The note was in my bedroom. An odd pang caught me, to imagine Sosia there. She had pegged her message on my pile of poetry under the jet bracelet that I knew. I wondered if she noticed that “Aglaia, Radiant Goddess,” was really about her. All the girls in my odes are called Aglaia, a poet needs to protect himself.

Sosia had left me a wooden tablet, unlaced from one of those four-page pocketbooks and then inscribed deeply with a stylus in a round hand that had never done serious writing:

Didius Falco, I know a place where they may keep the silver pigs. If I show you, you can claim your bonus. Will you meet me at the Golden Milestone in two hours? If you are too busy, I will go for you and see…

I pounded back downstairs in a blind panic.

“Lenia! Lenia, what time was she here—”

They were waiting for me calmly, at the foot of the last flight. Smaractus!

Below me, shadows moved, their bare feet noiseless on the stone steps: my landlord’s gladiators, after my unpaid rent.

I have an arrangement with the cloakmaker who lives on the second floor that in an emergency I can run through his room, fling myself over the balcony onto the fire-fighting porch, then drop into the street. I had passed the cloakmaker’s door. I half turned back. The door opened. Someone who was not the cloakmaker came out.

They were straight from Smaractus’ insanitary gym and in full fighting rig. Below me, the type called myrmillons, glistening with oil above their body-belts, their right arms padded and ringed with metal from collarbone to fist, their solid high-crested helmets shaped like curling, sneering fish. Above me, when I whirled round, two light, laughing men in tunics only, but each with a fiendish net coiled on his arm—his fishermen.

I whipped back.

“Didius Falco! What’s the rush?”

I recognized the one who spoke. I recognized his build. He crouched slightly, in fighting stance, faceless behind his helmet grille. I must have exclaimed.

“Oh no! Not now, oh gods, not now—”

“Now, Falco!”

“You can’t, oh you can’t—”

“Oh we can! Let’s show the man…” Then both fishers flung their nets down over my head.

I knew, as I struggled hopelessly in two ten-foot circles of biting cords, that it was going to be much worse than being arrested by the aedile’s bullyboys. If Smaractus was just making his point, they would tenderize me like an octopus slammed on the foreshore rocks. If he had found himself a new tenant for upstairs, I was finished. It was going to be as bad as anything could be. My only comfort was that I would know very little about it once I managed to pass out, and that perhaps I would never wake up.