Falco: The Official Companion (A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery)

by Lindsey Davis

  Petronilla, Silvana and Tadia are the three Petronius daughters. Silvana and Tadia die of chickenpox in The Jupiter Myth, causing their father anguish and guilt for leaving them.

  Tadia Longina’s need for a comfort stop in Shadows in Bronze saves Falco from being roughed up or worse by Pertinax’s thugs.

  After the break-up of her parents’ marriage, there is a touching scene where Petro and Petronilla are seen at the Games together: They were both eating pancakes. Petronilla had managed hers quite daintily for she had inherited her mother’s daintiness. Her father had a sticky chin and honey sauce down his tunic front. Petronilla noticed this. She soon cleaned him up with her handkerchief. Petronius submitted like a hero. When his daughter sat back he slung an arm around her while she snuggled up against him. He was staring at the arena with a set expression; I was no longer sure he was watching the race. [THF] After her sisters die, life is even harder for Petronilla; she lives with her mother but does regularly see her father.

  In the IV Cohort of Vigiles

  Marcus Rubella

  In Time to Depart, the new appointee Rubella is big physically; quiet, not tired by life. His grey hair was close-cropped in the military manner, giving him a tough appearance. His strength was enough to move an ox aside merely by leaning on it. The knowledge soothed him. Rubella took the world at his own pace. He was utterly composed. About fifty, this slightly sinister character left the legions as a retired ex-chief centurion, and is gruesomely ambitious to join the Praetorian Guard. He is suspicious of Falco, whom he views as an uncontrollable amateur. He lacks a sense of humour and earns a lot of insults: He could be one of those dark types who like to pretend they never lift a digit, while all the time they have a swift comprehension of events, a warm grasp of human relationships, and an incisive grip on their duties in public life. He could be loyal, trustworthy and intelligent. On the other hand he could be just as he appeared: a lazy, carefree, overpromoted swine … [TTD]

  When he first arrives, the cohort are obsessed by trying to categorise their new commander: whether he is an ineffectual layabout who needs a diagram in triplicate before he can wipe his backside clean – or whether he’s so poisonous he’s actually corrupt. [TTD] Then at the brothel fight, it is Rubella who deals with the bent centurion from the Sixth Cohort: He was locked in a hold with Tibullinus, a hold of painful illegality … he broke a bone somewhere in the centurion with a horrendous crack, then put in a punch like a pile-hammer. He jerked his chin up derisively … [TTD]

  Lieutenant Byrnes was the man in charge of the 87th Detective Squad. He had a small compact body and a head like a rivet. His eyes were blue and tiny, but those eyes had seen a hell of a lot, and they didn’t miss very much that went on around the lieutenant. The lieutenant knew his precinct was a trouble spot and that was the way he liked it.

  MCBAIN

  As we learn more about him, I love portraying Rubella as the archetypal ‘boss’: paranoid, obsessed with his own status, and deviously manipulating. He liked to think of himself as a dangerous spider twitching the strands of a large and perfectly formed web. [THF] For Petronius he will always be an ambitious, unscrupulous, discipline-mad, tyrannical hard man who could never wipe his bum with a latrine sponge without consulting the rules to see if a ranker was supposed to do it for him. [OVTM]

  He always kept his inkpot full and his sand tray topped up.

  [THF]

  However, he is brutally good at his job: For him ‘interviews’ were never an intellectual exercise. Marcus Rubella was a master of pain management, the excruciating mixture of torture and delay. [STH] My favourite Rubella scene is at the Fourth Cohort’s drinks party: in order to show how conscientiously he threw himself into occasions of cohort festivity, Marcus Rubella (a staid man, conscious of his dignity) was wearing a silly hat, winged sandals and a very short gold tunic. I noticed with a shudder that he had not shaved his legs. [SA]

  Martinus

  Originally Petro’s deputy, Martinus shamelessly tries to usurp Petro’s position. He’s forty, unmarried, and has straight brown hair, cut neatly across the forehead, heavily shaded jowls and a dark mole on one cheek. [TTD]

  Capable, but pedantic and painfully slow, he has a scene in Time to Depart where he secretly watches a brothel with Falco. He turns out to be devoted to draughts. Likening the game to investigation, Martinus says, ‘You need mental agility, strength of will, powers of bluff, concentration …’ ‘And little glass balls,’ replies Falco balefully. However, Falco watches Martinus on surveillance in the Forum and realises the man misses nothing. Falco decides he must be ‘straight’, because he is too lazy to be bent.

  Eventually he applies for promotion in the Sixth Cohort, which suits everyone.

  Fusculus

  Right-hand man to Petronius, Fusculus is a round, happy fellow, about thirty-five years and a hundred and eighty pounds. Balding on top, the rest of his hair ran around his skull in horizontal ridges. It had remained dark and he had almost black eyes. Though rotund, he looked extremely fit. [TTD] From his first appearance he is the man who studies lovingly the Forum scams and scammers’ patois. This starts with him listing ‘scratchers’ who steal gilding from statues, tanners who emit noxious smells, street fights and escaped wolves, then it progresses to detailed examples of criminal slang (all invented by me; see the Afterword to Saturnalia for comment).

  Sergius

  Sergius enjoys his work. Sergius was the Fourth’s punishment officer – tall, perfectly built, permanently flexed for action, and stupendously handsome. Flicking his whip gently, he was sitting on the bench outside, killing ants. His aim was murderous. Muscles rippled aggressively through gaps in his brown tunic. A wide belt was buckled tightly on a flat stomach, emphasising his narrow waist and well-formed chest. Sergius looked after himself. He could look after trouble too. No neighbourhood troublemaker whom Sergius looked after bothered to repeat his crime. At least his long tanned face, dagger-straight nose and flashing teeth made an aesthetic memory for villains as they fainted under the caress of his whip. To be beaten up by Sergius was to partake in a high-class art form. [THF]

  Scythax

  Scythax was a brusque Oriental freedman who seemed to suspect malingering. He expected people to cry ouch as soon as he entered a room; he viewed ‘headaches’, ‘bad backs’ and ‘old knee trouble’ with little patience. He had heard it all before. To get sympathy from Scythax, you had to produce a bright red rash or a hernia, something visible or proddable … His hair lay in a perfectly straight line on his eyebrows as if he had trimmed it himself using a cupping vessel on his head as a straight edge. [TTD] Falco later comments: Since the vigiles acted as a fire brigade, his unwillingness to soothe burns did hamper him, but he had worked with the Fourth Cohort as long as anyone could remember and the vigiles dislike change. [AC]

  Although the Romans lacked forensic science as we know it and autopsies were illegal, Scythax often provides medical insights about how a victim has died. He does his best over the severed hands found in aqueducts, though has little to go on and clearly dislikes being asked. He was a hard man with the living. Apparently we had found his weakness with our sad sections of the dead. [THF] Before we actually see a post-mortem in Alexandria, Falco comes to believe that Scythax is performing autopsies illegally on bodies that are dumped for him. [SA]

  His brother, Alexander, also a doctor, is murdered in Time to Depart as a reprisal for helping Petronius prosecute Balbinus.

  Passus

  Passus joins the Fourth in Ode to a Banker; later Falco says he was head-hunted by Petronius. He was a short, shock-haired neat type with a belt he was proud of and stubby hands. He had a quiet manner and was no raw recruit. His air was competent but not pushy. He was carrying a set of waxed tablets, with a bone stylus bending his right ear forward, for taking notes. [STH]

  Like many an off-duty policeman, he reads novels.

  Palace Bureaucrats and Spies

  Of course it is not due to my first career that I see bu
reaucracy as a byzantine tangle, peopled by slyly grappling mandarins!

  Falco takes a sceptical position: It was perfectly possible to substantiate a million-sesterces fraud, yet still to encounter some slimy high-powered bureaucrat who would decide there were policy reasons, or ancient precedents, or issues affecting his own pension, that made him advise his great imperial master to shelve the exposé. [TFL] Finding himself a patball in the power struggle between Laeta and Anacrites, he groans: This was the kind of situation where the general good could be overturned in the pursuit of some disastrous administrators’ feud. And it was a situation where Rome could, yet again, end up in the grip of sinister forces who ruled by torture and infamy. [DLC]

  There is the tricky question of bribes, the Roman equivalent of supposedly ‘normal’ sweeteners, whether it is big banks paying massive bonuses ‘to keep our executives’ or arms manufacturers handing illegal sums to sheikhs ‘because it is expected in their culture’. Bribery must be how Narcissus became a multimillionaire under Claudius, and it was said that Caenis amassed a fortune. I suggest Laeta may be deliberately creating an olive oil cartel, aiming to be bribed himself and to serve his master with profits. It was a real charge against Vespasian that he cornered the market in special commodities, which he then sold off at high prices.

  Intelligence is gathered and used by the most benign rulers. Vespasian maintained a pretence that he hated spies and informers – yet the imperial intelligence service still flourished. Titus Caesar had made himself commander of the Praetorian Guard, who ran the spies network (on the rationale that they were using it to protect the safety of the Emperor). From what I heard, rather than disbanding it, Titus was planning to restructure and expand the team. [BBH]

  It is believed Titus did so, but naturally we don’t have the top-secret records.

  ‘Oh let’s pretend Vespasian does not know what his Chief Spy fixes – or his filthy methods. No. Be realistic. Vespasian does not want to know.’

  ‘Inform Vespasian if you want to, Marcus – but he won’t thank you!’ [BBH]

  Tiberius Claudius Laeta

  Laeta, to whom I have given the position of chief secretary, creeps up on us in Time to Depart, though his full importance emerges in the following book, where his rivalry with Anacrites starts to show; it is Saturnalia before Falco tells us he had some undefined oversight of both home security and foreign intelligence. As he lurks in the old Palace of Tiberius on the Palatine where he has an enormous suite, working obsessively, Falco suspects that his position at the top can be lonely. Laeta likes it that way.

  He could be any age between forty and sixty. He had all his hair (dry-looking brown stuff cut in a short, straight, unexciting style). His body was trim; his eyes were sharp; his manner was alert. He wore an ample tunic with narrow gold braid, beneath a plain white toga to meet Palace formality. On one hand he wore the wide gold ring of the middle class; it showed some emperor had thought well of him. [DLC]

  As he looms into Falco’s orbit, Laeta is hoping to dominate the bureaucracy and even manipulate the Emperor. Falco considers his background: an imperial ex-slave, born and trained among the cultivated, educated, unscrupulous orientals who had long administered Rome’s empire. Nowadays they formed a discreet cadre, well behind the scenes, but I did not suppose their methods had changed from when they were more visible … [DLC]

  ‘Laeta’s a cheating, dabbling, double-dealing, swindling, jumped-up clerk.’ – (Perella, in DLC)

  His aims are long-term and self-serving. Above all, he revels in his feud with Anacrites: Cracking heads wasn’t necessary. Laeta’s not vicious. He’s not crude. He’s quite clever enough to outwit Anacrites, and depraved enough as a bureaucrat to enjoy finessing him. Laeta wants a classic power struggle. He wants Anacrites alive so he knows he has lost the game. Where’s the art otherwise? [DLC]

  His relationship with Falco is cautious on both sides: He was a silken-tongued twister I had never trusted. He saw me as a grimy thug who possessed intelligence and other handy talents. We dealt with one another, when we had to, politely. [SA] Laeta sees, and is too astute to ignore, that Vespasian and Titus think well of Falco; Falco suspects Laeta has found out that there is a secret reason for his own feud with Domitian.

  Laeta’s position in Nemesis is as ambiguous as we would expect.

  Outside the individual offices where they plotted against one another, they put on an urbane act as best friends. But if either ever followed the other down a dark alley, one would be found dead in a gutter the next day. Fortunately, perhaps, palaces are well lit. [OVTM] (Red herring – or prophecy?)

  Claudius Laeta would have buried a coded note in his columbarium, reminding himself to use my dangerous knowledge against me one day … Well, I had information on him too. He schemed too much to stay in the clear. I wasn’t worried. [SA]

  Tiberius Claudius Anacrites

  Initially, I had no plans for the Chief Spy. In Shadows in Bronze, he was just background, useful for making Falco feel out of place among the ‘official’ palace team. He called himself a secretary … He had a tense compact frame and a bland face, with unusual grey eyes and eyebrows so faint they were nearly invisible. [SB] Even here he is jumpy – tight-lipped, an insecure type – and as he checks documents, Falco notices presciently that he uses the fine detail of an auditor who expects another auditor to be round later checking him.

  By Venus in Copper, I had seen Anacrites’ potential. Every hero needs a rival to hamper and annoy him.

  There are explanations for his behaviour: His was a classic case of career blight. He must have studied his craft under Nero, those crazy years of suspicion and terror when prospects for intelligence agents had never looked more golden. Then as he reached his prime, he found himself stuck with the new Emperor Vespasian, a man so irredeemably provincial that he did not really believe in palace spies. So instead of enjoying himself at the centre of some crawling network of undercover termites, Anacrites now had to devote every day to proving that his place on the payroll was justified … [VC] Having been a civil servant in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, I wrote those words with insight and passion!

  The intelligence service was part of the Praetorian Guard; Anacrites does call on the Guards’ thumping brutality on occasions, and after he is badly wounded, he receives protection in their camp. His subordinates are a motley crew. Apart from Perella, he uses the derisible staff ‘Footsie and the dwarf’; Valentinus is of higher calibre, though unfortunately killed. Then Anacrites takes on the ‘Melitan brothers’, who will develop far beyond their original jokey sighting.

  Anacrites has built up a nest egg (Laeta complains about his seaside house at Baiae). Falco reckons he takes bribes; once he gains higher status after the Census, these bribes will be larger. He thinks himself a financial wizard (though comes a cropper when advising Ma); originally he lives at the Palace, yet he ends up in a desirable old republican house by the Palatine. This kind of discreet, expensive, securely protected private house can be seen in central Rome; I have speculated often on who can possibly live there. Probably faded aristocracy, not intelligence agents – though who is to know?

  His best agent – a man I reckoned I would have liked. I could walk away from the palace intrigue, but the dead Valentinus would continue to haunt me. [DLC]

  As a well-placed slave at the Palace whose work involved discovering facts that people wanted to hide, he must often have come across unsought bankers’ orders propped against his favourite stylus box. They might be anonymous – but he would know exactly who was asking him not to lean on them. [OB]

  Physically Anacrites is tight-lipped and tense, pale eyed, obsessively neat. [PG] He is a dandy, well manicured, consciously choosing tunics with a racy cut in odd shades that make him unobtrusive, but adorned with dashing braids. He wears his hair slicked back in a style Falco hates. Those eyes, it slowly emerges, are two-tone. This was decided at a conference, where a very unhelpful waiter served breakfast to Ginny, Michelle and me. His sinister
eyes were different colours – and we thought he came from Croatia …

  His damaging head wound has a profound effect: He remembered nothing about the evening he was battered. This troubled him. For a man whose career involved knowing more about other people than they chose to tell even their mistresses and doctors, losing part of his memory was a terrible shock. He tried not to show it, but I knew he must lie awake at night, sweating over the missing days of his life. [OVTM] It affects his ability to function: since his head wound had made him erratic, he could take a decision to spend large sums of our so far unearned money without turning a hair. Of course tomorrow the same erratic behaviour would make him change his mind … [TFL]

  Anacrites is not adept socially. It is never clear whether he has a love life. In Saturnalia, Falco and Petro discover he has a secret cabinet of pornographic Roman material. In Nemesis we have his formal dinner party; he is definitely an awkward bachelor and has to hire party-planners.

  A good spy, lacking character himself, he could blend into the background like fine mist blurring the contours of a Celtic glen. [TFL]

  He can be professional. In Nemesis, Laeta says he was always seen as intelligent, and even physical; indeed, as a gladiator in Two for the Lions, he survives, though lacks stamina and has to resort to a sly move called ‘Trainer’s Cheat’. He is a good public speaker (which can make him very dangerous) with a light, cultured voice. When they work on the Census, Falco observes him at close quarters: He conducted an unforced style of interview, making copious notes in a large loose hand. His manner was calm, as if merely familiarising himself with the local scenery. It was not what I had expected. Still, to become Chief Spy he must have been successful once. [TFL]