This is a serious shock for my parents," Helena rebuked me. One of their children can at last be mentioned at respectable dinner parties." I held back the jokes. Their daughter had left home to live with a lowlife, me. Now that Helena and I had daughters of our own I understood just what that meant. As parents we had better things to do than talk about Aulus. Freed for once from the threat of little visitors in the bedroom, we tested out our apartment with passion. I had hired one of the identical room-sets in a small block set around a courtyard with a well. There were balconies on the street side, for show; tenants could not access them. All around us were other visiting families; we could hear their voices and the knocking of furniture, but since we did not know them we did not have to care if they were listening in. We managed not to break the bed. I hate being at a disadvantage when the landlord comes to check the fixtures and fittings schedule before he lets you leave. After a short deep sleep, I awoke abruptly. Helena was face down and dreaming beside me, pressed closely to my side. I lay with my right arm along her long bare back, my fingers lightly splayed. If there had been a pillow, it had gone missing. My head was back, my chin up. As always at the very start of a mission, my brain was full of busy thoughts. I had been hired to find the absent Daily Gazette scribe. It was a mission I was foolish to take on, like most jobs I do. The only advantage to this one was that there were no dead bodies, or so I reassured myself. As I lay quiet, I thought back to how it had started. Back in Rome, the request first came obliquely via the imperial secretariats. There was a top man there called Claudius Laeta, who sometimes gave me business; the business always turned sour, so I was glad that Laeta's name was not attached to this. Well, not obviously. You could never be sure, with that smooth swine. At home two weeks ago, someone on the Palatine had recom mended my investigative skills to the scribblers at the Gazette. A scared little public slave was sent to sound me out; he wasn't telling me much, because he knew nothing. I was intrigued. If this problem had any significance, then as Chief of Correspondence, Claudius Laeta should have been made aware of it. the Daily Gazette was the official mouthpiece of the government. In fact, when the slave appeared in my office being secretive, one attraction was the delicious idea that scribes at the Gazette might be trying to work a flanker on Laeta. There was something that would make me even happier than going behind Laeta's back. putting one over on Anacrites, the Chief Spy. That glorious hope seemed a possibility. If there was a hitch at the Daily Gazette then, like Laeta, Anacrites ought to have been told about it. His role was protecting the Emperor, and the Gazette existed nowadays to burnish the Emperor's name. Anacrites was away at his villa on the Bay of Neapolis. He had told my mother, whose lodger he had been briefly, and she had passed it on to me so I would be jealous of his prosperity. Stuff his prosperity. Anacrites upset me just by talking to Ma, and he knew it. What he did not know, apparently, was that the scribes who produced the Gazette were asking for expert assistance. He was away, so they had come to me. I liked that. Initially I was only told by the messenger that there was a problem with an employee. Even so, curiosity grabbed me; I told the little slave I would be happy to help, and would call at the Gazette offices that same afternoon. In Rome I worked from an office at my own house on the Embankment, just under the cliff side of the Aventine Hill. At this period of my informing career, I had two younger assistants nominally, Helena's brothers, Aulus and Quintus. Both had their own preoccupations, so I was on my own with the Gazette enquiry. I felt relaxed; it had all the signs of a nice little escapade that I could handle blindfold. That fine day two weeks ago, therefore, after my usual lunch with Helena, I had taken a pleasant walk to the Forum. There I did some preliminary homework. Most jobs came to me without warning; this time, it was good not to have to make the usual snap decision about accepting the work. At the column where the news is hung up daily, a handful of idlers were telling each other utter nonsense about chariot-racing. These time-wasters could not decide which way four horses were facing, let alone work out the odds on the Blues making a comeback with that snotty driver they unwisely bought and their new quartet of knock kneed greys. In front of the column, a solitary slave stood copying headings, using big letters for his extracts so it would fill his tablet and look good. His master was most likely an over-fed slug in a palanquin who never read the stuff anyway. When I say read', I mean had it read to him." It was late in the day for perusing the column. People who needed to keep up to date would have acquired the news hours ago. Fashionable politicos would want to start outmanoeuvring their rivals before the rivals were up and networking. Adulterers would have to invent a good alibi before their spouses were awake. Even innocent householders liked to be abreast of the edicts. Helena Justina's father always sent along his secretary in time for him to bury himself in his copy over breakfast. That, I was sure, had nothing to do with Decimus Camillus wanting to avoid conversation with his noble wife as he blearily ate his nice white morning rolls. I checked today's familiar list. Most just made me yawn. Who cares about the number of births and deaths recorded in the city yesterday, or money paid into the Treasury and statistics relating to the corn supply? The election lists stink. Occasionally I found an intriguing nugget among the magistrates" edicts, wills of famous people, and reports of trials, though not often. The Acta Diurna was instituted to list the doings of the Senate, tedious decrees and toadying acclamations; automatically I skipped that. I sometimes consulted the court circular, if I needed to see the Emperor and did not want to waste time hanging around on the Palatine only to learn he had gone to his granny's villa for a festival. Now I skipped to the end, the most popular section. Here would be. prodigies and marvels [the usual lightning strikes and calves born with three heads]; notice of the erection of new public buildings [hmm]; conflagrations [everyone loves a good blaze in a temple]; funerals [for the old women]; sacrifices [ditto]; the programme of any public games [for everyone; the most consulted section]; and privately submitted advertisements from snobs who wanted the whole world to know they had a daughter newly engaged to a tribune [boring! Well, boring unless you had once flirted with the daughter] [or with the tribune. At last I reached the best bit. what the scribes discreetly call amatory adventures." Scandal, with the names of the parties robustly revealed, because we are an open city. Deceived husbands need to be told what is going on, lest they be charged with condoning it, which is statutory pimping. And the rest of us like a bit of fun. I was disappointed. Where the gossip should be was just a note that Infamia, the columnist, was on holiday. He often was on holiday." Everyone always joked about it. Let's be blunt. it was thought that senators" wives whose affairs he discovered sometimes gave him a free ride to shut him up, but the senators who knew about it then hired thugs to track down Infamia, and the thugs sometimes caught him.

On holiday" meant our scandalmonger was laid up with wounds again. With no juicy stories to delay me further, soon I was being interviewed by the rather dour scribes who run the news service. Or so they thought. I had more experience. In reality, I was interviewing them. There were two. Holconius and Mutatus. They looked about fifty, worn out by years of deploring modern life. Holconius, the elder and presumably senior, was a seamy, thin-featured stylus-pusher who last smiled when the story came in about the Empress Messalina plying her trade in a brothel. Mutatus was still more po-faced. I bet he never even chuckled when the Divine Claudius pronounced his edict that farting was legal at dinner parties.