A Comedy of Terrors Page 18

  “Never worth it,” I managed to put in sagely.

  Spendo careered on by himself, like a runaway wagon. “Building maintenance is straightforward enough. You just need to find the true cause of your problem, then don’t skimp on your repairs. All anybody needs to do is listen to me. There is a weak point by a turret, incidentally, at Milvia’s; it only leaks in heavy thunderstorms. She’s going to be too mean to continue the remedial works along that far. She will be sorry. Couple of large boys with axes, soon knock a useful hole through, drop in and surprise them.”

  “What?”

  “Tell your father, Falco, and that ex-vigiles mate of his. Your uncle. They’ll never give up chasing the Balbinus mob so this might be a useful tip for them.”

  “Oh, you know Father?”

  “Doesn’t everyone? Falco sold a set of lorica squamata for me once, republican scale armour, very rare piece. He got me a good price for it. I’m sorry I had to part with the suit, but we needed the cash.”

  I decided not to wade into a tussle about how Father and Uncle Lucius were now too creaky to engage with old enemies, though I knew they would love to make a surprise descent through a roof. The oldies would never retire—they still talked about the Balbinus mob. The rest of us were supposed to discourage them. “I am more concerned about my husband and the Fourth Cohort taking on the nut-distribution trouble.”

  “They been given any leads?” asked Spendo. He never bothered to drop his voice, which was a loud one.

  “Keep it down a bit! Agemathus, that sigillaria-seller, toddled along last night. It seems they have to find a man called Greius.”

  Spendo nodded wisely. “Once they pick him up, they can batter him until he croaks.”

  “Tiberius Manlius prefers to be subtle,” I murmured, trying to be more discreet. “I don’t imagine you’ve heard anything about this Greius?”

  This time Spendo shook his head, though it was a gesture of sorrow not a simple negative. “Flavia Albia, Flavia Albia, what did I tell you about meeting Balbina Milvia?”

  “I’m sorry, Spendo?”

  “You need to listen more!” announced Spendo. “Milvia has no secrets from me! I have been on her roof, Albia.”

  XXXV

  My husband would say it was obvious what I should do next: be a good meek wife and tell him this, then he and Morellus could debrief Spendo officially. Tiberius would immediately add, “But I suppose you have asked him for me?” Exactly, understanding spouse!

  While I began talking to the estimator in earnest, Zoe and Chloe lost interest. They picked up their bucklers and wooden practice swords, then wandered indoors. Prisca followed, after a slave signalled to her that customers were in the changing room.

  I made myself more comfortable, transferring to the seat Prisca had occupied, which had a battered cushion. “Tell me, this roof you priced, Spendo, when did you inspect it?”

  “Last week.”

  “Amphitrite’s armpit! No wonder you are up-to-date.”

  Spendo touched his eyes and his ears with a forefinger to show he kept them open. He had old forge-burns along his wrist and arm. Blacksmithing is notoriously dangerous. His short stature must have meant he had to stand closer than was wise to the heat and the hammer.

  He repeated that Balbina Milvia had called him in to price her leaky roof. While Spendo was up there measuring, she had a visitor. He, as a courtesy, stayed put, so the ladies could talk. He waited on the roof, rather than coming down to interrupt Milvia with points for customer consideration. I guessed he would have many such points, each needing its mini-lecture.

  The women were served lunch in a room off an upper veranda, pushing the shutters wide open to let in light. They came upstairs to be private from the household staff; this brought them conveniently closer to Spendo. Milvia had forgotten him, but Spendo claimed he was hardly being furtive since he had left his ladder propped up in plain sight.

  It was the first time I had heard of a ladder being used as an alibi. To some people they are invisible features in the landscape, but I am a contractor’s wife, trained to check whether work is being done by rival builders and whether the position of their ladder could be reported as unsafe. In addition, as an informer’s daughter, I had always been encouraged to watch who is nipping in furtively through windows.

  Spendo, never in a hurry, took out his own lunch from the satchel where he kept his rules and note-tablets. It must have made an unusual sight, a madly inquisitive dwarf sitting up on a roof tree with his short sturdy legs dangling and breeze-blown curls, munching hard-boiled eggs and onions. Spendo was, I believe, aware of the comedy.

  “What if anybody saw you from the street?”

  “I would have hurled onions at them. I don’t do target practice for nothing.”

  “Wonderful! If you are ever short of work, you can come and help me on surveillance, Spendo. So! You could eavesdrop on Balbina Milvia?”

  “They were obligingly in range.”

  “The visitor was female too, you said?”

  “She lives on the Aventine. Her name is Laetilla.”

  “Oh, I know of her.”

  “You know she is in a dirty business, then.”

  “I do. A loan shark. Is she part of the Balbinus organisation?”

  “Sounded as if her tribal ties are different. I meet a lot of people. I consider myself an expert judge,” Spendo boasted. “My impression was she and Milvia knew one another of old but don’t work together. Laetilla didn’t talk in any way subserviently. If she answers to anyone, it will be other people.”

  “What people, Spendo? Could you tell her reporting lines?”

  “No names were mentioned. She called her associates ‘the brothers.’ That,” Spendo began, “must be—”

  “Couple of bullies based in Greater Laurel Street,” I interrupted, trying to establish credentials for myself in the conversation. “Murrius and his bigger, supposedly badder, sibling.”

  “Well, if you know, I needn’t tell you!” Spendo grumbled sulkily.

  “I don’t know the brother’s name.”

  “Stuff you,” he reported rudely. “Neither do I!”

  “All right, then.”

  “Quintus.”

  “Quintus?”

  “Quintus is the brother’s praenomen anyway.”

  “Well, thank you, though it’s not much to go on.” There would be thousands of men in Rome with that first name. I had an uncle with it and the only oddity was that I didn’t have more.

  I calmed Spendo down, saying this set of brothers, Gaius and Quintus, were bankers for Laetilla; someone had said they had a bad reputation, but that was all I had learned. I wanted to hear why Laetilla met with Milvia. Had their meeting been tactical or casual? Just gossip, said Spendo. The women had shared a quick dish of olives and a herb tisane, both said business was good for them, then Laetilla wanted to share the exciting news that Murrius had been thrown out of home by his wife.

  “Bit of scandal?”

  “Gangland upset. They had a giggle together in a who’d-have-thought-she-had-the-nerve kind of way. According to Laetilla, Murrius is having to submit to it so he has moved in with his brother, at least temporarily.”

  “Yes, people nearby have suggested that.”

  “Analysing the language used,” Spendo carried on in his pompous way, “I reached my verdict that Laetilla and Milvia have known each other long-term, but the brothers don’t figure much.”

  “Not in the Balbinus group?”

  “Known associates, not enmeshed.”

  I nodded, though I was mainly concerned to find out what might have been said about my now fleeing client. “And what was the verdict on the Murrius domestic?”

  “He asked for it. She is testing him. He won’t accept that. His brother will gee him up to retaliate, to show he is a man. The wife will pay for chancing it. The crunch is coming any day now. The women agreed that, once the brothers are ready, they will bring the wife to heel and it will not be nice.”
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  I screwed up my mouth. Part of my duty to my client meant not telling anyone, even good contacts, what I knew about Nephele’s escape. At the moment she must still be on her journey downriver, not safe yet.

  I suspected Spendo could see I was holding back. “Did they mention the parrot?” I asked, as a distraction.

  “There is a parrot involved in this comedy?”

  “Feathers and bile, but they love it. Bitter custody battle.”

  “So they will pretend they are staying together for the bird?”

  “Fatal mistake. Same as children—it always goes sour.”

  “Parrots can live for many years, though not for ever! The impression I received,” Spendo assured me solemnly, “is that a reconciliation will occur. Will making-up be forcibly imposed? I wonder. I detected that the Quintus brother rules like a despot. You may have better information than me, Flavia Albia.”

  “Not my show. I was just passing the house and I heard them shouting.”

  “Laetilla said the wife even threw his mummified leopard out into the street.”

  “She threatened it. She yelled she would dump the stepchildren too—but his precious wild-beast collection was intended to rile him more.”

  “The leopard issue is a kick in the balls for Murrius,” agreed Spendo. “He is going demented over it. According to Laetilla, big bro says little bro’s furry friend stinks, so tyrannical Quintus refused to give it house room. But they have now found somewhere to put it.” The dwarf reached a new level of emphasis even for him. For the first time he had even lowered his strident voice.

  “Am I interested in where a crime lord secures his tatty taxidermy, Spendo?” I quizzed.

  “Mummy,” Spendo corrected me. “Not taxidermy. This is what makes the puss precious. Its owner spent a huge sum having it made. Laetilla never said how he first got hold of it, but a firm of Egyptian specialists by the new Temple of Isis did the work. It was to be a big feature of a jungle tableau that Murrius was planning to set up in his dining room.”

  I said I could see why his wife threw him out.

  Spendo, obsessive himself, missed my point. “It could have worked. I’m envious. Myself, my pride and joy is my own slingshot machine, an onager that I keep in the yard, but it’s not particularly useful in a city setting—the neighbours don’t like me firing it. I would happily make an offer for this beast, but apparently the preservation fails to satisfy close inspection. This is Rome. The Egyptians preserve a lot of domestic-sized cats, but a full-sized leopard is a whole new game of knucklebones. You can’t get the natron. That’s a drying salt they use for various purposes, but most significant in funeral ceremonies where pellets are stuffed into corpses to soak up moisture and deter moulds. It is gathered from evaporated lake beds…” He was off again.

  “I don’t care,” I declared frankly.

  “I think you will, Flavia Albia,” came the ponderous reply. “The ladies chattered away about this leopard.” I dare say Laetilla and Milvia were both relieved they did not have the odoriferous thing standing among their own cushioned dining couches. “Laetilla said the brothers have the leopard in a lock-up until Murrius regains access to his home abode.”

  “And where is the temporary leopard lair?”

  “That I don’t know,” the dwarf apologised. His disfigured face crumpled with disappointment at this failure. “Laetilla saw no need to specify, which you may find of interest in itself. I am dying to know—I would love to evaluate the Egyptians’ work.”

  “But you’ve no gen on where Spotty is stashed?”

  “Sadly no. Laetilla mentioned ‘that old hole-in-the-wall,’ as if Balbina Milvia knows. But every street in Rome is lined with those. All Laetilla specified is that the key to it lives with some trusty the brothers must know.”

  “New face?”

  “Not a new name, though. You should tell Faustus. The key-holder for this lock-up is called Greius.”

  XXXVI

  Yes, it would be useful for my husband to know of an association between Murrius, his brother called Quintus, Laetilla, and now Greius. If Murrius and his brother had just been identified as employers of Greius, it fingered them as the nut-dealing mob. Whether loans and nuts were linked in criminal activity, or how it worked, was an intriguing question, though of course my male associates would hog that question to themselves.

  For me, these glimpses from Spendo confirmed that Nephele was right to flee and had chosen her moment well. She had married into a family with rising influence, villains in age-old rackets who were flexing new muscles. If she was lucky, she took off before Murrius and his tyrannical brother gained so much kudos that he would be absolutely unable to tolerate loss of face.

  Even so, Murrius would endeavour to punish Nephele. I must hope his network was not yet so widespread that he would trace her despite the screening I had put in place. People said his brother was worse, but Murrius sounded hard enough. To me, his coveting the parrot and the leopard were not signs of a soft heart; they advertised a man who had the money for very expensive luxuries and who thought he warranted such trappings.

  He sounded no pushover. When his brother had complained the leopard stank, Murrius still kept it. They then found a solution together so there must be no serious bad blood. Their lock-up was somewhere Balbina Milvia knew, which suggested her father’s organisation had used it, but now the Aventine nut group had taken it over. I must tell Morellus to have his men look for a booth with a big cat peering out. Murrius couldn’t hide a leopard in a cupboard. He wouldn’t want to shove it in a corner. If the fool dreamed of this beast as a dining-room spectacle, he would mothball it carefully.

  Then there was the killer agent, Greius: did he work for one of the brothers, or both? What did he generally keep in the lock-up? More bad nuts? Other materials? At Saturnalia, my bet was candles. I tried to buy some on my way home, but there were none to be had. A pop-up chandlery usually appeared in December, yet I saw no sign of it. This was how criminals operated: they created a shortage, then cashed in when children were pathetically crying because they might have no lights this year.

  I was mentally allotting a better business plan to the mobsters than I had myself. I could have run a successful crime network. If I did not pick up new clients soon, that might be a new career. Being married to an aedile would give me a good start: people in your neighbourhood always respect men who buy their way into magistracies, which extends to the women who have snapped those men up.

  As I walked the short distance home, I reflected that controlling commodities was nothing new. Emperors did it, not only with critical resources like gold and silver, but corn to feed the masses and, on occasions, wine, olive oil, balsam, rare dyes or silk. In imperial protectionism they used the same strong-arm methods as criminals. The key purpose was to make money. Money and power were equal, interdependent assets. Rulers behaved like crooks; crooks aimed to become kings in the community. Rome, thank the gods, had an antipathy to kings.

  * * *

  At our house, someone was about to be appointed King-for-the-Day. As happens with real-life rulers, it was the wrong person.

  I came in, unchallenged. Rodan was not in his cubicle. Had he yet sat on his stool for even half an hour? Would he ever? Or had I merely added a pointless hanger-on to the food bill? One extra embuggerance in the general quotient?

  I tested the air, as if trying to sniff out our mouldy gladiator. I caught only the slightly damp, decaying odour of green vegetation, as festival garlands started to hum. They were near death already. By the time Saturnalia ended, our home would be decorated with strands of garden compost.

  Paris appeared. He told me Rodan was sulking in his hut. “When Dromo brought over his things for him, some of Rodan’s gruesome possessions must have fallen off the handcart. Have you seen that murderous spear he treasures? Dromo insists nothing else was ever on the cart, and Rodan himself loaded it. Anything he missed must have been left at Fountain Court. Rodan wants to go back, but he won’t go b
y himself.”

  “Why not?”

  “People hassled him. Really put the wind up him.”

  “Oh, I remember him saying something. Some gladiator! If he had ever fought in the arena against wild animals, a lion would have picked him up and gently put him in a basket on the sidelines, feeling sorry for him. Will you volunteer to take him?”

  “No,” said Paris.

  I sighed. Thanks, Paris. I would have liked to cut his festival bonus, but we both knew he had done good work to earn it. I managed not to snarl at him. “Well, at least that sounds as if Rodan does intend to stay as our porter.”

  “Thrills!” Paris was becoming outspoken. Still, he would fit in. Everyone here wore liberty caps all year round. “You’d better come quick, Albia. Fornix has made must-cakes today, so people are forcing him to give out the bean for choosing the Lord of Misrule.”

  In our house, misrule was hard to control even normally. For instance, they had started this little ceremony without me. I was supposed to supervise our cake lottery, to make sure that the bean ended up where I wanted it.

  Too late.

  Dromo had grabbed the serving tray, determined to help out on the sole occasion I needed him to leave this alone. Cake was his province, he believed. They were all as bad. Everyone had gathered; even Rodan had stopped sulking. The entire crew, including Tiberius, had their spiced treat ready in their hot hands. It looked as if the little boys were already slyly nibbling.

  My arrival was greeted with a cheer, not out of love but because they could now let fly with “Io, Saturnalia!” and before I could check the position of any cake Fornix had secretly marked, they would sink their teeth in. Fornix was looking helpless. It was going wrong. I knew my mother would never let this happen, so why had I lost control? (Answer: I went out; they did whatever they wanted while I foolishly left them to it.)