Poseidon's Gold

by Lindsey Davis

  The pair came in together. I already knew from Father that I was about to meet a couple where his taste and her money had made a long, successful bond. He was to speak the most, but her presence remained a force throughout. They were a firmly welded pair, welded by an inexorable interest in grabbing things. We had come to a house where the need to possess hung in the air as strong as a sickness.

  Cassius Carus was a thin, mournful streak with dark curly hair. About forty-five, he had hollow cheeks, and pouched, heavy-lidded eyes. He had apparently forgotten to shave lately-too enraptured with his monumental nudes, no doubt. Ummidia Servia was perhaps ten years younger, a round, pallid woman who looked as if she could be irritable. Maybe she was tired of kissing stubble.

  They both wore white, in lavishly formal folds. The man had a couple of gross signet-rings, the woman gold filigree about her, but they did not trouble much with jewellery. Their uncomfortably dignified dress was to set them up as fitting custodians of their art. Personal adornment did not come into it.

  They knew Father. ‘This is my son,’ he said, producing a chill for a second while they worked out that I was not the fabulous Festus.

  Each gave me an upsettingly limp hand.

  ‘We’ve been admiring the collection.’ My father liked to slaver.

  ‘What do you think?’ Carus asked me, probably sensing more reserve. He was like a cat that jumps straight on the lap of the only visitor who sneezes at fur.

  In my role as the auctioneer’s respectful son I said, ‘I have never seen better quality.’

  ‘You will admire our Aphrodite.’ His slow, light, slightly pedantic voice made this virtually an instruction. Carus led the way for us to view the wonder, which they kept until last in the collection, in a separate courtyard garden. ‘We had the water put in specially.’

  Another Aphrodite. First the painter’s special, now an even more suggestive little madam. I was becoming a connoisseur.

  The Carus model was a Hellenistic marble whose sensuality stopped the breath. This goddess was too nearly indecent to be displayed in a temple. She stood in the middle of a circular pool, half undressed, turning to gaze back over one lithe shoulder as she admired the reflection of her own superlative rear. Light from the still water suffused her, setting up a gorgeous contrast between her nakedness and the rigid pleating of the chiton she had half removed.

  ‘Very nice,’ said my father. The Aphrodite looked even more satisfied.

  Carus consulted me.

  ‘Sheer beauty. Isn’t she a copy of that very striking Venus on the great lake at Nero’s Golden House?’

  ‘Oh yes. Nero believed he had the original!’ Carus said ‘believed’ with a flick of contemptuous malice, then he smiled. He glanced at his wife. Servia smiled too. I gathered Nero thought wrongly.

  Putting one over on another collector gave them even more pleasure than possessing their incomparable piece. This was bad news. They would enjoy putting one over on us.

  It was time to tackle business.

  My father walked away around the path, drawing Carus with him while I murmured about nothing much to Servia. We had planned this. When two members of the Didius family go visiting there is always some fraught plan-usually an interminable dispute about what time we are going to leave the house we have not even arrived at. On this occasion Pa had suggested we should each try our wheedling skills on both parties, then we could adopt whichever approach seemed best. Not this variation, anyway. I was getting nowhere with the woman. It was like plumping a cushion that had lost half its feathers. I could see Pa going rather red, too, as he and Carus conversed.

  After a while Geminus brought Carus back round the remaining half of the circle. Adroitly changing partners, he imposed what was left of his famous attraction for women on the woman of the house, while I attacked her spindly spouse. I watched Pa oozing masculine civility over Servia as she waddled at his side. She hardly seemed to notice his efforts, which made me smile.

  Carus and I moved to stone benches, where we could admire the pride of the collection.

  ‘So what do you know about marbles, young man?’ He spoke as if I was eighteen and had never before seen a goddess undressing.

  I had stared at more nude femininity than he owned in his whole gallery, and mine was alive, but I was a man of the world, not some boasting barbarian, so I let it pass.

  In our introductory message, I had been described as a junior partner at the auction-house. So I played gauche and offered, ‘I know the biggest market is in copies. We cannot shift originals these days even if we bundle them in fives and throw in a set of fish skillets.’

  Carus laughed. He knew I was not referring to anything so important as a Phidias original. Anyone could shift that. Somebody probably had.

  My father despaired of entrancing Servia even more quickly than I had, so they both rejoined us. These preliminaries had established the rules. Nobody wanted to be charmed. There would be no easy release from our debt. Now Pa and I sat side by side, waiting for our limpid hosts to put the pressure on us.

  ‘Well, that’s a sign of modern life,’ I carried on. ‘Only fakes count!’ By now I knew that in chasing after Festus I was destined to expose another one.

  ‘Nothing wrong with a decently done fake,’ Pa opined. He looked calm, but I knew he was miserable. ‘Some of the best current reproductions will become antiques in their own right.’

  I grinned desperately. ‘I’ll make a note to invest in a good Roman Praxiteles, if ever I have the cash and the storage-room!’ As a hint of our family poverty this was not impressing our creditors.

  ‘A Lysippus is what you want!’ Geminus advised me, tapping his nose.

  ‘Yes, I saw the fine Alexander in the gallery here!’ I turned to our hosts confidentially: ‘You can always tell an auctioneer. Apart from a wandering look in his eye from taking bids off the wall-inventing non-existent calls, you know-he’s the one whose ugly snout bends like a carrot that’s hit a stone, after years of giving collectors his dubious investment tips…’ We were getting nowhere. I dropped the act. ‘Pa, Carus and Servia know what they want to invest in. They want a Poseidon, and they want it by Phidias.’

  Cassius Carus inspected me coldly in his fussy way. But it was Servia, their financier, who smoothed down the thick white folds of her mantle and broke in. ‘Oh no, it’s not a future investment. That piece already belongs to us!’

  XLIII

  I saw my father grip his hands.

  Rejecting the humble role that had been imposed on me, I hardened my attitude. ‘I came to this tale rather late. Do you mind if we just run over the facts? Am I right in my understanding? My elder brother Didius Festus is said to have acquired from Greece a modest statue, alleged to be a Poseidon and thought to be by Phidias?’

  ‘Known to be bought by us,’ responded Carus, obviously thinking he had put me down wittily.

  ‘Pardon me if I’m churlish, but do you have a receipt?’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Servia. She must have dealt with my family before.

  ‘I have been shown it, Marcus,’ murmured Pa. I ignored him.

  ‘It was made out to you by Festus?’ Carus nodded. ‘Festus is dead. So what has this to do with us?’

  ‘My point exactly!’ stated Pa. He drew himself up. ‘I made my son Festus independent of parental authority when he joined the armed forces.’ This was probably a lie, but no outsider could refute it. It sounded straight, though I could not imagine why Pa and Festus would have gone through such a formality. Acquiring emancipation from the power of his father is something that only troubles a son who feels bound by his father’s power in the first place. In the Didius family this had never applied. Any pleb on the Aventine would probably grin widely and say the same.

  Carus refused to accept any disclaimer. ‘I expect a parent to take responsibility for his son’s debts.’

  I felt a strong need for irony. ‘Nice to see that some people still believe in the family as an indissoluble unit, Father!’
/>
  ‘Bull’s testicles!’ Maybe Carus and Servia took this as a reference to the mystical rites of an Eastern religious cult.

  Maybe not.

  ‘My papa’s upset,’ I excused him to the couple. ‘When somebody says he owes them half a million, he loses his grip.’

  Carus and Servia gazed at me as if what I said was incomprehensible. Their indifference to our problem astonished me. It also made me shiver.

  I had been in many places where the atmosphere was more sinister. Toughs armed with knives or staves have a vivid effect; there were none of those here. Yet the mood was sour and in its way just as intimidating. The message reaching us was uncompromising. We would pay up, or we would suffer; suffer until we gave in.

  ‘Please be reasonable,’ I pressed on. ‘We are a poor family. We simply cannot lay hands on so much cash.’

  ‘You must,’ said Servia.

  We could talk all we wanted. But however closely we argued, we would never actually communicate. Even so, I felt compelled to struggle on: ‘Let’s follow through what happened. You paid Festus for the statue. In good faith he attempted to import it, but the ship sank. By then you owned the statue. It is,’ I declared, more boldly than I felt, ‘your loss.’

  Carus tossed a new nut into the mixing bowl: ‘No mention was ever made to us that the statue was still in Greece.’

  That was tricky. My heart lurched. I wondered what the date was on their receipt. Trying not to look at my father, I even wondered if my impossible brother had sold the Phidias to them after he already knew it was lost. Surely Pa would have noticed this detail when he saw the receipt; surely he would have warned me?

  One thing was definite: I could not draw attention to our lad’s fraud by asking to see the receipt for myself now. It did not matter; if Festus had deceived them, I did not want to know.

  ‘You mean you bought the item sight unseen?’ I floundered wildly.

  ‘“Antique marble”’ intoned Carus, evidently quoting from this bill of sale which I preferred not to examine. ‘“A Phidias Poseidon, heroic proportions, expression of noble placidity, wearing Greek dress, heavily coiffed and bearded, height two yards four inches, one arm raised to hurl a trident”… We have our own shippers,’ he informed me in a biting tone. ‘The Aristedon brothers. People we trust. We would have made our own arrangements. Then it would have been our loss. Not this way.’

  Festus could have let them take the shipping risk. He would have known that. He was always well up on customers’ backgrounds. So why not? I knew without even thinking about it. Festus was bringing the statue home himself because he had some extra wrinkle up his grubby tunic-sleeve.

  This was not my fault. It was not even Pa’s.

  That would not stop Carus and Servia.

  ‘Are you taking us to court?’

  ‘Litigation is not our philosophy.’

  I managed not to comment, No; only thuggery. ‘Look, I only recently came upon this problem,’ I began again. ‘I am trying to investigate what happened. After five years it is not easy, so I ask you to be sympathetic. I give you my word I will endeavour to illuminate the issue. I ask you to cease harassing my elderly father-‘

  ‘I’ll take care of myself!’ scoffed the elderly Didius, ever to the fore with a pointless quip.

  ‘And give me time.’

  ‘Not after five years!’ Carus said.

  I wanted to fight. I wanted to storm out, telling him he could do his worst and we would resist everything he did.

  There was no point. I had already discussed it with Father on the way here. We could provide muscle at the auctions. We could barricade the office and the store. We could guard both our homes and never step outside without a train of armed guards.

  We could not do all those things, however, every day and every night, for years.

  Carus and Servia had the grim insistence of people who would persist. We would never be free of the worry, for ourselves, our property-our women. We would be smothered by the cost of it all. We would never escape the inconvenience, or the public doubt that soon attaches to people who are trailing disputed debts.

  And we could never forget Festus.

  They were growing tired of us. We could see they were about to have us thrown out.

  My father was the first to acknowledge the deadlock. ‘I cannot replace the Phidias; no similar piece is known. As for finding half a million, it would wipe out my liquidity.’

  ‘Realise your assets,’ Carus instructed him.

  ‘I’ll have an empty storehouse, and a naked house.’

  Carus just shrugged.

  My father stood up. With more dignity than I expected, he simply said, ‘Selling everything I have, Cassius Carus, will take time!’ He was no longer requesting favours, but laying down terms. They would be accepted; Carus and Servia wanted to be paid. ‘Come along, Marcus,’ Pa ordered quietly. ‘We seem to have plenty of work to do. Let’s go home.’

  For once I abandoned my insistence on stating in public that he and I honoured different versions of ‘home’.

  He strode out with a set face. I followed. I was equally in despair. Half a million was more than I had already failed to assemble for my own most cherished purposes. It was more money than I really hoped to see. If I ever did see it, I wanted the cash so I could marry Helena. Well I could kiss goodbye to that idea for ever, if I became embroiled in this.

  Yet even if it broke me for ever, I realised I could not leave my father to shoulder the whole burden of my feckless brother’s debt.

  XLIV

  We had walked to the collectors’ house. We walked back.

  Well not quite: my father strode, at a ferocious pace. I hate to intrude upon another man’s trouble-and when a man has just failed to escape paying out half a million sesterces, he is certainly in trouble. So I marched along beside him, and since he wanted to fume in complete silence, I joined in loyally.

  As he steamed down the Via Flaminia my father’s visage was as friendly as Jove’s thunderbolt, and my own may well have lacked its usual winsomeness.

  I was thinking hard as well.

  We had almost reached the Saepta when he wheeled up to a wine-bar counter.

  ‘I need a drink!’

  I needed one too, but I still had a headache.

  ‘I’ll sit here and wait.’ Monumental masons were removing my skull on a tombstone hoist. ‘I spent last night oiling two painters’ vocal chords.’

  Pa paused in the midst of ordering, unable to decide which of the wines listed on the wall was sufficiently strong to create the oblivion he needed. ‘What painters?’

  ‘Manlius and Varga. ‘ I paused, too, though in my case there was no real wrench to the brain cells; I had only been applying my elbow to the counter and staring vaguely round me like any son accompanying his father out of doors. ‘Festus knew them.’

  ‘I know them! Go on,’ urged my father thoughtfully.

  On I went: ‘Well, there’s a disappearing sculptor who used to lodge with them-‘

  ‘What’s his name?’ asked my father.

  The barman was growing anxious. He could sense a lost sale approaching.

  ‘Orontes Mediolanus.’

  My father scoffed. ‘Orontes never disappeared! I ought to know; I use that idle bastard for copies and repairs. Orontes lodged with those loafers on the Caelian until at least last summer. They took your drink and twisted you!’ The barman lost his sale.

  We raced off to find Manlius and Varga.

  We spent most of the afternoon on the chase. My father dragged me round more sleepy fresco artists-and more of their burgeoning models-than I could bear to think about. We toured horrid hired rooms, freezing studios, teetering penthouses, and half-painted mansions. We went all over Rome. We even tried a suite at the Palace where Domitian Caesar had commissioned something elegant in yellow ochre for Domitia Longina, the dalliance he had snatched from her husband and installed as his wife.

  ‘Nothing like it!’ muttered Father. There was p
lenty like it actually; the Flavian taste was predictable. Domitian was only toying at that stage; he would have to wait for both his father and his brother to die before he could launch into his master plan for a new Palatine. I said what I thought about his decorating clich ‘Oh you’re right!’ agreed Pa, grovelling to the inside knowledge of an imperial agent. ‘And even adultery with the pick of the smart set is a convention nowadays. Both Augustus and that repulsive little Caligula acquired wives by pinching them.’

  ‘That’s not for me. When I grabbed a senator’s daughter, I chose one who had divorced herself in readiness for my suave approach.’

  ‘Quite right!’ came a rather sardonic reply. ‘You would hate to be publicly criticised…’

  At last someone told us the address where our quarries were working. We made our way there in silence. We had no plan this time. I was angry, but saw no need to elaborate. I never enquired what Father felt, though I did find out quite soon.

  The house in question was being done over completely. Scaffold hung threateningly over the entrance where old roof-tiles were flying down from the heavens into a badly placed skip. The site foreman must be a dozy swine. We clambered in, through a mess of trestles and ladders, then tripped over a tool-bag. Pa picked it up. When the watchman raised his head from a game of draughts scratched in the dusty base of a half-laid tessellated floor, I called out, ‘Have you seen Titus anywhere?’ and we rushed past, pretending to follow his vaguely raised arm.

  There is always a carpenter called Titus. We used him several times to bluff our way around. Even a fat fusspot in a toga, who was probably the householder, let us evade questions, merely frowning fretfully when we barged past him in a corridor. His property had been in the hands of louts for months. He no longer complained when they knocked him aside, peed on his acanthus bed or took naps in their filthy tunics on his own favourite reading-couch.

  ‘Sorry, governor!’ my father beamed. He had the knack of sounding like an unskilled pleb who had just put his pick through a water-pipe and was shuffling off out of it quickly.

  I knew Manlius would be working near the atrium, but there was too much going on there when we first arrived. We left him, and started working through the dining-rooms, looking for raped Sabines. It was a big house. They had three different feeding areas. Varga was touching up his Sabine ladies in the third.