Marina became noticeably cooler herself; she must have sensed a force to be reckoned with. Helena, in the same stately blue outfit as yesterday (still registering independence), seated herself gracefully as if she had been asked. ‘How do you do?’ This voice was quiet, cultured, and effortlessly satirical. Marina’s sense of humour was basic; basically, she didn’t have one. She looked tense.
Helena made no attempt to register disapproval. It only increased the impression that she was privately sizing up the situation and intended some swift changes. Marina was known for panicking every time the sparrows cheeped; she went pale under the purplish tones of her cheek paint and flailed around for rescue. ‘Have you come to see the baby, Marcus?’
There was no sign of little Marcia, so the child must be parked elsewhere. I had already had a few arguments about that habit. Marina’s idea of a suitable nurse for a four-year-old was Statia, a tipsy second-hand clothes dealer married to an expelled priest. Since he had been expelled from the Temple of Isis, whose attendants had the worst reputation in Rome, his habits had to be pretty seedy. ‘I’ll get someone to fetch her,’ Marina mumbled hastily.
‘Do that!’
She rushed out. Helena sat extremely still. I managed to avoid indulging in nervous chat, and stood about looking like the man in charge.
Marina returned. ‘Marcus is so fond of my daughter!’
‘Tact has never been your strong point!’ Ever since she informed my family what had gone on between us, my relationship with Marina had had formal overtones. At one point we could not afford to quarrel; now we were too remote to bother. But there was an edge.
‘He loves children!’ Marina gushed, this time directed even more plainly at Helena.
‘So he does. And what I like,’ Helena returned sweetly, ‘is the way it doesn’t matter whose they are.’
Marina needed time to take this in.
I watched my brother’s girlfriend staring at mine: beauty in the unfamiliar presence of strong will. She looked like a puppy sniffing at a strange beetle that seemed likely to spring up and bite its nose. Helena, meanwhile, conveyed lightness, discretion and sheer class. But our hostess was right to be nervous; this was someone who could bite.
I tried to take things in hand. ‘Marina, there’s a problem with a dodge Festus was running. I have to talk to you.’
‘Festus never told me about his dodges.’
‘Everyone keeps saying that.’
‘It’s true. He was a tight one.’
‘Not tight enough. He promised some soldiers to make them a fortune. He let them down and now they’re coming on to the family to make it up to them. I wouldn’t care, but one of them has been sent down to Hades and circumstantial evidence strongly points to me.’
‘Oh, but surely you didn’t do it!’ The girl was an idiot. I used to think she was bright. (Bright enough to rook me, though she would break a logic tutor’s heart.)
‘Oh don’t be ridiculous, Marina!’ She was wearing saffron yellow, a colour so clear it hurt the eyes; even in this weather she went bare-armed. She had beautiful arms. On them she wore a whole rack of bracelets that rattled continually. I found the noise highly irritating. ‘Be sensible!’ I commanded. Marina looked offended by this advice; I thought Helena smiled. ‘What do you know about Greek statues?’
Marina crossed her legs and gave me the full eye treatment. ‘Offhand, Marcus, not much that I can think of!’
‘I’m not asking for a lecture on Praxiteles. What do you know about any plans Festus had for importing the stuff and flogging it to rich people?’
‘It was probably with help from Geminus.’
‘Do you actually know that?’
‘Well it sounds right, doesn’t it?’
‘Nothing in the story sounds right! The whole business sounds like trouble-and we’re all in it. If I go to trial for murder that’s the end of my funds, Marina. Put your mind on that practical issue, take a grip on yourself and think back.’
She set herself in the pose of a very attractive, fairly thoughtful woman. As a statue she would have been high art. As a witness she remained useless. ‘Honestly, I don’t really know.’
‘He must have talked to you about something, sometimes!’
‘Why? Business was business, bed was bed.’ This topic was too uncomfortable.
‘Marina, I’m trying to remember things myself. Was he restless on that last visit to Rome? Preoccupied? Anxious about anything?’
She shrugged.
She could. She didn’t have Petronius Longus writing her name on a certificate of arrest while Marponius hopped from one foot to another just waiting to bang his seal ring on it.
‘Well you were there!’ smirked Marina. The implication was pointed, and quite unnecessary.
At this point a neighbour galloped in, carrying my niece. Marina seized the child with a relieved glance of thanks, the neighbour fled, and we all prepared for trouble. Marcia looked around, assessed the audience like a professional, then threw back her head and screamed.
Marina was bluffing madly as she tried to soothe her offspring. ‘See what you’ve done, Marcus.’ She was a fond, though vague mother, who suffered unreasonably at Marcia’s hands. Marcia had never been one to co-operate. She had a keen sense of occasion. She knew exactly when a tormented wail could make her mother appear like a monster. ‘She was perfectly happy. She likes going to play at Statia’s-‘
‘She’s showing off as usual. Give her here!’
As Marina weakly passed the child to me, Helena intercepted. Marcia fell into her arms like a galley hitting dock, then stopped screaming and settled on Helena’s lap looking blissfully good. It was a fraud, but well timed to make both her mother and uncle feel inadequate. ‘Let me see what I can do with her,’ Helena murmured innocently. ‘Then you two can talk.’ She knew Marcia. They made a fine pair of conspirators.
‘She loves it at Statia’s,’ Marina muttered again defensively.
I was annoyed. ‘You mean she loves dressing up in filthy cast-off rags, and being allowed to eat the musical bars out of the ex-priest’s sistrum!’
‘You don’t know that they neglect her.’
‘I do know I’ve seen Marcia do an impressive imitation of Statia falling over drunk!’ She also liked singing obscene hymns to Isis and mimicking suggestive rites. The child was a natural for the low life.
Marcia gazed lovingly at Helena, as if all this was news to her. Helena kissed her curly head consolingly. ‘Don’t worry, darling. It’s only Uncle Marcus having one of his quaint fits.’
I growled. No one was impressed.
I sank on to a stool, burying my head in my arms.
‘Uncle Marcus is crying!’ giggled Marcia, intrigued. Helena whispered something, then put her down so Marcia could run to me. She flung her fat arms round my neck and gave me a smacking wet kiss. A worrying smell of wine lees hung around her. ‘Uncle Marcus needs a shave.’ She was a frank, open-hearted child. Maybe that was why I worried about her. She would be a frank, open-hearted woman one day.
I picked her up. She always seemed tougher and heavier than I expected. Marina had hung a tawdry bead anklet on one chubby foot and let Marcia paint red spots on her cheeks. Somebody, probably at Statia’s, had given her a grotesque amulet. I had to close my mind to these details or I would have really lost my temper.
Holding my brother’s oddly solid child, I tried reconstructing his last night in Rome yet again. Marina had said it: I was there all right. Any clues should be apparent to me, if only I could remember them.
‘I do reckon he was edgy.’ I was trying to convince myself. Marina only shrugged again in her distant, disinterested way. With those shoulders and that bust, she went in for shrugs on principle. The principle was: knock ‘em dead. ‘Old Festus was skipping on his toes that last night. Olympus knows what caused it, though. I doubt if it was the thought of going back to Judaea. He didn’t care if the arrows were flying; he thought he could duck. Marina, do you remember that gang o
f ghastly wall artists he picked up?’
‘I remember the girl at the Circus Max!’ Marina said, with force. ‘I’m damned sure he picked her up!’
‘Can’t say I noticed,’ I mumbled, trying to avoid a scene. Helena was watching us with the tolerant expression of an intellectual at Pompey’s Theatre enduring the ghastly farce while awaiting a serious Greek tragedy. If she had had a handful of almonds, she would have been eating them one at a time with the tips of her teeth. ‘Marina, think about those graffiti merchants. They were gruesome. Where did they come from? I assumed he didn’t know them, but are we sure?’
‘Festus knew everyone. If he didn’t know them when he went into the bar, he would know them by the time he left.’
Making cronies of a barful of people was his signature. ‘He had his moments, but normally he drew the line at slaves and wall painters. He was making out to us that those posers were strangers. Did you know them yourself?’
‘Just some tricksters at the Virgin. Their usual ghastly clientele-‘
‘The Virgin?’ I had forgotten the name. Festus would have thought it a great joke. ‘Is that where we ended up?’
‘It’s a terrible place.’
‘That part I remember.’
‘I’d never seen them before.’
‘It must be quite near here. Do you still hang around there?’
‘Only if somebody pays me to go.’ Marina was as frank as her winsome child.
‘Have you ever seen those artists again?’
‘Not that I recall. Mind you, if I was desperate enough to be in the Virgin, I was probably too tipsy to spot my own grandmother.’
‘Or you wouldn’t want your granny to spot you.’ Even at eighty-four Marina’s old granny would have made a good Praetorian Guard. She liked hitting first and asking questions afterwards. She was three feet high, and her right upper-cut was legendary.
‘Oh no! Granny drinks at the Four Fish,’ Marina solemnly put me right.
I sighed, gently.
XX
Helena could see I was growing exasperated at the way this conversation jerked about.
‘What we need to ascertain,’ she intervened, in a tone so reasonable I felt my left foot kick out angrily, ‘is whether Didius Festus was contacting somebody in particular on his last home leave. Somebody who can tell us what his plans were. Why are you asking about the artists, Marcus? He could have been arranging business at any time during his leave. Was there really something special about his last night-and about that group?’
Suddenly Marina declared, ‘There certainly was!’ I started to feel hot. She was oozing indiscretion, though it did not come immediately. ‘For one thing,’ she said, ‘Festus was jumping like a cat on a griddle. You noticed that-you just said so, Marcus. That wasn’t like him. Normally he breezed into places and stirred everyone else up, but he let the excitement flow over him.’
‘That’s true. And he could hardly wait to drag us on from one bar to the next. Normally once he got comfortable he wouldn’t shift. That night he kept dodging on to new squats every five minutes.’
‘As if he was looking for someone?’ suggested Helena quietly.
‘For another thing,’ Marina pressed on inexorably, ‘there was the little matter of him sending me off with you!’
‘We don’t need to resurrect that,’ I said. Well, I had to try.
‘Don’t mind me,’ smiled Helena. The knives were out all round.
‘Suit yourself,’ sniffed Marina. ‘But Marcus, if you really want to know what he was up to that evening, I think this little incident needs considering.’
‘Why?’ Helena asked her, bright with unhealthy interest.
‘It’s obvious. It was a blatant fix. He annoyed me over the brunette, then he got up sunshine’s nose as well.’
‘Doing what? What offended sunshine?’
‘Oh I can’t remember. Just Festus being himself, probably. He could behave like a short-arsed squit.’
I said, ‘Looking back, I can see he was trying to get rid of both of us-despite the fact it was our last chance of seeing him, maybe for years.’
‘You were both very fond of him?’
Marina threw up her hands elegantly. ‘Oh gods, yes! We were both planning to stick to him like clams. He had no chance of keeping secrets. Even getting us to leave the Virgin was not safe enough. We would both have been back. Well, I would. If I had gone home and he hadn’t turned up soon afterwards, I would have stormed out again looking for him-I knew where to look, too.’
Helena glanced at me for confirmation. ‘Marina’s right. Festus was often elusive, but we were used to it. She had dragged him away from drinks counters in the early hours of the morning on many occasions. It was their natural way of life.’
‘What about you?’
‘As it was his last night, once I sobered up a bit I might well have gone back to toast his health again. I knew his haunts as well as Marina did. If he wanted any privacy, then he had to shoot us off somewhere, and make it stick.’
‘So he annoyed both of you deliberately, then threw you together?’
‘Obvious!’ Marina said. ‘Marcus had always been jealous of Festus. This loon had been eyeing me up for years-so why did Festus suddenly present him with the goods after all that time?’
I felt surly. ‘I seem to be coming out of this as weak, cheap, and sly.’ They both looked at me in silence. ‘Well thanks!’
Marina patted my wrist. ‘Oh you’re all right! Anyway, he owed you enough; no one could say otherwise. What about that business with your client?’
She genuinely puzzled me with that one. ‘What client?’
‘The woman who hired you to find her dog.’ I had forgotten the damned dog. The female client now returned to mind quite easily-and not only because she was one of the first I ever had after I set up as an informer.
‘It was a British hunting hound,’ I told Helena hastily. ‘Very valuable. Superb pedigree and could run like the wind. The daft creature was supposed to be guarding the woman’s clothes at some bathhouse; a slave stepped on his tail accidentally and he ran off like stink down the Via Flaminia. The young lady was heartbroken…’ It still sounded an unlikely tale.
‘Well you’ve been in Britain!’ Helena Justina said gently. She knew how to cast aspersions. ‘I expect you have a special affinity with British dogs.’ Oh yes. Lovely work for a professional; every informer ought to learn how to call ‘Here boy!’ in at least twelve languages. Five years later the jobs I was taking on seemed just as motley. ‘Did you find him?’ Helena pressed.
‘Who?’
‘The dog, Marcus.’
‘Oh! Yes.’
‘I bet your lady client was really grateful!’ Helena understood more about my business than I liked.
‘Come off it. You know I never sleep with clients.’ She gave me a look; Helena had been my client once herself. Telling her she was different from all the others somehow never carried weight.
The woman in search of the lost doggie had had more money than sense and astounding looks. My professional ethics were of course unimpeachable-but I had certainly considered making a play for her. At the time big brother Festus had convinced me that tangling with the moneyed classes was a bad idea. Now Marina’s words cast a subtle doubt. I gazed at her. She giggled. She obviously assumed I had known what was going on; now I finally saw the reason Festus had advised me to steer clear of the pretty dog owner: he had been bedding her himself.
‘Actually,’ I told Helena gloomily, ‘it was Festus who found the bloody dog.’
‘Of course it was,’ Marina piped in. ‘He had it tied up at my house all along. I was livid. Festus pinched it from the baths so he could get to know the fancy skirt.’ My brother, the hero! ‘Didn’t you twig?’
‘Ah Marcus!’ Helena soothed me, at her kindest (not so kind as all that). ‘I bet you never got your bill paid either?’
True.
I was feeling abused.
‘Look, when you
two have finished mocking, I have things to do today-‘
‘Of course you have,’ smiled Helena, as if she was suggesting I should hide in a barrel for a few hours until my blushes cooled.
‘That’s right. Repolishing my grimy reputation won’t be a quick job.’ It was best to be straight with her, especially when she was sounding facetious but looking as if she was trying to remember where she last put the vial of rat poison.
I kissed Marcia resoundingly and gave the child back to her mother. ‘Thanks for the hospitality. If you remember anything helpful, let me know at once. I’m due for the public strangler otherwise.’ Helena stood up. I put my arm round her shoulders and said to Marina, ‘As you see, my time should really be being taken up by this lovely girl.’
Helena permitted herself a complacent sniff.
‘Are you two getting married?’ Marina asked sympathetically.
‘Of course!’ we both chimed. As a couple we lied well.
‘Oh that’s nice! I wish you both every happiness.’
One thing must always be said for Marina: she had a good heart.
XXI
I informed Helena I had had enough supervision for one day and was going to my next appointment alone. Helena knew when to let me make a stand. I felt she acquiesced too graciously, but that was better than a fight in the open street.
We were virtually at her parents’ house, so I took her for a daughterly visit. I made sure I escorted her to within sight of the door. Stopping for goodbyes gave me a chance to hold her hand. She could manage without consolation, but I needed it.
‘Don’t hate me, sweetheart.’
‘No, Marcus.’ She would be a fool not to view me with caution, however. Her face looked guarded. ‘I always knew you had a colourful life behind you.’
‘Don’t judge me too harshly.’
‘I think you’re doing that yourself.’ Maybe somebody had to. ‘Marina seems a nice girl,’ Helena said. I knew what that meant.
‘You’re hoping someone some day will snap her up.’
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