Vita Brevis

by Ruth Downie

  Squeaky nodded to his companion, who moved to guard the exit.

  “Where is Esico?” Tilla demanded again, cradling Mara’s head in her hand.

  “Shut up, bitch!” squeaked the boy’s voice from the man’s body. “We’re talking to the doctor.”

  “You shut up!” snapped Tilla. “This is my home.”

  Ruso tried to mouth “No!” at her. Doubtless she thought she could say what she liked from behind the protection of the baby. But the undertakers were professional inflictors of pain. He had no idea where they would stop. As calmly as he could manage, he said, “How can I help?”

  Squeaky said, “We’re here for a private consultation.”

  “Where’s my slave?”

  Squeaky shook his head. “So many questions.”

  “Too many,” said the companion.

  Glancing around, Ruso saw that several bandages had unravelled across the floor like long white ribbons. One was draped over what seemed to be the shattered remains of the broom handle, and nearby he saw a glint of broken glass. He called, “Esico!”

  There was no reply.

  A third, smaller man came wandering in from the kitchen. “Not enough to keep a flea alive back there,” he observed, putting what looked like a quarter of hard-boiled egg into his mouth.

  “Let me see the slave,” Ruso urged. Instead of replying, the big men seized him under his arms and lifted him up like a child to sit on the table between them

  “Don’t hurt him!” cried Tilla. The third man strolled toward her. She gave a little cry: Ruso craned around his captor’s shoulder to see the knife pointing at the curl of Mara’s ear. To his horror Mara wriggled ’round and stretched her chubby fingers toward the blade. Tilla grabbed her hand and the man withdrew the knife, but not far.

  “Be a good girl and keep quiet,” the man said. “Otherwise my friends might get annoyed. And when my friends get annoyed, accidents happen.”

  Deliberately lowering his voice in an effort to keep it steady, Ruso said, “We can’t do business until he puts that knife away.”

  Squeaky nodded to his man, who made a show of offering Mara the blade once more before he stepped back.

  Ruso said, “Tell me what it is you want.”

  Squeaky put his face close to Ruso’s ear. His breath smelled of fish sauce. “We hear,” he said, “that you’re poking your nose into other people’s business.”

  “What business?”

  Squeaky sighed. “There you go again, see?”

  “Too many questions,” agreed his companion.

  “You want to stick to doctoring.” Squeaky reached up and took a bottle down from the shelf. “What’s this?”

  “Medicine,” Ruso told him, unable to see in the poor light and hoping Squeaky would not turn his attention to something really expensive and delicate like the weighing scales.

  The giant extended one arm, twisted the wrist, and let the contents of the bottle dribble onto the floor. He sniffed. “Mm. What does that smell like to you?”

  It was what was left of the rose oil. “It smells like a waste of money. What is it you want?”

  “I want you to stop making complaints to people about our service. Complaints and accusations that undermine the boss’s good name just when the city’s about to renew his contract.”

  “Which people? What service? I’ve never said anything about you to anybody.”

  “Doctor Kleitos never complained,” Squeaky observed. “We liked Doctor Kleitos. We want him back.”

  “You won’t find him here.”

  “We know,” Squeaky agreed. “We’ve looked.”

  Upstairs, the singing fell silent.

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  Squeaky turned to his friend. “You know,” he observed, “old Birna was right. The woman’s the clever one.”

  “Kleitos cleared the place out days ago,” Ruso insisted. “Ask anybody. We’ve had to borrow furniture.”

  “And he went to—?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  Squeaky let out a long, odorous breath. The bottle glinted in his fleshy grasp. Holding it between finger and thumb, he raised it in the air.

  Above them, the followers of Christos were clumping across the floorboards on their way home.

  “I told you yesterday,” Ruso said. “I don’t know where he is. I want to talk to him myself. I’ve been asking all over the place.”

  The large hand opened. The bottle fell, hit the tiles, and shattered. Mara began to cry. Squeaky said, “Whoops. That was clumsy.”

  Tilla tried to shush Mara as a cloying smell of roses drifted up from the floor. Ruso said, “I can’t tell you what I don’t—”

  He stopped, startled by a loud bang from above. Dust pattered down from the rafters as Phyllis called, “Are you all right down there, neighbors?”

  Squeaky glanced at his companion. “We’re just having a chat,” he told Ruso. “Tell her.”

  “Sorry!” Ruso shouted back.

  “We heard something break.”

  The giant raised his eyebrows and looked at Ruso, who called, “I dropped a bottle!”

  For a moment he thought the followers of Christos might have realized something was going on. Then came, “Is Tilla all right?”

  They had seen the tension between him and his wife in the prayer meeting. Now they thought they were hearing a fight.

  Tilla called, “It is all right, Phyllis!” and Phyllis wished her good night.

  “Nice lady,” observed Squeaky. “Always good to have friendly neighbors. Perhaps she can tell us where Kleitos is.”

  “None of them knows. I’ve asked.”

  Squeaky was towering over him once more. He could feel the warm flesh of the other man pressing against him from the other side.

  “See, Doctor, here’s my problem. When you say you don’t know where he is, you sound like you mean it. But when our friend Birna was here the other day you were singing a different song.”

  “The man with the limp?”

  “It’s coming back to you now, is it? You chased him off.”

  “We thought he was a debt collector.”

  “So he was,” Squeaky agreed. “For a delivery that wasn’t paid for.”

  “It’s not my debt.”

  “You offered to send Kleitos a message for him.”

  “That was before I knew Kleitos had vanished.”

  “Your woman, see, she was a bit more clever. She said straightaway that he’d cleared off.”

  “I swear I don’t know!” Ruso insisted, looking up at them. “Why would I hide him? Horatius Balbus wanted me to find him, but I couldn’t.”

  “Horatius Balbus.” The large head nodded. “Ah, yes. Shame about him.”

  It certainly was a shame. If ever Ruso had needed looking after, this was the hour. But Balbus’s people were all gathered around his dead body, and Firmicus, who might have done something to help if he were summoned, was busy trying to pull together the devastated household.

  “Tragic,” said his companion.

  Ruso sighed. “Just go. Please. I haven’t said anything about you to anybody. You’re upsetting my family and my neighbors and you’re wasting your time.”

  “We’d like to,” said Squeaky. “Believe me, my friend. We got better things to do. We’ve got two floggings to get through before bedtime.”

  “If I find Kleitos, I’ll tell him you were asking.”

  The head nodded again slowly, as if he were assimilating this offer. “Meantime,” he said, “somebody needs to pay what he owes us.”

  So in a way the story they’d wanted everyone to believe had been right all along: This was about money. The real debt collectors had arrived. Except the body hadn’t been put there as a threat: the body itself was the item that had to be paid for.

  “Someone needs to pay what Kleitos owes, and we think you’re the man.”

  Ruso was silent, desperately casting about for a reason not to be the man.

  “You don�
�t want it put out that you’ve been … experimenting, do you?”

  “Anything that’s happened here in the past has nothing to do with me,” Ruso insisted.

  “I think you might have a hard time making that clear when word gets around.”

  “If you put out lies about me,” he tried, “people are going to ask how you know.”

  Squeaky sighed. “There you go again with the threats, Doctor. See, when Kleitos pushed off and everything was quiet, we were prepared to be patient. We didn’t mind you coming to ask about the dead man. Very commendable. But now we hear you’ve been threatening to talk about us to your fancy friends in high places, and we think it’s only fair to have some compensation.”

  “I haven’t been threatening anything!” Ruso insisted. “I haven’t—”

  “How much?” Tilla asked

  Squeaky’s face cracked into a smile. “You see? That, my friend, is the right question. You should listen to your wife. Six hundred sesterces.”

  Ruso opened his mouth to say how ridiculous that was, caught sight of his wife and baby, and closed it again.

  Something was happening in the back room. There was someone—several people—moving about out there. There were voices. The undertakers stepped away from Ruso just as the kitchen door opened, and Esico said, “Visitors, master.”

  “We heard you had a bit of an accident, Doctor,” said the carpenter, stepping into the surgery. “Some of us thought you might want a bit of help clearing up.”

  44

  It was a very polite eviction.

  As soon as the big man with the child’s voice saw that more and more people were crowding in from the kitchen, he began to edge away. “We were just leaving,” he said, as if they had dropped in for a drink and a chat. Then he said, “Mind the glass, friends. The doctor’s broken a medicine bottle.”

  Tilla wanted to spit in his face, but instead she pointed at the floor, still clutching Mara’s soft hand in her own. “There,” she said. “And in front of the bench.”

  The man’s arm was around her husband’s shoulder. “We must do this again, Doctor. Don’t leave it too long, eh? We’ll drop by in, say, three days?”

  He said, “I’ll look forward to it,” and she was proud of him, because she knew he was afraid but he did not sound it.

  The big man’s horrible friends were already outside when the man himself turned to add, “By the way, Doctor, if you’re short of cash I hear there’s a vacancy with the second night watch.” He bent to avoid banging his head, and was gone into the night. The door swung open again behind him, and she saw for the first time that the lock had been smashed off.

  Now everyone was crowding forward and telling one another to mind the glass and fetch a broom and “What about some sawdust?” and “Are you all right, sister? Are you quite sure you’re all right? Who were those men?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, leaning back against the bench and holding Mara very close so she could feel warm baby breath on her neck. “Thank you, all. Thank you so much.” Then Mara was wriggling to get free, and she could hear her husband calling, “Esico, sit down and let me take a look at that cut on your head,” and “Narina, pass me that lamp” and then she heard Sabella at the door, saying her husband wanted to know what was going on here. That made Tilla laugh, because it meant Sabella herself wanted to know, and for once she was the last to find out.

  “Tell her to come in,” she urged Phyllis, but Sabella would not, insisting that there was no room and were all this lot the people who had been making that racket upstairs?

  “They came to save us,” Tilla called.

  “Don’t listen to them. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

  “No, no, from—” Tilla stopped, not knowing how to describe the men. “There were three of them. They broke in. They hurt our slave.” She swallowed. “They held a knife at Mara.” She bent and kissed the soft little fingers she was still holding. Mara pulled them free and gave her a cheerful smack on the head.

  Sabella’s husband appeared at his wife’s shoulder. “Now what’s going on?”

  “Three burglars,” Sabella told him. “Beat up the slave, threatened the baby.”

  “Shall I call the watch?” he asked her.

  “They are gone,” Tilla told him. “But the door is broken.”

  Behind her was the tinkle of broken glass being swept up and the excited chatter of people whose hearts were still roused for action even though the danger was gone. Sabella’s husband was muttering about not being able to get the lock fixed at this time of night, and tomorrow being the boss’s funeral, and—

  “Don’t worry!” she heard Phyllis say. “Timo can patch the door up in the morning.”

  Tilla closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall. Whatever her husband might think of the followers of Christos, and no matter how much she herself might want to gag Sister Dorcas, the man with the child’s voice had been right about one thing. It was good to have friendly neighbors.

  45

  Ruso rolled over, punched a lump in the mattress, and wondered how a reasonable man such as himself could have let things come to this. Now even sleep was beyond his control. The medicinal wine he had prescribed for himself on top of an empty stomach—that bastard had stolen his supper, and the bar was closed—had certainly made him drowsy, but it did nothing to answer the principal question that was keeping him awake: How could he get them all out of this mess?

  Tilla’s only suggestion after all the fuss had died down and everyone had gone away was, “We should go home to my people.”

  To which, rather than say, It’s not that simple, he had answered, “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  Then she put her hand on his arm and said with an air of quiet concern that warmed him inside, “Are you all right?”

  He assured her that he was, but he was glad when she didn’t believe him. Being worried about was the best thing that had happened to him all day.

  “Are you sure? You look pale.”

  “So do you,” he said, putting his own hand over hers in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. “It’s been a difficult day.” The last thing his wife needed to hear was that he was exhausted and angry and confused. That he felt humiliated. That he had fallen out with his patron, he didn’t know what to do, and he was afraid of what might happen next. That he too wanted to run back to Britannia where they both had friends, and where her family really weren’t that bad.

  He did not want to tell her any of these things. What he wanted was to take her to bed and for a few brief moments, to forget he had ever been unwise enough to bring them here. He said, “I think we should all try and get some rest.”

  “Yes,” she said, gently lifting his hand away. “I am thinking, if you are sure you are all right, perhaps Narina and Mara should come in the bedroom with me and you can be in the kitchen to guard the door.”

  “What?”

  She cuddled Mara closer. “I keep thinking about that man with the knife.”

  “She’s safe now,” he assured her, bending to kiss the top of Mara’s head and not sure whether he was doing that because he was fond of the baby, or because it seemed the easiest way to retain the attention of his wife.

  So that was how they had ended up as they were now: Esico with a bandaged head, lying on a straw mattress in the surgery, secure behind a street door that had the operating table pushed up against it until Christos’s carpenter could fix it tomorrow. Ruso had the mattress on the kitchen floor, guarding the back door even though it was already securely barred and he was certain that the undertakers would not be back tonight.

  He had spent all that money on a baby-minder and instead of the baby being moved out of the bedroom, the baby-minder had been moved in.

  A dog was barking in a nearby apartment. There was that cry again from somewhere around the courtyard: the third or fourth time since he had become aware of it. A woman giving birth. He hoped Tilla wasn’t awake to be counting the gaps and wonde
ring if she should go and see if she was needed. She would be mustering the courage to venture out in the dark, and doubtless wishing she were on a damp and windy island a long way from Rome.

  She was right, of course. They should never have come here. But leaving was not as simple as she seemed to think. Tomorrow, he would have to explain to her why a doctor could not flee the city while the death of his chief patient was under investigation. Especially when that investigation was being carried out by Metellus, who had contacts all over Britannia and access to the official postal service.

  So, if leaving was not an option, he was back to the question: How to get out of this mess?

  He must think logically. First, define the problem.

  Where to start?

  One: the body in the barrel. His own attempts to distance himself from whatever Kleitos and Simmias had been up to had been a spectacular misfire. It had never crossed his mind that Simmias—it must be Simmias—would go to the undertakers after what had been meant as a friendly warning. He could only assume that there was some sort of regular order for bodies that had to be canceled, and Simmias was so frightened of Squeaky that when he went to cancel it, he had trotted out some excuse about Ruso threatening to call in the authorities. So now Ruso had a bunch of professional torturers demanding six hundred sesterces in three days’ time, and even with the money he was holding back to pay Xanthe for the theriac that Balbus no longer needed, he could not muster more than a hundred and thirty-five to pay them.

  No wonder Kleitos had run away from these people. Be careful who you trust indeed! Ruso was feeling less and less kindly inclined to the little Greek and his masterly grasp of understatement with each hour that passed.

  Two: Accius, his only friend in moderately high places, had been driven away by another of Ruso’s attempts to offer helpful advice. He should have learned the first time.

  Three: the death of Balbus. Even thinking about that medicine made him feel nauseous. Nauseous and ashamed of how desperate he was to cover up his carelessness. Balbus’s tenants had been right to be suspicious: Ruso had spent much of the afternoon trying to find a way to blame them for their landlord’s death.