Three Hands in the Fountain

by Lindsey Davis

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Sharing a ewer of Spanish red with his old friend and new partner Petronius Longus, Marcus Didius Falco is on the spot when a man cleaning the local fountain makes a gruesome discovery: a human hand that suggests its owner met a terrifying fate. Naturally, Falco and Petro, formerly of the Vigiles, want to seize on it as their first big case. The officials of Rome, however, prefer to hush up the incident, since a population that riots at the drop of a toga might run wild if body parts are polluting their drinking water.

Soon other delicate, dismembered hands are being found in Rome’s two hundred miles of aqueduct. Falco and his partner suspect a serial killer is at large, linked to public festivals, and likely to strike again at the upcoming Roman Games. Even a detective as astute as Falco may not spot a twisted mind in a crowd of 250,000. And if Falco loses this race with time, another pretty victim will make a deadly splash.

Release date: April 4, 2019

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

The fountain was not working. Nothing unusual in that. This was the Aventine.

It must have been off for some time. The water spout, a crudely moulded cockleshell dangled by a naked but rather uninteresting nymph, was thick with dry pigeon guano. The bowl was cleaner. Two men sharing the bottom of an amphora of badly travelled Spanish wine could lean there without marking their tunics. When Petronius and I sloped back to the party at my apartment, there would be no clues to where we had been.

I had laid the amphora in the empty fountain bowl, point inwards, so we could tilt it on the edge when we wanted to refill the beakers we had sneaked out with us. We had been at it a while now. By the time we ambled home, we would have drunk too much to care what anybody said to us, unless the wigging was very succinctly phrased. As it might be, if Helena Justina had noticed that I had vanished and left her to cope on her own.

We were in Tailors’ Lane. We had deliberately turned round the corner from Fountain Court where I lived, so that if any of my brothers-in-law looked down into the street they would not spot us and inflict themselves upon us. None of them had been invited today, but once they heard I was providing a party they had descended on the apartment like flies on fresh meat. Even Lollius the water boatman, who never turned up for anything, had shown his ugly face.

As well as being a discreet distance from home, the fountain in Tailors’ Lane was a good place to lean for a heart-to-heart. Fountain Court did not possess its own water supply, any more than Tailors’ Lane was home to any garment-sewers. Well, that’s the Aventine.

One or two passers-by, seeing us in the wrong street with our heads together, assumed we were conferring about work. They gave us looks that could have been reserved for a pair of squashed rats on the highroad. We were both well-known characters in the Thirteenth District. Few people approved of either of us. Sometimes we did work together, though the pact between the public and private sector was uneasy. I was an informer and imperial agent, just back from a trip to Baetican Spain for which I had been paid less than originally contracted, although I had made up the deficit with an artistic expenses claim. Petronius Longus lived on a strict salary. He was the enquiry chief of the local cohort of vigiles. Well, he was normally. He had just stunned me by revealing he had been suspended from his job.

Petronius took a hearty swig of wine, then balanced his beaker carefully on the head of the stone wench who was supposed to be delivering water to the neighbourhood. Petro had long arms and she was a small nymph, as well as one with an empty cockleshell. Petro himself was a big, solid, normally calm and competent citizen. Now he stared down the alley with a glum frown.

I paused to slosh more liquor into my own cup. That gave me time to absorb his news while I decided how to react. In the end I said nothing. Exclaiming ‘Oh my goodness, old pal!’ or ‘By Jupiter, my dear Lucius, I cannot believe I heard that correctly’ was too much of a cliché. If he wanted to tell me the story he would. If not, he was my closest friend, so if he was playing at guarding his privacy I would appear to go along with it.

I could ask somebody else later. Whatever had happened, he couldn’t keep it secret from me for long. Extracting the fine details of scandal was my livelihood.

Tailors’ Lane was a typical Aventine scene. Faceless tenement blocks loomed above a filthy, one-cart lane that meandered up here from the Emporium down by the Tiber, trying to find the way to the Temple of Ceres, only to lose itself somewhere on the steep heights above the Probus Bridge. Little near-naked children crouched playing with stones beside a dubious puddle, catching whatever fever was rampant this summer. Somewhere overhead a voice droned endlessly, telling some dreary story to a silent listener who might be driven to run mad with a meat-knife any minute now. We were in deep shade, though aware that wherever the sun could find access the August heat was shimmering. Even here our tunics stuck to our backs.

‘Well, I got your letter at last.’ Petronius liked to approach a difficult subject by the winding, scenic route.

‘What letter?’

‘The one telling me you were a father.’

‘What?’

‘Three months to find me – not bad.’

When Helena and I and the new baby sailed back to Rome from Tarraconensis recently it only took eight days at sea and a couple more travelling gently from Ostia. ‘That’s not possible.’

‘You addressed it to me at the station house,’ Petronius complained. ‘It was passed around the clerks for weeks, then when they decided to hand it over, naturally I wasn’t there.’ He was laying it on with a mortar trowel – a certain sign of stress.

‘I thought it would be safer sent to the vigiles. I didn’t know you would have got yourself suspended,’ I reminded him. He was not in the mood for logic.

Nobody much was about. For most of the afternoon we had skulked here virtually in private. I was hoping that my sisters and their children, whom Helena and I had invited for lunch in order to introduce them all to our new daughter in one go, would go home. When Petro and I had sneaked out not one of the guests had been showing any sign of leaving. Helena had already looked tired. I should have stayed.

Her own family had had the tact not to come, but had invited us to dinner later in the week. One of her brothers, the one I could tolerate, had brought a message in which his noble parents politely declined our offer of sharing a cold collation with my swarming relatives in our tiny half-furnished apartment. Some of my lot had already tried to sell the illustrious Camilli dud works of art that they couldn’t afford and didn’t want. Most of my family were offensive and all of them lacked tact. You couldn’t hope to find a bigger crowd of loud, self-opinionated, squabbling idiots anywhere. Thanks to my sisters all marrying down I stood no chance of impressing Helena’s socially superior crew. In any case, the Camilli didn’t want to be impressed.

‘You could have written earlier,’ Petronius said morosely.

‘Too busy. When I did write I’d just ridden eight hundred miles across Spain like a madman, only to be told that Helena was in desperate trouble with the birth. I thought I was going to lose her, and the baby too. The midwife had gone off halfway to Gaul, Helena was exhausted and the girls with us were terrified. I delivered that child myself – and I’ll take a long time to get over it!’

Petronius shuddered. Though a devoted father of three himself, his nature was conservative and fastidious. When Arria Silvia was having their daughters she had sent him off somewhere until the screaming was all over. That was his idea of family life. I would receive no credit for my feat.

‘So you named her Julia Junilla. After both grandmothers? Falco, you really know how to arrange free nursemaids.’

‘Julia Junilla Laeitana,’ I corrected him.

‘You named your daughter after a wine?’ At last some admiration crept into his tone.

‘It’s the district where she was born,’ I declared proudly.

‘You sly bastard.’ Now he was envious. We both knew that Arria Silvia would never have let him get away with it.

‘So where’s Silvia?’ I challenged.

Petronius took a long, slow breath and gazed upwards. While he was looking for swallows, I wondered whatever was wrong. The absence of his wife and children from our party was startling. Our families frequently dined together. We had even survived a joint holiday once, though that had been pushing it.

‘Where’s Silvia?’ mused Petro, as if the question intrigued him too.

‘This had better be good.’

‘Oh, it’s hilarious.’

‘You do know where she is, then?’

‘At home, I believe.’

‘She’s gone off us?’ That would be too much to hope for. Silvia had never liked me. She thought me a bad influence on Petronius. What libel. He had always been perfectly capable of getting into trouble by himself. Still, we all rubbed along, even though neither Helena nor I could stand too much of Silvia.

‘She’s gone off me,’ he explained.

A workman was approaching. Typical. He wore a one-sleeved tunic hitched over his belt and was carrying an old bucket. He was coming to clean the fountain, which looked a long job. Naturally he turned up at the end of the working day. He would leave the job unfinished and never come back.

‘Lucius, my boy,’ I tackled Petro sternly, since we might soon have to abandon our roost if this fellow did persuade the fountain to fill up, ‘I can think of various reasons – most of them female – why Silvia would fall out with you. Who is it?’

‘Milvia.’

I had been joking. Besides, I thought he had stopped flirting with Balbina Milvia months ago. If he had had any sense he would never have started – though when did that ever stop a man chasing a girl?

‘Milvia’s very bad news, Petro.’

‘So Silvia informs me.’

Balbina Milvia was about twenty. She was astoundingly pretty, dainty as a rosebud with the dew in it, a dark, sweet little piece of trouble whom Petro and I had met in the course of our work. She had an innocence that was begging to be enlightened, and was married to a man who neglected her. She was also the daughter of a vicious gangster – a mobster whom Petronius had convicted and I had helped finally to put away. Her husband Florius was now developing half-hearted plans to move in on the family rackets. Her mother Flaccida was scheming to beat him to the profits, a hard-faced bitch whose idea of a quiet hobby was arranging the deaths of men who crossed her. Sooner or later that was bound to include her son-in-law Florius.

In these circumstances Milvia could be seen as in need of consolation. As an officer of the vigiles Petronius Longus was taking a risk if he provided it. As the husband of Arria Silvia, a violent force to be reckoned with at any time, he was crazy. He should have left the delicious Milvia to struggle with life on her own.

Until today I had been pretending I knew nothing about it. He would never have listened to me anyway. He had never listened when we were in the army and his eye fell on lush Celtic beauties who had large, red-haired, bad-tempered British fathers, and he had never listened since we came home to Rome either.

‘You’re not in love with Milvia?’

He looked amazed at the question. I had known I was on safe ground suggesting that his fling might not be serious. What was serious to Petronius Longus was being the husband of a girl who had brought him a very handsome dowry (which he would have to repay if she divorced him) and being the father of Petronilla, Silvana and Tadia, who adored him and whom he doted on. We all knew that, though convincing Silvia might be tricky if she had heard about sweet little Milvia. And Silvia had always known how to speak up for herself.

‘So what’s the situation?’

‘Silvia threw me out.’

‘What’s new?’

‘It was a good two months ago.’

I whistled. ‘Where are you living, then?’ Not with Milvia. Milvia was married to Florius. Florius was so weak even his womenfolk didn’t bother to henpeck him, but he was clinging fast to Milvia because her dowry – created with the proceeds of organised crime – was enormous.

‘I’m at the patrol house.’

‘Unless I’m drunker than I think, didn’t this whole conversation begin with you being suspended from the vigiles?’

‘That,’ Petro conceded, ‘does make it rather complicated when I want to crawl in for a few hours’ kip.’

‘Martinus would have loved to take a stand on it.’ Martinus had been Petro’s deputy. A stickler for the rules – especially when they helped him offend someone else. ‘He went on promotion to the Sixth, didn’t he?’

Petro grinned a little. ‘I put him forward myself.’

‘Poor Sixth! So who moved up in the Fourth? Fusculus?’

‘Fusculus is a gem.’

‘He ignores you curled up in a corner?’

‘No. He orders me to leave. Fusculus thinks that taking over Martinus’ job means he inherited the attitude as well.’

‘Jupiter! So you’re stuck for a bed?’

‘I wanted to lodge with your mother.’ Petronius and Ma had always got on well. They liked to conspire, criticising me.

‘Ma would take you in.’

‘I can’t ask her. She’s still putting up Anacrites.’

‘Don’t mention that bastard!’ My mother’s lodger was anathema to me. ‘My old apartment’s empty,’ I suggested.

‘I was hoping you’d say that.’

‘It’s yours. Provided,’ I put in slyly, ‘you explain to me how, if we’re talking about a quarrel with your wife, you also end up being suspended by the Fourth. When did Rubella ever have a reason to accuse you of disloyalty?’ Rubella was the tribune in charge of the Fourth Cohort, and Petro’s immediate superior. He was a pain in the posterior, but otherwise fair.

‘Silvia took it upon herself to inform Rubella that I was tangled up with a racketeer’s relative.’

Well, he had asked for it, but that was hard. Petronius Longus could not have picked a mistress who compromised him more thoroughly. Once Rubella knew of the affair, he would have had no choice about suspending Petro from duty. Petro would be lucky even to keep his job. Arria Silvia must have understood that. To risk their livelihood she must be very angry indeed. It sounded as if my old friend was losing his wife too.

We were too disheartened even to drink. The amphora was down to the grit in the point anyway. But we were not ready to return home in this glum mood. The water board employee had not actually asked us to move out of his way, so we stayed where we were while he leaned around us cleaning the cockleshell spout with a disgusting sponge on a stick. When the plunger failed to work he burrowed in his tool satchel for a piece of wire. He poked and scraped. The fountain made a rude noise. Some sludge plopped out. Slowly water began to trickle through, encouraged by more waggling of the wire.

Petronius and I straightened up reluctantly. In Rome the water pressure is low, but eventually the bowl would fill and then overflow, providing the neighbourhood with not only its domestic supply but an endless trickle down the gutters to carry away muck from the streets. Tailors’ Lane badly needed that but, drunk though we were, we didn’t want to end up sitting in it.

Petronius applauded the workman sardonically. ‘That all the problem was?’

‘Seized up while it was off, legate.’

‘Why was it off?’

‘Empty delivery pipe. Blockage in the outlet at the castellum.’

The man dug his fist into the bucket he had brought with him, like a fisherman pulling out a crab. He came up with a blackened object which he held up by its single clawlike appendage so we could briefly inspect it: something old, and hard to identify, yet disturbingly familiar. He tossed it back in the bucket where it splash-landed surprisingly heavily. We both nearly ignored it. We would have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. Then Petro looked at me askance.

‘Wait a moment!’ I exclaimed.

The workman tried to reassure us. ‘No panic, legate. Happens all the time.’

Petronius and I stepped closer and peered down into the filthy depths of the wooden pail. A nauseous smell rose to greet us. The cause of the blockage at the water tower now reposed in a bed of rubbish and mud.

It was a human hand.

None of my relatives had had the courtesy to leave. More had arrived, in fact. The only good news was, the newcomers did not include my father.

My sisters Allia and Galla made their excuses sniffily the moment I reappeared, though Verontius and bloody Lollius their husbands sat tight. Junia was squeezed into a corner with Gaius Baebius and their deaf son, as usual busy posing as a classic family group so they could avoid talking to anybody else. Mico, Victorina’s widower, was grinning inanely and waiting in vain for somebody to tell him how well turned out his horrible offspring were. Famia, the drunk, was drunk. His wife Maia was somewhere in a back room helping Helena clear up. Various children were bored, but doing their best to entertain themselves by kicking dirty boots against my newly painted walls. All present cheered up as they watched me brace myself.

‘Hello, Ma. Brought a footman, I see?’ If I had been warned in advance I would have hired heavies just to eject this man. A couple of moonlighting gladiators with instructions to turn him away at the door, and break both his arms as an extra hint.

My mother scowled. She was a tiny, black-eyed old bundle who could rampage through a market like a barbarian army. She was holding my new baby daughter, who had begun to bawl her eyes out the moment I appeared. Julia’s grief at beholding her father was not why Ma was scowling; I had insulted her favourite.

It was her lodger Anacrites. He looked smooth, but his habits were as savoury as a pigsty after months of neglect. He worked for the Emperor. He was the Chief Spy. He was also pale, silent, and reduced to a wraith after a serious head wound which unfortunately failed to finish him. My mother had saved his life. That meant she now felt obliged to treat him as some special demigod who was worth saving. He accepted the fuss smugly. I ground my teeth.

‘Find a friendly greeting for Anacrites, Marcus.’ Greet him? He was no friend of mine. He had once arranged to have me killed, though of course that had nothing to do with my loathing him. I could simply find no vacancy in my personal clique for a devious, dangerous manipulator with the morals of a slug.

I grabbed the screaming baby. She stopped crying. No one looked impressed. Against my ear she gurgled in a way I had learned meant she was soon going to be sick down the inside of my tunic. I laid her down in the fine cradle Petronius had made for her, hoping I could pretend any ensuing mess was a surprise to me. Ma began rocking the cradle, and the crisis seemed to pass.

‘Hello, Falco.’

‘Anacrites! You look terrible,’ I told him cheerily. ‘Turned back from the Underworld because you’d dirty Charon’s punt?’ I was determined to floor him before he had a chance to get at me. ‘How’s espionage these days? All the swallows over the Palatine are cheeping that Claudius Laeta has put a bid in for your job.’

‘Oh no; Laeta’s skulking in ditches.’

I grinned knowingly. Claudius Laeta was an ambitious administrator at the palace who hoped to incorporate Anacrites and the existing intelligence network in his own section; the two were locked in a struggle for power which I found highly amusing – so long as I could keep myself out of it.

‘Poor Laeta!’ I sneered. ‘He should never have tangled with that Spanish business. I had to make a report to the Emperor which showed him in rather a bad light.’

Anacrites gave me a narrow look. He too had tangled with the Spanish business. He was wondering what I might have reported to Vespasian about him. Still convalescent, a film of sweat suddenly shone on his brow. He was worried. I liked that.

‘Anacrites isn’t fit to return to work yet.’ Ma told us some details that had him crawling with embarrassment. I tutted with fake sympathy, letting him know that I was delighted he had terrible headaches and trouble with his bowels. I tried asking for further details, but my mother soon twigged what I was playing at. ‘He has taken indefinite sick leave, approved by the Emperor.’

‘Oho!’ I scoffed, as if I thought that was the first step to enforced retirement. ‘Some people who get hit very hard on the head have a personality change afterwards.’ He seemed to have avoided that; it was a pity, because any change in Anacrites’ personality would have been an improvement.

‘I brought Anacrites so you and he can have a little chat.’ I went cold. ‘You’ll have to sort out a decent business for yourself now you’re a father,’ my mother instructed me. ‘You need a partner – someone to give you a few tips. Anacrites can help get you on your feet – on days when he feels fit enough.’

Now it was me who felt sick.

Lucius Petronius, my loyal friend, had been surreptitiously showing the dismembered hand from the water tower to my brothers-in-law in a corner. Those ghouls were always eager for anything sensational.

‘Pooh!’ I heard Lollius boasting. ‘That’s nothing. We fish worse out of the Tiber every week –’

Some of my sisters’ children spotted the grisly item and crowded round to see it. Petro hastily wrapped up the hand in a piece of rag; I hoped it was not one of our new Spanish dinner napkins. It made an intriguing parcel, which caught the eye of Nux, a determined street mongrel who had adopted me. The dog leapt at the parcel. Everyone snatched to save it. The hand fell out of the rag. It landed on the floor, and was captured by Marius, the extremely serious elder son of my sister Maia who just happened to come into the room at that point. When she saw her normally wholesome eight-year-old sniffing at a badly decayed relic, apparently supervised approvingly by Lucius Petronius, my favourite sister used some language I never thought she knew. Much of it described Petronius, and the rest appertained to me.

Maia made sure she snatched up the flagon of fine olive oil which was her present from me from Baetica and then she, Famia, Marius, Ancus, Cloelia and little Rhea all went home.

Well, that cleared some space.

While everyone else was sniggering and looking shifty, Petro threw a heavy arm round my shoulders and greeted my mother with affection. ‘Junilla Tacita! How right you are about Falco needing to buckle down. As a matter of fact, he and I have just been outside having a long discussion about that. You know, he seems feckless, but he does recognise his position. He needs to establish his office, take on some lucrative cases and build up a reputation so the work continues to flow in.’ That sounded good. I wondered why I had never thought of it. Petronius had not finished his oration. ‘We found the ideal solution. While I’m taking a break from the vigiles I’m going to move into his old apartment – and give him a hand as a partner myself.’

I beamed at Anacrites in a charitable way. ‘You’re just a fraction too late for the festival. Afraid the job is taken, old fellow. Bad luck!’

When we slapped the parcel on to the clerk’s table, Fusculus reached for it eagerly. He had always had a hearty appetite and thought we had brought him in a snack. We let him open it.

For a second he did think it was an interesting new kind of cold sausage, then he recoiled with a yell.

‘Urgh! Where have you two infantile beggars been playing? Who does this belong to?’

‘Who knows?’ Petronius had had time to get used to the dismembered hand. While jolly Fusculus still looked pale, Petro could appear blasé. ‘No seal ring with a lover’s name, no handy Celtic woad tattoo – it’s so swollen and misshapen you can’t even tell whether it came from a woman or a man.’

‘Woman,’ guessed Fusculus. He prided himself on his professional expertise. The hand, which had four fingers missing, was so badly swollen from being in water that there were no real grounds for his guess.

‘How’s work?’ Petronius asked him yearningly. I could tell that as a partner in my own business his commitment would be meagre.

‘It was all right until you two came in.’

We were at the Fourth Cohort’s guard house. Most of it was storage for fire-fighting equipment, reflecting the vigiles’ main task. Ropes, ladders, buckets, huge grass mats, mattocks and axes, and the pumping engine, were all ready for action. There was a small bare cell into which cat burglars and arsonists could be flung, and a utilitarian room where those on duty could either play dice or beat all Hades out of the burglars and fire-raisers if that seemed more fun. Both rooms were normally empty at this hour. The holding cell was used at night; in the morning its miserable contents were either released with a caution or marched off to the tribune’s office for a formal interrogation. Since most offences occur under cover of darkness only a skeleton staff was on duty by day. They were out searching for suspects – or sitting on a bench in the sun.

Do not be fooled. The vigiles’ life was harsh and dangerous. Most of them had been public slaves. They had signed up because eventually, if they survived, they earned honourable discharge as citizens. Their official term of duty was just six years. Soldiers in the legions serve at least twenty. There was a good reason for the short enlistment, and not many vigiles lasted the full term.

Tiberius Fusculus, the best of Petro’s hand-picked officers and now standing in for his chief, gazed at us warily. He was a round, cheerful fellow, thin on top, extremely healthy, and sharp as a tenting needle. He was keenly interested in the theory of crime, but we could tell by the way he poked the swollen hand away from him he did not intend to pursue this if he could file it in the ‘No Action’ pigeonhole.

‘So what do you want me to do with it?’

‘Find the rest?’ I suggested. Fusculus scoffed.

Petronius surveyed the object. ‘It has obviously been in the water a long time.’ His tone was apologetic. ‘We’ve been told it was found blocking a pipe in a castellum on the Aqua Appia, but it could have got there from somewhere else.’

‘Most people are cremated,’ Fusculus said. ‘You might get some dog digging up a human hand at the crossroads in a village in the provinces, but bodies don’t get buried raw in Rome.’

‘It smacks of dirty business,’ Petro agreed. ‘If someone, possibly a woman, has been done in, why hasn’t there been an outcry?’

‘Probably because women are always being done in,’ Fusculus explained helpfully. ‘It’s their husbands or lovers who do it, and when they wake up sober the men either collapse in remorse and come straight here to confess, or else they find the peace and quiet so welcome that raising an outcry is the last thing they consider.’

‘All women have nosy friends,’ Petro pointed out. ‘A lot have interfering mothers; some are caring for aged aunts who if left on their own would wander out into the highway and frighten the donkeys. And what about the neighbours?’

‘The neighbours report it,’ said Fusculus. ‘So we go to the house and ask the husband; he tells us that the neighbours are poisonous bastards making malicious accusations, then he claims his wife has gone to visit relatives at Antium. We say, when she comes home will he ask her to drop in and confirm it; we file the details; she never comes, but we never have time to pursue it because by then twenty other things are happening. Anyway, the husband will have run off.’ He did not add ‘and good luck to him’, but his tone was eloquent.

‘Don’t give me the brush-off; I’m not some member of the public.’ Petronius was discovering how the public felt when they ventured to his office. He sounded annoyed, probably at himself for not having been prepared for it.

Fusculus was faultlessly polite. He had been putting off the public for the past fifteen years. ‘If there has been a crime it could have happened anywhere, sir, and the chances of us picking up the rest of the body are nil.’

‘You’re not keen on this,’ I divined.

‘Clever man.’

‘The evidence turned up on the Aventine.’

‘A lot of filth turns up on the Aventine,’ snorted Fusculus sourly, almost as if he included us in that category. ‘This isn’t evidence, Falco. Evidence is a material object that casts useful light on a known incident, enabling a prosecution. We have no idea where this forlorn fist came from, and I bet we never will. If you ask me,’ he went on, evidently thinking he had found an inspired solution, ‘it must have been polluting the water supply, so tracing any other body parts is a problem for the water board. I’ll report the find. It’s up to the Curator of Aqueducts to take action.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ scoffed Petro. ‘When did anyone in the water board ever show any initiative? They’re all too busy working fiddles.’

‘I’ll threaten to expose a few. Any sign of you coming back to work, chief?’

‘Ask Rubella,’ growled Petro, though I knew the tribune had said my foolish pal was to ditch the gangster’s daughter before showing his face around the cohort again. Unless I had missed something, that still left Petro with a goodbye speech to make to Milvia.

‘I heard you were in business with Falco nowadays?’ For a pleasant man, Fusculus seemed to be in a starchy mood. I was not surprised. Informers have a black name amongst most Romans, but we are particularly reviled by the vigiles. The cohorts keep lists with our names on so they can knock on our doors halfway through dinner and drag us off for questioning about nothing in particular. State servants always hate people who are paid by . . .