Wondering if I had stumbled on something to do with Laeta's motive for inviting me, I carried on being reverent about the liquid gold: "I do know your estimable society is not named after any old table condiment, but a staple of cultured life. Olive oil is any cook's master ingredient. It lights the best homes and public buildings. The military consume vast quantities. It's a base for perfumes and medicines. There's not a bathhouse or athletic gymnasium that could exist without oily body preparations—"

"And it makes a fail-safe contraceptive!" concluded one of the more jolly stylus-shovers.

I laughed and said I wished I had known that seven months ago.

* * *

Feeling thoughtful, I returned my attention to the food. Plainly this suited the others; they wanted outsiders to keep quiet while they showed off. The conversation became encoded with oblique references to their work.

The last speaker's remark had me grinning. I could not help thinking that if I passed on the stylus-shover's suggestion Helena would scoff that it sounded like making love to a well-marinaded radish. Still, olive oil would certainly be easier to obtain than the illegal alum ointment which we had intended to use to avoid starting a family. (Illegal because if you took a fancy to a young lady who was of the wrong status you were not supposed to speak to her, let alone bed her—while if your fancy was legal you had to marry and produce soldiers.) Olive oil was not cheap, though there was plenty available in Rome.

There was a suitably Hispanic theme throughout the meal. This made for a tasty selection, yet all with a similar presentation: cold artichokes smothered in fish-pickle sauce from the Baetican coast; hot eggs in fish-pickle sauce with capers; fowl forcemeats cooked with fish-pickle and rosemary. The endives came naked but for a chopped onion garnish—though there was a silver relish dish of you-guessed-it placed handily alongside. I made the mistake of commenting that my pregnant girlfriend had a craving for this all-pervasive garum; the gracious bureaucrats immediately ordered some slaves to present me with an unopened amphora. Those who keep frugal kitchens may not have noticed that fish-pickle is imported in huge pear-shaped vessels—one of which became my personal luggage for the rest of the night. Luckily my extravagant hosts lent me two slaves to carry the dead weight.

As well as the deliciously cured hams for which Baetica is famous, the main dishes tended to be seafood: few of the sardines we all joke about, but oysters and huge mussels, and all the fish harvested from the Adantic and Mediterranean coasts—dory, mackerel, tuna, conger eel, and sturgeon. If there was room to throw a handful of prawns into the cooking pot as well, the chef did so. There was meat, which I suspected might be dashing Spanish horse, and a wide range of vegetables. I soon felt crammed and exhausted—though I had not so far advanced my career an inch.

As it was a club, people were moving from table to table informally between courses. I waited until Laeta had turned away, then I too slipped off (ordering the slaves to bring my pickle jar), as if I wanted to circulate independently. Laeta glanced over with approval; he thought I was off to infiltrate some policy-molders' network.

I was really intending to sneak for an exit and go home. Then, when I dodged through a doorway ahead of my bearers and the garum, I crashed into someone coming in. The new arrival was female: the only one in sight. Naturally I stopped in my tracks, told the slaves to put down my pickle jar on its elongated point, then I straightened my festive garland and smiled at her.

TWO

She had been swathed in a full-length cloak. I like a woman well wrapped up. It's good to ponder what she's hiding and why she wants to keep the goodies to herself.

This one lost her mystery when she bumped into me. Her long cloak slithered floorwards, to reveal that she was dressed as Diana the Huntress. As definitions go, "dressed" was only just applicable. She wore an off-one-shoulder little gold pleated costume; one hand carried a large bag from which emerged a chink of tambourine clackers while under her spare armpit were a quiver and a silly toy hunting bow.

"A virgin huntress!" I greeted her happily. "You must be the entertainment."

"And you're just a big joke!" she sneered. I bent and retrieved her cloak for her, which allowed me to peruse a shapely pair of legs. "You're in the right place to get kicked somewhere painful!" she added pointedly; I straightened up fast.

There was still plenty to look at. She would have come up to my shoulder but was wearing cork heels on her natty hide hunting boots. Even her toenails were polished like alabaster. Her

smooth, extremely dark skin was a marvel of depilatory care; she must have been plucked and pumiced all over—just thinking about it made me wince. Equal attention had been lavished on her paintwork: cheeks heightened with the purple bloom of powdered wine lees; eyebrows given super-definition as perfect semicircles half a digit thick; lids glowing with saffron; lashes smothered in lampblack. She wore an ivory bangle on one forearm and a silver snake on the other. The effect was purely professional. She was nobody's expensive mistress (no gemstones or filigree) and since women were not invited tonight, she was nobody's guest.

She had to be a dancer. Her physique looked well fleshed but muscular. A shining swatch of hair, so black it had a deep blue sheen, was being held back from her brow in a simple twist which could be rapidly loosened for dramatic effect. She had both hands posed with a delicacy that spoke of practice with castanets.

"My mistake," I pretended to apologize. "I had been promised a Spanish dancer. I was hoping you were a bad girl from Gades."

"Well I'm a good girl from Hispalis," she countered, trying to sweep past me. Her accent was crisp and her Latin abrasive. But for the Baetican theme of the evening it might have been hard to place her origins.

Thanks to my trusty amphora I was keeping the doorway well blocked. If she squeezed through, we were going to be pleasantly intimate. I noted the look in her eye, suggesting that one wrong move in confined conditions and she was liable to bite my nose off.

"I'm Falco."

"Well get out of my way, Falco."

Either I had lost my charm, or she had sworn a vow to avoid handsome men with winsome smiles. Or could it be she was worried by my big jar of fermented fish entrails?

An oldish man with a cithara stepped from a room across the corridor. His hair was grizzled and his handsome features had dark, Mauretanian coloring. He took no interest in me. The woman acknowledged his nod and turned after him. I decided to stop and watch their performance.

"Sorry; private room!" she smirked, and closed the door smack in my face.

"Absolute nonsense! The Baetican Society has never encouraged plotting in smoky corners. We don't allow private parties here—"

It was Laeta. I had dallied too long and he had followed me. Overhearing the girl turned him into the worst kind of clerk who knows it all. I had stepped back to avoid getting my elegant Etruscan nose broken, but he pushed right past me intent on barging after her. His overbearing attitude almost made me decide against going in, but he had drawn me back into his orbit once more. The patient slaves wedged my amphora on its point against the doorframe and we sailed into the salon where the rude girl was to do her dance.

As soon as my eyes wandered over the couches I realized that Laeta had lied to me. Instead of the high-class world governors he had led me to expect, this so-called select dining club admitted people I already knew—including two I would have crossed Rome on foot to avoid.