“And the best is yet to come,” said Ampliatus. He clapped and one of the slaves hurried out of the dining room in the direction of the kitchen.
Popidius managed to force a smile. “I for one have left room for dessert, Ampliatus.” In truth he felt like vomiting, and he would not have needed the usual cup of warm brine and mustard to do it, either. “What is it to be, then? A basket of plums from Mount Damascus? Or has that pastry chef of yours made a pie of Attican honey?” Ampliatus’s cook was the great Gargilius, bought for a quarter of a million, recipe books and all. That was how it was along the Bay of Neapolis these days. The chefs were more celebrated than the people they fed. Prices had been pushed into the realms of insanity. The wrong sort of people had the money.
“Oh, it’s not yet time for dessert, my dear Popidius. Or may I—if it’s not too premature—call you ‘son’?” Ampliatus grinned and pointed and by a superhuman effort, Popidius succeeded in hiding his revulsion.O, Trimalchio, he thought,Trimalchio . . .
There was a sound of scuffling footsteps and then four slaves appeared, bearing on their shoulders a model trireme, as long as a man and cast in silver, surfing a sea of encrusted sapphires. The diners broke into applause. The slaves approached the table on their knees and with difficulty slid the trireme, prow first, across the table. It was entirely filled by an enormous eel. Its eyes had been removed and replaced by rubies. Its jaws were propped open and filled with ivory. Clipped to its dorsal fin was a thick gold ring.
Popidius was the first to speak. “I say, Ampliatus—that’s a whopper.”
“From my own fishery at Misenum,” said Ampliatus proudly. “A moray. It must be thirty years old if it’s a day. I had it caught last night. You see the ring? I do believe, Popidius, that this is the creature your friend Nero used to sing to.” He picked up a large silver knife. “Now, who will have the first slice? You, Corelia—I think you should try it first.”
Now, that was a nice gesture,thought Popidius. Up till this point, her father had conspicuously ignored her, and he had begun to suspect ill-feeling between them, but here was a mark of favor. So it was with some astonishment that he saw the girl flash a look of undiluted hatred at her father, throw down her napkin, rise from her couch, and run sobbing from the table.
The first couple of pedestrians Attilius approached swore they had never heard of Africanus’s place. But at the crowded bar of Hercules, a little farther down the street, the man behind the counter gave him a shifty look and then provided directions in a quiet voice—walk down the hill for another block, turn right, then first left, then ask again: “But be careful who you talk to, citizen.”
Attilius could guess what that meant and sure enough, from the moment he left the main road, the street curved and narrowed, the houses became meaner and more crowded. Carved in stone beside several of the squalid entrances was the sign of the prick and balls. The brightly colored dresses of the prostitutes bloomed in the gloom like blue and yellow flowers. So this was where Exomnius had chosen to spend his time! Attilius’s footsteps slowed. He wondered if he should turn back. Nothing could be allowed to jeopardize the main priority of the day. But then he thought again of his father, dying on his mattress in the corner of their little house—another honest fool, whose stubborn rectitude had left his widow poor—and he resumed his walk, but faster, angry now.
At the end of the street, a heavy first-floor balcony jutted over the pavement, reducing the road to scarcely more than a passageway. He shouldered his way past a group of loitering men, their faces flushed by heat and wine, through the nearest open door, and into a dingy vestibule. There was a sharp, almost feral stink of sweat and semen. “Lupanars” they called these places, after the howl of the lupa, the she-wolf, in heat. And “lupa” was the street word for a harlot—a meretrix. The business sickened him. From upstairs came the sound of a flute, a thump on the floorboards, male laughter. On either side, from curtained cubicles, came the noises of the night—grunts, whispers, a child’s whimper.
In the semidarkness, a woman in a short green dress sat on a stool with her legs wide apart. She stood as she heard him enter and came toward him eagerly, arms outstretched in welcome, vermilion lips cracked into a smile. She had used antimony to blacken her eyebrows, stretching the lines so that they met across the bridge of her nose, a mark which some men prized as beauty, but which reminded Attilius of the death masks of the Popidii. She was ageless—fifteen or fifty, he could not tell in the weak light.
He said, “Africanus?”
“Who?” She had a thick accent. Cilician, perhaps. “Not here,” she said quickly.
“What about Exomnius?” At the mention of his name her painted mouth split wide. She tried to block his path, but he moved her out of his way, gently, his hands on her bare shoulders, and pulled back the curtain behind her. A naked man was squatting over an open latrine, his thighs bluish-white and bony in the darkness. He looked up, startled. “Africanus?” asked Attilius. The man’s expression was uncomprehending. “Forgive me, citizen.” Attilius let the curtain fall and moved toward one of the cubicles on the opposite side of the vestibule, but the whore beat him to it, extending her arms to block his way.
“No,” she said. “No trouble. He not here.”
“Where, then?”
She hesitated. “Above.” She gestured with her chin toward the ceiling.
Attilius looked around. He could see no stairs.
“How do I get up there? Show me.”
She did not move so he lunged toward another curtain, but again she beat him to it. “I show,” she said. “This way.”
She ushered him toward a second door. From the cubicle beside it, a man cried out in ecstasy. Attilius stepped into the street. She followed. In the daylight he could see that her elaborately piled-up hair was streaked with gray. Rivulets of sweat had carved furrows down her sunken, powdered cheeks. She would be lucky to earn a living here much longer. Her owner would throw her out and then she’d be living in the necropolis beyond the Vesuvius Gate, spreading her legs for the beggars behind the tombs.
She put her hand to her turkey-throat, as if she had guessed what was in his mind, and pointed to the staircase a few paces further on, then hurried back inside. As he started to mount the stone steps he heard her give a low whistle.I am like Theseus in the labyrinth, he thought,but without the ball of thread from Ariadne to guide me back to safety. If an attacker appeared above him and another blocked off his escape, he would not stand a chance. When he reached the top of the staircase he did not bother to knock but flung open the door.
His quarry was already halfway out of the window, presumably tipped off by the whistle from the elderly whore. But the engineer was across the room and had him by his belt before he could drop down to the flat roof below. He was light and scrawny and Attilius hauled him in as easily as an owner might drag a dog back by his collar. He deposited him on the carpet.
He had disturbed a party. Two men lay on couches. A Negro boy was clutching a flute to his naked chest. An olive-skinned girl, no more than twelve or thirteen, and also naked, with silver-painted nipples, stood on a table, frozen in mid-dance. For a moment, nobody moved. Oil lamps flickered against crudely painted erotic scenes—a woman astride a man, a man mounting a woman from behind, two men lying with their fingers on each other’s cocks. One of the reclining clients began trailing his hand slowly beneath the couch, patting the floor, feeling toward a knife that lay beside a plate of peeled fruit. Attilius planted his foot firmly in the middle of Africanus’s back, Africanus groaned, and the man quickly withdrew his hand.