Anacrites mistook my silence for interest in his proposal. He gave me the usual flattery about this being a task very few agents could tackle.

'You mean you've already asked ten other people, and they all developed sick headaches!'

'It could be a job to get you noticed.'

'You mean if I do it well, the assumption will be it can't have been so difficult after all.'

'You've been around too long!' He grinned. Momentarily I liked him more than usual. 'You seemed the ideal candidate, Falco.'

'Oh come off it! I've never been outside Europe!'

'You have connections with the East.'

I laughed shortly. 'Only the fact my brother died there!'

'It gives you an interest – '

'Correct! An interest in making sure I never visit the damned desert myself.'

I told Anacrites to wrap himself in a vine leaf and jump head first into an amphora of rancid oil, then I derisively poured what remained in my winecup back into his flagon, and marched off.

Behind me I knew the Chief Spy wore an indulgent smile. He was sure I would think over his fascinating proposition, then come creeping back.

Anacrites was forgetting about Helena.

Chapter IV

Guiltily I recalled my attention to the baby elephant.

Helena was looking at me. She said nothing, but she gave me a certain still, quiet stare. It had the same effect on me as walking down a dark alley between high buildings in a known haunt of robbers with knives.

There was no need to mention that I had been offered a new mission; Helena knew. Now my problem was not trying to find a way of telling her, but sounding as if I had intended to come clean all along. I disguised a sigh. Helena looked away.

'We'll give the elephant a rest,' Thalia grumbled, coming back to us. 'Is he being a good boy?' She meant the python. Presumably.

'He's a treat,' Helena answered, in the same dry tone. 'Thalia, what were you saying about a possible job for Marcus?'

'Oh, it's nothing.'

'If it was nothing,' I said, 'you wouldn't have thought of mentioning it.'

'Just a girl.'

'Marcus likes jobs involving girls,' Helena commented.

'I bet he does!'

'I met a nice one once,' I put in reminiscently. The girl I once met took my hand, fairly nicely.

'He's all talk,' Thalia consoled her.

'Well, he thinks he's a poet.'

'That's right: all lip and libido!' I joined in, for self-protection.

'Pure swank,' said Thalia. 'Like the bastard who ran off with my water organist.'

'Is this your missing person?' I forced myself to show an interest, partly to insert some professional grit but mainly to distract Helena from guessing I had been called to the Palace again.

Thalia spread herself on the arena seats. The effect was dramatic. I made sure I was gazing out towards the elephant. 'Don't rush me, as the High Priest said to the acolyte: Sophrona, her name was.'

'It would be.' All the cheap skirts who pretended to play musical instruments were called Sophrona nowadays.

'She was really good, Falco!' I knew what that meant. (Actually, coming from Thalia it meant she was really good.) 'She could play,' Thalia confirmed. 'There were plenty of parasites taking advantage of the Emperor's interest.' She was referring to Nero, the water-organ fanatic, not our present endearing specimen. Vespasian's most famous musical trait was going to sleep during Nero's lyre performances, for which he had been lucky to escape with nothing worse than a few months' exile. 'A true artiste, Sophrona was.'

'Musicianship?' I queried innocently.

'A lovely touch: And looks! When Sophrona pumped out her tunes men rose in their seats.'

I took it at face value, not looking at Helena, who was supposed to have been politely brought up. Nevertheless I heard her giggling shamelessly before she asked, 'Had she been with you long?'

'Virtually from babyhood. Her mother was a lanky chorus dancer in a mime group I once ran into. Reckoned she couldn't look after a child. Couldn't be bothered, more like. I saved the scrap, fostered her out until she was a useful age, then taught her what I could. She was too tall for an acrobat, but luckily she turned out to be musical, so when I saw that the hydraulus was the instrument of the moment I grabbed the chance and got Sophrona trained. I paid for it, at a time when I wasn't doing so well as nowadays, so I'm annoyed at losing her.'

'Tell us what happened, Thalia?' I asked. 'How could an expert like you be so careless as to lose valuable talent from your troupe?'

'It wasn't me who lost her!' Thalia snorted. 'That fool Fronto. He was showing some prospective patrons around -Eastern visitors. He reckoned they were theatrical entrepreneurs, but they were time-wasters.'

'Just wanted a free gawp at the menagerie?'

'And at female tumblers with no clothes on. The rest of us could see we hadn't much hope of them hiring us for anything. Even if they had done it would have been all sodomy and mean tips. So nobody took much notice. It was just before the panther got loose and munched up Fronto; naturally things grew rather hectic after that. The Syrians did pay us another hopeful visit, but we pulled down the awnings. They must have left Rome, and then we realised Sophrona had gone too.'

'A man in it?'

'Oh bound to be!'

I noticed Helena smiling again as Thalia exploded with contempt. Then Helena asked, 'At least you know they were Syrian. So who were these visitors?'

'No idea. Fronto was the man in charge,' Thalia grumbled, as if she were accusing him of seedy moral habits. 'Once Fronto ended up inside the panther, all we could remember was that they spoke Greek with a very funny accent, wore stripy robes, and seemed to think somewhere called "the ten Towns" was the tops in civic life.'

'I've heard of the Decapolis,' I said. 'It's a Greek federation in central Syria. That's a long way to go looking for a musician who's done a moonlight.'

'Not to mention the fact that if you do go,' said Helena, 'whichever order you flog around these ten gracious metropolitan sites, she's bound to be in the last town you visit. By the time you get there, you'll be too tired to argue with her.'

'No point anyway,' I added. 'She's probably got a set of twins and marsh fever by now. Don't you have any other facts to go on, Thalia?'

'Only a name one of the menagerie-keepers remembered -Habib.'

'Oh dear. In the East it's probably as common as Gaius,' said Helena. 'Or Marcus,' she added slyly.

'And we know he's common!' Thalia joined in.

'Could the girl have gone looking for her mother?' I asked, having had some experience of tracing fostered children.

Thalia shook her head. 'She doesn't know who her mother was.'

'Might the mother have come looking for her?'

'Doubt it. I've heard nothing about her for twenty years. She might be working under a different name. Well, face it, Falco, she's most likely dead by now.'

I agreed the point sombrely. 'So what about the father? Any chance Sophrona heard from him?'

Thalia roared with laughter. 'What father? There were various candidates, none of whom had the slightest interest in being pinned down. As I recall it, only one of them had anything about him, and naturally he was the one the mother wouldn't look at twice.'

'She must have looked once!' I observed facetiously.

Thalia gave me a pitying glance, then said to Helena, 'Explain the facts of life to him, dearie! Just because you go to bed with a man doesn't mean you have to look at the bastard!'

Helena was smiling again, though the expression in her eyes was less charitable. I reckoned it might be time to halt the ribaldry. 'So we're stuck with the "young love" theory?'

'Don't get excited, Falco,' Thalia told me with her usual frankness. 'Sophrona was a treasure and I'd risk a lot to get her back. But I can't afford the fare to send you scavenging in the Orient. Still, next time you have business in the desert, remember me!'