Lou Muller, who in Vesunna called himself Lucius the book dealer, stared in horror at the crumpled corpse that had been Clodius Eprius. The gun shot still seemed to echo in the room. “Jesus H. Christ, Mark!” he said, and he was not speaking Latin at all. “The patrol-”

“Lou, you can take the patrol and stuff it right on up-” Mark Alvarez tucked away the pistol and rubbed his shoulder. “The old son of a bitch damn near broke my collarbone. What was I supposed to do, let him yell until all the neighbors came? Speaking of which-” He scooped up the Aleadai and trotted into the street. His partner followed, still expostulating.

“Oh, shut up and listen to me, will you, please?” Alvarez growled. “Why do we make a good team, anyway? It’s not just because you’re the fellow who knows his way around the second-century empire and I’m the one with the pull to get a timer. I’ve got the brains to get you out of trouble when you screw up, which you did. For one thing, even I know-you’ve told me often enough-Stobaeus isn’t going to be born for a couple of hundred years yet. For another, and worse, that geezer was never going to sell us the play after you got his back up.”

“But I offered him seventy-five aurei!”

“That didn’t impress him, now did it? And it doesn’t impress me, either. What’re seventy-five aurei to us? Thirty credits for the gold (always thanking God for fusion-powered transmutation), the same for some authentic molds, and voila! Aurei! Whereas we can-and we will-get easily fifty thousand credits for a lost play of Euripides.”

“Sophokles,” Muller corrected absently.

“Whatever. And as for the Time Patrol, why are we here in the boondocks instead of at the library of Alexandria? Why do we insist on so much privacy when we make our deals? Just so they won’t run across us. And they won’t. Erasing this fellow won’t leave any clues downtime. We don’t change anyone’s ancestry, because his wife’s been dead for years. We did check him out, you know.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Did anyone see us leave?”