spoken, tables thumped, and then Agathocles had asked Naso round for drinks and Naso had disappeared. Without him, the talks simply couldn’t continue. Ten days after the disappearance, the Roman garrisons on our borders mobilized and conducted unscheduled manoeuvres, as close to the frontiers as they could get without actually crossing them. Cousin Hiero had his soldiers turn the city upside down, but they found nothing. The Roman diplomats went home without saying goodbye. Their soldiers stayed on the border. Then, just as we were starting to think it couldn’t get any worse, Naso turned up again.
He made his dramatic re-entry when the swinging arm of the crane winching a great big jar of sprats off the bulk freighter snapped, on the main dock at Ostia, in front of about a thousand witnesses. The jar fell on the stone slabs and smashed open, and out flopped Naso. He was still in the full diplomatic dress he’d worn to the party, so it was immediately obvious that he was someone important in the military. He was quickly identified, and a fast courier galley was immediately launched, to tell us the bad news.
*
“Presumably,” Orestes said, “it was the extra weight that snapped the crane. A man’s got to weigh a damn sight more than his own volume in sprats.”
Orestes was the bright young Corinthian I’d proposed as my substitute. Instead, he’d been assigned to me as sidekick-in-chief. He was tall, skinny, gormless-looking and deceptively smart, with a surprisingly scientific cast of mind. “So what?” I said.
He offered me a drink, which I refused, and poured one for himself. My wine, of course. “This whole sprat business,” he said. “It’s got to mean something, it’s too bizarre otherwise.”
“Bizarre, I grant you,” I said. “But meaningful …”
“Has to be.” He nodded firmly. “Abducting and murdering a Roman emissary at a diplomatic function,” he went on, “has got to be a statement of some kind. Bottling him and sending him home must, therefore, be a refinement of that statement.”
“Expressive of contempt, you mean.”
“Must be.” He frowned at his hands. A nail-biter. “That’s not good for us, is it?”
“The crane,” I reminded him.
“What? Oh, right. I was just thinking, the timing of the discovery of the body. If the crane hadn’t broken, the jar would’ve been loaded on a cart and taken to Rome. It had been ordered by—” He looked up his notes. “Philippus Longinus,” he recited, “freedman, dealer and importer in wholesale foodstuffs. Disclaims all knowledge, et cetera. They’ve got him locked up, of course.”
“Greek?”
“Doesn’t say,” Orestes replied, “but he’s a freedman with a half-Greek name, so presumably yes. Loads of Greek merchants in Rome nowadays. Anyhow, in the normal course of business that jar of sprats would’ve stayed in his warehouse for months.” His eyebrows, unusually thick, lowered and squashed together. “Which makes no sense.”
I nodded slowly. “If you’re right about the murder as a statement,” I replied.
“Unless,” Orestes went on, looking up sharply, “whoever did it knew the extra weight would break the crane, in which case—” He looked at me, and sighed. “A bit far-fetched?”
“As wine from Egypt,” I said. “Of course,” I went on, “someone could’ve sawed the beam part-way through.”
“That’s—” He looked at me again. “You’re teasing me,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Fine. In that case, it makes no sense.”
“If,” I reminded him, “we approach the problem from the diplomatic-statement direction, as you seem determined to do.”
He gave me a respectfully sour look. “In the circumstances …”
He had a point, of course. “It would seem logical to assume that it’s something to do with politics and diplomacy,” I conceded.
“Exactly. So we should start from there.” I sighed. “No,” I said. “We should start from the beginning.”
*
We took a walk. On the way there, we discussed various topics – Pythagoras, the nature of light, the origin of the winds – and paused from time to time to let me rest my ankle, which hasn’t been right since I fell down the palace steps. We reached Agathocles’ house just before midday, a time when I was fairly sure he’d be out.
“I’m sorry,” the houseboy confirmed. “He’s at the palace. Can I tell him who called?”
“We’ll wait,” I said firmly.
*
Of course I’d been there before, many times. I knew that Agathocles lived in his father’s old house, and his father had been nobody special, a cheese merchant who was shrewd enough to buy into a grain freighter when the price was right, and then reinvest in land so his son could be a gentleman. I