I just wanted to be a good citizen. But this was when the situation gently began tipping from straightforward into the kind of dark enquiry I was used to.
VII
Modestus and Primilla lived at Antium, nearly thirty miles away. I dreaded announcing to Helena that I was going on a trip. The baby’s death still gnawed. It was the wrong time to leave home. However, some god was on my side. Some deity with time on their hands in Olympus decided Falco needed help.
I entered my house with a cautious step. After working the key gently, I let the door swing to with care, glad no one was acting as door porter. I had the classic bearing of a guilty bastard slinking in and hoping to avoid notice. It was the ninth hour, evening, the period when busy men return, freshly bathed and ready for a good dinner. In houses all through Rome such men were about to have ructions with tired wives, layabout sons or indecent daughters.
Drawing upon six hundred years of a Roman’s right to behave crassly, I flexed my shoulders. This house was where Pa had lived for twenty years but quite unlike the Janiculan spread. Crammed against the Aventine cliff on the Tiber’s bank, our town house lacked the depth to allow a classic atrium with an open roof and vistas across peristyle gardens. Here, we lived vertically. I felt easy with that because I had grown up in the tall apartment blocks where the poor fester. We lived mainly upstairs because sometimes the river flooded in. Plain rooms off the corridors on the ground floor were non-domestic and silent at this hour. I walked across the empty entrance hall and went up.
Albia, my foster daughter, rushed down towards me. She was trying not to trip over the hem of a blue gown she thought particularly suited her. Her dark hair looked more fancifully arranged than usual, though with a lopsided tilt as if she had pinned it hastily herself. She burst out excitedly, ‘Aulus has come home to Rome!’
Well, that could be good. Or not. He was a promising fellow. Still, she was too happy about his arrival. Something would have to be done. Helena was not up to it; this would be my problem.
Aulus Camillus Aelianus was Helena’s brother, the elder of two. Though neither was a disaster, as pillars of the community this pair wobbled. Aulus once loathed me because I was an informer, but later saw sense. He was maturing; I liked to think he benefited from my patronage. Like his brother Quintus, he worked with me sometimes, when I felt strong enough for in-depth training of the hare-brained. Lately Aulus had been away studying law, first in Athens then Alexandria. This could either make him more useful to me, or give him a separate new career.
I was aware Albia and he had struck up a friendship. As a father who expected the worst, it made me glad Aulus was spending time abroad, since he was a senator’s son and Albia was a foundling from Britain with a bleak history; they had no scope for romance, and anything else was unthinkable. On our recent family travels to Greece and to Egypt I had noticed Helena try to keep them apart, with limited success. Albia saw no problem. Aulus was something of a loner, and taking his time getting suitably married, so he liked having Albia to giggle with. He must know it could never go further. They were chums. It would pass. It had to.
‘Aulus is here?’
‘Come and see him!’ Eyes bright, my innocent fosterling rushed ahead of me into the salon where we received visitors.
I detected a strained atmosphere at once.
Helena was sitting in a basket chair, her feet very neatly together on a footstool. She looked pale and weary. Our small daughters, Julia and Favonia, were lolling against her knees. Those scamps had been subdued since we lost the baby. Even at four and two, they had a good sense of trouble. Now Father was home but for once they did not hurl themselves upon me, shrieking. Their dark eyes came to me, with the open curiosity of children who recognised a crisis; my intelligent tots were watching closely what would happen now.
‘Aulus!’ Albia had cried out with joy too readily. He grinned, but it was sheepish. He was a poor actor. Albia’s chum had come home looking indefinably hunted.
Albia tensed. She was very bright. I moved alongside and took her hand, like any fond father in company. But Albia was not like other people’s daughters. She had come from the rowdy streets of Londinium, a harsh, remote city. Her Roman sophistication was a cloak she soon hurled off, immediately anyone upset her.
Seated on a couch, Aulus was a couple of years short of thirty, with a flop of dark hair, athletically built. Right beside him - when there were various other seats available, some more comfortable - perched a silent young woman. If there was trouble in the room, she was it. I kept tight hold of Albia.
Of foreign appearance, the young woman wore layers of expensive drapery in dark silk-shot linen. Her gold necklaces and earrings were rather formal for an unannounced visit to friends. Aulus must have brought her from Athens, but if she was Greek, she was not bearing gifts.
‘Marcus!’ Family gatherings were Helena Justina’s strong point; she could direct bad-tempered relatives like a theatre producer getting an uncoordinated chorus into line. ‘And Albia, my dear - here’s a surprise.’ Over our children’s heads, her dark eyes sent me complicated messages. Without appearing to hurry, she began unhappily: ‘Aulus has come back to Italy to settle down. He thinks he has learned enough; he wants to use his knowledge.’ That, and his talent for upsetting everyone, I reckoned.
‘So who’s your new friend?’ I asked him bluntly.
He cleared his throat. ‘This is Hosidia.’ He looked hopelessly at Albia.
‘Hello, Hosidia.’ I don’t discriminate. I use the same brisk tone for tipsy barmaids showing their bosoms, hard-hearted females who have knifed their mothers, and Athenian dames who are looking down their nose as if they think I am the slave who cleans the silver. This Hosidia appeared to be costing up our metalware - the comport with the honey-glazed nutty titbits and the small but exquisite drinks tray. (Thanks to my father’s perfect taste, our best service was small, but second to none.) If she had been under investigation, I would have put her on the suspects list. I really did not like the way she was assessing my pierce-patterned wine strainer.
‘Marcus Didius Falco,’ Aulus introduced me formally. He sounded unsure how Hosidia would react. I thought he could not know her well; nowhere near well enough, if I had judged this situation right.
Helena wanted Aulus to come clean, but as he held back she said politely, ‘Hosidia is the daughter of my brother’s tutor, Marcus. You remember the famous professor, Minas of Karystos, don’t you?’
Jupiter help us! I raised an eyebrow, which Hosidia could take as admiration of her papa’s intellect if she chose. In front of his daughter, I refrained from saying, ‘That disgusting boozer, never in the classroom, trying to kill his students with his terrible all-night parties?’
Minas of Karystos was a decent court prosecutor when he could stand up straight, though that was rare. I knew Decimus Camillus, my father-in-law, was appalled by the shameless fees Minas charged.
Perhaps this explained the son’s recall, Camillus senior had decided to staunch the haemorrhage of cash. He can’t have banked on the tutor’s daughter.
Helena was looking overwrought. ‘Marcus, would you believe my little brother has gone and got married?’
‘No!’ Call me a cynic, but I believed it all too sourly.
Aulus would have been an easy mark. He thought himself astute, but that just put him in more danger.
I saw it all. Albia, however, was taken aback. After one wild glance, she wrenched her hand free from mine and tore from the room.
Nobody commented on Albia running out. I thought Aulus jumped, but he stayed put.
Helena continued bleakly, ‘The wedding happened in a rush, because of Aulus coming home. Minas is delighted -‘
Minas must have set it up. However big a rissole Minas of godforsaken Karystos was in Athens, the glory of Greece had passed away. Rome was the only place for any ambitious professional. Marrying off his sombre daughter to a Roman senator’s son must have been in the mind of the unscrupulous law teacher fro
m the moment he grabbed his new pupil, fresh off the boat, and promised to make him a master of jurisprudence.
Demonstrating to the newly-weds how a good husband arrives home, whatever shocks await, I crossed the room sedately, then bent and kissed my dear wife’s cheek. In the style of a good Roman marriage, she was the companion who shared my closest secrets, so to demonstrate our private affection to Aulus and his bride, I murmured a love greeting in Helena’s neat ear. I managed not to nibble her lobe, though I considered it, which may have shown in my face.
‘Seems Albia may want to leave town,’ I then muttered. ‘I could vanish to Pa’s villa maritima for a few days. Call it executor business. Shall I take her away for some breathing space?’
Helena kissed me back formally like a matron who knows the father of the family is up to no good. ‘Let’s talk later, darling.’
In the style of a good Roman marriage, I took that as settled.
VIII
Towards nightfall, to escape the tantrums that were rattling shutters in my house, I went out to see Petronius Longus. He was on duty with the vigiles, at the Fourth Cohort’s secondary patrol house. It was a calm, masculine environment where only the grunts of criminals being brutally thrashed ever disturbed the tranquillity. July and August were always quiet. Members of the public used fewer oil lamps and cooking fires, so they set fewer of their tenements on fire. For the vigiles, nights became tedious. Patrols could be stood down. While they waited for emergencies, the firefighters liked to sit in their exercise yard telling one another moral fables. Well, that was one way to describe it. They were ex-slaves, a rough lot.
Petronius sat apart in a small office, wrestling with his latest unsolved case. Drink was barred on these premises, but he gave me a slurp from the beaker he had under the table. He hid it again in case the tribune dropped in, then we swapped gossip.
‘Helena is hopping mad at her brother, and our girlie is distraught.’
‘Albia’s how old? Seventeen? - - Thundering Jove, was it that long ago you and I were in Britain during the Rebellion?’ That was when she must have lost her parents. ‘Did Aelianus touch her?’ We were fathers. We were paranoid with good reason. We had been lads in the army together, then dirty bastards about town. We knew what happens.
‘Albia is bound to deny it.’ I had not asked her. Why invite tears? Indeed, why give your daughter a reason to hurl abuse at you? ‘He’s been away a lot, which is one good thing,’ I went on gloomily. ‘We ran into him a couple of times ‘when we were travelling, but as far as I know, they just wrote to each other.’
‘Oh letters!’ scoffed Petro darkly. He did not have my literary leanings. ‘Soulmates, eh? Falco my friend, you are in deep donkey shit.’ He handed me his beaker again, though it was a joyless panacea. ‘What’s his new wife like? A looker?’
‘A spender.’
‘And a Greek prosecutor’s daughter?’
‘Guilty until proven innocent. We met her father in Athens. As a boozer he makes Bacchus look restrained.’
‘Jupiter and Mars!’ Petronius Longus viewed all lawyers as pests. Lawyers so easily demolished the criminal cases he put together; he ignored the fact that this feat was achievable because the vigiles’ definition of proof was simply a man whose face they did not like who walked down a street where they happened to be. ‘How are the senator and his wife taking this?’
I laughed drily. ‘Considering all three of their children have now, without permission, taken a spouse who is either foreign or plebeian, Helena says Decimus and Julia are calm. They have to be careful showing opinions, because not only is the Hellenic bride living in their house with the captured Aulus, but her go-getting, influence-seeking, hard-drinking Athenian father came to Rome too. Of course he would do. A niche among the ruling class, with access to a wine cellar? His sole purpose in fixing up the marriage.’
‘The bastard!’
I shared Petro’s curse, then put my troubles aside and let him tell me his. He was stumped on a peculiar case: a family who went to their mausoleum to hold a funeral discovered that someone had broken in and dumped an unknown body. Foul play among the tombs was commonplace. Some people would have just chucked out the corpse for the crows, but this family was sensible enough to notice disturbing elements. It was the body of a well-kept man of mature age, not the usual young rape or mugging victim, and he was laid out in an odd ritual position.
‘Violence. Someone really enjoyed it.’ Petronius was very experienced. He knew when death had been caused by an unexpected drunken fury and when it had a perverted smell.
‘You think there will be other victims?’
‘Dreading it, Falco.’ He dealt with atrocity all the time, but never became inured to humans’ absence of humanity.
I told him if anyone could solve this case it was him, and I meant it. Then I went home to be ready for an early start next morning on the trip to my father’s villa.
‘Is this the future?’ Petronius joked. ‘You swan off to your extravagant holiday home - while I get stuck here with a sordid serial killer?’
I grinned and told him to get used to it. He ought to know I wouldn’t change.
Albia and I went down to the sea on the Via Laurentina. All the best people have villas north of where that road hits the coast, turning towards Ostia. My father had his place a little to the south. He said he liked the privacy. There were reasons. They were mostly commercial, relevant to his dedicated avoidance of paying import tax.
Pa had left me a litter and bearers but I had forgotten I owned it. Automatically, I hired a donkey cart, which gave me an excuse to concentrate on driving. Albia sat bolt upright beside me. Throughout her childhood she had been a scavenger for both food and affection; she still had stick-thin arms and, when she was unhappy, a gaunt look. No fancy ringlets today; she had let her hair dangle loose, though Helena had run with a bone comb and tidied her up for the trip. Even though there was bright sun beating on the highway, the girl hunched in a shawl, making herself suffer.
We rode twenty miles in silence then Albia could no longer keep it up. She was bursting to accuse me of cruelty. ‘Why do I have to be dragged along with you? Am I forced to work in your business, like some horrible slave?’
‘No, I have a posse of grateful slaves and freedmen for that now. They may be Paphlagonian poltroons but unlike you, Flavia Albia, they are meek.’
‘I hope they all cheat you.’
I was the villain. Nothing new. ‘Bound to. So cheer up, will you?’
We drove on for a while.
‘I’d like to rip his head off.’ Aelianus deserved all he got, but I owed it to the senator and Julia Justa to preserve his well-barbered bonce. So I merely said Helena and I hated to see Albia so unhappy; we had thought she might appreciate a chance to avoid Aulus. ‘Yes,’ agreed Albia thoughtfully. ‘Then I’ll rip his head off- - when he thinks he’s got away with it.’
Helena Justina had taken in our British waif because she was so spirited, so torn with grief and loneliness, and had been so unjustly served by fate. Found as a baby in the ruins of Londinium, no one knew or would ever know whether Albia was a Briton or some half-and-half little bun, a dead trader’s offspring born to a local woman, maybe. She could even be fully Roman, though it was unlikely. When we offered to adopt her, we had wormed a certificate of citizenship out of the British governor, who owed me favours. We now gave Albia education, sustenance, security and friendship, though not much more was feasible. In the snobbery of Rome, she would have a hard fight. I was middle-class now, with the Emperor’s approval, but since I had plebeian origins, even my own daughters would need more than elocution lessons if they were to be accepted. I lived with a senator’s daughter but that was Helena’s choice. It was legal, but eccentric.
‘I hope Aulus did not make you any promises.’ I broached the subject tentatively, still not brave enough to say I hoped he had not slept with her.
‘Of course he wouldn’t; I’m a barbarian!’ Albia snapped furiously. H
er voice then dropped. ‘I was just stupid.’
‘Well, it must seem impossible at the moment, but one day you will get over him.’
‘I never will!’ Albia retorted. Her loves and hates were equally intense. I had a dark feeling she was right; she never would recover. After knocking about with street life in Londinium, Albia knew how to stay safe at that level, but she had trusted Aelianus. He was one of the family, her family now. She had dropped her guard.
‘Maybe it’s a good thing we are going to Antium, or I might rip his head off myself.’
‘You never would,’ sneered Albia bitterly.
‘Since he is actually married, there is not much I can do about the situation, and you know that.’
‘If he wasn’t married would you do anything?’
I gave her no answer. Aulus was overdue for marriage. I thought his choice was a disaster, but I would have seriously opposed any offer for Albia - - for both their sakes.
‘You talk about righting injustice, but you never do it,’ she grumbled.
‘Conciliation - there’s a fine Latin word … I hope you never have to see me stick a sword in someone’s ribs.’ It had been known. But I believed retribution should fit the degree of the crime. ‘Aelianus has been thoughtless and disloyal. Young men are like that. Young women can be just as bad - or worse.’
‘Oh I don’t expect anyone to stand up for me!’ Albia was back on the verge of tears now. My heart ached for her. ‘You are both men. He is your friend, your relative, your assistant. You will stick by him -‘
‘He was your friend too.’ I was nervous that Aulus might have the crazy idea they could carry on as friends. He was that kind of innocent. ‘I’d say, value your past - - but move on and forget him. Do it for yourself.’
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