Helena and I left the theater, amazing the doorkeeper who thought we should have been engrossed in the drama. We rousted

out Marmarides, who still seemed fairly sober, and I told him to drive Helena home. I would find my own transport back tonight or tomorrow—another prospect that made me glum. Riding home on a hired mule after dark through unknown roads can be disastrous.

I went with them as far as the bridge over the Baetis. "I'll make a bargain," Helena declared. "If I go home quietly and let you stay on your own to investigate Annaeus, then I'm going to go over to the Licinius Rufius estate tomorrow and make friends with his granddaughter."

"Find out if she can dance!" I chortled, knowing that the wealthy family she came from would be scandalized if she did.

The bridge at Corduba is three hundred and sixty-five paces long, one for every day of the year. I know, because I counted as I marched miserably back.

To fill in time I went to investigate the shipping offices of the bargees, in the vague hope of interviewing my other suspect, Cyzacus. All the wharfside huts were locked. A bleary-eyed man fishing off a jetty said the offices were closed for the festival, and that they would be for the next three days.

TWENTY-FIVE

 

Later that day, after a few inquiries, I left by the northwestern gate. Annaeus Maximus owned a lovely home outside the town walls, where he could plot the next elections with his cronies and his wife could run her salon for other elegant socially prominent women, while their children all went to the bad. Beyond the cemetery lining the route out of town lay a small group of large houses. An enclave of peace for the rich—disturbed only by the yapping of their hunting dogs, the snorting of their horses, the rioting of their children, the quarreling of their slaves and the carousing of their visitors. As town houses go, the Annaeus spread was more of a pavilion in a park. I found it easy to identify—lit throughout, including the long carriage drive and surrounding garden terraces. Fair enough. If a man happens to be an olive oil tycoon, he can afford a lot of lamps.

The clique we had seen at the theater were now assembling for a dinner party at this well-lit house with garlanded porticoes and smoking torches in every acanthus bed. Men on splendid horses were turning up every few minutes, alongside gilded carriages which contained their overindulged wives. I recognized many of

the faces from the front rows at the theater. Amidst the coming and going I also met the shepherds from the Parilia parade; they may indeed have been here for ritual purification rites in the stables, though I thought it more likely they were actors who had come to be paid for their day's work in town. There were a few shepherdesses among them, including one with hugely knowing dark brown eyes. Once I would have tried to put a light of my own into eyes like that. But I was a responsible father-to-be now. Besides, I could never take to women with straw in their hair.

I made myself known to an usher. Baetican hospitality is legendary. He asked me to wait while he informed his master I was here, and as the whole house was pervaded by delicious cooking smells I promised myself I might be offered a piquant dish or two. There was bound to be plenty. Excess breathed off the frescoed walls. However, I soon learned that the Cordubans were as sophisticated as Romans. They knew how to treat an informer— even when he described himself as a "state official and associate of your neighbor Camillus."

"Associates" received short commons in Corduba—not so much as a drink of water. What's more, I had to wait a damned long time before I got noticed at all.

It was evening. I had set out from town in the light, but the first stars were winking over the distant Mariana mountains when I was led outside to meet Annaeus Maximus. He had been mingling with his guests on one of the terraces, where they were soon to hold an outdoor feast, as is traditional at the Parilia. The supposed shepherds had really been setting fire to sulfur, rosemary, firwood and incense in at least one of the many stables so the smoke would purify the rafters. Now heaps of hay and straw were being burned on the well-scythed lawns, so that a few by now extremely tired sheep could be compelled to run through the fires. It's hard work being a ceremonial flock. The poor beasts had been on their trotters all day, and now they had to endure being ritually lustrated while humans stood around being sprinkled with scented water and sipping bowls of milk. Most of the men had one eye out for the wine amphorae, while the women kept flapping their hands about, in the vain hope of preventing their fabulous gowns being imbued with lustral smoke.

I was kept well back in a colonnade, and it wasn't to protect me from the sparks. The invited guests began to seat themselves for the feast out amongst the regimented topiary, then Annaeus stomped up to deal with me. He looked annoyed. Somehow I have that effect.

"What's this about?"

"My name is Didius Falco. I have been sent from Rome."

"You say you're a relative of Camillus?"

"I have a connection—" Among snobs, and in a foreign country, I had no qualms about acquiring a respectable patina by shameless usage of my girlfriend's family. In Rome I would have been more circumspect.

"I don't know the man," Annaeus snapped. "He's never ventured out to Baetica. But we met the son, of course. Knew my three boys."

The reference to Aelianus sounded gruff, though that could be the man's normal manner. I said I hoped Helena's brother had not made himself a nuisance—though I wished he had, and that I was about to hear details I could use against him later. But Annaeus Maximus merely growled, "High spirits! There's a daughter who's got herself in trouble, I heard?" News flies round!

"The noble Helena Justina," I said calmly, "should be described as high-minded rather than high-spirited."

He stared at me closely. "Are you the man involved?"

I folded my arms. I was still wearing my toga, as I had been all day. Nobody else here was bothering with such formality; provincial life has some benefits. Instead of feeling civilized, being overdressed made me hot and slightly seedy. The fact that my toga had an indelible stain on its long edge and several moth-holes did not help.

Annaeus Maximus was viewing me like a tradesman who had called with a reckoning at an inconvenient time. "I have guests waiting. Tell me what you want."

"You and I have met, sir." I pretended to stare at the bats swooping into the torchlight above the laughing diners' heads. I was really watching him. Maybe he realized. He appeared to be intelligent. He ought to be. The Annaei were not country bumpkins.

"Yes?"

"In view of your reputation and your position I'll talk straight. I saw you recently in Rome, at the Palace of the Caesars, where you were a guest of a private club who call themselves the Society of Olive Oil Producers of Baetica. Most neither own olives nor produce oil. Few come from this province. However, it is believed that among your own group the oil industry in Hispania was the topic under discussion, and that the reason is an unhealthy one."

"That is an atrocious suggestion!"

"It's realistic. Every province has its own cartel. That doesn't mean rigging the price of olive oil is something Rome can tolerate. You know how it would affect the Empire's economy."

"Disastrous," he agreed. "It will not happen."

"You are a prominent man, Annaeus. Your family produced both Senecas and the poet Lucan. Then Nero left you with two enforced suicides because Seneca had been too outspoken and Lucan allegedly dabbled in plots—Tell me, sir, as a result of what happened to your relatives, do you hate Rome?"

"There is more to Rome than Nero," he said, not disputing my assessment of his family's reduced position.