Poseidon's Gold

by Lindsey Davis

‘I want to see Rubinia!’

  I shrugged. Ignoring his frantic gaze, I carefully examined the statue I had chosen to lean on. It had the body of a Greek athlete in tiptop condition, but the head of a Roman countryman aged about sixty, with a lined face and very big ears. ‘Ovonius Pulcher’, according to its plinth. There were half a score of these monstrosities scattered through the studio, all with identical bodies but different heads. They were the latest craze; everyone who was anyone in Campania must have ordered one.

  ‘These are horrible!’ I said frankly. ‘Mass-produced muscle with entirely the wrong faces.’

  ‘He does a good head,’ Pa disagreed. ‘And there are some nice reproductions around us here. He’s a damn good copyist.’

  ‘Where do the youthful torsos come from?’

  ‘Greece,’ croaked Orontes, trying to humour us. Pa and I turned to each other and exchanged a slow, significant glance.

  ‘Greece! Really?’

  ‘He goes to Greece,’ my father informed me. ‘Now I wonder if he used to go there and find things for our Festus to sell?’

  I whistled through my teeth. ‘Treasure-hunting! So this is the clod-brained agent Festus used to employ! The legendary man he met in Alexandria… Greece, eh? I bet he wishes he’d stayed there sunbathing on the Attic Plain!’

  ‘I need a drink!’ interrupted the sculptor desperately.

  ‘Don’t give him any,’ snapped Pa. ‘I know him of old. He’s a drunken sot. He’ll drain it and pass out on you.’

  ‘Is that how you spent the bribe, Orontes?’

  ‘I never had a bribe!’

  ‘Don’t lie! Somebody doled out a lot of money for you to do them a favour. Now you’re going to tell us who paid you the money-and you’re going to tell us why!’

  ‘Bloody Cassius Carus paid the money!’ my father suddenly shouted out. I knew he was guessing. I also realised he was probably right.

  ‘That true, Orontes?’ Orontes groaned in feeble assent. We had found some wine while he was unconscious. Pa nodded to me, and I offered the sculptor the wineskin, pulling it back after Orontes had taken one thirsty swig. ‘Now tell us the full story.’

  ‘I can’t!’ he wailed.

  ‘You can. It’s easy.’

  ‘Where’s Rubinia?’ he tried again. He didn’t care much about the girl; he was playing for time.

  ‘Where she can’t help you.’ Actually we had shut her up somewhere to keep her quiet.

  Pa swung closer and grasped the wineskin. ‘Maybe he’s frightened of the girl. Maybe she’ll give him an earful if she finds out he’s talked.’ He took several deep swigs, then offered me a turn. I shook my head with distaste. ‘Wise boy! For the heart of a wine-producing area this is dreadful vinegar. Orontes never drank for the flavour, just the effect.’

  Orontes looked at his wineskin yearningly, but Pa held on to the dreadful prize. ‘Tell us about the Phidias,’ I urged. ‘Tell us now-or Pa and I are going to hurt you much more than anyone else who’s threatened you before!’

  I must have sounded convincing, because to my surprise Orontes then confessed.

  ‘I go to Greece whenever I can, looking out for bargains-‘ We groaned and sneered at his hybrid statues again, to show what we thought of that. ‘Festus had an arrangement with me. I had heard where there might be this Phidias. I thought we could get hold of it. Some run-down temple on an island wanted to have a clear-out; I don’t think they really appreciated what they were turfing on to the market. Even so, it wasn’t cheap. Festus and some other people managed to put the money together, and he also lined up Carus and Servia as eventual purchasers. When his legion left Alexandria to fight in the Jewish Rebellion, Festus wangled himself a journey to Greece as an escort for some despatches; that was how he came with me to view the Phidias. He liked what he saw and bought it, but there was no time to make other arrangements so it had to go on with him to Tyre. After that he was stuck in Judaea with the army, so I was supposed to supervise bringing it back to Italy.’

  ‘You were to escort it in person?’ Pa queried. I guessed that was the usual system he and Festus had imposed to protect an item of large value. Either one of them, or an agent they really trusted, would have stuck with it every mile of its journey.

  ‘That was what I promised Festus. He was sending a whole load of other stuff-nice goods, but minor quality by comparison-in a ship called the Hypericon.’

  I poked him with the toe of my boot. The sculptor closed his eyes. ‘Since the Hypericon sank while carrying the Phidias, and you’re lying here annoying us, the rest is obvious. You broke your promise to Festus, and bunked off elsewhere!’

  ‘That’s about right,’ he confessed uncertainly.

  ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this! You let a statue worth half a million travel alone?’ Pa was incredulous.

  ‘Not exactly-‘

  ‘So what exactly?’ menaced Pa.

  Orontes groaned hopelessly and curled up, hugging his knees as if he was in some terrible pain. A bad conscience hurts some folk that way. ‘The ship with the statue sank,’ he whispered.

  ‘We know that!’ My father lost his temper. He hurled the wineskin at a Coy Nymph; it burst with a horrible squelching sound. Red wine trickled down her scanty drapes like blood. ‘The Hypericon-‘

  ‘No, Geminus.’ Orontes took a deep breath. Then he told us what we had come to find out: ‘The Phidias that Festus bought was never on the Hypericon.’

  LIII

  I ran the fingers of both hands deep into my hair, massaging my scalp. Somehow this shock was not the surprise it ought to have been. Everyone had been telling us the Hypericon was carrying the statue; readjusting to another story took an effort. But some things which had made no sense before might now fall into place.

  ‘Tell us what happened,’ I commanded the sculptor wearily.

  ‘There had been some mix-up. Festus and I took the Phidias to Tyre, but the rest of his stuff, things he had fixed up on his own account, had gone to Caesarea. Festus then told me he had to make himself look a bit official-‘

  ‘You don’t say!’ Pa was getting rattled. ‘There was a war on in that region!’

  ‘Well that’s it!’ Orontes exclaimed gratefully. He appeared to lack any grasp of world events. Perhaps this was understandable, when he saw my brother behaving as if the Jewish Rebellion had been arranged solely to further his own business commissions. ‘Anyway, he went down to Caesarea to supervise his other stuff and to fix up a ship-what turned out to be the Hypericon.’

  ‘So you were not using her before this?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no. We were in military transports up to then.’ Bloody Festus! ‘I was left in charge of the statue. Festus told me before I brought it south to let one of the Aristedon brothers inspect it.’ The name was familiar; I remembered Carus and Servia mentioning they used these people to ship goods for them. ‘They were to verify it for the new owners, and until they did, Festus could not clear the banker’s order.’

  ‘So Festus was paid by Carus through a banker in Syria?’

  ‘More convenient,’ Pa muttered. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted to carry that kind of sum with him from Rome. And if his mates in Judaea had put up the stake money, he could pay them their profits straight away with less risk to the cash.’

  ‘I see. But before Carus would cough up so much money, he wanted an agent of his own to see the goods? So how did you lose our statue, Orontes?’

  He was really squirming now. ‘Oh gods… I thought it was for the best… Aristedon, their agent, turned up in Tyre and approved the statue. I was supposed to take it by road to Caesarea, but with soldiers barging about on all the highways, I was not looking forward to the trip. It seemed a godsend when the Aristedon brother suggested that his clients would prefer him to ship the Phidias in his own boat, the Pride of Perga.’

  ‘Did you go along with that?’ demanded Pa contemptuously.

  ‘I assume Aristedon gave you some form of receipt?’ I added dangerously.

 
‘Oh yes…’ Something was not right there. He had gone pale, and his eyes were wandering.

  ‘So you let him take it?’

  ‘Why not? It meant I could stop worrying about it. And I could forget about coming home on the Hypericon. I wanted to go back to Greece. That way I could spend my commission from Festus buying stuff for myself.’

  I weighed in: ‘So you handed over the Phidias, let the rest of my brother’s cargo take its chance with the Hypericon, flitted off to Achaea, then wandered back to Italy in your own good time?’

  ‘That’s right, Falco. And since it meant I escaped drowning, I’m not going to apologise!’ It seemed a reasonable attitude-unless this clown had lost your family a small fortune. ‘After I got home I discovered the Hypericon had sunk and Festus had lost all his gear.’

  ‘So where in Hades is the Phidias?’ grated Pa.

  ‘I was just congratulating myself on having saved it, when I heard that the Pride of Perga had miscarried too.’

  ‘Oh come on!’ roared my father. ‘This is too much of a coincidence!’

  ‘It was a bad time of year. Dreadful storms everywhere.’

  ‘So then what happened?’ I put in.

  ‘I found myself in trouble. I was visited by Carus. He made me swear I would not tell Festus about the statue swap-‘

  ‘He paid you for this deception?’

  ‘Well…’ The sculptor looked more shifty than usual. ‘He bought something I had.’

  ‘It can’t have been one of your pieces,’ my father said pleasantly. ‘Carus is a shit, but he is a connoisseur!’

  Orontes spoke before he could help himself. ‘He bought the receipt.’

  Both Father and I had to try very hard to restrain ourselves.

  ‘How much for?’ I asked, with feigned lightness of tone-my only way to avoid a burst blood vessel.

  ‘Five thousand.’ The admission was almost inaudible.

  ‘Is that all? The bloody statue was worth half a million!’

  ‘I was hard up… I took what I could get.’

  ‘But whatever did you think you were doing to Festus?’

  ‘It didn’t seem so bad,’ wailed Orontes. Clearly he belonged to the amoral class of artists. ‘If I had not changed the arrangements, Festus would have lost the statue anyway, in the Hypericon. I don’t see any difference!’

  ‘All the difference!’ my father raged. ‘Half a million nice bright shiny ones that Carus now thinks he can force us to pay!’

  ‘He was trying to squeeze Festus too,’ Orontes conceded dismally. ‘That was why I didn’t want to meet him when he came back to Rome. I reckoned Festus knew what I had done, and was coming after me.’

  Father and I looked at each other. We were both reminiscing about my brother, and we were both perturbed. Simple rage did not explain the agitation Festus had been showing on that last trip home. If he had known that this worm Orontes had cheated him, he would simply have enlisted help, either from me or from Father, to blast the fool. Instead, he had been running in circles trying to organise one of his secret plans. It could only mean he really believed that Cassius Carus had a grievance, and needed to be squared.

  Orontes misinterpreted our silence. Giving his all, he went on in anguish, ‘Carus must have been putting terrible pressure on Festus by then, and Carus is known as a dangerous character.’

  ‘Too dangerous for a fool like you to meddle with!’ my father told him brutally.

  ‘Oh don’t go on-‘ He had no grasp of priorities. ‘I’m sorry about what happened, but there seemed no way for me to get out of it. The way Carus first put it, he made me feel I had done wrong to let the statue go. He said everybody would feel better if we pretended it had never happened.’

  ‘I cannot believe this character!’ Pa muttered to me in despair.

  ‘Can we get the five thousand off him?’

  ‘I’ve spent it,’ Orontes whispered. By then I was prepared for that. Nothing useful or good would ever come out of this studio. ‘I spent everything. I always do. Money seems to shrivel up the minute I appear…’ I gave him a glare that should have shrivelled something else. ‘Look, I know you have a lot to blame me for. I never thought it would end the way it did-‘

  A bad feeling was creeping over me. Both my father and I were very still. A man with more astuteness would have shut up rapidly. But Orontes lacked any sensitivity to atmosphere. He went straight on: ‘I left Rome and kept right out of the way as long as I knew Festus was prowling about. When Manlius told me he had left, I hoped he had managed to sort something out about the cash, and I just tried not to think about it. So how do you imagine I felt when I heard what had happened to him, and realised it was all my fault?’ His question was almost indignant. ‘I knew Carus and Servia hate to be done down, and I realised their methods could be harsh. But I never thought,’ Orontes wailed, ‘Carus would put the frighteners out so badly that Festus would do what he did!’

  ‘What did Festus do?’ I demanded in a low voice.

  Suddenly Orontes realised he had caused himself an unnecessary predicament. It was too late. The reply came dragging out of him irresistibly: ‘I suppose he had come under so much pressure, he chose to die in battle so that he could get away from it!’

  LIV

  When I returned to the inn where we were currently staying, Helena was in bed. She stopped there, grumbling occasionally, while I spent half an hour trying to force the door-catch: my father’s idea of keeping her safe had been to lock her in. Unfortunately, he had remained at the studio to keep an eye on Orontes. I had walked the four miles back to Capua, in the dark, getting more and more cold, footsore and miserable-only to find that my aggravating father still had the key to our room stuffed down his tunic somewhere.

  My efforts to break in quietly failed dismally. In the end I abandoned caution and took a run at the door with my shoulder. The lock held, but the hinges gave. There was a terrible noise. It must have been obvious throughout the building that a Roman lady of status was having her room broken into, yet nobody came to investigate. Nice place, Capua. I could not wait to get out of it.

  I squeezed inside. Unable to find a tinder-box, I bruised myself squeezing back out again to fetch a lamp from the corridor. Then I puffed my way back in a second time, cursing harshly.

  Helena had eaten her own bowl of beans and all the side orders. I devoured my own cold portion, plus half of Father’s, while I started to tell her what had happened. Cold beans can be fine in a salad in summer, though as a main course in winter they lack panache. Oil had gelled on them unpleasantly.

  ‘Is there any bread?’

  ‘You forgot to bring it. Too busy,’ Helena informed me from beneath the blankets, ‘ogling big-busted customers.’

  I carried on talking, putting in all the details about Rubinia’s unclothed bust.

  Helena could always be won over by a story, especially if it featured me. At first barely the tip of her nose was visible above the bedcovers, but gradually more emerged as the tale of the silly antics and hard questioning caught her interest. By the time I had finished she was sitting up and holding out her arms for me.

  I climbed into bed and we wrapped ourselves together for warmth.

  ‘So what happens now, Marcus?’

  ‘We’ve told Orontes he has to come back to Rome with us. He knows he is in real danger from either Carus or us, so he’s happy to wilt under whichever option lets him return where he really wants to be. The man’s an idiot!’ I complained restlessly. ‘He has no concept that there now has to be a confrontation-and that whatever happens, it will turn out unpleasantly for him. He’s just happy to stop running.’

  ‘But have you escaped paying all that money to Carus?’

  I sighed. ‘This is a problem. Carus does have written evidence that he paid Festus for the statue, whereas we ourselves have nothing to prove that Orontes handed the thing over to his representative in Tyre. Aristedon and the ship’s crew drowned when the Pride of Perga sank. There are no other subs
tantial witnesses.’

  ‘And as for the bribe Carus subsequently paid to the sculptor, naturally an extortionist does not give a receipt to his collaborator?’

  ‘No, love-so we cannot prove the fraud. It’s Orontes’s word against Carus’s.’

  ‘Orontes could appear as a witness, though?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ I agreed gloomily. ‘He can appear. If we can keep him alive, sober, and willing to testify-which Carus will try to prevent. If we can keep him more frightened of us than he is of Carus, so that when we haul him into court he tells our story. And if we can make this limp, lying, unreliable character look believable to a jury!’

  ‘Carus will probably bribe the jury.’ Helena kissed my ear. ‘Orontes is a bad witness,’ she added. ‘He ignored your brother’s instructions, then sold the receipt without a quiver. The opposing barrister only has to accuse him of perennial bad faith, and you’ve lost your case.’

  By now I was ranting moodily. ‘Orontes is completely flabby. Carus is rich and single-minded. In court he would come over as an honest citizen while our man would be quickly discredited… But we’re not giving this to the barristers. Why pay fees on top, when you’re already up to your nostrils in dung? Pa and I are determined to do something, however.’

  ‘What can you do?’ Her hands were wandering pleasantly in places that liked wandering hands.

  ‘We haven’t decided. But it has to be big.’

  We both fell silent. Exacting revenge from the collectors needed time and careful thought. Tonight was not the moment. But even if my own ingenuity failed me, I half hoped to lure Helena into contributing some devious invention. Something had to be done. She would understand that. She hated injustice.

  She had become completely still in my arms, though I could sense busy thoughts working in that needle brain.

  Suddenly she exclaimed, ‘Trust you to leave a gap in the story!’ I started, afraid I had passed over something significant. ‘The luscious nude model went missing from the scene halfway through!’

  I laughed awkwardly. ‘Oh her! She was there all the time. While the sculptor was unconscious we gave her the choice of shutting up and promising to stop kicking, or being tucked out of the way while we woke him up and questioned him. She preferred to stay volatile, so we penned her in the sarcophagus.’