A Body in the Bathhouse Read online

  II

  IT HAD already been a hard winter. For most of it, Helena Justina had been pregnant with our second child. She suffered more than with the first, while I struggled to let her rest by looking after our firstborn, Julia. As queen of the household, Julia was establishing her authority that year. I had the bruises to prove it. I had gone deaf too; she enjoyed testing her lungs. Our dark-haired moppet could put on a burst of speed any stadium sprinter would envy, especially as she toddled towards a fiercely steaming stockpot or darted down our steps onto the roadway. Even dumping her on female relations was out; her favorite game lately was breaking vases.

  Spring saw no domestic improvements. First the new baby was born. It was very quick. Just as well. Both grandmothers were on the spot this time to complicate proceedings. Ma and the senator’s wife were full of wise ideas, though they had opposing views on midwifery. Things were frosty enough; then I managed to be rude to both of them. At least that gave them a subject on which they could agree.

  The new mite was ailing and I named her in a hurry: Sosia Favonia. In part, it was a nod to my father, whose original cognomen was Favonius. I would never have demeaned myself paying him a compliment if I had thought my daughter would survive. Born skinny and silent, she had looked halfway to Hades. The minute I named her, she rallied. From then on, she was as tough as a totter’s ferret. She also had her own character from the start, a curious little eccentric who never quite seemed to belong with us. But everyone told me she had to be mine: she made so much mess and noise.

  It took at least six weeks before my family’s fury at the name I had chosen died down to simmering sneers that would only be revived on Favonia’s birthday and at family gatherings every Saturnalia, and whenever there was nobody to blame for anything else. People were now nagging me to acquire a children’s nurse. It was nobody’s business but Helena’s and mine, so everyone weighed in. Eventually I gave up and visited a slave market.

  Judging by the pitiful specimens on offer, Rome badly needed some frontier wars. The slave trade was in a slump. The dealer I approached was a creased Delian in a dirty robe, picking his nails on a lopsided tripod while he waited for some naive duffer with a poor eye and a fat purse. He got me. He tried the patter anyway.

  Since Vespasian was rebuilding the Empire, he needed to mint coinage and had raided the slave markets for laborers to put in the gold and silver mines. Titus brought large numbers of Jewish prisoners to Rome after the siege of Jerusalem, but the public service had snapped up the men to build the Flavian Amphitheatre. Who knows where the women ended up. That left a poor display for me. In the dealer’s current batch were a few elderly Oriental secretary types, long past being able to see to read a scroll. Then there were various lumps suitable for farm laboring. I did need a manager for my farm at Tibur, but that would wait. My mother had taught me how to go to market. I won’t say I was scared of Ma, but I had learned to trot home with what was on the shopping list and no private treats for myself.

  “Jupiter. Where do people buy disease-riddled flute girls nowadays?” I had reached the bitter, sarcastic stage. “How come there are no toothless grannies that according to you can dance naked on the table while weaving a side-weave tunic and grinding a modus of wheat?”

  “Females tend to be snapped up, Tribune. …” The dealer winked. I was too careworn to respond. “I can do you a Christian, if you want to stretch a point.”

  “No thanks. They drink their god’s blood while they maunder about love, don’t they?” My late brother Festus had encountered these crazy men out in Judaea and sent home some lurid tales. “I’m looking for a children’s nurse; I cannot have perverts.”

  “No, no; I believe they drink wine—”

  “Forget it. I don’t want a drunk. My darling heirs can pick up bad habits watching me.”

  “These Christians just pray and cry a lot, or try to convert the master and mistress of the house to their beliefs—”

  “You want to get me arrested because some arrogant slave says everyone should deny the sanctity of the Emperor? Vespasian may be a grouchy old barbarian-basher with a tight-arsed Sabine outlook—but I work for him sometimes. When he pays up, I’m happy to say he’s a god.”

  “How about a bonny Briton, then?”

  He proffered a thin, pale-haired girl of about fifteen, wilting under her shame as the filthy trader poked her rags aside to reveal her figure. As tribal maidens go, she was far from buxom. He tried to make her show her teeth, and I would have taken her if she had bitten him, but she just leaned away. Too meek to be trusted. Feed her and clothe her and the next we knew, she’d be stealing Helena’s tunics and throwing the baby on its head. The man assured me she was healthy, a good breeder, and had no claims at law hanging onto her. “Very popular, Britons,” he said, leering.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Dirt cheap. Then your wife won’t worry about you chasing this pitiful thing around the kitchen the way she would with some ogling Syrian who knows it all.”

  I shuddered. “I do have some standards. Does your British girl know Latin?”

  “You are joking, Tribune.”

  “No good, then. Look, I want a clean woman with experience of headstrong children, who would fit in with a young, upwardly moving family—”

  “You’ve got expensive taste!” His eyes fell on my new gold equestrian ring. It told him my financial position exactly; his disgust was open. “We do a basic model with no trimmings. Lots of potential, but you have to train the bint yourself. … You can win them over with kind treatment, you know. Ends up they would die for you.”

  “What—and land me with the funeral costs?”

  “Stuff you, then!”

  So we all knew where we were.

  I went home without a slave. It did not matter. The noble Julia Justa, Helena’s mother, had the bright idea of giving us the daughter of Helena’s own old nurse. Camilla Hyspale was thirty years old and newly given her liberty. Her freedwoman status would overcome any squeamishness I felt about owning slaves (though I would have to do it; I was middle class now, and obliged to show my clout). There was a downside. I reckoned we had about six months before Hyspale wanted to exploit her new citizenship and marry. She would fall for some limp waste of space; she had him lined up already, I bet. Then I would feel responsible for him too. …

  Hyspale had not approved when Helena Justina abandoned her smart senatorial home to live with an informer. She came to us with great reluctance. It was made clear at our first interview (she interviewed us, of course) that Hyspale expected a room of her own in a respectable dwelling, the right to more time off than time on duty, use of the family carrying chair to protect her modesty on shopping trips, and the occasional treat of a ticket for the theater, or better still a pair of tickets so she could go with a friend. She would not accept being quizzed on the sex or identity of the friend.

  A slave or freedwoman soon rules your life. To satisfy Hyspale’s need for social standing, dear gods, I had to buy a carrying chair. Pa lent me a couple of bearers temporarily; this was just his excuse to use my chair to transport his property to his new home on the Janiculan. To give Hyspale her room, we had to move in before Pa’s old house was ready for us. For weeks we lived alongside our decorators, which would have been bad enough even if I had not been lured into giving work to my brother-in-law Mico, the plasterer. He was thrilled. Since he was working for a relative, he assumed he could bring his motherless brats with him—and that our nursemaid would look after them. At least that way I got back at the nurse. Mico had been married to my most terrible sister; Victorina’s character was showing up well in her orphans. It was a rude shock for Hyspale, who kept rushing over to the Capena Gate to complain about her horrid life to Helena’s parents. The senator reproached me with her stories every time I met him at the gym we shared.

  “Why in Hades did she come to us?” I grumbled. “She must have had some inkling what it would be like.”

  “The girl is very fond of m
y daughter,” suggested Camillus Verus loyally. “Besides, I’m told she believed you would provide the opportunity for travel and adventure in exotic foreign provinces.”

  I told the excellent Camillus which ghastly province I had just been invited to visit and we had a good laugh.

  Julius Frontinus, an ex-consul I had met during an investigation in Rome two years ago, was now suffering his reward for a blameless reputation: Vespasian had made him the governor of Britain. On arrival, Frontinus had discovered some problem with his major works program, and he suggested I was the man to sort it. He wanted me to go out there. But my life was hard enough. I had already written and turned down his request for help.

  III

  THE NIGGLE from Julius Frontinus had refused to go away. Next I was summoned to a light afternoon chat with the Emperor. I knew that meant some heavy request.

  Vespasian, who had domestic problems of his own, now lurked frequently in the Gardens of Sallust. This helped him to avoid petitioners at the Palace—and to dodge his sons too. Domitian was often at odds with his father and brother, probably thinking that they ganged up against him. (The Flavians were a close family, but Domitian Caesar was a squit, so who could blame them?) The elder and favorite son, Titus, acted as his father’s political colleague. Once a wonder boy, he had now imported Berenice, the Queen of Judaea, with whom he was openly conducting a passionate love affair. She was beautiful, brave, and brazen—and thus hugely unpopular. It must have caused a few spats over breakfast. Anyway, Berenice was a shameless piece of goods who had already tried making eyes at Vespasian during the Jewish War. Now that his mistress of many years, Antonia Caenis, had recently died, he may have felt vulnerable. Even if he could resist Berenice, seeing his virile son indulging her may have been unwelcome. At the Palace, Titus also had a young daughter who by all accounts was growing up a handful. Lack of discipline, my mother said. Having brought up Victorina, Allia, Galla, Junia, and Maia—every one a trainee Fury—she should know.

  Vespasian notoriously distrusted informers, but with that kind of private life, interviewing me may have seemed a peaceful change. I would have welcomed it too—intelligent chat with a self-made, forthright individualist—had I not been afraid he would offer me a bum task.

  The Gardens of Sallust lie in the northern reaches of the city, a long, hot hike away from my area. They occupy a generous site on both sides of the valley between the Pincian and Quirinal Hills. I believe Vespasian had owned a private house out there before he became Emperor. The Via Salaria, still his route home to his summer estates in the Sabine Hills, runs out that way too.

  Whoever Sallust was, his pleasure park had been imperial property for several generations. Mad Caligula had built an Egyptian pavilion, packed with pink granite statues, to commemorate one of his incestuous sisters. More popularly, Augustus displayed some giants’ bones in a museum. Emperors have more than a clipped bay tree and a row of beans. Here some of the best statues I had seen in the open air marked the end of elegant vistas. As I searched for the old man, I strolled under the cool, calming shade of graceful cypresses, eyed up by basking doves who knew exactly how cute they were.

  Eventually I detected various shy Praetorians lurking in the shrubberies; Vespasian had taken a public stand against being protected from madmen with daggers—which meant his Guards had to hang around here trying to look like gardeners weeding, instead of stamping about like bullies, as they preferred. Some had given up pretending. They were sprawled on the ground playing board games in the dust, occasionally breaking off to gulp from what I gently presumed were water flasks.

  They had managed to corral their charge into a nook where it seemed unlikely any deranged obsessive with a legal grievance could burst through the thick hedge. Vespasian had piled up his voluminous purple drapes and his wreath on a dusty urn; he did not care how many snobs he offended with his informality. As he sat working in his gilded tunic, the Guards had a fairly clear view of his open-air office. If any high-minded armed opponent did rush past them, there was a massive Dying Niobid, desperately attempting to pluck out her fatal arrow, at whose white marble feet the Emperor might expire very tastefully.

  The Praetorians tried to rouse themselves to treat me as a suspicious character, but they knew my name was on an appointment scroll. I waved my invitation. I was not in the mood for idiots with shiny javelins and no manners. Seeing the official seal, they allowed me through, making the gesture as offensive as possible.

  “Thanks, boys!” I saved my patronizing grin until I had marched into the safety of Vespasian’s line of vision. He was seated on a plain stone bench in the shade while an elderly slave handed him tablets and scrolls.

  The official name-caller was still flustering over my details when the Emperor broke in and called out, “It’s Falco!” He was a big, blunt sixty-year-old who had worked up from nothing and he despised the ceremonial.

  The boy’s job was to save his elite master from any perceived rudeness if he forgot eminent people. Trapped in routine, the child whispered, “Falco, sir!” Vespasian, who could show kindliness to minions (though he never showed it to me), nodded patiently. Then I was free to go forward and exchange pleasantries with the lord of the known world.

  This was no exquisite little Claudian, looking down his thin nose on the coinage like a self-satisfied Greek god. He was bald and tanned, his face full of character and heavily lined after years of squinting across deserts for rebellious tribes. Pale laughter seams ran at the corners of his eyes too, after decades of despising fools and honestly mocking himself. Vespasian was rooted in country stock like a true Roman (as I was myself on my mother’s side). Over the years he had taken on all the snide establishment detractors; shamelessly grappled for high-level associates; craftily chosen long-term winners rather than temporary flash boys; doggedly made the best out of every career opportunity; then seized the throne so his accession seemed both amazing and inevitable at the same time.

  The great one saluted me with his customary care for my welfare: “I hope you’re not going to say I owe you money.”

  I expressed my own respect for his rank. “Would there be any point, Caesar?”

  “Glad I’ve set you at your ease!” He liked to joke. As Emperor, he must have felt inhibited with most people. For some reason I fell into a separate category. “So what have you been up to, Falco?”

  “Dibbling and dabbling.” I had been trying to expand my business, using Helena’s two younger brothers. Neither possessed any informing talent. I intended to use them to lend tone, with a view to wooing more sophisticated (richer) clients: every businessman’s hopeless dream. It was best not to mention to Vespasian that these two lads who ought to be donning white robes as candidates for the Curia were instead lowering themselves to work with me. “I am enjoying my new rank,” I said, beaming, which was as close as I would let myself come to thanking him for promoting me.

  “I hear you make a good poultry-keeper.” Elevation to the equestrian stratum had brought tiresome responsibilities. I was Procurator of the sacred Geese of the Temple of Juno, with additional oversight of the augurs’ chickens.

  “Country background.” He looked surprised. I was stretching it, but Ma’s family came from the Campagna. “The prophetic fowl get pesty if you don’t watch them, but Juno’s geese are in fine fettle.”

  Helena and I had plenty of down-stuffed cushions in our new home too. I had grasped equestrianism rapidly.

  “How is that girl you kidnapped?” Had the disapproving old devil read my thoughts?

  “Devoted to the domestic duties of a modest Roman matron—well, I can’t get her to weave wool traditionally, though she did commandeer the house keys and she is nursing children. Helena Justina has just done me the honor of becoming mother to my second child.” I knew better than to expect a silver birth gift from this skinflint.

  “Boy or girl?” Helena would have liked the evenhanded way he offered both possibilities.

  “Another daughter, sir. Sosia Favon
ia.” Would it strike Vespasian that she was partly named after a relative of Helena’s? A dear bright young girl called Sosia, who had been murdered as a consequence of the first mission I undertook for him—murdered by his son Domitian, though of course we never mentioned that.

  “Charming.” If his eyes hardened briefly, it was impossible to detect. “My congratulations to your—”

  “Wife,” I said firmly. Vespasian glowered. Helena was a senator’s daughter and should be married to a senator. Her intelligence, her money, and her childbearing ability ought to be at the disposal of the halfwits in the “best” families. I pretended to see his point. “Of course I explain to Helena Justina continually that the cheap appeal of an exciting life with me should not draw her from her inherited role as a member of patrician society—but what can I do? The poor girl is besotted and refuses to leave me. Her pleas when I threaten to send her back to her noble father are heartrending—”

  “That’s enough, Falco!”

  “Caesar.”

  He flung a stylus aside. Watchful secretaries slid forward and collected a pile of waxed tablets in case he dashed them to the ground. Vespasian, however, was not that kind of spoiled hero. He had once had to budget cautiously; he knew the price of tablet wax.

  “Well, I may want to put space between you two temporarily.”

  “Ah. Anything to do with Julius Frontinus and the Isles of Mystery?” I preempted him.

  The Emperor scowled. “He’s a good man. And he’s known to you.”

  “I think highly of Frontinus.”

  Vespasian ignored the chance to flatter me with the provincial governor’s opinion of me. “There’s nothing wrong with Britain.”

  “Well, you know I know that, sir.” Like all subordinates, I hoped my commander in chief remembered my entire personal history. Like most generals, Vespasian forgot even episodes he had been involved with—but given time, he would recall that he himself had sent me to Britain four years ago. “That is,” I said dryly, “if you leave out the weather, the total lack of infrastructure, the women, the men, the food, the drink, and the mammoth traveling distance from one’s dear Roman heritage!”