“I was afraid that would happen. I don’t think it’s possible now for me to offer full price. The best I could do ... he sighed laboriously, “would be sixty thousand.”
“I think we’ve got it now,” Ludovicus called.
“Sixty thousand?! They cost me over a hundred.”
“And I have no doubt you squeezed the most from every sestercius. Although, I hear they’re doing marvelous things with concrete and fired bricks these days. A little more up front cost, but well worth it, I should imagine.”
At that moment, one of the firefighters closest to the building called out. “I heard something! I think someone may be inside!”
Immediately, Crassus dropped his play-acting, leapt off his horse and grabbed a torch from an onlooker. “Stay back!” he yelled to Ludovicus. He dashed across the unpaved street into the building. His men stared at each other in disbelief. Ludovicus didn’t know what to do. If he turned the pumps on the burning floors, the weight of the water might cause the already weakened structure to collapse on our master. If he ran in after Crassus, he’d be disobeying a direct order, and his back would bear witness to his insubordination. He settled on selecting several men with full buckets to wait with him a little closer to the doorway.
Crassus had given me no such order. I gave Ludovicus a look that said ‘watch the money.’ He nodded and I jumped off the cart and raced to follow my master into the building. I bypassed the tabernae on the ground floor, knowing we had only moments to search the upper floors. Crassus was already at the top of the stairs. Smoke hung in the deserted hallway, and the air was thick with the smell of burning wood as I joined him.
“Vulcan’s prick, man ...!”
“I’ll take the left,” I shouted above the roaring and ran down the narrow hall. I might get a beating for it later, but at least now I could honestly say I never heard my master give me an order to leave. I was relieved to hear the thump of Crassus’ boots heading in the other direction.
I ran into each apartment, calling out as loud as I could. With little furniture and only one or two rooms, they were easy to search. The second floor was empty. Crassus met me at the central stairway; as we bounded up to the next floor he threw me a glance but said nothing.
The heat grew alarmingly with each step. By the top of the landing, we could no longer stand. Fire flowed in waves across the ceiling of this hallway like an upside-down river. Crassus threw his cloak over his head and motioned for me to do the same. We called out again but it was almost impossible to hear anything above the noise of the fire and our own racked coughing. It was like inhaling the smoke at the top of a clay oven. There was a constant, deep rumbling over our heads. I remember thinking how ironic that it should remind me of pounding surf. If there had been anyone on the fourth floor, they were gone now.
These thoughts took but a second. We inhaled a lungful of air through the fabric of our cloaks and scrambled down opposite ends of the hallway, crouching low. The cenacula on this floor were empty as well. The heat from above pressed down on us like the hand of Hephaestus, forcing us to crawl. It was too hard to hold onto our torches, so we abandoned them. Looking for survivors was no longer our mission. Now our task was simply to make certain we would be counted among them.
We were scrambling toward each other on our bellies through thick, slowly curling smoke. Like me, Crassus held his cloak over his head with one hand and dragged himself forward with the other. His clothes were ruined, his face soot-stained, his eyes tearing. Another strange thought struck me: at this moment it would be hard to tell us apart.
My lord reached the stairwell just ahead of me. It couldn’t have been more than a second that he hesitated, waiting for me to join him so we could descend together. That’s when a section of the floor above came crashing down. A smoking plank hit Crassus in the back. It knocked him down the stairs to the lower landing. The hole in the floor above exposed an inferno. It wasn’t bravery that made me leap from where I stood to the