Two For The Lions (7 page)

XII

WE HAD NO domestic water supply. Like most of Rome we inhabited an apartment where the nearest fountain was around a corner in another street. For our daily ablutions we went to the public baths. They were plentiful, sociable, and in many cases nee. The more luxurious parts of the Aventine boasted large detached mansions with their own private bathhouses, but in our slum we had a long walk with our strigil and oil-flask. Our street was called Fountain Court, but that was an administrative joke.

Across the road, in the huge gloomy block where I had once lived myself: stood Lenia's laundry, which did possess a deep, rather fitful well. Its murky water was usually available in winter, and big cauldrons were always on the fires in the back yard. Because I was supposed to be helping Lenia arrange her divorce I felt able to cadge what remained of her warn1 water after the laundry closed for the night. She had been married a whole year now having lived with her husband for all of a fortnight--so in accordance with local custom it was well time she shed her spouse.

Lenia was married to Smaractus, the most stinking, greedy, heartless and degenerate Aventine landlord. Their union, which all her friends had been denouncing from the moment she proposed it, had been cobbled together out of their mutual hopes of defrauding each other of property. The wedding night had ended with the nuptial bed on fire, the husband in jail accused of arson, Lenia in acrimonious hysterics, and everyone else drunk out of their minds. An occasion to remember--as the wedding guests now insisted on reminding the unhappy pair. They did not thank us for it.

Their curious start should have provided years of nostalgic stories to retell happily around the fire at Saturnalia. Well, perhaps not around the fire, since Smaractus had been rather badly frightened by his adventure in the flaming bed. Around a festive table, with the lampwicks all trimmed neatly, perhaps. But from their night being rescued by the vigiles they had descended into a hell from which nobody could save them. Smaractus came home from jail in a foul temper; Lenia pretended she had had no idea he was so violent and unpleasant; he accused her of setting fire to the bed deliberately with a view to grabbing a big inheritance if she killed him; she said she wished she had done it, even if there was no inheritance. Smaractus made a few feeble attempts to claim rights in the laundry (the one freehold he had omitted to acquire in our district), then he stole what he could carry and fled back to his own grimy apartment. Now they were getting divorced. They had been talking about it for the past twelve months without any progress, but that was typical of the Aventine.

Lenia had been in her office where black winter mould, encouraged by the laundry steam, had encased the walls in a sinister patina. Hearing us, she swayed to the door. She seemed subdued, which meant either she had not yet drunk enough to liven her up this evening, or she had tippled so much she had poisoned herself Her unusual red hair, product of violent substances unknown to most cosmetics vendors, hung either side of her white, bleary-eyed face in frizzled hanks as she dithered at the doorway.

While Helena slipped past me to avail herself of the still-warm tubs, I planted myself in Lenia's path with a well-placed verbal tackle. "Hello! I see your hot-blooded lover's here."

"Falco, when the bastard comes down, trip him up and make him talk about my settlement."

"Call me when you hear him coming, and I'll make another attempt to reason with him."

Reason? Don't make me laugh, Falco! Just you put a noose around his throat and pull it tight; I'll hold the agreement so he can sign it. Then you can finish strangling him."

She meant it too.

Smaractus must be collecting rent from his hapless tenants. We could tell that from the angry shouting upstairs and also because the two dwindling stars of his back-up team, Rodan and Asiacus, were flat out with a wineskin in Lenia's front portico. Smaractus ran what he called a gladiators' school, and these punch-drunk specimens were part of it. He took them around for protection; I mean, to protect the rest of the populace from what these idiots might get up to if Smaractus left them unattended.

There was no need to drag Rodan and Asiacus up all the six storeys of leasehold hovels, because Smaractus himself was perfectly capable of forcing his debtors to turn out their purses if he caught them in.

He didn't scare me though. Nor did his thugs.

Giving Julia her bath was my job (hence the jibes about Cato the Elder and the late hour I had slunk home).

"I want her to grow up knowing who her father is," said Helena.

"Is that to ensure she will be rude and defiant to the right person?"

"Yes. And so you will know it is all your own fault. I don't want you ever to say Her mother brought her up and ruined her'!"

"She's a bright child. She should manage to ruin herself."

It took me at least twice as long to clean up the baby as it took Helena to rinse out her little tunics in another cauldron. Helena disappeared, perhaps to console Lenia, though I hoped she had gone to prepare my dinner back at home. I was left to make my usual failed attempt to interest Julia in the floating ship I had whittled for her, while she played instead with her favourite toy, the cheesegrater. We had to bring it or there was screaming. She had perfected how to smack it down on the water apparently aimlessly, though with a true knack of soaking her papa.

The cheesegrater had a curious history. I had swiped it at Pa's warehouse, thinking it looked like an ordinary product of a house clearance. When Pa noticed it at our apartment one day, he told me it had in fact come from an Etruscan tomb. Whether he was himself the tomb robber remained vague, as usual. He reckoned it might be five hundred years old. Still, it worked all right.

By the time I had dried Julia and dressed her, then dried myself I felt exhausted but there was to be no peaceful relaxation because when I clutched the wriggling baby under my cloak and gathered up all her accessories I found Helena Justina, my supposedly refined girlfriend, leaning on one of the crooked pillars in the outside portico, rewinding her stole around her shoulders and risking serious assault by actually talking to Rodan and Asiacus.

The ugly pair shined nervously. They were ill-fed, unhealthy specimens, kept on short rations by Smaractus' meanness. He had owned them for years. They were slaves, of course, pallid bruisers in leather skirts and with their arms wrapped in grimy bandages to make them look tough. Smaractus still made a pretence of exercising them at his seedy training barracks, but the place was just a cover and he could never dare risk them in the arena; for one thing, they fought even more dirtily than the Roman crowd liked.

There were no graffiti from lovelorn manicure girls scrawled on the walls of that particular gladiators' barracks, and no gold-laden ladies stopped their litters surreptitiously around the comer while they slipped inside with presents for the hulk of the month. So Rodan and Asiacus must have been startled when they found themselves accosted by Helena Justina, who was well-known in these parts as Didius Falco's snooty piece, the girl who had stepped down two ranks to live with me. Most people on the rough side of the Aventine were still trying to fathom where I could have bought the powerful love potion to bewitch her. Sometimes at the dead of night, I woke up in a sweat and wondered that myself

"So how is the world of gladiating?" she had just asked, quite as calmly as if she were enquiring of a Praetorian friend of her father's how his latest court case was progressing at the Basilica Julia.

It took the clapped-out wrecks a few minutes to interpret her cultured vowels, though not long to compose replies. "It stinks."

"It bloody stinks." From them that was sophisticated repartee.

"Ah!" Helena responded wisely. The fact that she seemed unafraid of them was giving them the jitters. It was not doing much for me. "You both work for Smaractus, don't you?"

She could not yet have seen me lurking in the shadows, anguishing how I could possibly protect her if the rancid pair heaved themselves upright and got lively. They were trouble. They always had been. They had beaten me up several times in the past, trying to make me pay my rent; I had been younger then, and not normally impeded by carrying a baby as I was now.

"He treats us worse than dogs," grumbled Rodan. He was the one with the broken nose. A tenant had hit him in the face with a mallet when Rodan tried to forestall a moonlit flit. Any desperate tenant who had finally glimpsed escape from Smaractus was likely to fight for it fiercely.

"You poor things."

"Still it's better than being an informer!" giggled Asiacus, the rude one with the pustular skin complaint.

"Most things are," Helena smiled.

"What are you doing shacked up with one?" They were bursting with curiosity.

"Falco spun me some fables; you know how he talks. He makes me laugh."

"Oh he's a clown, all right!"

"I like looking after him. Besides, we have a baby now."

"We all thought he was after your money."

"I expect that's it." Maybe by this time Helena had guessed I was, listening in She was an evil tease. "Speaking of money, I suppose Smaractus is hoping to make some out of the Emperor's new project?"

"That big place?"

"Yes, the arena that they are building at the end of the Forum, where Nero had his lake. The Flavian Amphitheatre, they are calling it. Won't it provide good opportunities when it opens? I should imagine there will be a big ceremony, probably lasting weeks, with regular gladiatorial shows--and probably animals."

"You're talking real spectacle," replied Asiacus, trying to impress her with size.

"That should be healthy for people in your line."

"Oh Smaractus thinks he'll be rolling--but he'll be lucky!" sneered Asiacus. "They'll be wanting class acts there. Besides, the big operators will have all the contracts well sewn up long before."

"Are they manoeuvring already?"

"You bet."

"Will there be a lot of competition?"

"Sharp as knives."

"Who are the big operators?"

"Saturninus, Hanno--not Smaractus. No chance!"

"Still, there should be plenty of profit to go round--or do you think things might turn nasty?"

"Bound to," said Rodan.

"Is that a well-educated guess, or do you know for sure?"

"We know it."

Helena sounded in awe of their inside knowledge: "Has trouble started?"

"Plenty," Rodan said, boasting like a Celtic beer-swiller. "It's not so bad among the fighters' lanistae. Supplying men can be fixed without much trouble--though of course they have to be trained," he remembered to say, as if he and his filthy partner were talented experts not simple brutes. "But the word is that there's going to be a huge venatio--as many big cats as the organisers can get hold of: and they are promising thousands. That's got the beast importers shitting bricks."

Helena ignored the obscenity without flinching. "It's going to be a wonderful building, so I suppose they will inaugurate it with appropriately lavish shows. Are the beast importers afraid they cannot meet the demand?"

"More like, each one is afraid the others will meet it and he'll lose out! They all want to make a killing!" Rodan collapsed, laughing hoarsely, overcome by his wit. "make a killing, see--"

Asiacus put on a show of greater intelligence, bashing Rodan sideways in disgust at the terrible pun. They sprawled over even more of the pavement while Helena politely stepped back to make more room for them.

"So what are the importers up to at the moment?" she asked, still as if she were simply gossiping. "Have you heard any stories?"

"Oh there's plenty of stories!" Asiacus assured her (which meant he had heard absolutely nothing definite).

"Blackening each other's character," suggested Rodan.

"Dirty tricks," added Asiacus.

"Oh you mean like stealing each other's animals?" Helena asked them innocently.

"Well, I bet they would if they thought of it," Rodan decreed. "Most of em are too thick to have the idea. Besides," he went on, "nobody's going to tangle with a great big roaring lion, are they?"

"Falco saw something very peculiar today," Helena decided to confess. "He thinks some dirty trick with a lion may have happened."

"That Falco's an idiot."

I decided it was time to step forward and show myself before Helena Justina heard something else a well brought-up senator's daughter should not be told.

XIII

HELENA TOOK THE baby from me demurely while the two heavies sat up and jeered. "Io, Falco! Watch out; Smaractus is looking for you."

They had immediately become perky now that I had appeared to put myself in line for thumping.

"Forget it," I said, giving Helena a glare to keep her in some sort of order. "Smaractus has stopped harassing me He promised me a year's free rent when I saved his life in the wedding fire."

"Get up to date," chortled Rodan. "The wedding was over a year ago. Smaractus has just realized you owe him for the past two months!"

I sighed.

Helena sent me a look that said she would talk to me at home about which part of our tight budget the money would come from. Since the rent in question was owed for my old apartment, currently occupied by my disreputable friend Petronius, she would reckon he should contribute. His life was such a mess at present, I preferred not to bother him. I winked at Helena, which nowhere near fooled her, then I encouraged her to go ahead and start putting pans on our cooking bench.

"Don't fry the fish; I'll do that," I ordered, asserting my rights as the cook.

"Don't stay too long gossiping then; I'm hungry," she retaliated, as if the delay in dinner was all my fault. I watched her cross the road, a figure that made the two gladiators salivate, and walking with more confidence than she ought to show. Then I saw the scampering shape of Nux our dog shoot out from the shadows at the foot of the stairs and accompany her safely home.

I had no intention of pressing Rodan and Asiacus for more information, but I had promised to tackle Smaractus about Lenia's divorce. He was on his way down. That became obvious, as the shrieks of abuse from his tenants grew louder. His bodyguards Hill their wineskin to stop him pinching it, and shambled to their feet.

I yelled up to Smaractus. As I expected, the pleasure of telling me my period of free rent had ended brought him rushing down the staircase. A lolloping figure with a belted-in winegut, he stumbled badly as he reached ground level.

"You want to watch that," I advised in a nasty tone. "Those treads are crumbling badly. The landlord's heading for a huge compensation claim when someone breaks their neck."

"I hope it's you, Falco. I'll pay the claim; it would be worth it."

"Glad to see relations between us are as amicable as ever--by the way, I'm surprised you haven't been asking for rent again; it's very good of you to extend my free-gift period--"

Smaractus went a horrid shade of purple, outraged by my cheek. He clutched at a heavy gold torque he had taken to wearing; he had always been prone to insulting his tenants by flashing large chunks of ugly jewellery. It seemed to act as a talisman and he hit back straightaway: "That big bastard from the vigiles who you've planted in my apartment on the sixth, Falco--I want him out. I never allow sub-letting."

"No; you prefer that when folk go on holiday you can stick in filthy subtenants of your own and charge twice Petro's all right. He's part of the family. He's just staying with me for a short term while he sorts out some personal business. And speaking of women, I want to talk to you about Lenia."

"You keep out of that."

"Now settle down. You can't go on like this. You both need your freedom; the mess you've put yourselves in needs to be untangled, and the only way is to face the situation."

"I've spelt out my terms."

"Your terms stink. Lenia's told you what she wants. I dare say she's been rather over-demanding too. I'm offering to arbitrate. Let's try and arrange a sensible compromise."

"Stuff you, Falco."

"You're so refined! Smaractus, this is the kind of stubbornness that dragged out the Trojan War to a decade of misery. Think about what I've said."

"No, I'll just think about the day I can lose you off my tenants' list."

I beamed at him. "Well, we're at one there!"

Rodan and Asiacus were growing bored, so they made their usual offer to Smaractus of rolling me out like a pastry and making a human fruit tart. Before he decided which of his pet bullies was to hold me down and which to jump on me, I put myself in the street with room to sprint for home, then asked him casually, "Is Calliopus, the lanista, a colleague of yours?"

"Never heard of him," growled Smaractus. As an informant he measured up to his filthy qualities as a landlord: he was as welcome as root rot.

"Rodan and Asiacus have been telling me about the ructions in your business. I gather the big new amphitheatre heralds an unparalleled era of happiness among the high-living venatio boys. Calliopus is one of them; I'm surprised a man of the world like you doesn't know him. What about Saturninus then?"

"Don't know him, and wouldn't tell you if I did."

"Generous as ever." At least that made him look worried that his truculence had in some subtle way shed light for me. "So you didn't know the arena suppliers are all hoping to make their fortunes when the new place officially opens?"

Smaractus merely looked furtive, so I grinned and waved goodbye. I arrived home just in time to wrench the fish skillet from Helena before she let the whitebait stick.

She was waiting for me to rebuke her for chatting to dangerous characters. I deplore arguments, unless there is a good chance of me winning. So we avoided that. We ate the fish, none of which were much bigger than my eyebrow though they were all equipped with spiky skeletons; there was also a small white cabbage and a few bread rolls

"As soon as I start getting paid for the Census job we're going to indulge in some fat tunny steaks."

"The cabbage is nice, Marcus."

"If you like cabbage."

"I remember my grandmother's cook used to do it with a pinch of silphium."

"Real silphium is a thing of the past. That was in the good old days when girls stayed virgins till they married, and we all believed the sun was a rather warm god's chariot."

"Yes, everyone nowadays complains that the silphium you can buy is nothing like it used to be." Helena Justina had an insatiable appetite for information, though she usually answered her own questions by raiding her father's library. I stared at her warily. She seemed to be playing innocent over something. "Is there a reason for this, Marcus?"

"I'm no expert. Silphium was always the prerogative of the rich."

"It's some kind of herb, isn't it? Imported in ground up form," Helena mused. "Is it not brought here from Africa?"

"Not any more." I leant on my elbows and stared at her. "What's the wrinkle about silphium?" She seemed determined not to tell me, but I knew her well enough to reckon this was more than a general knowledge forum. I racked my brains to get it straight, then declared: "silphium, known to those who can't afford it as Stinking Goat's Breath--"

"You made that up!"

"As I recall, it does smell. Silphium used to come from Cyrenaica; the Cyrenians protected their monopoly jealously--"

"You can see it on coins from Cyrene when you get one palmed in your change at market?"

"Looks like a bunch of grotesque onions."

"The Greeks always loved it?"

"Yes. We Romans for once allowed ourselves to copy them, since it involved our stomachs which always overrule our national pride. It was powerful stuff; but the ill-advised rural locals where it used to grow let their flocks overgraze the land until the precious crop disappeared. Presumably that causes much grief to their urban relations who used to run the silphium monopoly. Cyrene must be a dead town. The last known shoot was sent to Nero. You can guess what he did with it."

Helena's eyes widened. "Do I dare?"

"He ate it. Why, lady; were you imagining some imperial obscenity with the highly prized herbage?"

"Certainly not--go on."

"What's to add? New sprouts failed to appear. Cyrene declined. Roman cooks mourn. Now we import an inferior strain of silphium from the East, and gourmets at banquets moan about the lost Golden Age when stinking herbs really stank."

Helena considered what I had just said, filtering out the exaggerations for herself "I suppose if anybody rediscovered the Cyrenian species, they could make their fortune?"

"The man who found it would be regarded as the saviour of civilization."

"Really, Marcus?" Helena looked enthusiastic. My heart sank.

"Darling, you are not, I hope, suggesting that I should leap on a ship and sail to North Africa with a trowel and a trug? I really would much rather enjoy myself persecuting tax dodgers, even in partnership with Anacrites. Anyway, the Census is more of a certainty."

"Sweetheart, you carry on squeezing defaulters." Helena was decidedly preoccupied; she had allowed me to pick up the cabbage dish and drink the coriander sauce. "my parents have had a letter from young Quintus at last. And so have I."

I replaced the dish on the table as unobtrusively as possible. Quintus Camillus Justinus was the younger of her brothers He was currently missing, along with a Baetican heiress who had been his elder brother's intended bride.

Justinus, who had once possessed the Emperor's personal interest and a promise of a spectacular public career, was now just any disgraced senatorial sprig with no money (the heiress had presumably been disinherited by her thwarted grandparents the moment they arrived in Rome for the wedding that was never to be).

It was still unclear whether Helena's favourite brother had run off with Claudia Rufina out of true love. If not, he was truly stuck. In retrospect--as soon as they vanished we had all realized she had adored him; unlike her stodgy betrothed Aelianus, Justinus was a handsome young dog with a wicked expression and winsome ways. What he felt for Claudia I was in two minds about. Still, even if he returned her devotion, he had eloped into disgrace. He had thrown away his hopes of entering the Senate, offending his parents and jumping into what was bound to be a lifelong feud with his brother, whose vindictive reaction nobody could blame. As for me, I had once been his keen supporter, but even my enthusiasm was tempered, and for the soundest of reasons: when Justinus bunked off with his brother's rich bride, everyone blamed me.

"So how is the errant Quintus?" I enquired of his sister. "Or should I say, where is he?"

Helena gazed at me peacefully. Justinus had always been dear to her. It seemed to me, the adventurous streak which had made her come to live with me also made her respond to her brother's shocking behaviour with less outrage than she ought to show. She was going to let him off. I bet he always knew she would.

"Quintus has apparently gone to Africa, my darling. Searching for the silphium is an idea he has had."

If he did find it, he would make himself so much money he would certainly rehabilitate himself Indeed, he would become so rich he need not care what anyone in the Empire thought of him--including the Emperor. On the other hand, though he was a well-educated senator's son and supposedly intelligent, I had never seen any indication that Justinus knew the first thing about plants

"My brother has asked," said Helena, gazing now at her foodbowl with a subdued expression that suggested to me she was on the verge of laughing, "whether you--with your market-gardening family background and your well-known horticultural expertise--could possibly send him a description of what he is looking for?"