The barber’s boy ambled up, chewing the end of a Lucanian sausage. He was thirteen, not totally deficient but he managed to make eating a sausage look a complicated challenge for his brain. My sister Maia’s children all called him Plato.

“Falco! Lady looking for you outside your house.”

Rarely has a man with a Spanish razor at his throat leapt up so fast.

I hopped over a cockle barrel, dashed round a pile of empty amphorae, and cracked my head on a basket of flowers outside the funeral parlour where hired mourners were getting in voice—not for a wake, but for the next day’s Triumph which would close down the city in public holiday. Every musician in Rome would be out distracting the crowds so pick-pockets could do their work efficiently.

I saw no lady. No wonder. That fool Plato should have known better: it was Lenia who wanted to see me. Lenia, hovering outside the laundry—looking ashamed.

Twenty years of explaining away lost undertunics made a crestfallen laundress such an unusual sight that I realized the cause must be desperate. It was. To celebrate the Emperor’s Triumph she was planning an act of reckless delirium: our strong-armed queen of the washtubs was plunging into wedlock.

When people announce their marriages, I try to avoid informing them that they are making a bad mistake. They generally are, but if all the unsuitable pairings in Rome were suffocated at birth by kind friends’ good advice, there would be no new generation of civilized men to subdue the world’s barbarians.

“Who is the happy bridegroom?”

“Smaractus.”

On reconsideration I gave Lenia the strongest advice I could.

The reason for not bothering is that they never listen anyway.

“Shut up, Falco,” Lenia responded amiably. “He’s worth half a million sesterces!”

For several reasons this news raised a red mist before my eyes.

“If Smaractus told you that, girl, I can promise you he’s lying!”

“Don’t be a fool; I never asked him.”

“All right, it depends who you seduced. If it was his accountant he’s boasting, so halve it. If it was his banker he’s being cautious, so double it—”

“Neither. Believe me, I’m not taking chances; I’ve read his will.”

“Lenia,” I commented sadly, “there are no depths to which a scheming woman will not sink!”

A strategic alliance with my pernicious landlord could only be part of Lenia’s devious business plan. He had his eye on her laundry, that small but steady gold mine, but her own attention was riveted on his hefty real estate. Their lives together would be fortified by the keen nip of greed, as each prayed daily to their household gods that the other would die first.

Many marriages endure for decades on this healthy basis, so I wished her well.

“He’ll be living here, Falco—”

“Thought he already was.”

“Just warning you.”