Death Ex Machina (21 page)

“Even in the plays set long ago?” Diotima asked.

“
Especially
in the plays set long ago. If we get something wrong in those, every man, woman, and child will be backstage to tell us we got it wrong. Historical accuracy is very important.”

“Doesn’t anything ever go wrong, with all this stuff lying about?”

Kiron and Akamas both laughed.

“You better believe it. There was one time we had a man in the air—he was playing Zeus—the takeoff was as bad as you could get and he slammed into the skene and the entire wall fell over.”

“What did you do?”

“Luckily we had Romanos with us that day. He played it for a comedy. He was on stage doing his lines about tragic death as the entire skene fell slowly forward, revealing us backstage crew and a man in the air swinging like a dying fish. Quick as lightning, Romanos grabbed someone’s walking stick from the audience, then he chased us around the stage, whacking us with the stick while he repeated lines from some comedy he once played. This was in Pella, in Macedon. Those barbarians wouldn’t know fine art if it hit them.” Kiron hawked and spat in the dust. “The Macedonians laughed until they fell off their seats, and then they paid us extra ’cause it was so funny.”

“Romanos saved us that day,” said Akamas.

“Romanos was a good actor, I’ll say that for him,” said Kiron. He sighed. “We’ll miss him. Who would murder a man like that? I can’t believe it was one of our own.”

“That’s what the evidence says,” Diotima pointed out. She was unsympathetic. “I’m sorry, Kiron, but it’s one of your colleagues who’s causing all the trouble.”

“I’ve said this before,” I told Kiron. “There are three possible victims: the man, the actor, and the character in the play. If
Romanos the actor is the victim, then almost certainly his killer belongs to the theater.”

“You forgot another reason to kill Romanos,” said the stage manager.

I sighed. Everybody thinks they can be a detective.

“What reason?” I asked him.

“Creepy fans. Men who want to be best friends with the actors.”

“Does that happen?” Diotima asked.

The stage manager laughed. “Yes. Have you noticed how elegant actors are? Men get drawn to that. When I say these fans want to be best friends, I mean they want to be
really close
friends, if you get my meaning.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Mostly they’re older men, but not always. You can spot them straight away. They linger about and try to look like they belong, but you can tell they’re nervous as all Hades and when they get up the nerve to approach an actor—it’s always the protagonist—they hold some love offering.”

“Was there anyone like that yesterday?” I asked.

“Several.”

“Anyone in particular?” I asked.

“No.” Then Kiron thought again and said, “Wait, what about the strange kid?”

“What strange kid?” Diotima and I said simultaneously.

Kiron looked from one to the other of us. “There’s a kid hangs about the theater like a bad smell. Stares at everything like he’s never seen it before, even though I know he’s watching almost every day. There’s something weird about this guy. He’s kind of intense.”

“Does he go backstage?”

“Not since I caught him once and told him to bugger off.”

Creepy, intense, and at the scene of the crime. That sounded like a killer to me.

“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” I complained.

“Was I supposed to?” He looked insulted. “That happened long ago. When I said he hung around here, I didn’t mean only recently.”

Diotima said, “I think I know who you mean. When we expelled the ghost, we saw someone in the audience who didn’t seem to quite belong.” Diotima described the man she’d spotted that day. “Was that him?”

“Yeah, that’s the kid,” the stage manager said.

It was the man Diotima had pointed out to Pythax and me. I remembered what he looked like. When the stage manager had said “kid,” what he’d meant was someone my own age. It made me wonder what the stage manager thought of me.

“Was he here today?” I asked. “Maybe we can catch him when he comes.”

“Well that’s a funny thing,” said Kiron. “I haven’t seen him since the murder.”

Diotima and I shared a glance.

I said to Kiron, “I think we might need to talk to him. Does this ‘kid’ have a name?”

“Yeah, I heard someone talk to him, once. What was it?” The stage manager scratched his head. “I dunno. I can’t remember.”

“Do you know
anything
about him?” Diotima asked.

“Well, his mother sells vegetables in the agora. Woman has a voice like the Furies on a bad day.”

“How do you know that?”

“She came here once, looking for her son. You should have heard what she had to say to the poor fellow. Apparently he was supposed to be moving boxes of vegetables instead of watching us work. Every man present could hear what she said, and it wasn’t pretty.” He paused. “Mind you, with her projection, if she’d been a man she could have had a career on stage.”

SCENE 26

THE VEGETABLE WOMAN

D
IOTIMA AND I went to the agora in search of a woman stall holder who had a voice like the Furies on a bad day.

Unfortunately, that description fit many of those who worked behind the stalls. Haggling with agora shoppers every day wasn’t the kind of job that led to gentle feelings. The fishwives were the worst. They used language that would make a soldier blush. I wondered why. Was it their husbands? Was it all that salt?

Next for rudeness after the fishwives came the farmwives. I supposed it was all the dirt.

There’s no official rule, but people who sold the same things tended to cluster in the same parts of the agora. I wasn’t quite sure how this arrangement had come about, but like so many things it was traditional and thus no one questioned it. One area in the northwest held all the bronzeware stalls. The smell of fish came from another in the southwest, close to the road that leads to Piraeus port town. The east side serviced the many people who passed by along the Panathenaic Way. That was where the sellers of fashionable cloth and the wine sellers and the people selling ready food set themselves. They made a small fortune at inflated prices. Toward the center, behind the fashionable vendors, were the unfashionable vegetables.

Patches of dark clouds had been threatening all day. Now there was a sudden clap of thunder and it poured down, as it had the night before Romanos died. Everyone ran for the
cover of roofs and awnings. With all the stalls up there were plenty of sunshades, under which people squeezed.

There was general agreement on the unseasonable weather: Dionysos had deserted us.

“He punishes us for the death at the theater,” someone said.

Luckily no one had recognized me as the man supposed to find the killer to placate the God. If they did, they’d probably blame me for not having solved the crime yet.

“If it’s to be like this throughout spring my crops will be ruined,” a farmer said. “My family will starve.”

“We’ll
all
starve,” said an optimist.

The storm dripped to a sudden end, to be followed by a burst of sun that did nothing but turn the puddles into muggy steam. It had been the worst spring of my remembrance. Everyone in the agora returned to business as usual.

Diotima and I walked along the two rows of vegetables, now somewhat damp. I imagined anyone who bought the produce now would see it rot faster than it usually did.

In the way of Athens it was mostly the women who managed the stalls while their men worked the fields. There were few men to check. It didn’t take us long to see that the man we were looking for wasn’t there. This reduced us to walking along the rows of vegetable merchants one more time, stopping to talk to each woman who looked old enough to have a grown son.

“Excuse me, do you have a son who likes going to the theater?”

This got us nowhere in the investigation, but a long way in invective.

I had lost hope by the time we came to the second to last woman in the last row, who said, “That’ll be my good-for-nothing troublemaker son Euripides. What’s he done this time?”

Hope returned, and also interest. Did this Euripides have a reputation as a troublemaker?

I told her the truth. I said, “As far as we know, your son has done nothing.”

She snorted. “That’d be right. He’s a lazy bugger.”

I wondered how someone could be both a troublemaker and lazy.

I said, “We merely want to speak with him. May I ask your name, ma’am?”

“Cleito.”

Cleito was larger than life, in the sense that there was twice as much of her in every direction as you would find on any normal woman.

“Why did you say, what’s he done this time?” Diotima asked carefully.

Cleito scowled at Diotima. “Well, it’ll be because he’s the son of that other good-for-nothing lazy troublemaker, my husband Mnesarchus.”

Cleito was angry about something. She shook her cleaver at us, decided against severing our limbs, and instead with a force that could have penetrated armor brought the blade down against an innocent, unsuspecting onion. The onion was stripped of its extra stalk. She tossed the stalk into one of the puddles at her feet and the onion in the basket, ready for sale.

“You want to buy onions?” she asked with a breath that indicated she’d been sampling her wares. “I got some good garlic too,” she added.

“No thank—” I began, until Diotima jabbed me with an elbow. “Er, that is, we’ve been looking forward to some good onions,” I corrected myself. “Diotima
loves
to cook onions, don’t you dear?”

“I certainly do,” Diotima agreed. “As much as you love to eat them, dear husband.”

I loathed onions. When I’d been in the army, onion and cheese was all they fed us on route marches. The mere smell
of onions reminded me of sore feet, cramped calf muscles, and given what usually happened during a forced march, having the runs in both meanings of the word.

If there was any food I never wanted to see again, it was onions.

“How many do you want?” Cleito demanded. “A basket?”

“That would be lovely.”

Cleito looked around, expecting something that she couldn’t see. “Where’s your slave to carry them?” she asked.

“We don’t have a slave.”

She looked from one to the other of us, astonished. “None? You can’t afford a single slave? How poor can you get?”

We weren’t that poor. I just didn’t like having a slave follow me around everywhere. In my line of business it didn’t work.

She said, “In that case you gotta carry this.”

She heaved up the basket with her massive biceps and practically threw it at me. I staggered under the weight.

Diotima paid Cleito the coins. It was a lot of coins, but at least we had enough onions to last us the rest of our lives, plus some useful information.

“Cleito, you haven’t told us where we can find your son?” Diotima said.

“Where he always is, if he isn’t mooning about in that theater.”

“Yes?”

“At home avoiding as much work as possible.”

“Where’s home?” Diotima asked patiently. Getting information from the vegetable woman was like pulling thorns from your feet. Painful. And slow.

“Phyla,” said Cleito. “Our farm is in the deme of Phyla.” She told us where to find their farm, then waved her cleaver at us again. “And if you see the lazy good-for-nothing, tell him his mother expects him to come here to do some real work.”

THE DEME OF Phyla is well to the northeast of the city. It’s true farmland out there, where the success or failure of the harvest decided all our futures for the next year. It was, in short, exactly the sort of place where the god Dionysos would make us suffer if he was offended by the murder at his shrine.

We knocked on the door of the farmhouse. We heard footsteps behind. They grew louder, then stopped. There was a fumbling with the bolt, before the door opened a crack and two worried eyes stared out at us.

“Oh, I thought you might be my mother,” he said. “Or the murderers.”

“Are you Euripides, son of Mnesarchus?” I asked.

“I’m Euripides, son of Cleito, more to the point,” he said.

I knew what he meant. I said as much.

He was suddenly concerned.

“My mother didn’t send you, did she?”

“Your mother did mention something about doing useful work, but we’ll tell her we couldn’t find you.”

His shoulders relaxed. “Thanks. You’re theater people, aren’t you? I saw you there.”

“That’s what we came to ask you about.”

“The theater? I spend all my spare time there. I’m going to be a writer.”

“I see.” My tone must have told him how difficult I found that to believe.

Euripides sniffed. “I’m sure you’ve heard men say that a hundred times.”

I hadn’t. Normal men talked about sport and women.

“Well, I’m different,” Euripides said. “I study the theater like other men study war.”

I knew only two writers: Aeschylus and Sophocles. Neither of them was anything like Euripides. Aeschylus was a hard man, a veteran soldier who had survived the worst fighting of
the Persian Wars. Sophocles was the very image of an Athenian gentleman, one of the rulers of the world. This Euripides was a weedy weakling who hid from his mother. To look at him up close, I realized Euripides and I must be almost exactly the same age.

“When did you complete your army time?” I asked, because every man must serve in the army from the year he turns eighteen until his twentieth birthday.

“Three years ago,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“I was in then too. I don’t remember you.”

Euripides shrugged. “We’re in different tribes.”

That was true enough. Army units are arranged according to the ten tribes of Athens. Euripides and I could have been on the same route marches and not known it. Yet I was struck by how different our physiques and our situations were. Somehow in the last three years I had progressed without even noticing it. I was a married man with a fine woman and an important job, and a few successes to my name, while Euripides, it seemed to me, was no different to the boy I had been on that first chilly morning when we all stood in line as raw recruits. I understood now why the stage manager had called Euripides a kid.