`Someone will try to take over his position,' Petronius insisted.

`Let them try!'

`If it hasn't happened yet, now Balbinus has left Rome you'll meet with pressure eventually. When it happens, I want to know.'

`Sorry,' she answered acidly. `You're in the same bumboat as all my customers: you'll get what you pay for – and no more!'

`That's closer to what I call a bargain,' Petronius responded, in his normal, level tone. `For the big item, I'll be buying.'

She heaved her bosom, setting up ripples of light from the jewellery. The effect was less worrying than the eye trick, but highly professional. `How much?'

`What it's worth. But I don't want shoddy goods or fakes.'

`You don't want much.' The last comment was amiable bluster. They had reached the real centre of the discussion; the terms were understood and more or less accepted by both sides. Whether that meant Lalage would ever produce any information was another matter.

`Bring me the name I need, and you won't regret it. You'll find me at the station house in the Thirteenth,' Petro announced politely.

`Oh go away,' she sneered, addressing me as if her patience with him had run out. `And take the Big Unsusceptible with you!'

We were leaving. I turned back at the last moment to add a courtesy of my own. Giving the famous whore a generous smile, I said, `I'm glad to see your ear healed up!'

While she and Petronius were thinking about it, I grabbed him by the elbow and we fled.

XXI

W E EMERGED UNSCATHED, though I for one wanted to head

for the nearest respectable bathhouse. `What was the crack about the lug, Falco?' I just grinned and looked mysterious.

The place seemed much emptier than when we arrived. News spreads.

The girl Macra was standing back at the outside door. She looked edgy, but when she saw we were leaving peacefully she relaxed. As we passed her I heard a young child's cry. Macra noticed my surprise. `Things happen, Falco!'

`I thought you were organised in places like this.' Some brothels were so organised, their expertise had led to them operating as neighbourhood abortionists.

`Losing a baby's illegal, isn't it, officer?' Macra gurgled at Petronius. He looked tense. We all knew it would be a long time before anyone bothered to take a prostitute to court for this. The unborn are protected if there's a legacy in it; the unborn with shameless mothers have few rights.

`Like to see around the nursery?' the girl then offered Petro. There was a distinct undertone of offering him a prepubertal titbit. He declined in silence, and she giggled. `You're a hard man to tempt! Maybe I'll have to come and see you in your station house.'

`Maybe I'll show you the cell!' Petro growled in annoyance. A mistake.

`It's a promise!' Macra shrieked. `We know a client in the vigiles who does amazing things with chains during "interviews".'

Petronius had had enough. He took out his note tablet formally: `And who would that be?'

`Well do you believe,' she leered at him, `his name seems to just escape me.'

`You're a lying little flirt,' Petronius told her, fairly pleasantly. He put away the note tablet. We stepped out into the street with her jibes ringing along the narrow passage at our backs.

`So that's a brothel!' Petro said, and we both nudged each other, grinning at an old joke from the past.

We had hesitated, lacking plans. We should. not have laughed. Laughing on a brothel doorstep can lead to disaster. Never do it before you have taken a careful look in both directions down the street.

Somebody we knew was coming towards us. Petro and I were already helpless. It was too late to make off discreetly; far too late to look less like guilty men.

Approaching down the narrow lane, crying loudly, was a little girl with big feet and a dirty face. She was seven years old, in a tunic she had outgrown months ago; with it she wore a cheap glass bracelet that a kind uncle had brought her from abroad, and an extravagant amulet against the evil eye. The evil eye had not been averted; the child was being dragged along by a small, fierce old lady with a pinched mouth who had an expression of moral outrage even before she spotted us. Spot us she did, of course, just as we two emerged like utter layabouts from Plato's Academy.

The little girl was in deep trouble for playing truant. She was glad to see anyone else she could drag down to Hades with her. She knew we were exactly the distraction she needed.

`There's Uncle Marcus!' She stopped crying at once.

Her jailer stopped walking. Petro and I had been reprobates in our youth, but nobody in Rome knew that. Petro and I. had not been stupid. We were reprobates abroad.

We had just blown our cover. My niece Tertulla stared at us. She knew that even bunking off school after her grandma had pinched and scraped to pay for it failed to match our disgrace. We knew it too.

`Petronius Longus!' cried the old lady in frank amazement, too horrified even to mention me. Petro was renowned as a good husband and family man, so this disaster would be blamed on me.

`Good afternoon,' murmured Petro shyly, trying to pretend he had not been chortling, or if he had it was only because he had just heard a very funny but perfectly tasteful story about an aspect of local politics. With great presence of mind he embarked upon explaining that we could not make ourselves available to escort people to a safer neighbourhood, owing to a message he'd just received about a crisis over at the station house.

At the same moment a flying figure whom I recognised as my fraught sister Galla came hurrying down the lane crying, `Oh you've found the little horror!' Galla spent half her life oblivious to what her children might be getting up to, and the rest in guilty hysterics after somebody stupid had told her.

`I found more than that!' came the terse reply, as a pair of unmatchedly contemptuous eyes finally fixed themselves on me.

There was nowhere to hide.

`Hello, Mother,' I said.

XXII

WHEN I WALKED into my apartment I found someone standing in the doorway from the balcony. Her dark hair shone in the sunlight behind her; she had left its warmth immediately she heard my football.

She was full of grace and serenity. She wore a simple dress in blue, with a late October rosebud in a pin on the top seam. If she had used perfume, it was so discreet that only the favoured fellow who kissed her neck would be aware of it. A silver ring worn on her left hand showed her loyalty to whoever he was. She was everything that a woman should be.

I gave her a courteous nod.

`People will be racing to tell you,' I said, `that Petronius and I spent an hour in a brothel near the Circus Maximus this afternoon. It's famous for offering disgusting services as bribes to the vigiles. We were witnessed coming out nudging each other guiltily, and with happy grins.'

`I know,' she said.

`I was afraid of that.'

`I dare say!'

The slender links of one bracelet slipped over her fine wrist as she lightly held a scroll. Her feet were bare. She, who should have been cushioned on swan's-down amidst some great man's marble colonnades, had been reading in the warm sun, high above the squalor of the Aventine where she lived with me.

I selected a cool and formal tone. `People overreact sometimes. I was with Petro when he reached his own house and couldn't make his wife answer the door. A neighbour shoved her head through a shutter and bawled, "She's taken the children to her mother's and your dinner's been thrown at the cat." I had to help him pick the lock. He loves that cat; he insisted on going in to look for it.'