Saturnalia Page 4

  No wonder the woman took her chance and escaped.

  The door porter did not fail me. He was a thin Lusitanian in a tight tunic, with a flat head and a pushy manner, who spurned me before I had spoken a word: ‘Unless you are expected, you can turn around and leave.’ I gazed at him. ‘Sir.’

  My cloak, being my smart one, hung on a big brooch with a red enamelled pattern, on one shoulder. I threw the material back over the other shoulder in a nonchalant gesture, barely tearing any threads of the cloak. This enabled him to see me stick my fists in my belt. My grimy boots were planted apart on the washed marble. I wore no weapons, since going armed is illegal in Rome. That is to say, I wore none the door porter could see, though if he had any intuition he would realise that there might be a knife or a cudgel somewhere, currently invisible yet available to whop him with.

  I had my civilised side. If he was a connoisseur of barbering, he would admire my haircut. It was my new Saturnalia haircut, which I had had two weeks early because that was the only time the decent barber at my training gym could fit me in. The timing suited me. I prefer a casual look at festivals. On the other hand, there was no point investing in a cripplingly expensive snip, with a slather of crocus oil, if porters still sneered at my locks and slammed the door.

  ‘Listen, Janus. Let’s not get off on a bad footing unnecessarily. You just go to your master and mention that I , Marcus Didius Falco (that’s as in respected imperial agent) am here on the orders of Titus (that’s as in Caesar) to discuss something very important, and while you (that’s as in unmitigated ning-nong) are off on your errand, I’ll try—because I am a generous man—to forget that I would like to tie your scraggy neck in a double clove hitch knot.’

  Titus’ name worked like a love charm. I always hate that.

  While the porter disappeared to make enquiries, I noted that there were two very large cypress trees in four-foot pots like round sarcophagi, one either side of the twelve-foot-high double entrance doors. Either the Quadrumati liked their Saturnalia greenery to be very sombre, or there was another cause: somebody had died.

  M. Quadrumatus Labeo, son of Marcus, grandson of Marcus (a consul), had a bulbous shape hung about with a flowing long-sleeved robe, embroidered all over with lotus blossoms, which carried unexpected hints of Alexandrian decadence. I reckoned the pharaonic cuddler was worn for warmth; he was of straight deportment otherwise. A couple of enormous gold rings forced him to hold his hands rather stiffly so people would notice the metalwork, but his general manner was austere. His personal barber kept his hair clipped like a boxer, shaved him until his cheeks were the colour of crushed damsons, then splashed him with a light orris water.

  I knew from prior enquiries at the Atrium of Liberty records office, his family had been in the Senate for at least three generations; I had been too bored to trace them any further back. It was not clear how this family had acquired their money, but I deduced from their home situation they still owned pleasant quantities. Quadrumatus Labeo could well have been a jovial fellow who kept his household in stitches with his witty stories, but when I first met him he was preoccupied and looked nervy.

  The reasons for this emerged straight away. He was accustomed to business meetings, which he probably chaired with dispatch. He knew who I was. He told me what I needed, without waiting for questions: he had accepted Veleda into his house as a patriotic duty, though he was reluctant to have her for long and had intended to make representations for her removal (which I fancied would have been successful). They had made her comfortable, within reason, given that she had once been a ferocious enemy and was now a captive with a death sentence. His house was large enough to hide her away in a self-contained suite. There had been minimal contact between Veleda and his family, though his gracious wife had extended the courtesy of taking mint tea with the priestess in the afternoons.

  He regretted that Veleda had overheard details of her fate from a visitor. (Of course this indicated that visitors had been allowed to gawp at her.) If he or his staff could assist me in my investigation of her disappearance, they would do so, but on the whole, Labeo would prefer to forget the whole ghastly incident—insofar as that was possible. His wife would never get over it. The entire family would be forced to remember Veleda for the rest of their lives.

  There were some odd circumstances, Laeta had warned me. Ganna had said nothing, but I had sensed her keeping things back. I had a grim feeling. ‘What happened, sir?’

  Sometimes interviewees waffle; sometimes they conceal the truth. Sometimes they just don’t know how to tell a story straightforwardly. Quadrumatus Labeo was an exception. He wasted neither my time nor his. His manner was restrained, but his voice was tight: ‘When Veleda escaped, she murdered my brother-in-law. There is no doubt she was responsible. His decapitated body was lying in an enormous pool of blood; the slave who was first on the scene has had a mental breakdown. My wife then found her brother’s severed head in the atrium pool.’

  Well, that explained the funereal cypress trees. And I could see why Laeta and Ganna had omitted this detail.

  VII

  I had walked through the atrium when I arrived, but now I knew it was a crime scene I asked Quadrumatus Labeo to show me again.

  While we stood on the marble-clad edge of a twenty-foot basin of water, I took out my note-tablet and stylus. I sketched the scene and indicated with an arrow where the head was found. Behind me, the Lusitanian porter ogled from the narrow, curtained corridor that led in from the entrance door; seeing his master, the lanky creep busied himself looking officious. Ahead, beyond the pool and the square spacious hall with its scatter of plinths bearing pompous fat-faced busts, I could see an enclosed garden. Clipped box globes and a fountain in the form of a clam shell. Two stone doves drank from the shell. A real dove currently perched on one of the stone ones, cooing for crumbs. Classic.

  Not many beauteous patrician atria have severed human heads staring up from their water features. The head was gone now, but I could not help imagining it.

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘Ten days ago.’

  ‘Ten days?’

  Quadrumatus looked abashed momentarily, then became petulant. ‘I was not willing to have strangers barging about my home, upsetting my family even further, until we had gone through the nine days of formal mourning. I am sure you understand that.’

  I understood all right. Veleda had now been on the run for too long. The trail, if I could ever even find it, would be stone cold. This was why Laeta hadn’t told me about the murder. I would have spurned the job.

  ‘I’ll be discreet.’ My reply was curt.

  At my feet, clear water lapped almost imperceptibly against black and white marble. The atrium pool, peaceful beneath a classic square rain-hole up in the elegant roof, contained a small base upon which danced a floral female deity, in bronze, about a foot and a half high.

  She looked cute, but I knew my father would have said it was a bad statue. The drapery was too static to be interesting, and the flowers were badly moulded.

  ‘We had to drain the cistern below completely, afterwards,’ complained the senator, talking of a water storage basin that must be fed from the atrium pool. His voice was low. ‘None of my staff wanted to volunteer… I had to supervise closely in person. I needed to be sure it was done thoroughly.’

  I was still angry, so I said, ‘You wouldn’t want to end up drinking your brother-in-law’s gore.’ Quadrumatus shot me a swift look, but did not rebuke me. Perhaps he realised the position on the ten-day delay. With his rank, he must have been an army officer and he would have held civil posts where he needed to handle crises. Now he ran who knows what kind of property portfolio, with who knows how many interlinked commercial businesses. I could tell from his neat, calmly behaved slaves, he had basic efficiency. When you are dealing with an idiot, you see it in his staff’s expressions.

  ‘Was any weapon found?’

  ‘No. We assume she took it with her.’

  �
�Did Veleda come here with companions?’

  ‘A girl-Ganna.’

  ‘Yes, I know about her. No one else? And did the priestess have any visitors while she stayed here?’

  ‘My orders forbade that.’ Did he mean the orders he had issued, or orders that had been issued to him by the Palace? Both, I hoped. ‘Her presence was, as I am sure you know, Falco, a state secret. I only agreed to give her houseroom on that basis; I could not have tolerated disruption and public curiosity. We are a very private family. But to my knowledge, nobody attempted to see her.’

  ‘And tell me about your brother-in-law, please.’

  ‘Sextus Gratianus Scaeva, my wife’s brother. He lived here with us.

  He was a young man of exceptional promise—’ Inevitably. I had yet to meet a senator who described his relatives in any but glowing terms especially ones who were safely dead. Given that most relatives of senators are talentless buffoons, a cynic might wonder.

  ‘And before Gratianus Scaeva died so tragically, what were his connections with Veleda?’

  ‘He barely met her. We held a couple of formal family dinners to which the woman was invited as a courtesy; she was introduced to him. That’s all.’

  ‘No infatuation on one side or the other, a flirtation that you might have been unaware of at the time?’

  ‘Certainly not. Scaeva was a man of spirit, but we could always rely on him for proper behaviour.’

  I wondered. The Veleda I remembered glowed with lustrous assurance. We had looked at her and gulped. It was more than a queenly figure and pale gold hair. To win the trust of suspicious, belligerent tribesmen took special qualities. Veleda made the Bructeri believe fighting Rome was their only destiny; moreover, she persuaded them they had chosen this for themselves. She used strength of mind and strength of purpose. She was cloaked in an aura that went way beyond the fake mystery of most fortune-tellers and charlatans. She was brilliant, enthralling—and, when I met her, she had been desperate for intelligent male conversation. If she had been a prisoner for months, she would have been desperate again.

  Veleda had been quick to share her thoughts and dreams with a ‘promising young man’ when we provided one. The young man I saw vanish up her tower with her had cast aside ‘proper behaviour’ without thinking twice. I did warn him to watch himself, but he rushed at the chance to be close to her.

  Afterwards, Justinus had carried the pain of leaving Veleda behind for five years, and I saw no reason to think he would ever be free of her. So had Scaeva been captured in the same subtle spider’s web?

  Quadrumatus Labeo had finished with me, whether or not I had finished with him. His dream interpreter had arrived.

  ‘Nightmares since the murder?’

  The senator looked at me as if I was cracked. ‘Such consultations aid rational thinking. My man calls daily.’

  So the dream therapist governed his every act. I kept my gaze neutral. ‘And did you consult him about whether to allow Veleda to stay here?’

  His expression sharpened. ‘I assure you, Falco! I maintained scrupulous security.’

  I took that as an admission.

  The dream therapist had a cold. He was wiping his nose on the sleeve of his star-spattered knee-length tunic as he brushed past me, heading after his dignified client to the inner sanctum. We were not introduced. I would know him again, though. He looked straight from the Chaldees, right down to the long hooked nose, peculiar cloth head-dress and air of having caught a disease from over-friendly relations with his camel. As exotic enhancement, he wore soft felt slippers with curly toes that had foully moulded themselves to the shape of his feet; he was a martyr to bunions, by the look of it.

  His name was Pylaemenes. The house steward told me. To my surprise the slaves here seemed indifferent to the man; I had reckoned they would be hostile to an influential outsider—especially one of distinctly foreign appearance whose robe hem needed tacking up but who was probably paid zillions.

  ‘We are used to all sorts,’ shrugged the steward, as he took me to find the slave who discovered the body.

  This was a distraught waif of about fifteen, now trembling in the corner of his cubicle, hugging his knees. When I entered the bleak compartment, a typical slave cell which he shared with another, he showed me the whites of his eyes like an unbroken colt. The steward picked up a thin blanket and draped it over him, but it would clearly slide off again.

  As a witness the lad was useless. He would not speak. It looked as if he did not eat. If nothing was done soon, he was a lost soul.

  What could anyone expect? The steward had told me about him. He had been a cheery, useful teenager who then found himself alone in a room with a headless corpse. Born and bred a house slave in a home of refulgent luxury, where the owners were obviously civilised people and he was probably never chastised by more than wounding sarcasm, this was his first meeting with crude death by violence. Pools of still-warm, spreading blood, in one of which he had accidentally stepped, had horrified him out of his wits.

  He was the flute boy. His double flute sat on a ledge in his cell. He had gone to entertain Gratianus Scaeva with music while the young master was reading. I guessed he would never play again.

  ‘Does Quadrumatus Labeo have a personal doctor? Someone should take a look at this lad.’

  The steward gave me an odd look, but said that he would mention it.

  Next, I was taken to meet Drusilla Gratiana.

  The noble Drusilla was a typical senator’s wife: an ordinary woman in her forties who, because she was descended from sixteen generations of senatorial stiffs, believed herself exceptional. The only thing that made her different from a fishwife slitting open fresh-caught mullet was her spending budget.

  Drusilla Gratiana had papery skin, a suspicious expression, a twenty-five-thousand sesterces pearl necklace bestowed on her by Quadrumatus, four children of whom one daughter was betrothed last month, a troupe of pet dwarfs, a corn warehouse she inherited from her uncle, and a drink habit. Some of this I had extracted from the steward, the rest was obvious. She was draped in red-purple silk, which two pale maidens kept tidy while a seventy-year-old wardrobe mistress constantly supervised. My mother would have made a friend of this black-clad crone. Her contempt for me was immediate. I did not imagine the malignant attendant had seen Veleda as an ornament to the household either.

  ‘We are expecting Cleander,’ barked the wrinkled and beady-eyed creature. ‘You’ll have to be quick!’

  I ignored her. I addressed her mistress direct in a cool, calm voice that was meant to establish my credentials as a man of refined manners. It irritated all the women in the room. ‘Drusilla Gratiana, I offer my condolences on your brother’s dreadful fate. I regret any disturbance I have to cause to your household. But I must confirm exactly what happened, so I can bring the perpetrator to justice.’

  ‘As Phryne says: be quick then!’ Mistress and maid worked as a team. Just my luck.

  ‘Who is Cleander?’

  ‘My lady’s doctor.’ I was told this by the black-clad Phryne, angrily of course.

  The noble lady and her freedwoman were bound by thirty years of complicity. Phryne had decked out Drusilla Gratiana as a bride; she knew all her secrets, not least where she kept the wine flagon; there would be no bumping Phryne out of the way. She was owed too much. She wanted to control Drusilla; she would stick around.

  I cleared my throat. ‘I’ll try to be brief, then… Were you close to your brother?’

  ‘Of course.’ Apart from the fact that Drusilla spoke rather dreamily, with a husky toper’s voice, that told me nothing. Gratianus Scaeva could have lived with his sister because they were devoted or because he was a social liability who needed to be kept under tight control. The relationship between the siblings could have been anywhere on a spectrum between incest and outright loathing. Nobody intended me to find out.

  ‘Yes, I assumed that—because he lived with you. Was he your only brother, by the way?’

  ‘I have
two others and two sisters. Scaeva happened to be unmarried.’ So now I had it: of his five married brothers and sisters, Drusilla Gratiana had the richest spouse and the most comfortable home. Gratianus Scaeva knew how to sponge.

  ‘Not found the right girl yet?’

  Drusilla gave me a nasty look. ‘There was nothing wrong with him, if that is what you are implying! He was only twenty-five and perfectly normal, though not strong. He would have been a wonderful husband and father; all that has been taken away from him.’ I won’t say she cried. It would have spoiled her careful face makeup. Besides, I was a lout and she was too proud to give way.

  I wished I had brought Helena Justina for this. Even the old bag in black would have been impressed by her.

  ‘This is bound to be painful, but I need to ask about how you found your brother’s head, please.’ Drusilla Gratiana whimpered and looked faint. Phryne shuddered, making a big show of it. ‘Was there any particular reason why you went into the atrium, or were you just passing through normally on your way somewhere?’ With a struggle, Drusilla gave a slight nod that indicated the latter. ‘I’m sorry. This is unacceptably hard for you. I won’t ask you any more.’

  I was only being amenable because my interview was ended anyway: the damned doctor had turned up. I knew who he was from the stuffed satchel of medicaments, the piqued frown, and the bustling manner that told his patients they were being charged by the minute by an exceptionally busy specialist who was much in demand.

  ‘Who is this low fellow?’

  ‘The name is Falco. Didius Falco.’

  ‘You look like a slave.’

  His arrogance smelt like a fisherman’s fart, but I was not in the mood for nit-picking.

  Drusilla Gratiana was already stretching out on a couch. There were some female invalids with whom I would happily play doctors and nurses. In this case, I left.

  Some informers get to deal with buxom young female slaves who carry the titbit trays and yearn to make free with male visitors. My name is Didius Falco, and I end up with implacable old freedwomen: Cleander had shooed her out, making it plain that however intimate she was with Drusilla, he would not accept an underling at his consultation.