Everything was done to the highest diplomatic standards. The usual enormous trays of peculiarly concocted morsels. Civic canapés: a cuisine unknown anywhere outside the lukewarm ambience of large-scale catering. Wine that was all too familiar: from some unhappy Italian hillside which even though it was in our fine home country failed to get enough sun. This mediocre vintage had been carefully transported here - our dross, imported to this city whose own superb Mareotic wine was deemed fit to grace the gilt tables of the very rich in Rome. Always insult the people you are ruling. Never take advantage of their wonderful local produce, lest it seem you are rotting with unpatriotic enjoyment of your overseas tour.
Fulvius and Cassius soon went off to canoodle with businessmen. Traders always know how to angle for invitations. There were plenty here. We shed Pa - or rather, he shed us. It might be his first night, but he already had someone to see. My father possessed the knack, which my late brother Festus also mastered, of making himself seem an habitué of any place he found himself. In part, Pa was sufficiently insensitive never to worry about whether he was welcome; the rest was winning over startled locals with sheer weight of personality. Strangers took to him eagerly. Only his close relatives shrank away. Fulvius was one exception. The first time I ever saw them together I knew that Fulvius and Pa met on equal, equally shady terms.
I managed to identify the Prefect’s admin staff. Most were clustered around Albia. They probably all kept mistresses locally, but a polite girl from home with flowers in her hair was a treat. She was telling them about the zoo. None had been there; they just assumed they would get around to it later. Who goes out to work in a foreign province and ever sees the sights? Each of the plump women for whom they bought flowers and fancy necklaces was after sex with some clean, virile youth, exciting because he was foreign and because he would be off home by the time they were bored with him. Going out to the zoo when they could be eating pastries in their apartment love-nests and complaining about the weather was beneath such cultured Alexandrians.
As for these young men on the brink of their public careers, they were at least more impressed by an imperial agent than their master had been. One even winked, as if my presence in Alexandria was some insider secret. ‘Only a fact-finding mission,’ I bluffed - and even that was pushing it.
‘Are you making progress? Can we smooth your path? Remember, we are here to help. ’The old lies were flowing. Every time a new boy came out on detachment, the well-thumbed bureaucrats’ lexicon must be passed on, along with the inkwells and the petty cash for bribes.
‘I am bogged down working on your suspicious death.’
‘Oh you landed that!’ Gaily he pretended not to know.
‘I landed that.’ I was grim. ’Actually you could speed my task; something would help me incredibly -’ I saw Helena flash approval of my diplomatic phrasing, though she looked suspicious. ‘I need to see the financial budget of the Museion, please.’ I nearly choked on ‘please’. Helena smiled wickedly.
The golden bureaucrat pursed his lips. I knew what was coming. It was too difficult. To know where to lay hands on a document was far beyond the vague, floppy-haired senatorial brats who came out to the provinces. For them, this was a twelve-month posting that would clinch their next move up the ladder. The one I was talking to only wanted to survive it without getting Nile mud on his white tunic. He was here for a year of sun, wine, women and collecting exotic stories, then he would go home to the next elections, taking the lifetime patronage of the particular Prefect he had served and sure of a bench in the Curia. Daddy would have a rich bride waiting; Mummy would have ensured the selected heiress was, or could pass herself of as, a virgin. The new wife would face a marriage, whether short or long, full of dreary stories about Sonny’s triumphal experiences in Egypt, where according to him he ran the place single-handed, fighting off local ineptitude and graft, plus the obstructions of all his Roman colleagues. Probably with Barbary lion hunts and a narrow escape from a rhinoceros thrown in.
Think again, highborn aide-de-camp. Who really ran Egypt for Rome were the centurions. Men like Tenax. Men who acquired geographical knowledge, legal and administrative skills, then used them. They would resolve disputes and root out corruption in the thirty or so old Ptolemaic local districts, the nomes, where appointed locals supervised local government and taxation but Rome was in overall charge. No twenty-four-year-old son of a senator could safely be let loose on embezzled land, sheep-stealing, house burglary or threats against a tax collector (especially if the taxman’s ass was stolen or he himself had gone missing). How could this thumb-sucking juvenile decide whether to believe the word of the witness with the scar on his thigh who smelt of sweat and garlic or the word of the man with one leg and a scar on his cheek who smelt of sweat and horses - both speaking only Egyptian, looking shifty and signing their names with just a mark?
‘I’ll check, Falco. That request might be a smidgeon tricky.’
See what I mean? Useless.
I gave the sign that he need not bother. Quickly, he sidled out of reach.
Somewhere must be a tribune, who was nominally in charge of finance. Better still, I knew from experience, in a small accounts office off a poorly decorated corridor, plying his abacus furiously, would lurk an imperial freedman who could find me what I needed.
‘You’re tired.’ Helena had read my expression. Before we came, I had been allowed to go out to the baths, which enlivened me, but the effect was temporary. On the way here I had given her the gist of my afternoon’s investigations so she knew my head was whirling with facts to digest - not to mention our joint experiences at the Board meeting and the zoo. Plucking a triangular cheese tart from a passing tray, she fed it to me. Tiny shreds of onion invaded the gaps in my teeth. That would give me something to play with if I was bored.
‘Come along; I’ve found out where the entertainment room is. You can loll on cushions like Mark Antony and doze off while someone plays a lyre at us.’
Helena jerked her head; Albia shed her covey of admirers and scampered after us. I was sure I heard my foster-daughter mutter ‘Prunes!’
‘You are talking about the cream of Roman diplomacy, Albia,’ I said.
‘Not all young men are idiots,’ Helena soothed her.
‘No; I remain an optimist.’ Helena had taught Albia the knack of sounding strait-laced while being satirical. ‘Thanks to you, I am travelling large distances and seeing very many foreign lands. I am sure one day I shall meet the only fellow in the world who has a drip of intelligence. I learned today,’ breezed Albia, grazing a salver of almond fancies as we passed, ‘the earth is a sphere. I only hope the one man with a brain has not fallen off the other side while I am looking.’
‘You made her like this,’ I grumbled at Helena.
‘No, the men she knows did that.’
‘Your views are just as scathing.’
‘Perhaps - but I believe my role as a mother is to instil fair-mindedness and hope. Anyway -’ Helena’s fine dark eyes gleamed with reflections from many lights on a mighty candelabrum - ‘I know men can be good, bright and honest. I know you, dearest.’
You could rely on a Ptolemaic palace to have long, wide, apparently deserted corridors, with handsome statues on enormous plinths and with shiny floors up which you could chase women, sliding along and larking about with squeals of glee.
‘There is probably a wily eunuch spying on us!’ Helena whispered, pulling up.
‘A priestly conspirator, who will send us to a lingering death to satisfy his raven-headed god’s demands!’Albia must have been reading the same myths. She was enjoying herself this evening and darted around us like a scatterbrained butterfly. More attendants appeared, so we all slowed to walk more sedately; I placed Helena’s right hand formally upon my own as if we were a pair of bandaged corpses going to the Egyptian underworld.