This one seemed to have grasped the point. If anything, it made Glaucus more venomous. He asked his trick question: Where was the breakdown of expenditure on entertaining distinguished visitors?

"Appendix at the end."

On rare occasions Glaucus was compelled to endure the prospect of a sprat who looked certain to go far.

* * *

Once he was replaced from his debriefing, the ex-quaestor turned deeper into the Palace interior. Strolling through the poorly swept corridors, he passed faded staterooms long commandeered as store-rooms. He took time to reorient himself, but was soon nosing at that measured pace along a familiar route. He found the door he remembered. He knocked slightly; listened; his face cleared in anticipation; he went in.

Caenis was not there.

* * *

Everything had subtly changed. He had expected improvements (more of her "nudging"), yet still felt bemused. The light was muffled by a fug from two charcoal braziers; at last her room was warm. Opposite the door there now reposed a respectable table on marble feet, empty except for a bronze candelabrum in the form of a slim nymph with a look of disheveled surprise.

There were two places on one side of the room; at each sat a neat young female scribe. Their training must be tiptop, and their supervisor obviously kept a strong grip even when she was out. These girls were polite, wary, helpful, nicely spoken little things. They asked his name, though he did not tell them; then they repeated the question, though he still pretended to be deaf. Caenis would be furious with them for letting him get away with it.

He had only just missed her. Her girls, who were called Phania and Melpomene, thought she was dropping in at the Library of Octavia on her way home for lunch with Antonia; afterward her nap, of course (Oh, of course!), then probably to the baths to meet her friend. Phania and Melpomene related all this, without giggling, even though they realized that this must be the man who wrote to Caenis from Crete. Hoping to discover secrets, they offered to take a message; they offered to let him leave a note. He thanked them, but declined both offers, and he was still frowning as he collected his escort and left.

* * *

Rome had its quiet places.

He stepped from the pushing turmoil of the street into one of the dusty gardens that were open to the public, where the street traders' cries immediately dropped to a distant background hum as if a giant door curtain had just swung closed across the garden gate. Even in Rome a man could stand and think.

Then, forcing a path along the Via Triumphalis—the same way he had once strolled to the Theater of Balbus with Caenis at his heels—he came to the great open spaces of the Ninth District, where no one was allowed to live except the caretakers of the public buildings and the priests at the temples and monuments. Plenty of people came this way, but once past the elegant Theater of Marcellus this was another area where the noise dimmed and the pace of daily life pleasantly slowed. On the Field of Mars, returning armies traditionally rested and polished up their trophies before their triumphal entry into Rome. The princes of the Empire and their chief men had established their memorial buildings here: the Theater of Pompey, the Baths of Agrippa, the Pantheon, and the Mausoleum of Augustus.

Here too, in a muted corner of the city between that curve in the river and the dominating double heights of Capitol Hill, stood a series of monumental enclosures, the Porticoes. Cool marble colonnades surrounded squares containing temples or planted groves, their internal walls adorned with magnificent frescoes and their quiet cloisters filled with two centuries of booty from Egypt, Asia Minor, and Greece. First on the right was the Portico of Octavia, produced by Augustus in honor of his sister; within its Corinthian columns he had deposited half the workshop of the sculptors Pasiteles and Dionysius, plus some of the finest antiques a civilized collector ever managed to loot, including a Venus and a Cupid of Praxiteles. It contained temples to Jupiter and Juno, and schools. This Portico also boasted a superbly endowed public library.

The searcher rested, his feet upon crisply frosted grass, his face upturned to the open sky, creamy as papyrus with the faint threat of rain. He gazed absently at Lysippus' slender group of Alexander and his generals conferring before the Battle of Granicus. Then once again he left his slaves outside, some squatting on their haunches and others lounging out of the wind beside the mighty columns, staring at passers-by.

The reading room was huge: thousands of manuscript rolls set into the walls like doves in a columbarium, guarded by humorless busts of safely dead historians and poets. He noticed a roped-off area where a major reorganization was in hand. Caenis could well be involved with this; she was the sort of girl anybody would ask to help.

He invented an excuse to potter about, enlisting advice from the custodian of maps. "Granicus, sir? Is that somewhere near the Bosphorus? No, here we are—it's on the Sea of Marmora."

"Thanks. Stupid of me. Must have plodded through Alexander's campaigns often enough at school."

A familiar shape on a mapskin arrested him. Caenis had called the island a scrawny goose braised in a swordfish pot: "Somebody interested in Crete?"

"Just been returned, sir." The custodian looked sheepish. "We don't normally loan out the maps."

"Nudged into it, eh?" The custodian pretended not to understand him. "What's that racket over there?"

"Overhauling the main catalogue, sir; quite a task. A lady who is helping reminded us about the two hundred thousand volumes Mark Antony lifted from the Library at Pergamum. Some poor dog must have recorded those! She said, did we realize that Cleopatra was just a girl who liked to curl up with a good read. . . ." He subsided into giggles.

After a worrying pause the senator abruptly grinned too, transfiguring his face. "Sounds like Caenis!" He could hear her voice in his head, deceptive and crisp, as she made the daft comment. "Is she here?"

"Not now."

"Ah."

Another pause.

Eighteen months abroad was nothing to a man who had already lived away from home, doing his military service at a much younger, more impressionable age. Who could say what eighteen months might bring to an ambitious female slave?

He had expected Caenis to make her way. Yet there seemed an odd discrepancy today. He had marked her as a worker. Now she seemed to rely on others, while she merely went flitting from place to place, never needing to lift her pen; for a slave she was taking horribly public risks.

"Speaking of Caenis—I have something of hers I borrowed."

"You could drop in on her at Antonia's house, sir. You might be offered lunch!"

A much longer pause: Antonia's house? Drop in? Lunch?

On rare occasions elderly citizens grew so incapable of managing their own affairs that unscrupulous slaves took over their property and ruled like monarchs in their homes, while the senile patrons were locked away in little rooms and starved. . . . Still, Antonia had family to protect her interests. Her son Claudius, though kept from public life, was an author and antiquarian—perfectly fit to supervise if ever his mother's capacities failed. And not Caenis, surely? Caenis could not be capable of abusing an old woman.

"Thanks!" the senator contented himself with saying sternly in reply.

He went home. He had lunch by himself.

* * *

There were two hundred public bathhouses in Rome. Fortunately, Phania and Melpomene had mentioned which one Caenis used.

He was struggling down the Clivus Tuscus from the main Roman Forum, dragging his tired train of attendants like a magpie's unwieldy tail, when Cornelius Capito came out of the bookshop on the corner, hailed him, and tagged along. By then the baths were in sight, so he stopped to converse as a man was supposed to do. A detachment of Guards came tramping straight up the center of the road, grinding down anyone who meandered in their path; as the grumbling crowds pressed back into the gutters, Vespasian and Capito moved under the awning of a wineshop. Vespasian propped himself on the counter, with its inset jars of red and white beverages; he paid for warmed measures for his acquaintance and himself, then spun a coin to the captain of his slaves so they too ordered a round, glancing at him sideways, unable to believe their luck.