the point while he removed the waxed bung. He had worked here long enough to become well practised. The amphora was propped safely against his left knee while he whipped out the stopper one-handed, then he flicked his cloth around the rim to brush off stray shreds of the sealing wax. He had his back to me.
`Philomelus!'
At once, he turned round. Our eyes met. The waiter made no attempt to deny that he was Pisarchus' youngest son.
Well, why should he? He was just a would-be writer who had found a job to pay the rent while he scribbled, a job that enabled him to hang about longingly, conveniently close to the Golden Horse scriptorium.
LII
AT HOME, Petronius Longus was looking more himself today, though he seemed quiet. Helena and I dragged him with us via my sister Maia's house. I wanted Helena to be at the case confrontation, in the role of my expert witness on literature; she could hardly have our daughter toddling about there in her walking-frame. We were intending to ask Maia to look after baby Julia, but when we arrived we found her out in the street seeing off her own children for their trip to the seaside with my other sister Junia.
They were all being loaded up with bundles, prior to a long walk out to the Ostia Gate where Gaius Baebius would be waiting for them with an ox-cart. Maia's four looked surly, all rightly suspicious that this `treat' had been arranged with an ulterior motive. Marius and Cloelia, the elder two, took Ancus and Rhea by the hand, as if assuming responsibility for poor little souls who were being sent to Ostia to be drowned, thus freeing their feckless mother for dancing and debauchery.
She was being freed for Anacrites. He knew it, and was on the spot, helping to send off her brood. The way he was fastening satchels around them almost looked competent. The spy had probably learned how to supervise children while torturing innocents into betraying their parents to Nero, but Maia and Helena seemed impressed. Petronius and I stood aside, watching the situation grimly.
`I took some leave for the festival of Vertumnus,' Anacrites told me, almost apologetically. There was no mention of Pa hitting him, but I was pleased to see his ear had swollen like a cabbage leaf. In fact, once any of us noticed, it was hard to avoid staring at his lug. I wondered how he would explain it to Maia, currently waving the children off. Marius and Cloelia stubbornly refused to wave back. Marius even refused to acknowledge me when I winked at him. I felt like a traitor, as he meant me to.
`Vertumnus? That's not until tomorrow.' Hades. It implied my sister and the spy would be spending all the intervening time together – in bed, for instance.
`I am very fond of gardening!' Maia chirruped brightly.
When we asked if it would be convenient for her to have Julia for the next few hours, she replied with unusual force, `Not really, Marcus!'
Undoubtedly, Maia and Anacrites were not laying plans to dig out a shrubbery with hand trowels. I cursed Vertumnus. Garden festivals and regrettable behaviour have always gone together. People only have to put a prickly wreath of leaves and apples round their necks and they start to think about life surging in all the wrong places. The idea of Anacrites making offerings to the spirit of change and renewal was too ghastly to contemplate.
We had to take Julia to my mother's instead. Helena went in to beg the favour. It was too soon after I had upset Ma for me to show my face.
Petronius and I stayed out in the street, watching a group of slaves carrying out bundles from Ma's apartment and loading a short mule train. I enquired who was leaving, and they told me Anacrites. I had had enough of him today – but I could bear this. I wondered privately where they would be transporting his chattels; Petro asked straight out: to the Palatine.
`He has a house up there,' Petronius told me in a sombre voice. `Swank place – Old republican mansion. Goes with his job.'
That was news. I only knew about Anacrites' office on the Palatine and his Campanian villa. `How do you know?'
`He has been living on my ground,' said Petronius, like a heavy professional. His eyes narrowed with loathing. The vigiles hated the intelligence service. `I keep an eye on local spies.'
Helena came out, this time minus the baby. She flashed me a look of relief that the arrangement had been conducted peacefully, then she too glanced at the slaves who were packing up the spy's belongings. Now it was Helena's turn to wink – at Petronius and me.
`How was Ma?' I ventured to ask nervously; I would have to go in and see her when we came back to collect the child later.
`Seemed all right.' Helena waved at someone cheerily; she had spotted the old neighbour, Aristagoras. He had joined a group of sightseers gawping at the removal gang. `Of course,' she then told Petro and me in a strange voice, `there is always a possibility that while Anacrites thought he was two-timing your mother with Maia, the excellent and spirited Junilla Tacita may have been two-timing him.'
Too much imagination. She read too many sensational love stories; I told her so.
Miffed, Helena chose to ignore me on the short walk to the Clivus Publicius. She, tucked her arm through that of Petronius Longus. `Lucius, I have been meaning to ask you about the other night. If you had been asleep in bed, that giant would have killed you before you could raise the alarm. But you threw the bench and the flowerpots into the street. Were you out on the balcony when he burst in?'
`With a drink!' I snorted. If so, and if he had been there until nearly dawn, I did not care to know. I had enough worries. I wanted a best friend with a casual attitude, but not one who was an outright mess.
He had definitely not been drunk, though. If he had been, he would be dead now.
`I'm on night shift this week,' he explained. `I had only just come home.'
`So what were you doing?' Helena pried.
`Thinking. Looking at the stars.'
`Good gods,' I muttered. `Everybody must be at it – you really have got a new woman you're mooning about.'
`Not me,' he said. We were squeezing down an alley, so he was able to concentrate on avoiding broken paving-slabs.
`Liar. Can I remind you, I told you all about it, when I fell in love.'
`Every time it happened!' he groaned. I ignored the slander.
He was still too quiet. I started to wonder if it had been a bad mistake letting him see Maia's children going off to Ostia. His own three young daughters lived there these days; his wife had taken them there with her lover, the potted salad-seller, who was trying to build up a business selling snacks on the harbour quays. Now I felt guilty. If I had finished the Chrysippus case earlier, Petronius could have gone with Junia and Gaius Baebius in their ox-cart, and could have visited his own children.
Something in his expression warned me not to mention that, not even to apologise.
Fusculus and Passus, with a few vigiles in red tunics, were waiting for us outside the house in the Clivus Publicius. Helena's brother Aelianus was talking to them. I had sent for him. This had little to do with his enquiries into the bank's clients, but it would be good experience.
We all went indoors together. Passus and Helena immediately
started conferring on the sidelines about the scrolls they had read. I checked with Fusculus that he had managed to contact the shipper, Pisarchus, and ordered him to join us here.
Petronius was walking slowly around a large handcart that was standing in the first great reception hall. Everyone was moving from their lodgings today: this, we were told as we sniffed at it like curious street mongrels, was the removal cart Diomedes had brought to take away his property. He was stripping out the room he used to have here.
