The Ides of April fam-1 Read online

  "Ooh," the archivist crooned. "Are you part of the emperor's morality campaign? Do you take these absconders to court?"

  "No, I track down loose husbands for abandoned wives who can't afford to go to law. My clients have to settle for battering the bastards with heavy iron frying pans."

  "I get the impression you hold the men down while it happens?"

  Andronicus was smiling broadly. Why spoil his party? I smiled back. "That's my deluxe service… You mentioned your superior," I hinted broadly, dragging us back to the point of my visit. "I think it's him I need to see. Is the notable who calls himself Manlius Faustus available? Or are you going to spin me the old line-'sorry, you just missed him'? "

  He gave me a wry gleam. "Faustus is, genuinely, out. I hardly dare say this, but he did leave the building just before you came."

  "Not that lout who nearly knocked me over on the step?"

  I thought something flickered in the archivist's gaze but he answered calmly, "Oh that would have been our runner." He paused, then added, "Tiberius. Did you speak to him?"

  "No." Why would I? "He was a grim bastard. And what's Faustus like?"

  "Couldn't possibly comment. He is much too aware that I owe him this job."

  "Not on good terms?" I guessed.

  "Let's say, if you think our runner is dour, you will not like Faustus."

  Andronicus seemed keen to move on the conversation. He asked what brought me, so I explained about the accident in the Clivus Publicius and that notice calling for witnesses with Faustus' name on it.

  "Sounds like him," Andronicus commented. "He's quite a meddler."

  "Well, I suppose it is his job… Have any witnesses shown up in response?"

  "Only you."

  I smiled with the complicity we had developed between us so nicely. "I wouldn't have come if I hadn't been stuck… Are you going to mention me to Faustus?"

  "Why? You haven't told me anything." Andronicus gave me his own conspiratorial grin. I did like dealing with this man. He came so much cheaper than the clerks I usually had to badger or bribe.

  "I want to ask a cheeky favour. If anyone does bring in a story, could you possibly let me know?"

  "Love to." Showing how keen he was, Andronicus then asked, "So where do I contact you?"

  I always considered this carefully. People can find my office; I could not work otherwise. But there was a difference between clients who were too preoccupied with whatever trouble they were already in to cause any other trouble, and chancers who might have tricky personal motives in coming after me.

  Andronicus worked for a magistrate. That guaranteed he was reliable, surely? I told him where I lived.

  Anyway, I had Rodan. "It's a climb and not easy to find. But my doorman brings up visitors. Rodan will show you."

  "Sounds exclusive!"

  I snorted. "That's right. Fountain Court is the most exclusive slum on the Aventine." And he had not yet seen Rodan. I wouldn't spoil the surprise.

  "Best you can do?"

  "I am only a poor widow." Never imply you have money.

  "Oh is that so?" scoffed Andronicus. He sized up my outfit pointedly. I like a man who sees through banter. Indeed, I like a man who notices that you have dressed nicely to meet him. Still, he had not gained the full measure of me. Not yet. "And what is your name when I ask for you?"

  "Flavia Albia. Just ask for Albia. Everyone knows me." A lot of people did, though "everyone" was pushing it. This was another ploy for protection that I had learned; it gave the impression there might be many people looking out for me.

  I said I had to be going. He said he had enjoyed meeting me. More people were now arriving for official reasons, so I saw myself out, which seemed to be procedure in that office. In mine, I like to be quite sure visitors have left, but Andronicus did not need such precautions.

  So, no aedile. That had been a wasted trip, like so many others. I was used to it. In the street I paused, turning up my face to the Roman sky. Heard the hubbub surrounding me on the Aventine and also coming from far away all over the city. Smelt hot oil on lunch-time griddles. Felt the oppression of the Temple of Ceres, gloomily shadowing the street.

  Mentally I apologised to my romantic little sisters. Despite my smart get-up I would not be meeting the love of my life this afternoon. Nevertheless I had just had an extremely pleasant experience. That was an improvement on normal.

  In any case, I had met the love of my life already, met him long, long ago. You will not be surprised, any more than I was at the wise age of seventeen, that the man toyed with me, then dropped me when he feared it might be serious. The pain had not lasted; I soon met and married Farm Boy, and if people thought that was love on the rebound, they understood nothing about me. There was nothing fake in my affection for him.

  He was still around. Not Farm Boy; Farm Boy died. The other one. For family reasons I saw him at social gatherings and sometimes I even worked with him. These days, our past seemed to bother him far more than me.

  There had been one result from visiting the aediles' office. If the rapport I had built with the archivist today ever came to anything, that would be fun.

  Something would happen with Andronicus. Hades, I was an informer. I could tell that.

  III

  The surly man they called Tiberius was standing at a bar counter further up the main street. Most people would have passed without remembering the aediles' runner, but my job needs good observation. I walked by quietly on the other side of the street, making no eye-contact. I bet he did not notice me.

  Whatever kind of running the aediles employed him to do must make few demands. He had a beaker and the bar's draughtboard in front of him; he looked set there for the afternoon. I was tempted to march up and exclaim, "Three radishes says I can thrash you!" I knew I could. Farm Boy, my late husband, had taught me draughts, sweetly allowing me to beat him on a regular basis. He never cared who won; he just liked us to play. He liked most things we did together and, as the uncle of mine he worked for used to say, he had a heart as big as Parthia.

  I was at a loose end myself now, but a presentable woman of twenty-eight may not take herself to bars alone, apart from the speedy-breakfast kind where you can have a pastry and a hot drink before most members of the public are up. Even then, you have to look as if you keep a salad stall; riding in on a donkey at dawn from a market garden way out on the Campagna gives even a woman a legitimate cause for sustenance. Otherwise, it is obvious to everyone you must be touting for paid sex. The men with randy propositions are bad enough; the furious grannies hurling curses at you soon become unbearable. Roman grannies really know how to hustle a flighty bit off their street by giving her the evil eye. The worst of them do it to everyone, just in case they miss one.

  Considering unpleasant old dames led naturally to thoughts of my client.

  I had to grit my teeth to make me visit her, but in my career of nearly twelve years as a solo informer, that had been my feeling about many people who employed me. It's not a job where you meet the cream of society. Indeed, if you want to see the worst manners, filthiest motives and saddest ethics, this is the profession. Informers deal in hopelessness at every level.

  Salvidia, as I mentioned before, had inherited the construction firm when her husband died. Nobody had much to say about him, but I sensed that originally he had been typical of a builder with his own business: sometimes hard-working but more often lazy, and always a poor manager with money troubles. Salvidia soon toughened him up. She stormed in and buffed the firm into an extortion machine until Metellus and Nepos became the high-quality renovation shysters they were now. Nepos vanished, probably squeezed out deliberately, while her husband Metellus expired after a few years in the face of Salvidia's driving efficiency.

  Salvidia was running the firm at a huge profit, but you would not know it from the untidy builder's yard they still used and the cramped living quarters she maintained alongside. They had always operated out of premises on the Vicus Loreti Minoris, Lesse
r Laurel Street. Like most of the roads that passed among the great cluster of temples on the Aventine, it thought itself superior yet had its bad smells and seedy side. It ran from near the Temple of Ceres, so was in the north-west corner of the hill above the barbers' quarter and the corn dole building; it climbed slightly towards the once open area where Remus took the auguries in the contest to see who would found a new city, Rome. You know the story. He lost out to his twin brother Romulus, who had all a great leader's ideal qualities-by which I mean he cheated. Nowadays, the Aventine high tops were completely built up. From most vantage points you could barely see the sky, let alone count enough birds to foretell the rise of a great nation.

  Lesser Laurel Street ran into Greater Laurel Street at the crossroads with Box Hill and the Street of the Armilustrium, a long byway that passed close to where I lived. These were some of the earliest roads I learned when I first moved up to live in Fountain Court. They all occupied the part of the hill right above where my parents had their town house on the river embankment. That was downstream of the salt warehouses and the Trigeminal Porticus. When life was hard, I could head for the steps, scamper down the steep escarpment and hide away at home. Often I went just to see them. They were good people.

  No need of a refuge today, however: I was fired up, in full professional mode. I had decided it was time to tell Salvidia she could keep her commission. "Keep" was a more polite word than the one in my prepared speech.

  I was all the more impolite when my plan was thwarted.

  I had gone to the yard first because my client was usually there, making miseries of her workmen's lives. It was a jumble of planks, sheets of marble (mostly broken), handcarts and old buckets full of set concrete. A pall of dust over everything made it an asthmatic's graveyard. Two labourers in ripped tunics were squatting on a horizontal column; a chained, skinny guard dog pretended he would bite my leg off if I came within reach. The men seemed too depressed to speak and the hound shrank against a piece of dismantled partition when I glared his way. I refused to give the men the time of day, but I spoke to the dog, who then remembered me and whined hopefully. Last time I had given him the end of a rather poor meatball I regretted buying, but today I had nothing for him. At least it would save him a bellyache.

  I picked my way to the office, trying unsuccessfully to keep my sandals clean. A runt who called himself a clerk-of-works was hiding in a cubbyhole amongst mounds of filthy dustsheets. He told me the bad news. There was no chance of me being paid, even for the work I had already done. Salvidia was dead.

  Now I was glum. I said, "I've had clients who go to abnormal lengths to avoid paying, but expiring on me is extreme."

  "She just came home from market, took to her bed and stopped breathing."

  "Whatever caused that? She wasn't old."

  "Forty-six," he groaned. The workman, gnarled by disappointment and a poor diet, was probably forty-five; today he had suddenly become nervous that life might be transient. He probably hadn't bet on as many dud horses and screwed as many altar boys as he was hoping for.

  I cursed in agenteel fashion ("Oh whatanuisance!" — approximately), then since he had no more to tell me, I went to the house. Pretending I wanted to pay my respects, I meant to double check. The thought did strike me that Salvidia might not be dead at all, but had arranged for me to be told a yarn in order to get rid of me. I even wondered if she was avoiding all her creditors, intending to shimmy off to a secret retirement villa. Anyone else in Rome who had money passing through their hands would have acquired a second property by a lake, at the coast, or on an island.

  Anyone else in Rome who had money and their own building firm would have lived somewhere better than a run-down hovel on Lesser Laurel Street, with its porch propped up on a scaffold pole and broken roof tiles in teetering piles either side of the doorstep. A neglected oleander in a tub would have convinced a more excitable informer than me that Salvidia died of botanical poisoning, but I stayed calm.

  Inside the house there was slightly less dust but it was crammed with almost as many building materials as at the yard next door. In what passed for an atrium, which had no tasteful pool or mosaic, stood quite a lot of garden statues that had clearly been removed from other people's houses. A maid confirmed her mistress was indeed dead. She had passed away that afternoon. If I wanted, I could see the body.

  You might have sidestepped that invitation; not me. It's true Salvidia was almost a stranger. I had only met her twice and I hadn't liked her either time. As far as I was concerned, I owed this woman no respect and I might as well cut my losses.

  Yet my papa really was the excitable kind of informer I alluded to above; he saw mischief in everything and had a lifelong habit of stumbling into situations where persons died suspiciously. It was one way to earn a few sesterces, by exposing what had happened. There was no reason for me to suppose anything unusual had happened to Salvidia; she was an unfriendly woman who probably expired from her own bile. Even so, I had been taught always to invent an excuse to inspect a corpse. To be invited to view one was a welcome privilege: I was in there like a louse up a tramp's tunic.

  IV

  As I had been told, the woman lay in her bedroom, one of the few places in her house that was furnished normally. Years before, she and Metellus must have invested in a pretty solid marriage bed, though the webbing under the mattress was now sagging too much for my taste. I guessed she had never taken a lover, or they would have constantly rolled into each other awkwardly during moments of rest. Why do people who are surrounded by their own workmen never get them to do repairs?

  The room had the usual cupboards and chests. There were no windows, so although it did not smell particularly sour, the lack of fresh air was oppressive.

  "She was just like that when I found her," the maid quavered from the doorway. I saw no reason to comment. I was wondering how long I had to stand looking solemn at the bedside before I could leave politely.

  Salvidia lay on her back. Her arms were straight by her sides, she looked relaxed; either she died in her sleep or someone had closed her eyelids. With all the life gone, she was a shell, middle-aged in actual years but now sunken like an old woman; certainly a woman who would have claimed she led a hard life.

  Salvidia had had a heavy build, the kind of weight that arrives with the menopause. Her hair was wound up in a simple bun, which she probably did herself She had flabby arms and a lined, sunken face. She wore day clothes, the same kind of bunched tunic I had seen her in, with a girdle cinched tightly as if to hold in her constant anger at everything. Her wedding ring and one other plain ring gripped her fingers; her earrings were dull gold drops which somehow gave the impression she just put the same pair on daily and had done so for the past twenty years. There was no other jewellery on her, and no gem boxes in the room that I could see; no cream or cosmetic pots either. She wasted no cash on self-adornment.

  I assumed her heart had suddenly stopped, or something similar. That was how it looked. There was nothing to suggest any kind of interference. Her skin had a few shapeless brown spots you would expect in a woman of her age, that's all. No bruising. I did notice a short, fine scratch on her left arm, with faint reddening around it, but it was like a graze anyone could pick up brushing clumsily against something. Salvidia had not been an elegant mover.

  Even a lifeless body can give off an aura. This woman's endless agitation was over, yet her corpse signalled permanent disappointment. I felt her unhappy submission to death after a life that was in my terms, and probably her own, mainly wasted. Had she ever known contentment? I doubted it.

  Depressed, I left the bedroom. The maid stayed there to watch over her mistress, with more loyalty than I had expected. Staff would forget she had been annoying, it seemed. They would feel normal sadness at her early parting. It should have given me faith in human decency but I felt unsettled. Needing to recover, I made my way to a small outside area beyond the atrium that I had spotted earlier.

  With better owners,
this space could have been made into a natty little courtyard garden. Salvidia had almost filled it with a huge stone basin of the kind used in public baths, though this was rough and unattractive, not fine-grained alabaster or porphyry. Lolling at an angle, the monster was so unwieldy and heavy-looking I could not imagine how they manoeuvred it in-nor why they bothered. It was stored, no use to anyone, and ruining what could have been a pleasant sitting-out place.

  I found a bench, upturned against a low wall. Nobody could have used it for years. With effort, I turned the seat right way up in a tiny patch of sunlight, then perched on it, trying to avoid the mossy parts. I was reflecting thoughtfully in a way that generally means someone is upset-and so I was. I was furious that because of Salvidia's inconvenient death I had probably lost my payment.

  I assumed no one would bother me as I sat brooding there. From the surrounding house came only silence, as if even the maid might have left. I had seen no other staff and wondered if either the mistress had been too mean to have any, or if when she died they took their chance and ran away. Most homes have cooking smells, woofing dogs, distant knocks and footsteps, snatches of indecipherable conversation. This place lay still, seemingly deserted. Not even a pigeon shared my nook. It all gave the impression nothing much had ever gone on here. Even calling it a "home" seemed an exaggeration.

  At least it was peaceful. Eventually my annoyance and melancholy settled. Just as I was ready to leave, surprisingly someone turned up. I never heard him coming and he was equally surprised to see me.