A Comedy of Terrors Read online

“Would you give a loan to someone because of his jokes, Albia?”

  “Hell, no.” Hell, yes, I would! “But Laetilla may be sick of whingers pleading at her. ‘I’m in such trouble, it was not my fault, I don’t know what I’m going to do, they won’t give me any more time to pay, I’m thinking I’ll jump in the Tiber and drown myself. Oh, Laetilla, you have to help me!’ After that, a man with a crackling silver tongue may be exactly the light entertainment she needs. She’s desperate for relief from turgid misery. Given a wisecrack that makes her laugh, she may even hand out twice as much cash, with cheaper interest and longer credit.”

  “You are inventing,” replied Suza, stubbornly. “You have no evidence for this picture, Albia.”

  I growled. The trouble with my growing household was that more people were there to criticise. “Stop asking me, then. Talking over a case with you is worse than discussing it with a husband.”

  Suza looked worried. “That sounds like you have had more than one.”

  “I was married once before.” We were very young; he was an ex-soldier; we had plenty of interaction—though not much of it was talk.

  “Does Tiberius Manlius know?” demanded Suza, protectively. She seemed to believe he was a really good man, married to a really dangerous wife.

  “It’s no secret, Suza.”

  “Definitely?”

  “Of course he knows. We both had partners long ago.”

  “Oh, he was married to that woman Laia!” Suza remembered, losing her anxiety.

  “Yes. That woman.” Bloody Laia. The skinny temple-devotee, who had deviously dumped Sheep on us.

  One thing I liked a lot about Tiberius, a fact he had honestly told me quite early on in our history, was that he had had the good taste to thunderously cheat on Laia.

  XXII

  Back at home, my husband was now missing, though not out cheating on me. “Sudden site-call from the vigiles,” whistled Larcius the foreman, toothlessly. “Dead body found.”

  Since Tiberius had had to leave, while Larcius and the apprentice were still up on a trestle madly laying bricks, Fornix the cook was now mixing their mortar.

  “Dromo was here. Couldn’t he have helped with that?”

  “He decided he ought to play escort with the master.”

  “He must have guessed you had a job for him, Larcius.”

  “This is nothing,” Fornix assured me. “Like stirring a sauce with a huge spurtle. I’ve got the muscles. Anyone who has put in years with a pestle and mortar can spade together hydraulic lime and aggregate.”

  He sounded as though he had done time on building sites. The big fellow was wrapped in his second-best apron, with his sleeves rolled up, as he really put his back into it. He was happy, so were the builders. They ought to be. When your bonding material is mingled by a celebrity chef, it will have a silken consistency, with no lumps of dry sand.

  I was assembling a cluster of talented staff. It was Fornix, too, who was teaching us all to look after the new donkey (“Always approach her from the side, say her name so she feels she has friends, and wipe her down when you take the bridle off in case the leather chafes.”) Gratus had wide domestic knowledge, plus a cynically varied repertoire to suit all types of visitor. Rodan could simply keep any visitor out by not answering the door. Glaphyra wiped noses, bottoms, tears or smears left on door-handles by sticky little fingers. Paris and Suza helped me. Even Dromo had his speciality: knowing the difference between the fillings in all the cakes sold at the baths.

  “A dead body, Larcius? Anyone say whose cadaver?”

  The messenger had been mysterious. Trust the vigiles. Unless a corpse was so important their tribune poked his nose in, death was a game to them: plucking a body off the pavement or out of the river, while helping themselves to any small change left on the corpse. This time, though, someone thought it would interest Tiberius: Morellus, no doubt. I might have to wait some time to hear about it. I decided to have my lunch.

  Only well-scraped dishes remained when Tiberius came home, trailed by a disconsolate Dromo. I had even brought the builders in to eat with us, which seemed fair after they were pulled off their holiday break. Gaius and Lucius had shown us their latest trick, learned from the Morelli that morning, which involved goggling their real eyes so horribly they bulged like fake ones. Glaphyra started teaching them that the words “That’s enough of that now” could actually mean it.

  Once Lucius, who lacked his elder brother’s social savvy, had nevertheless shown the eyes trick to their uncle, the boys were removed. Glaphyra thought children deserved breaks from adult company. I took Tiberius to a private space, bringing a food bowl I had reserved for him.

  “What about me, then?” came a sad call after us.

  “It’s all gone. You’ll have to wait until dinner, Dromo.”

  Dromo started complaining, but Glaphyra leaned over from the balcony to say that that would be enough of that too.

  Dromo called her a rude word. Cringe!

  My discussion with Tiberius stalled, while he explained to Dromo how there was to be no swearing at other staff, or else some slave boy’s next job would be cleaning dead bodies’ orifices for a second-rate embalmer who wouldn’t provide any lamb’s wool to perform the job but made assistants use their fingers …

  It was rare for his master to discipline Dromo. I was impressed. Dromo soon managed to recover.

  There are times when a wise wife sits quiet and lets her man eat his food.

  If Tiberius ever lost his temper, I knew something disastrous had happened. I let him finish morosely chewing, then I tidied away his bowl, spoon and napkin, leaving them on a side-table outside the room, where Gratus would ensure they were silently collected. I sat beside Tiberius on a couch. I took his hand. I waited.

  Eventually, he shook away my hand, but only to lean on the couch back with his arm around me. He pressed his head against mine, breathing slowly, taking comfort. It was safe to ask what had happened. He groaned. He told me the nut-war had been whipped up to a new level, then described the call-out. It had been shocking.

  The scene-of-crime was a warehouse. A body had been discovered by a wholesaler who hired space there. The dead man was crammed into a sack. This had originally contained walnuts, which until recently were being sold by one of the traditional hawkers, acting for the wholesaler—who opened the oddly bulging sack and recognised his man.

  This dead street-seller had doggedly refused to change. He declined to buy from the newcomers and stuck with his old supplier. Now he had been left with his limbs folded up, like a linen serviette, then tied in place with extremely tight twine. Morellus believed that while that had happened to him he was still alive. He must have realised what his final fate would be. Making him suffer was a sadistic element. The sack had been deposited in a side-room that formed a deep square bin for storing nuts. Walnuts, hazelnuts and cobnuts in heavy quantities had been piled on top, then tamped down, probably by people jumping on them, going by the number that were cracked open.

  “Morellus reckoned the man had been there for three days. At some point he suffocated.”

  “Bad smell?”

  “Whole bad scene.”

  “Dare I ask, love, did the warehouse belong to your brother-in-law?”

  “No. Not him, nor Uncle Tullius, thankfully. Another small operator, a slightly disorganised absentee owner. His site-manager should have been vigilant—the whole point of warehouses is to be secure, and constantly monitored—but he is suffering from a bad heart, not doing his job well. When the vigiles fetched him and he saw what had happened, I thought he would drop dead from shock.”

  “Could the manager tell you anything useful?” I asked.

  “Not really. His regime is relaxed, to put it mildly. He admits he sometimes looked the other way if a vagrant was sheltering in a colonnade, but of course that was allegedly rare and only done out of charity during bad weather.”

  “Could a rough sleeper have committed this murder?”

 
“No. It’s plainly part of the nut-wars.”

  “It’s a complication, though,” I warned. “If you ever catch the real perpetrators, they could claim a vagrant was to blame.”

  “I’d like to find him anyway,” Tiberius said. “He may be a witness.”

  “You speak as if there was a special regular?”

  “Yes, one frequent visitor was described to me—though he sounds feeble, a wafting character, with no flesh on his bones, who melts away if anyone speaks to him. He wouldn’t have the strength or courage, let alone a motive.”

  “If he saw something happen, he is bound to have run away now,” I said. “He’ll be terrified.”

  “I know.” Tiberius was brooding. “I know, I know.”

  “So, back to the building manager. Does he have any ideas?”

  “He reckons the killers broke in. Obvious conclusion! He cannot have been supervising on any regular basis, but that’s a matter for the warehouse owner. If the manager had been going round properly, he might have discovered the intrusion while the poor victim could have been saved.”

  “I expect he blames Saturnalia.”

  “Indeed. Anyway, the manager knows what he has done, so Morellus isn’t pushing the matter. The wholesaler is innocent, of course. Leaving this body in his rental space was a warning for him to get out of town and let the criminals take over. He is utterly distressed that a loyal member of his team has been so savagely punished. They had worked together for twenty years. You can imagine.”

  “You and Morellus have spoken to this wholesaler?” I asked. “Any suggestion who the rivals are?”

  “Men in the shadows. He couldn’t—or dared not—supply names, though he knows how they operate. Same as happened to my brother-in-law—deals are closed by some shifty lag, who keeps his hat pulled down. No address ever given, details later found out to be fake, paid in cash or never paid at all, operatives vanish from sight after the keys are taken. These new crooks flit in and use space for a very brief time. Their rotten stock appears on the streets, with regular hawkers bullied into taking it. The street hawkers are all too scared to say who they have been made to buy their stock from.”

  “Don’t warehouse owners ever ask for references from customers they don’t know?”

  Tiberius gave a dry laugh. “Rarely. Tullius claims he can smell a wrong ’un. He says, if a tenant is going to cheat on him, they will provide fake refs in any case. He builds in slack to cover occasional mistakes. Besides,” admitted Tiberius, wryly, “I think Tullius, charming though he is, has a reputation for dealing with it, if anything goes bad on him. I’ve seen the accounts, remember. Marked absence of defaulters!”

  I would not have called Tullius Icilius charming. He had never charmed me. Tiberius and his uncle were quite different characters, although they co-existed in curious harmony. I hoped the same would happen eventually with Tiberius and his own nephews.

  “So,” I pondered, “the dead man is a street-seller who dared to stand up to bullying.”

  “Yes. Suffocating him is intended to dampen resistance elsewhere. As it undoubtedly will.”

  “You can’t blame people, love. Who wants to be killed in a trade dispute? And now,” I summed up, “you’ll have the usual questions. Did any witnesses see when or how the victim was taken to the site? Did he go willingly to meet someone, or was he kidnapped?”

  Tiberius sighed. “Morellus thinks anyone who saw what happened will go to ground in terror. He has troops out combing the neighbourhood nevertheless, stopping people in the street, knocking on doors.”

  “Waste of time.” I pre-judged it. “So, what next, love?”

  Tiberius shifted against me on the couch. “I shall engage with it in the way you would. I’ll find out if the dead man had any family or friends, then interview them myself in a different style from whatever they expect from the vigiles. Someone should know when he first disappeared, what he was doing beforehand, whom he might have met on that occasion, where he might have been snatched and who took him.”

  “Need any help?” I asked hopefully.

  But he shook his head. “Better not go in mob-handed. I want to approach people quietly, trying to win trust. The intelligent method you use, Albia: show understanding, promise no harm will come to them if they talk to me, sweet-talk them.” I pulled a face. I never classify sweetness as a tool of mine. “Anyway,” he tried to deflect me, “you must be fully occupied with that man who visits the bawd from Diana Aventina.”

  Accepting the distraction technique, I explained that she looked like a loan shark, not a bawd. “When you are next nuzzling up to your crony, you might ask Morellus whether he has a note of where Laetilla lives.” Usury was illegal, at least at the interest rates a shark would demand. The vigiles ought to have such a woman in their records.

  “Of course. Anything you need, my darling.” This was a blatant put-off.

  Tiberius did remind me that one tradition of Saturnalia is that the law against public gambling was suspended. My quarry might be addicted to dice; this could be the time of year when he went overboard with debts. Oh, joy! If I wanted to spy on Gaius Murrius, I would have to search for him among the inebriates who quarrelled over Soldiers and Twelve Lines in disreputable bars. I grumbled that I must remember to borrow my sister Favonia’s beaker and weighted dice to give me cover.

  Tiberius corrected me: gamblers would never choose to play Duodecim Scripta. If they wanted a race-and-strategy game, they would prefer Tabula, which was much faster.

  Almost the first time I noticed this husband of mine, he was outside a wine bar with their draughts board in front of him. On that occasion, I now believed, the only strategy in play was a hope of seeing me pass by. As I went about my business locally, I had caught his eye. The draughts board was bluff.

  Even so, he seemed to have a striking knowledge of games. This is something any wife should be aware of.

  As a magistrate, Tiberius Manlius always seemed very straight, but I liked to think there was a rapscallion underneath. A man with a past is less likely to feel that life has eluded him, and be more able to resist sudden urges towards excitement.

  Perhaps Nephele’s husband used to lead a boring life. Perhaps his trouble now was a middle-aged yearning to explore all the wickedness he felt he had missed. So, when he gamed, was he stupid? Was he being conned? Had too much Tabula against better players, probably swindlers who kept raising the stakes, kept him away from home and drawn him into debt with Laetilla?

  If so, it made me despondent. I knew there would be little hope of Nephele reforming Murrius. Divorcing him might be her only escape—though my chance of fees might trickle down the drain along with his debts.

  XXIII

  In early evening, when losers would start coming out to play, I set off to track down Murrius. We still had two days before the big Saturnalia feast. Of course, if this was Moon Day, with Mars and Mercury before the festival started on Jove’s Day, it would probably be called three days by inclusive Roman date counting. Such craziness reverts me into a stroppy barbarian: we had two working days by my system.

  When I set out at twilight, the atmosphere was already lively. In some ways most riots occurred publicly in the festival run-up; once the official holiday started, people would be trapped at home. Now, in anticipation of being stuck with their families for five grim days, men in particular were out on the loose. There were women too, and those women were intent on having a high old time. Both species were loud, though the girls tended to scream and totter more.

  I called the Vicus Armilustri our Street of Shame. It was a long, straight route across the top of the hill, easily used for an evening saunter or stops at the many drinks outlets; they were mainly guarded by bare-armed bouncers, some in colourful ethnic costume (rarely the costume of their home province). Paraded along the street were eye-watering party clothes. Most revellers had no idea of matching their dress to their maturity or status. The young threw themselves into shocking behaviour. The old had skin li
ke dried leather and the dead eyes of habitual drinkers. The middle-aged men were looking around, wondering where all the good parties were and whether they could shed their wives, while their women, in silly shoes that hurt their feet, gradually realised they should not have come, as they wished that they lived with better men. Once in a while we would hear next day that someone had been fatally stabbed or a young girl dragged down an alley and viciously raped.

  If this was the normal beat of Gaius Murrius, it need not brand him as seedy. Ordinary people walked down the Vicus Armilustri for genuine reasons. We kept up the pretence that for locals it was harmless. We just made sure we walked carefully to avoid being bashed into. We never showed fear. Or stared. Or giggled openly. We never made eye contact.

  I had looked through the notes Nephele had written for me. She had named a couple of wine bars Gaius Murrius liked: the Ephesian and the Syracusan. I knew them; they would not have been my choice for meeting friends. In these, customers could go inside to sit down at rough tables, but the prices were twice as much as at street-side stand-ups. The snacks might be more sophisticated (that is, smaller), but the wine would be the same.

  I took Paris. He brought knucklebones. Neither establishment we visited viewed this well; they wanted us to use their gaming boards, for which an addition would appear like magic on the bill. Neither was pleased to see us at all, really. One place decided I was a straying wife and Paris must be my honey-boy. The other thought Paris was there to lift purses, using me as his glamorous decoy. Not glamorous enough, Suza would have said.

  I was reluctant to ask if they had a customer called Murrius because if he was a regular they were bound to tell him. That would put him on the alert. Instead, at both bars we listened in to other people, straining to pick up names, eventually deciding he was not among the groups around us. Although Nephele had implied she had told me everything I could need, her details about him were witness banalities: he was of normal height, with dark hair, brown eyes, no marks, nothing remarkable. Rome’s inhabitants must number a million, half of them male, most fitting that description.