Ode To A Banker

by Lindsey Davis

  We managed to shed him, though he seemed to want to cling. In the confusion, Helena distracted me from my original purpose and took me on the short walk home with her. ‘I need to talk to you about those scrolls, Marcus.’

  ‘Stuff the scrolls.’

  ‘Don’t be petty. I think you will be interested. Something you told me does not fit.’

  I let myself be deflected. Fortune had given me a clear sign that saving my mother from infamy was not required today. Anacrites must have bribed some bored god in the heavenly pantheon.

  I growled. Helena refused to be menaced by an informer parading as a mangy bear. ‘So what’s up with the nutty Greek novel, fruit?’

  ‘I thought you told me Passus was enthralled by what he was reading?’

  ‘He could hardly tear himself away.’ Except when he saw a chance to embarrass me in the clutches of Vibia… I kept quiet about that.

  ‘Well, Marcus, what you gave me must be different. It’s quite, quite dreadful.’

  ‘Oho! So is Passus too easily pleased?’

  Helena sounded doubtful. ‘Different people like different content or writing styles. But I think he must be reading a story by some other writer than mine.’

  ‘Mind you, some people will plod through anything… Passus is anew boy to me. I don’t know him well enough to appraise his reading tastes. But he seems sensible. Likes adventure yarns, he says. Plenty going on, and not too mushy with the love interest. Would that be too masculine for you, perhaps?’

  ‘I can cope. Anyway, all these stories always have a very romantic view of life…’ Helena paused. She liked to tease when I was being too serious. ‘No, perhaps romance is more masculine. It’s men who dream, and long for perfect women and ideal love affairs. Women know the opposite: that life is harsh, and mostly about clearing up the messes men create.’

  ‘Now you sound like Ma.’

  As she intended, she had managed to interest me. It was late afternoon, and we were strolling at ease now. The heat of the sun diminished as shadows lengthened, though the day was still bright. Occasional lock-up workshops started opening their shutters. Stallholders were sweeping up squashed figs and sluicing away fishscales and scallopshells.

  ‘So what are we talking about here, sweetheart? Poetic dramas?’

  ‘Prose.’

  ‘Oh! Fluff and chaff, you mean.’

  ‘Not at all. Well-written escapism that keeps you, the reader, unrolling the scroll even when your oil-lamp is failing and you are stricken with a crick in your back.’

  ‘Or until you nod off and set fire to your bed?’

  ‘With the best,’ Helena reproved me, ‘you cannot bear to nod off until you finish them.’

  ‘Are silly stories ever that gripping?’

  ‘Oh, the silly ones are the worst in that respect… The stories can be daft, the plots implausible - but the human emotions will be intensely real. You know what we’re talking about? Zisimilla and Magarone, the one I’m reading is probably called. You’ll have a beautiful girl who is tougher than she looks and a handsome boy who is soppier than she thinks; they meet by chance -‘

  ‘Sounds like you and me.’

  ‘No, this is true love.’ Helena grinned. ‘Not a girl losing her concentration for a moment and a man who was at a loose end.’ I grinned back, as she continued, ‘So - the couple may marry, or even have their first child. Then their troubles begin. A calamitous accident separates them - after which they both embark on tremendous adventures -‘

  ‘That’s the part Passus likes, presumably.’

  ‘Yes: if the pirates don’t get them, the invading army will. The characters each have to spend years searching a wilderness for somebody who believes them dead. Meanwhile the pirates will be trying to rape one of them, but a resourceful slave or a faithful friend will rescue the other, the hero perhaps - though in his grief and solitude he wishes he had perished. Yet still, as he battles with monsters and enchantresses, he clings to hope -‘

  ‘Fit, but thick?’ I sneered.

  ‘The heroine will be threatened by an unscrupulous rival and doomed unjustly until she wins the respect of a noble king who has captured her, enslaved her, and naturally fallen in love with her modesty, wisdom, steadfastness and shining natural beauty. At last, with the benign care of the deities who unknown to them guard their every step, one day -‘

  ‘When the papyrus is about to run out -‘

  ‘The couple are reunited amidst tears and amazement. Then they embark on a life of endless happiness.’

  ‘Fabulous!’ I chortled. ‘But the scroll I just gave you doesn’t match that standard?’

  Helena shook her head. ‘No. Only the one Passus has, by the sound of it.’

  ‘You’ve only had yours since lunchtime.’

  ‘I am a fast reader.’

  ‘You cheat!’ I accused her. ‘You skip.’

  ‘Well, I am skipping this one. I dumped the devious brigand and the exotic female temptress - and I was not inclined to dally over the pompous chief priestess. This tale is terrible. I have better things to do.’

  ‘Hmm. This is odd. Chrysippus was, by all accounts, a good businessman. Surely, he would have rejected anything so bad.’

  Helena looked doubtful. ‘Doesn’t Turius say he had bad editorial judgement? Anyway, it’s not that simple. You seem to have given me two different versions of Zisimilla and Magarone.’

  ‘So Passus thought.’

  ‘Parts seem to have been rewritten - by a different author, I think. To be honest, Marcus, the results are just as bad. Different, but equally awful because they are trying to be lighter and funnier. Whoever tackled the rewrites thought a lot of himself - but had no idea what was required in this genre.’

  ‘I suppose publishers do sometimes ask for manuscripts to be improved before they accept them for copying… What about thescrolls Passus is reading? He seems to have a good author. Maybe he has one with a noble brigand and a devious priestess, where the rival in love turns out to be high-minded,’ I scoffed.

  Helena went along with it: ‘While the barbarian king in whose power they end up is a complete rascal? I had better confer with Passus,’ she offered. ‘We can exchange stories and see what we think then.’

  Fine. She would be tactful. And if he lacked judgement, she would identify the problem without offending him. If I knew Helena, she would then turn Passus into a sharp literary critic without him ever noticing that his tastes had been retrained.

  It had been a long day. A corpse, suspect interviews, family shocks. I let my mind empty itself as I walked with Helena over the Aventine. At heart, it remained my favourite of the Seven Hills. Bathed in early evening sunlight and slowly cooling down, this was my favourite time of day too. People unwinding after work, and others gearing up for evening fun. The tenements echoing as daytime and night-time life began interacting on the narrow stairways and within the cramped apartments, while the odours of stale incense sank to nothing as the great temples emptied and were locked up at the approach of darkness.

  We had a number of important sacred buildings around the base and on the crest of the hill Temples to Mercury, and to the Sun and Moon fringed the lower road beside the Circus Maximus; on the crest we had that of Diana, one of the oldest in Rome, which had been built by King Servius Tullius, and the great Temple of Ceres, prominent above the Trigeminal Gate. There too was one of the many temples in Rome dedicated to Minerva.

  Once, I would hardly have thought about these places. My mind would have run on shops and winebars. As an informer my interest lay in places where people might be frolicking and cheating one another; that included temples in theory, but I used to think they were just too sordid to bother with. My recent tenure as Procurator of the Sacred Geese of Juno Moneta at her state shrine on the Capitol had made me more alert to the presence of religious sites - if only out of fellow feeling for the other luckless holders of minor offices. Observation of religious duties ensnares not just priests of the seedy career type, but ma
ny a hapless dog like me who has found himself attached to some shrine in the course of his civic advancement. I knew how much they might yearn to escape - and the urge to escape is a strong human motive for all sorts of intriguing behaviour.

  Ma lived near the Temple of Minerva. Minerva, goddess of reason and the arts, identified with the wisdom of Athene, and patroness of trades and craft-guilds, has a side-chapel at the monumental Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and a great altar at the base of the Caelian Hill. And here she was, as the Aventine goddess too. It struck me belatedly that the calm, austere lady whose temple dignified Ma’s district had featured in the Aurelius Chrysippus case. Her name had been given to me by one of my suspects, though I had never taken him up on it. Diomedes, son of Lysa and Chrysippus, and soon-to-be relative by marriage of Vibia, had cited her temple as his whereabouts on the day when his father had been murdered. Minerva was his as-yet-untested alibi. When Petronius had asked were there any big holes in the enquiry, I had forgotten this.

  The Temple lay only a short step from Diomedes’ father’s house, no distance from the top end of the Clivus Publicius. It was near my own apartment too. So the Diomedes connection was something I could fruitfully investigate tomorrow, once the priests reopened for business - or whatever passed for business at a shrine to reason and the arts.

  XLIII

  NIGHT ON the Aventine, my favourite hill. Stars and the mysterious steady glow of planets are piercingwisps of cloud. A persistent August temperature, with not enough air to breathe. Sleepers lying naked, or twisting unhappily on top of crumpled bed covers. Hardly a lover’s cry or an owl’s screech to be heard. Those few short hours when rollickers have fallen silent, slumped at unlit tables in the lowest drinking-houses as the whores give up on them in exhaustion or contempt. The dedicated partygoers are all away at the coast, splitting the Campanian darkness with their flutes, castanets and hysteria, allowing Rome some peace. The wheeled carts that flood the city in thousands at dusk all seem to be stationary at last.

  The dead of night, when sometimes rain begins imperceptibly, increasing in force until thunder cracks - though not tonight. Tonight there is only the suffocating August heat, in the brief dull period when nothing stirs, a little before dawn.

  Suddenly Helena Justina is shaking me awake. ‘Marcus!’ she hisses. Her urgency breaks through my troubled dream of being hunted by a large winged rissole dripping fishpickle sauce. Her fear shakes me into instant watchfulness. I reach for a weapon - then start fumbling after a means of light. I have lived with her for three years. I realise what the crisis is: not a sick child or a barking dog, not even the violence of Aventine low life in the streets outside. A high-pitched whine has disturbed her rest. She has heard a mosquito just above her head.

  An hour later, sandal in hand, bleary-eyed and furious, I have chased the sly tormentor from ceiling to shutter, then into and sneakily out of the folds of a cloak on a doorpeg. Helena is craning her eyes, now seeing its cursed body shape in every shadow and doorframe cranny. She smacks her hand on a knot in a wooden panel that I have already tried to kill three times.

  We are both naked. It is not erotic. We are friends, bound by our hatred of the devious insect. Helena is obsessive because it is her sweetskin they always seek; mosquitoes home in on her with horrific results. We both suspect, too, that they carry summer diseases that might kill our child or us. This is an essential ritual in our house. We have a pact that any mosquito is our enemy, and together we chase this one from bed to wall until at last I swat the thing successfully. The blood on the wall plaster - probably ours - is our sign of triumph.

  We fall together into bed, arms and legs entwined. Our sweat mingles. We fall asleep at once, knowing we are safe.

  I start awake, certain that I have heard another insistent high-pitched whine above my ear. I lie rigid, while Helena sleeps. Still believing I am listening for trouble, I too fall asleep again, and dream that I am chasing insects the size of birds:I am on guard. I am the trained watcher, keeping the night safe for those I love. Yet I am unaware of the shadows that flit through the laundry colonnade in Fountain Court. I cannot hear the furtive feet as they creep up the stairs, nor even the crash of the monstrous boot as it kicks in a door.

  The first I know of it is when Marius, my nephew and puppy-loving lodger, runs in yelling that he cannot sleep because of a row from the tenement opposite.

  That is when I do grab my knife and run. Once awake, I can tell where the commotion is, and I know - with cold fear in my heart - that somebody is attacking my friend Lucius Petronius.

  XLIV

  I SHALL NEVER forget his face. Dim light from a feeble wall-lamp showed the scene eerily.

  Petronius was being strangled. His lungs must have been bursting. He was purple, his face screwed with effort as he tried to break free. I threw my knife from the doorway; there was no time to cross the room. After racing up six long flights of stairs, I simply had no breath myself. It was a bad aim. All right, I missed. The blade sheared past the huge man’s cheek. Not quite useless; he did drop Petro.

  The main room was wrecked. Petronius must have roused himself when the door crashed in. I knew he had been on the balcony at some point; to attract attention he had hurled down an entire bench, tipped it right over the rocky parapet. As I had rushed here, I fell over it in the street, barking my shin badly. That was just before I stepped on the broken flowerpot and cut my foot. Petro had certainly done all he could to rouse the neighbourhood before he was overpowered. Then the giant had dragged him into the main room, and that was where I found them.

  No one but me had come to help. As I pelted up the stairs, I had known that people would have been lying awake now, all petrified in the darkness, nobody willing to interfere lest they themselves were killed. Without Marius, Petro would have succumbed. Now perhaps, this gigantic assailant might kill both of us.

  Milo of Croton would have nothing on him. He could have fought a rhinoceros; the betting touts would have gone crazy trying to fix the odds. He could have stepped in front of the lead quadriga in a full-pelt chariot race, and stopped it by seizing the reins, barely needing to brace his back or his enormous legs. I had seen some muscles, but he excelled all the weightlifting buttonheads I had ever had to fight before.

  Petronius, no mean figure, now lay slumped at the monster’s feet like a whittled doll. His face was hidden; I knew he might be dead. A pine table, so heavy it had originally taken us three days to hoist itupstairs, stood on one end with its main stretcher snapped; everything that had been on it lay in a smashed heap. With a delicate twist of his ankle, the giant kicked debris aside. Heavy potsherds skidded everywhere. It did not seem the moment to say, ‘Let’s talk about this sensibly…’

  I grabbed an amphora and heaved it at him. It bounced off his chest. As it landed, it cracked open and wine slewed everywhere. Unreasonably angered - because Petronius was a wine expert so it must be good stuff - I hurled a stool in the brute’s face. He caught it, one-handed, and crushed it to a fistful of splinters. There had never been much furniture in my old office - which this was - and now there was virtually nothing in one piece.

  Petronius had hooked his toga on the back of the door. Glancing down at my nudity as if shy, I grabbed the great white woollen thing. As the giant approached to crush out my life too, I swirled it once like a man who was seeking modesty in death - then flapped it in his eyes, a cloud of material that forced him to blink. Despite his flailing arm, I pancake-flipped the toga over his head. I dodged past him, trying to reach my knife Shedding blood was my only hope. Once he grappled me, I would be lost.

  He was blundering, trapped briefly in the toga’s folds. I snatched the knife and since his neck was inaccessible, plunged it down between his mighty shoulder blades. My dagger had killed men in its time, but I might as well have tried to carve prime bullock steak with an ivory-handled plum-paring knife. As he spun around, with a small grunt of irritation, I did the only thing possible; I jumped on his back, temporarily out of hi
s reach. I knew he would crash me against a wall, which with his force could be fatal. I got my arm round his neck, pegging down the toga so he could not see. One free hand was clawing behind him.

  He was staggering forward. A massive foot missed the prone Petronius by an inch. The left hand had found my upper thigh and was squeezing so hard I nearly fainted. He was shaking me off, or trying to. He bucked forwards, got up speed, and by chance shot straight into the doorway to the balcony. He had wedged himself in the frame. I was still in the room behind. I slid floor-wards, leaned my shoulder and head against the slab of his waist, and pushed for all I was worth. It pinioned his arms. He was still blinded by the toga. He was stuck, but it would never last. Even my full body weight was making no impression, with raw tenor to inspire me.

  Material ripped; the toga had had it. I felt the brute shudder. He wasabout to use his full strength. Either the wall would collapse, or he would burst outside. The old folding door, which had had a hard life during my tenancy, creaked in protest. I groaned with effort. Someone else groaned. My sinews were bunting. My bare feet were skidding as I pushed. I was aware of noises like Petronius complaining after a hard night. Next moment he had hauled himself upright beside me.

  The giant could have resisted the two of us as easily as one, but he did not realise what was coming. Through eyes that were squinting and filled with running sweat as I struggled, I met Petro’s woozy gaze. We did not need a verbal countdown. As one, we gave an unexpected heave with all our strength and shoved our assailant through the doorway.

  He stumbled right out onto the parapet. It must have been stronger than I thought, because it survived his crashing weight. He was scrabbling for a grip on the stonework, but we rushed forwards. We seized a foot each. Raising them right above our heads, we leaned back, and then pushed hard again, one to each gigantic leg.