Falco?”
I glanced around the room, tapped my nose, and whispered, “State business. Tell you tomorrow.” He knew I was intending to forget.
“You don't need any secrets here,” scoffed my mother. I said I would be the judge of that, and she aimed a swipe at me with a colander. The reason she had the implement (which I dodged) was that Ma deemed Helena Justina too noble to prepare cabbages. Don't get me wrong; she approved of Helena. But if Ma was there, Ma shredded the greens.
Anacrites, as her lodger, obviously supposed this meant that they would both be staying to dine with us. I let him dream.
Now I was home, in what passed for my place as the master of the household, Ma quickly completed her work and gathered herself together to leave. She took the baby from me with the air of saving Julia from the talons of a bird of ill omen, kissed her goodbye, and handed her to Helena for safe keeping. We had offered Ma a meal, but as usual she decided that we would rather be left on our own for romantic reasons (though of course being given permission crushed any romance there might have been). I hooked a hand under Anacrites' elbow, and without actually letting it seem like rudeness, propelled him to his feet. “Thanks for escorting my mother home, old fellow.”
“It's no trouble,” he squeezed out. “Look, have you been taking that lion business further on your own?”
“Never entered my head,” I lied.
As soon as I had waved off Ma, I closed the door firmly. Helena, more tolerant than Ma, waited for me to explain in my own time where I had been. She allowed me to reassert my authority with a few moments of lewd assault, followed by tickling the baby until Julia was hysterical, then looking round for titbits to nibble until I was provided with proper sustenance.
Anacrites had made sure he gave Helena his opinion of our progress on the Census job, adding a warped description of what I had been up to regarding Leonidas. I now told her the parts I had not told him. “There's a smell of something nasty. It's quite clear the lanista is trying to stop me poking my nose in-”
Helena laughed. “Little does he realize that's a certain way to ensure you take an interest!”
“You know me.”
“On the whole.” She shrugged, taking a bowl of nuts away from me, ostensibly to stop me filling myself up before supper, then tucked into it herself It always gave me a thrill to see this girl who looked so prim revealing her healthy appetites. As she guessed what I was thinking, her huge eyes gazed back at me serenely; she smoothed her skirt over her knees with a very precise, stiff-fingered gesture-then she cracked open another pistachio.
“Am I being stubborn over this, sweetheart?” I reached for the nut bowl but she swung around on her stool and avoided me. “There is a lion that has been somehow spirited away from his cage, apparently without a roar- or if he did roar, without anybody hearing him even though his devoted keeper and a gaggle of gladiators were just strides away. He's been killed somewhere else-why? then returned to his billet and locked in.”
“To make it look as if he never left?”
“Seems so. Doesn't it make you curious?”
“Certainly, Marcus.”
“The keeper is lying, and has probably been ordered to do so.”
“That's odd too.”
“And the gladiators have clammed up.”
Helena was watching me, her dark brown eyes as thoughtful about the mystery as they were about evaluating what it meant to me. “This is troubling you, my darling.”
“I hate secrets.”
“And?” She could tell there was more to it. “Well, perhaps I'm getting overexcited.” “You!” She was; teasing. “How, Marcus?”
“I wonder whether it is pure coincidence that this happened when I'm conducting enquiries there.”
“What could be behind it?” prompted Helena levelly.
“The dead lion is the one who had been booked to execute Thurius Since it was me who apprehended Thurius-” I told her my real suspicion; it was one I could never mention to Anacrites: “I wondered whether somebody may have it in for me.”
Helena could well have laughed or scoffed. I would not have blamed her. Instead, she listened calmly and as I expected she made no attempt to patronize me. She simply told me that I was an idiot, and on reflection I agreed.
“Can we have some dinner now?”
“Later,” she said firmly. “First, you're going to be a good Roman like Cato the Elder, and you're going to see the baby bathed.”
12
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.”
