A Capitol Death Read online

  “If you know who it was, I suppose you’re not going to tell me.”

  “Clever woman! But, honest, we don’t know.”

  “Then give me a steer on his dodgy business contacts.”

  Too many to name. They just chortled.

  XV

  The food-seller was nowhere to be seen. Gone to lunch, said the painters. He wouldn’t grab one of his own sausages: he knew what went into them.

  I needed to move on. When I asked if they knew where the gilder hung out while he was working on the special chariot, they made a big fuss of pretending its whereabouts were confidential.

  “State secret.”

  “Whyever is that?”

  “Security. Some saboteur might damage it.”

  “Get away!”

  “Give me a chance, I’d throw a pot of colour at it!” muttered Spurius, darkly.

  “He gets colour everywhere, the messy dope,” commented Successus, playing down the seditious threat. In fact both men kept meticulous work areas, protected with surprisingly clean dust sheets. “No, there’s no hope for him. He’s a republican. He’s away with the dryads. I could paint him into a woodland scene, only he’s too ugly.”

  “Whereas you think the Emperor is wonderful?”

  “I’m not saying. You never know who may be listening.”

  “True! Informers are everywhere nowadays … So, Spurius, if you wanted to hurl paint over that chariot as a wild political gesture, where would you go to find the thing? Give a girl a break.”

  “Oh, all right, then.”

  The painters were all heart. A cynic might say it could mean they were guilty men bamboozling me, though I refused to believe that.

  * * *

  I found the gilder in a temple precinct. Since this is a state secret, never mind which temple. However, it was near the big new sanctuary of Isis, the one on the Campus, from where the Triumph would take its start. As he waited for a hot fire to melt a small crucible of gold, Lalus was leaning on a sphinx. Work it out.

  He was a stick-thin, deeply anxious, extremely slow-working man in a tunic he had belted so tightly he was obviously squashing his liver. He looked ancient; he must have done that work for years. If he had ever had staff or colleagues to help with the gold, his perpetual worrying had driven them away.

  The chariot was so important it was housed in its own temporary carriage house. That stopped pigeons shitting on it. Once he had accepted me as genuine, I followed the gilder to it. Within the gloom the monster stood, with blocks under its wheels. Lalus made me climb mounting steps and step inside. I had a brother and many male cousins who would grind their teeth that this privilege had been given to me, a female, who by definition could never appreciate the finer points of racy transport. Even Tiberius would probably have liked a go. All I wanted was to jump safely down again.

  I was struck by how high up I was. The front rail would be above the level of the horses’ backs. A driver would have a fine view right over the team’s heads to the cheering crowds. The standing board was firmer than I expected. Inside was sumptuous, finely upholstered with a light padding. The top rail felt comfortable. I found myself pretending to shake reins.

  Suddenly Lalus kicked the blocks away and hauled the beast into the open. He needed it out in the light so he could work on it. As the chariot rocked under me, I clung on nervously. It was very heavy, yet Lalus had more strength than he showed, and even with my weight, it moved smoothly like a boat on water. No friction jarred the massive wheels, so I was afraid it would sheer off of its own accord and run away with me.

  Even to an amateur, this was a crack vehicle. Lalus discussed it intently. Apparently it had a superb turning circle and was a smoking good runner. A luxury ride, very few miles on it, just a few dings to the axle hubs, while the interior trim still smelt like new.

  As soon as Lalus shoved back the blocks to hold it, I sat on the edge and scrambled down. “I suppose you’ll tell me it’s had one careful owner who never took it outside Rome. If I could arrange finance, I’d snap it up!”

  “Two owners. Titus rode in it first. We don’t tell Our Master. He won’t want his brother’s castoff.” Lalus sniffed. I reckoned he would only reluctantly put this beauty in the hands of Domitian, or anyone.

  The great curved front was decorated all round with embossed and painted garlands. Everything gleamed. I saw curious hooks on which could be hung a bell and a scourge, mythical symbols to avert the evil eye—which Lalus said he always tried to leave off on the day because the damned things scratched his gilding. Near the bottom, an oddly crow-like bird, impersonating an eagle, was having his bedraggled feathers touched up.

  “Beaky is a character!”

  “The bird-carver’s joke. I can’t do much with him—he always comes out looking as if he’s been pulled backwards through a hedge.” Lalus had begun brushing on molten gold. The recalcitrant Beaky would still splay his flight feathers at all angles, unlike the well-groomed silver eagles used as legionary standards. “Can’t stop. I have to do this while it’s right. We are not allowed any waste. I need to keep back some gold for the white oxens’ horns. They won’t allow me any extra. The Senate is so tight with funds, the plunder team have had to raid imperial stores for unused furniture to pass off as captured booty.”

  “I heard. My father runs an auction house. He shifted some ghastly big vases onto the commissariat. And, luckily for them, he can always lay his hands on mock-Parian statues with the wrong heads. If you really run out of gold, he may have some old-fashioned necklets that could be melted down…”

  We had exchanged enough chat. I said we had better tackle what I had really come for. “Gabinus.”

  “Gabinus!” exclaimed Lalus. “You want to talk about him? Now that’s a surprise! I hear the miserable bugger died.”

  “That’s the issue. Tell me all you know about him. The word is, you and he were not friends.”

  “He had no friends. Even if he had, I would never have been one of them.”

  Lalus finished tending his graffito-like eagle. Still holding his crucible, he broke into a furious mime of a short-legged man with a stuck-out chest and a vicious sneer, marching about aggressively.

  “You’re good, Lalus! I feel I have now met the man and instantly taken against him.”

  For a time, Lalus kept in motion, acting his caricature of a bumptious offender, despite being himself so thin and precise. I persuaded him to calm down and say what had passed between them. It was a sorry story. Gabinus had upset the entire chariot team: Lalus, the coach-maker, the wheelwright, the tack-manager in charge of bits and reins, and the two grooms who would walk alongside to hold the outer horses’ heads, even though Domitian was supposedly driving.

  “I tend to be our spokesman.” On the face of it, he was a good choice. When not agitated at the thought of Gabinus, Lalus became measured and articulate.

  “So you and the others are guardians of the quadriga. You are the experts. Then what did Gabinus do to upset you all and why would he be so foolish?”

  “The teams!” Lalus spat, almost unable to speak at all.

  “The four white horses? Egnatius, the deputy, told me you have more than one set. You have to use reserves.”

  “What matters is that we use the right ones,” Lalus raged. “Right temperament. First, that self-opinionated squit decided this time it would be elephants. Elephants! Pompey Magnus had elephants, but he had conquered Africa. Elephants don’t go prancing along the Danube, yet Gabinus even put the mad idea to Our Master. Of course it went down a treat there! Thank the gods, sense prevailed. Bloody Gabinus was threatening to wreck everything—even after horses had been agreed, he kept interfering.”

  Lalus subsided into bitter silence.

  “How?” I prompted. “Where would he source your white horses?”

  “From the factions.”

  “The racing stables? Circus runners? Is that ideal?”

  “No, it bloody well isn’t!” Lalus exploded. “But this
is the way, so there it is. We have done it before, we can manage. The whole thing about chariot racers is they gallop. They are trained to go fast, that’s the point of them—they even love doing it.”

  I saw the problem. “But in a triumph, the poor beasts must go very slowly.”

  “You said it, Albia.”

  “Chariot horses keep trying to canter.”

  “If they speed up—and they will attempt to do so—someone who knows how has to slow them again. Not easy. They will fight him. They are keyed up anyway. All the time noise and movement is going off all around. The trumpets are worst, but the crowds will spook them. We have to get it right. Bloody Gabinus picked out the wrong team. Insisted we get them from the Greens. We told him he had to find a calmer four or the day would be a disaster.”

  “You cannot have the quadriga running away.”

  “We don’t want any kind of crash.”

  “No, that would be an ill omen.”

  “It would smash the chariot!” Lalus protested, full of possessiveness. He showed no anxiety about harm befalling the Emperor. “All our work for nothing. Call himself a transport manager? Gabinus had no idea! Now you’re going to ask me why he was so determined on his set.” I had no need to ask: the answer was erupting. “Listen—the Greens want to boast that their team pulled the chariot. They made sure Gabinus went their way.”

  “They bribed him?” I had lived in Rome long enough. I was not shocked to hear it. The Blues and the Greens were the leading factions, the richest and loudest.

  “The Whites own the team we want,” Lalus confirmed. “Controllable and steady. Not winners, but lovely to look at and responsive to handling. They have had them in training, up to twenty miles a day, for weeks, so they are at peak condition. Fed them. Groomed them until they look exquisite. The Reds also have a very nice four that we identified as good reserves. We’ve been talking to the Whites and Reds about this for a long while. We had it sorted, but Gabinus decided otherwise.”

  I jumped in, turning tough: “So does that mean one of your colleagues killed Gabinus to stop him?”

  “Not us.”

  “No?”

  “No. Now he’s copped it, we are laughing—but we didn’t push him. We can prove we weren’t there,” Lalus told me. Yes, he was a man who thought ahead: he had an alibi ready. “The morning when Gabinus took his tumble off the Rock, all of us were somewhere else, brothers-in-arms together. We were holding a dawn meeting about how to overturn his stupidity. We were at the Whites’ stables, so there were plenty of them present, and we also invited a group of the Reds.”

  “What were you planning to do? Offer him a bigger bribe than the Greens paid?”

  “We thought about that. There was a lot of strife about how much we would be prepared to give him, and how we might find the money. Both the Whites and the Reds would have struggled, though it never came to that. In the end, we decided we hated him too much. Nobody could stomach giving him a fortune. He was too obnoxious. He would have gloated unbearably—anyway, we guessed he would say no. Worse than that, we could not trust him. He might have taken our money, then turned up on the day with the Greens’ team anyway.”

  “What was the alternative?”

  “Appeal to the City Prefect.”

  “Rutilius Gallicus is sensible. I’ll vouch for it; he is straight.”

  “We sent in a petition. I said we should, even after Gabinus died. We worded it quietly, drawing on our experience. A mistake was nearly made, we said, but it can still be righted. We pleaded with Rutilius to suggest that Egnatius ought to act with us, not against.”

  Working men in Rome are always presumed to have little power. Even so, they do collaborate, often with surprising muscle. The trade guilds are deeply embedded and long-standing. The chariot guardians Lalus spoke about were a mixed group of professionals, but I could see them using their influence. The Prefect would probably listen, in the interest of providing a successful triumph; in fact, I thought Rutilius might have listened to them even before Gabinus died.

  “I should think Gabinus was afraid of you.”

  “That had made him even more set against us.” Lalus was a realist.

  There seemed no more to ask. I was about to leave when Lalus threw in one last comment. He was using the informer’s trick: catch them with some tease, just as they head off. I fell for it. People always do.

  “Never mind suspecting us, Flavia Albia. You should be going after his wife.”

  XVI

  This was a facer. I had been on my way, heading off through the temple’s sphinxes and obelisks, but I stomped back to the gilder. “No one has mentioned a wife.”

  He shrugged. As so often, someone had thrown me a valuable nugget, but he immediately backed off, as if it was nothing after all. Witnesses can be so misleading. “Well, I might be wrong,” Lalus hedged, “but we always believed he had one somewhere.”

  “I never even met him, but I can guess she led a terrible life!” I scoffed. “A name or address would be helpful.”

  “Can’t tell you. He never talked about her—people just thought a wife existed. I never saw her. If you ask me,” Lalus cheerfully condemned the man, “neither did Gabinus most of the time.”

  Absences would give the woman a motive to hound him, or worse. On the other hand, if his behaviour in the home had been as unpleasant as it was with his work contacts, she might have been glad he stayed out. Did she know he was dead? Was she pleased?

  “I gather he had other women too. Do you know anything about that, Lalus?”

  “Nobody special. Only girls he went with sometimes, working girls he grabbed for a night. They soon learned better. Never lasted. None of them had any real reason for doing him in.”

  “Not relevant to his death, then?”

  “I can’t see it. He flirted. Either they flirted back or they took a hike. Most women kept out of his way. Brave ones, the ones he couldn’t bully, told him where to go. He didn’t need to bother them twice—Rome is full of easy women.”

  “Any of them available to a man like him. He had a good job. He had money,” I said.

  “He had money,” Lalus agreed, his tone more dour than usual.

  “More than he should have?”

  “Not for me to say.”

  “I take that as an affirmative.”

  “Take it as you like.”

  * * *

  I was satisfied Lalus had now told me all he knew. I had an idea for following up his information. On my way homewards, I went via the Diribitorium, where I sought out Quartilla again.

  The costume-maker was critically examining a rack of new red tunics, which she said were sent in by out-workers. These scarlet duds were for the troops who would march in Domitian’s procession. They would shout obscenities along the route, while scoffing food that the public laid out for them on portable tables as their official welcome home. They were supposed to be unarmed—a good idea if they had too much to drink. As they would. Domitian would give them a huge amount of thank-you money; they would spend it eagerly.

  If a general ever let them break the rule, the weapons they carried would be ornamented with laurel, that well-known meaningless symbol of peace. Another farce was that by tradition they were kitted out with special uniforms, supposedly silk. The material in the new garments seemed lighter than normal woollen tunics, though even to me it felt inferior. In view of triumph economies, I did not pursue whether the “silk” was real or faux.

  Quartilla was venting dismay at the colour. The shade looked much like a madder dye, the cheapest available, rather than the better hue that had been ordered. I did not care whether the army were to parade in rusty sorrel, ox-blood, vivid scarlet or even washed-out pink, but Quartilla had become obsessive. “Now I’ve seen this tacky tint, I’ll have to take a good look at the purple. If someone has skimped on these uniforms, what have they done about the Emperor’s doings? Is his toga picta reduced to a mockery as well?”

  Managing to sidetrack her, I asked
if her own team were doing the gold embroidery on the all-over purple robes for Domitian. She mentioned specialists in metallic thread, sounding mildly dismissive. Then I slipped in my real query innocently: as someone who kept her eyes and ears open, had she ever heard that Gabinus was a married man?

  Quartilla continued assessing the new uniforms. She tried one against a passing barrow-boy she commandeered, while she shook her head abstractedly as if a Gabinus spouse was news. Absorbed in her critique of the unsatisfactory red tunics, that matter-of-fact gesture was all the answer I would get. Around her, various members of her team, who might have heard what I was saying, continued their stitching while they showed no interest in our conversation.

  “Did you ever hear where in Rome Gabinus lived?” I asked.

  Quartilla finally looked up. Her gaze was straight. “When he hadn’t grabbed someone else’s hut, you mean? He organised imperial transport. Wasn’t he required to doss down on the Palatine?”

  Her reply seemed final enough and it made sense, so I went home.

  XVII

  There could be reasons why a married person would avoid their own household. Mine was topsy-turvy enough, I thought, as I approached my door. If his domestic world was similar, Gabinus might have been reluctant to face the chaos.

  Maybe his wife was equally obstreperous. Like attracts like. A harridan. Perhaps she drove him out.

  * * *

  The new dog had already learned to distinguish whose key was being turned in the lock. Before I had the door properly open, Barley came up with her shy, wandering gait, testing my response; if I rebuffed her, she could pretend she had been passing through the hall by chance. I bent to give her a receptive pat, while I listened to hear what was going on.

  It seemed quiet, so I ventured to the courtyard. The new steward was talking to Tiberius, making his acquaintance under the baleful glare of our slave. Immediately he saw me, Dromo exclaimed loudly, “I hope nobody thinks I will be taking orders from him!” He knew I must be the cause of the outrage, importing another tyrant who would have authority over staff; when the previous housekeeper left, Dromo had seen it as his personal triumph. In fact she had simply thought us lunatics and taken herself off somewhere more normal.