business preservation, he would soon ensure he introduced himself to me.
XXI
I CHECKED IN at the Fourth Cohort's patrol-house. The enquiry team were all out and the duty clerk reckoned I would be on my own with the Chrysippus case. Then Petronius rolled in and confirmed it.
I brought him up to date. `So it may not be literature but banking. Want to pull it back and handle the case yourself?'
Petro flashed his teeth. `Why should I? You're the Census tax expert. You are fully at home with money, Falco.'
`I wish I'd called in your Census return and audited you to Hades and back.'
`Mine was impeccable – at least, it was once I heard it might be checked by you.'
`I should have made life harder for my so-called friends,' I grumbled.
Petro shook his head sadly. `Dream away – you're a soft touch, boy!'
`Still, I'm happy that Anacrites deposits money with Chrysippus. I'd laugh if that bank should hit the rocks, taking him with it.'
`Banks don't fail,' Petro disagreed. `They just make money out of their customers' debts.'
`Well, I bet this bank is relevant to the murder,' I said. `If only because of who gets to inherit the glittering reserves.'
`Assuming they have any reserves,' Petro warned. `My banker once – when very drunk indeed – confided that it's all a myth. They rely on the appearance of solid security, but he reckoned they just trade on air.
On our usual good terms, we gossiped some more about the dead banker, not forgetting his women. Then Petro fished out a note-tablet. `Passus left this for you – the addresses of the writers that Chrysippus had summoned for interviews yesterday. Passus left orders that they should all be told to present themselves to you this morning. He commandeered a room there for you to use. You'll like this,' said Petronius Longus, with a gleam, `you will be allowed to occupy one of the libraries.'
`The Greek one?' I asked dryly.
`No; the Latin,' came Petro's riposte. `We knew a sensitive soul like you couldn't bear to sit looking at horrible bloodstains on the floor.'
Before I made my way to the Clivus Publicius, I had a moan to him about Anacrites smooching up to Maia. Petro heard me out impassively, not saying much.
This time I did not enter the Chrysippus abode via the scriptorium, but broached the formal entrance portico as the killer must have done. It was grand architecturally, though there was a faint smell of mice. Was young Vibia Merulla a poor housewife? I could imagine what the deposed Lysa would make of that.
Today at least there was a porter sitting in a cubicle, as though after the householder's death security had been tightened up. Not much, however. The airy slave could hardly be bothered to ask my name and business. He waved me through, and let me find my own way to the library.
`I am expecting the writers whose books your master sold. Have any arrived yet?'
`No.' And I was quite late getting here myself. Bad news. Still, writers have their little routines: if I knew anything, they were either still in bed – or they had gone early for lunch. Long and leisurely, probably.
`I want to see them one at a time, so if more turn up together please make them wait. Don't let them talk to each other but put them somewhere separately.'
The house was very quiet. There were slaves padding about, though I could not decide whether they had definite errands for their mistress or were pottering by themselves. The Latin library was deserted. The inner Greek one lay even more silent. It had already lost the corpse, though cleaning up was still in hand. A couple of buckets with sponges stood against one wall. And the scrolls I had asked Passus to catalogue were now collected in a dirty heap on a table. It looked as if he had dealt with some, which he had discarded into a large rubbish hamper, though others had still to be listed. Sensibly; he had not left his list lying around – though I wouldn't have minded an advance peek myself.
Passus was not there. Nobody was.
Nobody visited the Latin library for over an hour. I dipped into Virgil's Georgics and put myself in pastoral mood.
Eventually, a man sidled in. `Well, good afternoon, or should I say good evening!' I might be pastoral, but since I lacked the ameliorating influence of a warm-blooded shepherdess, I was also slightly sarcastic. `Here to see Didius Falco? Jupiter, how prompt!'
`I am generally the first,' he said, sounding self-satisfied. I took against him immediately.
He was in his thirties or forties, moderately tall and very thin, with spindly legs and arms, and hunched shoulders. It brought out the urge to bawl like a centurion for him to straighten up. Saturnine, sallow, and dressed in shabby black. I had not been expecting high fashion from a bunch of authors, but this was the worst kind of low taste. Black fades. It also leaks at the laundry onto other people's whites. To find black on the second-hand clothes stalls you have to be in a world of your own, and a public menace.
`What's your name?
'Avienus.'
`I am Falco. Investigating yesterday's death.' I took out a notetablet and let him see me start a fresh waxed board in a capable manner. `Were you the first visitor yesterday as well?'
'As far as I know.'
We discussed times briefly, and I reckoned Avienus had turned up shortly after my spat about publication terms. He was almost certainly the first to appear after Chrysippus came into the house from the scriptorium, so if the others confirmed they saw their patron alive later, it cleared him. _I lost interest, but I was stuck with him in the absence of anyone else.
`What do you write, Avienus?'
`I am a historian.'
`Oho – murky doings in the past.' I was being deliberately crass.
`I confine my interests to modern times,' he said.
`New emperor, new version of events?' I suggested.
`A new perspective,' he forced himself to agree. `Vespasian is writing his own memoirs, it is said -'
`Isn't there a rumour he brought home some tame hack from Judaea who will do the official Flavian whitewash?'
This time Avienus pulled up at my brisk interruption. He had not expected the investigating officer to crash in on his subject. `Some limpet called Josephus has attached himself to Vespasian as the approved biographer,' he said. `He has rather cornered the market.'
`Rebel leader.' I was brisk. `Picked up as a prisoner. Should have been executed on the spot, or brought to Rome in shackles for the Triumph. Made a flattering prophecy or two, based on the bloody obvious, then turned traitor to his own side with commendable quick thinking.' I tried not to make this sound too insulting to professional historians in general. I like to maintain a polite veneer, at least while the suspect looks innocent. `My brother served in Judaea,' I told Avienus amicably, to explain my knowledge. `I heard that this flattering Judaean has been living in Vespasian's old private house.'
`That should encourage an unbiased viewpoint!' His mouth screwed up, below a hooked nose down which he could have looked quite snootily, had he possessed sufficient character. Instead, his vindictiveness was the fussy, ineffectual kind.
I smiled. `Vespasian will charge the going rent. So – what's your own angle on our life and times?'
`I like to be impartial.'
`Oh – no viewpoint?'
Avienus looked hurt. `I catalogue events. I do not expect renown myself – but I shall be used as a source by future authors. That will satisfy me.' He would be dead. He would know nothing about it. He was either an idiot or a hypocrite.
