Helena Justina was looking so unhappy I had to say, “Don’t think about what happened to Pertinax.”

“No.”

“And don’t try to convince yourself he was sorry when you divorced him—”

“No, Falco!” I leaned back in my corner of the chair, twisting my lip. In the near darkness she apologized. “You’re so passionate when you give advice. Did your hero brother have a wife?”

“A girl—and a child he never heard about.”

“Marcia!” she exclaimed. Her tone changed. “I thought she must be yours.”

“I told you not.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t lie to you.”

“No. I beg your pardon…Who looks after them now?”

“Me.”

I sounded terse and I was shifting about, but it had nothing to do with anything we had said. We had descended as far as the Forum before I was sure: furtive footsteps were keeping pace with us, too level and much too close.

“What’s the matter, Falco?”

“We’re being shadowed. All the way from the Palace—”

I banged on the roof, springing out as the chair stopped. Helena Justina slid after me almost before I offered my hand. I snatched up my mother’s bag of gold, then I handed her ladyship straight off the open street and into the lighted doorway of the nearest dreadful dive, as if she were some bored socialite paying me to take her to see the low life of Rome at night.

In the lurid light of their entrance cubicle, she looked so highly strung I almost wondered if she wished she was.

XLV

There was a tiptilted head of Venus blowing her cheeks out beside a welcoming motto above the outside door, where a stupendous man extracted a stupendous entrance fee. It was a brothel. I couldn’t help that. It took us off the streets; it was warm, dark, and no doubt confirmed her ladyship’s abysmal opinion of me.

I would have to find the entrance money myself. Client or not, I could hardly ask the senator to excavate his bank box to pay for me taking his delicate daughter to a place as foul as this.

The proprietors here made a meagre living from the profits of fornication, and a small fortune from picking pockets and selling stolen clothes. There was one cavernous room, with hides hung on poles round the walls to form cubbyholes where fraud, theft or murder could take place in decent privacy. Other varieties of intercourse occurred in whatever patch of gloom the participants already occupied.