Death Ex Machina

by Gary Corby

  “The hold Romanos had over you was that strong?” I said.

  “It was,” he said sadly. “Believe me or not, as you will. If you wish, I will swear by Zeus, by Athena, and by Dionysos whom I hold dear that I did not kill Romanos.”

  THERE WAS NOTHING more we could do. No threat would cajole Lakon into revealing his secret. Lakon himself shut the door behind us as we departed.

  “What do you think?” I asked Diotima as we walked.

  “I think we need that secret,” Diotima said. “What sort of secret would a man be willing to die to protect?” she pondered.

  “The sort of crime that merits death, would be my first guess,” I said.

  “Then how come no one noticed it?” she said.

  I had no answer to that.

  “Maybe it was an unhappy love affair? Maybe he was torn apart from his true love, and they decided that if they couldn’t live together than they would die together. But then at the last moment, after she’d taken poison—”

  I laughed. “What sort of idiots kill themselves merely because they can’t get married? Any couple with half a brain would simply run away.”

  “We didn’t,” she pointed out.

  “We were ready to!” I said.

  Diotima had to concede that was true. When we had first met, during a moment of crisis, I had asked Diotima if she would run away with me, and she had said yes. Luckily circumstances had saved us the trip.

  I said, “Anyway, that doesn’t explain his reticence now.”

  “All right then, maybe he accidentally killed his own father?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “In that case he avenged himself against his father’s murderer, who as it turned out was his mother and her lover. He slaughtered them with an axe.”

  “You’ve been watching too many tragedies.”

  “Well so have you.”

  Try as we might, we couldn’t think of a circumstance that would cause a man to be ready to face death today for something that had patently occurred many years before.

  “Maybe he’s merely sensitive about something embarrassing?” Diotima suggested at last.

  “Lakon doesn’t strike me as the sensitive sort,” I said.

  “I’m not so sure, Nico,” said my wife. “That shallow actor’s manner he puts on might be to cover a delicate and insecure nature.”

  I snorted amusement. “Yeah, right.”

  “All right then,” she said crossly. “I’m the one coming up with all the ideas. Why don’t you think of something?”

  “I already have.”

  As we’d walked I’d led Diotima in a direction she didn’t normally like to go.

  “What are we doing here?” she said in distaste.

  “Borrowing a boat.”

  I knocked on the door of Pericles’s home.

  Pericles and Diotima had never been friends. There was enough history among the three of us to explain the antipathy, but after three years it showed no signs of abating. I thought it odd because Diotima and Pericles were beyond doubt the two smartest people I knew.

  Pericles frowned when he saw Diotima, but was too polite to throw out a lady. Instead we sat in his courtyard and discussed the case. I told him what we had learned. I finished with, “And so, Pericles, I want to borrow a boat.”

  “Why?” asked Pericles.

  “Why?” asked Diotima, at exactly the same time.

  The two of them looked at each other, startled.

  I said, “Because as far as we know, Lakon has led a blameless life, if you don’t count the possibility that he killed Romanos. If there was any stain on him during his time as an actor then Sophocles wouldn’t have had him in the play.”

  “Certainly not,” Pericles said. “Sophocles is a solid citizen. What’s your point?”

  “That any dark secret Lakon carries is probably a family secret,” I said. “Something beyond Athens.”

  “That’s really quite clever,” Diotima murmured.

  “It was Diotima’s list of great tragedies that made me think of it,” I said modestly.

  “I see,” Pericles said. “What is his family’s deme?”

  “Rhamnus. It’s about as far away as you can get and still be within Attica.”

  Attica was the region of Hellas controlled by Athens. It was a big area. Pericles saw my point. Now I showed him the solution.

  “As it happens, Rhamnus is on the coast. That’s why I want the boat.”

  “How fast a boat do you want?” he asked.

  “How quickly do you want the case solved?” I countered. “If we have to go overland you can add at least three days for travel alone. Maybe four if there are brigands.”

  Pericles said nothing.

  “Give me Salaminia,” I said simply.

  It was a measure of how far I had come that I dared ask for the fastest warship in the world. Salaminia had once carried me to distant Ionia on an urgent mission, and got me there on a single overnight stop. I knew her qualities. She could certainly get me to Rhamnus and back in a day, if we found what we were looking for quickly. Two days at the outside.

  It was also a measure of how far I’d come that Pericles merely grunted.

  He held out his hand and a slave instantly filled it with an ostrakon—a broken pottery shard. Pericles sent so many messages every day that he had a slave dedicated to doing nothing but collecting broken pottery.

  “Take this message to her captain,” he said, scratching words into the ostrakon. “I assume you leave at first light tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  Salaminia was ready on a moment’s notice, but there was nothing to be gained by departing for Rhamnus at once. The ship would only have to lie overnight in a port along the way.

  Pericles handed me the order that gave me control of Salaminia. “This had better be worth it.”

  “We have another problem, Pericles,” I said.

  He frowned. “Yes?”

  I explained about the problem with paying for Phellis’s treatment. “He was injured through no fault of his own,” I finished.

  “This is a duty for the play’s choregos,” Pericles said.

  “He denies it.”

  “I hope you’re not suggesting that I should be paying for this?” Now Pericles sounded truly upset.

  “No.”

  “Good. Because I’m already funding the public feast.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “I’ve ordered my estate manager to strip my lands of everything edible. Even so, I have buyers at every farm within cart distance of Athens. You wouldn’t believe what this is costing me,” he said, and he shuddered. “I said it before about Salaminia, but I’ll say it again about the public feast. Nicolaos, this had better be worth it.”

  SCENE 25

  A SUDDEN REVELATION

  WE DECIDED TO make best use of our time before we left for Rhamnus by investigating Socrates’s theory: that one man acting alone could not have murdered Romanos; not unless the victim was drugged. I pointed out, also, that we’d yet to inspect the scene of the crime, as we would with any normal murder.

  Diotima snorted and said, “Good luck with that. How many people have trampled over the theater?”

  Socrates was already there, looking closely at the machine. So were Kiron and Akamas. They were hanging around, Kiron said, because in the absence of a running festival they had nothing better to do.

  “Excellent, I’m glad to see you,” I said. “You can help us with an important point about how the machine works in Sisyphus—”

  “Don’t say that name!” Akamas almost shouted. He looked about suspiciously, before saying in a more normal voice, “You mean The Corinthian Play.”

  “The what?” I asked.

  “The Corinthian Play,” Akamas repeated.

  “That’s what all the crew are calling it now,” Kiron said in exasperation. “On account of Sisyphus being set in Corinth.” Kiron shrugged as expressively as one of his actors. “They’ve reached the
point that they think even saying the name of the accursed play will bring back the Ghost of Thespis and all the bad luck.”

  I’d never heard anything so ridiculous in my life, but there was no point in arguing about it. Instead, we got on with our work.

  We used Akamas to stand where Romanos must have stood, or lain, when the long arm of the machine rose during the murder. Kiron fitted Akamas with the harness and attached the rope. I took hold of the short arm backstage and tried to move it.

  By heaving with all my might, I could raise Akamas into the air, but I was unsteady. Akamas was heavier than Romanos, but not so much that it would make a big difference, especially considering that the killer must have worked in the dark. The short arm I held was heavily weighted at the end, to balance the longer arm over the skene, but it wasn’t enough to make my job simple. It was easy to see why during plays they used two men. When I said as much, Kiron nodded.

  “That’s why we use three,” he said. “Two men to hold the actor steady, so there are no mistakes. The third man to direct the arm sideways.” He paused, then added, “Plus me, of course. I have to make sure those idiots don’t let go of the arm.”

  “Does that happen?” Diotima asked.

  The stage manager turned to her. “Only once per idiot. If a man lets go of the machine while the actor’s in the air, I beat him senseless to remind him not to do it again, and then I fire him.”

  “That seems a little harsh.”

  “You wouldn’t think so if you were the actor.” He rubbed his sweaty face with a thick cloth. “Look, you probably think I’m a tough boss—”

  Diotima and I said nothing.

  “But you know what my job is? It’s to make sure nothing goes wrong. Nobody notices when everything goes right, but when something goes wrong, it’s always the stage manager’s fault.” He wiped his brow again.

  Socrates tugged on my clothing. “Nico? There’s the other problem for the killer.” He pointed to the spot in the mechanism where the killer had placed a chock, to keep the long arm in the air. Socrates went on, “You can’t both raise someone and chock the machine.”

  I tried. I wasn’t a large man, but I was a strong one. My strength came from helping my father heave blocks of stone, from the training that Pythax had given me, and from my chosen profession. It would be an unusual killer who was stronger than me, and yet I didn’t dare let go with either hand or Akamas would have crashed to the ground. My attempts to do so caused several anguished screams from Akamas, who suffered this experiment hanging in the air. Even half-drunk, he knew enough to be terrified with me at the controls.

  I tried to reach from the end of the machine arm to the center where it pivoted. The distance I had to reach was simply too great. All this supposed that Romanos was waiting quietly to be hanged, or else was unconscious.

  Socrates had made his point.

  “What if the killer added more weight to the end of the short arm?” I said.

  “That might work,” Kiron said, “But see here …” He demonstrated the end of the short arm. “There are no rope marks, no peg holes, no nothing.”

  “The killer wrapped rags around the arm and then tied on weights?” Socrates suggested. “That would work.”

  “Getting a little complex here, aren’t we, lad?” Kiron said.

  Indeed we were. It seemed an extravagant way to kill someone. We needed a simpler explanation.

  We abandoned the machine for the moment and turned to the next item: the search for any other clues.

  It went as badly as Diotima had predicted. The plays this year included an axe murder (that was Aeschylus’s contribution), various stabbings (Chorilos), and scenes of torture and incest (thank you, Sophocles). The comedies were barely any better. The props for all these evil deeds were scattered across the area behind the skene.

  “Dear Gods,” I said, “I never realized how violent these plays are.”

  Diotima held a stylus and a wax tablet on which she’d listed everything that would have been a clue at a normal crime scene, including all the potential murder weapons lying about. It was a long list.

  Diotima chewed her lip and stared at the list. “I’ve been imprisoned in dungeons that were safer than this place,” she said.

  I nodded. I was beginning to understand why Akamas and the other theater crew lived in such fear of bad luck.

  “Does your list of murder weapons include the machine?” I asked.

  Diotima looked up at the machine that loomed above us. “Thanks. I forgot that one.” She added another line.

  I noticed that the prop knives and swords were sharp enough for battle, the cudgels were properly weighted to smash a skull, the axe propped in the corner was good enough to chop down a tree, or to chop down Agamemnon in his bath.

  I queried Kiron about the lethal array. “Why don’t you blunt them?”

  He looked at me as if I were insane. “Every man in the audience is a serving soldier or a veteran.”

  “Yes, of course. All citizens are. So?”

  “So to any man who’s ever stood in the line, a blunt sword will look like a blunt sword. They know what a sharp sword looks like in the hand of a man who’s coming at them. They’ve seen it often enough.”

  “Oh. I see what you mean.”

  “If we send the actors on stage with swords and spears too blunt to hurt a fly, the audience couldn’t miss it. They’d complain later. Or they’d boo the actor, which would be even worse.” The stage manager threw his hands in the air. “You have no idea what lengths we go to, to get these details right.”

  “Even in the plays set long ago?” Diotima asked.

  “Especially in the plays set long ago. If we get something wrong in those, every man, woman, and child will be backstage to tell us we got it wrong. Historical accuracy is very important.”

  “Doesn’t anything ever go wrong, with all this stuff lying about?”

  Kiron and Akamas both laughed.

  “You better believe it. There was one time we had a man in the air—he was playing Zeus—the takeoff was as bad as you could get and he slammed into the skene and the entire wall fell over.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Luckily we had Romanos with us that day. He played it for a comedy. He was on stage doing his lines about tragic death as the entire skene fell slowly forward, revealing us backstage crew and a man in the air swinging like a dying fish. Quick as lightning, Romanos grabbed someone’s walking stick from the audience, then he chased us around the stage, whacking us with the stick while he repeated lines from some comedy he once played. This was in Pella, in Macedon. Those barbarians wouldn’t know fine art if it hit them.” Kiron hawked and spat in the dust. “The Macedonians laughed until they fell off their seats, and then they paid us extra ’cause it was so funny.”

  “Romanos saved us that day,” said Akamas.

  “Romanos was a good actor, I’ll say that for him,” said Kiron. He sighed. “We’ll miss him. Who would murder a man like that? I can’t believe it was one of our own.”

  “That’s what the evidence says,” Diotima pointed out. She was unsympathetic. “I’m sorry, Kiron, but it’s one of your colleagues who’s causing all the trouble.”

  “I’ve said this before,” I told Kiron. “There are three possible victims: the man, the actor, and the character in the play. If Romanos the actor is the victim, then almost certainly his killer belongs to the theater.”

  “You forgot another reason to kill Romanos,” said the stage manager.

  I sighed. Everybody thinks they can be a detective.

  “What reason?” I asked him.

  “Creepy fans. Men who want to be best friends with the actors.”

  “Does that happen?” Diotima asked.

  The stage manager laughed. “Yes. Have you noticed how elegant actors are? Men get drawn to that. When I say these fans want to be best friends, I mean they want to be really close friends, if you get my meaning.”

  “Oh. I see.”
/>   “Mostly they’re older men, but not always. You can spot them straight away. They linger about and try to look like they belong, but you can tell they’re nervous as all Hades and when they get up the nerve to approach an actor—it’s always the protagonist—they hold some love offering.”

  “Was there anyone like that yesterday?” I asked.

  “Several.”

  “Anyone in particular?” I asked.

  “No.” Then Kiron thought again and said, “Wait, what about the strange kid?”

  “What strange kid?” Diotima and I said simultaneously.

  Kiron looked from one to the other of us. “There’s a kid hangs about the theater like a bad smell. Stares at everything like he’s never seen it before, even though I know he’s watching almost every day. There’s something weird about this guy. He’s kind of intense.”

  “Does he go backstage?”

  “Not since I caught him once and told him to bugger off.”

  Creepy, intense, and at the scene of the crime. That sounded like a killer to me.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this before?” I complained.

  “Was I supposed to?” He looked insulted. “That happened long ago. When I said he hung around here, I didn’t mean only recently.”

  Diotima said, “I think I know who you mean. When we expelled the ghost, we saw someone in the audience who didn’t seem to quite belong.” Diotima described the man she’d spotted that day. “Was that him?”

  “Yeah, that’s the kid,” the stage manager said.

  It was the man Diotima had pointed out to Pythax and me. I remembered what he looked like. When the stage manager had said “kid,” what he’d meant was someone my own age. It made me wonder what the stage manager thought of me.

  “Was he here today?” I asked. “Maybe we can catch him when he comes.”

  “Well that’s a funny thing,” said Kiron. “I haven’t seen him since the murder.”

  Diotima and I shared a glance.

  I said to Kiron, “I think we might need to talk to him. Does this ‘kid’ have a name?”

  “Yeah, I heard someone talk to him, once. What was it?” The stage manager scratched his head. “I dunno. I can’t remember.”