Death Ex Machina (11 page)

Euboulides nodded. “Yes, sir.” He left at a trot.

“What was the message?” Sophocles said.

“That we have a problem,” I said. “My commission is with Pericles. He needs to know.” I winced.

“You’re worried?” Aeschylus asked.

“Sympathy for failure is not one of Pericles’s strong points.”

“It’s not your fault,” Aeschylus consoled me. “I’m sure Pericles will understand.”

I wished I had his confidence.

A reply came back sooner than I expected, carried by a slave runner. He handed it to me.

PERICLES SAYS THIS TO NICOLAOS. I HAVE CALLED AN EMERGENCY COUNCIL TO DISCUSS THE CRISIS. WE MEET AT NOON AT MY HOUSE. THAT WILL GIVE MEN OUTSIDE THE CITY TIME TO ARRIVE. IT WILL ALSO GIVE ME TIME TO THINK WHAT WE ARE GOING TO SAY TO ALL THE DISTINGUISHED GUESTS FROM OTHER CITIES WHEN THEY LEARN OF THIS DEBACLE. SAME SUMMONS TO MEET IS GOING TO THE ARCHONS, TO THE CHOREGI, TO THE WRITERS, AND ALL OTHER SENIOR MEN OF THE DIONYSIA. INFORM EVERYONE AT THE THEATER WHO FITS THAT DESCRIPTION. PERICLES.

I silently handed the ostrakon to Aeschylus, who read it with raised eyebrows. He handed it to Sophocles, who handed it to Lakon, who handed it to Kiron. The ostrakon made its way around the producers, writers, and actors of every comedy and every tragedy.

“Thank you,” I said to the messenger slave. “Tell Pericles we’ll be there.”

“Sir, I also have a message for you,” said the slave.

“For me?” I said. “What does Pericles say?”

“My master Pericles says you are to arrive early, if you can manage to do that simple thing without tripping over your own feet, you incompetent moron.”

The slave grinned as he said it.

I had little doubt that the slave had passed on the message exactly as Pericles had spoken it, but I was equally sure it was the slave’s own special touch to repeat it in front of all these leading citizens.

Aeschylus broke the embarrassed silence. He squinted up at the sun. He said, “Noon. That gives us plenty of time before the meeting.”

“I’ll need it,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I have to inform a family that they’re bereaved. Where did Romanos live?” I asked, then added, “Does he have family here?”

“Not as far as I know,” Kiron said. He turned to Sophocles, who shrugged.

“I hired him because he’s a good actor, not because he’s a friend,” the playwright said. “I have no idea about his family.” Sophocles turned to the man beside him. “Do you know, Lakon?”

“I’ll need to think about that,” Lakon said. He immediately struck a thoughtful pose, hands behind his back, chin sunk to his chest. After a few moments he said, “Yes, I do believe the poor fellow lived in Melite.”

Melite was a deme to the west of Athens but within the city walls. It was a place of narrow lanes and crowded tenements. Finding the victim’s home amongst them would be a nightmare.

I said, “I don’t suppose you know where in Melite he lived?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to ask around. I said I knew the man, not that I socialized with him.”

“You mentioned that before,” Diotima said. “Was there some bad blood between you?”

Lakon turned to her. “Not at all, dear lady, but being a woman, you wouldn’t understand.”

I quickly stepped between Lakon and Diotima, in case Diotima decided to punch out our lead actor. I’d seen her hit before in anger and we needed Lakon to remain conscious. But Diotima showed creditable restraint.

“Why don’t you try anyway,” Diotima said, through gritted teeth. “Despite my obvious limitations.”

“I am a citizen actor,” Lakon said. “I do not act for money. That would be demeaning.”

“What about Romanos?”

“He acted for money.”

SCENE 14

DESCENT INTO MELITE

I
T WAS ESSENTIAL we find the family of Romanos, if he had one, and if not, his home, so that we could search it. Someone, somewhere, had a reason to want Romanos dead. Someone, or some evidence, was going to have to tell us why.

Lakon had told us that Romanos lived in Melite, a deme directly west of the theater. I refused to have Socrates with us when we delivered bad news. He was the least tactful person I knew. I sent him home. As we walked away in the opposite direction, Diotima said, “If Lakon turns out to be the killer, I will personally offer my thanks to the Gods with a fine sacrifice.” She was still angry about his attitude. In her sandals, Diotima kicked a loose stone on the path in anger. The stone went flying, and she spent the rest of the trip cursing her sore toe.

THERE ARE NO signs to mark the boundaries of the demes within Athens, but you always know when you’ve stepped from one into another because their characters are quite different. It was only a matter of crossing the southbound road to Piraeus to take us from influential Collytos into downmarket Melite.

Piraeus Way is one of the busiest thoroughfares in Athens: all the commercial traffic from the port to the agora is on that road. The east side is lined with expensive town houses. The west side is lined with houses too, less expensive ones. Diotima and I walked along one of the paths between them into the narrow byways of Melite.

Melite had been the home deme of Themistocles, the great General and traitor whom Diotima and I had met in Ionia. We thought of him as we passed by his old house. A hundred steps further on, we passed the small temple to Artemis that Themistocles had commissioned. It was in a sad state of disrepair; a chipped façade of faded paint and wooden columns with hairline fractures.

In the days of Themistocles he’d seen to it that Melite was the best decked out deme in Athens. Since then Melite had absorbed much of the influx of metics to the city. Several families crammed into buildings that had once housed only one. To make extra room, the men had extended rooms so that they overhung the street or encroached at ground level. Streets that had once been narrow but adequate had become almost impassably narrow and claustrophobic. This change had happened in my own lifetime.

More people meant more sewage. It all went into the open drains that ran down the middle of the street. Combined with the muddy walkways and the second storeys that loomed above, Melite had acquired its own unique aroma.

Diotima and I took care to walk the outer edge of these mean streets, because what floated down the center didn’t bear thinking about.

Naked or ill-clothed children watched us from doorways. Some of them asked for money. A mother told them sternly not to bother the citizens passing by.

Diotima was having none of that. She stopped at the doorway where the mother had issued the rebuke. Diotima glanced at the mother, bent to talk to the snotty-nosed children. She held up three obol coins—half a drachma. It was a paltry sum, but the children’s eyes went round as bowls.

“Do you know a man named Romanos?” Diotima asked them.

The children said nothing, but their eyes never left the coins.

“They don’t, but I do,” their mother spoke up. She was dressed in a chiton of some heavy material and had a weary air.

When the woman said nothing more, Diotima said, “We’d like to find his home.”

The mother thought about it. Then she asked, “How do I know you’ll pay the children when you’re done?”

Diotima handed over the coins on the spot, one to each child. Each clutched the coin to their bosom as if it were their most prized possession.

Their mother said, “I suppose it can’t hurt.” She bent to the children and gave them instructions on where to take us. Having heard her words I could have gone straight there myself, but I wasn’t going to deprive the children of their work.

The children led us deftly down the paths. I guessed the two older for seven and eight, a boy and a girl. The youngest was perhaps five and had to be stopped by his older siblings from playing with the muck in the drains.

They led us left, right, left to the center of the deme, where there was a square, a tiny one from which someone had swept the rubbish. Old women hawked their wares from faded wooden boxes: wilted vegetables, cheap pottery, and good luck amulets. No doubt the sellers weren’t paying the vendor fees with which the city hit the stallholders in the official agora. This was some sort of unofficial agora that had sprung up, discreet enough that the archons probably didn’t even know it existed.

On the opposite corner of the agora was a house, and it was before this that the children stopped. They looked up at us expectantly.

“This is the place?” Diotima asked.

They nodded.

“Thank you.”

They turned to run home.

“Hey, kids!” I called.

They stopped.

“Here,” I said. I handed each of them a full drachma piece. I used my body to block the transaction from idle sight.

“Now I want you to take these to your mother. You’re to give them to her, and nobody but her. And you hide them, right now, you understand?”

I worried that in these parts, there were people who would beat a child for a drachma.

They nodded and three drachmae disappeared beneath three rag-thin tunics. The children might not say much, but they lived on these streets and they weren’t stupid.

“All right. Run.”

They ran.

“Melite’s a lot poorer than it used to be,” I said to Diotima when they were gone. “It wasn’t like this when I was a child.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Diotima said. “I wasn’t allowed out of the house.”

“I probably ran down every street in Athens,” I said. “I remember when they were building most of these places.”

We knocked on the door.

It was opened by a slim young woman.

“Yes?” She peered around the edge of the door, ready to slam it shut.

Her hair was ragged and shorn. The classic signs of bereavement.

I was taken aback.

“I’m sorry,” Diotima said, equally nonplussed. “I see you’re already in mourning.”

“I am?” the young woman blinked at Diotima. The two women looked much the same age. But whereas Diotima was dark, this woman was light skinned with light brown hair.

She realized we were both staring at the top of her head.

“Oh, you mean my hair. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m a professional mourner.”

It was my turn to be surprised. Of course I’d seen
professional mourners in the street, but I’d never thought I’d meet one. In every case I’d seen them walking behind a cart upon which a dead person had been laid, on their way to the cemetery at Ceramicus. Mourners were hired by the family, to express their grief, which they did with loud wails, graphic tearing at their hair, and the rending of their clothes.

Until that moment it had never occurred to me that professional mourners must have normal lives, when they weren’t walking behind dead people.

“Then you
haven’t
heard,” I said, relieved to have solved at least one tiny puzzle.

“Heard what?” she asked.

“That Romanos is dead,” I told her.

The young woman raised her arms to the sky and screamed.

SCENE 15

WHOOPS

“W
ELL HOW WAS I supposed to know she was his sister?” I protested.

Diotima had spent considerable time listing my various defects: mental, moral, and social. She paid particular attention to my lack of tact.

“Nico, they’re living in the same house.
Of course
she was a relative of some sort. I thought at first she must be his wife.”

Diotima had had plenty of time to berate me. The woman—her name was Maia—had installed us in the visitor’s room at the front while she went off to inform the rest of the house of the disaster. As she spread the word the wailing rose throughout, until it sounded like a house of madmen. But it wasn’t; it was a house in genuine mourning.

A man entered the room. His hair was freshly cut and ragged.

He greeted us and said, “My name is Petros.” Beneath the sadness his voice was pleasant. “I would offer you refreshments,” he said politely, “but …” His voice trailed away.

“But a house in mourning doesn’t serve refreshments,” I finished for him.

“No. My wife didn’t ask you for details.”

“Your wife?”

“Maia. Romanos is my brother-in-law.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So are we all. I must ask you what happened, and even more urgent, where is my brother-in-law’s body?”

“At the theater.”

I told him, as succinctly as I could, what had happened.

At the word murder, Petros turned gray and staggered back until he leant against the wall. “Dear Gods, no,” he whispered.

I said, “I’m sorry to have delivered such harsh news to your wife. But we had no idea Romanos had so much family in Athens. The people at the theater could tell us nothing, except for Lakon—”

“Lakon?”

“Another actor. He told us Romanos lived in Melite, but beyond that he too had no information.”

“I see.”

“Do you know Lakon? I suppose you must know other actors, your brother-in-law having been one.”

“Everyone in this house is an actor. Even the children.”

“Oh?”

“I must ask you to excuse me. My brother-in-law’s body must be brought back here.”

I nodded. Petros was right. Already the psyche of the murdered man would be loose from its body. Romanos’s psyche needed to descend to Hades, but the psyche couldn’t begin its journey until the rites had been performed. Until then it should stay close to its mortal remains. But in the theater, alone, a psyche could become lost. The last thing Athens needed was a real psyche haunting the Great Dionysia.

No, the sooner Petros got the body back here the better. They would place the body in the inner courtyard, with its feet facing the door. That would prevent the psyche from straying.

“Do you need help?” I asked. I wouldn’t normally offer to help strangers move their dead, but I felt sympathy for these people.

“Thank you, but there are plenty of men in this house. Far too many men, in fact.”

“Many men?” I said, surprised.

“And their families too,” Petros said.

“Did you all come to Athens together?” Diotima asked.

“No. Romanos was here long before the rest of us. He is … was … an Athenian in all but name. He moved to Hellas as a young man, to make his fortune. Maia and I didn’t leave Phrygia until after we married. The others drifted in over time. It’s easier for folk from the same place to get along.”