I was leaving the Palace, with the sardonic taste of this interview still pursing my mouth, when someone in a doorway greeted me derisively.
'Didius Falco, you disreputable beggar! Thought you were wearing yourself out on the women around Neapolis!'
I wheeled cautiously, ever on my guard in the Palace environs, and recognized the grim presence. 'Momus!' The slave overseer who had helped with the dispersal of the Pertinax estate. He seemed grubbier than ever as he grinned through half-toothless gums. 'Momus, the widespread assumption that I fill all my free time fornicating is beginning to get me down! Has somebody been saying something I might want to dispute?'
'Plenty!' he chaffed. 'Your name seems to crop up everywhere these days. Have you seen Anacrites?'
'Should I?'
'Keep your head down,' Momus warned. There was no love lost between him and the Chief Spy; they had different priorities.
'Anacrites never bothered me. Last I saw, he was demoted to book-keeping.'
'Never trust an accountant! He keeps bouncing in saying he wants to examine you about a certain lost consignment of Treasury lead-' I groaned, though I made sure I did so under my breath. 'The word is that Anacrites has booked a pallet in the name of Didius Falco in a long-term cell in the Mamertine.'
'Don't worry,' I told Momus, as if I believed it. 'I'm in on it. Prison is just a ruse to escape the indignant fathers of all the women I have deceived…'
He grinned, and let me go. Pausing only to shout after me, 'By the way, Falco, what's this about a horse?'
'He's called Hard Luck,' I answered. 'By Short Commons, out of Come to Grief! Don't bet on him; he's bound to break a leg.'
I strode out of the Palace on the north side of Palatine Hill. Half-way back to my own sector I passed an open winery. So I changed my mind, turned into it, and got drunk after all.
I was woken by the sound of a very brisk broom.
This told me two things. Someone thought it was their duty to wake me up. And last night I did find my way home.
When you fall down in a gutter people leave you there in peace.
I groaned and grumbled a few times, to give warning I might emerge; the broom fell silent huffily. I hauled on a tunic, decided it was dirty, so covered the stains with a second one. I washed my face, rinsed my teeth and combed my hair, all without achieving any improvement in how I felt. My belt was missing and I could only find one boot. I stumbled out.
The woman who made it her business to keep my apartment in order had been working quiet miracles for some time before she started that stuff with the broom. Her familiar black eyes seared me with piercing disgust. She had done the room; next she would tackle me.
'I came to make you breakfast, but it had better be lunch!'
'Hello mother,' I said.