It was a night when professional burglars would glance quickly outside, then decide to stay in and annoy their wives. Heartbroken women would be hanging around the Aemilian Bridge waiting for a quiet moment to edge over the parapet and jump into oblivion. Tramps would cough to death in the gateways at the Circus. Lost children and runaway slaves would huddle against the huge black walls under the Citadel, slipping into Hades by accident when they forgot to breathe. There was no blizzard; it was not even raining. But all the same it was a bitter, baleful, dolorous night, and I hated to be out in it.

  In the end I broke the rules. I strode up to the painters’ lodging-house, entered by the creaking door, felt my way up five flights of stairs (fortunately I had counted the storeys when I was here before), found their room, spent half an hour trying to pick the lock, discovered the door was open anyway, and then sat in darkness waiting for them. At least I was under cover now.

  XXXVIII

  Manlius and Varga came swinging back home in the dead of night, arguing at the tops of their voices with a gang of other artistic delinquents as if it was broad daylight. I heard a shutter crash open and someone screamed at them; they answered with an innocent calm that hinted this was a regular occurrence. They had no sense of time. They had no sense of decency either, but having seen them cadging drinks off Festus I already knew that.

  The other crowd went on, leaving my two to lurch upstairs. I sat, listening to their uneven approach. Informers dread this moment: sitting in pitch-darkness, waiting for a problem.

  I already knew quite a lot about them. Anyone who broke into their room stumbled over discarded amphorae. Their room smelt sour. They owned few clothes, and paid fewer laundry bills. They lived such abnormal hours that by the time they thought of washing, even the public baths had closed. As well as their own odours, which were plentiful, they lived among a complicated waft of pigments: lead, palm resin, galls, crushed seashells and chalks, together with lime, gypsum, and borax. They ate cheap meals, full of garlic and those artichokes that make you fart.

  In they fell, all paint-stains and dirty politics. The smoke from a resinous torch added itself to the other smells that lived here. It enabled me to see I was in a communal room. A small space crammed with beds for three or four people, though only these two appeared to be renting at present. The painters showed no surprise at finding me sitting there in the dark. They did not object: I had brought them an amphora. Well, I had met creative types before.

  One was tall and one short, both of them bare-armed, not from bravado but because they were too poor to own cloaks. They both had beards, mainly to strike a defiant social attitude. They were aged about thirty, but their manners were adolescent and their habits puerile. Under the grime they might both have been good-looking in different ways. They preferred to make their mark through personality; a kind friend should have advised them their personalities needed sprucing up.

  They stuffed their torch into a narrow oil jar: some tasteful Greek’s funeral urn. I guessed the Greek was still in it. That would be their idea of fun, making a lampstand out of him.

  Neither of them remembered me.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘I’m Marcus-‘ I began, intending full formality.

  ‘Hey, Marcus! Wonderful to see you!’

  ‘How’s your life, Marcus?’

  I refrained from saying that only select members of my family were permitted to use my personal name. Etiquette is lost on free spirits; especially ones who are habitually drunk.

  Manlius was the designer. The tall, sleepy-eyed one, he wore what had once been a white tunic and had a fringe of dank black hair. Manlius squiggled and doodled in miniature. He had drawn neat little columns, swags and flower vases all around his corner of the room.

  Varga’s short legs were compensated for by a wide moustache. His tunic was a brownish manganese colour, with rags of purplish braid, and he wore sandals with gold thongs. Ma would have reckoned him untrustworthy. He was the one who could paint. He preferred ambitious battle scenes with bare-chested mythological giants. He had a good line in tragic centaurs; one five feet high reared up in agony above his bed, gorily speared by an Amazon.

  ‘I’d like to meet your model!’

  ‘The girl or the horse?’

  ‘Oh the horse-amazing fetlocks!’

  Our quips were satirical; the Amazon was startling. I pretended to admire her sensitive skin tones so we could all leer at her shape. Her body owed something to the girl who had posed for the picture, though more to Varga’s fervent lust. He had improved her until she was almost deformed. I knew that. I knew his model; had seen her, anyway. His painted fighting maid was based on a luscious bundle whose proportions in real life would make a man gulp, yet not despair. The Amazon was for wild dreams.

  The original model was a ripe brunette with wide-set daring eyes, eyes that had fallen on my brother once, almost certainly by design. She was the girl he had sat next to at the Circus, the night he dumped Marina on me. The night, I now felt certain, when he had roamed through our city on the lookout for someone though for once, I reckoned, the girl was only a messenger.

  ‘Who owns the body?’

  ‘Rubinia-though I made some adaptations! She often sits for us.’

  I was in the right place. That night, Rubinia must have told Festus he would see the painters at the Virgin. (She had probably told him her address too, though that was now irrelevant.)

  I laughed, easily. ‘I think she knew my brother.’

  ‘More than likely!’ chortled Manilus. He must be commenting on the girl; he had not asked me who my brother was.

  Maybe he knew.

  Probably not yet, I thought.

  While I wondered how to work around to my enquiry, we lay on the beds with our boots on, drinking steadily. (Artists do not have mothers who bring them up nicely-or at least, they do not have to acknowledge them.)

  My reference to Festus was forgotten. The painters were the casual type who would let you mention an acquaintance, or a relation, without further curiosity. They knew everyone. If he was carrying an amphora or sitting in a bar with a full purse on him, any stranger was their friend. Trying to remind them of one past patron among so many could prove difficult.

  Our encounter tonight became as bad as I expected: they started talking about politics. Manlius was a republican. I was one myself, though wary of mentioning it in this loose-tongued company. Too serious a hope of restoring the old system implied removing the Emperor. Vespasian might be a tolerant old buffer, but treason was still a capital offence, and I try to avoid such hobbies. Being set up for a soldier’s murder was unpleasant enough.

  Manlius definitely wanted to dispose of Vespasian; Varga hated the entire Senate. They had a plan to turn Rome into a free public gallery, stocked by grabbing patrician collections and raiding the public porticoes, and financed from the Treasury. The plan was highly detailed-and completely impractical in their hands. These two could not have organised an orgy in a brothel.

  ‘We could do it,’ declaimed Varga, ‘if the establishment were not protected by the mailed shirts and hidebound mentality of the Praetorian Guard.’

  I decided against mentioning that I sometimes worked as an imperial agent, in case I was found decapitated in a public square. Artistic people have no sense of proportion-and drunks have no sense.

  ‘This is a city run on fear!’ Manlius slurred. ‘For instance-here’s a for instance, Marcus-why do slaves all wear the same clothes as the rest of us? Why do their masters make sure of that?’

  ‘Because they work better if they’re warm?’

  My answer produced a huge guffaw. ‘No! Because if they all wore a slave uniform, they would realise that there are millions of them, control
led by a mere handful of bastards they could easily overthrow if they put their minds to it-‘

  ‘Thank you, Spartacus!’

  ‘I’m serious,’ he mumbled, making serious efforts to pour himself another drink.

  ‘Here’s to the republic,’ I toasted him gently. ‘When every man tilled his own furrow, when every daughter was a virgin, and every son stayed at home to the age of forty-nine, saying “Yes, Father” to everything!’

  ‘You’re a cynic!’ commented Varga, evidently the astute one of this rollicking pair.

  I mentioned that I had a nephew who had apprenticed himself to a fresco painter on the Campanian coast. Actually Larius was on my mind now because I was thinking he might have attached himself to sume useless degenerate like these two. He was embarrassingly sensible, but I should have checked before I left him there.

  ‘Campania’s a dump!’ Manlius grumbled. ‘We were there; it was dreadful. We went for the sun and the women and the precious grapes-plus the stupendously rich clients, of course. No luck. All snobs, Marcus. Nobody wants you unless you’re a Greek or a local. We came home again.’

  ‘Are you in work at the moment?’

  ‘Surely. Good commission. Varga’s doing The Rape of the Sabine Women for aristos to gaze at while they stuff themselves silly on peacocks in aspic. He creates a nice rape, Varga…’

  ‘I can believe it!’

  ‘I’m doing them a pair of rooms: one white, one black. Either side of the atrium. Balanced, see? Balance appeals to me.’

  ‘Doubles your fee?’ I grinned.

  ‘Money means nothing to artists.’

  ‘This generous attitude explains why you had to descend to painting rude sketches at the Virgin-settling a bill, I presume?’

  Varga winced. ‘That thing!’

  ‘You were slumming,’ I said, looking at the quality of what he painted for himself.

  ‘We were, Marcus. The need to drink is a terrible thing!’

  I was tired of this. My feet had warmed up enough to start hurting; the rest of me was stiff, tired and bored. I was sick of drinking; sick of holding my breath against the unsavoury atmosphere; sick of listening to drunks.