We told him. I had once worked as a slave in a lead mine, so I knew all the horrors.

We gave him a last chance. And he still said nothing.

45

Soon after I returned home alone after removing the agent, Anacrites came to the house.

I had bathed and eaten. I had devoted time to making sure all trace of recent events had been removed. I was in my study, reading a scroll of affable Horace to cleanse my sullied brain. It was late. I was missing my family.

A slave announced the spy was downstairs. Would I see him? This was how things worked now; I would probably get used to it. Helena must have stiffened the staff, teaching them not to let visitors get past them. It gave a prosperous householder a few moments to prepare himself—much better than the days when any intruder walked right into my shabby apartment, saw exactly what I had been doing (and with whom), then forced me to listen to his story whether I cared or not.

I paused to wonder at the spy’s timing—did he know we had shed our prisoner? Then I went in my house slippers to greet him.

He had no Praetorians. The other ‘Melitan’ was not with him either. He had brought a couple of low-grade men, though when I invited him up he left them below in the entrance hall. Taking no chances, I put slaves to watch them. I had known him when he only had available a legman with enormous feet and a dwarf; later he hired a professional informer, though he was killed on duty. A woman worked with him sometimes. This pair today were a grade up from basic, ex-soldiers I guessed, though pitiful; in a peaceful province they would have been relegated to rampart turf-cutting or in war they would have been expendable, mere spear fodder.

‘I called in to wish you good fortune, Falco, on the Feast of the Rustic Vinalia,’ Anacrites bluffed. I rarely honoured feast days, whether mystic or agricultural; nor did he, in my experience. I had sat with him in our Census office, yearning in vain for him to leave early to go sardine-munching at the Fishermen’s Games in the Transtiberina or to pay his respects to Invincible Hercules.

‘Thanks; how civil.’ I refrained from bringing out a rock-crystal flagon of rotgut nouveau.

Anacrites favoured guarded sobriety while he was working—so different from Petronius and me, abandoning care at every opportunity and living on the edge. He made no attempt to cadge a festival drink. Significantly, as was also his tendency, he straightway lost his nerve. Despite having probably spent hours perfecting an excuse, he came right out with it: ‘I have mislaid an agent.’

‘Careless. What’s it to me?’

‘He was last seen outside your house. You won’t object if I take a look around here, will you, Falco?’