The River God's Vengeance(22)

He rubbed his chin. “Some predict the river walk will be ankle deep by morning, and that’s why I’m clearing out tonight. It could be up into the Forum Boarium and in the Circus by next morning. Personally, I don’t think it’s going to be all that quick, but I’m not taking any chances.”

“Wise move. What about the warehouses and the boats?”

“The river people have known this fiood was coming for more than a year. They’ve taken precautions. Goods have been stored up higher than usual. Anything made of wood’s likely to be lost though.” He shrugged again. “Nothing that can’t be replaced. Inside the City”—he jerked a thumb back over his shoulder toward the city wall that rose behind him— “that, I’m not responsible for. But I hope your house is on high ground.”

“High enough,” I told him. Something was tickling away at the back of my mind, some business that I had previously had planned for the wharf area. That was my greatest problem—I had too many things crowding my mind, each demanding my attention. Then I remembered.

“Do you know of a barge owner named Lucius Folius?”

“Certainly. He owns at least a hundred barges on the river. I heard he was killed in that insula collapse yesterday.”

“He was, along with his wife and his whole household. Has anyone been acting for him here, a factor or a business partner? Someone is going to have to take over his operations.”

“No one’s showed up yet, but it’ll take awhile in any case. I know he had a factor downriver at Ostia to handle the overseas part of the trade. All the river trades have their headquarters at Ostia. Like I said, nothing’s going to come up from Ostia for a while.”

“He can come by road,” I told him. “I’m going to send a summons. I have questions about Lucius Folius that need answering. What sort of trade did he engage in?”

“At this end, it was mostly general cargoes: slaves, worked metal, oil, some livestock, and paying passengers. Light loads for the most part. A lot more comes into Rome than goes out of it.”

“And what did he bring in?”

“He had some fish barges, Rome being a great consumer of sea fish. The usual wines and exotic slaves for the great households. That was at the Ostia end. He also brought in a good deal of cargo from along the river. I’d estimate that at least half of his imports were picked up at the wharves between here and Ostia.”

“Agricultural products, I take it?”

“For the most part. And building materials.”

My neck prickled in that old, familiar fashion, and I felt a little smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. “Building materials, you say?”

“Absolutely. I won’t say that he had a monopoly on the stuff—a lot comes in through the landward gates—but I’d wager that more than half of the timber and brick and roofing tile, sand and mortar and so forth, that came up by river arrived in his hulls.”

“Stone? Marble? Lead and bronze for roofs?”

Ogulnius shook his bald head. “No, those things are used mainly for the big public projects—the temples and porticoes and the restoration works. In the last ten years, 90 percent of that material’s gone into Pompey’s big theater and its complex out on the Campus Martius. The great men like Pompey mostly contract independently for work like that, use their own slaves and freedmen, and buy directly from the quarrymen. I heard Pompey just bought his own quarries and workers outright to spare himself the trouble of going through middlemen. He bypassed the wharves here and built his own up past the Island, where he could unload near his project.

“No, Aedile, men like that would not deal with the likes of Lucius Folius, unless they were putting up housing for the workers. Even then they’d deal directly with the building contractors, not with a man who hauled brick and mortar.”

“You’ve been of great help, Marcus Ogulnius,” I commended him.

“Always happy to be of service to Senate and People,” he said, beaming. They had certainly been a source of profit to him.

We reentered the City near the Sublician Bridge, just off the Forum Boarium of which Ogulnius had just spoken. It, along with the nearby Circus Maximus, lay on the lowest ground within the walls and was thereby the area most vulnerable to fiooding.

Here, just a few hundred paces from the rising Tiber, nobody seemed to be taking any action. All the gossip I overheard was about the brawl in the Forum earlier that day. On a whim I went over to one of the stall keepers, an old fellow from across the river who sold kids and smelled very much like his merchandise. When I asked whether he and the other market people were preparing for a fiood, he merely looked amused.