Three Hands in the Fountain Read online

  In these circumstances Milvia could be seen as in need of consolation. As an officer of the vigiles Petronius Longus was taking a risk if he provided it. As the husband of Arria Silvia, a violent force to be reckoned with at any time, he was crazy. He should have left the delicious Milvia to struggle with life on her own.

  Until today I had been pretending I knew nothing about it. He would never have listened to me anyway. He had never listened when we were in the army and his eye fell on lush Celtic beauties who had large, red-haired, bad-tempered British fathers, and he had never listened since we came home to Rome either.

  ‘You’re not in love with Milvia?’

  He looked amazed at the question. I had known I was on safe ground suggesting that his fling might not be serious. What was serious to Petronius Longus was being the husband of a girl who had brought him a very handsome dowry (which he would have to repay if she divorced him) and being the father of Petronilla, Silvana and Tadia, who adored him and whom he doted on. We all knew that, though convincing Silvia might be tricky if she had heard about sweet little Milvia. And Silvia had always known how to speak up for herself.

  ‘So what’s the situation?’

  ‘Silvia threw me out.’

  ‘What’s new?’

  ‘It was a good two months ago.’

  I whistled. ‘Where are you living, then?’ Not with Milvia. Milvia was married to Florius. Florius was so weak even his womenfolk didn’t bother to henpeck him, but he was clinging fast to Milvia because her dowry – created with the proceeds of organised crime – was enormous.

  ‘I’m at the patrol house.’

  ‘Unless I’m drunker than I think, didn’t this whole conversation begin with you being suspended from the vigiles?’

  ‘That,’ Petro conceded, ‘does make it rather complicated when I want to crawl in for a few hours’ kip.’

  ‘Martinus would have loved to take a stand on it.’ Martinus had been Petro’s deputy. A stickler for the rules – especially when they helped him offend someone else. ‘He went on promotion to the Sixth, didn’t he?’

  Petro grinned a little. ‘I put him forward myself.’

  ‘Poor Sixth! So who moved up in the Fourth? Fusculus?’

  ‘Fusculus is a gem.’

  ‘He ignores you curled up in a corner?’

  ‘No. He orders me to leave. Fusculus thinks that taking over Martinus’ job means he inherited the attitude as well.’

  ‘Jupiter! So you’re stuck for a bed?’

  ‘I wanted to lodge with your mother.’ Petronius and Ma had always got on well. They liked to conspire, criticising me.

  ‘Ma would take you in.’

  ‘I can’t ask her. She’s still putting up Anacrites.’

  ‘Don’t mention that bastard!’ My mother’s lodger was anathema to me. ‘My old apartment’s empty,’ I suggested.

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that.’

  ‘It’s yours. Provided,’ I put in slyly, ‘you explain to me how, if we’re talking about a quarrel with your wife, you also end up being suspended by the Fourth. When did Rubella ever have a reason to accuse you of disloyalty?’ Rubella was the tribune in charge of the Fourth Cohort, and Petro’s immediate superior. He was a pain in the posterior, but otherwise fair.

  ‘Silvia took it upon herself to inform Rubella that I was tangled up with a racketeer’s relative.’

  Well, he had asked for it, but that was hard. Petronius Longus could not have picked a mistress who compromised him more thoroughly. Once Rubella knew of the affair, he would have had no choice about suspending Petro from duty. Petro would be lucky even to keep his job. Arria Silvia must have understood that. To risk their livelihood she must be very angry indeed. It sounded as if my old friend was losing his wife too.

  We were too disheartened even to drink. The amphora was down to the grit in the point anyway. But we were not ready to return home in this glum mood. The water board employee had not actually asked us to move out of his way, so we stayed where we were while he leaned around us cleaning the cockleshell spout with a disgusting sponge on a stick. When the plunger failed to work he burrowed in his tool satchel for a piece of wire. He poked and scraped. The fountain made a rude noise. Some sludge plopped out. Slowly water began to trickle through, encouraged by more waggling of the wire.

  Petronius and I straightened up reluctantly. In Rome the water pressure is low, but eventually the bowl would fill and then overflow, providing the neighbourhood with not only its domestic supply but an endless trickle down the gutters to carry away muck from the streets. Tailors’ Lane badly needed that but, drunk though we were, we didn’t want to end up sitting in it.

  Petronius applauded the workman sardonically. ‘That all the problem was?’

  ‘Seized up while it was off, legate.’

  ‘Why was it off?’

  ‘Empty delivery pipe. Blockage in the outlet at the castellum.’

  The man dug his fist into the bucket he had brought with him, like a fisherman pulling out a crab. He came up with a blackened object which he held up by its single clawlike appendage so we could briefly inspect it: something old, and hard to identify, yet disturbingly familiar. He tossed it back in the bucket where it splash-landed surprisingly heavily. We both nearly ignored it. We would have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. Then Petro looked at me askance.

  ‘Wait a moment!’ I exclaimed.

  The workman tried to reassure us. ‘No panic, legate. Happens all the time.’

  Petronius and I stepped closer and peered down into the filthy depths of the wooden pail. A nauseous smell rose to greet us. The cause of the blockage at the water tower now reposed in a bed of rubbish and mud.

  It was a human hand.

  II

  NONE OF MY relatives had had the courtesy to leave. More had arrived, in fact. The only good news was, the newcomers did not include my father.

  My sisters Allia and Galla made their excuses sniffily the moment I reappeared, though Verontius and bloody Lollius their husbands sat tight. Junia was squeezed into a corner with Gaius Baebius and their deaf son, as usual busy posing as a classic family group so they could avoid talking to anybody else. Mico, Victorina’s widower, was grinning inanely and waiting in vain for somebody to tell him how well turned out his horrible offspring were. Famia, the drunk, was drunk. His wife Maia was somewhere in a back room helping Helena clear up. Various children were bored, but doing their best to entertain themselves by kicking dirty boots against my newly painted walls. All present cheered up as they watched me brace myself.

  ‘Hello, Ma. Brought a footman, I see?’ If I had been warned in advance I would have hired heavies just to eject this man. A couple of moonlighting gladiators with instructions to turn him away at the door, and break both his arms as an extra hint.

  My mother scowled. She was a tiny, black-eyed old bundle who could rampage through a market like a barbarian army. She was holding my new baby daughter, who had begun to bawl her eyes out the moment I appeared. Julia’s grief at beholding her father was not why Ma was scowling; I had insulted her favourite.

  It was her lodger Anacrites. He looked smooth, but his habits were as savoury as a pigsty after months of neglect. He worked for the Emperor. He was the Chief Spy. He was also pale, silent, and reduced to a wraith after a serious head wound which unfortunately failed to finish him. My mother had saved his life. That meant she now felt obliged to treat him as some special demigod who was worth saving. He accepted the fuss smugly. I ground my teeth.

  ‘Find a friendly greeting for Anacrites, Marcus.’ Greet him? He was no friend of mine. He had once arranged to have me killed, though of course that had nothing to do with my loathing him. I could simply find no vacancy in my personal clique for a devious, dangerous manipulator with the morals of a slug.

  I grabbed the screaming baby. She stopped crying. No one looked impressed. Against my ear she gurgled in a way I had learned meant she was soon going to be sick down the inside of my tunic. I laid her dow
n in the fine cradle Petronius had made for her, hoping I could pretend any ensuing mess was a surprise to me. Ma began rocking the cradle, and the crisis seemed to pass.

  ‘Hello, Falco.’

  ‘Anacrites! You look terrible,’ I told him cheerily. ‘Turned back from the Underworld because you’d dirty Charon’s punt?’ I was determined to floor him before he had a chance to get at me. ‘How’s espionage these days? All the swallows over the Palatine are cheeping that Claudius Laeta has put a bid in for your job.’

  ‘Oh no; Laeta’s skulking in ditches.’

  I grinned knowingly. Claudius Laeta was an ambitious administrator at the palace who hoped to incorporate Anacrites and the existing intelligence network in his own section; the two were locked in a struggle for power which I found highly amusing – so long as I could keep myself out of it.

  ‘Poor Laeta!’ I sneered. ‘He should never have tangled with that Spanish business. I had to make a report to the Emperor which showed him in rather a bad light.’

  Anacrites gave me a narrow look. He too had tangled with the Spanish business. He was wondering what I might have reported to Vespasian about him. Still convalescent, a film of sweat suddenly shone on his brow. He was worried. I liked that.

  ‘Anacrites isn’t fit to return to work yet.’ Ma told us some details that had him crawling with embarrassment. I tutted with fake sympathy, letting him know that I was delighted he had terrible headaches and trouble with his bowels. I tried asking for further details, but my mother soon twigged what I was playing at. ‘He has taken indefinite sick leave, approved by the Emperor.’

  ‘Oho!’ I scoffed, as if I thought that was the first step to enforced retirement. ‘Some people who get hit very hard on the head have a personality change afterwards.’ He seemed to have avoided that; it was a pity, because any change in Anacrites’ personality would have been an improvement.

  ‘I brought Anacrites so you and he can have a little chat.’ I went cold. ‘You’ll have to sort out a decent business for yourself now you’re a father,’ my mother instructed me. ‘You need a partner – someone to give you a few tips. Anacrites can help get you on your feet – on days when he feels fit enough.’

  Now it was me who felt sick.

  Lucius Petronius, my loyal friend, had been surreptitiously showing the dismembered hand from the water tower to my brothers-in-law in a corner. Those ghouls were always eager for anything sensational.

  ‘Pooh!’ I heard Lollius boasting. ‘That’s nothing. We fish worse out of the Tiber every week –’

  Some of my sisters’ children spotted the grisly item and crowded round to see it. Petro hastily wrapped up the hand in a piece of rag; I hoped it was not one of our new Spanish dinner napkins. It made an intriguing parcel, which caught the eye of Nux, a determined street mongrel who had adopted me. The dog leapt at the parcel. Everyone snatched to save it. The hand fell out of the rag. It landed on the floor, and was captured by Marius, the extremely serious elder son of my sister Maia who just happened to come into the room at that point. When she saw her normally wholesome eight-year-old sniffing at a badly decayed relic, apparently supervised approvingly by Lucius Petronius, my favourite sister used some language I never thought she knew. Much of it described Petronius, and the rest appertained to me.

  Maia made sure she snatched up the flagon of fine olive oil which was her present from me from Baetica and then she, Famia, Marius, Ancus, Cloelia and little Rhea all went home.

  Well, that cleared some space.

  While everyone else was sniggering and looking shifty, Petro threw a heavy arm round my shoulders and greeted my mother with affection. ‘Junilla Tacita! How right you are about Falco needing to buckle down. As a matter of fact, he and I have just been outside having a long discussion about that. You know, he seems feckless, but he does recognise his position. He needs to establish his office, take on some lucrative cases and build up a reputation so the work continues to flow in.’ That sounded good. I wondered why I had never thought of it. Petronius had not finished his oration. ‘We found the ideal solution. While I’m taking a break from the vigiles I’m going to move into his old apartment – and give him a hand as a partner myself.’

  I beamed at Anacrites in a charitable way. ‘You’re just a fraction too late for the festival. Afraid the job is taken, old fellow. Bad luck!’

  III

  WHEN WE SLAPPED the parcel on to the clerk’s table, Fusculus reached for it eagerly. He had always had a hearty appetite and thought we had brought him in a snack. We let him open it.

  For a second he did think it was an interesting new kind of cold sausage, then he recoiled with a yell.

  ‘Urgh! Where have you two infantile beggars been playing? Who does this belong to?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Petronius had had time to get used to the dismembered hand. While jolly Fusculus still looked pale, Petro could appear blasé. ‘No seal ring with a lover’s name, no handy Celtic woad tattoo – it’s so swollen and misshapen you can’t even tell whether it came from a woman or a man.’

  ‘Woman,’ guessed Fusculus. He prided himself on his professional expertise. The hand, which had four fingers missing, was so badly swollen from being in water that there were no real grounds for his guess.

  ‘How’s work?’ Petronius asked him yearningly. I could tell that as a partner in my own business his commitment would be meagre.

  ‘It was all right until you two came in.’

  We were at the Fourth Cohort’s guard house. Most of it was storage for fire-fighting equipment, reflecting the vigiles’ main task. Ropes, ladders, buckets, huge grass mats, mattocks and axes, and the pumping engine, were all ready for action. There was a small bare cell into which cat burglars and arsonists could be flung, and a utilitarian room where those on duty could either play dice or beat all Hades out of the burglars and fire-raisers if that seemed more fun. Both rooms were normally empty at this hour. The holding cell was used at night; in the morning its miserable contents were either released with a caution or marched off to the tribune’s office for a formal interrogation. Since most offences occur under cover of darkness only a skeleton staff was on duty by day. They were out searching for suspects – or sitting on a bench in the sun.

  Do not be fooled. The vigiles’ life was harsh and dangerous. Most of them had been public slaves. They had signed up because eventually, if they survived, they earned honourable discharge as citizens. Their official term of duty was just six years. Soldiers in the legions serve at least twenty. There was a good reason for the short enlistment, and not many vigiles lasted the full term.

  Tiberius Fusculus, the best of Petro’s hand-picked officers and now standing in for his chief, gazed at us warily. He was a round, cheerful fellow, thin on top, extremely healthy, and sharp as a tenting needle. He was keenly interested in the theory of crime, but we could tell by the way he poked the swollen hand away from him he did not intend to pursue this if he could file it in the ‘No Action’ pigeonhole.

  ‘So what do you want me to do with it?’

  ‘Find the rest?’ I suggested. Fusculus scoffed.

  Petronius surveyed the object. ‘It has obviously been in the water a long time.’ His tone was apologetic. ‘We’ve been told it was found blocking a pipe in a castellum on the Aqua Appia, but it could have got there from somewhere else.’

  ‘Most people are cremated,’ Fusculus said. ‘You might get some dog digging up a human hand at the crossroads in a village in the provinces, but bodies don’t get buried raw in Rome.’

  ‘It smacks of dirty business,’ Petro agreed. ‘If someone, possibly a woman, has been done in, why hasn’t there been an outcry?’

  ‘Probably because women are always being done in,’ Fusculus explained helpfully. ‘It’s their husbands or lovers who do it, and when they wake up sober the men either collapse in remorse and come straight here to confess, or else they find the peace and quiet so welcome that raising an outcry is the last thing they consider.’

 
‘All women have nosy friends,’ Petro pointed out. ‘A lot have interfering mothers; some are caring for aged aunts who if left on their own would wander out into the highway and frighten the donkeys. And what about the neighbours?’

  ‘The neighbours report it,’ said Fusculus. ‘So we go to the house and ask the husband; he tells us that the neighbours are poisonous bastards making malicious accusations, then he claims his wife has gone to visit relatives at Antium. We say, when she comes home will he ask her to drop in and confirm it; we file the details; she never comes, but we never have time to pursue it because by then twenty other things are happening. Anyway, the husband will have run off.’ He did not add ‘and good luck to him’, but his tone was eloquent.

  ‘Don’t give me the brush-off; I’m not some member of the public.’ Petronius was discovering how the public felt when they ventured to his office. He sounded annoyed, probably at himself for not having been prepared for it.

  Fusculus was faultlessly polite. He had been putting off the public for the past fifteen years. ‘If there has been a crime it could have happened anywhere, sir, and the chances of us picking up the rest of the body are nil.’

  ‘You’re not keen on this,’ I divined.

  ‘Clever man.’

  ‘The evidence turned up on the Aventine.’

  ‘A lot of filth turns up on the Aventine,’ snorted Fusculus sourly, almost as if he included us in that category. ‘This isn’t evidence, Falco. Evidence is a material object that casts useful light on a known incident, enabling a prosecution. We have no idea where this forlorn fist came from, and I bet we never will. If you ask me,’ he went on, evidently thinking he had found an inspired solution, ‘it must have been polluting the water supply, so tracing any other body parts is a problem for the water board. I’ll report the find. It’s up to the Curator of Aqueducts to take action.’