Death Ex Machina (8 page)

“But an important one. We need an answer.”

“I don’t even know who you are or why you’re here.”

I decided not to enlighten him. Not until we had our answers.

“You drew all the scenes on the wall?” I said.

“Of course.”

“Did anyone else paint any of it?”

“Are you suggesting I subcontract my work?” he said it angrily.

“No, not at all Stephanos. I merely don’t know much about how artists work.”

“Who decides what you draw?” Diotima asked.

“The paying client, obviously,” Stephanos said. “Sophocles told me he wanted Corinth.”

“Was that all that Sophocles said?” Diotima asked.

“Yes. I took it from there. I decided to draw the agora and the city as if looking down from a high mountain. Like the Gods were looking down on the action, you know?”

“Did you draw a man tripping in the agora?”

“How should I know?”

“You don’t remember?”

“I draw hundreds of little background figures every month. I don’t keep a list.”

“What about a wine bar?” I asked. “Did you draw that?”

“Probably. Every agora has one.”

That was true enough.

“What about someone throwing up?”

He laughed.

“What about a picture of the god machine and a man falling from it?”

“Look, who are you people?”

“We’re investigating a series of sabotage attempts against the theater.”

“It’s nothing to do with me,” he said.

“The last one resulted in a man having his leg destroyed. And mark this, Stephanos: every single booby trap that’s hurt someone is drawn into the skene that
you
painted.”

Stephanos had switched colors. He hesitated while he worked on a particularly tricky piece of blue clothing that a satyr was ripping off a maenad.

“I haven’t hurt anyone,” he said.

“Do you know a man named Phellis?” I said.

“One of the actors?”

“He’s the one with the crippled leg,” I said.

“Bad luck for him then.”

“What about the stage manager?”

“Kiron? I know him well. I deal with him whenever I work at the theater. He’s a good man.”

“Do you have an apprentice by any chance?” Diotima asked. I thought it was an inspired question.

“No.”

So much for inspiration.

“Did you alter the skene painting?”

“No.” He sounded tense.

“Did you draw in the god machine?”

“No. I might have done those other figures you talked about. I can’t remember.”

I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. I couldn’t think of any way we could break his statement. Not unless we could find someone who’d seen him working on the skene in the last few days. I looked Diotima’s way to see if she had any ideas. She silently shook her head.

Stephanos must have sensed the pressure was off. He put down the paint pot and began to flake another into the brazier.
He cleaned off the palette knife and the other tools. Seeing a few spots of white paint on his hand, he licked them off.

“Is that safe?” I asked.

“It’s only lead. It can’t hurt you.”

“HE WAS TENSE when you questioned him about the wall,” Diotima said when we were outside.

“Hardly surprising, since I’d just accused him of assault in a sacred area,” I pointed out. “Most people would be a little put out.”

“If anyone had seen him at the theater in the last few days surely they would have mentioned it,” Diotima said.

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. It was amazing what people remembered only after you asked them. But there was another problem. “What possible motive would he have to foul the plays?”

“I don’t know.”

Diotima’s point, though, applied to everyone. I said, “There’s one thing we know for sure.
Someone
painted in the god machine and Phellis’s accident.”

“That’s true,” Diotima said.

“So your logic applies to everyone. Whoever did the paint job, why weren’t they seen?”

“For the same reason nobody saw the booby traps being laid,” Diotima said at once. “Someone sneaked in and did them at night.”

“How good are you at painting in the dark?” I said.

“They used torches,” Diotima said.

“And yet they escaped detection. Or else they did it in the glaring light of day.”

“They’d have to be very confident,” Diotima said. “People walk in and out of the theater all the time.”

“Or maybe the pictures were there all the time.”

We reached the deme boundary at Piraeus Way. As we
crossed the road I felt a few drops of water land on my head. I looked up. A drop landed in my eye. The sky had clouded over and it was about to rain, something that rarely happens in spring, but when it does it can turn into a late winter downpour.

Diotima had felt the drops too. She put out her hands to confirm. She said, “Nico … what about my house?”

Dear Gods. Diotima’s house. She’d inherited the house from her birth father. We lived with my parents, because that was how things were done in Athens, but the house was part of her dowry.

The problem was, the house was in a state of disrepair. I’d been meaning to fix the roof for the past month, but it hadn’t seemed urgent. Now I was going to have to do it in the rain.

We turned left, and passed through the agora. Those vendors who hadn’t already left for the day were packing their stalls as quickly as they could. We dodged around the line of departing donkeys laden with goods. Only a few blocks later we came to Diotima’s house.

It had been something of a puzzle what to do with that house. It was a grand place with a fine courtyard and large rooms, but city homes were a sink for wealth, not a source. We couldn’t move in even if we wanted, because we couldn’t afford to maintain and staff it, not on my income.

We’d tried renting it out to visiting trade delegations and wealthy merchants who were in Athens on extended stays. There were one or two men of influence in Athens who were well-disposed toward me, and they sent wealthy visitors my way. The rich tenants had complained constantly about every little thing, demanded extra slaves to serve them, and when it came time to settle the bill looked for every possible excuse to reduce the agreed amount. I’d decided that wealthy men got that way by never paying their bills. Also these men invariably left the place in a worse state than they found it. They would
hold parties in our house but not replace the broken furniture. I knew for sure that one man who owned a merchant fleet in Rhodes had departed with our complete set of new kitchen knives.

Something had to be done. Somehow we had to make that house pay.

Achilles let us in. Not the hero of the Trojan War, but an old slave, crippled in the heels, who for his faithful service Diotima had promised to care for to the end of his days. There used to be two house slaves as well, but we’d sold them when we stopped renting the place. We simply couldn’t afford to feed that many mouths.

“Master, mistress,” Achilles said as he opened the door. Every time I talked to him, he seemed older. “It’s good that you’re here. What am I to do about the women’s quarters?”

“You’re not to do anything, Achilles,” I said. If he tried to climb onto the roof, he would certainly die.

“I’ve placed pots where the worst of the leaks are,” he said.

I walked into the central courtyard to inspect the damage. The courtyard itself was jumbled. The garden beds were full of weeds, the furniture looked the worse for wear. But there was nothing that couldn’t survive some rain.

The hole in the inner wall where a drunk partygoer had punched his way through was under the cover of the eaves. The eaves themselves showed signs of wet rot setting in, and the coming rain would worsen that, but there was nothing to be done about it now.

The immediate problem was higher up. If I craned my neck, I could see where holes had developed in the thatching in numerous places. If the rain came down as hard as I thought it might, there’d soon be pools of water on the second storey floors. That wouldn’t do.

I fetched the ladder from out back and carried it up to the women’s quarters in the right wing. That was where I could
see was the worst of the damage. Achilles followed after with the canvas of an old musty army tent that he struggled to hold. Diotima carried rope. It wouldn’t be the best fix, but it would have to do for now.

I climbed up.

Things crawled all over me. I jerked back but they clung on. I waved my arms and they fell off. But there was one on my head.

“Ugh!”

“Nico! What is it?” Diotima called up. She sounded worried.

“Mice. The thatch is full of mice. They’re crawling on me!”

Peals of laughter from below. So much for sympathy from a worried wife.

Then I felt something crawling up my leg.

“There’s one under my chiton!”

More laughter. Now even our slave was laughing.

“Arrgh! Oh, dear Gods …” On the ladder, I bent over in excruciating pain. It hurt so much I thought I might faint.

“Nico! What’s wrong?” Diotima called from below.

“It bit me.”

“Where?” Now she sounded worried.

“I’m not going to say. But it hurts like Hades.”

“Oh Nico, be careful.” That part of me was essential to Diotima’s life plans. “We’ll have to get a cat,” she called up.

“Two cats. One would die from overeating.”

It was clear now what had caused the holes, and if we didn’t do something about it, and soon, I’d have to replace the entire roof. Worse, mice can easily jump from one roof to another. Which meant I’d have to warn our neighbors. I could imagine how pleased they were going to be at the news. I just hoped they wouldn’t decide to sue me.

The rain was heavy now. My body poked halfway through the roof. From the waist up I was above the house. Achilles passed up the canvas, which I spread as wide as I could to cover
the worst of the holes. From where I stood I could see a second mouse nest. Terrific.

I lashed down the canvas and tied it tight. There’d still be drips, but damage to the floor was averted.

The moment I was down, Diotima knelt and stuck her head under my chiton to inspect the damage to my nether regions.

“That looks nasty,” she said from underneath my clothing.

“If you say anything,” I warned Achilles, who watched this with an amused smile, “I will … I will …” I couldn’t think of anything bad enough.

Diotima emerged from my chiton.

“It needs a wash and definitely some ointment.”

Some nice oily ointment sounded good.

“Your mother will know what to do.”

“My mother!”

“She is a midwife after all, Nico.”

“That means she knows how to treat
your
parts, dear wife, not mine. All it needs is a gentle rub, and, er—”

A massive thunderclap.

Achilles hurried to place more pots where leaks dripped.

Zeus, or Apollo, or Dionysos, or whichever god had caused this rain, it was like he had an Olympus-sized bucket and had turned it upside down over Athens.

I said as much to Diotima. She considered the downpour for a moment and said, “The amount of water that’s coming down, I think it must be Poseidon.”

“We could stay here for the night?” I suggested.

Diotima hesitated. “I’d rather not …”

This old house had some terrible memories for Diotima. That was the other reason we didn’t live here.

“Then we run for home.”

We ran.

It was immediately obvious that this was a bad idea. Diotima tripped over her chiton and landed face first in
the mud. She was still wearing the bright Dionysiac festival chiton that she planned to wear throughout the festival. The material covered her arms to the wrists and her legs to the ankles, and that was her downfall. She picked herself up at once and I wiped her down. The rain helped by washing off a lot of the street muck.

Diotima lifted the skirt of her chiton. Together we splashed our way to the agora.

We were so saturated now that it didn’t matter, but the rain was unpleasant enough that we wanted to get out of it.

As we hurried, we passed by people who also looked for shelter. Most of them did the same thing we did. We ran up the steps of the nearest stoa, the covered, colonnaded porticoes that surrounded the agora of Athens. This stoa was already crowded with people sheltering from the rain. We didn’t let that stop us, we pushed our way in.

“This is the curse of Dionysos,” an anonymous man amongst us said.

It had become surprisingly cold. The chilly wind didn’t help. Other men, new arrivals, all soaked, tried to make their way under cover, but there was no more room and the men on the outer edge pushed away the latecomers. Diotima and I had wriggled our way to the middle where the mass of bodies created some warmth and our clothing began to steam. I put my arm around Diotima to make it clear she was my wife, so that no man thought to grope her. An Athenian would never take liberties with another man’s wife—not if he wanted to live—but if there were any slave girls in this press of people then they were probably getting more attention than they wanted. Come to that though, no slave girl would risk the wrath of her mistress by tarrying under cover. She would run for home.

We stood like that for a long time. I thought about our farm. There was nothing I could do about the olive trees—either the fruit would drop too early in the wet or it wouldn’t—but I
hoped the slave we left to mind the farm would at least make sure the chickens were safely in the henhouse.

Another man raced across the agora, coming from the south, head down and hands raised in an ineffectual shield against the downpour.

He saw the crush under the stoa and that there was no more room but he shouted. “Make way!”

He didn’t stop to see if anyone made way. He ran in.

Men moved back because they had no choice.

The new arrival raised his head. It was Romanos.

He shook his hair, which was unnaturally long. Droplets sprayed the men beside him. That caused more complaints, though these were perfunctory since we were all damp anyway.

Romanos caught my eye. I waved to him, and motioned for him to join us. The actor pushed his way through with polite, muttered apologies.