bring Donatus round again. No chance of that now…' Every time he wafted off into misery I felt it was staged. `Saffia and I were a wonderful team, Falco. Nobody to touch us. It can be like that, you know.'
`I know.'
He shook his finger at me. `I see it! You have a wife and you love the girl.'
`She's very sharp,' I said quietly. That was true; Lutea was a lifelong fraud, but Helena had seen through him. Clearly he had no recollection that he had met her with me last night. He had blotted out the cold assessment with which her eyes had raked him. `She runs the home – and she runs me.'
`Excellent!' Lutea beamed at me. `That's how it should be. I am pleased for you.'
I was leaning on a wall, since Lutea was still lying on his couch and there were no other seats. I enjoyed myself, smiling slightly, as I thought of how Helena viewed him. Here he was, a man in his early thirties. He lived in a luxury he did not need, on promises he would never fulfil. What had he been doing before I arrived? Dreaming up schemes. Dreaming so hard that the fragile lies from which he built his life became his reality.
`Helena was anxious about your boy,' I said. `Maybe I can see him, to reassure her?'
`No, no,' Lutea murmured. `Lucius is not here. He went to his old nurse.
`Someone he knows,' I said, without judgement.
`Someone familiar,' Lutea agreed, as if this excuse had just struck him.
Different men react in different ways. If my children lost their mother, I would be inconsolable. And I would never let the children from my sight.
`This is good of you,' Lutea said, fooling himself as he tried to fool others. `Taking the trouble to bring your condolences. I appreciate that.'
I straightened up. `I'm afraid there is more to it.'
Lutea smiled at me, allowing himself to sink into a grief-stricken half-trance. `Nothing too terrible, I'm sure.'
`Oh no.' I walked over to him. I slung his feet off the couch and sat down with him. I shook my head like a concerned old uncle. If he stiffened up, he hid it. `Just this. It is being said that your sweet little Saffia blackmailed the Metelli. And I think that you were in the project with her. Any comment?'
Now sitting upright, the ex-husband let a bemused expression fill his features. Maybe he had been accused of bad practice before; the display was good. `That is a terrible thing for anyone to say about poor Saffia! Now she is dead and cannot defend herself against such accusations. I don't believe it – and I know nothing about any of it.'
`She knew their secret. Did she tell you?'
`What secret?' Lutea gasped as if the whole idea astonished him. `Oh come on! The secret that made you two decide to move in close to them. So close, Saffia actually left you and married herself to Birdy. Divorcing you was a sham. Poor Birdy knows it now. I wonder how long it took him to realise.'
`I have no notion what you are talking about, Falco.'
`Well that's a shame. Call yourself a friend of Birdy's? Don't you know that your very best friend is being made somebody's pat-ball? And don't you see why the evidence is pointing straight at you?'
Lutea shook his head in wonderment. A faint whiff of fine oil came my way. As with all the best confidence tricksters, his personal grooming was immaculate. If this scam failed, he would be able to build an extensive career preying on the rich widows of exotic commodity traders. He would like that. He could plunder their attics of stored commodities, not just empty their bankboxes. The widows would get plenty out of it – while his attentions lasted. I saw them playing dice with him, their be-ringed fingers flashing in the light of many lamp stands, while they congratulated themselves on their cultured catch. Better to paw a spiny sea urchin, in fact, yet there would never be unpleasantness. Lutea would leave them flat broke; even so, they would remember him with few hard feelings. He was good-looking and would play the innocent. Not wanting to believe he had deceived them, his victims would never be quite sure it really was darling Lutea who had robbed them.
I knew how it worked. I had dreamed of doing it, in the hard, lost days before I was rescued by improvements in my fate. But I recognised bad dreams for what they were. As an entrepreneur that was my tragedy. But it was my salvation as a man.
I stayed another hour. Lutea feigned shock, disgust, outrage, reproof, anger and near-hysteria. When he threatened litigation if I libelled him, I laughed at him and left.
He had confessed nothing. Still, I became certain that he and Saffia really had conspired together in a complex scheme – and one which might still be operational. Lutea denied it – but Lutea was undoubtedly lying through his teeth.
XL
HONORIUS LOOKED more confident when he appeared in court next day. Marponius greeted him benignly. That would have scared me, but Honorius had less experience. This trusting boy would have smiled back at a Nile crocodile as it climbed out to grab him by his short legs.
He was setting out the background to Metellus' death, explaining – perhaps in too much detail – the issues behind the original corruption trial. His current argument was that Rubirius Metellus may have been a bad citizen, but he had been convicted, so the jury should dispel any feeling that in some way he deserved to die. Killing him in his home was a serious crime. Parricide – by which Honorius meant, according to Roman custom, the murder of any close relative – had been the most reviled crime since the founding of our city. It was the jury's duty to avenge the crime, lest social order disintegrate…
When I hear the words `social order', I start looking around for somebody to pick a fight with.
The jury and I were thoroughly bored. I felt no conscience pangs when a message from Aelianus allowed me to make a run for it. I passed Honorius a note, did my best to make it look mysterious for the benefit of Paccius and Silius, then slid out of the Basilica like a man on the trail of hot new evidence.
The chance of that was slim. We were off to interview a fortune-teller. Presumably foresight would warn her about us before we even left the Forum.
Aelianus led me to his father's litter. He might hit the punch bag hard at the gym, but he had the natural laziness of any young man in his twenties. We crammed in and yelled at the bearers to get going as they protested at our weight. We were jogged along the Sacred Way the full length of the Forum, then waited interminably in the traffic jams around the building site for the new amphitheatre. Eventually we settled into a more regular pace along the Via Tusculanum. Olympia lived on that highway, though outside the city boundary. Cynics might think the remoteness was deliberate. For a woman who was courted by fine women who led busy lives, it seemed an awkwardly long-distance trek, though maybe the far location gave them a sense of security. A senator's wife having her stars read would have to be very discreet. If the stars under scrutiny belonged to her husband, she was breaking the law – whilst if they belonged to the Emperor, she was committing treason. To know another person's fortune smacks of wanting to control their fate for the wrong reasons.
As we jerked along, I warned my companion not to expect dead bats being thrown on to green fires. If Aelianus wanted to buy a love philtre made from the desiccated testicles of disgusting mammals, he. would not find the bottles on display, well, not openly. The last fortune-teller I interviewed turned out to be a cultured piece who had three accountants and a crisp way of disposing of informers. I would not have eaten an almond cake at her house, but if she ever used witchcraft she knew how to bribe the aediles first, so they kept away. Tyche had given me a creepy feeling that if she did cast spells, they would work. Tyche… dear gods, that took me back.
Aelianus and I decided against pretending we wanted horoscopes. Olympia would know far too much about people's follies, hopes and terrors for us to fool her. Aelianus looked interested, but I warned him off.
‘No seances. I promised your mother I would look after you.'
`My mother thinks you'll let her down, Falco.'
Olympia lived in a house that was primly feminine, with a manicurist in a clean little booth on the right of the front door, and a depilatory salon on the left. Rich women came out here to be pampered, to share gossip, to denigrate their husbands and deplore their in-laws, to arrange marriages for their children, and to lust after low- class lovers. The house remained very much that of Olympia herself, its rooms were completely domestic in character and she kept up a respectable front. Wooing senators' wives to visit her lair could be dangerous; she
