Pompeii

by Harris, Robert

  ‘Where’s the key?’

  ‘Downstairs.’

  ‘Get it.’

  When they reached the street he pushed the brothel-keeper back into the gloomy hallway and stood guard as he fetched his cash-box from its hiding-place. The meretrix in the short green dress had returned to her stool: Zmyrina, Africanus called her – ‘Zmyrina, which is the key to Exomnius’s room?’ – his hands shaking so much that when finally he managed to open the cash-box and take out the keys he dropped them and she had to stoop and retrieve them for him. She picked out a key from the bunch and held it up.

  ‘What are you so scared about?’ asked Attilius. ‘Why try to run away at the mention of a name?’

  ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ repeated Africanus. He took the key and led the way to the bar next door. It was a cheap place, little more than a rough stone counter with holes cut into it for the jars of wine. There was no room to sit. Most of the drinkers were outside on the pavement, propped against the wall. Attilius supposed this was where the lupanar’s customers waited their turn for a girl and then came afterwards to refresh themselves and boast about their prowess. It had the same fetid smell as the brothel and he thought that Exomnius must have fallen a long way – the corruption must have really entered his soul – for him to have ended up down here.

  Africanus was small and nimble, his arms and legs hairy, like a monkey’s. Perhaps that was where he had got his name – from the African monkeys in the forum, performing tricks at the ends of their chains to earn a few coins for their owners. He scuttled through the bar and up the rickety wooden staircase to the landing. He paused with the key in his hand, and cocked his head to one side, looking at Attilius. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  ‘Open it.’

  ‘Nothing’s been touched. I give you my word.’

  ‘That’s valuable. Now open it.’

  The whore-monger turned towards the door with the key outstretched and then gave a little cry of surprise. He gestured to the lock and when Attilius stepped up next to him he saw that it was broken. The interior of the room was dark, the air stuffy with trapped smells – bedding, leather, stale food. A thin grid of brilliant light on the opposite wall showed where the shutters were closed. Africanus went in first, stumbling against something in the blackness, and unfastened the window. The afternoon light flooded a shambles of strewn clothes and upended furniture. Africanus gazed around him in dismay. ‘This was nothing to do with me – I swear it.’

  Attilius took it all in at a glance. There had not been much in the room to start with – bed and thin mattress with a pillow and a coarse brown blanket, a washing-jug, a pisspot, a chest, a stool – but nothing had been left untouched. Even the mattress had been slashed; its stuffing of horsehair bulged out in tufts.

  ‘I swear,’ repeated Africanus.

  ‘All right,’ said Attilius. ‘I believe you.’ He did. Africanus would hardly have broken his own lock when he had a key, or left the room in such disorder. On a little three-legged table was a lump of white-green marble that turned out, on closer inspection, to be a half-eaten loaf of bread. A knife and a rotten apple lay beside it. There was a fresh smear of fingerprints in the dust. Attilius touched the surface of the table and inspected the blackened tip of his finger. This had been done recently, he thought. The dust had not had time to resettle. Perhaps it explained why Ampliatus had been so keen to show him every last detail of the new baths – to keep him occupied while the room was searched? What a fool he had been, holding forth about lowland pine and scorched olive wood! He said, ‘How long had Exomnius rented this place?’

  ‘Three years. Maybe four.’

  ‘But he was not here all the time?’

  ‘He came and went.’

  Attilius realised he did not even know what Exomnius looked like. He was pursuing a phantom. ‘He had no slave?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Exomnius?’ Africanus spread his hands. How was he supposed to remember? So many customers. So many faces.

  ‘When did he pay his rent?’

  ‘In advance. On the kalends of every month.’

  ‘So he paid you at the beginning of August?’ Africanus nodded. Then one thing was settled. Whatever else had happened to him, Exomnius had not planned to disappear. The man was obviously a miser. He would never have paid for a room he had no intention of using. ‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘I’ll straighten it up.’

  Africanus seemed about to argue, but when Attilius took a step towards him he held up his hands in surrender and retreated to the landing. The engineer closed the broken door on him and listened to his footsteps descending to the bar.

  He went around the room, reassembling it so that he could get an impression of how it had looked, as if by doing so he might conjure some clue as to what else it had held. He laid the eviscerated mattress back on the bed and placed the pillow – also slashed – at the head. He folded the thin blanket. He lay down. When he turned his head he noticed a pattern of small black marks on the wall and he saw that they were made by squashed insects. He imagined Exomnius lying here in the heat, killing bed bugs, and wondered why, if he was taking bribes from Ampliatus, he had chosen to live like a pauper. Perhaps he had spent all his money on whores? But that did not seem possible. A tumble with one of Africanus’s girls could not have cost more than a couple of copper coins.

  A floorboard creaked.

  He sat up very slowly and turned to look at the door. The moving shadows of a pair of feet showed clearly beneath the cheap wood and for a moment he was sure it must be Exomnius, come to demand an explanation from this stranger who had taken his job and invaded his property and was now lying on his bed in his ransacked room. ‘Who’s there?’ he called, and when the door opened slowly and he saw it was only Zmyrina, he felt oddly disappointed. ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘What do you want? I told your master to leave me alone.’

  She stood on the threshold. Her dress was split, to show her long legs. She had a fading purple bruise the size of a fist on her thigh. She gazed around the room and put her hands to her mouth in horror. ‘Who done this?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘He said he take care for me.’

  ‘What?’

  She came further into the room. ‘He said when come back he take care for me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Aelianus. He said.’

  It took him a beat to work out who she meant – Exomnius. Exomnius Aelianus. She was the first person he had met who had used the aquarius’s given, rather than his family, name. That just about summed him up. His only intimate – a whore. ‘Well he isn’t coming back,’ he said roughly, ‘to take care for you. Or for anyone else.’

  She passed the back of her hand under her nose a couple of times and he realised that she was crying. ‘He dead?’

  ‘You tell me.’ Attilius softened his tone. ‘The truth is, no one knows.’

  ‘Buy me from Africanus. He said. No whore everyone. Special him. Understand?’ She touched her chest and gestured to Attilius, then touched herself again.

  ‘Yes, I understand.’

  He looked at Zmyrina with new interest. It was not uncommon, he knew, especially in this part of Italy. The foreign sailors, when they left the Navy after their twenty-five years’ service and were granted Roman citizenship – the first thing most of them did with their demob money was head for the nearest slave-market and buy themselves a wife. The prostitute was kneeling now, picking up the scattered clothes and folding them, putting them away in the chest. And perhaps it was a point in Exomnius’s favour, he thought, that he should have decided to choose her, rather than someone younger or prettier. Or, then again, perhaps he was just lying and never intended to come back for her. Either way, her future had more or less disappeared along with her principal client.

  ‘He had the money, did he? Enough money to buy you? Only you wouldn’t think it, to look at this place.’

  ‘Not here.’ She sat back on h
er heels and looked up at him with scorn. ‘Not safe money here. Money hidden. Plenty money. Some place clever. Nobody find. He said. Nobody.’

  ‘Somebody has tried –’

  ‘Money not here.’

  She was emphatic. No doubt she had searched for it often enough when he wasn’t around. ‘Did he ever tell you where this place was?’

  She stared at him, her vermillion mouth wide open, and suddenly she bent her head. Her shoulders were shaking. He thought at first she was crying again but when she turned he saw that the glint in her eyes was from tears of laughter. ‘No!’ She started rocking again. She looked almost girlish in her delight. She clapped her hands. It was the funniest thing she had ever heard, and he had to agree – the idea of Exomnius confiding in a whore of Africanus where he had hidden his money – it was funny. He began laughing himself, then swung his feet to the floor.

  There was no point in wasting any more time here.

  On the landing he glanced back at her, still kneeling on her haunches in her split dress, one of Exomnius’s tunics pressed to her face.

  Attilius hurried back the way he had come, along the shadowy side street. He thought, This must have been Exomnius’s route from the brothel to the castellum aquae. This must have been what he saw whenever he came here – the whores and drunks, the puddles of piss and patches of vomit baked to crusts in the gutter, the graffiti on the walls, the little effigies of Priapus beside the doorways, with his enormous jutting cock dangling bells at its tip to ward off evil. So what was in his head as he walked this way for the final time? Zmyrina? Ampliatus? The safety of his hidden money?

  He looked back over his shoulder but no one was paying him any attention. Still, he was glad to reach the wide central thoroughfare and the safety of its glaring light.

  The town remained much quieter than it had been in the morning, the heat of the sun keeping most people off the road, and he made quick progress up the hill towards the Vesuvius Gate. As he approached the small square in front of the castellum aquae he could see the oxen and the carts, now fully laden with tools and materials. A small crowd of men sprawled in the dirt outside a bar, laughing at something. The horse he had hired was tethered to its post. And here was Polites – faithful Polites, the most trustworthy member of the workgang – advancing to meet him.

  ‘You were gone a long while, aquarius.’

  Attilius ignored the tone of reproach. ‘I’m here now. Where is Musa?’

  ‘Still not here.’

  ‘What?’ He swore and cupped his hand to his eyes to check the position of the sun. It must be four hours – no, nearer five – since the others had ridden off. He had expected to receive some word by now. ‘How many men do we have?’

  ‘Twelve.’ Polites rubbed his hands together uneasily.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘They’re a rough-looking lot, aquarius.’

  ‘Are they? Their manners don’t concern me. As long as they can work.’

  ‘They’ve been drinking for an hour.’

  ‘Then they’d better stop.’

  Attilius crossed the square to the bar. Ampliatus had promised a dozen of his strongest slaves and once again he had more than kept his word. It looked as if he had supplied a troop of gladiators. A flagon of wine was being handed around, from one pair of tattooed arms to another, and to pass the time they had fetched Tiro from the castellum and were playing a game with him. One of them had snatched off the water-slave’s felt cap and whenever he turned helplessly in the direction of whoever he thought was holding it, it would be tossed to someone else.

  ‘Cut that out,’ said the engineer. ‘Leave the lad alone.’ They ignored him. He spoke up more loudly. ‘I am Marcus Attilius, aquarius of the Aqua Augusta, and you men are under my command now.’ He snatched Tiro’s cap and pressed it into his hand. ‘Go back to the castellum, Tiro.’ And then, to the slave gang: ‘That’s enough drinking. We’re moving out.’

  The man whose turn it was with the wine regarded Attilius with indifference. He raised the clay jar to his mouth, threw back his head and drank. Wine dribbled down his chin and on to his chest. There was an appreciative cheer and Attilius felt the anger ignite inside himself. To train so hard, to build and work, to pour so much skill and ingenuity into the aqueducts – and all to carry water to such brutes as these, and Africanus. They would be better left to wallow beside some mosquito-infested swamp. ‘Who is the senior man among you?’

  The drinker lowered the flagon. ‘“The senior man,”’ he mocked. ‘What is this? The fucking army?’

  ‘You are drunk,’ said Attilius quietly. ‘But I am sober, and in a hurry. Now move.’ He lashed out with his foot and caught the flagon, knocking it out of the drinker’s hand. It spun away and landed on its side, where it lay, unbroken, emptying itself across the stones. For a moment, in the silence, the glug-glug of the wine was the only sound, and then there was a rush of activity – the men rising, shouting, the drinker lunging forward, with the apparent intention of sinking his teeth into Attilius’s leg. Through all this commotion, one booming voice rang louder than the rest – ‘Stop!’ – and an enormous man, well over six feet tall, came running across the square and planted himself between Attilius and the others. He spread out his arms to keep them back.

  ‘I am Brebix,’ he said. ‘A freed man.’ He had a coarse red beard, trimmed, shovel-shaped. ‘If anyone is senior, I am.’

  ‘Brebix.’ Attilius nodded. He would remember that name. This one, he saw, actually was a gladiator, or rather an ex-gladiator. He had the brand of his troop on his arm, a snake drawing back to strike. ‘You should have been here an hour ago. Tell these men that if they have any complaints, they should take them to Ampliatus. Tell them that none has to come with me, but any who stay behind will have to answer for it to their master. Now get those wagons out through the gate. I’ll meet you on the other side of the city wall.’

  He turned, and the crowd of drinkers from the other bars, who had come thronging into the square in the hope of seeing a fight, stood aside to let him pass. He was trembling and he had to clench his fist in his palm to stop it showing. ‘Polites!’ he called.

  ‘Yes?’ The slave eased his way through the mob.

  ‘Fetch me my horse. We’ve wasted long enough here.’

  Polites looked anxiously towards Brebix, now leading the reluctant work gang over to the wagons. ‘These men, aquarius – I don’t trust them.’

  ‘Neither do I. But what else can we do? Come on. Get my horse. We’ll meet up with Musa on the road.’

  As Polites hurried away, Attilius glanced down the hill. Pompeii was less like a seaside resort, more like a frontier garrison: a boom town. Ampliatus was rebuilding her in his own image. He would not be sorry if he never saw her again – apart from Corelia. He wondered what she was doing, but even as the image of her wading towards him through the glittering pool began to form in his mind he forced himself to banish it. Get out of here, get to the Augusta, get the water running, and then get back to Misenum and check the aqueduct’s records for evidence of what Exomnius had been up to. Those were his priorities. To think of anything else was foolish.

  In the shadow of the castellum aquae Tiro crouched, and Attilius was on the point of raising his hand in farewell, until he saw those flickering, sightless eyes.

  The public sundial showed it was well into the ninth hour when Attilius passed on horseback beneath the long vault of the Vesuvius Gate. The ring of hooves on stone echoed like a small detachment of cavalry. The customs official poked his head out of his booth to see what was happening, yawned and turned away.

  The engineer had never been a natural rider. For once, though, he was glad to be mounted. It gave him height, and he needed every advantage he could get. When he trotted over to Brebix and the men they were obliged to squint up at him, screwing their eyes against the glare of the sky.

  ‘We follow the line of the aqueduct towards Vesuvius,’ he said. The horse wheeled and he had to shout ov
er his shoulder. ‘And no dawdling. I want us in position before dark.’

  ‘In position where?’ asked Brebix.

  ‘I don’t know yet. It should be obvious when we see it.’

  His vagueness provoked an uneasy stir among the men – and who could blame them? He would have liked to have known where he was going himself. Damn Musa! He brought his mount under control and turned it towards the open country. He raised himself from the saddle so that he could see the course of the road beyond the necropolis. It ran straight towards the mountain through neat, rectangular fields of olive trees and corn, separated by low stone walls and ditches – centuriated land, awarded to demobbed legionaries decades ago. There was not much traffic on the paved highway – a cart or two, a few pedestrians. No sign of any plume of dust that might be thrown up by a galloping horseman. Damn him, damn him . . .

  Brebix said, ‘Some of the lads aren’t too keen on being out near Vesuvius after nightfall.’

  ‘Why not?’

  A man called out, ‘The giants!’

  ‘Giants?’

  Brebix said, almost apologetically, ‘Giants have been seen, aquarius, bigger than any man. Wandering over the earth by day and night. Sometimes journeying through the air. Their voices sound like claps of thunder.’

  ‘Perhaps they are claps of thunder,’ said Attilius. ‘Have you considered that? There can be thunder without rain.’

  ‘Aye, but this thunder is never in the air. It’s on the ground. Or even under the ground.’

  ‘So this is why you drink?’ Attilius forced himself to laugh. ‘Because you are scared to be outside the city walls after dark? And you were a gladiator, Brebix? I’m glad I never wagered money on you! Or did your troop only ever fight blind boys?’ Brebix began to swear, but the engineer talked over his head, to the work gang. ‘I asked your master to lend me men, not women! We’ve argued long enough! We have to go five miles before dark. Perhaps ten. Now drive those oxen forward, and follow me.’

  He dug his heels into the flanks of his horse and it started off at a slow trot. He passed along the avenue between the tombs. Flowers and small offerings of food had been left on some, to mark the Festival of Vulcan. A few people were picnicking in the shade of the cypresses. Small black lizards scattered across the stone vaults like spreading cracks. He did not look back. The men would follow, he was sure. He had goaded them into it and they were scared of Ampliatus.