by Gary Corby
Lakon had told us that Romanos lived in Melite, a deme directly west of the theater. I refused to have Socrates with us when we delivered bad news. He was the least tactful person I knew. I sent him home. As we walked away in the opposite direction, Diotima said, “If Lakon turns out to be the killer, I will personally offer my thanks to the Gods with a fine sacrifice.” She was still angry about his attitude. In her sandals, Diotima kicked a loose stone on the path in anger. The stone went flying, and she spent the rest of the trip cursing her sore toe.
THERE ARE NO signs to mark the boundaries of the demes within Athens, but you always know when you’ve stepped from one into another because their characters are quite different. It was only a matter of crossing the southbound road to Piraeus to take us from influential Collytos into downmarket Melite.
Piraeus Way is one of the busiest thoroughfares in Athens: all the commercial traffic from the port to the agora is on that road. The east side is lined with expensive town houses. The west side is lined with houses too, less expensive ones. Diotima and I walked along one of the paths between them into the narrow byways of Melite.
Melite had been the home deme of Themistocles, the great General and traitor whom Diotima and I had met in Ionia. We thought of him as we passed by his old house. A hundred steps further on, we passed the small temple to Artemis that Themistocles had commissioned. It was in a sad state of disrepair; a chipped façade of faded paint and wooden columns with hairline fractures.
In the days of Themistocles he’d seen to it that Melite was the best decked out deme in Athens. Since then Melite had absorbed much of the influx of metics to the city. Several families crammed into buildings that had once housed only one. To make extra room, the men had extended rooms so that they overhung the street or encroached at ground level. Streets that had once been narrow but adequate had become almost impassably narrow and claustrophobic. This change had happened in my own lifetime.
More people meant more sewage. It all went into the open drains that ran down the middle of the street. Combined with the muddy walkways and the second storeys that loomed above, Melite had acquired its own unique aroma.
Diotima and I took care to walk the outer edge of these mean streets, because what floated down the center didn’t bear thinking about.
Naked or ill-clothed children watched us from doorways. Some of them asked for money. A mother told them sternly not to bother the citizens passing by.
Diotima was having none of that. She stopped at the doorway where the mother had issued the rebuke. Diotima glanced at the mother, bent to talk to the snotty-nosed children. She held up three obol coins—half a drachma. It was a paltry sum, but the children’s eyes went round as bowls.
“Do you know a man named Romanos?” Diotima asked them.
The children said nothing, but their eyes never left the coins.
“They don’t, but I do,” their mother spoke up. She was dressed in a chiton of some heavy material and had a weary air.
When the woman said nothing more, Diotima said, “We’d like to find his home.”
The mother thought about it. Then she asked, “How do I know you’ll pay the children when you’re done?”
Diotima handed over the coins on the spot, one to each child. Each clutched the coin to their bosom as if it were their most prized possession.
Their mother said, “I suppose it can’t hurt.” She bent to the children and gave them instructions on where to take us. Having heard her words I could have gone straight there myself, but I wasn’t going to deprive the children of their work.
The children led us deftly down the paths. I guessed the two older for seven and eight, a boy and a girl. The youngest was perhaps five and had to be stopped by his older siblings from playing with the muck in the drains.
They led us left, right, left to the center of the deme, where there was a square, a tiny one from which someone had swept the rubbish. Old women hawked their wares from faded wooden boxes: wilted vegetables, cheap pottery, and good luck amulets. No doubt the sellers weren’t paying the vendor fees with which the city hit the stallholders in the official agora. This was some sort of unofficial agora that had sprung up, discreet enough that the archons probably didn’t even know it existed.
On the opposite corner of the agora was a house, and it was before this that the children stopped. They looked up at us expectantly.
“This is the place?” Diotima asked.
They nodded.
“Thank you.”
They turned to run home.
“Hey, kids!” I called.
They stopped.
“Here,” I said. I handed each of them a full drachma piece. I used my body to block the transaction from idle sight.
“Now I want you to take these to your mother. You’re to give them to her, and nobody but her. And you hide them, right now, you understand?”
I worried that in these parts, there were people who would beat a child for a drachma.
They nodded and three drachmae disappeared beneath three rag-thin tunics. The children might not say much, but they lived on these streets and they weren’t stupid.
“All right. Run.”
They ran.
“Melite’s a lot poorer than it used to be,” I said to Diotima when they were gone. “It wasn’t like this when I was a child.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Diotima said. “I wasn’t allowed out of the house.”
“I probably ran down every street in Athens,” I said. “I remember when they were building most of these places.”
We knocked on the door.
It was opened by a slim young woman.
“Yes?” She peered around the edge of the door, ready to slam it shut.
Her hair was ragged and shorn. The classic signs of bereavement.
I was taken aback.
“I’m sorry,” Diotima said, equally nonplussed. “I see you’re already in mourning.”
“I am?” the young woman blinked at Diotima. The two women looked much the same age. But whereas Diotima was dark, this woman was light skinned with light brown hair.
She realized we were both staring at the top of her head.
“Oh, you mean my hair. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m a professional mourner.”
It was my turn to be surprised. Of course I’d seen professional mourners in the street, but I’d never thought I’d meet one. In every case I’d seen them walking behind a cart upon which a dead person had been laid, on their way to the cemetery at Ceramicus. Mourners were hired by the family, to express their grief, which they did with loud wails, graphic tearing at their hair, and the rending of their clothes.
Until that moment it had never occurred to me that professional mourners must have normal lives, when they weren’t walking behind dead people.
“Then you haven’t heard,” I said, relieved to have solved at least one tiny puzzle.
“Heard what?” she asked.
“That Romanos is dead,” I told her.
The young woman raised her arms to the sky and screamed.
SCENE 15
WHOOPS
“WELL HOW WAS I supposed to know she was his sister?” I protested.
Diotima had spent considerable time listing my various defects: mental, moral, and social. She paid particular attention to my lack of tact.
“Nico, they’re living in the same house. Of course she was a relative of some sort. I thought at first she must be his wife.”
Diotima had had plenty of time to berate me. The woman—her name was Maia—had installed us in the visitor’s room at the front while she went off to inform the rest of the house of the disaster. As she spread the word the wailing rose throughout, until it sounded like a house of madmen. But it wasn’t; it was a house in genuine mourning.
A man entered the room. His hair was freshly cut and ragged.
He greeted us and said, “My name is Petros.” Beneath the sadness his voice was pleasant. “I would offer you refreshments,” he said polit
ely, “but …” His voice trailed away.
“But a house in mourning doesn’t serve refreshments,” I finished for him.
“No. My wife didn’t ask you for details.”
“Your wife?”
“Maia. Romanos is my brother-in-law.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So are we all. I must ask you what happened, and even more urgent, where is my brother-in-law’s body?”
“At the theater.”
I told him, as succinctly as I could, what had happened.
At the word murder, Petros turned gray and staggered back until he leant against the wall. “Dear Gods, no,” he whispered.
I said, “I’m sorry to have delivered such harsh news to your wife. But we had no idea Romanos had so much family in Athens. The people at the theater could tell us nothing, except for Lakon—”
“Lakon?”
“Another actor. He told us Romanos lived in Melite, but beyond that he too had no information.”
“I see.”
“Do you know Lakon? I suppose you must know other actors, your brother-in-law having been one.”
“Everyone in this house is an actor. Even the children.”
“Oh?”
“I must ask you to excuse me. My brother-in-law’s body must be brought back here.”
I nodded. Petros was right. Already the psyche of the murdered man would be loose from its body. Romanos’s psyche needed to descend to Hades, but the psyche couldn’t begin its journey until the rites had been performed. Until then it should stay close to its mortal remains. But in the theater, alone, a psyche could become lost. The last thing Athens needed was a real psyche haunting the Great Dionysia.
No, the sooner Petros got the body back here the better. They would place the body in the inner courtyard, with its feet facing the door. That would prevent the psyche from straying.
“Do you need help?” I asked. I wouldn’t normally offer to help strangers move their dead, but I felt sympathy for these people.
“Thank you, but there are plenty of men in this house. Far too many men, in fact.”
“Many men?” I said, surprised.
“And their families too,” Petros said.
“Did you all come to Athens together?” Diotima asked.
“No. Romanos was here long before the rest of us. He is … was … an Athenian in all but name. He moved to Hellas as a young man, to make his fortune. Maia and I didn’t leave Phrygia until after we married. The others drifted in over time. It’s easier for folk from the same place to get along.”
“One last question then. Do you know of anyone who might have wanted your brother-in-law dead?”
“No.”
“Had he any enemies?”
“None that would murder,” he said shortly. “And now I must go.”
“WELL THAT WAS a waste of time,” I said as we walked away.
“No it wasn’t, Nico,” Diotima said. “We told a family they were bereaved. Now they’ll collect Romanos and he won’t lie alone.”
“We’ll have to interview them again,” I said. “But not until they’ve had a chance to calm down. The next question is, which persona did the killer intend to kill?”
Diotima looked at me oddly. “What do you mean, Nico?” Diotima said. “Nobody could have mistaken Romanos for someone else.”
“No, but there were three men in the same body,” I said. “There was Thanatos the character in the play—”
“You mean someone was trying to kill the character?” Diotima said. “What sort of a crazy person would do that?”
“Characters kill other characters,” I said.
“Characters aren’t real, Nico,” Diotima said. “Real people kill other real people. They don’t kill fictional people.”
“Then why did the killer choose to kill Romanos as if he were Thanatos?” I said. “There are so many easier ways to kill a man than hanging from a god machine on a stage, in the dead of night, with two guards close by.”
Diotima chewed at her lip while she thought about it. “The method does sound rather dramatic,” she conceded. “Or it’s a crazy person. Go on.”
I said, “Then there’s Romanos the actor. That’s how he’s best known to men in Athens. Was this a professional quarrel that turned violent? Then there’s Romanos the metic who lives in a crowded house in Melite. Nobody at the amphitheater even knew he had a family in Athens, that’s how secretive he was.”
“Nico, you’re talking about motive.”
“All right. But which of those three men did the killer intend to strike down?”
SCENE 16
THE ACADEMY
IT’S A STRANGE case when you know who the body is, but aren’t sure which man died. Was it Romanos the actor? Or the character he played? Or perhaps because of his life outside the theater?
Diotima’s point that it came down to motive was true, but the three different identities of Romanos were so extreme that we felt we had to begin with this question: who was Romanos that someone would want to kill him?
Diotima pointed out that Phellis had fallen in exactly the same situation as we had found Romanos dead, and both men had been dressed as the god of death.
“It’s almost as if the play was unlucky,” Diotima said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I scoffed. “Whoever heard of an unlucky play?”
Diotima shrugged.
I said, “Besides, we know that Phellis was brought down by the saboteur.”
“Do we?” she asked. “Is the saboteur the same person as the killer?”
It was my turn to shrug. “We’ll have to find out.”
“What do we make of the woman who drugged the guards?”
“I think they saw the killer.”
“So do I. But it might have been a man.”
“They said it was a woman.”
“Nico, actors pretend to be women all the time.”
Romanos might have walked to his place of execution, but more likely he had been carried—perhaps they knocked him out first, or perhaps he was drunk—either way there would have to be at least two men; one at each end. This idea caused us to knock on the door of every house close to the theater, in the hope that someone had seen a body being carried down the street.
It turned out there had been at least seven. The people of Athens hadn’t waited for the Great Dionysia to start before the dionysiac parties had begun. All across the city, symposia had raged through the night. Exhausted drunk men had been carried home by their slaves.
The heavy intermittent showers that had soaked Diotima and me had forced everyone to rush from place to place between spells of rain. Witnesses saw many incapacitated men on the street at the same time, and to an observer at night, there was no difference between a man who was dead drunk and a man who was dead.
It occurred to me that the perfect time to carry a body through the streets of Athens was on a party night.
Whatever, it meant there was no useful witness, and if someone had seen something, they would have been too tipsy themselves to be a reliable witness.
We abandoned the search and decided instead to question Sophocles. After all, he was the author of this tragedy.
Sophocles lived in the deme of Colonus, which lay to the northwest of the city. I sent a slave runner with a request to visit him, and received an immediate reply that Sophocles had gone to the local gymnasium to relieve the tension of the disaster, and that I was to see him there. His local gymnasium was the Academy.
I passed through the agora on my way to the Dipylon Gate, which was the closest exit to Colonus. In the agora all was chaos. Chaos was the agora’s usual state, but today’s chaos was different from the norm. Today, the market stalls had not been raised. Instead, slaves were hard at work hammering together long planks to make tables and benches for the party to come. Women strung chains of flowers between poles that the men had raised. Children carried baskets of flowers for the women or ran between the legs of the adults. Dogs followed their
masters or ran with the children. People smiled as they worked, even the slaves. Men and women laughed and sang songs in praise of Dionysos, the god of wine and the harvest.
I followed the Panathenaic Way northwest from the agora and on through Ceramicus. This was the deme where the potters worked, and it showed in the large clods of clay dropped here and there, and the men working with their hands behind their wheels, in workshops that were open to the road. None of them looked up as I passed. Nor did the people here seem as interested in the Dionysia as other parts of the city. Perhaps it was because they were too busy making money.
These men were famous throughout the world, because only they knew how to paint their handiwork with red figures on a black background. The red figure pots of Athens were one of our biggest exports. A “ceramic” jar could command an outrageous price in places where the potters weren’t as talented as ours.
Every second house had a serving hole cut into its front wall, with a wooden door that opened upward to form an awning for the women who served behind the counters. They hawked the wares that their husbands and sons had made in the workrooms. In Athens, every business is a family business. Even mine. Diotima was as much a part of my work as I was.
Ceramicus was also home to another place where business was booming: the city’s cemetery. I passed it on the right, and reflected that soon Romanos would be cremated here.
The other side of Ceramicus backed onto the double portal of the Dipylon Gates, the widest way in and out of Athens. Despite this, there were so many people coming into Athens that I had to step back and wait for the tide to ebb.
I passed the time with one of the guards at the gate. He swore at the visitors and told them to hurry along, talking to me between the cuss words.
“Most of this is people coming for the party,” he said to me.
“Then why are they all coming from outside?” I asked.
“They’re camping outside the city walls.” He spat on the ground, narrowly missing a tourist. The tourist scowled but took one look at the unhappy guard and decided to make nothing of it.