The Ides of April: Falco: The New Generation (Falco: The Next Generation)

by Davis, Lindsey

  Long practised, I parried with humour. ‘Oh, the one with the yacht is out of town, detained for customs infringements last I heard, and they reckon he won’t get away with it this time. The actor let me down as well; he was getting all frothed up with a group of rich old widows. He’s given himself a hernia, lifting the contents of their jewel caskets …’

  ‘You read a lot of satirical poetry?’

  ‘No, I write my own lines.’

  I had no lover at the moment. I had had no one for a long time, but a girl should never sound too available. Not on a first tryst. I had my self-respect.

  Andronicus abandoned the grilling. Opposite me, he settled in a relaxed pose, one arm along the couch’s backrest. I liked the way he had made himself at home. We assessed one another, both pretending not to. I still found him delightful.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, reading my mind. ‘Of course you ask the questions here!’

  I kept it light. ‘Indeed I do. I would not want to waste my carefully learned interrogation skills … What brings you?’

  ‘She goes straight to the point!’ He leaned forward earnestly. ‘There has been a development. I wanted to be first to tell you.’

  ‘You care! I’m thrilled … So what’s the news?’

  ‘Salvidia is dead. Someone from her family − a nephew − came to inform Faustus yesterday evening.’

  I chose not to enlighten my new friend that I knew of the woman’s death already, nor did I correct him on the real status of Metellus Nepos. I liked Andronicus, but did not know him well enough − yet − to break my rules. Say nothing that you need not say.

  ‘That’s shocking, Andronicus. She was hardly old. What happened?’

  ‘Just reached the end of her thread, apparently. Must be annoying for you to lose a client. That’s why I thought you would like to know – no point wasting any more of your time on her.’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ I thought he could not have been present when Nepos and Manlius Faustus were talking. The Nepos I met would undoubtedly have mentioned to a magistrate his nagging doubts about how his stepmother died. I wondered how Faustus had reacted. Tried to put him off?

  ‘This “nephew” came to the aedile’s house? How did you come to be there?’

  ‘I live there.’ He had been a slave there, presumably. You can deduce a lot from what family freedmen prefer not to tell you. Some are brazen about their origins; well, slavery is not their fault. Yet I could tell Andronicus was quite sensitive. He was never going to say the words ‘slave’ or ‘freedman’ in connection with himself. ‘It is his uncle’s house; on and off, Faustus has lived with his uncle since boyhood.’

  ‘He is not married?’

  ‘Divorced.’

  ‘A parting for mutual convenience, or was he caught out with a kitchen maid?’

  ‘There were rumours … He left his wife rather quickly, and had to surrender the dowry. I’ve never been able to squeeze out of him anything to explain what happened; there’s a conspiracy of silence in the family.’

  ‘Read his diary?’

  ‘Bastard doesn’t write one.’

  ‘The man’s a disgrace – tell him he has responsibilities to clarify matters for his caring household!’

  ‘Well, if he strayed from the marriage, he behaves like a sanctimonious prig now,’ Andronicus grumbled.

  ‘No mistress then?’

  ‘Never even fingers the girl who makes his bed.’

  ‘So she thinks he has lovely manners – but she’d rather he tried it, so she would get a big Saturnalia present! And the uncle?’

  ‘Oh a different mullet entirely. Tullius is a bit too randy in his habits to be tied down to marriage. You know the type − jumps any slave of any age, male or female; has even been known to stand up after the appetisers, leave the room with a serving boy, hump the lad in the anteroom and saunter back for the main course as if nothing has happened, taking up the conversation where he left off … Flavia Albia, you do rack the questions up. I am impressed!’

  ‘Just habit. I apologise.’

  ‘Oh I don’t care if you want the scandal on Faustus …’

  ‘You haven’t told me any scandal about Faustus,’ I corrected him.

  ‘No, he’s a cold fish.’

  ‘If I ever have to meet him, I would like to be primed with some salacious background!’ I had now confirmed that Andronicus really disliked Manlius Faustus. His manner with me generally was so open that I could tell he was being reticent about his poor relationship with the aedile. Of course, that aroused my interest, though I let it pass, temporarily. Andronicus thought me direct, but I could be very patient. ‘So, Andronicus – last night?’

  ‘Faustus had this visitor – people sometimes bother him on business after dinner.’

  ‘He is good about it? Doesn’t mind being cornered at home, when he’s relaxing?’

  ‘I’ve never known him relax! He takes a pious attitude to “duty”. He loves to suffer. And I expect he was curious.’

  ‘Whereas you didn’t care at all what Salvidia’s nephew wanted?’ I teased.

  Andronicus raised his eyebrows so his forehead wrinkled, looking fake-innocent. ‘When Faustus gets up and abandons a nutmeg custard for a mystery caller, I do tend to follow and put my ear to the door.’

  ‘You need to know what he’s up to?’

  ‘I like to keep a kindly eye on him.’

  In some homes, freedmen take that much interest for dubious reasons, hopeful of causing friction between family members, planning blackmail even. Luckily the good-natured way Andronicus joked about it would have reassured even Faustus.

  He suddenly became more serious. ‘I did have an interest, Albia. The fact is, I myself had had a grisly run-in with that awful woman. I can hardly bear to remember it. Salvidia came to see Faustus, but he was out of the office. I had to deal with her. She was furious about the wall poster, the one asking for witnesses to the child’s death. She laid into me something terrible. Left me shaking.’

  ‘Oh poor you!’

  ‘As if it was my fault!’ Andronicus still seemed upset. Having met Salvidia, I could imagine why. ‘She was a pest. Her arrogance was simply unacceptable. I thought she was going to attack me physically.’

  ‘I expect she was afraid there would be consequences after the accident.’ Manlius Faustus could come down heavily on her building firm, to punish them for negligence. Overloading carts and having drunken drivers were areas of interest for aediles. ‘Had you told Faustus about how she confronted you? Was he sympathetic?’

  ‘According to him, my job is always to be helpful to members of the public.’

  ‘He doesn’t know much about the public.’

  ‘Albia, how true! When her nephew arrived to speak to him, Faustus ordered me to sit tight. I wasn’t having that. He went to speak to the visitor; I sneakily followed him.’

  ‘You thought there was some trouble arising from your altercation? Why would a relative feel he ought to inform a magistrate Salvidia had died, Andronicus?’

  ‘No idea.’ The archivist shrugged.

  ‘Maybe,’ I suggested disingenuously, ‘he is prepared to pay the compensation that has been demanded for little Lucius Bassus. So he thinks the poster calling for witnesses should be taken down now? Hush things up? If he means to carry on the construction business, being named as an organisation that has killed a child besmirches its reputation. And if he wants to sell up, he has even more need to hide what happened so he can ask a good price for a going concern.’

  ‘I can think of another motive for him paying the compensation. He wants to prevent the company being fined for negligence,’ retorted Andronicus.

  ‘That’s possible.’ Since Nepos was my client, I felt obliged to keep my tone neutral.

  ‘Oh you have such a trusting nature!’ smiled my companion, unaware that I had simply preferred not to sound too clever. He composed compliments like many men: clichés I found embarrassing. ‘So where does that leave you regarding Salvidia? You
can stop working on her case now?’

  What a generous friend. He seemed so keen to spare me unnecessary labour. ‘If the compensation is paid, I am redundant. Unluckily for me, Salvidia had tied me to a no win, no fee contract.’

  Andronicus cocked his head on one side. ‘Upset?’

  ‘No. A child was killed. I never liked the case.’

  The archivist rose to his feet, looking pleased with my answer. ‘So! Since that vile termagant is out of the way and your work is over,’ he offered, ‘maybe you might come out and have lunch with me?’

  I had work. But I knew how to pace it. Suddenly I became the kind of woman who goes out to lunch with a man she only met yesterday.

  I let him choose where. Juno be praised he did not go for my aunt’s place, though we did walk past it.

  He picked an eatery with an interior courtyard, secluded from street noise and well run, so it was pleasantly busy with a clientele of commercial customers. We had a light lunch, fried fish and salad, water with it. We talked and laughed. He made no moves. I valiantly refrained from making moves on him, though I was tempted. A woman has needs. Mine had not been met for a long time. Too long. I really liked him and was ready for adventure.

  Afterwards he went back to the aediles’ office. He had a nice line in looking regretful that he had to leave.

  Left alone, I walked to an ancient piazza called the Armilustrium, where I sat for a long time, thinking about life.

  8

  The Armilustrium was the shared name of a festival and a sanctuary. The place was an old walled enclosure, sacred to Mars, the Roman god of war. From time immemorial, it had been where weapons were ritually purified in March and October, the start and end of the fighting season. After each ceremony there would be a big parade down to the Circus Maximus: all noise and triumphalism. Romans love to make a racket.

  Since the enclosure served as a parade ground during the spring and autumn ceremonies, it was kept mainly bare, although there was a shrine at one end, a permanent stone altar in the centre and a couple of benches for the benefit of old ladies. In one corner was alleged to be the ancient tomb of Titus Tatius, a Sabine king who had ruled jointly with Romulus for a period, thousands of years ago. As a foreigner, he had been buried here on what was then the outsiders’ hill; an oak tree shaded his resting place. It must have been renewed. Even oaks don’t last that long.

  In between festivals, the Armilustrium often lay deserted. I liked to come into the enclosure and sit out here. It was better than a public park where you were constantly irritated by lovers and rampaging schoolboys, beggars and mad people pretending to be lost as an excuse to engage strangers in conversation. There was hardly any litter here because the populace never wandered about with food in their hands, and nor was there that worrying smell of old dog dirt that tends to waft over even the most formal gardens if people are allowed to exercise their pets.

  Don’t misunderstand me. I like dogs. At one terrible time of my young life, I had lived on the streets of the town I was born in, scavenging with the feral dogs; they were kinder to me than most humans. I became as wild as they were. Maybe at heart I still was. If ever I paused quietly to consider my origins and character, the fear of having an unRoman nature unsettled me. It positively scared other people. Men, particularly. Not that I minded upsetting men.

  The ideal Roman matron was supposed to be docile, but I had noticed how few of them were. It seemed to me, Roman men had devised their prescriptive regime for their women precisely because the women really held domestic power. We let them think they were in charge. But in many homes they were wrong.

  I liked the Armilustrium because even without dog dirt it did harbour a smell, a musky odour near any undergrowth, a rank scent of wildlife that deterred many people: foxes frequented the area. When sitting still and silent I had often seen them. To me, since I had never kept ducks or chickens, foxes were a wilder, more intriguing kind of dog.

  The Aventine foxes were currently causing me anxiety. It was April. In the middle of the month would come one of the numerous festivals that cluttered the Roman calendar, this one dedicated to Ceres, the Cerialia. Like the Armilustrium, it always had several days of public events down in the Circus, but with one extra feature that I found loathsome. On the first night, live foxes would be driven down the hill, with lit torches tied to their tails. Whooping celebrants would herd them into the Circus, where they died in agony.

  Some years I went away. My family owned a villa on the coast.

  This year there was a big auction in which Father was involved, so the others were not going to the sea until later, and they wanted me to stay in Rome too. Ever since I was widowed, it had been understood I would be with them at this time. Our family had almost as many ritual days as the city had festivals, and the Ides of April was a compulsory engagement for me. In an unstated way, they had made it conditional on their allowing me to be independent the rest of the time. The thirteenth day of April, during the Cerialia, was my birthday. On the Ides, I had to be with them.

  Oh let’s get this out of the way.

  Nobody really knows when I was born, nor who my parents were. No one will ever know. Being an informer now, in a family of investigators, made no difference. I could never find out. Even I had accepted years ago that a search would be a waste of time. I would never go back to Britain. There was nothing for me there. Not even the truth.

  I was discovered as a crying baby in the streets of Londinium, that ramshackle shanty town at the mist-covered end of the world. I had been abandoned, or perhaps hidden for safety, when the Boudiccan tribes attacked and burned the Roman settlement. There were few important officials in Britannia in Nero’s day; it was a new, very remote, province. I was unlikely to be an official’s baby or my loss would have been noted. There were soldiers, but soldiers were not supposed to have families and in a rebellious frontier province that rule tended to be enforced. The most likely possibility is that I was a trader’s child, which meant I could be of any nationality, or half and half, with my mother possibly British though just as likely not.

  Orphaned babies plucked from horror tend to be hailed as miracles. They give hope at a time of chaos and grief. People fostered me. My childhood was spent among shopkeepers. These slipshod, uneducated people, emigrants from mainland Europe, were decent to me, until caring for an extra infant and feeding an extra mouth became burdensome. I began to sense they had ideas of selling me into one kind of slavery or another, so I ran away. I was a skinny, bitter, unwanted street-child who slept in chilly colonnades, handed as many blows as curses.

  Finally, more compassionate people saw me there and saved me. Didius Falco and Helena Justina, my new, cultured, adventurous, warm-hearted and eccentric parents, certainly did not object to a challenge; by then I was undomesticated, vermin-ridden and although we never talked about it afterwards, I had been targeted by a brothel-owner and raped. I was aggressive and angry, too – moods I never really lost. But I also yearned for survival. I recognised a chance. Never stupid, I took it.

  I came to Rome. A diploma of Roman citizenship had been arranged for me. I agreed to be formally adopted (my rescuers had principles; they gave me the choice). Birthdays are important in Roman families and I was encouraged to choose a date we could call my own. Since the Boudiccan Rebellion had happened in the autumn, and by then I had survived without a mother, spring seemed a likely time for me to have been born. Father’s birthday was in March; I selected a date three weeks after his, time for us to recover from one family party and arrange the next. I chose the Ides of April before ever I knew anything about the foxes.

  They came in from the country, following the great highways, sneaking at dusk up through the roadside ditches along the Via Latina, the Via Appia and the Via Ostiensis. They came to raid rubbish piles and detritus in gutters. They knew the places in the city where poultry was kept in cages, ready for butchers’ shops or market stalls: ducks, hens, pheasants, geese, even occasional exotics like peacocks or fl
amingos. They ate mice. Occasionally they snatched puppies or kittens, or tame doves; certainly they carried off the corpses of dead pets, and also rats and pigeons. Perhaps sometimes they would scoop a fancy lamprey from a garden pond. They licked fish skins and skeletons; picked through rabbit bones; ran off, weighed down lopsidedly with meat carcasses in their mouths; skulked around butchers’ stalls, licking the blood on the streets; snatched the remains of religious offerings from outdoor altars.

  After a night’s foraging, most probably scampered back to their dens on the open Campagna, the agricultural plain surrounding Rome. Others stayed. I knew that because I recognised at least one animal at the Armilustrium. I had seen him a few times; I knew the size and shape of him, and his regular habits. The time of evening when he visited the walled enclosure. How he paused, ears up, to check for safety. How he slipped along in shadow, almost impossible to see unless your eyes were keenly used to the darkness and spotted slight movements. He must have made a lair somewhere. I called him Robigo. It’s the name for wheat rust.

  Some nights I slipped out to the Armilustrium with a bowl of scraps and fed him. He had learned that I would come. If I stayed long enough, I might see him. I had learned to look for his ears, pricked up as he crouched on the top of the enclosure wall, waiting and watching until he felt secure. Then he slid down the full height of the wall, tail at full stretch, vanishing into shadow. I had to strain my eyes to find his movements. Keeping close to the wall, he would approach the bowl, with his neat tread and constant hesitation. He sniffed, he ate. The way he took food was surprisingly dainty. He made domestic dogs look like untidy gluttons.

  Any slight sound would send him silently melting back into cover. But soon he would creep out again, returning until the whole bowl of food was eaten.

  He liked pies, with gravy, or other broths. He thought dry grains were an insult. In many ways his appetite was the same as mine.

  Once, a piece of fish I put out for him must have been dangerously rotten. Robigo lifted it out delicately and laid it on the grass a stride away, before returning to the bowl and finishing the other scraps.