“What could he buy out here for twenty aurei? For that much gold, he could stay home and have whatever it was brought to him.”
“It is interesting, isn’t it?” Cassia said, ignoring my irritation. “Not a Saturnalian gift, surely. It is fashionable for the patrician classes to give each other very low-value presents for Saturnalia. The cheaper or sillier the object, the more it indicates affection for the receiver.”
I didn’t bother to comment on how ridiculous that was.
We reached the Pons Agrippae and crossed it, the wide arched bridge taking us to the Campus Flaminius and its public buildings and temples.
I expected Cassia to turn east for the Quirinal once we passed the Theatrum Marcelli. At home, we’d refresh ourselves and discuss how we’d find one small person—male or female—in all of Rome for the senator and Nero.
Instead, Cassia headed south, past the Forum Bovarium and made for the Aventine.
While most people had gone to the games today, there were still plenty taking advantage of the holiday to run last-minute errands or maybe break into empty apartments or domii. I couldn’t get close enough to ask where Cassia was going until we’d entered a street at the base of the hill.
“If you want to speak to Nonus Marcianus, he’s at the games,” I said. Marcianus’s home and practice were nearby, but at the moment, he’d be at the Circus to set broken bones, sew up wounds, or take dead gladiators away for burial.
“I know,” Cassia said. “I seek someone else.”
“Who?” I demanded.
She turned to me serenely. “The thief. If I am right, I know who he is and where his family lives.”
Cassia smiled at my astonishment and strolled on without further word.
Chapter 4
I followed Cassia past the turnoff to Marcianus’s home and along a street that grew narrower as we went. This lane ran behind insulae that lined the base of the hill, finer homes rising above us.
Just before the path ended in a blank space between high walls, Cassia pivoted and started up a staircase cut into the hill. I hastened after her, not liking the dim closeness of the passageway.
We encountered no one at all as we ascended, to my surprise. The cutthroats who would wait in a confined space like this must also be at the games today.
We emerged into another lane, this one lined with buildings that could barely be called homes. They were low, built against the backs of insulae on the main streets, and consisted of slanted walls, slabs of tiled roofs, and small arched openings. I could see inside the doorways as we passed—the apartments were more or less alcoves that contained a stool and table or pallet, or nothing at all.
Cassia stopped in front of one arch that had a thin cloth tacked over its opening. She scratched at the cloth and called inside.
She spoke Greek, so I did not understand her, but she clearly expected those inside to know that language.
We waited in silence for a long moment before a woman who couldn’t be long past twenty summers pulled back the curtain. She was slim, with straight black hair, but too tall, I thought, to be the thief Drusus described.
She started violently when she saw me, and froze, her hand on the curtain.
Cassia spoke again, her tone reassuring. The young woman darted back inside, her voice rising as she called to someone there. Cassia caught the curtain before it dropped and followed her in.
The inside of the hovel was as shallow as the others I’d passed, the back wall composed of the rough bricks of whatever insulae or house lay behind it. The room held only a table and three stools, one of which had been hastily pushed back.
Another curtain closed us off from whatever spaces lay beyond. The woman had disappeared behind this second cloth, but before it fluttered closed, I spied the family’s shrine—a table containing an oil lamp and a small, closed wooden cupboard. Oddly, I saw no masks or tokens of their ancestors, though I reasoned that, being Greek, they might have different traditions.
“Leave the rudis against the wall,” Cassia whispered to me. “They are frightened of gladiators. Any armed men, actually.”
“Who are they?” I whispered back. I propped the rudis against the wall beside the door, the stones there so rough they had no trouble keeping the sword upright.
“Her husband is a freedman, a laborer, working as he can. They’re from Philippi.”
She named a city in the Greek mainland, in Macedonia. It was a Roman colony now, I knew from a gladiator who’d been captured and sold into the games from there. He’d claimed his grandfather had fought in a battle near Philippi between Marcus Antonius and Octavian before Octavian had become Augustus, many years ago. I’d never been able to find out more about this story, because Aemil had traded him soon after his arrival.
I wanted to ask Cassia more questions, such as what she’d meant when she’d said she knew the thief, but the woman abruptly returned.
She pushed a boy in front of her, her fingers clamped around the base of his neck. The boy had straight black hair that was pale with dust and wore a soiled tunic, exactly as Drusus had described. The lad hung his head but peeped up at us defiantly.
