A Body in the Bathhouse (31 page)

Now, Maia had reflected on how she would have felt if she stumbled on the dead man. She confessed that she regularly lurked in the bathhouse alone, at hours when she hoped no one else would be around. She had gone there last night, for instance, she told me guiltily.

“This was after I left for Novio?”

“After dinner.”

“Stupid! Maia Favonia, your mother brought you up to know that bathing on a full stomach can give you a seizure.”

“It can give you a lot of thinking time too,” Maia growled. I preferred not to know what she was thinking about. Exploring the dark elements of my sister’s soul would have to wait.

“Strangers might assume you are making assignations.”

“I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks.”

“You never did! So you were at the crime scene last night, Maia. Tell me about that. Tell me every little detail.”

Maia was now prepared to help. “I knew someone had gone through ahead of me. When I arrived, there were clothes in two of the bunkers.”

“Two?”

“I can count, Marcus.”

“You can be rude too! Describe this clothing.”

Maia had worked for a tailor in her youth. “Bright stuff in one—expensive cloth, untidily crammed in. Unusual; figured cloth, maybe with silk in the weft. In another row of bunkers, there was a plain white tunic—wool, a common weave—folded neatly, with a man’s belt on top.”

“Was the expensive material dyed brown and turquoise?” She nodded. “Pomponius. So who was the other man? Could it have been Cyprianus, who discovered the corpse? Was your visit just before I came home from Noviomagus?”

“No, quite a lot earlier.”

“Before the crime was committed. Anyway,” I remembered, “Cyprianus was wearing blue last night. You never saw these men?”

“I decided not to stay,” said Maia. “I reckoned they were in the hot rooms, but they could have stayed there for hours.” The three hot rooms lay in sequence, normal procedure for a small suite. People had to come out the same way they went in, meeting anybody following. A woman alone would not want to be relaxing in a tiny towel when men strolled back through.

“So you decided not to wait?”

Maia confirmed her reluctance. “I’m perished in this province. I could not face shivering in the cold room, applying my oil at a dawdle, while I waited to hear them leave. I thought I would go back this morning—but I’m still thwarted!”

“Sweetheart, just be glad you didn’t trip naked into the last caldarium while Pomponius was croaking on the floor.”

“He was a man,” said Maia grimly. “One who thought he ran the world—I expect I could have borne it.”

I was leaving when she added in an offhand tone, “The one with the white tunic had hung a bag on the cloak hook.”

She was able to describe it with the accuracy of an alert girl who took a practical interest. She described it so well, in fact, I knew whose bag it was.

As I set off to go the painters’ hut, I saw that studies were afoot for incorporating the previous palace into the new design. Strephon and Magnus were in deep discussion while the surveyor’s assistant stood around meekly with measuring equipment.

It looked a busier version of the scene I saw a few days ago. Magnus, distinguished by his smart outfit and gray hair, was setting up his elaborate
diopter
, while more junior staff had to settle for the basic
groma
. Some were responsible for raising twenty-foot-high marked posts that helped in taking levels, while others were awkwardly deploying a huge set square to mark a right angle for the initial setting-out of the intersection of the two wings of the new palace. As they struggled to work close up against the building, hindered further by its cloak of scaffold, I overheard Magnus telling them to dispense with the cumbersome square in favor of simple pegs and strings. He had straightened up and caught my eye. We exchanged cool nods.

First things first. A fresh breeze riffled through my hair as I marched off to the hutments outside the west end of the site. I had crossed the great platform, striding over the flat area that would one day be the great courtyard garden and picking my way over the dug trenches of the formal west wing and the first blocks laid for its grand stylobate. There was action on-site, but it seemed subdued. I could hear hammering from the yard where I knew stone blocks were shaped and faced, and from a different direction came the rasp of a saw slicing marble. Sunlight, bright but in Britain not glaring, gently warmed my spirits.

Ahead of me scavenging seagulls wheeled above the wooded area where the carts were parked. I could smell the wood smoke again from the camp. I walked up the track quietly, passing the mosaicist’s hut, which seemed devoid of life. I stopped at the adjoining home of Blandus and his lad. Its door was open; someone was inside. It was not Blandus.

He had his back to me, but was standing at a slight angle so I could see he was working on a small still life. It was fresh fruit in a glass bowl. He had crated the arrangement of apples and was now adding delicate white lines to represent the ribs of a translucent comport. Unsure whether he had heard me, I stood still, admiring the flushed rotundity of the ripened fruit and the exquisitely hinted glassware. The young painter seemed absorbed.

He was a big lad. I could see one protruding ear, half covered by unkempt dark hair that would have been improved by a serious trim and work with a teasing comb. His clothes were covered with multicolored paint splashes, though the rest of him looked clean enough, given that he was about eighteen and a thousand miles from home. He worked steadily, adept and confident. His design was already alive in his head, needing only those thoughtful, rhythmic brush strokes to create it on the wooden panel.

I cleared my throat. He did not react. He knew I was there.

I folded my arms. “Creativity for your own pleasure is a high ideal—but my advice is, never waste effort unless you persuade some half-wit client to pay for it.”

Most painters would have spun about ready to thump me. This one only grunted. He kept going. The glass bowl acquired a thread of painted light to indicate a handle.

“The project-team plotters have decided who eliminated Pomponius,” I said. “They’ve settled on the smartarse from Stabiae. A stippling brush with some incriminating initials has been dumped on the body—just where I was bound to find it and shriek, ‘Ooh, look at this!’ So tell me, smartarse: did you kill him?”

“No, I bloody well did not.” The artist stopped painting and turned around to face me. “I was screwing a girl from a bar in Noviomagus—she wasn’t as good as I hoped she would be, but at least I can tell Justinus that I got there first.”

I gave him a long cold stare. “The only good thing about that story is that you were screwing the floozy, not my brother-in-law.”

“Plus another good thing.” He scowled, as unabashed as he had always been. “You know the story’s true, Falco.”

I knew him, so I did believe it. He was my nephew Larius.

XL

I
TOSSED HIM
the brush from the bathhouse. He caught it one-handed, the other hand still holding the finer one he had been working with, plus his thumb pallette. “That’s your pig’s bristle?”

“LL. That’s me. Larius Lollius.”

“Thank Juno you were not born under a laurel tree,” I scoffed. “A third L would have been obscene.”

“Two names are sufficient for me and Mark Antony.”

“Listen, big shot, when you’ve finished aligning yourself with the famous, you are to get yourself to Novio and ensure that your luscious Virginia is not bribed to forget your romantic alibi.”

Larius looked coy. “She’ll remember. I said
she
was a disappointment. I didn’t mention my own performance.”

I reined in my reaction and merely answered quietly, “Ask somebody sophisticated to explain about two-way pleasure. Incidentally, how is dear Ollia?” Ollia was his wife.

“Fine when we parted company,” Larius said tersely.

“You parted? Is this a permanent phase? Had the union of you two fresh hopefuls produced offspring?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Still, I hate to see young love waning.”

“Skip the family talk,” he chided me. He did not ask after Helena, though they had met. While he and Ollia had been assuring the world they shared eternal devotion, the world had prophesied that the teenagers were doomed—then also decreed that I was a philandering louse, destined to abandon my woman. Assuming I could manage it before Helena ditched me first … Larius cut through my wandering thoughts. “We need to know why people want to frame me for Pomponius.”

“They are not framing you,” I told him. “They are implicating me.”

He brightened up. “How’s that?”

“I bring my nephew on-site and he kills the top man? That’s bound to diminish my status as the Emperor’s troubleshooter!”

“Status bollocks!” Since I last saw him when he was fourteen, Larius had coarsened up. “I’m not connected with your work. Blandus brought me here. I’ve come to do miniatures—and I do not want to be dragged into any of your slimy political stews.”

“You are already neck deep in fish-pickle sauce. Have you told people you are my nephew?”

“Why not?”

“You should have told me first!”

“You were never there to tell.”

“All right. Larius, how did anyone else acquire this paintbrush?”

“From the hut while I was out, I suppose. I leave everything here.”

“Any chance Pomponius himself might have borrowed it?”

“What, to tickle his balls at the baths?” mocked Larius. “Or cleaning his ears out. I hear it’s a new fashion among the arty fraternity—better than a plebeian scoop.”

“Answer the question.”

“As for pinching a brush, I don’t suppose that snooty beggar ever knew where our site huts were.”

“What happened when you wanted to show him a proposed design?”

“We carried sketches to the great man’s audience chamber and waited in a queue for two hours.”

“You did not like Pomponius?”

“Architects? I never do,” scoffed Larius offhandedly. “Loathing self-important people is a churlish habit I picked up from you.”

“And why are you so ripe for incrimination, happy nephew? Whom have you upset?”

“What, me?”

“Is Camillus Justinus the only man you’ve beaten up recently?”

“Oh yes.”

“Have you slept with anybody other than Virginia?”

“Certainly not!” He was a real rogue. A total hypocrite.

“Has Virginia another lover?”

“Famous for it, I should say.”

“So is she attached to anyone who bears grudges?”

“She’s a girl who gets herself attached. No one regular, if that’s any help.”

“And what about you, Larius? Everyone knows you? Everyone knows what you’re like nowadays?”

“What do you mean—
what I’m like?
”

“Start with layabout,” I suggested cruelly. “Try a wine-swigging, fornicating, quarrelsome byword for trouble.”

“You’re thinking of my uncle,” said Larius, as ever surprising me with sudden caustic repartee.

“True.”

“I get around,” confessed the lad. I remember him as a shy, poetry-loving dreamer—the single-minded romantic who had once spurned my dirty profession in favor of high ideals and art. Now he had learned to hold his own in rough company—and to despise me.

“You’d better come along to my quarters,” I said quietly. “On reflection, I’m taking you into custody until this is sorted out. Let’s get this clear—I have young children and polite nursing mothers in my party, not to mention the noble Aelianus withering away from his doggy bite, so we’ll have no drinking and no riots.”

“I see you’ve gone staid,” sneered Larius.

“Another thing,” I ordered him. “Keep your damn hands off my children’s nurse!”

“Who’s that?” he asked, full of rosebud ignorance. He knew who I meant. He did not fool me. He was born on the Aventine, into the feckless Didii.

To be honest, his attitude gave me a nostalgic pang.

XLI

I
WAS WORSE
than staid. I was suffering like any householder whose domestic life had filled up with crying infants, sex-crazed nephews, disobedient freedwomen, unfinished business tasks, and jealous rivals who wanted him dismissed or dead. I was like the harassed foolish father in a Greek play. This was no milieu for a city informer. Next thing I would find myself buying pornographic oil lamps to leer at in the office and giving myself flatulence as I worried about inheritance tax.

Helena shot me an odd look when I deposited Larius in her care. He seemed startled to see her. He had once adored her. This was awkward for the new man who trifled with women for a bet, then breezed off, callous and untouched.

Helena greeted him with an affectionate kiss on the cheek, a refined gesture that upset his equilibrium further. “Oh, this is splendid! Come and meet your little cousins, Larius …”

Horrified, Larius shot me a baleful glance. I returned an annoyng grin, then left to investigate who really killed Pornponius.

Magnus was still supervising his assistants near the old palace. They had extended the lines for foundations where the two huge new wings would meet the existing buildings. When the dug trenches currently petered out, strings on pegs now showed the planned links. Magnus himself was scribbling down calculations for the levels, his instrument satchel lying open on the ground.

“This yours?” I asked casually, holding something out to him as if I had found it lying around on-site. Absorbed in his work, he was fooled by my indifferent tone.

“I’ve been searching for that!” His eyes came up from the long string that I was proferring and I saw him freeze.

I had deliberately asked the question so his student helpers would hear. Having witnesses put pressure on. “That’s a five-four-three,” one of them informed me helpfully. Magnus said nothing. “It’s used to form a hypotenuse triangle when we set out a right angle.”

“That right? Geometry is an amazing science! And I thought this was just any old length of twine. May I have a private word, Magnus? And bring your instruments, please.”

Magnus came to my office without a quibble. He realized his setting-out string was what had strangled Pomponius. Now I had to decide, did he know that before I produced it—or did he simply work out why the knotted twine was in my possession today?