This roost was another point of disagreement. All my career I had operated as an informer from a gruesome apartment in Fountain Court up on the Aventine. Complainants could traipse up the six flights of stairs and rouse me from bed to listen to their woes. Timewasters baulked at the climb. Bad fellows who wanted to dissuade me from my investigations by hitting me hard on the head could be heard coming.

When Helena and I had needed more spacious living accommodation we moved across the road, keeping my old place to work from. I had let Petronius move in after his wife threw him out for philandering, and even though we were no longer partners, he was still there. Anacrites insisted that we now required somewhere to stash the scrolls we amassed for the Census job, somewhere without Petro glowering at us disapprovingly. What we did not need, as I wasted my breath saying, was to install ourselves among the deadbeats at the Saepta Julia.

He fixed it up without consulting me. That was the kind of partner my mother had stuck me with.

The Saepta is a large enclosure next to the Pantheon and the Election Hall. Its internal arcades in those days-before the great clearances-were home to informers. The ones who lurked there were the slyest and grubbiest. The political creeps. Nero's old crawlers and grasses. No tact and no taste. No ethical standards. The glory of our profession. I wanted nothing to do with any of them, but Anacrites had plunged us right into the middle of their louse-ridden habitat.

The other low class of Saepta Julia wildlife was composed of goldsmiths and jewelers, a clique loosely formed around a group of auctioneers and antique-dealers. One of them being my father, from whom it was my habit to keep as far away as possible.

“Welcome to civilization!” crowed Pa, bursting in within five minutes of us arriving back there.