Death Ex Machina

by Gary Corby

  I stopped one of the men, to ask him what was happening and where I might find the painter. It seemed the home owner was renovating. He’d moved his family elsewhere while his home was stripped to its bare beams and rebuilt from the ground up.

  Inside, I paid close attention to what the workmen were doing. I counted no fewer than twenty of them. Carpenters cut away and replaced walls. One man was tearing up the treads of the stairs to replace the old wood. Stone workers laid new paving in the courtyard. Two thatchers stood in the courtyard and stared straight up, pointing at this or that as they discussed how they would replace the roof.

  This was what I wanted to do to Diotima’s house, but could never afford unless I did it myself. The mere sight of all the work involved depressed me. On my own it would take ten years, or maybe a hundred.

  We followed the tradesman’s directions to the only room that was complete: the master’s bedroom, to the left off the courtyard. The room had that new wood smell that makes you want to breathe deep. But it was mixed with an aroma that was even sweeter. It smelled like honey.

  A thin man of medium height stood with his back to us, bent over pans. He wore an exomis spattered with colors that ranged from faded pastel yellow to recent hits of vibrant red and blue. It could have been a bright party dress, except the paint was crusted hard.

  This must be the artist.

  “Stephanos of Vitale? My name is Nicolaos, son of Sophroniscus. I have a few questions to ask—”

  “They’ll have to wait. I’m working.”

  He hadn’t even turned to speak to us.

  Stephanos pulled a sponge from the small brazier over which he leaned. The brazier stood upon a tripod. A gentle fire lapped at the metal from an oil lamp placed beneath. A layer of something sticky coated the sponge in the artist’s hand.

  “What’s that?” Diotima asked.

  “Beeswax.”

  He began to wipe the sponge across the wall in broad, easy strokes. When the sponge ran out of wax he dipped it back in the brazier for more. He continued this way until the wall was coated top to bottom and side to side in a wax undercoat. Stephanos seemed to use a lot of beeswax. Were there really that many bees in Athens?

  “I can’t stop now that I’ve begun,” he explained as he worked. “The wax undercoat needs to be soft for the next part. If you want to talk, go ahead, but I’ll be concentrating on this.”

  He picked up a stylus, of the sort people use with a wax tablet. But instead of writing notes, the artist sketched the outlines of the mural to come. It was hard to see the scratchings against the translucent background, but I discerned large, robust figures and petite women.

  “What are you drawing?” I asked.

  “Satyrs ravishing maenads,” he said without stopping.

  “Interesting choice for a bedroom,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I’m just the hired help. You’d have to ask the owner’s wife. She chose the subject.”

  “Hmm.”

  Stephanos completed the outline of an enormous half-man, half-beast, to which he added an anatomically correct phallus that was entirely rampant. Diotima leaned closer to inspect it.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  “If you’re thinking about redecorating,” I told her, “you can forget it.”

  In a row along the floor were blocks of pigment: red, blue, yellow, green, and white. Stephanos picked up a block of white. He used a knife to scrape flakes into a second brazier.

  “Now for the color,” he said. Then added, “Was there something you wanted to ask me about?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We believe you painted the skene for the play Sisyphus, written by Sophocles.”

  “I do the skenes for all the plays,” he said as he stirred the contents of the brazier. “Both the tragedies and the comedies.”

  Stephanos added some olive oil. He stirred the brew, then added more oil.

  “How did you end up as everyone’s skene painter?” I asked.

  “I paint murals,” he said. “One day—it must be almost fifteen years ago—how do the years pass so quickly? Anyway, I’d been hired by a citizen to do a mural for his courtyard. The client was an important man by the name of Aeschylus. He wanted a Battle of Marathon.”

  “I’ve seen that painting!” I said. I had been a visitor to the house of Aeschylus. “It’s very good.”

  Stephanos said, “Thanks. Aeschylus watched me for most of the day while I worked, like you two are now, only he talked less. When I was done, he admired my work, and then he said, ‘You know, something like that would look great in my next play.’ ” He shrugged again. “So I painted the skene like it was a mural. It was a huge hit with the audience. Aeschylus paid me double what he promised, then made me swear that I’d do it again the next year.”

  Stephanos stopped stirring.

  “After that, well, everyone else wanted me to paint their skenes.”

  The flakes and the oil had melted into solution. He took the gooey mess to the wall. With the cup in his left hand and the palette knife in his right, he spread the white onto the warm beeswax. I could see the color embed itself into the wax.

  “You see why this must be done before the undercoat cools,” he said.

  “What’s in the pigment?” I asked.

  “For white? You take strips of lead, as thin as you can make them, and lay them crossways in an open tray. Then you pour in vinegar and toss in a pile of goat droppings. Wait a few months, and you’ve got white pigment.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I was. Vinegar I can get from bad wine; the Gods know there’s plenty of that in this city. Goat droppings are free for the taking from any street, but lead ingots cost a fortune.”

  “You don’t sound entirely pleased with Athens,” I said.

  He shrugged. “It’s the clients in this town that drive me crazy. You wouldn’t believe how many of them are amateur artists. Always watching over my shoulder, demanding changes to perfectly good pictures.”

  He glared at me as if it were my fault.

  “I’ve got a plan,” he said. “When I’ve made enough money, I’ll buy a nice farm on some island in the Cyclades and live simply and raise goats and chickens. Have you ever heard a goat complain about a painting?”

  “No.”

  “There you are, then.” He nodded sagely. “Goats are civilized.”

  As he spoke Stephanos continued to press and spread paint into his creation. The style was clearly the same as the skene at the theater.

  “Stephanos, did you make any changes to the backdrop of Sisyphus?”

  “I see you know nothing about painting. Every artist has to touch up some places.”

  “I mean, after you’d finished the skene, did you return to add anything extra?”

  Though he was still painting, he turned his head to look at me. “That is a very odd question,” he said.

  “But an important one. We need an answer.”

  “I don’t even know who you are or why you’re here.”

  I decided not to enlighten him. Not until we had our answers.

  “You drew all the scenes on the wall?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “Did anyone else paint any of it?”

  “Are you suggesting I subcontract my work?” he said it angrily.

  “No, not at all Stephanos. I merely don’t know much about how artists work.”

  “Who decides what you draw?” Diotima asked.

  “The paying client, obviously,” Stephanos said. “Sophocles told me he wanted Corinth.”

  “Was that all that Sophocles said?” Diotima asked.

  “Yes. I took it from there. I decided to draw the agora and the city as if looking down from a high mountain. Like the Gods were looking down on the action, you know?”

  “Did you draw a man tripping in the agora?”

  “How should I know?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I draw hundreds of little background figures
every month. I don’t keep a list.”

  “What about a wine bar?” I asked. “Did you draw that?”

  “Probably. Every agora has one.”

  That was true enough.

  “What about someone throwing up?”

  He laughed.

  “What about a picture of the god machine and a man falling from it?”

  “Look, who are you people?”

  “We’re investigating a series of sabotage attempts against the theater.”

  “It’s nothing to do with me,” he said.

  “The last one resulted in a man having his leg destroyed. And mark this, Stephanos: every single booby trap that’s hurt someone is drawn into the skene that you painted.”

  Stephanos had switched colors. He hesitated while he worked on a particularly tricky piece of blue clothing that a satyr was ripping off a maenad.

  “I haven’t hurt anyone,” he said.

  “Do you know a man named Phellis?” I said.

  “One of the actors?”

  “He’s the one with the crippled leg,” I said.

  “Bad luck for him then.”

  “What about the stage manager?”

  “Kiron? I know him well. I deal with him whenever I work at the theater. He’s a good man.”

  “Do you have an apprentice by any chance?” Diotima asked. I thought it was an inspired question.

  “No.”

  So much for inspiration.

  “Did you alter the skene painting?”

  “No.” He sounded tense.

  “Did you draw in the god machine?”

  “No. I might have done those other figures you talked about. I can’t remember.”

  I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. I couldn’t think of any way we could break his statement. Not unless we could find someone who’d seen him working on the skene in the last few days. I looked Diotima’s way to see if she had any ideas. She silently shook her head.

  Stephanos must have sensed the pressure was off. He put down the paint pot and began to flake another into the brazier. He cleaned off the palette knife and the other tools. Seeing a few spots of white paint on his hand, he licked them off.

  “Is that safe?” I asked.

  “It’s only lead. It can’t hurt you.”

  “HE WAS TENSE when you questioned him about the wall,” Diotima said when we were outside.

  “Hardly surprising, since I’d just accused him of assault in a sacred area,” I pointed out. “Most people would be a little put out.”

  “If anyone had seen him at the theater in the last few days surely they would have mentioned it,” Diotima said.

  “Maybe,” I said doubtfully. It was amazing what people remembered only after you asked them. But there was another problem. “What possible motive would he have to foul the plays?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Diotima’s point, though, applied to everyone. I said, “There’s one thing we know for sure. Someone painted in the god machine and Phellis’s accident.”

  “That’s true,” Diotima said.

  “So your logic applies to everyone. Whoever did the paint job, why weren’t they seen?”

  “For the same reason nobody saw the booby traps being laid,” Diotima said at once. “Someone sneaked in and did them at night.”

  “How good are you at painting in the dark?” I said.

  “They used torches,” Diotima said.

  “And yet they escaped detection. Or else they did it in the glaring light of day.”

  “They’d have to be very confident,” Diotima said. “People walk in and out of the theater all the time.”

  “Or maybe the pictures were there all the time.”

  We reached the deme boundary at Piraeus Way. As we crossed the road I felt a few drops of water land on my head. I looked up. A drop landed in my eye. The sky had clouded over and it was about to rain, something that rarely happens in spring, but when it does it can turn into a late winter downpour.

  Diotima had felt the drops too. She put out her hands to confirm. She said, “Nico … what about my house?”

  Dear Gods. Diotima’s house. She’d inherited the house from her birth father. We lived with my parents, because that was how things were done in Athens, but the house was part of her dowry.

  The problem was, the house was in a state of disrepair. I’d been meaning to fix the roof for the past month, but it hadn’t seemed urgent. Now I was going to have to do it in the rain.

  We turned left, and passed through the agora. Those vendors who hadn’t already left for the day were packing their stalls as quickly as they could. We dodged around the line of departing donkeys laden with goods. Only a few blocks later we came to Diotima’s house.

  It had been something of a puzzle what to do with that house. It was a grand place with a fine courtyard and large rooms, but city homes were a sink for wealth, not a source. We couldn’t move in even if we wanted, because we couldn’t afford to maintain and staff it, not on my income.

  We’d tried renting it out to visiting trade delegations and wealthy merchants who were in Athens on extended stays. There were one or two men of influence in Athens who were well-disposed toward me, and they sent wealthy visitors my way. The rich tenants had complained constantly about every little thing, demanded extra slaves to serve them, and when it came time to settle the bill looked for every possible excuse to reduce the agreed amount. I’d decided that wealthy men got that way by never paying their bills. Also these men invariably left the place in a worse state than they found it. They would hold parties in our house but not replace the broken furniture. I knew for sure that one man who owned a merchant fleet in Rhodes had departed with our complete set of new kitchen knives.

  Something had to be done. Somehow we had to make that house pay.

  Achilles let us in. Not the hero of the Trojan War, but an old slave, crippled in the heels, who for his faithful service Diotima had promised to care for to the end of his days. There used to be two house slaves as well, but we’d sold them when we stopped renting the place. We simply couldn’t afford to feed that many mouths.

  “Master, mistress,” Achilles said as he opened the door. Every time I talked to him, he seemed older. “It’s good that you’re here. What am I to do about the women’s quarters?”

  “You’re not to do anything, Achilles,” I said. If he tried to climb onto the roof, he would certainly die.

  “I’ve placed pots where the worst of the leaks are,” he said.

  I walked into the central courtyard to inspect the damage. The courtyard itself was jumbled. The garden beds were full of weeds, the furniture looked the worse for wear. But there was nothing that couldn’t survive some rain.

  The hole in the inner wall where a drunk partygoer had punched his way through was under the cover of the eaves. The eaves themselves showed signs of wet rot setting in, and the coming rain would worsen that, but there was nothing to be done about it now.

  The immediate problem was higher up. If I craned my neck, I could see where holes had developed in the thatching in numerous places. If the rain came down as hard as I thought it might, there’d soon be pools of water on the second storey floors. That wouldn’t do.

  I fetched the ladder from out back and carried it up to the women’s quarters in the right wing. That was where I could see was the worst of the damage. Achilles followed after with the canvas of an old musty army tent that he struggled to hold. Diotima carried rope. It wouldn’t be the best fix, but it would have to do for now.

  I climbed up.

  Things crawled all over me. I jerked back but they clung on. I waved my arms and they fell off. But there was one on my head.

  “Ugh!”

  “Nico! What is it?” Diotima called up. She sounded worried.

  “Mice. The thatch is full of mice. They’re crawling on me!”

  Peals of laughter from below. So much for sympathy from a worried wife.

  Then I felt something crawling up my
leg.

  “There’s one under my chiton!”

  More laughter. Now even our slave was laughing.

  “Arrgh! Oh, dear Gods …” On the ladder, I bent over in excruciating pain. It hurt so much I thought I might faint.

  “Nico! What’s wrong?” Diotima called from below.

  “It bit me.”

  “Where?” Now she sounded worried.

  “I’m not going to say. But it hurts like Hades.”

  “Oh Nico, be careful.” That part of me was essential to Diotima’s life plans. “We’ll have to get a cat,” she called up.

  “Two cats. One would die from overeating.”

  It was clear now what had caused the holes, and if we didn’t do something about it, and soon, I’d have to replace the entire roof. Worse, mice can easily jump from one roof to another. Which meant I’d have to warn our neighbors. I could imagine how pleased they were going to be at the news. I just hoped they wouldn’t decide to sue me.

  The rain was heavy now. My body poked halfway through the roof. From the waist up I was above the house. Achilles passed up the canvas, which I spread as wide as I could to cover the worst of the holes. From where I stood I could see a second mouse nest. Terrific.

  I lashed down the canvas and tied it tight. There’d still be drips, but damage to the floor was averted.

  The moment I was down, Diotima knelt and stuck her head under my chiton to inspect the damage to my nether regions.

  “That looks nasty,” she said from underneath my clothing.

  “If you say anything,” I warned Achilles, who watched this with an amused smile, “I will … I will …” I couldn’t think of anything bad enough.

  Diotima emerged from my chiton.

  “It needs a wash and definitely some ointment.”

  Some nice oily ointment sounded good.

  “Your mother will know what to do.”

  “My mother!”

  “She is a midwife after all, Nico.”

  “That means she knows how to treat your parts, dear wife, not mine. All it needs is a gentle rub, and, er—”

  A massive thunderclap.

  Achilles hurried to place more pots where leaks dripped.