After Larius left me, I stood out on my balcony. Our tenement stood half-way up the Aventine Hill, and its one great advantage was a fabulous view. Even when I closed my dry, tired eyes there was plenty to absorb: creaking carts and barking watchdogs; distant cries from river boatmen; leery wineshop choruses and wavering temple flutes; screams from young girls, from either terror or hysterical amusement, it was impossible to tell.
Down there, Rome must be harbouring plenty of fugitives. Men running from their mothers; their debts; their business partners; their own inadequacy. Or like Gnaeus Atius Pertinax Caprenius Marcellus: running from Fate.
I wanted to see Helena, but a small knot of doubt had started tightening inside me.
It was still evening when I took my travel-grimed body for a bathe. The gymnasium I often went to stood near the Temple of Castor; its clients were mostly dining at this hour-decent men who did not object strongly to eating in with their families, or whose idea of entertainment out was a plain three-course meal among old friends with light music and pleasant talk. Glaucus the proprietor would be at home himself by now. I was glad, because Glaucus would certainly make free with snide comments about the havoc two months in Campania had wreaked on my physique. As soon as he saw me he would want to bash me back into shape. I was too tired to let him start tonight.
The bath-house usually stayed open until after dinner time. It was well lit, with pottery lamps lining all the corridors, yet at this time of night the place assumed a certain eeriness. There were attendants lurking somewhere who would scrape you with a strigil if you wanted to shout out for them, yet most people who came at dusk managed alone. Many clients were middle-class grafters with proper jobs of work. Designers of aqueduct systems and harbour engineers who sometimes worked late at emergencies on site. An academic type who had lost all sense of time in the library at the Portico of Octavia and then come here stiff and bleary-eyed. Men in trade, arriving from Ostia after an afternoon tide. And one or two offbeat, freelance freaks like me, whose weapons training Glaucus personally supervised and who worked at odd hours for reasons which his other customers politely never asked about.
I left my clothes in the changing room, hardly glancing at the stuff on other pegs. I had a good scrape in the hot room, swilled off, then pushed through the heavy retaining door to relax in the dry steam. Someone else was already there. I nodded. At this hour it was traditional to pass in silence, but as my eyes became accustomed to the humidity I recognized the other man. He was in his fifties, with a pleasant expression. He too was slumped in private thought, but knew me just as I took in his vibrant eyebrows and spiked, boyish hair: Helena's papa.
'Didius Falco!'
'Camillus Verus!'
Our greeting was unforced. He took an affectionate view of my rough-and-ready attitude, and I liked his shrewd good humour. I realigned my exhausted frame alongside.
'You've been in Campania, I heard.'
'Just got back. You're late, Senator!'
'Seeking refuge,' he admitted, with an honest grin. 'I'm glad I've seen you here tonight.'
I lifted an eyebrow, with a definite feeling I was waiting for bad news. 'Something special, sir?'
'Didius Falco, I am hoping,' declared the Senator with significant formality, 'you can tell me who has done me the honour of making me a grandfather.'