Flavia Albia Mystery 09 - A Comedy of Terrors

by Lindsey Davis

  Even in Rome, for over a decade at Fountain Court, I lived close to danger. You do grow sadly used to it. And now I was married, married again, which brings a feeling of safety, or at least the illusion that you can cope with anything. Because you are together, you feel it will all be easier. So the sheep-stealers’ threats were bad news, yet they failed to chill me as much as they intended.

  They had surprised me, though. Even as a young woman alone, my life had been more discreet than this. I felt much more exposed now. Tiberius had given me the children, the animals, the whole domestic paraphernalia that made us more visible socially, identified us to the men who watched from doorways, implied to hustlers and grabbers that we would own valuables, named us to those we antagonised—set us up as possible victims.

  Although Tiberius had caused our crisis, because of whatever he was doing with Titus Morellus, I did not blame him. I had come into this willingly, knowing the kind of life he wanted, seeing that he was a pious, determined kind of man. He would stand up for the wider community, taking action for good; despite that, I was sure if we ever seemed vulnerable, his first care would be for his own. So he also gave me what those Gallic lovers had: I could lie in his arms under my blanket, with the warm weight of Barley on our feet. I could be happy.

  A faint small voice began crying. I listened, waiting. I never left a child to grieve alone in the night. Tiberius too, though he seemed deeply asleep, had probably heard and prepared himself. He did not expect me always to respond. We both stayed quiet yet were both ready.

  Someone else went to comfort the child; the sad sound stopped.

  Then, although I lay still trying not to wake him, Tiberius pulled himself up from his chasm of slumber. Somehow, he was aware of my troubles. Drawing me in tighter, he kicked a little, trying to shift the dog’s weight. Barley protested with a grumbling snore. Almost at once Tiberius sank back into heavy sleep. But first, perhaps without even knowing it, he reminded me of why I’d married him. On the top of my head I felt his warm breath as he murmured, “Stop worrying.”

  XVI

  Being told not to worry ensures that you do it. I took my rest, but lightly. I woke first. I slipped downstairs, walked around the house checking, went through to the yard, placed a hand on each new door lock (acquired oil on my fingers), leaned over the stable door and stroked the donkey. Mercury pulled down strands of hay from her manger, reassuringly ignoring me. Nothing was amiss.

  I liked to be by myself in the house, the only person awake. I lifted my face to the sky above the courtyard, reconnecting with the self only I knew. Grey skies, full of high, fast-moving rain clouds, were part of my old life. I would never go back to Britain, but Rome’s changeable winters gave me a tug of recognition. I disliked the cold, but it was familiar. You need your past—at least, you do once you have managed to stop raving over its injustices.

  The light remained gloomy, the claggy air unwelcoming. I made a jug of hot posca; I took some for myself, which I sipped slowly, cradling the beaker, huddled in a stole, seated alone in the courtyard, in reflective mood. When I heard movement upstairs, I did not call out. Whoever it was stayed up there. The dog came down to join me, but reproachfully—Why are you up? I want to lie on your feet. Still sleepy, she retreated to her kennel.

  Some caller banged on our front doors. What was wrong with the knocker? I went to squint through the grille at the man outside. Unhelpfully—or deliberately?—he had turned away while he awaited a response. Even so, his weight squeezing the seams of his tunic and his air of nonchalant dumbness were more of a pique than a threat. I lifted the big beam we kept on drop-in cradles at night, then admitted the visitor. He glanced behind at the street, which was still misty and sinister at dawn, as if he was checking it out. I was nervous the house might be watched; I urged him to hurry. With no one in sight in the silent road, he ambled indoors. At least he put the beam back for me.

  I knew him. One of the vigiles. His name was Rufinianus. Well padded, not tall, his tunic too tight around his flesh. He had a square, balding head with a small mouth that he kept mostly drawn down in a straight line. His talents were basic, I knew, but his approach well-meaning. I thought he liked his job; he did not put himself out, but neither did any of them.

  I led this early bird into the courtyard. “Keep your voice down. I want people to sleep. We had some upsets yesterday.” He nodded. He had heard. When he stared at my beaker, I fetched him posca of his own. He said he was supposed to meet Tiberius and Morellus. While we waited for one or other of them to show up, I talked to him quietly—playing the polite hostess in order to pick his brains. “I thought you had retired, Rufo. Can’t you give up?”

  “Called back for Saturnalia cover. At least I get a place at the drinks party.” This horrible booze-up was the focal point in the Fourth Cohort’s calendar. They saved for it all year and needed a month to recover afterwards; those who survived the party would crawl back on duty in a week, only because their station-house offered the presence of mattresses and the absence of wives. Do not set your building on fire in the New Year.

  Rufinianus looked around at what he could see of our house: respectable family property, modifications in progress, idealistic décor, pergola hung with green garlands, fountain set with festive lights on brackets that had been fixed out of reach of children.

  “Flavia Albia! Who’d have thought it?” The first time I met him was some years ago when I lived at Fountain Court. Was I a different person then? I would say no, but he clearly decided so. “I always remembered your incident. We get hundreds of home invasions, but I only know one where the perp stealing the necklaces was stopped in his tracks for ever by a young lady! I’ll never forget how calm you were.”

  Wrong. When I reached the Fourth’s building I was shuddering so badly, I had to sit down on an upturned fire-bucket. At that point, although I was aware of how much blood I had left behind in my apartment, I had not realised the intruder had died. They only told me afterwards.

  I never intended to kill the cat-burglar, probably no more than when he entered my apartment he had planned to attack me. He had thought no one was there. As soon as he saw otherwise, he decided on a full assault. At Fountain Court, people might hear screams but no one would investigate. The burglar never knew that back in Londinium, barely more than a child, I had fallen into the clutches of a sex-trader who, as part of the induction process, thought it good practice to rape me.

  Never again. Stop right there, puny Aventine thief. Feel my kitchen knife going into your guts, with ten years of hate behind it. Take that for Florius: Gaius Florius Oppicus, the filthy brothel-owner with whom, if he ever returned to Rome, I planned to have my reckoning …

  “Of course, you never wanted to finish him off,” mused Rufinianus now, remembering he had taken my statement. He had been a night-time stand-in; I had had to show him how to smooth the waxed tablet before he could start his notes. “You just happened to be handy with a carrot knife and his liver just happened to get in the way.” He smiled, as if even after all this time I might need reassurance that their tribune would not take the business further. “And now look at you—an aedile’s wife! We’d better warn this new gang Morellus is chasing just who they are dealing with,” he told me, with amusement.

  I must have been shaken by remembering the dead burglar because I said, with more passion than I meant to show, that I too would like to know with whom we were dealing. “Who are they, the new gang?”

  “Just the old gang again.” Rufo was matter-of-fact, surprised to hear I cared. “Nothing changes.”

  “What gang?”

  “Hasn’t your husband told you, him and Morellus, their thinking on it?” Without rancour, Rufinianus spelled out drily that, as a married woman, I would now always be trying to find out what my husband was up to.

  I let him pronounce his opinion. “They told me someone is muscling in on traders, Rufo. Is it all about festival nuts?”

  “Well, no, that’s only the starting point.” H
e set out to explain the crisis, unaware that Tiberius and Morellus wanted me to stick to scribbling shopping lists. “Selling nuts for Saturnalia has always been a monopoly of one consortium. Now along come some would-be hard men who don’t carry weapons because it’s illegal—but they manage a lot with planks and broom handles. They go at the established sellers, fight them in the street, cause a riot. Well, anywhere else they would call it a riot. On the Aventine it was a mild disagreement. Just happened to occur on Dolichenus Street, though it could have been an afternoon bust-up anywhere.”

  “That’s a bit close to Fountain Court! Anyone hurt?”

  “Planks can hurt like Hades, Flavia Albia.” Rufo shook his head. “Never let anyone hit you with a plank, especially if it’s had bloody big nails deliberately stuck in it. Nobody dead, though. Not yet. To us it’s just a harp recital with a few bum notes.”

  “Our sheep is dead!” I countered angrily.

  “Oh, yes, I heard that.” The vigilis applied a sombre expression as if commiserating with my loss of a close relative.

  “You know what the bastards did?”

  “Baa-lamb’s head all bloody on your nice clean doorstep. Morellus has got the lads looking out for the other cuts for you.”

  “We don’t want them.” I reconsidered that. “No, my cook will. Cooks are short on feeling. He wants to come up with some delicacy, never mind that it’s our pet.”

  “Mutton pie?” Rufinianus chortled. “Homemade is best! It’s all over the district about your aedile having a bust-up at Xero’s. He’s a brave man, your fellow.”

  “Manlius Faustus—absolutely bloody fearless!”

  “You do choose them!” That was when Rufinianus let slip, “Well, he must be a right lad, to be up for this—tackling the Balbinus lot.” Balbinus? That certainly was a dark name from the past. “Morellus on his own would be leery. That’s who we think it is now, incidentally: the rags of the old firm, having a revival. You’ve got connections, Albia, so you know all about these crooks.”

  I nodded. I certainly did.

  Balbinus Pius was an old-time, old-style mobster. Before I ever came to Rome my uncle, Lucius Petronius, managed to have him prosecuted. It had taken years of trying. Then Petro even persuaded a jury to convict. He brought jurors in from out of town.

  As a free citizen, even a gang-master pinned down for capital offences had to be given “time to depart,” though his notion of that had been “time to come back from exile incognito.” Easy to predict. Hard to prevent. But Balbinus did subsequently pass into Hades in murky circumstances, which Petro and my father used to chortle about when they believed no one was noticing. I had paid attention because their stories were always worth listening to: fine constructions of irony, suspense and metaphor. Once Falco started rattling off, his style and one-liners brought him a wide circle of admirers.

  Despite their efforts, the Balbinus crime empire was never entirely extinguished. Remnants were taken over by surviving sidekicks, though there had not been many left after Petro finished. A son-in-law inherited, eagerly learning to impose fear and clutch ill-gotten money. That was Florius. The Florius who, when forced out of Rome, groomed me for his brothel in Londinium. Nobody knew where exactly he was now, but not in Britannia.

  “Has Morellus decided who is behind this spurt of revival?” My heart thumped, though I made the question sound inconsequential. Was Florius back in Rome?

  Rufinianus only pulled a face. “Some turd who lives here on the Aventine. Been brooding here a while, but just spreading his stinking wings. We had a tip he’s acquired a new sidekick to help beef up his organisation. I’m brought back to help Morellus get closer. That’s all the gen so far.”

  “That’s enough!” I said. Then I hinted, “The Balbinus events were before I came to Rome…”

  Rufo assumed that, because of my heritage with Falco and Petronius, I was allowed to know. “Old Balbinus and his key henchmen tended to live down in the valley, Albia. Their beat was the Circus originally—whorehouses and gambling dens. They were too savvy to rob temples, but they ran a lot of pavement thieves. Purse-snatchers, bangle-grabbers, even tunics from bath-houses, they were never picky. Those men were rough. If they couldn’t wrench the big cabochon signet ring from a victim on the Sacred Way, they thought nothing of cutting off his finger with a dagger, then running away with the dripping digit while he stood howling.”

  I was surprised. “Isn’t nut-warfare a stretch from that?”

  “Nuts and the rest! You know what it’s like up here,” said Rufinianus. “You did it yourself. You’ve lived in an alley: no amenities.”

  “No amenities?”

  “The original old speculators put up tenements to bring in as much rent as possible: cram them in and cream it off. They never bothered giving people anything else, no markets, baths, temples or marble halls for literary lectures. More vitally, there were hardly any street stalls and fewer hardware shops. Well, it’s all freed slaves and foreigners, isn’t it? No one cares whether they eat. The new villains played on it. They started with cart wars—bringing products around to the big old lodgings, ringing a jingly little bell to say, We’re here, come and get stuff, then selling cheap goods off the back of the cart.”

  “As in cheap goods that ‘fell off the back of a wagon’ in the first place?”

  “Oh, yes. It was all tat, though. Mouldy bread and leaky lamps. Old bones you wouldn’t give your dog. Greens they pinched from people’s market-gardens. Working men’s tunics, cloaks that are all patches, seventh-hand sandals with two left feet. Knock-offs at knock-down prices—though a high price eventually comes with it. They allowed the poor to run up massive tabs on credit, drew them in ever deeper, then they were off into loan sharking. That used to be Balbinus in the old days, putting pressure on helpless creditors, viciously beating them up to make them pay, smash your door in, set your place on fire, fatal warnings to all the others he was preying on.”

  I tried not to think about Sheep. Our warning. “Have the Fourth Cohort been aware of this for long?”

  “Until recently,” Rufo told me, “the gangsters kept everything nice and quiet. Out of sight. But come Saturnalia, the nut-sellers were going to lose too much. It’s seasonal trade they were looking forward to, so they cut up rough at being pressurised. When the street fighting started, even Morellus had to sit up and take notice—he gets his corn plasters in Dolichenus Street.”

  I started to laugh, just as we heard more knocks and a familiar voice shouting ruderies to demand entry: the man himself. Tiberius wanted to stop him deafening the neighbours, so he came down. Staff appeared, ready for their daily tasks or, in Dromo’s case, wondering what tasks he could ritually avoid. The dog climbed out of her kennel, stretched her back and barked at the air. Little boys ran around the upper balcony with no clothes on, while exasperated people tried to fix them up with their tunics and shoes. Normal life began again.

  I went into a room by myself, to do some thinking.

  XVII

  Morellus had brought his two elder children, claiming it was cover to fool observers, though I guessed Pullia needed a break from them. He said their latest trick was a fur effigy that looked like a puppy with its head trapped in a cupboard door; Morellus had made them leave it at home. Talking about it kept all the children busy, huddled together and giggling.

  While the men dawdled over their business breakfast, I ran through my daily steward’s meeting. Gratus was brisk, I brisker. “You order grape-must and honey. I’ll get us a door porter.” I grabbed a bread roll, summoned Dromo, then marched over to Fountain Court. From not wanting Rodan anywhere near us a few days ago, I was now determined to hire him. Whether he wanted it or not.

  Hello, hello! Rodan was ready packed. Overnight he had changed his mind: from being afraid of our perilous household, he was now eager to move in. He had had a confrontation in the alley last evening, after which he was still trembling. “I’m getting out of here. It isn’t safe.”

  “Rodan, you’
re a gladiator! You are a huge man trained in violence. Who were these scary people?”

  He refused to talk about it. At Saturnalia they were probably girl garland-weavers with drink inside them. Upholstery tassel-makers have a wild reputation, and some milkmaids are notorious if you meet them in the dark. At any rate, Rodan quickly piled his stuff onto Dromo’s handcart (Dromo stood watching scornfully with his arms folded, while handing out loading advice), then the porter loped along to our house.

  “How long is this man staying?” asked Dromo, determined not to lose his place as the one who made us furious.

  “We shall see.”

  Yes, I was a mother now. I could look vague and deflect any question with bland dialogue.

  * * *

  At home I handed Rodan over to Gratus. They were from opposite ends of the human scale. Gratus linked his fingers, flexed them, looked as firm as he could in the face of this rebellious lump of flesh, then went into his induction talk with the air of a man drowning. Rodan single-mindedly refused to listen.

  “Do I get a stool to sit on in my cubicle?”

  “We can find you a stool.”

  “Is there time off for eating?”

  “We shall provide cover for refreshment breaks.”

  “Where’s the toilet?”

  “Now?”

  “Better had.”

  “Rodan can access the builders’ privacy hut in the yard,” I intervened hastily. Their facilities were a bucket surrounded by trellis; the apprentice was responsible for emptying it. Someone had better warn him. “He may as well use the same one all the time. It will be handy for his sleeping quarters at night.”

  “Indeed!” Gratus backed me up smoothly. “The cubby-hole by the kitchen won’t fit a man of your stature, Rodan, and already suffers too many queues.” Rodan prepared to argue. The steward dropped his voice to an exquisite murmur. “Humble apologies, Rodan. House rule. The master is extremely particular, I’m afraid. We have to ensure that Tiberius Manlius is never kept waiting.”