Rome Burning (16 page)

So they parted at her door with the usual faint awkwardness – a glancing kiss, like friends. Sulien walked on, alone. His flat was in a tall, shabbily handsome building whose faded, powdery blue walls emerged from aggressive rainbows of graffiti at its base, towards the rear of Transtiberina, right under the sudden steep peak of the Janiculum hill. Sulien turned a few corners, following one raggedy uphill street after another. A black curtain of hanging creeper, lovely in daylight, fell draped between buildings. Sulien crossed beneath it, and beyond there was no light at all except the low, electric glare of the sky. It was strange how often, how abruptly, in Transtiberina, one could pass from light and activity into exposed solitude and darkness.

Sulien found that he had fastened one hand around the wrist of the other. He was absolutely certain that footsteps had been quietly accompanying him since he had left Tancorix, and that, although he could see no one, someone was watching him as he unlocked the door of his building. He shut the door behind him with a little shiver of relief.

He slept badly. Half his friends said you needed a set of earplugs to get a decent night’s sleep in Rome. Usually Sulien was adept at shutting out the nocturnal sounds of Transtiberina – the inexplicable bangs and thuds in the streets outside, the strange, isolated yells, the barks of dogs – but that night they all seemed louder and closer, while the feverish summer heat soaked into the sheets.

In the morning, however, he barely even remembered the fear any more than he remembered what he’d dreamt that night, the daylight itself seemed such a strong repudiation of it.

But three days later, on the steps of the bath house he saw a man heading in as he came out, quite unremarkable-looking and surely not the same as the figure on the street that night – and yet Sulien felt that he had seen him more than once, between the clinic and here. But if he had – on the way after all to a public building – what of it? He could not think what was wrong with him.

In the clinic, Bupe, the girl from the arms factory, lay propped in a narrow bed and stared with her remaining eye. She had screamed with pain and horror for a day, but was now still, her maimed face dull with a terrible lack of surprise. The yellow was gone from her skin now, and though the wound still looked horrifying, Sulien was sure he could make the flesh heal straight, force the tissue not to form itself into fibrous knots; she would hardly be scarred. But of course the eye socket would stay empty, and there was nothing he could do about the missing hand and thumb.

‘So I could still be a whore,’ she said grimly, when he told her about her face.

Varius, progressing moodily through the ward, was almost relieved by the rare twinge of real shock he experienced at this.

He said, ‘Bupe, we’re going to Veii; we’re going to stop
them doing this,’ but then suppressed a grimace of displeasure with himself. Why should he think that would comfort her? Even if they could stop it, what good was it to her?

Bupe’s visible eyelid lifted slowly. ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ she said flatly. And she asked Sulien, because Varius had strode away in a frustrated sweep, ‘When are you going to do that?’

‘This afternoon.’

Bupe looked at him and uttered a bitter little scoffing noise. ‘There’s no point with those places,’ she announced.

Sulien said nothing else, but Bupe brought back the tension that had dogged him for the last few days. He thought of Una, because Bupe reminded him of her in a way; they were almost the same age, and there was something else, a level, bitter certainty they both had, which troubled him.

Later he went after Varius, insisting, ‘There’s got to be something for her. There’s no rule that says her life has to be ruined. Is there? There have got to be things she could do. The factory should pay for doing that to her. They could
help
her. At least she’s free, in a way, isn’t she?’

It was true, in that no one would want her as a slave and officially, she hardly existed.

Varius only forced a nod. In fact he couldn’t imagine a future for Bupe that seemed both tolerable and plausible. A weary quarrel resumed in his head:
This is no good,
it went.
Better than nothing
, came the answer, dully.
Such a fraction above nothing that you might as well stop
. He did not want to say this to Sulien. He did not want to make other people believe it.

‘I hope my sister never worked anywhere like that,’ blurted Sulien.

‘Wouldn’t you know?’ asked Varius, slight curiosity briefly lifting his mood.

Sulien gritted his teeth. ‘I don’t know if I’d know,’ he said. ‘She was in some factories. What she’s told me … maybe it’s all of it, maybe it’s not. Probably not, is what I think.’

‘She’s not stunted, she’s not disfigured. She can’t have been somewhere that bad for long,’ said Varius, with
contained, deliberate brutality that seemed somehow directed at himself, not Sulien.

‘You could tell Marcus you’ve changed your mind,’ Sulien said, recklessly.

Varius looked sharply at him, so that Sulien half-expected a rebuke, but all he said was, ‘But I haven’t.’

At noon, Sulien was called to the longdictor.

The voice was female, hushed, blurred with urgency. ‘… wouldn’t stop kicking him, he’s only eleven. I think he’ll die, oh, you’ve got to come.’

‘All right – all right. Can’t someone bring him here?’ He was a little irritated at being called over to say these things, it was not his job.

‘I
can’t
.’ There was an indistinct sound of shouting somewhere, she caught her breath in an audible flinch.

‘Then we’ll send someone. Where are you?’

‘In the Subura but
no
.
No
. I’m not supposed to be doing this. They’ll find out. He won’t let you take him.’

‘You mean the owner? We can deal with him. Look, we can help, but I’m going to give the longdictor to—’

‘
No
,
I need to talk to you
.
No
. He said he stole – or something – I think he’s mad, I think he might kill me.’

‘If it’s that bad then we—’

‘
No, no, please
, if you do that you’ll make it worse, I can manage, he’ll calm down later, he’ll be out, he won’t even see you but
please just come I’ll do anything
. This
is
Sulien, isn’t it?’

Sulien said, ‘Yes, it’s me,’ and then felt an unfamiliar stirring of vague paranoia. ‘Why did you ask for me?’

‘I know about you, everyone does. I know you do things no one else can – you can really help, you can save his life. The little boy—’

‘I can’t just walk out and—’

‘Please, I think he’ll die,
he’s not moving
–
please
.’

Sulien turned off the longdictor, and sighed. He felt somehow that he should not go, but could think of no reason why not. He could send someone else to fetch the child, despite the woman’s frantic insistence – but it was true, he was different; he could do more, and more quickly. He remembered that he had not complained about being
whisked across town for Faustus, and that decided him. He sighed again, and walked out of the cool clinic into the melee of heat.

His trirota was chained outside the clinic. Sulien winced as he fired the motor, the metal stung with heat even though the machine had been standing in the shade. He crossed the Aemilian bridge, the shrunken Tiber creeping along below, under the gold glare of light, and rode west.

As he moved into the sudden shade between tenement blocks, for no reason at all, at least unprompted by any sign of something wrong that he could place – he remembered the man on the bath-house steps, the footsteps on the way home from Tancorix’s. He was uncomfortably aware of the dampness on his forehead and in his hair; the shade in the street seemed only a kind of formality of light, it cast a bluish, dazzled haze over his vision, but had no effect on the heat. At the next turn the hot street was emptier, and the shabby high buildings pressed closer together, crushing it. It seemed as if he was being led away from where there were people.

It occurred to him that if there was a household here who had a slave – two slaves, it seemed – it was strange that they could afford to throw them away so lightly.

He was a fool to have come alone. He’d said he was going to the Subura, but he should have left the exact address; no one would know where to look for him – why was he thinking like this, in broad daylight? What could he do except keep on?

The next street was so narrow that it was almost dark, despite the burning strip of blue sky skimming above it. At street level, the walls were ragged and blank, the windows boarded up, the surfaces bare even of graffiti: a torn poster urging the election of an official in a contest two years over, and a young woman standing in the middle of the street, were almost the only signs of human life, as if it was not a street but a split in the earth, naturally formed by rain, or earthquake.

Sulien knew, even before she spoke, that the woman must be the one who’d summoned him. She certainly looked like a slave: tangled dark hair tied roughly back, a colourless
dress that left her arms bare, a premature droop to the edges of the thin, dry-skinned lips. Still, she was younger than he expected, perhaps only twenty-three or -four. Talking to her before, he’d assumed she was the mother of the hurt child – it was still possible, but seemed less likely. She called out his name, and barely giving him time to prop the trirota against a wall, she ran forward, seized his wrist and fairly dragged him up the steps and through the open front door of an apartment block of dark, run-down brick, hissing at him, ‘Oh, hurry. I mean thank you for coming here, but please.’

Inside, the block was almost silent. There was a lift, but the woman ignored it, rushing for the stairs, not letting go of Sulien’s arm. Occasional windows, cracked and miserable, let a little light into the stairwell, but the lamps on the stained walls were unlit. This is a joke, Sulien thought unhappily, almost scoffing at himself: no one lives here. Or no one who can afford two slaves. Why are you going along with this?

But although he felt the possibility of the hurt boy’s existence dwindling every second, it had not disappeared altogether, and until it had he must go on, mocked with pity for what he suspected did not exist. The feeling of wrongness had to be
proven
correct, however disastrously.

But the block was not, evidently, completely empty, for just as he thought this, a heavy-set man emerged from one of the flats and pushed past them without acknowledging them or looking either in the face, and trudged downstairs.

Sulien asked, trying to sound normal, ‘Where’s your master?’

‘He’s gone – he’s selling some stuff. It’ll be all right. I think he’ll be an hour, at least – that’ll be all right, won’t it?’

Out of breath on the eighth floor, she took him to the end of the corridor and opened the door of a dismal little flat. The furniture looked old and sad and perfunctory, and aside from that, there was scarcely any evidence of life, no books, pictures, or even discarded clothes, nothing personal. But there were residues of violence; the white fragments of a bowl or plate had been swept into a small pile, but not
removed. A chair lay overturned, which, even in her desperation, the woman darted from his side to put straight. She opened another door behind which was another sharp flight of steps, leading up steeply into loft space. He could see the upper slice of a little cell of a room, and from halfway up the steps he could see the edge of a mattress, and a shape under a blanket that did not move. For a moment Sulien thought the child might be dead, but the next instant he knew it was not a human body at all. It could have been simply another blanket rolled up, or perhaps a dummy more artfully constructed of clothes that might have deceived the eye a little longer – but for Sulien it was as if he’d been asked to believe that the cold banister under his hand was the bone of an arm. He knew, before he was close enough to see, that the bulk was something dull and cheap, not flesh. And the room was windowless: once inside, and the door locked, there would be nothing he could do. He felt a tiny lapsing of tension, a sort of relief at being right, before his nerves shrilled furious warning.

As if the woman might not know, might somehow believe a child really lay there, Sulien felt a brief, ridiculous urge to announce to her what was wrong and why he had to get out, as if sudden flight might make him look callous unless he explained himself. But he began to move nevertheless, backwards down the steps, knocking into the woman and swivelling, thudding down into the living room. She gave a wail of protest at first, but as he forced past her to the floor, she gave that up and tried to catch at him, saying, ‘Stop.’

He ignored her, covering the dingy ground through the flat, a tutting voice in his mind pointing out to him in slow, told-you-so tones that of course no one lived here, the furniture was perfunctory scenery, either what she – what they – had found abandoned here or rubbish that they’d managed to scramble together.

The woman called again, ‘Stop.’ But she was striding, not running after him. She was confident that he would not get far, Sulien realised. There were more people in the building.

Nevertheless, the door of the flat was only shut, not locked. He burst out into the corridor, and behind him, the
woman shouted – but not to him, this time. Sulien pounded round the stairwell once, twice, and as he swung round the turn he looked down. The flights were placed too tightly in the shaft, to let him see who was coming, but he saw a shadowy blur of swift movement three, two floors down? A hand briefly grabbing the banister, sliding up towards him, fast.