The Ides of April Read Free Page B

Boy, and if people thought that was love on the rebound, they understood nothing about me. There was nothing fake in my affection for him.
    He was still around. Not Farm Boy; Farm Boy died. The other one. For family reasons I saw him at social gatherings and sometimes I even worked with him. These days, our past seemed to bother him far more than me.
    There had been one result from visiting the aediles’ office. If the rapport I had built with the archivist today ever came to anything, that would be fun.
    Something would happen with Andronicus. Hades, I was an informer. I could tell that.

3
    T he surly man they called Tiberius was standing at a bar counter further up the main street. Most people would have passed without remembering the aediles’ runner, but my job needs good observation. I walked by quietly on the other side of the street, making no eye-contact. I bet
he
did not notice
me
.
    Whatever kind of running the aediles employed him to do must make few demands. He had a beaker and the bar’s draughtboard in front of him; he looked set there for the afternoon. I was tempted to march up and exclaim, ‘Three radishes says I can thrash you!’ I knew I could. Farm Boy, my late husband, had taught me draughts, sweetly allowing me to beat
him
on a regular basis. He never cared who won; he just liked us to play. He liked most things we did together and, as the uncle of mine he worked for used to say, he had a heart as big as Parthia.
    I was at a loose end myself now, but a presentable woman of twenty-eight may not take herself to bars alone, apart from the speedy-breakfast kind where you can have a pastry and a hot drink before most members of the public are up. Even then, you have to look as if you keep a salad stall; riding in on a donkey at dawn from a market garden way out on the Campagna gives even a woman a legitimate cause for sustenance. Otherwise, it is obvious to everyone you must be touting for paid sex. The men with randy propositions are bad enough; the furious grannies hurling curses at you soon become unbearable. Roman grannies really know how to hustle a flighty bit off their street by giving her the evil eye. The worst of them do it to everyone, just in case they miss one.
    Considering unpleasant old dames led naturally to thoughts of my client.
    I had to grit my teeth to make me visit her, but in my career of nearly twelve years as a solo informer, that had been my feeling about many people who employed me. It’s not a job where you meet the cream of society. Indeed, if you want to see the worst manners, filthiest motives and saddest ethics, this is the profession. Informers deal in hopelessness at every level.
    Salvidia, as I mentioned before, had inherited the construction firm when her husband died. Nobody had much to say about him, but I sensed that originally he had been typical of a builder with his own business: sometimes hard-working but more often lazy, and always a poor manager with money troubles. Salvidia soon toughened him up. She stormed in and buffed the firm into an extortion machine until Metellus and Nepos became the high-quality renovation shysters they were now. Nepos vanished, probably squeezed out deliberately, while her husband Metellus expired after a few years in the face of Salvidia’s driving efficiency.
    Salvidia was running the firm at a huge profit, but you would not know it from the untidy builder’s yard they still used and the cramped living quarters she maintained alongside. They had always operated out of premises on the Vicus Loreti Minoris, Lesser Laurel Street. Like most of the roads that passed among the great cluster of temples on the Aventine, it thought itself superior yet had its bad smells and seedy side. It ran from near the Temple of Ceres, so was in the north-west corner of the hill above the barbers’ quarter and the corn dole building; it climbed slightly towards the once open area where Remus took the auguries in the contest to see who would found a