Falco: The Official Companion (A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery) Read online

  Sweetheart, it seems our work is done with Albia. She is the complete Roman woman – wheedling, devious and brutal when she wants something. [SDD]

  Albia absorbs what being a Roman entails; she struggles to learn Greek. She gains professional insights from Falco and Helena; by See Delphi and Die she starts asking the right questions, for instance about the death of Cleonymus. Falco later notices, There were many things I had never explained or discussed with her, yet she had picked them up from fragments of conversation, almost from facts Helena and I had left unsaid. [SA] It will have its benefits. Always streetwise, at the end of Nemesis she decides a way to evade the unfair limitations on her future. Her choice is a surprise to Falco, who has previously told Thalia: my foster daughter is never going to run away to the circus. Albia has already had enough adventure. She wants to learn secretarial Greek and bookkeeping. [AL] But she finds a different way out for herself. You gave me a chance; I am grateful. I want to stay in Rome. But I am going to make myself a life, a life that is suitable and sustainable. Don’t tell me I cannot try … [NM]

  Marcus Didius Alexander Postumus

  Conceived in Alexandria, foetal in Nemesis. Not even born yet, this infant of questionable parentage is absolutely, archetypically a cuckoo in Falco and Helena’s nest.

  Nux

  We meet this very important dog (her opinion) in Time to Depart, where the scruffy Aventine stray decides Falco should adopt her. She was a tufty mongrel in several colours, with limpidly soulful eyes. Something about her big furry paws and her whiskery face had a dangerous appeal.

  A tenacious defender of her adopted family, she gets her way and joins the household after helping save Falco from a thug in a fight at the apartment. Thereafter she behaves like my brother’s two dogs, Nicky the Lakeland terrier and Samantha. Nux was a crazy, friendly, frowsty little mutt, always keen to give visitors a guided tour of rooms where we kept valuables. [SA] Walking Nux was always a good excuse to get out of the house. [NM]

  I can’t squeeze Nux into every book, but she appears regularly – otherwise readers complain. Although her skills as a sniffer dog are derided, it is she who finds the missing child in One Virgin Too Many. A tricky moment comes at the end of See Delphi and Die, where in an incident I don’t regret, Nux nearly eats the missing body. In Nemesis her passion for a piece of rope nearly lands Falco in trouble with Anacrites.

  Nux had become anxious and clinging after an episode on the Capitol where she was arrested by priestly acolytes who were looking for doggies to crucify. In addition to that, a succession of nasty male curs had occupied our front porch recently, suggesting Nux was on heat …[OVTM]

  Slaves

  I bought slaves who were obviously useless because I loathed the idea of owning them and I could not bring myself to bargain as hard as you had to for anyone with real skills. [AC]

  Falco comes late to ownership; then his slaves come and go fast. In The Jupiter Myth he fails to buy a nursemaid. In The Accusers, his Camillus relatives have fun over the useless cook Genius, who becomes a celebrity chef. ‘It’s a new kind of investment commodity,’ the senator joined in. ‘Genius never needs to visit a real kitchen – which is just as well, if I may tactfully mention the after-effects of that pork marinade …’

  By Saturnalia there are Galene, a nursemaid who wants to be a cook, and Jacinthus, a cook who wants to be anything else; luckily ten billeted soldiers do the chores instead. Here, Falco does impose his authority surprisingly, when the slaves try to take over his house.

  Two books later a nervous Falco has a slave bonanza but Helena takes charge.

  Falco brings home from Egypt a secretary, Katutis; he is free and just very grateful for what he believes to be a high-class job. They rub along, insofar as Falco is prepared to toe the line. Perhaps Katutis copies out the memoirs that form these novels.

  Falco’s Relatives

  Falco’s Parents

  Junilla Tacita, Ma

  My mother could wop three naughty children back in line while stirring a pot of tunic dye, discussing the weather, chewing a rough fingernail and passing on gossip in a thrilling undertone. And she knew how to ignore what she did not want to hear. [OB]

  She operates on the principle that if you want anything doing, do it yourself. She claims she never interferes. She wants to know everyone’s business. She had a way of saying nothing which was worth three scrolls of rhetoric. [OVTM] She sees no reason to let go after Falco leaves home; she invades his apartment to clean it, leave him a nice bit of dinner, and sweep out his female conquests. Obviously she cannot be based on my mother, or I would be scared to write such things.

  Ma lives in a flaky grey building on the Aventine, behind the Emporium, near the Temple of Minerva. This is where she brought up her children; Falco’s affection for the place, where he retains rights to return home to Mother, suggests that the cramped apartment Geminus walked out of was somewhere different. Falco pays his mother’s rent. Geminus sends her an annuity through the Auctioneers’ Guild, but we can imagine the distaste with which the indomitable Junilla Tacita refuses to spend this cash on herself; she uses it to educate her grandchildren.

  Her front door opens into the kitchen, which tends to be full of visitors who feel easily at home. When Sosia is there, Falco says, I suppose she had never been anywhere where there was so much going on in such good-humoured chaos … [SP] Many scenes in subsequent books occur there. It becomes a haunt of Anacrites, then hosts Ma’s eighty-year-old follower, Aristagoras. Despite his age, the papery swain was agile on his walking sticks. She brushed aside his adulation but let him into her apartment sometimes and gave him a panfried sardine as a reward for his faithfulness. On my arrival she always sent him packing. [SA]

  Early on, Ma seems to have no faith in Falco, appearing unfairly biased towards Festus. Falco complains, She treats me like a hopeless case. She speaks to me as if I were a delinquent child. The loss of my great-hearted brother burns between us like wormwood in the throat, a perpetual reproach. I don’t even know what she reproaches me for. I suspect she doesn’t know herself … [SP] Generally, Ma remains sceptical: Faced with a son who had noble motives, Ma lost interest. [AC]

  Not to be trifled with: an elderly Roman lady

  Even as early as The Silver Pigs, Ma is a little old lady. My mother’s face would never age. Only her skin had grown tired in recent years, so it no longer fitted properly on her bones. (Easy to write that at forty, incidentally – I might think twice now!) She keeps going through bustle and bossiness: a tiny, black-eyed old bundle who could rampage through a market like a barbarian army. [THF]. Love for her children and grandchildren, grumpily expressed but immoveable, and her endless determination to best Geminus, provide her motivation. Characteristically, Most days, Ma was either out, whirling about the Aventine on errands and causing annoyance, or else she was in, scrubbing away at pots or chopping like fury in her cooking area. [OB] In Saturnalia her daughters pay for her to have a cataract operation, which she endures with stoicism.

  In Nemesis, she claims her position as a wife, and I believe readers will cheer her at this moment.

  Marcus Didius Favonius (aka Geminus), Pa

  You might as well

  Accept the title – and income – of an auctioneer, join in

  The saleroom battles, flog lots under the hammer

  To a crowd of bidders – winejars, three-legged stools,

  Bookcases, cupboards, remaindered plays by nonentities …

  JUVENAL

  I devised Geminus for Shadows in Bronze after my own father asked piteously why Falco didn’t have a dad? Perhaps Falco’s Pa owes something to my father.

  Geminus is insidious. Outsiders think him a lovable rogue and can’t see why Falco barely tolerates him, whereas Falco knows the damage Geminus can inflict. In fairness, his children do remember their infancy with occasional affection; to his grandchildren, who don’t resent him, he becomes an attractive figure with a hint of mystery. Helena, who takes to him, tries to r
econcile Falco to him; she says his father may stand back, yet watches his offspring and worries over them. He even bops Anacrites, for hanging around Ma – though that is macho jealousy: ‘Whether it’s true doesn’t matter,’ roared Pa. ‘People should not be saying these terrible things about your mother …’ [OB]

  In Poseidon’s Gold, we learn that Pa abandoned his family as much because of pressures caused by overcrowding as because he was pursuing his redhead. Poverty forced Ma to take in a lodger, the childless Melitan moneylender who paid for Falco and Maia to attend school; his plea to adopt them caused Pa wild indignation. Junilla Tacita says of the family break-up: too many people crammed in too small a space. Too many quarrels and too many mouths to feed. Then people give up on each other sometimes … [PG] Years later, Falco notices with a start that his father still wears his wedding ring.

  ‘I am not unaware of your sister’s position … Leave this to me,’ declared my incorrigible parent, throwing himself into being magnanimous as eagerly as he had once fled the family coop. [OVTM]

  Geminus lived for over twenty years with Flora. It may be significant that they had no children. The town house on the banks of the Tiber to which they return after an exile in Capua is clearly a quiet haven. Flora is by no means his only flirtation; he even cosies up to Thalia in Alexandria.

  Physically, Geminus is a stocky, secretive, moody man, about sixty years old, with rampant grey hair, all curls. He was good-looking (though not as good-looking as he thought). His profile swooped in one strong line without a ledge between the eyes – a real Etruscan nose. He had a nose for a scandal and an eye for a woman that made him a legend even in the Saepta Julia where the antique dealers congregate. [SB] Not tall, he was still a commanding presence; people who wanted to annoy me (says Falco) said we looked alike. In fact he was heavier and shiftier. [TTD]

  As a businessman Pa is a mixture. He would sooner lie than tell the truth. He had sold more fake Athenian blackware vases than any other auctioneer in Italy. A potter turned them out for him specially. [TFL] He cheats mercilessly, even attempting a fraudulent compensation claim against the government in Time to Depart; he certainly avoids paying taxes. But he has taste, and a genuine love for art and antiques; a fine art and furniture man, he sometimes dabbles in scrolls or statues. Falco comments that both his stock and his staff turn out to be better quality than you expect. However, Any collector who wants twenty identical statuettes of a Muse on Mount Helicon – one or two with chipped noses – will come rushing straight here! [TTD] Apart from the house on the Embankment and his even larger spread on the coast, he has the trappings of wealth to make his life easy: He was travelling back tonight in his normal quiet style – a lordly litter with six massive bearers, a gaudy troop of torchmen and two private bodyguards. [SB]

  He has made himself rich. In Poseidon’s Gold, Falco taunts Geminus, ‘Go ahead – disinherit me!’ This is satirical because he suspects his father has never even made a will. In Nemesis we will discover just what lies behind the shifty pause that follows his taunt. Meanwhile, when Geminus offers a loan to help Falco join the middle class, they are thwarted by Domitian.

  Falco’s attitude to his father varies from outright hostility to uneasy tolerance. Geminus gets on well with Helena from the start and makes friendly overtures. Only in Poseidon’s Gold, with their inherited trouble from Festus, do he and his son make a fist of working together. It can’t be perfect because Falco can’t forget. My father was shocked to find anyone criticising his past behaviour. He really had convinced himself that abandoning a wife and infant children was fine. Now he was hurt and I was angry. Some things don’t change. [STH]

  There is an ironical outcome, and it happens in Nemesis.

  Flora

  For a long time all we know is that Flora was a redheaded scarf-maker. Geminus buys her the Caupona, perhaps as a source of pin money, or to stop her nosing into his own business.

  Falco meets Flora briefly at the end of Poseidon’s Gold, where he spots that she looks very like his mother. She dies during Ode to a Banker; Geminus is devastated – even Ma tells Falco to look after him.

  Her Caupona has a unique style: an eatery so unpretentious it barely rated attention from the local protection rackets … Its customers were doggedly loyal – sad idlers who tolerated the unwashed bowls of lukewarm broth. The surly clientele at Flora’s wanted to sit where there were other antisocial types whom they could steadfastly ignore. [OB]

  ‘Go to the baths and the barber, Pa.’

  ‘Sod off – And don’t tell me that was what Flora would have wanted, because Flora had one great advantage – she left me alone!’ [OB]

  Falco’s Other Relations

  Most of my family were offensive and all of them lacked tact. You couldn’t hope to find a bigger crowd of loud, self-opinionated, squabbling idiots anywhere. [THF]

  I came from a family who saw it as life’s greatest challenge to be the first to interfere in any problem. [OB]

  Victorina

  It takes four books before we learn the lowdown on Falco’s sister Victorina: the eldest in our family, the bane of my childhood and my worst social embarrassment since then, says Falco. As a child she had been a tough little tyke with a constant runny nose and her loincloth at half-mast around her scabby knees. All the other mothers warned their children not to play with us because Victorina was so violent; Victorina made them play with her anyway. When she grew up she played only with the boys. There were plenty. I could never understand why. [IHM] One of the boys was Petronius Longus; in the one scene where she appears, she calls him Primrose, to his discomfiture.

  Falco’s view is unchanging: She had a terrible reputation: an eye for the boys, a saucy green parasol, and the side-seams of her tunic always revealingly unstitched. When she visited the Circus, the men who held her parasol for her were always repugnant types. [PG] In Saturnalia, Falco says she once organised a nymphs-and-satyrs party but inadvertently let out the secret so all the family aunts turned up.

  Married to Mico, she has five children but dies of a ‘female problem’ during The Iron Hand of Mars. We never see very much of her.

  Mico

  Mico’s name sends even hard-bitten foremen with thirty years’ experience rushing off to the nearest public fountain to drown themselves. [SB] Even when contractors are desperate, Falco sneers, Mico – with his famously bumpy scrim – is the last plasterer they call in.

  Mico is a lot of fun to write about – so I had to give him a good side. Left a widower, he is bringing up five fractious children single-handed, without complaint. His mother comes to stay, but doesn’t help. His nature is gloomy and his luck is worse. If Mico tripped over a bag of gold bits on his way to the baker’s, the bag would split open, the aurei would scatter – and he would watch every one of them drop down a manhole into a sewer at full flood … [PG] Falco, on the up himself, helps out with work: He left plaster floats in doorways and tramped fine dust everywhere; he made me feel I owed him something because he was poor and his children were motherless. Really, Mico was only poor because his bad work was notorious. [BBH]

  Augustinilla

  While Victorina is fatally ill, Augustinilla goes to Germany with Falco and Helena. He describes her as having an elaborate name but a very straightforward personality – dumb insolence. [IHM]

  At eight years old in this story, Augustinilla has a plain face and a petulant expression, with five or six thin little plaits tied together with a skinny rag on the top of her head … She was hip-high, wearing a tunic that ought to have been decent, though she had managed to have it hitched up so her bottom showed. This unfortunate child does triumph when, following a toothache, she and her German friend Arminia encounter the son of Civilis at Augusta Treverorum, then report to Falco where the rebel is.

  Valentinianus

  Another of Mico’s absurdly named children. In A Body in the Bath House the infant eats too many gherkins and, while trying to humiliate Falco, strives to be sick on Nux.

 
Marcus Didius Festus

  A very significant character.

  I am still waiting for a message to say, Festus has landed back in Ostia so will I please bring him a wagon and some wineskins because he’s run out of cash but has met some lads on the boat that he would like to entertain … [SP]

  Killed at Bethel in Judaea, aged thirty-five, Falco’s brother probably died heroically – though there will always be a question mark. Supposedly, he was first man over the battlements and died as he turned back to encourage his men. For this he won the Palisaded Crown. The sculptor Orontes thinks Festus chose to die in battle because he was under pressure; but Orontes embodies unreliability.

  Everything we know about Festus is said by other people. We never see him. (We never will; I mean that.)

  He is the antithesis of what I like in a man, representing the untrustworthy side of Falco himself. His importance is as a bad influence and as a personal loss that darkens the early books. Falco, eight years younger, is both fascinated by and envious of his brother’s charisma: He was shorter and more thickset. More athletic and with a sweeter temperament. More gifted in business, luckier with women, smarter, sharper, more easily accepted as a treasure by the family … [PG]