“Has he ties with your family?”

“No,” he chipped in impatiently, then checked. Nothing was simple here. “A slight connection,” he corrected himself, and by now his expression had deliberately cleared. “Business links with my brother.”

“Did you tell your brother that Sosia was with me?”

“I had no opportunity.”

“Someone did. He asked Pertinax to arrest me.”

The senator smiled. “I do apologize. My brother has been frantically worried about his daughter. He’ll be delighted you brought her home.”

Tidily cleared up. Petronius Longus had said my description was known, so an aedile might track me down. Pertinax and Publius assumed I was a villain. Big brother Decimus had omitted to mention to little brother Publius the fact that he hired me. I was not surprised. I come from a large family myself. There were lots of things Festus had never remembered to tell me.

XIV

This silver leak was a clever scheme! The British mines, which in my day were guarded so cautiously by the army, had apparently been tapped off as neatly as those illegal standpipes plugged in by private citizens all along the Claudian aqueduct; silver bars sparkling all the way to Rome like the crystal waters of the Caerulean Spring. I wished Petro and I had done it ten years before.

Passing the Capena Gate lockup, I nipped in to see the loafers from the cookshop whom I had seen being arrested that morning for spying on the senator. I was out of luck. Pertinax had let them go—no evidence to hold them, he maintained.

I gazed at the duty guard with my world-weary fellow comrade sigh.

“Typical! Did he bother to question them?”

“Few friendly words.”

“Brilliant! What about this Pertinax?”

“Knows it all!” the squaddie complained. We were both acquainted with the type. We exchanged a painful look.

“Is he just inefficient, or would you say it was something else?”

“I’d say I don’t like him—but I say that about them all.”

I grinned. “Thank you. Look,” I cajoled frankly, “what’s the word on an ingot of government lead? This is unofficially official, if you understand what I mean.” This was a lark. I didn’t understand what I was saying myself.

He insisted he was under strict orders to say nothing. I chinked some coinage his way. Never fails.

“A drayman handed it in last week; turned up hoping for a reward. The magistrate himself came down to look. The drayman lives…” (Another magic chink.) “In a river booth on the Transtiberina bank, at the sign of the Turbot, near the Sulpician Bridge…”