Three Hands in the Fountain Read online

  ‘Where all the administrative units remain strictly pigeon-holed?’

  ‘If the person was killed, and if it happened in a different part of the city from where the severed hand turned up, who ought to be responsible for investigating the crime?’

  ‘Only us – if we’re stupid enough to take the job.’

  ‘Who will bother to ask us?’ I demanded.

  ‘Only a friend or relative of the deceased.’

  ‘They may not have any friends – or any who care where they are.’

  ‘A prostitute.’

  ‘Or a runaway slave.’

  ‘A gladiator?’

  ‘No – they have trainers who want to protect their investment. Those bastards keep track of any missing men. An actor or actress, perhaps.’

  ‘A foreigner visiting Rome.’

  ‘There may be any number of people looking for lost relatives,’ I said sadly. ‘But in a city of a million people, what are the chances they will hear we found an ancient mitt? And even if they do, how can we ever identify something like that?’

  ‘We’ll advertise,’ Petronius decided. He thought that was the answer to everything.

  ‘Dear gods, no. We would get thousands of useless replies. What would we be advertising for, anyway?’

  ‘Other parts of the puzzle.’

  ‘Other parts of the body?’

  ‘Maybe the rest is still alive, Falco.’

  ‘So we’re looking for someone one-handed?’

  ‘If they’re alive. A corpse won’t answer an advertisement.’

  ‘Neither will a killer. You’re drunk.’

  ‘So are you.’

  ‘Then I’d better stagger across the road.’

  He tried to convince me that I ought to stay there and get sober first. I had been on enough bouts to know the folly of that one.

  It felt extremely odd, finding Petronius Longus acting like a reprobate bachelor who wanted an all-night party, while I was the sober head of household seeking an excuse to scuttle off home.

  VIII

  THE ACTIVITY OF running down six flights of stairs ought to be enough to clear a tipsy head, but it just leads to bruises when you fail to negotiate the corners. Cursing the damage can attract unwanted attention.

  ‘Falco! Come here! Tell me I ought to leave Smaractus.’

  ‘Lenia, don’t just leave him. He’s a household pest; knock him down and jump on him until he stops squeaking.’

  ‘But what about my dowry?’

  ‘I told you: divorce him, and you can keep it.’

  ‘That’s not what he says.’

  ‘Him? He told you if you got married you would have prosperity, peace, and a life of uncloying happiness. That was a lie, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a lie even he never tried on me, Falco.’

  Maybe I should have stayed in the laundry and tried to console my old friend Lenia. In the old days I had spent half my time in the cubbyhole she used as an office, drinking bad wine with her and moaning about injustice and lack of denarii. Now, since she was still married to Smaractus, there was every chance he would roll in to join us so I tended to avoid the risk. Besides, I had a home of my own to go to, when other people stopped distracting me.

  What I didn’t know was that my home had been invaded by another pest: Anacrites.

  ‘Hello, Falco.’

  ‘Help! Fetch me a broomstick, Helena; someone’s let a disgusting roach in here.’ Anacrites was giving me a quiet tolerant smile. It really wound up my rope to straining point.

  Helena Justina scrutinised me sharply. ‘How was your friend?’ She had obviously decided that having Petronius camping out in our spare apartment could threaten our domestic life.

  ‘He’ll be all right.’

  Helena deduced that meant he was in a bad way. ‘There’s a pine nut omelette and rocket salad.’ She had eaten hers already. My dinner was set out in a dish. There was slightly less than I would have served for myself, the omelette had gone cold, and it was accompanied rather pointedly by water.

  Anacrites cast a few yearning glances, but it was made clear he was excluded. Helena was ignoring him. She disliked him as much as I did, although she had no strong views on his efficiency or character. Helena simply loathed him for trying to kill me. I like a girl with principles. I like one who thinks I’m worth keeping alive.

  ‘Any chance of Petronius Longus going back to his job?’ Anacrites had come straight to the point of his visit. Before his head wound he would never have been so obvious. He had lost his social guile and his sleek, seditious confidence. But his eyes were as untrustworthy as ever.

  I shrugged. ‘Balbina Milvia’s a very pretty girl.’

  ‘You think the infatuation is serious?’

  ‘I think Petronius Longus doesn’t take kindly to being told what to do.’

  ‘I hoped there was a chance you and I could work together, Falco.’

  ‘Anyone would think you were afraid of my mother.’

  He grinned. ‘Isn’t everyone? I’m serious about this.’ So was I, about avoiding it.

  I continued eating my dinner. I wasn’t going to joke about Ma with him. Helena deposited herself on a second stool alongside me. She linked her hands on the edge of the table and glared at Anacrites. ‘Your question seems to be answered. Is that all you came here for?’

  He looked flustered in the face of her hostility. His pale grey eyes wandered uncertainly. Since he’d been clouted on the head he seemed to have shrunk slightly, both physically and mentally. It was odd to have him sitting here with us. There was a time when I only ever saw Anacrites at his office on the Palatine. Until Ma brought him to our party he had never met Helena formally, so he must be wondering how to deal with her. As for Helena, even before he came to our house she had heard a great deal about the troubles Anacrites had caused me; she had no doubt how to react to him.

  Ignoring Helena, he appealed to me again. ‘We could be a good partnership, Falco.’

  ‘I’m working with Petro. Apart from the fact that he needs to keep occupied, we’re old team-mates.’

  ‘This could be the end of your friendship.’

  ‘You’re a pessimistic oracle.’

  ‘I know how the world works.’

  ‘You don’t know us.’

  He bit back any rejoinder. I then kept my head down over my food bowl, making no attempt at conversation, until the spy took the hint and went home.

  Helena Justina turned to face me. ‘What’s he up to, do you think?’

  ‘I made my feelings clear the other day. He’s behaving impulsively coming here again; I put it down to his crack on the head.’

  ‘According to your mother he keeps forgetting things. And he looked very worried by the noise at our party. He’s not right.’

  ‘All the more reason not to work with him. I can’t afford to carry a dud. Whatever Ma says, he’s not up to it.’

  Helena was still perusing me critically. I enjoyed the attention. ‘So Petro is coping. And how are you, Marcus Didius?’

  ‘Not as drunk as I could have been, and not as hungry as I was.’ I wiped round my bowl neatly with the last of a bread roll, then laid my knife at an exact angle in the bowl. I drained my beaker of water like a man who was really enjoying her choice of drink. ‘Thank you.’

  Helena inclined her head quietly. ‘You could have brought Petronius over,’ she conceded.

  ‘Another day maybe.’ I lifted her hand and kissed it. ‘As for me, I’m where I want to be,’ I said to her. ‘With the people I belong to. Everything is wonderful.’

  ‘You say that as if it were the truth,’ scoffed Helena. But she smiled at me.

  IX

  THE NEXT TIME I ate dinner the surroundings were more luxurious, though the ambience was less comfortable: we were being formally entertained by Helena’s parents.

  The Camilli owned a pair of houses near the Capena Gate. They had all the amenities of the nearby busy area around the Via Appia, but were ensconced in a pri
vate insula off a back street where only the upper classes were welcome. I could never have lived there. The neighbours were all too nosy about everyone else’s business. And someone was always having an aedile or a praetor to dinner, so people had to keep the pavements clean lest their highly superior enclave be officially criticised.

  Helena and I had walked there over the Aventine. Her parents were bound to insist on sending us home in their beaten-up litter, with its just-about-adequate slave bearers, so we enjoyed a stroll through the early evening stir of suburban Rome. I was carrying the baby. Helena had volunteered to lug the large basket of Julia’s impedimenta: rattles, spare loincloths, clean tunics, sponges, towels, flasks of rosewater, blankets and the rag doll she liked to try to eat.

  As we came under the Porta Capena, which carries the Appian and Marcian aqueducts, we were splashed by the famous water leaks. The August evening was so warm we were dry again by the time we arrived at the Camillus house and I worked up a temper rousing the porter from his game of dice. He was a dope with no future, a lanky lout with a flat head who made it his life’s work to annoy me. The daughter of the house was mine now. It was time to give up, but he was too dumb to have noticed.

  The whole family had assembled for the ceremonial meeting with our new daughter. Considering the household boasted two sons in their early twenties, this was quite a coup. Aelianus and Justinus were ignoring the call of theatres and the races, dancers and musicians, poetry parties and dinners with drunken friends in order to greet their firstborn niece. It made me wonder what threats to their allowances must have been issued.

  We handed over Julia to be admired, then beat a retreat to the garden.

  ‘You two look exhausted!’ Decimus Camillus, Helena’s father, had sneaked out to join us. Tall, slightly stooped, and with short, straight, upstanding hair, he had his problems. He was a friend of the Emperor, but still laboured under the shadow of a brother who had tried to hijack the currency and disrupt the state; Decimus could not expect to be awarded any senior post. His coffers were light too. In August a senatorial family ought to be sunning themselves at some elegant villa on the spa coast at Neapolis or on the slopes of a quiet lake; the Camilli owned farms inland, but no proper summer haven. They passed the million sesterces qualification for the Curia, yet their cash in hand was insufficient to build on, either financially or socially.

  He had found us sitting side by side on a bench in a colonnade, heads together and motionless, in a state of collapse.

  ‘Having a baby’s hard work,’ I grinned. ‘Were you allowed a glimpse of our treasure before she was mobbed by cooing women?’

  ‘She seems skilled at handling an audience.’

  ‘She is,’ confirmed Helena, finding the energy to kiss her papa as he squashed informally on to our seat. ‘Then when the flatterers finish, she’s good at being sick on them.’

  ‘Sounds like someone I knew once,’ the senator mused.

  Helena, his eldest child, was his favourite; and unless I had lost my intuitive powers, Julia would be next in line. Beaming, he leaned across Helena and clapped me on the arm. He ought to view me as an interloper; instead I was an ally. I had taken a difficult daughter off his hands, and proved I intended to stick with her. I had no money myself, yet unlike a conventional patrician son-in-law I did not come round once a month whining for loans.

  ‘So, Marcus and Helena, you are back from Baetica – in good repute as usual, say those in the know on the Palatine. Marcus, your resolution of the olive oil cartel greatly pleased the Emperor. What are your plans now?’

  I told him about working with Petronius, and Helena described our skirmishes with the Censors’ clerk yesterday.

  Decimus groaned. ‘Have you done the Census yourself yet? I hope you have better luck than I did.’

  ‘In what way, sir?’

  ‘Up I marched, full of self-righteousness for reporting promptly, and my estimate of my worth was disbelieved. I had reckoned my story was foolproof too.’

  I sucked my teeth. I thought him an honest man, for a senator. Besides, after the business with his treasonous brother, Camillus Verus had to prove his loyalty every time he stepped into the Forum. It was unjust, since he was that political rarity: a selfless public man. The condition was so rare, nobody believed in it. ‘That’s hard. Do you have any right of appeal?’

  ‘Officially, there’s no audit. The Censors can overrule anybody on the spot. Then they impose their own tax calculation.’

  Helena’s dry sense of humour was inherited from her father. She laughed and said: ‘Vespasian declared he needed four hundred million sesterces to refill the Treasury after Nero’s excesses. This is how he intends to do it.’

  ‘Squeezing me?’

  ‘You’re good-natured and you love Rome.’

  ‘What an appalling responsibility.’

  ‘So did you accept the Censors’ ruling?’ I asked, chuckling slightly.

  ‘Not entirely. The first option was to protest – which meant I would have to put in a lot of effort and expense producing receipts and leases for the Censors to laugh at. The second option was to pay up quietly; then they would meet me halfway.’

  ‘A bribe!’ cried Helena.

  Her father looked shocked; anyway, he made a pretence of it. ‘Helena Justina, nobody bribes the Emperor.’

  ‘Oh, a compromise,’ she snorted angrily.

  Feeling cramped with three on the bench, I stood up and went to investigate the garden fountain on a nearby wall: a spluttery drunken Silenus pouring feebly from a wineskin. The poor old god had never been up to much; today his flow was being additionally obstructed by a fig which had dropped from a tree trained to grow against the sunny wall. I fished out the fruit. The gurgle resumed slightly more strongly.

  ‘Thanks.’ The senator tended to put up with things that failed to work. I strolled to a fancy border, where last year’s pot lilies had been planted out. They were struggling against beetle, their leaves bitten and badly stained with rust. They weren’t flowering, and would be seriously ailing next season. Lily beetles are bright red and easily outwitted, so I was able to knock some off on to the palm of my hand, then drop them on to the paving where I flattened them under my boot.

  Checking the result of my work on the fountain, I told the senator about the dismembered hand. I knew he had paid for private access to one of the aqueducts. ‘Our supply seems pretty clean,’ he said. ‘It comes from the Aqua Appia.’

  ‘Same as the Aventine fountains,’ I warned.

  ‘I know. They receive priority. I pay a huge premium, but the rules are strict for private householders.’

  ‘The water board regulates your quantity?’

  ‘The board gives me an officially approved calix let into the base of a water tower.’

  ‘Can’t you bend it a bit and increase the flow?’

  ‘All private access pipes are made from bronze to prevent their being illegally enlarged – though I believe people do try.’

  ‘How big is your pipe?’

  ‘Only a quinaria.’ Just over a digit in diameter. The smallest, but given an uninterrupted flow day and night sufficient for a reasonable household. Camillus had no spare cash. He was the kind of millionaire who seriously needed to economise.

  ‘Too small for objects to come floating down,’ Helena commented.

  ‘Yes, thank goodness. We get a lot of sand, but the thought of receiving body parts is decidedly unpleasant.’ He warmed to his theme. ‘If there were loose debris in the aqueduct my calix could become blocked inside the water tower. I might not complain immediately; private houses are always the first to be cut off if there’s a problem. I suppose that’s fair.’ Camillus was always tolerant. ‘I can’t see the water board admitting that they’d found something unhygienic inside the castellum. I imagine I’m being supplied with sparkling water straight from the Caerulean Spring – but is the stuff from the aqueducts really safe to drink?’

  ‘Stick to wine,’ I advised him. Which reminded
us to go indoors to dine.

  When we passed through the folding doors to the dining room we found a more formal spread than was usual here, so fatherhood brought some benefits. There were seven adults dining. I kissed the cheek of Julia Justa, Helena’s mother, a proud, polite woman who managed not to flinch. I greeted her arrogant elder son Aelianus with a mock sincerity that I knew would annoy him, then gave an unfeigned grin to the tall, more slightly built figure of his brother Justinus.

  As well as the entire Camillus family and myself, there was Claudia Rufina, a smart but rather solemn young girl Helena and I had brought over from Spain who was staying here because we had no guest bed to offer her. She was of provincial birth but good family, and would be welcome in all but the snobbiest homes, since she was of marriageable age and sole heiress to a large fortune. Helena and I greeted her kindly. We had introduced Claudia to the Camilli in the flagrant hope that this could be their route to a villa at Neapolis at last.

  So it might prove: we heard that she had already agreed to a betrothal. The Camilli must possess a ruthless streak. Less than a week after Helena and I had delivered this reserved young woman to their house, they had offered her Aelianus. Claudia, who knew him from the time he had spent in Spain, had been brought up to be a good-mannered guest – and Julia Justa had not let her meet any other young men – so she had meekly agreed. A letter had been despatched to her grandparents inviting them to Rome to seal the arrangements straight away. Things had happened so fast it was the first we had heard of it.

  ‘Olympus!’ cried Helena.

  ‘I’m sure you will both be extraordinarily happy,’ I managed to croak. Claudia looked sweetly pleased by this concept, as if nobody had led her to think her well-being came into it.

  They would be as miserable together as most couples, but were rich enough to have a large house where they could avoid one another. Claudia, a quiet girl with a rather big nose, was dressed in white in mourning for her brother, the intended heir, who had been killed in an accident; she probably welcomed something new to think about. Aelianus wanted to enter the Senate, for which he needed money; he would go along with anything. Besides, he was crowing over Justinus, his better-looking and more popular younger brother.