Spare a copper for a bath!" In the littered shade at the back of the most prestigious buildings, there are beggars. This wit knew how to suggest his request should be granted urgently; he was filthy. In fact he was so filthy he looked as if he had covered himself with grime on purpose. Anyone charitable would shoo him to hot water and a strigil. [Anyone who then thought twice would remember that most towns offer free public baths. This beggar was dirty from choice] I held up a coin. Then I gave it to him. There was no point holding back; he would just say what I wanted to hear in order to obtain the money. Seen anyone leave the temple just before I came around the corner? Which way did he go?" A grimy arm, swathed in dreadful rags, waved vaguely down the Cardo Maximus, towards the far Laurentine Gate. The man was probably drunk. He looked too verminous to question at close quarters. I had to decide whether I believed him. With nothing else on offer, I set off up the road.
I'm Cassius!" he croaked after me.
I'll remember!" I lied, fleeing. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck with a madman with dangerous politics. Having a bust of Cassius in your house still counts as treason. On the birthdays of Brutus and Cassius, all sensible men are very careful not to hold dinner parties that could look like memorials. Compared with the Decumanus, the Cardo was a narrow little street, gently sloping downhill and deeply shadowed by the buildings alongside it. I had been here before, though I was riding not walking, as I went to see Damagoras. One of the houses near the Temple of Rome and Augustus had been a smoking ruin, the morning Gaius Baebius and I first encountered the fire-fighting bullies of the builders' guild. I had also come here during my temple hunt. The road to the Laurentine Gate had become a motif of this mission. Cassius did not let me down. I was halfway to the Gate when the traffic coming towards me thinned and ahead of me I saw a boy. I recognised the slight figure. Zeno. Zeno, from the gatehouse, that thin little street rascal whose mother was Pullia, the Cilician kid nappers" drugs queen. Walking alongside Zeno and talking to him earnestly was a well-built elderly man. I knew him too. It was my Uncle Fulvius. Fulvius had one hand on Zeno's shoulder. The boy looked up at him with a trusting expression. Pullia had been in custody now for several days. Lygon was only captured today, but he had never himself lived at the gatehouse, and he had appeared indifferent to Pullia's child. Without his mother, Zeno would have had to fend for himself. Fulvius must have befriended him. Maybe they knew one another even before Pullia's arrest. If Caninus was correct in identifying my uncle as the negotiator, the Illyrian" used a young boy as his runner. All along, little Zeno could have been that boy. Now, if the Diocles ransom demand did, after all, come from the Cilician gang, the pair could be going to meet Mutatus. Even if not, there were good reasons to investigate what a young child was doing in my uncle's company. I followed them hotfoot. I wondered if they were heading outside the Gate, so my day would be ending as it began, at a necropolis. Sitting in a tomb in the pitch dark had been bad enough. Now, had I but known it, I was heading somewhere worse.
