Behind her stood two large men. They never directly threatened me. Their presence was enough. Everyone understands a pair of heavies like that.
Instinctively I glanced back to the bar, but we all knew that by the time I could attract attention, it would be too late. I had better cooperate.
XXVII
I felt as distrustful as when I had seen her earlier with the Dardanians. Close to, she was around fifty, with the air of an angry matriarch even if in fact she was not a mother. She was at least as old as Lepida, and much unhappier in her spirit.
She carried a powerful aura, full of confidence. She looked like someone who would matter-of-factly drown unwanted kittens. She might also drown me, if I happened to offend her and there was a handy barrel.
From time to time, people passed in the street, though nobody gave us a second glance. That could mean that once they identified Menendra, they were careful to look away.
“You!” Her voice was throaty. Either she made a habit of yelling at people or she had spent too much time amid the smoky oil of late-night lamps.
“Me?” I queried demurely, stalling.
“Yes, you! The magistrate’s bint.” Faustus would smile at that. I gave her my I am my own woman stare. My attempt was as much use as trying to wash a dog that’s rolled in dung without getting dirty yourself.
She came nearer. I would have stepped back but I was already against the bar counter. Menendra was a hard-faced ratchet who could not be called attractive, though she looked as if she had never been held back by that. She wore a dark green gown with a fierce belt, but she had let her body run to seed so her belly flopped over it. The necklace hanging heavily from her dry, creased neck must have cost plenty, though if she had money she did not waste it on skin lotions. She also wore large metal earrings of an exotic ethnic type. Taking those together with her accent, wherever she originated was a long way from Rome.
I never despised anyone for that.
“You want to speak to me?”
“Yes, I do, if you can find me a moment, dearie.” I could see this woman forcing herself to sound milder. She wanted something, or she wanted to make me do something; it would be bad policy for her to start out too rough. I was equally uncomfortable. Everything about her, including the lurking heavies, made me feel too dainty. The urge to simper and tuck in locks of hair felt strong, though I have never been a hair-twiddler, thank you, Juno.
“Well, I am Flavia Albia, as you seem to know. And you are…?”
“Menendra.” I gave no sign of having heard the name, but asked what she did. She ignored that, so I asked what she wanted. “Just a word to the wise, dearie.” This is the usual euphemism when somebody is warning you to back off. I played innocent. She kept pressing. “You don’t want to get yourself in any trouble, do you?”
I refused to understand her. At moments like this, I like to be my mother’s daughter: educated, well-off, well-mannered, sweet-natured … Well, maybe not sweet-natured. I pursed my lips slightly, but I folded my hands gently at my waist and raised my eyebrows, looking merely amused at her tone of voice. Then I simply waited. I wanted to see how far she would commit herself.
It was an interesting situation. Menendra clearly struggled, as if she was addressing me in a foreign language. The codes she normally used with people she bullied—and I reckoned bullying was her medium—were not working. She was desperate to make me comply; she did not know how to go about it. She had a reputation, but I seemed to have no fear of it. She saw that an open offensive would be counterproductive. Since I was a magistrate’s woman, anything stronger than wheedling would be risky, because Faustus could come down very heavily on her.
I refused to help. Let her flounder. Let her wonder whether I was too dense to see what she meant—or actually laughing up my sleeve at her.
“Now listen, dearie. You just tell that man of yours, whatever happened was a long time ago and it’s better for everyone not to stir it all up again.”
“Why don’t you tell him?” Even to myself I sounded haughty. “Of course he will ask what is it to you? Were you involved? What do you know about the people we have found dead?” I paused for a single beat. “Did you kill them?”
Still controlling her manner, Menendra gave me a reproachful look. “Now, you don’t want to go around accusing people of killings.”
I stopped being a nice senator’s granddaughter. “It’s what I do.”
She blinked.
I smiled with false sweetness. “We seem to have got off on the wrong foot. Shall we try again? I am formally investigating the events that led to six bodies being buried in the courtyard of this bar. Manlius Faustus, the plebeian aedile, wants to know who they are and who put them there. Apparently, you don’t think we should interfere, but you’re too late. As soon as the first bones turned up, that was the end of keeping things quiet. So, before we discuss the corpses, Menendra, why don’t you tell me about yourself and your connection with the Hesperides? I have heard you act as a supplier to the local bars. Fruit was mentioned.”
“Fruit?” Menendra now definitely thought I was making mock.
If what she really supplied was flesh for the upstairs-room trade, “fruit” could be a witty word for it. But Menendra lacked my sense of humor. I noticed that after her first outburst of disgust, she failed to correct me. To me, that confirmed what she traded was sexual. “I am in commerce, yes that’s right. I work with all the neighborhood bars. They all know me very well.” But for what? She had no intention of explaining.
“And they don’t mess with you!” Flattery was worth a try. But again she completely ignored it. This was a hard, shrewd woman who expected to be in control.
“Were you at the Garden of the Hesperides on the night the six people died?”
“I was not.” Menendra spoke with a nasty smirk, daring me to try to prove otherwise. I felt sure she would lie to me. If I was ever to put her at the scene that evening, someone else would have to tell me. First I would have to find them, then convince them it was safe to risk Menendra’s wrath.
“Did you know Rufia?”
“Who told you that?”
“I can’t remember,” I bluffed. A wise informer protected her sources. Otherwise, if Menendra got to them with her hints about keeping quiet, backed up with her heavies’ meaningful looks, those sources would dry up rapidly. “Several people.”
“Yes, I knew Rufia, knew her very well. What of it?”
“Do you believe one of those bodies they dug up is her?”
“Well she vanished, didn’t she?”
“She did so quite unexpectedly?”
“I heard that.”
“Somebody tried to burgle her old room last night. I wonder what they were looking for?”
“Oh, what can it have been?” sneered Menendra, not even troubling to deny her involvement.
“Rufia isn’t the only puzzle. There are five more bodies. That night she disappeared a group of salesmen were in the bar. You’re in commerce. Do you know anything about them, or who they were?”
“I never heard about any salesmen.” Really? Nothing she said was reliable; she actually flaunted that.
“Rufia looked after them.”
“You seem to know all about it, Flavia Albia!”
I knew damn all, and this witness was not helping. I recognized what was going on. Her aim was to find out how much I did know, but not to enlighten me further.
I toughened up again. “Oh I think you are the one who knows, Menendra. So if I can hand out quiet advice myself, it is let me find out by my own civilized methods. Don’t compel me to call in the men with hot irons and weights.”
“You don’t scare me!” She leaned toward me, full of menace. “I said, leave it all alone!” She intended to petrify me. She turned to her two heavies, her intention plain.
“Call them off, Menendra.” Measuring distances by eye, I let her know I could get to her before her men could get to me. Then I spoke like a street urchin who had taken
part in every kind of street fight: “Scram them! Or I’ll pull out your eyes with my bare hands before your brutes can move a step.”
XXVIII
Everything shifted.
I took a step forward, pointing my right forefinger. “Move them back!” My tone made her believe I would carry out my threat to her eyes. It almost made me believe it too. That’s all you need.
Now she saw that I too had an unforgiving past. No one crossed her; nobody crossed me.
After a beat of disbelief, she made a slight, angry movement to her men; the heavies slowly walked across to the Medusa, leaving us.
A chill sweat trickled down my neck and under my tunic, but I made sure no anxiety showed. I was not so foolish as to think I had outfaced this woman. “That’s good. Now answer my questions, Menendra. Better to speak to me than officials. It’s your choice, but you are not stupid.”
Her chin came up though she did not object.
“Tell me how things were in those days, back when Rufia vanished. Thales owned the Hesperides, Rufia worked there. What about you? Were you providing your ‘supplies’ in those days?”
“Not me.”
“Too young? You hadn’t started?”
“I built up my little business afterward,” she acknowledged.
I looked her up and down. From the way she dressed, her business could not be so little; she was comfortably decked out. “Everything was more casual back then?” That was what the woman at the snacks stall had told me.
“I suppose so.”
“Where do you come from, Menendra? Where were you born?”
“Lycia.” In the northeastern Mediterranean. Pirate country. Not much else there.
“Slave or free?”
“I am no slave!”
“Never have been?”
“Wash your mouth out.” I saw her scanning me, wondering. Plenty of people assumed I myself must have slave origins. It was a possibility. I would have to live the rest of my life not knowing. In moments of depression, I felt that any slave had better luck than me; at least they understood their place in the world. Still, I was a happy bride now. Happy and fortunate. Happy, fortunate and free.
“All right. So you came to Rome of your own accord, for the pickings—was that when you met Rufia?” She begrudged me a curt nod. “You were friends?”
“She was decent to me. Took me under her wing. Taught me how to survive here.”
“Oh, all girls together then? I’m trying to imagine how it was.”
“You’re wrong.” Menendra cackled as she anticipated my discomfiture when she explained. “Way wrong. Rufia was hardly a girl. She must have been easily fifty. Could have been older. She had worked at the Hesperides for decades. She was older than Old Thales himself, and she looked every day of it. She was like a grandmother to me. So you haven’t been seeing the picture at all, have you, dearie?”
I pulled a face, openly admitting that I had misjudged everything. Believe me, I was cursing.
XXIX
Our conversation ended. I was too nonplussed to sustain it.
Menendra turned on her heel and made off down the main road. A jerk of her head drew the two heavies after her. If I managed to interview her again, she would gloat and I would flail. The only option next time was an official interrogation. She would resist and only if we had direct evidence could she be leaned on. I had lost this game.
I was left to feel I had so far been foolish. Nobody ever told me Rufia was young; that was my own stupid misapprehension. Now I knew, I had to work through everything all over again. I had quite wrongly perceived the kind of event that must have happened here; I understood nothing about it.
Nowhere in the Twelve Tables is it legally enshrined that in the city of Rome a barmaid must be some cute young girl. Of course they generally are, unless the landlord can acquire others so much more cheaply that he puts up with a lack of youth or beauty. Some landlords have to employ their own relatives, who may be any age from eight to eighty and look as ugly as their employers.
I wouldn’t care how old Rufia was, except that all my previous theories about her fate suddenly became unlikely. The kind of predator I had imagined attacking a barmaid would want young flesh; that kind of sexual killer hardly ever stalks an older woman. Even if he is brave enough to take her on, her tough maturity insults his manhood. Perverts want them luscious. They need to snatch youth, which is for them unobtainable because of their own oddness; they yearn to punish the lively women they have seen with other men.
The idea that Old Thales had bumped off Rufia also took a new twist. If she and her employer had had any relationship, it could not have been as I once thought. If they had quarreled, it must have been a different kind of quarrel. Why Rufia was then killed along with five men became an even more intractable puzzle.
At least the stories of her quelling any trouble in the bar now seemed more natural. Experienced women tend to know how to quash obstreperous men. I could easily envisage this Rufia throwing out troublemakers. I could see them meekly leaving as soon as she said go. Regulars who knew her would probably not even start being loud while she was serving. She had been here for years. This bar ran the way she decreed.
Nipius and Natalis groaning at her bossiness now made more sense too. And I could see why they had sounded so astonished when I suggested they had gone upstairs with her. Menendra could not have been the only one who saw Rufia as an old woman.
*
While I was coming to terms with all this, Sparsus and Serenus, two of the workmen, appeared from behind me with one of their baskets of rubble, which they dumped in the gutter. Perhaps a cart had been arranged to pick up the mess later. Perhaps not. I was too preoccupied even to give them a reproving glance.
They asked if I was all right. From habit, I immediately said yes. I had looked after myself for twelve years as an informer. It would be hard to accept that I was becoming part of a family group, with staff who might take an interest, people who might want to protect me. Even so, I followed them back into the bar and through it to the courtyard, where I sat down, feeling more secure in their company.
The men got on with their work, consolidating the ground where the bodies had been dug up and starting a trench for the water feature. They must have been able to tell I was only giving them half my attention. I really wanted quiet time to readjust my thoughts.
*
This was hardly the first time a suspect had startled me, but I admit I felt like Prometheus having his liver pecked out. Perhaps being a bride was unsettling my guts. Hades, Albia. We hadn’t even got to traipsing out at dawn to cut the flowers for the bride-and-groom headdresses yet. Stinging nettles, if I had my way … I was in a foul mood.
I gazed around the courtyard, once again mentally peopling it with drinkers at tables, then trying to envisage how the customers had been attacked. Well, I presumed the victims had come as customers.
Now, instead of picturing a young, agreeable barmaid joking with them and perhaps upsetting her jealous landlord by seeming overfriendly, I superimposed a much older woman. She would be competent, yet not flirtatious. That would make customers cringe and Thales scoff. But I doubted that Rufia ever chatted up men as she served them. So, when the attack started that night, I wondered if the victims had grabbed her as a shield or a hostage. Maybe that was how she came to be killed in the scrum.
Musing, I wondered if Rufia had been the kind of barmaid who effortlessly remembered the exact round of drinks that had been ordered, or whether she was a vague one. If she was as stern as people implied, I bet no one argued when she banged down a wrong flagon. Once she came out to the garden with what she deemed people wanted, only a brave customer would send her back indoors for something else …
The workmen stopped for lunch. Huge chunks of bread, raw onions, fruit. Fruit … It was a while since their breakfast so they believed they were due a break. They tended to take many. I had heard Tiberius chivvying them, though mildly. Mostly, unless he was with me, he joine
d in. There was another wifely task; I would have to watch his weight.
Larcius, the foreman, came and plumped himself by me. Like the others, he asked if everything was all right. I must have looked properly shaken.
“I had an unpleasant set-to with a woman I needed to interview. I’m used to it. Don’t say anything to Faustus. I’ll tell him myself in due course, but it’s nothing he needs to worry about.”
“Who was that?” asked Larcius, nosily.
“Her name is Menendra. She sells some commodity to the bars around here. Ripe young whores, I expect.”
He nodded. “Seen her.”
“Oh! Do you know what her game is?”
Regrettably, he shook his head. “Only that she comes and goes a lot. As you say, in all the bars.” Did that mean the workmen had tried them all?
“Has she been here?”
“Once a week, on the dot. Keeps wanting to know when the Hesperides will reopen. I tell her we don’t know and shoo her out again.”
“Does she get aggressive?”
He grinned his toothless grin. People who inquired about the works were nothing new; he was an old hand at seeing them off. Neighbors often tried to extract information from builders, who (I was learning from Tiberius) either stalled completely or, if they were feeling mischievous, invented a mad story to cause consternation.
I sat and pondered.
Sparsus and Serenus, to whom ludicrous stories came easily, were in deep discussion as to what they were likely to encounter if and when they made a connection with an aqueduct for the water feature. They started talking about sewers. The fact that the builders made little distinction between the supply of fresh water and the removal of effluent could explain why so many households have plumbing work go badly wrong. Certainly the underground world was a source of thrills to our men. I heard mention of gigantic rats, discarded pet crocodiles, ghosts coming up from the Underworld, and—their favorite fright—large pulsating blobs.
“Worms!” called Larcius, hoping this detail would insert realism into the conversation. “Big tangles of worms.” No use. Sparsus and Serenus were not looking for facts, they wanted to scare themselves silly. Discussion of the legendary horrible blobs continued. They decided that if they should find one of these, Larcius could be the brave person who poked it with a stick to see what happened. He patiently agreed he would—if it was ever necessary. He had worked with them for years. He let them ramble.
Graveyard of the Hesperides Page 13
