‘You misunderstand. I'll wait in the vestibule. This would be strictly for the boy's pleasure, not for mine. And perhaps for your pleasure, as well.'
She raised a sceptical eyebrow. What sort of man, after all, would pay good money to have his slave entertained by a whore?
I turned to leave. Tiro started up from his chair. 'But, sir—'
'Quiet, Tiro. Stay. A gift. Accept it graciously.'
I left, closing the door behind me. I lingered in the hall for a long moment, half-expecting Tiro to follow me. He didn't.
In the vestibule, business had begun to pick up. The proprietor greeted new guests; Stabius and another slave paraded the merchandise. All the seats were taken and some of the clients had to stand. I stood among them, out of the way and out of sight. It was not long before Tiro came walking rapidly down the hall, awkwardly adjusting his tunic about his shoulders. His face was damp with sweat, his hair tousled. He had not even bothered to straighten his clothes before fleeing the room.
'Finished?' I said.
I expected a grin, but he barely glanced at me before he plunged into the small crowd and headed relentlessly for the door. I followed after him, glancing over my shoulder at the latest selection of girls. Young Talia was among them. Her owner had pulled the robe back from her shoulder and was gently fondling her breasts. 'See how she blushes?' I heard him say. 'What a colour it gives her cheeks. She blushes in other places as well, too delicate to mention..'.
In the street Tiro walked so fast I had to run to catch up. 'I shouldn't have done it,' he said, shaking his head and staring straight ahead.
I laid my hand on his shoulder. Though he shrank away, he obeyed as a horse obeys, slowing his pace. 'You didn't find her desirable, Tiro?'
'Of course I did. She's…' He searched for a word, and finding none adequate gave a despairing shrug. ‘You didn't enjoy yourself?' 'Of course I did.'
'Then you might at least thank me.'
'But I shouldn't have done it.' He scowled. 'It was Cicero paying, not you. You'll charge him the expense. What do you think he would say if he knew? Using his money to buy a woman for me…'
'Then he needn't know. Anyway, I had paid for the whore already; it was a legitimate expense, you must admit that. It only made sense that one of us should use her.'
'Yes, when you put it that way. Even so…' He looked me straight in the eye, only for an instant, but long enough for me to see inside him. The guilt he felt was not for abusing Cicero's trust, but for betraying another.
That was when I first knew just how badly Tiro had been smitten by the daughter of Sextus Roscius.
13
We walked again past the widow Polia's tenement, past the bloodstain, past the old shopkeeper and his wife. Tiro was in a mood to walk fast; I matched him and then set a fester pace. I had had enough for one day of strangers and their tragedies. I longed to be home again.
We entered the square. The shops had reopened; the street vendors had returned. The sun was still high enough to reach over the rooftops and strike the public sundial. An hour of daylight remained.
Children were playing about the cistern; housewives and slaves stood waiting to fetch water for the evening meal. The square was alive with noise and movement, but something was amiss. Only gradually I realized that half of the crowd or more had their feces turned in the same direction. A number of them were pointing.
Rome is a city of fire and smoke. The people are sustained by bread, bread is baked in ovens, ovens release plumes of smoke. But the smoke of a tenement fire has an altogether different appearance. The smoke rises thick and black; on a clear and windless day it thrusts upward in a great column. Currents of ash roil and thrash against the sky, only to be sucked inward to the core, thrown higher and higher against the sky.
The fire lay directly in our path, somewhere between us and the Capitoline. Tiro, seeing it, seemed suddenly relieved of all anxieties. His face took on a smooth, healthy lustre of excitement as he quickened his pace. Man's instinct is to flee from fire, but city life obliterates the animal urges; indeed, we passed not a single person going in the opposite direction as we neared the fire, but instead found ourselves drawn into an ever-growing congestion of pedestrians and wagons as people from all about rushed to see the catastrophe at its peak.
The fire was near the foot of the Capitoline, just outside the Servian wall, in a block of fashionable apartments south of the Circus Flaminius. A four-storey tenement was almost completely engulfed. Flames belched from the windows and danced about the roof. If there had been a drama of the type the crowd so adores, we had missed it; there were no helpless victims screaming from the upper windows, no babies being thrown to the street. The inhabitants had already escaped or else were dead inside.
Here and there in the crowd I saw women tearing their hair, men weeping, families huddle together. The mourners and the destitute were swallowed up in the general mass of the crowd, who watched the flames with various expressions of awe and delight.
'They say it started in mid-afternoon,' said a man nearby, 'and took all this time to swallow the whole building.' His friend nodded gravely. 'Even so, I hear there were several families trapped on the upper floors, burned alive. You could hear them screaming. They say a flaming man came hurtling out of an upper window not more than an hour ago, landing in the midst of the crowd. If we move over that way, we might be able to see the spot where he landed….'
In the open corridor between the crowd and the flames a grey-bearded man was running hectically to and fro, hiring strangers off the street to help contain the conflagration. The wage he offered was hardly more than a volunteer's honorarium, and not many took him up. On the northward side, looking up the hill, the fire seemed to pose little danger of spreading; there was no wind to carry the flames, and the wide space between the buildings was adequate protection. But on the southward side, towards the Circus, another, shorter tenement neatly adjoined the burning building, with only the width of a tall man's reach between them. Already the facing wall was scorched, and as the burning building began to crumble, heaps of ash and debris tumbled into the gap between them, with some of the flaming material landing on the roof of the lower structure, where a team of slaves hastily shovelled it off.
A noble, finely dressed and attended by a large retinue of slaves, secretaries, and gladiators, stepped out of the crowd and approached the distressed greybeard. 'Citizen,' he called out, 'are you the owner of these buildings?'
'Not the burning building,' the man snapped. 'That would be my stupid neighbour Varius, the kind of fool who lets his tenants build fires on the hottest day of the year. You don't see him here, fighting the fire. Probably on holiday down at Baiae. This is mine, the one that's still standing.'
'But not, perhaps, for long.' The noble spoke in a fine voice that would not have been out of place in the Forum. I had not yet seen his face, but I knew who he must be.
'Crassus,' I whispered.
'Yes,' Tiro said, 'Crassus. My master knows him.' There was a trace of pride in his voice, the pride of those who appreciate a brush with celebrity no matter what its nature. 'You know the song: "Crassus, Crassus, rich as Croesus." Already they say he's the richest man in Rome, not counting Sulla, of course, which makes him richer than most kings, and growing richer every day. So Cicero says.'
'And what else does your master say about Crassus?' The object of our conversation had wrapped one arm around the greybeard's shoulder. Together they walked to a spot with a better view ofthe breach between the two buildings. I followed behind, and stared beyond them into the blinding cleft, impassable for the constant rain of ash and smouldering bricks.