“Wherever are we?”

“Aventine Sector, Thirteenth District. South of the Circus Maximus, heading for the Ostia Road.” As reassuring as a shark’s grin to a flounder. She would have been warned about places like this. If her loving old nurses knew what they were doing, she had been warned about fellows like me.

I slowed down after we crossed the Aurelian Way, partly because I was on secure home ground, but also because the girl was ready to expire.

“Where are we going?”

“My office.”

She looked relieved. Not for long: my office was two rooms on the sixth floor of a dank tenement where only the dirt and dead bedbugs were cementing together the walls. Before any of my neighbours could price up her clothing I wheeled her off the mudtrack that passed for a highroad, and into Lenia’s distinctly low-class laundry.

Hearing the voice of Smaractus my landlord, we wheeled smartly back out.

II

Fortunately he was leaving. I stowed the girl in a basketweaver’s portico while I crouched down behind her and fiddled with the straps of my left boot.

“Who is it?” she whispered.

“Just a blotch of local slime,” I told her. I spared her my speech about property-magnates as parasites on the poor, but she took the point.

“He’s your landlord!” Smart.

“He gone?”

She confirmed it. Taking no chances, I asked, “Five or six skinny gladiators at his heels?”

“All black eyes and dirty bandages.”

“Come on then!” We pushed through the wet garments Lenia was allowing to dry out in the street, turning our faces away as they flapped back at us, then went in.

Lenia’s laundry. Steam billowed out to flatten us. Washer-boys stamped the clothes, sploshing up to their cracked little knees in hot tubs. There was a great deal of noise—slapping the linen, thumping and pounding it, clanging cauldrons—all in a close, echoing atmosphere. The laundry took up the whole ground floor, spilling out into the courtyard at the back.

We were greeted with derision by the slipshod proprietress. Lenia was probably younger than me, but she looked forty, with a gaunt face and a slack stomach that rolled over the edge of the basket she was carrying. Wisps of frizzled hair escaped from a colourless ribbon around her head. She cackled with throaty laughter when she saw my honeycake.

“Falco! Does your mother let you play with little girls?”

“Ornamental eh?” I adopted a suave expression. “Bargain I picked up in the Forum.”

“Don’t chip her pretty glaze!” Lenia scoffed. “Smaractus left a hint: pay up, or his fisherboys will be poking their tridents up your delicate parts.”

“If he wants to wring out my arm-purse, he should render a written account. Tell him—”

“Tell him yourself.”