A Body in the Bathhouse (21 page)

The resulting slabs would then be stacked vertically according to their thickness and quality. Lying around haphazardly were a number of broken blocks, which must have shattered under the saw. Elsewhere fine sheets had been laid out on benches and were now being smoothed to a high finish with ironstone blocks and water.

As I wandered around, I was amazed by the color and variety of the marble being worked on. It all seemed a little premature, given that the new building was only at foundation stage. Perhaps that was because the materials were coming from far-flung places and needed to be acquired well in advance. Preparation on-site would take a very long time, in view of the huge scale of the proposed palace.

The head marble mason found me watching. He dragged me into his hut. There I readily accepted the offer of a hot drink—since he had despaired of Iggidunus and was brewing up his own on a small tripod.

“I’m Falco. You’re—?”

“Milchato.” They were a cosmopolitan bunch here. Who knows where he hailed from with a name like that? Africa or Tripolitania. Egypt, possibly. He had grizzled gray hair, but his skin was dark; so was his narrow beard. His origin must be somewhere the web-footed Phoenicians left their mark. Or raking up old sores, let’s call it somewhere Carthaginian.

“Worth the fire risk.” I grinned as he blew on the charcoal burner, heating up wine in a small bronze folding saucepan. A man who tolerated life in a temporary camp by bringing his own battery of comforts. It reminded me, with a pang, of my efficient friend Lucius Petronius. Britain was where he and I served in the army. I was seriously missing Petro. “I’ve been looking at your stock. I thought most of the planned decoration on the palace would be paint—but Togidubnus seems to like his marble too. I’m staying in the old house; there’s quite a range there. Surely it’s not local?”

“Some.” He sprinkled dry herbs in two beakers. “You’ll see a bluish colored British stone. Slightly rough.” Ferreting among the clutter, he tossed me a piece of it. “Comes from down the coast to westward. And what else has the old fella got? Oh, there’s a red from the Mediterranean—and some brown speckled stuff from Gaul, if I remember.”

“You worked on the old house?”

“I was just a lad!” He grinned.

Like the other craftsmen, he had a vast array of samples scattered around him. Irregular pieces of multicolored marble lay everywhere. A few had tablets pegged under them, with what must be firm orders for the new scheme. Leaning casually against the hut’s doorframe, used as a doorstop, was a superb finished panel of inlaid veneers with a pentagon set in a circle. I picked up a delicate molding with a seductive shine. It looked like a dado rail or a border between panels.

“Fillets!” exclaimed Milchato. “I like a few carved fillets.”

“This is exquisite. And I’ve rarely seen so many types of marble in one place.”

Milchato demonstrated offhandedly. They came from places far apart: the blue stone, plus a similar gray, from Britain and then crystalline white from the central hills of distant Phrygia. He had a fine green-and-white-veined type from the foothills of the Pyrenees, a yellow and white from Gaul, more than one variety from Greece. …

“Your import costs must be staggering!”

Milchato shrugged. “That’s why there will be quite a lot of paintwork—including mock marbling.” He seemed relaxed about it. “They’ve brought a lad over to do it. Naturally it’s not his field; he’s really a landscape specialist—”

“Typical!” I sympathized.

“Oh … Blandus knows him. Jobs for the guild, you know. Some smartarse from Stabiae—it’s no problem; I can train him in what marble really looks like. The young fellow’s all right, quite bright really—for a painter.” Milchato drained his beaker. He must have a throat that could swallow hot bitumen. “My contract is big enough to keep me busy and, believe me, Falco, I can buy what I want. Free hand. Authority to draw on resources from anywhere in the Empire. Can’t ask for more than that.”

But could he, though? Was he somehow padding his salary? I would have to check how much stone was being imported and whether it was all still here.

“I’ll be frank,” I said. “You know I am here to look for problems. There may be diddling with the marble.”

Milchato gazed at me, wide-eyed. He was giving his most careful attention to this theory of mine. If he studied it any more seriously, I would think he was mocking me. “Whoops! Do you think so?”

“I wouldn’t insult you by claiming it, otherwise,” I replied dryly.

“That’s terrible. … Surely a mistake.” He ran one hand over his beard which rasped as if he had tough hairs and dry skin.

“Do you rule it out?” Only an idiot rules out fraud anywhere on a building site.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Falco.” Now he was being open and helpful. “No, it’s entirely possible. … In fact, you may well be right.”

This was easy. I always like that. “Any ideas?”

“The sawyers!” cried Milchato at once, almost eagerly. Yes, it was very easy. Loyalty to his labor force was not his strong feature. Still, I was the man from Rome; he would feel even less respect for me. “Bound to be them. Some of them deliberately use too coarse a grain of sand when they’re cutting. It wears away more than necessary of the slabs. We have to order more material. The client pays. The sawyers split the difference with the marble supplier.”

“Are you sure of it?”

“I have had my own suspicions for a while. This fiddle is famous. Oldest trick in the book.”

“Milchato, that is extremely helpful.” I rose to leave. He came to the door with me. I slapped him around the shoulders. “I’m glad I called on you. This will save me days of work, you know. Now I’m going to leave you with it for a while; I want you to look out for the trick, and see if you can put a stop to it. I could order the bastards to be sent home again, but we’re really stuck out here. I can’t lose them. Obtaining new labor for a specialism is too difficult.”

“I’ll jump on it, Falco,” he promised gravely.

“Good man!” I said.

It was time to leave. He had another visitor. An elderly man in a Roman tunic, wrapped in a dramatic long scarlet cape and with a traveling hat. He acted as if he was somebody—but whoever it was, I was not introduced. Though Milchato and I parted on good terms, I was sure the marble master waited deliberately until I left the area. Only then did he greet his next visitor properly.

It was decent of him to admit the fault. If all the supervisors with scheming workmen came through so well, I would soon be going home.

On the other hand, when any witness in an enquiry owned up too readily, my habit was to look around to see what he was
really
hiding.

Iggidunus brought his five barred gates late that afternoon. They started off large, then became smaller as he ran out of space on his tablet. I could see at once that if his count was vaguely accurate, my fears were correct.

“Thanks. Just what I wanted.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me what it’s for, Falco?” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Gaius, head down over his work, looking apprehensive.

“Auditing pottery,” I decreed smoothly. “The storekeeper isn’t happy. Seems we’ve had too many beaker breakages on-site.”

Iggidunus, thinking he would get the blame, scurried off hastily.

Gaius and I at once grabbed the tablet and started to set our official labor records against the numbers who were actually here on-site according to the
mulsum
round. The discrepancy was not as bad as I had expected, but then they were still digging foundations and the current complement was low. When the walls of the new palace started rising, I knew Cyprianus was due to take on a very large group of general masons, plus stonecutters to shape and face the ashlar blocks, scaffolders, barrow boys, and mortar mixers. That would be any day now. If we acquired nonexistent workers in the same proportions, our numbers would at that point be out by nearly five hundred. In army terms, someone would be defrauding the Tresaury of the daily cost of a whole cohort of men.

The clerk was extremely excited. “Are we going to report this, Falco?”

“Not straightaway.”

“But—”

“I want to sit on it.” He did not understand.

Discovering that a fraud exists is only the first step. It has to be proved—and the proof has to be absolutely watertight.

XXVI

I
WHISTLED TO
Nux and took her on a walk. She wanted to go home for her dinner, but I needed the exercise. As I plodded along, lost in thought, she looked up at me as if she thought her master had gone crazy. First I’d dragged her on a frightening ship, then an immense journey overland, and finally I brought her to this place where there were no pavements and the sun had died. Half the human legs she sniffed were clad in hairy woolen trousers. Nux was born a city dog, a sophisticated Roman layabout. Like me, she wanted to be kicked at by the bare-legged bullies of home.

I took her to the painters’ hut, hoping to ask the assistant about Blandus’ progress. There was no sight of this lad everybody talked about. I did see more of what must be his work. In the blank space where someone had previously written
LAPIS BLUE HERE
, that note was now scrawled out and a different hand had added
POMPONIUS TOO MEAN: BLUE FRIT
! Perhaps that was the assistant. Some deep blue paint was mixed in a bucket, no doubt ready to obliterate the graffiti before the project manager saw it.

Since I was last here, someone had tried out new types of marbling. Blue and green paints were smeared together in an artistic technique he had not quite mastered, with pairs of symmetrical patches like the mirrored patterns of split-open marble blocks. Endless squares of better-executed dull pink-and-red veining had been added to the chaos. There was a landscape panel, a stunning turquoise seascape, with finely touched white villas on a shore that looked exactly like Surentum or Herculaneum. No, it was Stabiae, of course—whence the smartarse had been fetched.

Light seemed to dance off the waves. With a few competent brush strokes the artist had created a haunting miniature holiday scene. It made me long for the Mediterranean. …

The fresco assistant had loafed off somewhere. Given what Cyprianus said about painters, he might be after some woman. It had better not be one of my party.

In the hut next door I did find the bereaved mosaicist, Philocles Junior.

“I’m sorry about what happened to your father.”

“They say you hit him!”

“Not hard.” The son was obviously all fired up. “Keep calm. He was going mad and had to be restrained.”

The son took after his father, I could see. It seemed best not to hang about. I had too much to do; this was no time to start making myself a slow-burning, brooding enemy. If Philocles Junior wanted a feud in his late father’s mold, he must look elsewhere.

I led Nux past the parked wagons, hunting for Aelianus. He was lying in the statue cart not quite asleep today, but looking bored. Recognizing him, Nux jumped on him happily

“Ugh! Get it off me.”

“Not a dog lover?”

“I spend half my time hiding from the guard dogs from the secure compound.”

“Fierce?”

“Man-eaters. They bring the pack out once a day, looking for human flesh they can train them with.”

“Ah, British dogs have a tremendous reputation, Aulus.”

“They’re gruesome. I was expecting them to howl all night—but their silence is worse, somehow. The handlers can hardly hold them. They snake around, virtually towing the men, searching for someone who’s stupid enough to try running away. It’s clear they’d kill anyone who did. I think the handlers bring the dogs out so would-be thieves see them and are too terrified to break in.”

“So you’re not going over the fence to pick up a new fountain bowl for your father’s garden?”

“Don’t joke.”

“All right. I don’t want to have to tell your mother I found you with your throat torn out. … Anything to report?”

“No.”

“I’ll be off, then. Stick with it.”

“Can’t I stop doing this, Falco?”

“No.”

Nux and I set off to our elegant royal quarters for dinner, leaving Aelianus out in the damp woods. As I started walking back, I wondered how his brother was, and when Justinus might manage to send me word of his activities. My assistants and I were too scattered. I needed a runner. At home I could have brought in one of my teenage nephews; here there was no one I could trust.

Nux was rooting. This was better. She had learned that in Britain there were at least ways of getting her hair full of twigs, and her snout earthy. Maybe the guard dogs had left fascinating messages as they passed this way. She spent long pauses with her nose in the leaf litter at the side of our track; then she tired of that and rushed crazily after me, dragging a large branch and barking hoarsely.

“Nux, let’s show the barbarians some Forum manners, please—
don’t roll in that!
” Too late. “Bad dog.” Nux, who had never grasped the finer points of reprimands, wagged her tail frenetically.

Why had I taken in a reckless street mongrel with a taste for dung as an unguent, when other Romans acquired sleek lapdogs with long pointed noses to appear in the stone plaques they commissioned? Father togaed and serious with a scroll, mother matronly and bestowed, infants tidy, slaves respectful, moneybags flaunted—and clean pet gazing up at them adoringly … I should have known better. I could at least have let myself be picked by a dog with short hair.

Mine was happy now she stank. She had simple taste. We walked on. Gloomily I pondered the possibility of taking Nux through the Great King’s bathhouse. It could have raw consequences. Ever since the official insensitivity that led to Boudicca and the Great Rebellion, all Romans who came to Britain were required to conduct themselves with clean-hands diplomacy. No rape, no plundering inheritances, no racial abuse, and absolutely no cleaning muck off your dog in a tribal king’s domestic plunge bath.

I was trying to call her back to me, with a view to attaching a rope to her so she did not rush indoors before I had had a chance to sluice her down, when Nux found new excitement. A pile of rough-hewn tree trunks had slipped. I could see that, because some were spilt across the track. Nux dashed up the remaining pile, scrabbling.