I could suggest reasons. He was a sinister shark with devious motives who manipulated everyone. He received a good salary for working as little as possible. I was just a freelance hero doing his best in a hard world, meanly paid for it, and always in arrears. Anacrites stayed in the Palace and dabbled in sophisticated concepts, while I was out saving the empire, getting filthy and beaten up.
I smiled quietly. 'I've no idea.'
He knew I was lying. Then he hit me with the words I dread to hear from bureaucrats: 'Time we made it all up, then! Marcus Didius, old friend, let's go out for a drink:'
Chapter III
He hauled me off to a thermopolium the Palace secretaries use. I had been there before. It was always full of ghastly types who liked to think they ruled the world. When secretariat papyrus beetles go out to socialise they have to burrow among their own kind.
They can't even find a decent hole. This was a shabby stand-up wine bar where the air smelt sour and one glance around the clientele explained it. The few pots of food looked caked with week-old crusts of gravy on their rims; nobody was eating from them. In a chipped dish a dry old gherkin tried to look impressive beneath a pair of copulating flies. A misshapen, bad-tempered male skivvy flung herb twigs into pannikins of hot wine boiled down to the colour of dried blood.
Even halfway through the morning, eight or ten inky blots in dingy tunics were Crammed up against one another, all talking about their terrible jobs and their lost chances for promotion. They swigged drearily as if someone had just told them the Parthians had wiped out five thousand Roman veterans and the price of olive oil had slumped. I felt ill just looking at them.
Anacrites ordered. I knew I was in trouble when he also settled the bill.
'What's this? I expect a Palace employee to dash for the latrine door whenever a reckoning hoves into view!'