A Body in the Bathhouse (40 page)

I turned the corner; sudden sea views distracted me. A gust of wind slammed into me frighteningly. I grabbed the guardrail. Mandumerus crouched, waiting. In one hand he wielded a pick handle. He had hammered a nail into the end of it. Not any old nail, but a huge thing like the nine-inch wonders they use for constructing fortress gatehouses. It would go right through my skull and leave a point on the other side long enough to hang a cloak on. And a hat.

He made a feint. I had my knife. Small comfort. He lunged. I swung, but was out of reach. I stabbed the air. He laughed again. He was a big, pale, swollen-bellied brute who suffered from pinkeye and eczema-cracked skin. Scars told me not to mess with him.

He was coming at me. He filled the width of the platform. With the pick handle flailing from side to side in front of him, I had no clear approach, even if I had dared close in with him. He flailed at me; the nail point hit the house and screamed down the stonework, leaving a deep white scratch as it gouged the limestone blocks. I grabbed his arm, but he shook me off and viciously jabbed at me again. I turned to flee, my foot slipped on the boards, my hand grabbed for the rail again—and it gave way.

Someone had come up behind me. I was barged to safety against the wall. It knocked the breath out of me. As I scrabbled to regain my footing, someone stepped past, featherlight as a trapeze artist. Larius. He had a shovel and an expression that said he would use it.

Justinus must have run along at ground level and climbed up by another ladder. I glimpsed him, too, at our height now, crashing towards us on the scaffold from the far side. He only had bare hands, but his arrival was at high speed. He grasped Mandumerus from behind in a bear hug. Using the surprise, Larius then smashed his shovel on the brute’s shoulder, forcing him to drop the wood and nail. I fell on top of him and laid my knife on his windpipe.

He threw us all off. Dear gods.

He was back on his feet and now chose to run up the pantiles. He scaled the palace roof at a slant. The tiles began to suffer. Marcellinus must have provided inferior roof battens. (No surprise, the best probably went to his own villa.) Even climbing at an angle away from us, the steep roof pitch told against Mandumerus. He got halfway up, then lost his momentum. With nothing to grab, he began to slow down. Then his feet skidded.

“Not a roofer—wrong boots!” chortled Larius. He was setting off to intercept Mandumerus.

“Watch yourself!” I cried. His mother would kill me if he killed himself up here.

Justinus and I inched warily past the section where the guardrail had gone, then followed Larius. The Briton slid slowly down the roof slope, in a vertical line towards the three of us. We captured him neatly. He seemed to give up. We were taking him back to the ladder when he broke free again. This time he managed to get his great hands on the giant hook on the pulley rope.

“Not that old trick!” scoffed Larius.
“Duck!”

The evil claw, made of heavy metal, came hurtling round in a circle at face height. Justinus leaped back. I crouched. Larius simply gripped the rope, just above the hook, as it reached him. Four years playing about on Neapolis villas had left him fearless. He took off and swung. Feet out, he kicked Mandumerus in the throat.

“
Larius!
You are not nice.”

While I contributed the refined commentary, Justinus rushed past me. He helped my nephew batten onto the man again. Clutching his neck, Mandumerus gave in a second time.

Now we had a problem. Persuading a reluctant captive to descend a ladder is no joke. “You can go down nicely—or we’ll throw you off.”

That was a start. We acted as if we meant it—while Mandumerus looked as if he didn’t care a damn. I dropped my sword to Aelianus so he could stand guard at the bottom. Larius did gymnastics down the scaffold, then jumped the last six feet. The Briton reached ground level. The ladder must have been merely leaned against the scaffold (or else he slipped its ties as he went down). Now he grasped the heavy thing and hauled it away from its position. I had been about to follow him down, so I had to make a jump for safety. He swiped Aelianus and Larius with the ladder—and left me dangling from a scaffold pole. Then he threw down the ladder and was gone.

I had no alternative: I sized up the distance to the ground; then as my wrists began to go, I dropped. Luckily, I broke no bones. Larius and I replaced the ladder for Justinus to descend.

The fugitive made it to the end of the garden colonnade. Then two figures appeared unexpectedly, discussing some abstruse design point in the fading light of dusk. I recognized the parties and feared the worst. Yet they turned out to be quite handy. One threw himself headlong in a tackle and brought Mandumerus down: Plancus. Maybe a low lunge to the knees was how he acquired new boyfriends. The other grappled with a garden statue (faun with panpipes, rather hairy, anatomically suspect; dubious musical fingering). He wrested it from off its plinth, then dumped the armful on the prone escapee: Strephon.

We cheered enthusiastically.

Being captured by a pair of effete architects hurt Mandumerus’ pride. He subsided, grizzling tears of shame. As he pleaded in crude Latin that he had meant no harm, Strephon and Plancus assumed the high-handed manners of their fine profession. They summoned staff, loudly complained about rowdiness on-site, denounced the clerk of works for permitting horseplay on a scaffold, and generally enjoyed themselves. We left them to supervise the miscreant’s removal to the lockup. Thanking them quietly, we continued to our suite.

LIV

M
AIA WAS
alone with my children.

She was furious. I could handle that. She was anxious too. “Where’s everyone?” I meant,
where was Helena?

The Camilli and Larius, sensing domestic danger, shuffled off to another room, where I could soon hear them trying to repair the damage to their outfits. At least their bruises made them look like men to reckon with.

My sister’s mouth was tight with distaste for yet another stupid situation. She told me Hyspale had gone off with her “friend”; he had turned out to be Blandus, the chief painter. Hyspale must have met him when she was hanging around the artists’ habitat, hoping to encounter Larius.

I was disgusted and annoyed. “Blandus should not be entrusted with an unmarried woman—one with limited sense and no experience! Helena allowed that?”

“Helena forbade it,” Maia retorted. “Hyspale sneaked off anyway. When none of you men came back for hours, Helena Justina went after her.” Of course she would.

“You couldn’t stop her?”

“It’s her freedwoman. She said she couldn’t leave Hyspale to her fate.”

“I’m surprised you stayed at home,” I scoffed at my sister.

“I would have gone to see the fun!” Maia assured me. “But you have two babes in arms, Marcus. Your nurse is a complete wastrel, and since their mother has abandoned them, I’m looking after them.”

I was making preparations. I called out to the others. There was a water flagon on a tray; I drained it. We had no time to rest. No time to wash off the sweat, blood, and smells of the dog kennel. I checked my bootstraps and weapons.

“Where did Hyspale and Blandus go?”

“The River Trout. Hyspale wanted to see the dancer.” To be a woman in the company of the men “Stupenda” aroused would not be clever. Helena would instinctively understand that. Hyspale had no idea. Hyspale had been nothing but trouble to the pair of us, but Helena made up for the other woman’s complete absence of feeling for danger. “He’ll jump her,” said Maia bleakly. Nobody needed to tell me that. “And the silly chit will be
so
surprised.”

“I’ll go. Don’t worry.”

“With you in charge?” Maia was now positively caustic. I told myself it was a form of relief since I would have to take the blame.

All my sisters liked to disrupt life with a complete turnaround just when plans had been made. “I’m coming too,” Maia suddenly declared.

“Maia! As you said just now, there are two small children—”

But it seemed one crisis had forced her to speak out over another. The moment was inconvenient, but that never stopped Maia. She gripped my arms, her fingers digging through my tunic sleeves. “Ask yourself, then, Marcus! If you feel like this about
your
children, what about mine? Who is looking after mine, Marcus? Where are they? What condition are they in? Are they frightened? Are they in danger? Are they crying for me?”

I forced myself to listen patiently. The truth was, I did find it odd that Petronius Longus had never sent a single word of what the situation was. He must have made arrangements for my sister’s children—with Ma looking after them, probably. I would have expected a letter, at least one that was heavily coded—if not to Maia, then to me.

“I don’t know what is going on, Maia. I was not in on the plot.”

“The children had help,” Maia insisted. “Helena Justina.” Helena had admitted it. “Petronius Longus.” That was obvious. “You too?” Maia demanded.

“No, really. I knew nothing.”

It was the truth. Maybe my sister believed it. At any rate, she agreed to take care of my two daughters, and she let me go.

It had been a long afternoon, but a much longer evening lay ahead.

LV

T
HE RIVER TROUT
was a dump. I expected that. It stood at the junction of a puddled lane with a frightening alley, just two or three kinks in the road from the town’s south gate. Calling its location a road is a courtesy. However, it did have a set of road menders installing new cobbles at one end—and the inevitable workmen following them, tearing up the brand-new blocks in order to fiddle with a drain. Civic-amenity management in true Roman style had hit this province.

There was no street-side space where food shops with marble counters could offer food and drink to passersby. A grubby wall, mainly blank, offered a couple of tiny barred windows too high to see in through. The heavy door stood half open; that passed as a welcome. A petite signboard showed a sad gray fish who would be a waste of pan space. There was no graffiti on any outside wall, which told us that no one in this neighborhood could read. In any case, they had cleared the streets. Provincials don’t dally. Why linger to socialize when your province has no meaningful society?

I had the Camilli and Larius with me. We stepped down a couple of uneven treads into a gloomy cavern. It had a warm rank smell: too much to hope this was caused by animals—the people alone were responsible. There was one interior drinking den, with misshapen curtains half concealing filthy anterooms that ran off to the sides like burrows. Quality customers were perhaps reclining in an upstairs gallery, though it seemed unlikely. There was no upstairs.

That was to be rectified. Like everywhere these days, the River Trout had a facility-improvement program. It was being extended upwards; so far, percentage progress was zero. A gaping hole in the ceiling marked the spot where a stairway was to be opened up. That was all.

Downstairs offered sparse amenities. Lamps were kept to a minimum. One amphora stood propped in a corner. Covered with dust, it served more as an item of decor than a source of supply. From the shape, it had only held olives, not wine. A single shelf carried a line of beakers in odd sizes.

The place was far too quiet. I knew exactly how many laborers worked on our project. Even allowing for stragglers, most were not here. Maybe we were too early for the dancer. Musicians were certainly due to play tonight: on a bench lay a worrying pipe with a skin bag attached, whilst a hand drum was being pattered lethargically by a long-faced laggard dressed in what passed around here for glamor (a dull pinkish tunic edged in unraveling two-tone braid).

Of “Stupenda” there was no sign. Nor did she have a decent audience. The place should have been packed with people sitting or even standing on the rectangular tables, as well as squashed on every bench. Instead, a handful of men dawdled over their drinks in ones and twos. The most interesting presence was a three-foot-high statue of Cupid, supposedly bronze, on a plinth in the corner opposite the amphora. The love god had chubby cheeks, a big belly, and a sinister fixed expression as he aimed his bow.

“Save us!” muttered Aelianus gloomily. “Sextius must have been touting his tat. The landlord must be an idiot to buy that.”

“Rather a ferocicous talking point!” Justinus observed. Instead of an arrow, some wag from the site had provided the naked Eros with a long iron nail in his bow. I made an audit note that nails were disappearing from the palace stores. “Don’t anyone turn your back on this little blighter.”

“You’re safe,” his brother assured him. “He’s supposed to shoot harmless blunt arrows, but we never could make him operate.”

“Why have a love god on the premises when there are no skirts in sight?” complained Larius. There were no women visible. No Hyspale, no Helena. “No Virginia!” groaned Larius to Justinus.

“Avoiding you,” came the reply, with an edge that suggested Justinus did know Larius had already had some luck with the girl.

We tired of waiting for a greeter to seat us and positioned ourselves at a table. This took some doing as all the stools had wobbly legs. I managed to keep mine steady by wedging one knee under the table rim and bracing the other leg. A man with a grimy apron lurched from a back pantry to serve us. Aelianus asked, in his crisp aristocratic accent, to see the wine list. It was the sort of dump where customers were so locked up in their own misery, nobody noticed this crazy breach of etiquette. Even the waiter simply told him that there wasn’t one. It was hard work causing a shocked silence here, let alone making people fail to see a joke.

We had what came. Every one had what came. Ours was brought in a blackened flagon, which seemed to be a polite gesture to Roman visitors. The rest had theirs poured into their Celtic face pots from a cracked old jug, which was taken away after one quick slosh.

“Could you go for a dish of appetizers?” Aelianus asked. He was a joy to take undercover.

“What?”

“Forget it!” I ordered. I had just tasted the drink. I wasn’t risking food. All my companions had parents who would blame me if they expired of dysentery.