Feliculus and I shared a useful chat, though only after formal preliminaries. Informers sometimes pay in coin for evidence, but more often we extract it by listening. This is harder to recover through your invoice system, though clients who bother to pay up approve because it is a cheap item. So, first, I had to suffer tedious views on poultry-keeping.
“White geese are held in great esteem, as you probably know, Flavia Albia. They are delightful characters, very tame once they know you, not at all as fierce as people think.”
“Not unless your dog annoys them.”
“They will take offence at any strangers. It’s their nature. If you were to keep a pair at your house, they would soon snuggle up with your dog in her kennel.”
I hoped no geese ever heard that our kennel was a decorative Greek temple. Barley would be mobbed again, this time by would-be lodgers.
“But they are generally docile,” Feliculus maundered on. “They can live for twenty years, you know. Looking after them is no trouble. All I have to do is move them to better grass or put grain for them in the bottom of a bucket of water. Every night I steer them into their lovely houses that Falco improved so much. Now they have learned the daily routine, they expect it. If I happen to be thinking too deeply about my troubles, they will even come knocking, to remind me it’s their bedtime.”
“Good heavens!”
“Everyone moans about their droppings, but the splods don’t smell—well, it’s nothing but grass, is it? Everything dissolves when it rains, or it can easily be washed off with water and a broom.”
“So,” I insinuated gently, hoping to drag this barnyard chat towards more useful subject matter, “while you were out poo-sweeping, did you have any contact with that man who died, Gabinus the transport manager?”
Feliculus sneered. “Oh, yes. His honour brought himself over here.”
“Really?”
“My geese didn’t take to him, not at all!”
I had never envisaged that loathing for the victim might be shared by this feathered flock. If they could speak, would they too tell me they found the man unbearable, yet swear they took no part in killing him?
Or had the Sacred Geese of Juno ganged up and run him off the rock?
XXII
“I have had my bad times.” Feliculus was thinking about himself again. As with most depressives, whatever originally caused his unhappiness, self-obsession had taken over as his problem. “I often have thoughts of ending it all. Your father used to talk me out of it. He would say, ‘You are up here on the roof of the world, Feliculus, with the finest views in Rome. You have an important role in society, a good life out of doors, free food, and pets who love you. The geese need you, Feliculus. You have to be strong for them.’ A lovely man.”
That did not sound like my father, who was more for telling people to snap out of it. Try a little light woodwork, or sex in the afternoons … Still, it gave me an idea. I asked, “Was Gabinus prone to dark thoughts too? It’s said he may have committed suicide. Was fellow-feeling how you came to know him?”
Feliculus turned stroppy. “Him? You are joking!”
“I am sorry. For a moment I had a picture of you two helping each other by talking your misery through…” I saw them gloomily dissecting methods of self-elimination and the risks involved: falling on a sword, the Roman way, though you had to be rich enough to own weapons; poisoning, where some interfering person might have an antidote handy; drowning yourself, if do-gooders along the Tiber Embankment were looking the other way. Or there was jumping from the Tarpeian Rock—even if you changed your mind halfway down, it would be too late … “Gabinus was living in the custodian’s hut on the Capitol, I expect you know that. He sounded very happy to have grabbed it. Why did he come over here to the Arx, Feliculus?”
“The first time, people he was meeting one evening didn’t know the way, so they came up the wrong peak. He hiked over here to fetch them—seemed anxious to haul them off before they started talking with me.” That sounded as if Gabinus was up to no good. He had not wanted Feliculus, or anyone else on the Arx, knowing who those people were or what they had come for. “After that he used to strut around here because he knew it stirred up the geese. He enjoyed causing trouble. He would make out I wasn’t up to the job.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. Don’t let it upset you. I gather he was like that with everyone … Did you manage to get anything out of his visitors before he stole them away? Who were they?”
“No idea. The geese were in a fit, so my whole attention was on calming the situation. The strangers never said who they were, not to me.”
“Did you only see them the once?”
“Once was enough. There was quite a big group—they even had children. It was the nippers my geese got all worked up about. They always run after little ones, as soon as they spot them coming. High little squeals of ‘Nice birdies!’ are a natural signal to attack.”
I knew how they felt. Roman parents think their children sweet. Not me. I had never tried aggressive honks to scare them, but when next faced with some spoiled infant in its dear little tunic and gold bulla, this was a thought … “Sounds as if it could have been his own friendly family visiting Gabinus.”
“I don’t think so,” said Feliculus, sneering again.
“Why not?”
“What friendly family could a man like that have? Anyway, when he came over here looking for them, there were introductions and very polite handshakes. They looked uncomfortable, as if they didn’t like his attitude. For some reason they needed a meeting, but they were wary of him and unhappy with the situation.”
“So, not his familiar aunts and uncles? Were they foreign, then? Visitors to Rome?”
“Tarentum. They came from Tarentum,” Feliculus told me, as if hailing from the heel of Italy made people dangerous foreigners. As a slave, he himself could have come from anywhere, but he chose to claim Rome as his; he was snobbish towards all other places.
“How did you know that? Presumably they had not cried, ‘Don’t chase us! We are special, we come from Tarentum!’ while your geese were having a go?”
“You’re a one! When you talk, I can hear your father.”
“I learned it all from him … ‘How could you tell that?’ would be Falco’s first question.”
Good grief, enough! I was twenty-nine: I did not need a patriarch taking over.
“I told you it was evening. They got in, but must have wasted time coming to the wrong place. They went off to his hut with Gabinus but they can’t have known that the gate to the Area Capitolina would be locked after dark.” The Porta Pandana is always closed at night. I had heard so that very morning. Who expects to learn something useful from a local guide?
“So these bods strolled over to the Capitol, held their meeting, but stayed too long with Gabinus until they found themselves the wrong side of the Pandana, locked into the temple precincts? I see it! They had to rouse the gatekeeper, who would have been suspicious. It was him who asked their identity. So, Feliculus, you later went for a gossip at the Pandana?”
Feliculus looked annoyed to be rushed. “I knew him, so I went to find out. I wanted to know who upset my geese. I have to give in reports, you know.”
“Yes, you told me. It was the gatekeeper who said they came from Tarentum?”
“I don’t know. He must have done. Somebody told me. Maybe Lemni.”
“You know Lemni? Lemni at the Auguraculum?”
“Everyone knows Lemni.”
“All right. The gatekeeper told you Gabinus forced him to let the Tarentines go out.”
“Yes. That miser never gave the keeper a tip for unlocking the gate, so he was furious afterwards.”
“One more person who hated Gabinus,” I grumbled. “Probably not enough to kill him, though. Or it might depend how far into his supper he was, when loudly roused after hours.”
“He lost his job,” Feliculus told me, one public slave on behalf of another, indignant at this cruel trick. �
�The day after the incident, Gabinus made a complaint about him being over-officious—he could talk! So the gatekeeper was moved to a new post. Nothing was his fault, but management don’t care. They whistled him out of Rome to a farm somewhere. A new boy came to the Pandana, who couldn’t fasten a bootstrap, let alone lock up a gate. Don’t ask me where the old one is. He was dragged off and vanished without telling me. And since you’re bound to want to know, he went first. Gabinus fell off the rock later, so the gatekeeper couldn’t have pushed him—though he must have wished he did.”
I sighed. “Thank you.”
“So that,” concluded the goose-boy, dramatically, “is all I have to tell you, Flavia Albia. All except one curious thing the gatekeeper also mentioned. He didn’t need to tell me. I copped a whiff for myself when they got lost on the Arx.”
I waited.
“Those people stood out very noticeably. Believe me, I didn’t get too close.”
He was milking it. I couldn’t wait: “Because?”
“Because they stank disgustingly of fish.”
XXIII
Fishermen? Neptune’s winkles! Fishermen? Barbs and bobbing floats: that was all I needed.
Feliculus had not actually seen this crowd hung about with nets or lobster pots, though such an occupation sounded plausible. Plenty of fish is eaten in Rome every day. Much of it is genuinely fresh and bright-eyed. If it’s five days old you can never prove it; often it hardly looks flabby at all, though you find out when the stomach-ache kicks in.
Most seafood is unloaded on the coast, though. Why would a transport manager in the heart of Rome be meeting trident-wielders, bottom-trawlers, clam-diggers or prawn-netters? What monumental octopus glut would require an imperial mule train to deliver it? Did a gilt-head bream caught in their nets contain a wondrous jewel? Had they hauled up a turbot of such huge proportions they wanted to give it to the Emperor—a gift, they would say, while silently begging a reward, or at least a mention in a satirical poet’s raw invective? Had Gabinus offered to negotiate for them at court? Why had wily sons of the sea failed to see such an offer was not needed?
Did the self-motivated crook reel them in, squeezing out a bribe to “smooth the way at the palace,” but they spotted the dupe and took revenge? Cast him off the rock? Far-fetched, I thought. If he had been found with a filleting knife stuck between his ribs, I would like the clue more.
Better idea: look at it the other way. It might not be the briny people who were petitioners. Gabinus could have run some scam with them. He sought them out, dragging them to his meeting so he could fix up a deal to use imperial beasts of burden for private business; in this deal, the fisher-men “borrowed” transport that he supplied and he creamed off the profits. Everything I had learned about him said he enjoyed a fiddle. This man would cheat the Treasury, even if his lover was the Minister of Finance. So donkeys and mules would go moonlighting. The Emperor would be none the wiser that his baggage trains were trotting around in private commerce …
No. If the mules came home to their stable after hauling creels of squid, they would, in the most literal sense, smell fishy. Someone officious would notice. Someone who had not been included in any underhand pay-outs was bound to ask an “innocent” question of the last honest bureaucrat in some lacklustre secretariat, who would primly take it upon himself to alert an auditor who was looking for promotion and would trash Gabinus.
Of all the undercover trades he could have dabbled in, shifting seafood around was the least appealing.
Maybe the fishermen were going through hard times. Had they come here simply to beg Gabinus to employ a lad or two of theirs? Driving might look easier than rowing out to sea in search of uncertain tunny shoals. Driving for the Emperor might appear more lucrative than working on their local dock. Maybe my first assumption had been wrong: they were aunties and uncles of Gabinus, his own relations pulling family strings.
But flying jellyfish! Why were these people from Tarentum? Tarentum is in Calabria; that is a long way down the boot of Italy. It lies in the soft part of the instep, in the spot where a foot is maddeningly ticklish.
Of all the seafarers who might visit Rome, those from Tarentum were the most unlikely. It was just too far away. Anyone could come to watch a triumph but, given the slow speed at which news travels, I bet no one in Calabria had yet heard Domitian was having one. In any case, Calabria had no particular love of Rome, emperors in general, or the Flavians in particular. Putting together a long-distance journey to Rome would take time, advance planning, money and a distinct motive. Surely not worth it, just to see a plump man in a chariot? Even that scrumptious chariot I stepped into yesterday.
“Feliculus, were they Greek-speaking?” Tarentum is down in Magna Graecia, ultra-civilised in its inhabitants’ own eyes because of its ancient heritage as a series of Greek colonies, yet barely absorbed into the Roman world. My father had had to travel there once. He reminisced of it as badlands. More of an outback even than the Pontine Marshes, another remote spot Falco disparaged.
“No, Latin. Strangers, though, with thick country accents. I could hardly understand a word.”
To a native-born Roman, that could describe anyone from as little as five miles outside our city. Dialects went down badly. To fit in here, a standard intonation was vital: coming from Britain, that was the first thing I learned.
Of course Romans have an accent. They just don’t know it. Try asking for a loaf in any other argot: you’ll go hungry.
“Thanks, Feliculus. Were they buried in luggage?”
“No, they had nothing.”
“So they were staying somewhere.”
“Must have been. All you have to do is find an innkeeper who is complaining loudly about how they stank!” He had a nice line in sarcasm: “If that dog of yours had any training you could show her a sardine and she’d find their trail.” His style was nice for a while. I could easily tire of it. “Or even, Flavia Albia, you can sniff the wind and follow your own nose—”
“Enough, Feliculus! I do know my task is hopeless.”
“Your father would find them,” the goose-boy badgered, “no sweat. Falco could do it. He would devise some cunning ruse to ferret them out. In a wink, he’d have them.”
Time to go, before I socked this man. “I’ll be off now. Any chance of that dead birdie coming home with me?”
Sadly there wasn’t. That was because at the same moment I offered to nobble the carcass for a succulent supper, the “dead” goose suddenly stood up, ruffled its feathers with a petulant shake, then stalked away.
Some people never have any luck.
I was sounding like my father again.
XXIV
I looked out for Lemni, but the augury tent appeared deserted. I crossed back to the Capitol. I found Egnatius. I asked whether he knew of any contacts from Tarentum who had been engaged off-the-record with Gabinus; naturally he denied it. If his predecessor had had a scam, Egnatius would want to keep quiet and carry it on himself.
Much as I loathed Nestor, I would have asked him. But he was nowhere to be seen. Egnatius told me he had been ordered back to the Praetorian Castra; it was to receive a wigging, the messenger had said. That could be because Tiberius Manlius had tipped off his superiors. All the more reason to avoid the guard: he must know who had dumped him in it.
After Egnatius, I gave up on the Capitol. I came down on the river side, with Barley quietly following. We walked over to the Porticus of Octavia. It was new, rebuilt by Domitian after the last great fire, like everything in this area. Its elegant cloisters housed a library I liked. Fortunately so few Romans are scholars I could always find a space. In the Porticus of Octavia you can tie up your dog to statuary by Alexander the Great’s great sculptor, Lysippus of Sicyon. You can gaze at prime paintings while you wait for your scrolls. You can sit down for as long as you like, among the world’s best stolen art. The scrolls available are many, all beautifully cared for, filed neatly and scented with cedar oil to keep away bugs. And it’
s free.
All the scrolls were new copies, all recently catalogued. Only the librarian was old; when the fire swept the city, he must have been out of town. Sometimes he was helpful. Not today, though. He was grumpy over something. Perhaps Domitian’s return had made him fearful his tenure might be reviewed. Perhaps the mighty cost of the Triumph would impact on his book budget.
He threw a bunch of scrolls and a map at me; I wasted a couple of hours looking up Tarentum on my own. After dragging through yards of tiresome history, I picked up that it was supposed to have been founded by Spartans born to unmarried women—“Bastards!”—after which had followed centuries of wars between the Tarentine Greeks and Greeks of other flavours, then Italian wars with Bruttium, Samnium and Lucania, before further wars with Rome. Typical. I could never be a historian. All this showed a fighting Spartan heritage, though not necessarily bastardy. It was too light on scandal to keep me from drowsing. The worst aspect of my job is that sometimes it is very boring.
Facts that looked helpful were not. During the Carthaginian Wars, amid anti-Roman feeling, Tarentine hostages who were being held in Rome were caught trying to escape; they were thrown from the Tarpeian Rock—even this was irrelevant to whether more recently Gabinus might have jumped or been pushed. So far, the only person I knew he might have needed to escape from was his wife, yet my information said she ought to have escaped from him but had been pleading for more contact.
After Hannibal was kicked out of town, thirty thousand prisoners were brought here to Rome, along with Tarentum’s art treasures, including a statue of Nike, or Winged Victory. Some transport manager at the time had had his work cut out with bringing Nike home, making sure her gorgeous wings never broke off to leave her half clad in her gloriously flowing garments, like any young girl who had gone out in wild weather without a good cloak … But again, that expert’s anxiety had no bearing on Gabinus, centuries later.
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