Venus in copper mdf-3

by Lindsey Davis

  The stables were just around the corner from where we lived. From this corner, you could see the entire block. I was like a lad with his first sweetheart, staring round in wonder at everything. I looked up, which you normally never do at your own house since you are thinking about wherever you have just come from, and trying to find your latch-lifter.

  The sun was above me, hitting my left eye. I started to squint, looking away from the apartment. Then I had to look back.

  Something produced an odd effect. I shaded my eyes. The building seemed to shimmer for a second, though not with light. I was about fifty yards away. The street was busy; no one else noticed anything at first.

  The entire frontage of my apartment block crumpled, quite quickly, like a human face dissolving into tears. The building swayed, then visibly hung in the air. All the natural forces which keep a structure upright had lost their effect; for an instant every component was suspended in space individually. Something maintained the shape of the building-then nothing did. The block neatly folded, with a strangely compact motion, falling in upon itself.

  Then the noise overwhelmed the street.

  Immediately afterwards we were swamped by a great cloud of masonry dust which enveloped everyone in its stinging, suffocating filth.

  Chapter LVII

  First the incredible silence. Then people start to scream.

  You have to clear the dust from your eyes first. Shaking yourself makes it worse. You cannot move until you can see. Your senses are righting to catch up with what is happening.

  The first screams are the people in the street, startled and shocked, but grateful that they at least still have breath to scream. After that there may be others, from underneath the rubble, but it is difficult to tell until the panic quietens down and someone starts to organise. Someone always will.

  There is a procedure to follow. In Rome, buildings often come falling down.

  Word goes round the neighbourhood quickly; the noise assures that. In no time men run up with shovels and props. Others will follow with carts, grapplers, barrows from building sites, makeshift stretchers and perhaps even a hoist. But not soon enough. If the building was known to be occupied, those of you on the spot don't wait. Before the men come with shovels you start in with bare hands. It achieves little. But how can you just stand?

  All I had in the world to worry about was two pastries in a hatful of dust. I put the hat down on a doorstep and laid my cloak over it. A gesture really; while I tried to cope.

  Stay there… Don't stir-stay there and wait for me!

  The walk to what had been our apartment seemed to take a year. Others were moving forwards with me. Even if you are a stranger you do what you can.

  I wanted to shout; I wanted to roar. I could not bear to speak her name. Someone did shout: a cry, just a noise to say we were there. So next we stood, listening to the debris settling. That is the procedure; you shout or you knock on something; then listen; then dig. With luck, you are digging for someone. But you dig anyway. You wrench away whole beams as if they were cordwood, turn over doors which are still attached to frames, bend jagged spars, and scrabble among tons of anonymous rubble which somehow no longer bears any resemblance to the materials which originally went into the block. All around the air is cloudy. Shapes move. The mass beneath your boots sinks suddenly, with a lurch that makes your heart race, amid more sick clouds of filth. A four-inch nail, still as bright as the day it was first hammered home, gouges your bare knee. The backs of your hands are in shreds from scraping against bricks and concrete. Your sweat can hardly manage to trickle through the thick coating of pale dust that dries your skin. Your clothes are stiff with it. Your boots will never be worth pulling on again. Through their thongs your toes and ankles bleed. That dust clop your lungs.

  Every now and then people stop again and call for silence; then somebody who has the heart for it shouts. And you listen to the slow trickle of loose mortar among the broken bricks and tiles and papery lathes that were once your home.

  If it was a large building, you know before you listen that there is very little chance of anybody ever answering.

  While we are working I hardly spoke to anyone. Even strangers must have realised the place was known to me. When the first spades came I snatched one at once; I had proprietary rights. At one point there was a sudden rattle of subsidence so we all jumped back. I took the lead then, to supervise the forcing of props into place. I had been in the army. I was trained to take command of civilians when they were running round like chickens. Even in a catastrophe, you have to be businesslike. Even if I had lost her, she would expect that. The girl would expect me to do what I could, in case I could save someone else. If she was here, at least I was close to her. I would stay here, day and night if necessary, until I knew for certain where she was.

  What I felt would have to come later. The later the better. I was not sure I could ever endure what my brain already said I felt.

  When they found the woman's body, everything went quiet.

  I never knew who said my name. A space cleared. I forced myself to stumble over there and look; they all waited and watched. Hands touched my back.

  She was grey. Grey dress, grey skin, grey matted hair full of plaster dust and fragments of building material. A complete corpse, made of dust. So covered with filth that it could be anyone.

  No ear-rings. The wrong curve to the lobe, and no gold there-in fact no tiny hole to take the hook.

  I shook my head. 'Mine was tall.'

  Besides, once I was certain it was safe to look properly, I could tell that under the grey dust this woman's hair would still be grey. The hair was thin-just a sad trail in a braid no broader than my little finger, which petered out to a few strands after a foot or so. Mine had a thick plait, hardly varying in width, down to her waist.

  Someone dropped a neck scarf over the face. A voice said, 'Must be the old woman on the upper floor.' The mad old bag who had so often cursed me.

  I went back to work.

  It had upset me. I was beginning to imagine now what I was going to find.

  I paused, wiping the sweat from my filthy brow. Someone who knew he had more will than me at that moment took the shovel from my hand. I moved aside, as he attacked the swamp of masonry where I stood. Standing idle for a moment, something caught my eye.

  It was the handle of a basket. I recognised the shiny black raffia wound round it by my mother when the original canework started to unwind. I dragged it to the surface. Something of mine. It used to hang beside the doorway in our living room.

  I walked aside. Bystanders were quietly handing drinks to slake the rescuers' throats. I found a beaker shoved into my hand. There was nowhere to sit. I squatted down on my heels, swallowed the liquid, put down the cup, shook the dirt off the basket and looked inside. Not much. All I had left. The pride of our household: ten bronze spoons Helena once gave me; she had refused to let me hide them in my mattress now they were needed for daily use. A dish that belonged to my mother, put aside for her. My best boots; hidden from the parrot… And a cheese grater.

  I had no idea why the grater had been singled out. I would never be able to ask. So much unfinished business: the worst result of sudden death.

  I replaced everything in the basket, shoving my arm through the handles right up to the shoulder. Then my bravery ended; no longer any point to it. I buried my head in my arm and tried to shut out everything.

  Somebody was shaking my shoulder. Someone who must have known me, or known her, or both of us. I looked up, full of rage. Then I saw him point.

  A woman had turned round a corner, just as I did half an hour ago. She had a big circular loaf in her arms. She must have been out to buy something for lunch; now she was coming home.

  Home was no longer there. She had stopped, as if she thought she had turned into the wrong street in a daydream. Then the truth of the collapsed building struck.

  She was going to run. I spotted her before she started moving, but her intentio
n was clear. She thought I might have been in the apartment; now she thought I was dead underneath. There was only one way to let her know.

  I whistled. My whistle. She stopped.

  I was on my feet. She had heard me. At first I could see she could not find me. Then she did. There was no need any longer, but I was already shouting. At last I could say it. 'Helena?'

  'My lass, my love-I'm here!' The loaf crushed to a thousand fragments between us. Then she was in my arms. Soft-warm-living – Helena. I gripped her skull between my two open palms as if I was holding treasure. 'Helena, Helena, Helena…' Her hair caught on my roughened fingers where I had been dragging beams aside in search of her. She was clean, and untouched, and crying her heart out helplessly because for one fraction of a second she had believed she had lost me. 'Helena, Helena! When I saw the house fall down, I thought-'

  'I know what you thought.' 'I said you were to wait for me-' 'Oh Didius Falco,' Helena sobbed,'I never take any notice of what you say!'

  Chapter LVIII

  People were slapping us on the back; women kissed Helena. I would have returned to the digging, but the crowd voted otherwise. We were jostled into a tavern where a flask, which I needed, appeared in front of us followed by hot pies, which I could have done without. My hat and cloak were brought in to me. Then, with that gentle tact which strangers discover for one another at the scene of a catastrophe, we were left alone.

  Helena and I sat close, heads together. We hardly spoke. There was nothing to say. Just one of those times of deeply shared emotion when you know that nothing can ever be the same again.

  A voice I knew cut through my concentration when almost nothing else would have broken it. I turned. A sleepy-eyed gawper in a brown and green striped tunic was buying himself a drink while he stood unobtrusively in the shade of the awning and peered outside. He was surveying the extent of the damage. It was the letting agent: Cossus.

  I got to him before he received his order. I must have sprung out, still covered all over with dust, like a spirit from the Underworld. He was so amazed he had no time to dodge away.

  'Just the man I want to see!' I gave him the elbow treatment, and fetched him indoors. 'If you want a drink, Cossus, come and have one with us-'

  Helena was sitting on the nearest bench so I made Cossus take the other. There was a table in the way of it, but I lifted him, slewed him sideways, and threw him across there anyway. I leapt the table myself with a one-handed vault, landing astride his bench. Cossus gasped. 'Helena, this is Cossus; Cossus is the wonderful chap who controlled our lease! Sit down, Cossus-' He had been trying to struggle upright but sank down immediately. 'Have a drink, Cossus-' I gripped him by the hair, screwed his head against my side, seized the flagon and poured all that was left of it over his head.

  Helena did not move. She must have realised it was a pretty awful draught of wine.

  'That's your drink. Next,' I said, still in the same convivial tone, 'I'm going to kill you, Cossus!'

  Helena reached across the table. 'Marcus-' Cossus looked up at her sideways with what must have been (for a letting agent) gratitude. 'If this is the man who controlled our apartment,' said Helena Justina at her most refined, 'I should like to be the person who kills him myself!'

  Cossus squeaked. Her measured, aristocratic tones were more chilling than any grit of mine. I let him go. He straightened up, rubbing his neck. He flashed a glance round the tavern in search of support. All he saw were turned backs. They knew his pedigree. If I killed him no one would help him; people were hoping that I would. Helena had made herself popular in the neighbourhood. If she killed him, people would probably help.

  I walked back round the table and sat with my lass.

  'You chose the wrong day, Cossus,' I said grimly. 'The Kalends of September is a white day in the calendar; it's tomorrow people mark with the sign of bad luck. No style, Cossus! How can your tenants plan ahead?' He started to mutter. I cut him short. I turned to Helena and asked her quietly, 'I noticed this morning the landlord's contractors had turned up to do some work on the ground floor. Were they still there when you went out?'

  'They were just finishing,' Helena returned. 'They were taking away all that scaffolding that used to be in the entrance.'

  'Bit of a mix-up,' Cossus mumbled, still too crass to know when to stop the bluff. 'Must have disturbed something-'

  'Me, for instance!'

  'Sorry, Falco,' Cossus reluctantly answered, knowing his skull was in danger of being shattered by my fist.

  'So am I, Cossus.'

  'The landlord will offer compensation-'

  'He will, Cossus! That would be very sensible!'

  'How,' Helena enquired levelly, 'can he compensate the old lady from the fourth floor, who is dead?'

  'Unforeseeable miscalculation by our civil engineer,' he hedged, trying out the excuse they must keep rehearsed for appearances in court.

  'Rather drastic solution to your problem with her lease!' I weighed in. Cossus sighed. At last he appreciated that my grasp of the situation made resistance irrelevant. He was lazy; he hated trouble. My interference made him too depressed to answer, so I elaborated myself: 'The landlord was trying to terminate the old woman's tenancy so he could pull down the building and replace it with a more prestigious block. When she refused to leave, this charitable man saved her lawyers the trouble of fleecing her by demolishing the building anyway!'

  'But why not simply give her notice?' demanded Helena.

  'We did. Well,' the agent admitted, 'we should have done. The old biddy had been living up there for so long, I forgot she was there. We have a huge number of clients. I can't remember everyone. In June she tripped into the office and paid up, grumbling into her chin like they all do, so I just got rid of her as quickly as possible and only noticed her address after she had scuttled off cursing me. The owner had never really given me firm instructions about the place so I just let it lie. Come July, he suddenly made up his mind to redevelop, but we were stuck with the old mother for another year.'

  'Why exactly,' Helena enquired, 'did you then grant a new tenancy to us?'

  He forced his aggravating features to appear ashamed. I would not trust him as far as I could see up a camel's backside at midnight; Helena might have put it more elegantly, but she felt the same.

  'Make it look good,' I stated. 'When the place crashes down, it is easier to justify if the landlord pretends he was filling the empty apartments; then it's not deliberate demolition, but an accident during refurbishment. Tough luck, tenants (if you happen to have survived the shock): here's some of your rent back, so make sure you look grateful; now go away!'

  'I told you the lease was temporary,' Cossus grumbled self-righteously.

  'Excuse me! I must have misread my contract. I never realised it ran "for six months – or until your house falls down."'

  'We can give you a pro rata rebate-' Cossus began. His mouth was like the doors on the Temple of Janus: never shut.

  'Wrong!' snapped Helena. 'You will give Didius Falco a full refund, plus compensation for the loss of his effects and furniture!'

  'Yes, madam.'

  The concept of men making eager promises then changing their minds later was familiar to my love. 'You will write out a banker's draft for us here and now,' Helena decreed decisively.

  'Yes, madam. If you want to put a new roof over your heads urgently, I may be able to find something-' He was a true landlord's agent; a complete fool.

  'Another of your temporary specials?' I sneered. Helena took my hand. We stared at him.

  Helena Justina stormed off up the road to the local stationer's while Cossus and I agreed a price for my lost furniture. I enjoyed myself, and the agreed price was better than the furniture.

  When she came back, Helena dictated the draft. 'Make it out to the lady,' I instructed. 'Her name is Helena Justina; she keeps all my accounts.' Cossus looked surprised. I cannot say how Helena looked, since I avoided her eyes.

  We had reached the point
where we either had to let the agent leave or have him arrested. It was Helena who said quietly, 'I should like to know our careless landlord's name.'

  Cossus looked uneasy; I confirmed his fears: 'Getting our money back is just the start.'

  'He has to be brought to justice,' Helena said.

  Cossus started to bluster but I cut him short. 'Your principals have made a slight error. This lady who was nearly killed today by your so-called accident is the daughter of a senator. When her father hears what happened to his treasure he is bound to raise the issue of landlords' derelictions in the Curia-and that won't be the end of it!' The last thing Helena wanted was to let her father know how dangerous life with me could be. But he was bound to find out, and Camillus Verus was one of the few in the Senate who would be prepared to tackle the issue. 'I want to know anyway,' I continued. 'Just tell me, Cossus. So I can sleep tonight with a clear conscience-tell me I did not entrust myself and this precious lady to that calamity Priscillus!'

  He looked relieved. 'Oh no, Falco!'

  'Well then?'

  Edging away, his voice withered to a croak as he tried to confess: 'I work for the Hortensii. Novus controlled your lease.'

  Chapter LIX

  I gripped the front of his baggy tunic in my two blackened claws and gave him a shake that would loosen his teeth.

  'Don't blame me,' pleased Cossus. 'I would have thought it was obvious!' He was waiting for me to let go of him, but I kept hold.

  'Novus is dead! Novus died last week!'

  'So what's the panic?'

  'On whose instruction did the demolition go ahead?'

  'Novus told me to put in the order weeks ago-'

  'And when Novus died, did you never think of checking with his heirs?'

  'I did check.' Something in the bluff way he said it rang untrue.

  'With Felix or with Crepito?' I stopped shaking him, but screwed the tunic tighter round my fists. I felt certain he had been too idle to go up to the house and ask.