the Metellus funeral: strife among the relatives and Carina's outburst about her father having been murdered. Biltis confirmed the routine details too: the procession to the Via Appia and burning of the bier at the mausoleum, where Negrinus had presided with Juliana's husband and a friend who was presumably Licinius Lutea. The chief clown they had first intended to use in the procession was called Spindex. He worked for Tiasus regularly, though Biltis said it was ages since anyone had seen him.
`He went all huffy when he was dumped by the Metelli. Tiasus sent him one or two commissions afterwards but he failed to confirm or show up. He just dropped out of sight.'
`So why, exactly, was he omitted from the Metellus do?'
Exactly must have worried her. From pretending to be the expert on everything, she started to look shifty.
`Don't worry then,' I said. `I can ask Spindex himself, if I find him. I hope he didn't go off into retirement at some homestead in a remote province.
`Oh he has no connections,' Biltis assured me. `He has no friends and never mentions family.'
`Probably because he spends his days being rude,' I suggested.
`And is he rude!' the woman exclaimed. `You won't find better than Spindex for rooting out the worst in human nature. Once he gets the dirt, he does not hold back.'
`Do you know how he finds his material?'
'Digging.'
`Do it himself?'
`Half and half, I think. With a senatorial family, he would never get direct access. He has a pal with contacts, who helps him out.'
`I thought you said Spindex has no friends? What pal?'
`Don't know. Spindex keeps to himself.’
`And you don't know the helper's name?'
`No. I tried to find out, but Spindex got stand-offish.'
`Why did you want to find out?'
`Just nosy!' Biltis admitted with a grin.
I sympathised with the clown. People like Biltis crowd in, finding out your weaknesses along with your dearest secrets. Then they turn against you, or poison your other relationships. In the army I had met men who worked the same way.
Still, Biltis had discovered the clown's home address. She even insisted on taking me on a route march to the road where he lived and pointing out his building. We set off under grey January skies, observed by a few chilly pigeons. Spindex had a billet which turned out to be a long walk from the Fifth, all the way back to the Twelfth District. He lived opposite the Aventine, in the shadow of the Servian Walls, close to the Aqua Marcia.
`See, I had to bring you,' Biltis crowed. `This is a terrible hole. You'd never have found your way around.'
`You're talking about my birthplace, woman.' I cursed myself for giving away something personal.
If I had not insisted she leave, Biltis would have trodden on my heels all the way up to the clown's room, where she would have sat on my knee making saucy interventions while I asked him questions. I said bluntly that I didn't need anyone to hold my note-tablet and after the obvious lewd retort from the mourner, I managed to shed her.
Alone, I approached a narrow opening that provided dark stairs upwards from the street. As she waved goodbye from outside one of the shops that flanked this entrance, Biltis called after me that Spindex was a disorderly, filthy type. `You'll find his room, easy -just follow the smell.'
I grunted and went up the cramped stone steps. This was not a tenement approach, but a narrow insert between commercial premises. I guessed Spindex had solitary attic lodgings on the third floor, beyond the living quarters that lay above owner-occupied shops, which would be accessed from within those shops. Only Spindex and his visitors ever came up this way.
Biltis was right, perhaps more right than she knew. The reek on the staircase was strong, growing worse every day no doubt. This smell was very particular; in my line of work, it was familiar. Filled with foreboding, I tramped up and found the apartment. I was sure before I even opened the door that Spindex would be there inside. And I knew he would be dead.
XXXI
BEING A funeral clown must have all the glamour and high rewards of being an informer. There was hardly any light on the stairs. I crashed into empty wine containers on the landing. Then I entered a meagre apartment. Two dark rooms – one for being awake in misery and one for sleeping with nightmares. No cooking or washing facilities. A high-up filthy window let in a square of murky sunlight. Either the occupant had been habitually untidy, or I was looking at evidence of a struggle. It was hard to tell which. Even at my lowest ebb in my bachelor days, I had never kept my room like this. I liked to tidy up sometimes, in case a woman could be inveigled in.
This was the horrid abode of a loner; he had never visited a laundry nor bought proper meals. Nor would he have kept records of his work; I knew before I started, there would be nothing here for me. I saw not a scroll or tablet in the place; Spindex must have kept everything in his head. Easy enough. Funerals are short-term projects, of course.
I passed a table, littered with the stale relics of a drinking session. Two dirty beakers lay on their sides; one of them had rolled to the floor. There were empty flagons everywhere, plus a half-filled one with its bung abandoned in a dish of dried-up olives. Their roughly chewed stones had been spat everywhere.
The clown's body was lying on a narrow bed in the second room. From the awkward posture, I thought he might have been dragged in and dumped there after death. It looked as though he had been strangled, but it was hard to be sure. Spindex had not been seen by the Tiasus crew for months; death must have occurred way back then. I did not linger. I called in the vigiles to deal with the remains. We were just within the boundary of the Fourth Cohort, as it happened.
Petronius Longus thanked me for the task with a growl of insincerity but promised to investigate as best he could. His men, braver than I was, came out from the apartment and confirmed that a tight ligature was buried in the fleshy neck of the corpse. Tough cord: cut and brought here for the purpose, probably. Our chances of learning who committed the crime were slim, given the time lapse.
Even while we still stood around cursing, the investigation team found out from local shopkeepers that their last awareness of the clown alive had been of him roaring back drunk from a bar, with somebody. They did not see the visitor. No one had heard the person leave.
Surprise!
The vigiles might or might not pursue this further. We had probably learned all we could hope for. The death of a low-grade entertainer, about whom nobody cares enough even to discover why he has gone missing from his work, carries little importance in Rome.
There was no point enquiring whether a funeral satirist had enemies. Petronius pointed out wryly that at least we knew most of the people Spindex brazenly mocked had predeceased him, so they were not suspects. Their relatives would be unlikely to complain, Petro believed. Everyone always knows already that the dead man was a serial seducer who lied to political colleagues, ran up hefty debts at a brothel, deliberately farted in the Basilica and was known by an obscene name behind his back. The fun is being at last free to enjoy it – with the stiffened dead lying there, unable to retaliate.
`Do you suppose, Falco, this clown was rubbed off the tablet because of something he knew?'
`Who can say? It could just have been a pointless row when he was sozzled.'
`So what do you think it was?'
`Oh – elimination due to something he knew.'
`Well thanks again! Do I stand any chance of learning what, or proving it?' wondered Petro.
`Do you ever, lad?'
That was too metaphysical, so we went for a drink. Long practice made this an essential part of enquiries. We
