I told Petro what I believed was now afoot and he promised to stake out the warehouse with me when I tipped him the word. I left him on his hands and knees being ridden like an elephant by his three tiny girls. His wife gave me a black pudding when I departed, I think as a present for leaving them alone.

I wanted to get drunk. Luckily for Petro’s wife I hold the philosophy that you can be drunk at any other point in a case, but never when you know at last who it is you are looking for.

When I went up to the Palace I had thought it was all over. The cases you hate most never seem to end.

LVI

I took all of my sisters and a dozen small children to watch Vespasian’s Triumph. For that alone my soul deserves quiet rest in Elysian fields.

I managed to miss the tedious march of the consuls and senators by the simple trick of having overslept. (Even with the city in ferment, up on the sixth floor I could doze deep into the morning as peaceful as a dove’s egg in a stone pine nest.) Out on the Campus Martius the army drew up in parade, while Vespasian and Titus took their places on ivory seats in the Portico of Octavia to receive the troops’ acclaim. When this shout tore the skies, even an Aventine sleepyhead leapt out of bed. While the Imperial party pecked at breakfast under the Triumphal Arch, I sorted out my holiday tunic, peacefully watered the flowers on my balcony, and combed my hair. I hummed on my way northwards, passing through the garlanded arcades, into a wall of sound.

It was a lively day, warm and bright, with a lift in the air. A bad day for bunions; by the time I strolled out there was standing room only. All the temples had been thrown open, and the baths were closed; incense, smoking on a thousand altars, grappled with the whiff of half a million people perspiring in their holiday clothes without a chance to bathe all day. Apart from one or two dedicated housebreakers slipping through deserted alleys with discreet sacks of swag, everyone who was not in the procession was watching it. There were so many gawpers packed along the processional route that the marchers and floats could hardly crawl along.