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

  Festus was a cynical soldier; he saw the chance to eat, drink and fart at the Empire’s expense, while using its unrivalled travel opportunities … [PG] His legion is the Fifteenth Apollinaris, commanded by Titus, so Titus knows of the Didius family – a connection that may explain why Vespasian and Titus first trust Falco.

  Clearly he had a good side: Festus could always be relied on to throw crumbs to a stranded fledgling or pat a three-legged dog. [PG] Marina wanted to marry him; Falco thinks Festus had other ideas, though if presented with baby Marcia, his brother would have accepted her (which traps Falco with the problem).

  As a businessman, Festus had all the good and the bad traits of Geminus; his complex web of deals unravels posthumously, landing his father and brother in deep trouble.

  Festus was a dedicated womaniser, a massive drinker, a feckless, elusive relative who would bring home a stream of tiresome new friends and spongers. My brother Festus could walk into any tavern in any province of the Empire and some wart in a spotty tunic would rise from a bench with open arms to greet him as an old and honoured friend … What’s more, if our lad then progressed into the back room where the cheap whores were entertaining, equally delighted shrieks would arise as girls who should have known better all rushed up adoringly … [PG]

  Maia disliked him, and although their mother grieves, there are indications that she may have seen through Festus.

  So was he a hero? Falco believes the Jewish prisoner who says an arrow squeezed in between Festus’ helmet and his head. So let Falco have the last word on the brother he envied and loved:

  Helmet not strapped properly. Trust him. Always unlaced, unhooked, half belted. He hated feeling trapped.

  He was bloody good. Our Festus, with even only half his mind on a problem, could outstrip most of the dull plodders he was up against. Festus was the charismatic kind who soars to the top on talent that is genuine, easy and abundant. He was made for the army; the army knew its man. Stupid enough to show he did have that talent. Placid enough not to offend the establishment. Bright enough, once he was in position, to hold his own against anyone … [PG]

  Marina

  Originally a braid-maker, Festus’ exquisite girlfriend has a hard streak of self-preservation. She might have gone off and married, but why should she bother when she had me paying the bills? Her conquests were getting a voluptuous shape allied to a free and easy manner, attractive goods even before they discovered the lien on my bankbox. [PG]

  Marina lives almost at the foot of the Caelian, in the Street of Honour and Virtue. A short, dark, sultry vision with immense wide-set eyes. She manoeuvred those eyes constantly, to nerve-racking effect. A cracker to look at, but she had been born common and was making a brave attempt to remain completely faithful to her origins. [PG] Only when she spoke did the mystique fade; she had the voice of a winkle-seller. [THF]

  She is not very bright (apart from rooking Falco). A fond but vague mother, she is given to farming out Marcia with unsuitable neighbours (Statia and husband, the ex-priest of Isis). Helena tries to discourage this wanton, but from time to time Marina pops up, when she can tear herself from her social life. After the early books she becomes more remote, but she sees her chance again in Nemesis and briskly reappears to claim any booty that’s going.

  Marcia

  Marcia, Falco’s favourite niece during his Fountain Court days, is a good-looking child of character. It is possible that Falco is himself her father. As he says, For various reasons, a few of them noble, I tried to take his place. [THF]

  We first meet her as a handful at three: Marcia flopped like a sack in her arms looking thoughtful, gazed up at her, deliberately dribbled, then blew bubbles in the spit … [SP] She improves but is still a worry: She was a frank, open-hearted child. Maybe that was why I worried about her. She would be a frank, open-hearted woman one day. [PG]

  She can be uncooperative and knows how to make her mother look like a monster with well-timed wails. By Nemesis, when she must be around eleven, she has developed an attractive straight-talking style. It is clear she and Falco have kept their good relationship – and she has the capacity to wind him around her little finger.

  Allia

  Falco’s second-eldest sister is a close ally of Victorina and sometimes has a spiteful attitude to him. She is famous for borrowing (and not returning) items. Falco calls her big-boned and somehow slightly awkward, as if she might have been damaged in the birth process.

  Married to the ghastly Verontius, she has various children of whom we know Cornelius. All Allia ever taught her children was how to borrow from relatives. [SDD]

  Verontius

  A shifty, untrustworthy road contractor who smelt of fish pickle and unwashed armpits … The lengths he went to defraud the government were tortuous. A glance at Verontius looking half asleep and guilty was enough to explain half the potholes on the Via Appia … [TTD]

  He first appears when Falco’s client has been an aedile in charge of road maintenance contracts. Falco visits this charmer, who could bend figures better than a conjurer stuffing doves up his fundament … He was colourless, bald, squinty and half deaf. He stank of armpits and feet … I won’t say he and Allia lived in squalor. We all knew they had money. It was squirrelled away somewhere. Hoarded meanly, never spent. They would both die early, worn-out victims of a life they need not have had. Falco knows too much to be palmed off. Verontius has a secret second job selling squid, which involves an intriguing slave girl … Verontius still fooled around with the girl, and he knew I knew. [AC]

  In Scandal Takes a Holiday, Falco makes direct allegations: Petronius had a serious down on Verontius, whom he once tried to arrest for bribery on official contracts; Verontius got off without a stain on his character (he bribed his way out of the charge).

  Domestically, Verontius thought being a good father meant bringing home a fruit pie once a week; when he wanted to be a very good father, he bought two. [SDD]

  Cornelius

  Taken to Greece to help guard baggage, etc., Cornelius (filled out with the fruit pies) is one of those large, chubby lads who is constantly taken for older than his real age; he might be only about eleven. [SDD] He does become horribly homesick, so Falco takes him to the gymnasium where Cornelius nearly comes to grief when he is seized by the wrestler Milo of Dodona.

  Galla

  Falco’s third sister is married to the absentee Lollius: Sometimes he left her; more often Galla threw him out. Occasionally she relented ‘for the sake of the children’ (that tired old myth); the family’s father stayed with her a month if she was lucky, then he drifted off after the next shortsighted garland-seller, my sister produced another unhappy baby, and the whole brood were left on their own again; when they were stuck, the poor things were sent to me. [SB] In this sorry situation, Falco is repeatedly put upon to assist. It facilitates new characters as he nurtures the neglected children.

  Galla, who cannot be called a deft budget manager, [OVTM] does know how to get free food at Saturnalia. She lives in a rented doss by the Trigeminal Gate, with her offspring, who include Larius, Gaius and Tertulla, except when they escape from home on occasions when their father briefly reappears.

  Lollius

  My sister Galla’s husband was a lazy river boatman whose main advantage was the fact he was never at home. He was a hopeless womaniser. We could all have coped if my sister had not minded but Galla was unusually fastidious and she did. Not even Galla ever expected any support from Lollius … In Time to Depart, when all the other brothers-in-law rally to try to find Tertulla, Lollius is the only one who fails to turn up.

  A foul bubble of riverbank scum [OVTM]

  Lollius is introduced properly when Falco seeks his advice. He was lazy, deceitful and brutal – ugly too, yet so cocky that he somehow convinced women he was vitally attractive. Galla fell for it – every time he came back to her from the others. [THF] Falco describes Lollius as probably drunk, always walking with a serious limp, and looking as if he smells; about fif
ty, he is short, stout, ugly, toothless, and has one eye permanently closed after Galla hit him with a solid-bottomed pancake pan.

  He is a joy to write about.

  Larius

  Falco’s favourite nephew is a troubled fourteen-year-old when we meet him first. Something of my brother Max in his last year informs this picture of Larius, though they are not the same.

  He was half my age and twice as despondent, but when he stopped being miserable he had a wonderful sense of fun. I was very fond of Larius … He had an intelligent brow under an unkempt swath of hair that drooped into solemn deep brown eyes. His body had stretched so fast it had left his brain behind. His feet, and ears, and the parts he was suddenly too shy to talk about, were those of a man half a foot taller than me. While he was expanding into them, Larius had convinced himself he looked ridiculous, and in all honesty he did. [SB]

  Delightfully aware of the ‘difficult phase’ he is going through, Larius reads Catullus, despite which he comes good when he saves Falco from drowning then also saves Milo and actually sinks the villains’ ship. He decides to become a wall painter and to marry Ollia, the daft lump who is nursemaid to the Petronius children.

  We next meet him in A Body in the Bath House, eleven books and four years later. Larius has reached another difficult phase. Parted from his wife, he is among the experts working on the King’s palace. He has become reprehensible and laddish, but skilled. He was a big lad. I could see one protruding ear, half covered by unkempt dark curls that would have been improved by a serious trim and work with a teasing comb. His clothes were covered with multicoloured paint splashes, though the rest of him looked clean enough, given that he was about eighteen and a thousand miles from home. He worked steadily, adept and confident. [BBH] He teams up with the Camillus brothers, egging them on into bad behaviour, but he is useful when the going gets rough: Larius had grown up in the toughest neighbourhood in the Empire; he knew nasty tricks with feet and fists. [BBH]

  He is left behind a second time, in Britain. Perhaps I wanted to save him from Vesuvius. But Larius has talent; he could go anywhere.

  Randy little beggars, the lot of them. Why do you think they become painters? They go into people’s houses, with access to the women! [BBH]

  Gaius

  An urchin of some character, small for his age. He had the gravity of a patriarch and the manners of a lout. He liked to wear boots that were too big for him. He had tattooed his name on his arm in Greek lettering with something that passed for blue woad; some of the letters were festering. He never washed. [PG] This ragamuffin grew on me and became a fixture: A shaved head, an armful of self-inflicted tattoos of sphinxes, half his teeth missing, a huge tunic belted in folds by a three-inch-wide belt with a ‘stuff you’ buckle and murderous studs. Hung about with scabbards, pouches, gourds and amulets. A small boy making a big man’s fashion statement – and, being Gaius, getting away with it. He was a roamer. Driven on to the streets by an unbearable homelife and his own scavenging nature, he lived in his own world. [THF] At one point, Falco arranges for Gaius to stay with Great-Auntie Phoebe on the Campagna farm, though it doesn’t last.

  Looking in Poseidon’s Gold like an embryonic copy of Festus, Gaius is taken up by Geminus at the auction house, while also becoming close to Falco and Helena; they take him to Africa in Two for the Lions, where he is homesick and upset because people are too nice to him. In Greece he steals votive figures, so is clearly destined for the antiques world. In the absence of Geminus, without being asked he takes charge of the auction business like a born entrepreneur. Helena had suggested his mother should donate him to some apothecary who was developing experimental medicines. But he was a sweetie underneath; we sometimes used him for babysitting. [NM]

  Tertulla

  Figuring in Time to Depart when she is kidnapped for ransom (a mistake!), Tertulla exemplifies Falco’s young relatives. She is a grubby little girl of about seven years, with large feet and a very small nose. She bunks off from school, though Falco’s mother (who has paid the fees) determinedly tries to ensure that the child attends. Her disappearance shows the whole Didius family – except her own useless father – rallying for once to tackle the crisis.

  Junia and Gaius Baebius

  This house-proud, formal pair are so devoted to the idea of being a Roman couple (tending to pose as if practising for their own tombstone) that they have to be considered together. Married young, they have no natural children but throw themselves into home reconstruction, dog-owning and social ambition. Junia is regarded as a great annoyance. Helena tries, but can hardly stand her. She can be spiteful in telling tales. Although the couple are apparently prosperous, in a rare aside in Scandal Takes a Holiday, Falco points out that if Gaius ever lost his job they would be in trouble.

  Junia was an impatient, supercilious piece. She had a thin face, a skinny frame, and a washed-out character to match. She wound her black hair into tight plaits pinned around her head, with stiff little finger-long ringlets in front of her ears and either side of her neck. This was all modelled on a statue of Cleopatra – a big joke, believe me … Life had disappointed Junia, and she was firmly convinced it could not possibly be her own fault. In fact, between her terrible cooking and her resentful attitude, most of what went wrong could be easily explained … [TTD]

  Junia ‘volunteers’ to run Flora’s Caupona as a ‘little project’; like many people who insist on running bars she can’t cook, she has a history of quarrelling with staff, she bosses the customers. Her big coup is the Fourth Cohort’s Saturnalia drinks party where she serves vinum primitivum – my tribute to the house wine at the British School in Rome.

  He and Junia had started saving up for ghastly furniture and an eight-bowl dinner set the minute they first held hands on a garden bench. [OB]

  The boring Gaius first appealed to Junia because he was an orphan with his own apartment. He is a customs clerk supervisor, lusting for an honourable appointment as a priest of the imperial cult. Always hungry (because of Junia’s awful cooking?), always slow to pick up the tab, Gaius Baebius is about as exciting as watching a bird-bath evaporate. [PG] He is truly devoted to Junia and an immaculate father to their adopted boy. Falco acknowledges the generosity, but still feels, My brother-in-law was completely unsociable; people fled his company. He was a ponderous, pontificating, boring, boasting drone. [STH]

  When he and Falco take a trip to the coast looking for the pirate Damagoras, Gaius almost costs them their lives; after he is beaten up, we see him for once crushed, frightened and miserable – though he delights in his ensuing bad back. Gaius represents a specific, imperturbable kind of official. Falco imagines how he appears to traders: A treat awaited. Gaius Baebius would be here. They would find him lying in wait on the quay at Portus, seated behind his customs table with his soft smile and his maddening attitude, ready to give them their first long, slow, unbearable experience of a Roman clerk. [STH]

  Ajax

  He was black and white, with a long snout, ferocious teeth that did occasionally sink into strangers, and a long feathered tail. [OB]

  The dog Ajax is a spoilt child-substitute for Junia and Gaius, so uncontrolled he has been cited in legal actions for biting people. ‘He loves children!’ protested Gaius Baebius, as Ajax strained on the flimsy string on his collar and tried to reduce Mico’s family to something he could bury on Gaius’ home-built sun-yourself pilastered breakfast patio … [TTD] An attempt is made to use Ajax as a sniffer dog to find Tertulla. It fails.

  Marcus Baebius Junillus

  The ‘skip baby’ – kidnapped by brothel girls, then abandoned by his family – is adopted by Junia and Gaius. They do this, knowing he is deaf – a serious problem in the ancient world. Whatever I thought of my sister, she and Gaius would dote on the babe. Both would make every effort to help him communicate. [TTD] And so they do, Junia becoming an unlikely forerunner of Helen Keller. He was a pretty boy, now showing some intelligence, and he watched Junia carefully. If anyone could do it, my siste
r would one day make him talk. [OB]

  Little Marcus becomes a handful: Soon we were subjected to an hour of him running around, showing everyone his bare bottom. ‘We can’t stop him. He is our King for the Day!’ He might be deaf and speechless, but he had a flair for misrule. [SA]

  Falco and Helena know his real parents: the unnamed VIP magistrate, glimpsed at Lalage’s brothel, and his wife. They keep this secret. So if there is trouble in the future, which Falco might say is inevitable, then it’s a long way in the future. It’s a bonus of writing a series that there is scope to imply much but not cover it.

  Maia Favonia

  Falco’s only younger sibling, the sparky Maia is his favourite; they grew up as family allies. The sight of a normal, rather attractive fellow with spots of fish sauce down his tunic, being shoved down hard beneath his little sister’s expert thumb, must have confused the poor woman. It often confused me. [OVTM]

  Maia had always been a looker. Despite four children she had kept her figure. She combed her dark tight curls in a neat frame to her round face. Her eyes were intelligent, merry and adventurous. [TFL] In character, she carries a hint of danger: She knew how to get what she wanted, and what Maia wanted tended to be a tad different. Yes indeed, as Norbanus finds out when she shoots him in the back.

  Married to Famia, her home life becomes desperately sad: Famia preferring to be almost always absent, and tiresome when he did appear; Famia constantly raiding the household budget for wine money; Famia proclaiming loud social jollity at unsuitable moments; Famia forcing other people either to share in his relentless habit, or making them seem tight-arsed if they tried to save him from himself. Maia would be much better off without him, but he was the father of her children, and really too far gone to abandon. [TFL]

  Like Falco, she hates their father for abandoning them, but as a widow she is forced to accept his offer of secretarial work in the auction house. At this time, she tangles briefly – but fatally – with Anacrites. Eventually even Maia sensed a dangerous imbalance in their friendship. Anacrites was too intense for her. She told us they had parted. She would have been tactful. She was even a little upset … [BBH]. The spy’s refusal to let go leads to him stalking her, then sending men to destroy her house. Falco and her children manoeuvre her to safety through travel to Britain, where she links up permanently with Petronius. Falco and Petro together swear revenge on Anacrites, but they know they must wait their moment. They are still waiting in Nemesis …