Last Act In Palmyra Read online

  ‘So if you inherited a collection of old jokes,’ I put to him, ‘you’d just toss it away?’ Feeling I might be on to something, struggled to remember details of my earlier conversation with Grumio. ‘Are you telling me I shouldn’t believe all that wonderful rhetoric your tentmate exudes about the ancient hereditary trade of the jester? The professional laughter-man, valued according to his stock in trade? The old stories, which can be sold when in dire straits?’

  ‘Crap!’ Tranio cried.

  ‘Not witty, but succinct.’

  ‘Falco, what good have his family connections done him? Myself, I’ve had more success relying on a sharp brain and a five-year apprenticeship doing the warm-ups in Nero’s Circus before gladiatorial shows.’

  ‘You think you’re better than him?’

  ‘I know it, Falco. He could be as good as he wants, but he’ll need to stop whining about the decline in stage standards, accept what’s really wanted, and forget that his father and grandfather could survive on a few poor stories, a farmyard impression, and some trick juggling. Dear gods, all those terrible lines about funny foreigners: Why do Roman roads run perfectly straight?’ Tranio quipped harshly, mimicking every stand-up comedian who had ever made me wince. ‘To stop Thracian foodsellers setting up hot-and-cold foodstalls on the corners! And then the unsubtle innuendoes: What did the vestal virgin say to the eunuch?’

  It sounded a good one, but he was cut short by the need to yank at his camel as it tried to dash off sideways across the road. I refrained from admitting my low taste by asking for the punch line.

  Our route had been tilting slightly downhill, and now up ahead we could make out the abrupt break in the dry landscape that heralds Damascus, the oasis that hangs at the edge of the wilderness like a prosperous port on the rim of a vast infertile sea. On all sides we could see more traffic converging on this ancient honey-pot. Any moment now either Grumio would trot up to join his supposed friend or Tranio would be leaving me.

  It was time to apply blatant leverage. ‘Going back to Heliodorus. You thought he was an untalented stylus-pusher with less flair than an old pine log. So why were you and Grumio so thick with him that you let the bastard encumber you with horrific gambling debts?’

  I had struck a nerve. The only problem was to deduce which nerve it was.

  ‘Who told you that, Falco?’ Tranio’s face looked paler under the lank fall of hair that tumbled forwards over his clever, dark eyes. His voice was dark too, with a dangerous mood that was hard to interpret.

  ‘Common knowledge.’

  ‘Common lies!’ From being pale he suddenly flushed a raw colour, like a man with desperate marsh fever. ‘We hardly ever played with him for money. Dicing with Heliodorus was a fool’s game!’ It almost sounded as if the clowns knew that he had cheated. ‘We gambled for trifles, casual forfeits, that’s all.’

  ‘Why are you losing your temper then?’ I asked quietly.

  He was so furious that at last he overcame his camel’s perversity. Tearing at its mouth with a rough hand on the bridle, he forced the animal to turn and galloped off to the back of the caravan.

  Chapter LIII

  Damascus claimed to be the oldest inhabited city in the world. It would take somebody with a very long memory to disprove the claim. As Tranio said, who wants to live that long? Besides, the evidence was clear enough. Damascus had been working its wicked systems for centuries, and knew all the tricks. Its money-changers were notorious. It possessed more liars, embezzlers and thieves amongst the stone-framed market stalls that packed its colourful grid of streets than any city I had ever visited. It was outstandingly famous and prosperous. Its colourful citizens practised an astonishing variety of villainy. As a Roman I felt quite at home.

  This was the last city on our route through the Decapolis, and it had to be the jewel of the collection. Like Canatha, its position was remote from the rest, though here the isolation was simply a matter of long distance rather than atmosphere. This was no huddled bastion facing acres of wilderness -even though there were deserts in several directions. Damascus simply throbbed with power, commerce and self-assurance.

  It had the normal Decapolis features. Established in a flourishing oasis where the River Abana dashed out through a gorge in the long mountain range, the stout city walls and their protecting towers were themselves encircled for a wide area by water meadows. On the site of an ancient citadel within the city stood a modest Roman camp. An aqueduct brought water for both public baths and private homes. As the terminus of the old, jealously guarded Nabataean trade route from the Red Sea and also a major crossroads, it was well supplied with markets and caravanserai. As a Greek city it had town planning and democratic institutions. As a Roman acquisition it had a lavish civic building programme, which centred on a grandiose plan to convert the local cult precinct into a huge sanctuary of Jupiter that would be set in a grotesquely oversized enclosure overloaded with colonnades, arches and monumental gates.

  We entered town from the east by the Gate of the Sun. Immediately the hubbub hit us. Coming out of the desert, the cries of rapacious street sellers and the racket of banter and barter were a shock. Of all the cities we had visited this bore the closest resemblance to the setting of a lively Greek play, a place where babies might be given away or treasure stolen, runaway slaves lurked behind every pillar, and prostitutes rarely survived to retirement age. Here, without doubt, sophisticated wives would berate their enfeebled husbands for not coming good in bed. Wayward sons bamboozled doddering fathers. Dutiful daughters were a rarity. Anyone passing for a priestess was likely to have had a first career preparing virgins for deflowerment by off-duty soldiers in a damp quayside brothel, and anyone who openly admitted to being a madam was best avoided hastily in case she turned out to be your long-lost grandmother.

  From the Gate of the Sun to the Gate of Jupiter at the opposite end of town ran the Via Recta, a street some surveyor with a sense of humour had once had named ‘Straight’. An embarrassing thoroughfare. Not exactly the place to hire a quiet room for a week of contemplative soul-searching. It ought to have been a stately axis of the city, yet singularly lacked grandeur. In Roman terms it was a Decumanus Maximus, though one that took several demeaning wiggles around hillocks and inconvenient old buildings. It was a foundation line in what should have been a classical Greek street grid. But Hippodamnus of Miletus, who laid down the principles of gracious town planning, would have chucked up his dinner in disgust if faced with this.

  It was chaotic too, and characterised by a forest of columns that held up cloth awnings. In the turgid heat that soon built up beneath the heavy roofing as the sun climbed, official traders worked from solidly constructed lock-ups. Numerous illegal stalls were also crammed in, spilling in unsupervised rows across most of the width of the street. A Roman aedile would have become apoplectic. Controlling the irreverent mayhem would be impossible. Traffic ground to a standstill soon after dawn. People stopped for long conversations, planting themselves immovably in the road.

  We clapped our hands on our purses, clung together, and tried to forge our way through the impasse, wincing at the noise. We were assailed by entrancing scents from huge piles of spices and blinked at the glitter of tawdry trinkets hung in streamers on the stalls. We ducked to avoid casually wielded bales of fine-weave material. We gaped at the array of sponges and jewellery, figs and whole honeycombs, household pots and tall candelabra, five shades of henna powder, seven kinds of nuts. We were bruised. We were crushed against walls by men with handcarts. Members of our party panicked as they glimpsed an exotic bargain, some bauble in copper, with a twirl to its handle and an Oriental spout; they only turned round for a second, then lost sight of the rest of us among the jostling crowds.

  Needless to say, we had to traverse almost the whole of this chaotic street. The theatre where Chremes had secured us a booking was at the far end, slightly south of the main thoroughfare, near the Jupiter Gate. It stood close to the second-hand clothes-sellers, in what people had
honestly named the louse market.

  Since we were to have the honour of performing at the monumental theatre built by Herod the Great, we could live with a few lice.

  We never did find out how Chremes pulled off this coup. With a slight sign of awareness that people despised his powers as an organiser, he clammed up proudly and refused to say.

  How he did it ceased to matter once we ascertained the local rate for theatre tickets and started selling them. At that point we cheered up tremendously. We had a smart venue (for once), and found no difficulty filling the auditorium. In this teeming hive of buyers and sellers people handed over good money regardless of repertoire. They all prided themselves on driving a hard bargain; once off the commodities in which they were experts, most of them became easy touches. Culture was merely a facet of retailing here. Plenty of brokers were looking to impress clients; they bought tickets to entertain their guests without bothering what might be on. Commercial hospitality is a splendid invention.

  For a couple of days we all thought Damascus was a wonderful place. Then, as people started to realise they had been rooked by the money-changers and as one or two purses were lifted in the narrow alleys off the main streets, our views cooled. Even I went out on my own one morning and bought as a present for my mother a large quantity of what I believed to be myrrh, only to have Musa sniff at it and sadly tell me it was bdellium, a much less pure aromatic gum that should sell at a much less aromatic price. I went back to challenge the stallholder; he had disappeared.

  Our booking was for three nights. Chremes settled on performing what he regarded as the gems in our repertoire: The Pirate Brothers, then a fornicating gods farce, and The Girl from Mykonos. The last sparkler had been cobbled together by Heliodorus some time before he died: maybe he should have died of shame. It was ‘loosely based’ on all the other Girl from … comedies, a teaser for lustful merchants who were on the razzle in a big city without their wives. It had what the Samos, Andros and Perinthos plays all lacked: Grumio’s falling-off-a-ladder trick, Byrria fully clothed but doing a revealing dance while pretending to be mad, and all the girls in the orchestra playing topless. (Plancina asked to be paid a bonus after trapping a nipple between her castanets.)

  Chremes’ choice caused groans. He had no real sense of atmosphere. We knew these were the wrong plays and after a morning of muttering, the rest of the company, led by me as their literary expert, gathered to put matters right. We allowed The Girl from Mykonos, which was obviously a runner in a bad city, but overruled the other two; they were altered by democratic vote to The Rope, with its ever-popular tug of war, and a play Davos liked that enabled him to show off in his Boasting Soldier role. Philocrates, so in love with himself and public adulation, would probably have argued as his own part in the latter was minimal, but he happened to be hiding in his tent after spotting a woman he had seduced on our visit to Pella in the company of a rather large male relative who looked as if he had something on his mind.

  That was the trouble with Damascus. All roads led there.

  ‘And lead away,’ Helena reminded me, ‘in three days’ time. What are we going to do, Marcus?’

  ‘I don’t know. I agree we didn’t come to the East to spend the rest of our lives with a cheap drama company. We’re earning enough to live on - but not enough to stop and take a holiday, and certainly not enough to pay our fares home if Anacrites won’t sign for it.’

  ‘Marcus, I could pay those.’

  ‘If I lost all self-respect.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate.’

  ‘All right, you can pay, but let me try to complete at least one commission first.’

  I led her into the streets. Uncomplainingly she took my arm. Most women of her status would have frizzled up in horror at the thought of stepping into the public hubbub of a loud, lewd foreign metropolis with neither a litter nor a bodyguard. Many citizens of Damascus eyed her with obvious suspicion for doing so. For a senator’s daughter Helena had always had a strange sense of propriety. If I was there, that satisfied her. She was neither embarrassed nor afraid.

  The size and liveliness of Damascus suddenly reminded me of the rules we had left behind in Rome, rules that Helena broke there, too, though at least it was home. In Rome scandalous behaviour among senatorial females was just a feature of fashionable life. Causing trouble for their male relatives had become an excuse for anything. Mothers regarded it as a duty to educate daughters to be rebellious. Daughters revelled in it, throwing themselves at gladiators, joining queer sects, or becoming notorious intellectuals. By comparison, the vices open to boys seemed tame.

  Even so, running off to live with an informer was an act more shocking than most. Helena Justina had good taste in men, but she was an unusual girl. Sometimes I forgot how unusual.

  I stopped at a street corner, caught by an occasional need to check up on her. I had one arm tight around her to protect her from the bustle. She tipped her head to look at me questioningly; her stole fell back from her face, its trimming caught on her earring. She was listening, though trying to free the strands of fine gold wire, as I said, ‘You and I lead a strange life. Sometimes I feel that if I cared for you properly I would keep you somewhere more suitable.’

  Helena shrugged. She was always patient with my restless attempts to make her more conventional. She could take pomposity, if it came as a near relative to a cheeky grin. ‘I like my life. I’m with an interesting man.’

  ‘Thanks!’ I found myself laughing. I should have expected her to disarm me, but she still caught me unawares. ‘Well, it won’t last for ever.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed solemnly. ‘One day you will be a prim middle-rank bureaucrat who wears a clean toga every day. You’ll talk of economics over breakfast and only eat lettuce for lunch. And I’ll have to sit at home with my face in an inch-thick flour pack, forever checking laundry bills.’

  I controlled a smile. ‘Well that’s a relief. I thought you were going to be difficult about my plans.’

  ‘I am never difficult, Marcus.’ I swallowed a chortle. Helena slipped in thoughtfully, ‘Are you homesick?’

  I probably was, but she knew I would never admit to it. ‘I can’t go home yet. I hate unfinished business.’

  ‘So how are you proposing to finish it?’

  I liked her faith in me.

  Luckily I had put arrangements in hand for resolving at least one commission. Pointing to a nearby house wall, I showed off my cunning device. Helena inspected it. ‘Congrio’s script is getting more elaborate.’

  ‘He’s being well taught,’ I said, letting her know I realised who had been improving him.

  Congrio had drawn his usual poster advertising our performance of The Rope that evening. Alongside it he had chalked up another bill:

  HABIB

  (VISITOR TO ROME)

  URGENT MESSAGE: ASK FOR FALCO

  AT THEATRE OF HEROD

  IMMEDIATE CONTACT IS

  TO YOUR DEFINITE ADVANTAGE

  ‘Will he answer?’ asked Helena, a cautious girl.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Thalia said he was a businessman.He’ll think it’s a promise of money.’

  ‘Oh well done!’ said Helena.

  Chapter LIV

  The specimens called Habib who asked for Falco at the theatre were varied and sordid. This was common in my line of work. I was ready for them. I asked several questions they could answer by keen guesswork, then slipped in the customary clincher: ‘Did you visit the imperial menagerie on the Esquiline Hill?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Very interesting.’ The menagerie is outside the city by the Praetorian Camp. Even in Rome not many people know that. ‘Don’t waste my time with cheating and lies. Get out of here!’

  They did eventually catch on, and sent their friends to try ‘Oh no’ as the answer to the trick question; one spectacularly blatant operator even attempted to delude me with the old ‘Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t’ line. Finally, when I was starting to think
the ploy had failed, it worked.

  On the third evening, a group of us who had suddenly become very interested in helping out with the costumes were stripping off the female musicians for their half-naked starring roles in The Girl from Mykonos. At the crucial moment I was called out to a visitor. Torn between pulchritude and work, I forced myself to go.

  The runt who might be about to help me with Thalia’s commission was clad in a long striped shirt. He had an immense rope girdle wrapped several times about his unimpressive frame. He had a lazy eye and dopey features, with tufts of fine hair scattered on his head like an old bedside rug that was fast losing its grip on reality. He was built like a boy, yet had a mature face, reddened either by life as a furnace stoker or some congenital fear of being found out in whatever his routine wrongdoing was.

  ‘I suppose you’re Habib?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Well that was different.

  ‘Did he send you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Are you happy speaking Greek?’ I queried drily, since his conversation did seem limited.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  I would have told him he could drop the ‘sir’, but that would have left us staring in silence like seven-year-olds on their first day at school.

  ‘Cough it up then. I’m needed on stage for prompting.‘I. was anxious to see the panpipe girl’s bosom, which appeared to be almost as alarmingly perfect as the bouncing attributes of a certain rope dancer I had dallied with in my bachelor days. For purely nostalgic reasons I wished to make a critical comparison. If possible, by taking measurements.

  I wondered if my visitor had just come to cadge a free ticket. Obviously I would have obliged just to escape and return to the theatre. But as a hustler he was sadly slow, so I spelled it out for him. ‘Look, if you want a seat, there are still one or two at the top of the auditorium. I’ll arrange it, if you like.’