Three Hands in the Fountain Read online

  ‘How much?’ He was a true member of the Didii.

  I named a price, Gaius made me double it, then he handed Julia very carefully back to Helena and decided to go home.

  Helena called him back to be given a cinnamon pastry (to my annoyance, since I had already spotted it on the table and had been looking forward to devouring it myself). Then she kissed his cheek formally; Gaius screwed up his face, but failed to avoid the salute.

  ‘Jupiter! I hope he’s clean. I haven’t dragged him to the baths since we went to Spain.’

  We watched him go. I still held his little treasure from the drains. I was pleased with myself for rebuffing his attempt at bribery, though I had mixed feelings all the same.

  ‘Why’s that?’ asked Helena dubiously, already suspecting the worst.

  ‘Mainly because I rather think it really is a human toe.’

  Helena touched my cheek gently, with the same air of taming a wild creature that she had shown when kissing Gaius. ‘Well there you are,’ she murmured. ‘Anacrites can do what he likes – but you’re obviously still taking an interest!’

  XVI

  LENIA LET PETRO and me put up a notice on the laundry advising that all samples of body parts from the waterways were now required By Order to be handed in to Anacrites. That helped.

  We had become so notorious that even our flow of regular clients improved. Mostly they brought in work we could do with our eyes closed. There were the usual barristers wanting witness statements from people who lived out of Rome. I sent Petro to do those. It was a good way to take his mind off missing his children – and to make sure he could not disgrace himself again by visiting Balbina Milvia. Besides, he had not yet realised that the reason the barristers wanted to employ us for this work was that it was tedious as all Hades riding a mule to Lavinium and back just to hear some crone describe how her old brother had lost his temper with a wheelwright and bopped him on the nob with half an amphora (bearing in mind that the wheelwright would probably get cold feet about suing the brother and withdraw the case anyway).

  I busied myself tracing debtors and carrying out moral health checks on prospective bridegrooms for cautious families (a good double bind, because I could sneakily ask the bridegrooms if they wanted to pay for financial profiles of the families). For several days I was a dedicated private informer. When that palled I retrieved the big toe from an empty vase on a high shelf out of Nux’s reach, and went down to the Forum to see if I could irritate Anacrites.

  He had had so many revolting finds handed in by people who assumed the reward still applied that a separate room and two dedicated scribes had had to be assigned to the enquiry. A quick glance told me most of the horrid deposits should have been rejected, but the officials were receiving and logging everything. Anacrites had progressed only as far as devising a form to be filled in laboriously by his scribes. I tossed in the toe Gaius had found, refused to supply the prescribed half a scroll of details, leered round the door of Anacrites’ strictly private office, then disappeared again.

  I had had my fun. I could have left it at that. Instead, gnawed at by something Gaius had said and what I had overheard myself at Julia’s party, I decided I would go and visit Lollius.

  My sister Galla struggled to exist with an uncertain number of children and no support from her husband. She rented a doss down by the Trigeminal Gate. It could have been described as a fine riverbank property with fabulous views and a sun terrace, but not to anyone who had seen it. Here my favourite nephew Larius had grown up, before he had the sense to elope and become a wall painter in the luxurious villas on the Bay of Neapolis. Here in theory lived Gaius, though he rarely put in an appearance, preferring to steal sausages from street sellers and curl up at night in a temple portico. Here, on extremely infrequent occasions, one could encounter the Tiber water boatman Lollius.

  He was lazy, deceitful, and brutal – quite civilised by my brothers-in-law’s standards. I despised him more than any of the others except Gaius Baebius the puffed-up customs clerk. Lollius was ugly, too, yet so cocky that he somehow convinced women he was vitally attractive. Galla fell for it – every time he came back to her from the others. His success with tavern trollops was just unbelievable. Galla and he regularly tried to make an effort with their marriage, saying they were embarking on that defeatist course for the children’s sake. Most of the children ran away to my mother’s house when it happened. Almost as soon as the pitiful pair were supposedly together again Lollius would be playing pop the bunny down the hole with some new fifteen-year-old flower-seller; inevitably Galla would hear the news from a kind neighbour, and he would stagger home one night in the small hours to find the door locked. This always seemed to surprise him.

  ‘Where’s Gaius?’ shouted Galla as I entered their sordid home and tried to clean my boot where I had stepped in a bowl of puppies’ gruel left in the hall.

  ‘How should I know? Your unwashed, undisciplined little rag-picker isn’t my affair.’

  ‘He was coming to see you.’

  ‘That must have been two days ago.’

  ‘Oh, was it?’ No wonder young Gaius ran wild. Galla was a hopeless mother. ‘What are you going to do about Larius?’

  ‘Nothing, Galla. Don’t keep asking me. Larius is doing what he wants, and if that happens to be painting walls miles from Rome I don’t blame him. Where’s Lollius?’ I roared, since I had not actually encountered Galla face to face and was still uncertain which room she was bawling from.

  ‘Who cares? He’s asleep.’ At least he was in.

  I tracked down the unprepossessing blackguard and dragged him out from under a grimy bolster where he was snoring with his arm round an empty flagon. This was the boatman’s idea of uxorious devotion. Galla sounded off at him as soon as she heard him grumbling, so Lollius winked at me and we sauntered from the house without calling out that we were going. Galla would be used to it.

  I walked my brother-in-law towards the Forum Boarium. He was probably drunk, but always had a serious limp that made him walk with a lurch, so I had the distasteful task of holding him upright. He looked as if he smelt, though I tried to avoid snuggling up close enough to find out.

  We were on the stone-clad side of the Tiber, what they call the Marbled Bank, a good way past the wharves that surround the Emporium but before the elegant theatres and porticoes and the great bend in the river that encompasses the Campus Martius. After the Sublician Bridge we steered round the Arch of Lentulus, and the Market Inspector’s office, and ended up looking out over the water near the ancient Temple of Portunus, immediately above the exit arch of the Great Sewer. A nice smelly place if I had thrown Lollius off the embankment. Something I should have done. Rome, and Galla’s children, deserved it.

  ‘What do you want, young Marcus?’

  ‘It’s Falco to you. Show some respect for the head of the family.’ He took it that I was joking. Being head of our family was an unenforceable honour. Unendurable, too; a punishment I had been give by the Fates out of malice. My father, the auctioneer and fillollicking finangler Didius Geminus, ought to carry out the prescribed duties, but he had fled from home many years back. He was callous, but shrewd.

  Lollius and I stared gloomily towards the Aemilian Bridge. ‘Tell me about what you find in the river, Lollius.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Is that a considered answer, or a general curse?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘I want to hear about dismembered bodies.’

  ‘More fool you.’

  I fixed him sternly. It did no good.

  When I forced myself to survey him I was looking at a miserable specimen. Lollius appeared to be about fifty, though he could have been any age. He was shorter and stouter than me, in such bad condition that things looked cheerful for his heirs. His face had been ugly even before he lost most of his teeth and had one of his eyes permanently closed by Galla’s hitting him with a solid-bottomed pancake pan. His eyes had been too close together to start with, his ears w
ere lopsided, his nose had a twist that made him snuffle and he had no neck. A traditional waterman’s woollen cap covered his lank hair. Several layers of tunics completed the dreary ensemble; when he had spilt enough wine down himself he just pulled a new one on top.

  So was there nothing to recommend him? Well, he could row a skiff. He could swim. He could curse, fight and fornicate. He was a potent husband, though a disloyal father. He made regular earnings, then persistently lied about them to my sister, and never handed over anything for the upkeep of his family: a classic. True metal from the traditional Roman mould. Surely overdue to be elected to a priesthood or a tribunate.

  I looked back at the river again. It wasn’t much. Brown and gurgling fitfully as usual. Sometimes it floods; the rest of the time the fabled Tiber is a mediocre stream. I had stayed in smaller cities whose waterways were more impressive. But Rome had been built on this spot not just because of the fabled Seven Hills. This was the prime position in central Italy. To our right at Tiber Island had been the first bridgeable position above the sea, a decent one-day stage from the coast. It had probably seemed a sensible location to the kind of slow-witted shepherds who thought they were clever fortifying a floodplain and placing their Forum in a stagnant marsh.

  Nowadays the narrow, silting river was a grave disadvantage. Rome was importing fabulous quantities of goods from all over the world. Every amphora and bale had to be dragged along the highroad in carts or on muleback, or carried up by barges to the Emporium. The new harbour at Ostia had had to be rebuilt but was still unsatisfactory. So as well as the barges there was plenty of small boat traffic, and that enabled the existence of parasites like Lollius.

  He was the last person I wanted to see credited with assisting any enquiry I took part in. However, Petro and I were stuck for useful information. If we were to vie with Anacrites even my brother-in-law had to be tackled. ‘Lollius, either shut your trap about finding things, or tell me what in the name of the gods they are.’

  He gave me his most unreliable squint, bleary and sly. ‘Oh, you mean the festival fancies!’

  I knew at once that the bastard had just told me something significant.

  XVII

  ‘WE CALL THEM that,’ he gloated. Slow to grasp a point himself, he assumed I was just as dim. ‘Festival fancies . . .’ he repeated lovingly.

  ‘What exactly are we talking about, Lollius?’

  He drew two lines on his own body with his index fingers, one across his filthy neck and one at the top of his fat legs. ‘You know –’

  ‘Torsos? Limbless?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I was no longer feeling chatty, but my brother-in-law looked eager. To forestall more horrible details I asked: ‘I suppose the heads are missing too?’

  ‘Of course. Anything that can be chopped off.’ Lollius flashed what remained of his stumpy teeth in an evil grin. ‘Including the melons.’ He drew circles on his chest then sliced down with the flat of his hand as if cutting off breasts. At the same time he made a revolting squelching sound through his gums.

  ‘I gather they are women?’ His mime had been graphic, but I had learned to make sure of everything.

  ‘Well, they were once. Slaves or flighty-girls presumably.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Nobody ever comes looking for them. Who else could they be? All right, slaves might be valuable. So they’re all good-time girls – ones who had a really bad time.’ He shrugged off-handedly. I deplored his attitude, though he was probably right.

  ‘I’ve never heard anything about these limbless lasses.’

  ‘You must move in the wrong circles, Falco.’

  I made no plans to alter my social life. ‘Have you fished any out?’

  ‘No, but I know someone who did.’ Again.

  ‘You saw it yourself?’

  ‘Right.’ Remembering, even he went quiet.

  ‘How many are we talking about?’

  ‘Well, not so many,’ Lollius conceded. ‘Just enough for us to think “He’s still at it!” when one floats to the top or gets tangled in an oar. They all look pretty much the same,’ he explained, as if I was too dumb to work out how the boatmen made the connection.

  ‘With the same mutilations? You talk as if pulling these beauties out of the river is a traditional perk of your job. How long has it been going on?’

  ‘Oh, years!’ He sounded quite definite.

  ‘Years? How many years?’

  ‘As long as I’ve been a waterman. Well, most of the time anyway.’ I should have known better than to hope Lollius would be definite, even about something as sensational as this.

  ‘So we’re looking for a mature murderer?’

  ‘Or an inherited family business,’ Lollius cackled.

  ‘When was the last one discovered?’

  ‘The last I heard about’ – Lollius paused, letting me absorb the implication that he was at the centre of life on the river so bound to know everything important – ‘would have been about last April. Sometimes we find them in July, though, and sometimes in the autumn.’

  ‘And what did you call them?’

  ‘Festival fancies.’ Still proud of the definition, he didn’t mind repeating it once more. ‘Like those special Cretan cakes, you know –’

  ‘Yes, yes, I get it. They turn up at public holidays.’

  ‘Neat, eh? Somebody must have spotted that it’s always when there’s a big set of Games, or a Triumph.’

  ‘The calendar’s so crammed with public holidays I’m surprised anyone noticed.’

  ‘The joke is, it’s always when we roll back to work with a really vile headache and can’t face anything too raw.’ That happened frequently too; the water boatmen all had a notorious capacity for drink.

  ‘When they get fished out, what do you do with the bodies?’

  Lollius glared at me. ‘What do you think we do? We shove in a spike to let the gas out, tow them downstream out of trouble, then sink them if we can.’

  ‘Oh, the humane touch.’

  His scorn was justifiable. ‘We’re certainly not daft enough to hand them in to the authorities!’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Public spirit is at best a waste of time, at worst positively asking for ten months rotting in the Lautumiae jail without a trial.

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’ Lollius jibed. ‘That we should dig a dirty great hole in a public garden and bury the lumps when nobody’s looking – or when we hope they’re not? Or we could all club together and arrange something through our guild’s funeral club, maybe? Oh, yes. You try arranging a polite cremation for someone you don’t know who has had all their extremities hacked off by a pervert. Anyway, Falco, if I had found one of the fancies, and even if I was prepared to do something about it, can you imagine how I’d explain it to Galla?’

  I smiled drily. ‘I expect you’d tell my wonderful trusting big sister some complicated lies, Lollius – just as you normally do!’

  XVIII

  PETRONIUS WAS FURIOUS. When he returned from his trip out of town, the tale I reported from Lollius brought out his worst side as a member of the vigiles. He wanted to storm down to the Tiber and arrest anyone who carried an oar.

  ‘Back off, Petro. We don’t know any names, and we won’t be told any either. I poked around a bit but the boatmen have clammed up. They don’t want trouble. Who can blame them? Anyway, without an actual torso what can you do? We now know that the rivermen find these things; it’s no real surprise, because if there are dismembered hands floating about then the other body parts had to be somewhere. I let it be known along the embankments that next time we’ll take delivery of what they trawl up. Let’s not annoy the bastards. Lollius only coughed to me because he was yearning to play the big prawn.’

  ‘He’s a rotten old bloater.’

  ‘Don’t tell me.’

  ‘I’m sick of messing about, Falco.’ Petronius seemed tetchy. Maybe when I sent him to Lavinium I had made him miss an assignation with Milvia. ‘
The way you do things is incredible. You tiptoe all around the facts, sidling up to suspects with a silly smile on your face, when what’s needed is to hand out a few beltings with a cudgel –’

  ‘That’s the vigiles’ trick for encouraging public trust, eh?’

  ‘It’s how to run a systematic enquiry.’

  ‘I prefer to woo the truth out of them.’

  ‘Don’t fib. You just bribe them.’

  ‘Wrong. I’m too short of cash.’

  ‘So what’s your method, Falco?’

  ‘Subtlety.’

  ‘Bulls’ bollocks! It’s time we had some routine around here,’ Petro declared.

  To impose this fine concept, he rushed off, despite the hot weather, and took himself to the river where he would try working on the boatmen although I had told him not to. I knew he would get nowhere. Clearly the harsh lessons I had absorbed in seven years as an informer would have to be learned all over again by him before Lucius Petronius carried weight as my partner. He was used to relying on simple authority to generate something even simpler: fear. Now he would find he lacked that. All he would inspire in the private sector was scorn and contempt. Anyway, for private citizens putting the boot in was not a legal option. (It was probably illegal for the vigiles too, but that was a theory nobody would ever test.)

  While Petro was exhausting himself among the water bugs, I applied myself to earning some petty cash. First I cheered myself up extracting payment for various jobs I had done months ago, before Petro joined up with me; the denarii went straight into my bankbox in the Forum, minus the price of a couple of shark steaks for Helena and me.

  Then, thanks to our recent notoriety, we had a few tasty tasks. A landlord wanted us to investigate one of his female tenants who had been claiming hard luck; he suspected she was harbouring a live-in boyfriend who should be coughing up a share of the rent. A glance at the lady had already revealed that this was likely; she was a peach and in my carefree youth I would have strung out the job for weeks. The landlord himself had tried unsuccessfully to waylay the boyfriend; my method only took an hour of surveillance. I settled in at midday. As I expected, promptly at lunchtime a runt in a patched tunic turned up looking furtive. He couldn’t bear to miss his snack. A word with the tenement’s water-carrier confirmed that he lived there; I marched in, confronted the culprits as they shared their eggs and olives, and clinched the case.