Now I was literally left holding the baby. She was a nice child, oddly enough, but I passed her on. Suza and Dromo immediately vied with one another to look after her. Suza had heard some story about babies being put into mangers in stables when accommodation had been overbooked, but we agreed that would be unhygienic. Dromo, who had an odd softness for babies, fetched a basket he normally used to carry Tiberius’s clothes to the bath-house.
Hysterical children ran about finding mats to sleep on. They all crowded into one bedroom to fit out their makeshift dormitory. To quieten the noise, I ordered my staff to tell them creepy ghost stories. The children found this quite banal, though Paris had a fund of tales. Dromo and Suza ended up terrified.
It was all good-humoured. But it was not the life I had once imagined having.
* * *
Tiberius came home in a bad mood. I was glad the rest were all upstairs, so we two could talk.
“My brother-in-law is astounding. The first thing he asked was, ‘Has anybody died from this?’ That’s all he cared.”
“And do we know? Has anyone?”
“Not according to what I was told at Xero’s.”
“True?”
“Who knows? I suspect a cover-up.”
Tiberius was so honest he had told Salvius Gratus there were no known casualties. Gratus reckoned any deaths among the public from nuts in his store were his tenant’s responsibility. “That doesn’t help. He has no idea who his tenant is. He claims a hireling came along, squiggled initials on a rough-and-ready agreement, paid cash, took the keys, never named the principal.”
“Too casual! I hope you gave him a piece of your mind.”
“Well…” Suddenly Tiberius assumed a look of superiority. “I am astonished how that man does business. He knows he has been an idiot, though I could hardly chastise him. He’s my brother-in-law. I’ve known him fifteen years.”
I gazed at him pointedly.
“Ex.”
“That’s right,” I agreed, mildly enough after the concession. “Your brother-in-law these days is Marcus Didius Alexander Postumus—who has just gone home from our house with a very careful diagram for making a fake turd.”
Tiberius held out for as long as he could, then we both broke into laughter. “I know I am in love with you,” he said. “Albiola, I fear I may end up in love with your entire family!”
The warehouse remained an issue. If this investigation had been mine, I would have sat down to eat an apple slowly, opposite the building where the mouldy nuts were. Sooner or later—quite soon, given it was Saturnalia—a man with a barrow would have trundled along to extract more sacks. This minion would have led me to the distributor.
But, being an aedile, Tiberius decided he must make a point. First, he told me that he had for once tackled his ex-brother-in-law: “Lucius, old man, these bad nuts are hardly your fault. I won’t blame you for your tenants’ defects, but you do need to check whether your place has a damp problem. If you are experiencing difficulties in managing that warehouse, I am sure I can persuade Tullius to take it off your hands—though you know what he’s like. It may cost you.”
Excellent! Lording it over Salvius Gratus must be doubly sweet because his sister had once imposed a hard divorce on Tiberius; also Gratus himself had tried standing for aedile this year but lacked Tiberius’s popularity so he failed. I was amused at how the nut issue had brought about a shift in the two families’ old power struggle.
Although it was evening, our man sent Dromo to the Temple of Ceres to fetch some of the slaves who supported magistrates in their duties. Enough were found before they dispersed to drinking dens, and they were ready for adventure with Tiberius, whom they all liked. Dromo played centurion because he was a slave in a private house. He marched them up the hill, shouting orders that they rudely ignored.
Under stern direction from Tiberius, the public slaves burst the locks on the warehouse. Apparently it did smell musty. Those who suffered from allergies reeled away with streaming eyes. Tiberius joked to me afterwards that even the rats had mildew.
All the foul nuts were dragged out. Tiberius then had them carried on carts to the big enclosure with the Altar of Mars, the Armilustrium. The slaves had a fine old time as the nuts were publicly burned. Dromo stayed to watch, though we could see the glow from home.
This bonfire was at the high point of the Aventine. It had grown fully dark by the time they lit it; bright flames must have been visible for a long way. Tiberius came home and announced that the nut suppliers might try to hide from him but this blaze would send them a clear message.
He was right about that. Perhaps it might have been better if he had considered how they might reply.
X
Next morning at least we had plenty of free bread and sesame twists. Breakfast leftovers were grabbed by Morellus when he came to pick up his children. He looked chipper.
“And how is your wife today, Titus Morellus?”
He failed to pick up my allusion. Being obtuse must hamper his criminal interrogations. Luckily the vigiles work more from intuition: “I say, you did it. Confess to me, slimeball.” This works more times than you would think.
While Morellus and Tiberius were here, I persuaded them to discuss the nut scandal. They feared territorial warfare. Nuts were traditionally thrown around by revellers and also featured in festival food. The flourishing December trade had been targeted: previous suppliers were being shoved out by aggressive new rivals, who wanted easy money. Morellus believed these were professional organised criminals. They needed to be stopped before they took too much control. He had yet to establish who they were; he had ideas, but nobody was talking.
“You need some proof.”
“Proof? What’s that?”
“Something you never bother with—but it’s useful for convicting people.”
“Oh, I think I heard about that crackpot idea once. Flavia, the times when we have ‘proof’ are always the ones when some idiot judge tosses out the case. Give me ‘probability’ every time.”
“You make it up.”
“I know how to make things up so they stick.”
Morellus and Tiberius planned to go out patrolling the district, to canvass possible informants. This walkabout was fact-finding, they said. An in-depth investigation. I need not worry about it. That meant, don’t nag us about progress.
Morellus foolishly told me to occupy myself with an easy little job, like, he said, helping a widow find birth certificates. I said I had to stay at home with our sheep. Anyway, all the document depositaries would be on their holiday closures.
Morellus peered short-sightedly at Sheep, who had been brought in for the boys to play at being shepherds. “Albia—a domestic matron spinning wool?” He thought it hilarious. My husband managed not to grin, but gave me a wink. Tiberius knew when to suggest he was on my side, even when I could not be too sure that was true.
A slave came up from my parents’ house. My brother was now annoying everyone with ceaseless pranks that involved obscene concoctions he put together in his bedroom. No one blamed Postumus; he was only twelve, yet creative, with excellent mechanical skills. His trick vomit was lurid. Everyone blamed me for giving him the idea.
My punishment was that my father had sent me the festival gift for the porter at a tenement he owned: I had to deliver it. Since the Eagle Building was to be sold and demolished, its porter, horrible Rodan, would be out of a job. Rodan knew this was coming and was very unhappy, so my errand was to pay him off finally and confirm his departure date. Then he would be even more unhappy. Thank you, Falco, devious father.
When I tried to set out to do it, I pulled open our tall front doors boldly, only to find my way blocked. A torrent of prickly green lava tried to burst in. Luckily there was so much, it held together and stayed put. The front steps were impassable under a high mound of boughs, ordered for home decoration. The carter had gone away without knocking, after he dumped his load right in our porch.
This festi
val treat was to be shared out between us and various relatives. Some bright spark had had the big idea of a special purchase. Top-quality material from a forest. Order early. Buy in bulk … Naturally that clever person would not be helping to move it.
Tiberius and Morellus had already made themselves scarce. (I bet they saw the cart coming and scarpered.) If the load stayed put, we would have no access, while people would steal our wood. Someone was already poking into the pile, pulling out branches. I yelled a classic Aventine reference to their mother’s morality, while I grimly rounded up my staff for a removal job.
I refused to have all these branches indoors, blocking up the entrance hall, so everyone formed a crocodile to drag foliage along the street, around the corner and into our building yard. This was the kind of manoeuvre that haunts you later. It was dirty, scratchy, brutally hard work. There were many complaints. I had to say we could have first pick for decorating our house, before Father, Uncle Petro, Uncle Tullius or the waiters at the Stargazer—and, yes, all right, everyone could start making garlands today. I would collect the twinkly moons and stars, old family treasures, when I went to Fountain Court. Yes, I was going now. No, nobody else could come with me. Only the dog. Barley would come instead of Suza, who wanted to begin on the decorations. Anyway, I had to be kind to Rodan, who wouldn’t like people staring at him if he was very upset. Yes, he would be upset: he was going to lose his house. No, he couldn’t come to live with us.
Since I had lost time during the green branch exercise, once I had washed, changed and calmed down, I decided to ride Merky. Poor Sheep bleated pathetically when the two friends were separated; I patted her long nose, with its dark mark, but she jerked away, agitated. I told Gratus to make sure Sheep was penned safely in the stable, in case she nibbled the cypress and mistletoe, which might not be good for her. I do know that I locked the door from the yard to the street; too many passers-by had seen the greenery. I won’t say the Aventine was full of thieves, but if you had an interesting pimple, somebody would steal it off your face.
* * *
The Eagle Building, Fountain Court, was once known as Lenia’s Laundry, though it had not functioned for years. Lenia had died. Her horrible husband had sold the place to my father, after Falco inherited money and was looking for stupid ways to waste it. The tenement had been tottering then; now it could barely stay up. We had recently sold it to a senator called Ulpius Trajanus, a Spaniard. He seemed low in the heap. He had made it to provincial governor, but in his home province. Then when he dashed to help the Emperor stop a rebellion, he arrived after another general had done all the work. To prove he was going nowhere, he bought my father’s crumbling dump, intending to replace it with a new private house. He had a friend on the Aventine; his friends must be lousy too. Anyone could see this man would sink into obscurity.
All right. I know he has not done so. Simple mistake, Tribune. If the suggestion wasn’t treason, I would hope the Dacians get him. Stick that on your column, crazy building purchaser!
Falco had lived at Fountain Court, then so did I. That was when the building only stank, creaked, rotted at the heart and echoed with misery. Nowadays the stone staircase barely held up as a skeleton. The rest slumped, rocking on temporary props whenever the wind blew. Someone had died when a balcony fell off the top storey. Any remaining tenants must be dead in their rooms too, though Father claimed he had carried out a check for bodies and only counted rats. As soon as we arrived, Barley ran off to nose them out.
“Good dog!”
Under the stairs, like one of the rats, nested Rodan. Even after he gained his pick of all the empty rooms, he kept to his foul cubicle. Once trained as a gladiator but too useless to fight, he had originally been the old landlord’s rent-enforcer along with his crony, one Asiacus, who was even more hopeless, everyone said, and brutal with it. After selling up to Falco, the old landlord died of some dread disease; Pa called it disappointment at having no tenants to bully. Asiacus died in a fight, for once not of his making but one he was trying to break up. Rodan was left lonely, living on his fat, a snivelling, pustular remnant from bad times. Father felt sorry for him, though not enough to face him when he could send me instead. Because I had been a street child, a starveling, it was said I never felt sorry for anyone.
To a point people were right: I rarely did feel sorry, not even for myself. Especially not myself. Life is there. You either jump off a bridge in despair or get on with it.
I dug out the porter to give him his money. The hopeless ex-gladiator shambled up and snatched it without bothering to greet me. “Say thank you nicely! That’s from Falco. He’s sent you a big purse, Rodan. If you take care, it should last you a while. You have to be out of here by the first day of January. Trajan will own it on New Year’s Day, and his agent is sending the wreckers in to clear the site immediately.”
Naturally there was an agent. My family suspected the senator himself had never seen this place.
Rodan stopped slavering over the money, as he deplored the site clearance. “The snooty bastard just can’t wait!”
“It’s sensible. He can’t risk squatters getting in and being hurt, then suing him.”
“I could stop them.” No, you couldn’t stop a spider with a broken leg, Rodan. “Won’t his house need a porter?”
“He is bringing his own, I dare say.” Some needy Iberian, who did not pong or answer back or sleep all day. Some useful man who could, and would, keep a building secure: a door-keeper that a householder would be glad to say hello to. Not Rodan.
“So, what am I supposed to do now?”
“You know what, Rodan. Move out. There won’t be a building, you will not have a job. Be grateful for all the years Marcus Didius helped you out, though we’re afraid it is now over. He has given you plenty of warning.” That was true. Trajan had been a tricky buyer. Anyone might think he had doubts about the high-end piece of land we were passing off on him. “Rodan, you great lump of lard, don’t cry or I’ll have to thump you.”
“You don’t care!”
“I do care, Rodan. We rubbed along well enough, didn’t we, when I lived here? If I hear of anything suitable, I will recommend you.”
That would not happen. Rodan’s work ethic was simple: avoidance. He could be goaded into action by a very frank slew of insults, but even then he bungled it. He had never been suitable for anything.
I left him to grumble while I nervously climbed to our old apartment on the top floor. At every step I expected the dying tenement to subside into rubble under me. The deserted sixth-floor office was a sad place, not for nostalgic lingering. Most of my possessions had been taken out when I married, but in the dank bedroom I found one last casket. Stored for my parents to stop my siblings dragging it out unseasonably, it was buried under a revolting cocoon of spider’s webs: the container where we kept “gold” constellations for hanging on Saturnalia branches. Fake gold is cheap, though never as cheap as it ought to be.
A few decorations had been bought new each year, so the heavy box rattled seductively. When I looked inside, everything was smaller or duller than I remembered. Even so, I found myself reliving past times, with the ritual of hanging our moons and stars on festive branches each December. My younger sister Favonia always went down with a winter fever so she had to lie on a couch, miserably watching. Our little dog Nux would race around, teasing us by carrying off the twinkly stars. If Falco was out when we hung the decorations, we always had to save the last one for him to place … Now the ritual was about to start in my house. I must try to make it special for those sad little boys. Responsibility is very depressing.
I lugged the chest downstairs. There was nobody to help. Fountain Court had always been like that. Rodan heard me coming; he rolled out for another grumble. I ignored him again.
Although I had Merky, riding with a large casket in my arms would be a challenge, but I had a solution. Stepping with care, I crossed the alley. Dire in summer, in winter it was deadly. I managed not to slip over on a trea
cherous puddle of slurry or break an ankle in a ragged pothole, but I ended up with mule dung on my tunic hem. Classic Fountain Court embroidery.
A basket-weaver worked opposite the Eagle Building. My parents had once lived in rooms above his shop. He kept saying he intended to retire, but he was still there, still a wiry man in a tawny tunic, still reminiscing about my sister Julia as a baby (she was fifteen now), still pleasant and ready to give me a good price on a pair of panniers, which he kindly fitted on my donkey.
Barley scampered over, covered with brown smelly gunk. I biffed her nose, until she dropped the rat she was carrying. It strolled away, insouciant. The amiable dog watched as Ennianus and I hauled the casket into one of the new panniers; she immediately scrabbled up into the other, smearing muck all over the wickerwork. Ennianus, grinning, said the panniers were mine now so I could clean it up. “Thanks, friend!”
As the dog wuffed at me to start off, I took a last look around. On the other side of the alley, gracing a damp colonnade with thin, wonky pillars, stood the same old row of dilapidated shops. The colonnade provided shelter for down-and-outs, who would come there to curse passers-by or engage in flaring fights, during which they could hurl one another like sandbags against the shops’ shutters.
This sordid stretch was not part of the property Falco owned. Some tycoon was their landlord, a long-term absentee, as happened everywhere in Rome. My father knew who it was but never talked about him.
Ennianus suggested I might be able to buy more decorations in the Lumber Room, a far-from-suave lock-up that dolefully offered “Gifts of Charm.” That classic dump looked a treasure trove from a distance; close to, it was piled with broken dishes, bent candelabra, mysterious metalware, dust, debris and badly damaged medical implements. Though not quite empty, it reeked of dereliction and despair. Everything inside was old and filthy, yet not antique. I barely remembered ever seeing the shop open.
A Comedy of Terrors Page 6