I walked back past the warehouses and into the unpromising interior streets where the racketeers seemed to operate. I had agreed with Hilaris: this happened everywhere. Yet that big-time frighteners would try taking over the commercial outlets in Britain still seemed unlikely.
There was so little here. Retail outlets selling staples: carrots, spoons and firewood bundles, mostly in rather small quantities. Oil, wine and fish-pickle sauce, all looking as if their crack-necked amphorae, with dusty bellies and half the labels missing, had been unloaded from the boat several seasons before. Dim eating houses, offering amateur snacks and piss-poor wine to people who hardly knew what to ask for. One obvious brothel that I saw yesterday; well, there must be more of those. A respectable husband and father – well, a husband with a scathing wife who missed nothing – had to be careful how he looked for them. What else? Oh look! Between a sandal-seller and a shop full of herbal seeds (buy our exciting borage and caress away care with curative coriander!) here was a placard scrawled up on a house wall which advertised a gladiatorial show: Pex the Atlantic Thrasher (really?); the nineteen times unbeaten Argorus (clearly some old frowsty fox whose fights were fixed); a clash of bears; and Hidax the Hideous – apparently the retiarius with the niftiest trident this side of Epirus. There was even a furious female with a clichame: Amazonia (advertised in much smaller letters than her male counterparts, naturally).
I was too grown-up to be lured by nasty girls with swords, though they might be sensational for some. Instead, I was trying to remember the last time I had any borage that was more than mildly interesting. Suddenly I became aware of excruciating pain. Somebody had jumped me.
I never saw him coming. He had slammed my face against a wall, pinioning me with such brutal force he nearly broke the arm that he had twisted up my back. I would have cursed, but it was impossible.
'Falco!' Hades, I knew that voice.
My fine Etruscan nose was squashed tightly against a wall that was so deeply rough-cast it would imprint me for a week with its hard pattern; the daub was bonded with cow dung, I could tell.
'Petro -' I gurgled.
'Stop drawing attention!' He might have been bullying some thief he had caught fingering women's bustbands off a laundry drying line. 'You sapheaded blunderer! You interfering, imbecilic rat's bane-' There were more hissed insults, all meticulously spittable, some obscene, and one I had never heard before. (I worked out what it meant.) 'Get this, you flakewit – leave it, or I'm a dead man!'
He released me abruptly. I nearly fell over. When I staggered round to tell the swine he had made himself quite clear enough, he had already gone.