Last Act In Palmyra mdf-6

by Lindsey Davis

  Our booking was for three nights. Chremes settled on performing what he regarded as the gems in our repertoire: The Pirate Brothers, then a fornicating gods farce, and The Girl from Mykonos. The last sparkler had been cobbled together by Heliodorus some time before he died: maybe he should have died of shame. It was 'loosely based' on all the other Girl from… comedies, a teaser for lustful merchants who were on the razzle in a big city without their wives. It had what the Samos, Andros and Perinthos plays all lacked: Grumio's falling-off-a-ladder trick, Byrria fully clothed but doing a revealing dance while pretending to be mad, and all the girls in the orchestra playing topless. (Plancina asked to be paid a bonus after trapping a nipple between her castanets.)

  Chremes' choice caused groans. He had no real sense of atmosphere. We knew these were the wrong plays and after a morning of muttering, the rest of the company, led by me as their literary expert, gathered to put matters right. We allowed The Girl from Mykonos, which was obviously a runner in a bad city, but overruled the other two; they were altered by democratic vote to The Rope, with its ever-popular tug of war, and a play Davos liked that enabled him to show off in his Boasting Soldier role. Philocrates, so in love with himself and public adulation, would probably have argued as his own part in the latter was minimal, but he happened to be hiding in his tent after spotting a woman he had seduced on our visit to Pella in the company of a rather large male relative who looked as if he had something on his mind.

  That was the trouble with Damascus. All roads led there.

  'And lead away,' Helena reminded me, 'in three days' time. What are we going to do, Marcus?'

  'I don't know. I agree we didn't come to the East to spend the rest of our lives with a cheap drama company. We're earning enough to live on – but not enough to stop and take a holiday, and certainly not enough to pay our fares home if Anacrites won't sign for it.'

  'Marcus, I could pay those.'

  'If I lost all self-respect.'

  'Don't exaggerate.'

  'All right, you can pay, but let me try to complete at least one commission first.'

  I led her into the streets. Uncomplainingly she took my arm. Most women of her status would have frizzled up in horror at the thought of stepping into the public hubbub of a loud, lewd foreign metropolis with neither a litter nor a bodyguard. Many citizens of Damascus eyed her with obvious suspicion for doing so. For a senator's daughter Helena had always had a strange sense of propriety. If I was there, that satisfied her. She was neither embarrassed nor afraid.

  The size and liveliness of Damascus suddenly reminded me of the rules we had left behind in Rome, rules that Helena broke there, too, though at least it was home. In Rome scandalous behaviour among senatorial females was just a feature of fashionable life. Causing trouble for their male relatives had become an excuse for anything. Mothers regarded it as a duty to educate daughters to be rebellious. Daughters revelled in it, throwing themselves at gladiators, joining queer sects, or becoming notorious intellectuals. By comparison, the vices open to boys seemed tame.

  Even so, running off to live with an informer was an act more shocking than most. Helena Justina had good taste in men, but she was an unusual girl. Sometimes I forgot how unusual.

  I stopped at a street corner, caught by an occasional need to check up on her. I had one arm tight around her to protect her from the bustle. She tipped her head to look at me questioningly; her stole fell back from her face, its trimming caught on her earring. She was listening, though trying to free the strands of fine gold wire, as I said, 'You and I lead a strange life. Sometimes I feel that if I cared for you properly I would keep you somewhere more suitable.'

  Helena shrugged. She was always patient with my restless attempts to make her more conventional. She could take pomposity, if it came as a near relative to a cheeky grin. 'I like my life. I'm with an interesting man.'

  'Thanks!' I found myself laughing. I should have expected her to disarm me, but she still caught me unawares. 'Well, it won't last for ever.'

  'No,' she agreed solemnly. 'One day you will be a prim middle-rank bureaucrat who wears a clean toga every day. You'll talk of economics over breakfast and only eat lettuce for lunch. And I'll have to sit at home with my face in an inch-thick flour pack, forever checking laundry bills.'

  I controlled a smile. 'Well that's a relief. I thought you were going to be difficult about my plans.'

  'I am never difficult, Marcus.' I swallowed a chortle. Helena slipped in thoughtfully, 'Are you homesick?'

  I probably was, but she knew I would never admit to it. 'I can't go home yet. I hate unfinished business.'

  'So how are you proposing to finish it?'

  I liked her faith in me.

  Luckily I had put arrangements in hand for resolving at least one commission. Pointing to a nearby house wall, I showed off my cunning device. Helena inspected it. 'Congrio's script is getting more elaborate.'

  'He's being well taught,' I said, letting her know I realised who had been improving him.

  Congrio had drawn his usual poster advertising our performance of The Rope that evening. Alongside it he had chalked up another bill:

  HABIB

  (VISITOR TO ROME)

  URGENT MESSAGE: ASK FOR FALCO

  AT THEATRE OF HEROD

  IMMEDIATE CONTACT IS

  TO YOUR DEFINITE ADVANTAGE

  'Will he answer?' asked Helena, a cautious girl.

  'How can you be so sure?'

  'Thalia said he was a businessman. He'll think it's a promise of money.'

  'Oh well done!' said Helena.

  Chapter LIV

  The specimens called Habib who asked for Falco at the theatre were varied and sordid. This was common in my line of work. I was ready for them. I asked several questions they could answer by keen guesswork, then slipped in the customary clincher: 'Did you visit the imperial menagerie on the Esquiline Hill?'

  'Oh yes.'

  'Very interesting.' The menagerie is outside the city by the Praetorian Camp. Even in Rome not many people know that. 'Don't waste my time with cheating and lies. Get out of here!'

  They did eventually catch on, and sent their friends to try 'Oh no' as the answer to the trick question; one spectacularly blatant operator even attempted to delude me with the old 'Maybe I did, maybe I didn't' line. Finally, when I was starting to think the ploy had failed, it worked.

  On the third evening, a group of us who had suddenly become very interested in helping out with the costumes were stripping off the female musicians for their half-naked starring roles in The Girl from Mykonos. At the crucial moment I was called out to a visitor. Torn between pulchritude and work, I forced myself to go.

  The runt who might be about to help me with Thalia's commission was clad in a long striped shirt. He had an immense rope girdle wrapped several times about his unimpressive frame. He had a lazy eye and dopey features, with tufts of fine hair scattered on his head like an old bedside rug that was fast losing its grip on reality. He was built like a boy, yet had a mature face, reddened either by life as a furnace stoker or some congenital fear of being found out in whatever his routine wrongdoing was.

  'I suppose you're Habib?'

  'No, sir.' Well that was different.

  'Did he send you?'

  'No, sir.'

  'Are you happy speaking Greek?' I queried drily, since his conversation did seem limited.

  'Yes, sir.'

  I would have told him he could drop the 'sir', but that would have left us staring in silence like seven-year-olds on their first day at school.

  'Cough it up then. I'm needed on stage for prompting.'I. was anxious to see the panpipe girl's bosom, which appeared to be almost as alarmingly perfect as the bouncing attributes of a certain rope dancer I had dallied with in my bachelor days. For purely nostalgic reasons I wished to make a critical comparison. If possible, by taking measurements.

  I wondered if my visitor had just come to cadge a free ticket. Obviously I would have obliged just
to escape and return to the theatre. But as a hustler he was sadly slow, so I spelled it out for him. 'Look, if you want a seat, there are still one or two at the top of the auditorium. I'll arrange it, if you like.'

  'Oh!' He sounded surprised. 'Yes, sir!'

  I gave him a bone token from the pouch at my belt. The roars and whoops from the theatre behind us told me the orchestra girls had made their entrance. He didn't move. 'You're still hanging around,' I commented.

  'Yes.'

  'Well?'

  'The message.'

  'What about it?'

  'I've come to get it.'

  'But you're not Habib.'

  'He's gone.'

  'Gone where?'

  'The desert.' Dear gods. The whole damn country was desert. I was in no mood to start raking through the sands of Syria to find this elusive entrepreneur. In the rest of the world there were vintages to sample, rare works of art to accumulate, fine foods to cadge off rich buffoons. And not far from here there were women to ogle.

  'When did he go?'

  Two days ago.'

  My mistake. We should have omitted Canatha.

  No. If we had omitted Canatha, Canatha would have turned out to be where the bastard lived. Destiny was against me as usual. If the gods ever did decide to help me out, they would mislay their map and lose themselves on the road down from Mount Olympus.

  'So!' I took a deep breath and started off again with the brief and unproductive dialogue. 'What did he go for?'

  'To fetch his son back. Khaleed.'

  'That's two answers to one question. I haven't asked you the second.'

  'What?'

  'What's his son's name?'

  'He's called Khaleed!' wailed the red-faced drip of rennet plaintively. I sighed.

  'Is Khaleed young, handsome, rich, wayward and utterly insensitive to the wishes and ambitions of his outraged parent?'

  'Oh, you've met him!' I didn't need to. I had just spent several months adapting plays that were stuffed with tiresome versions of this character. Nightly I had watched Philocrates shed ten years, put on a red wig, and stuff a few scarves down his loincloth in order to play this lusty delinquent.

  'So where is he being a playboy?'

  'Who, Habib?'

  'Habib or Khaleed, what's the difference?'

  'At Tadmor.'

  'Palmyra?' I spat the Roman name at him.

  'Palmyra, yes.'

  He had told me right then. That really was the desert. The nasty geographical feature of Syria that being a fastidious type I had sworn to avoid. I had heard quite enough stories from my late brother the soldier about scorpions, thirst, warlike tribesmen, deadly infections from thorn prickles, and men raving as their brains boiled in their helmets from the heat. Festus had told a lurid tale. Lurid enough to put me off.

  Perhaps we were talking about entirely the wrong family.

  'So answer me this: does your young Khaleed have a girlfriend?'

  The dope in the shirt looked guarded. I had stumbled on a scandal. Not hard to do. It was the usual story after all, and in the end he admitted it with the usual intrigued glee. 'Oh yes! That's why Habib has gone to fetch him home.'

  'I thought it might be! Daddy does not approve?'

  'He's furious!'

  'Don't look so worried. I know all about it. She's a musician, one with a certain Roman elegance but about as high-born as a gnat, completely without connections, and penniless?'

  'That's what they say… So do I get the money?'

  'Nobody promised any money.'

  'The message for Habib then?'

  'No. You get a large reward,' I said, loftily giving him a small copper. 'You have your free ticket to see the half-naked dancers. And thanks to you inflicting this scandalous story on my delicate earlobes, I now have to go to Palmyra to give the message to Habib myself.'

  ACT THREE: PALMYRA

  Late summer at an oasis. Palm and pomegranate trees cluster tastefully around a dirty-looking spring. More camels are wandering about as a disreputable caravan arrives upon the scene…

  SYNOPSIS: Falco, a cheeky low-life character, appears in the gracious city of Palmyra with a troupe of Travelling Players. He discovers that Sophrona, a long-sought runaway, is having an affair with Khaleed, a rich ne'er-do-well whose father is furious; Falco will have to resort to trickery if he is ever to sort things out. Meanwhile danger threatens from an unexpected quarter as the drama on-stage becomes more lifelike than the players had bargained for…

  Chapter LV

  My brother Festus was right about the dangers. But Festus had been in the Roman legions, so he had missed a few quaint customs. For instance, in the desert everything is based on 'hospitality' to strangers, so nothing comes free. What Festus left out were little matters like the 'voluntary contribution' we found ourselves needing to make to the Palmyrenes who offered us their 'protection' across the desert. It would have been fatal to cross without an escort. There were rules. The chief man in Palmyra had been charged by Rome to police the trade routes, paying for his militia from his own well-stuffed coffers as befitted a rich man with a civic conscience. The chief man provided the escort, therefore, and those who enjoyed the service felt obliged to show immense gratitude. Those who rejected the service were asking to be set upon.

  The regular protection squads were waiting for us a few miles north of Damascus, where the road divides. Helpfully loafing at the wayside, as soon as we took the right-hand turn for Palmyra they offered themselves as guides, leaving us to work out for ourselves the penalty for refusing. On our own we would make an easy target for marauding tribesmen. If the tribesmen didn't know we were there, the rejected escort would soon point us out. This protection racket must have operated in the desert for a thousand years, and a small theatre group with unwieldy baggage was unlikely to thwart the smiling tradition of blackmail. We paid up. Like everyone else, we knew that getting to Palmyra was only one part of our problem. Once there, we wanted to be able to come back.

  I had been to the edge of the Empire before. Crossed the boundary, even, when I had nothing better to do than risk my life in a foolish mission. Yet as we headed eastwards deep into Syria, I had never experienced quite such a strong feeling that we were going to stare out at unknown barbarians. In Britain or Germany you know what lies over the frontier: more

  Britons or Germans whose nature is just a touch too fierce to conquer and whose lands are just too awkward to enclose. Beyond Syria, which itself becomes a wilderness a mere fifty miles inland, lie the unconquerable Parthians. And beyond them roll legendary tracts of unexplored territory, mysterious kingdoms from which come exotic goods brought by secretive men and borne on strange animals. Palmyra is both the end of our Empire, and the end of the long road leading towards us from theirs. Our lives and theirs meet face to face in a market that must be the most exotic in the world. They bring ginger and spices, steel and ink, gemstones, but primarily silk; in return we sell them glass and Baltic amber, cameo gemstones, henna, asbestos and menagerie animals. For a Roman, as for an Indian or Chinaman, Palmyra is as far as you can ever go. I knew all this in theory. I was well read, within the limits of a poor boy's upbringing, though one with access to dead men's libraries when they came up in my father's auctions. Moreover, I had brought with me a strikingly well-read girl. There had never been limits on what Helena's father could provide for her. Decimus Camillus had always allowed her to ask for literary works (in the hope that once she had grabbed the new scroll box and devoured it in an evening he might saunter through the occasional scroll himself). I knew about the East because my own father studied the luxury trade. She knew because she was fascinated by anything unusual. By pooling our knowledge, Helena and I were forewarned of most things we encountered. But we guessed before we ever started that mere theory might not be enough preparation for Palmyra in reality.

  I had persuaded the company to come with us. Hearing that finding Sophrona had suddenly become a possibility, many were curious. The stagehands and mu
sicians were loath to let me leave them so long as our killer remained on the loose. The long desert haul offered us one last chance to drive him out from under cover. So, by a large majority, Chremes' cherished plan to trot sedately up to Emesa had been overturned. Even the giant watermills on the Orontes and the famous decadence of Antiochia failed to match the lure of the empty desert, the exotic silk markets, and a promise of solutions to our mysteries.

  I was no longer in doubt that I was finding solutions. I had obtained an address in Palmyra for the businessman whose son had absconded with the water organist. If I found her, I was confident I would also find some way of restoring her to Thalia. It sounded as if Habib was already hard at that. If he successfully split her from her boyfriend, my offer of her old job back in Rome should come as welcome news.

  As for the killer, I was sure I was close to him. Perhaps even in my own mind I had worked out who he was. I had certainly reduced my suspects to two. Whilst I could accept that one of them might have gone unobserved up the mountain with the playwright, I still believed it was impossible for him to have killed Ione. That left only the other, apparently – unless somewhere I could nail a lie.

  Sometimes, when we pitched camp among the rolling brown hills where the wind moaned over the sandy slopes so ominously, I sat and thought about the killer. Even to Helena I was not yet ready to name him. But more and more in the course of that journey I was allowing myself to put a face to him.

  We had been told it was a four-day trip to Palmyra. That was the time our escort would have taken, by camel, unencumbered by cartloads of properties and the awkward stumbles and accidents of complaining amateurs. For one thing, we insisted on taking our carts. The Palmyrenes had tried strenuously to persuade us to abandon our wheeled vehicles. Our fear had been that this was a ploy to let their comrades pinch the waggons once we had parked them and left them behind. Eventually we accepted that the urgings were genuine. In return for our money they did wish to give a good service. Oxen and mules took far more time than camels to cross the wilderness. They carried less, and were subject to more stress. Besides, as our guides generously pointed out, at Palmyra we faced a punitive local tax on each cart we wanted to take into town. We said that since we were not trading we would leave our carts at the city perimeter. Our escort looked unhappy. We explained that trying to load a camel with two extremely large stage doorways (complete with doors), plus the revolving wheel of our lifting machinery for flying in gods from the heavens, might be difficult. We made it clear that without our normal transport for our odd trappings we would not go. In the end they shook their heads and allowed us our madness. Escorting eccentrics even seemed to give them a sense of pride.