asked the barkeeper if he had had Spindex among his customers. He said every barman this side of the Esquiline could boast that – until about three months ago. Could it be nearer four months? I asked, and he shrugged agreement. As I had thought, that would take us back to the time of the Metellus funeral. Of course a defence lawyer would call it mere coincidence.
Noticing the clown's absence from lolling on his bar counter, the barman had deduced that Spindex must be dead. He said it was nice to remember the old misery for a moment, and gave us a free beaker. `I can just see him crouched here, scratching at his fleas…'
I tried not to feel itchy.
`Did Spindex have a regular boozing partner?' asked Petro. We had told no one yet that Spindex had been murdered.
`Not often. He sometimes had his head together with another fellow, plotting scandal they could use at funerals.'
`Would they buy wine and take it back to the clown's lodgings?'
`Oh Spindex bought a take-out flagon every night. However late he finished here, he'd get in a spare. Sometimes he emptied it before he got home, so he'd go in another bar and buy another one.'
`But did he ever go home with his friend, the plotter?'
The barman gazed at Petronius for a while. `Was there a fight or something?'
`Do you have a reason to think that's likely?'
`I sell liquor – so I know life. So what happened to Spindex?'
`He had a fight or something,' confirmed Petronius tersely. The barman pulled a face, half surprised, half not surprised. Petro voiced the usual message: `If you hear anything, contact me, will you? You know the main station house. I work in the Thirteenth -' The Fourth Cohort covered two regions, controlled here in the Twelfth, but Petronius based himself in the out-station. I won't say it was to avoid the tribune – but Rubella worked from the main building and Petronius loathed him. `Any message gets passed over to me.'
I stretched, dropping coins in the gratuities bowl. `And we would dearly like to know who his fellow-plotter was. People may gossip.:
'Or they may not!' commented the barman.
Today had now turned unpleasant. Nothing new in that. As I walked home at dusk, I wondered if high-flyers like Silius and Paccius experienced such days. I doubted it. The reek of human putrefaction or the bleakness of a lonely man's sour existence played out in filthy rooms under the shadow of the dripping aqueducts were far removed from the `civilised' Basilica. Silius and Paccius were men who never really knew the grim side of life – or the sight of sordid death.
I went to the baths, but fragrant oil and hot water failed to expel the odours. Their foulness had ingrained itself in my clothes and skin; it remained a taste on my tongue as persistent as regurgitated acid. Only nuzzling the soft sweet neck of our baby once I was back at home gradually helped to take away the horror.
Yes, I was tough. But today I had seen too much. I spent a long time that night considering whether I wanted to be connected with this case any more. I lay awake, gripped by distaste for the whole affair. It took Helena justina, warm, calm, perfumed with cinnamon, a girl full of honour and resolute before any injustice, to convince me I must carry on to show that our client was innocent.
I knew perfectly well that he would be sleeping well, comfortable and at ease.
XXXII
RAIN HAD drizzled all night. The streets shone and would be slippery. Before I decided on my next course of action, I went up to my roof terrace. The sky was clear now. From the river came distant shouts of stevedores, with the unexplained crashes and shouts that emanate from wharves. We were out of sight of the Emporium, yet it somehow made its presence felt; I was conscious of all the commercial activity close by. Occasional mooing sounded from the other direction, the Cattle Market Forum.
It felt mild. Not warm enough to sit on the stone benches, but pleasant enough for a quick stroll among the browned roses and near dormant shrubs. At this time of year there was little to occupy a gardening man, but I picked off a few dead twigs and left them in a small soggy pile.
Something startled me. I thought it was a large bird, diving downwards in the wide-armed fig tree Pa had planted here and half trained. But the movement that had caught my eye was a stray leaf, desiccated and loose, suddenly falling from a cleft where it had lodged among high branches. Pallid and heavy with rain water, it had sought the ground in a sudden swoop.
Most of those leaves had dropped much earlier. When the great things had first carpeted the terrace and made it treacherous underfoot, we were sweeping up heaps of them all the time. Now I had for some time been able to see the tree's skeleton. I meant to prune the taller branches. They were carrying baby fruit over the winter, but some might yet be shed. They were too high up anyway. Even if the figlets stayed on to grow and ripen next year, blackbirds would devour them the very hour they turned purple. I would never manage to harvest the fruit unless I was up a ladder every day.
The side branches needed to be cut back too. Pa had neglected it. The fig's roots had been contained in an old round-bottomed amphora but the tree was prolific. It would need a really hard prune every spring and more tidying would be advisable each year in late summer. I made a note to acquire a billhook. Like the one in the Metellus store.
That made up my mind. I was off to see Calpurnia Cara.
The first disappointment somehow failed to surprise me. Yet again the door was guarded by a substitute. When I asked after Perseus, I was told he was no longer at the house.
`What – sold? Shoved off in disgrace to the slave market?'
`No. Sent to the farm in Lanuvium.' The substitute porter flushed. 'Oops – I'm not supposed to say that!'
Why not? I knew the family had connections near the coast. Lanuvium was where Justinus went to fetch that document Silius had requested, when we were involved in the original corruption trial.
So the door porter had been carted off at short notice. Was it convalescence or a punishment for him? Had Calpurnia finally lost patience with her slave's bad behaviour? Or was it a move to thwart me?
The steward was out, or he might have denied me admittance. The substitute porter innocently told me Calpurnia had gone outside to take the morning air. He escorted me as far as the first enclosed peristyle, but then passed me into the care of a gardener.
I passed a few polite remarks about burgeoning narcissi. The gardener was slow to respond, but by the time we reached the orchard area, I was able to ask if Metellus senior had been a plantsman. No. Or handy with a pruning knife? No, again. That failed to fit a theory I was mulling, but I made one last attempt, asking who looked after the fruit trees? The gardener did. Damn.
He spotted his mistress, so he beetled off and left me to face her wrath.
Calpurnia scowled, annoyed that I had been let in. She had been standing much where I found her on my first visit, near the store and also near the fig tree. Ashes of a bonfire smoked alongside. The store had its door wide open; slaves with cloaks over their heads were pulling down the roof panels and tackling the wasps' nest. Calpurnia, veiled, was supervising in an irritated voice. If insects buzzed her, she swept them aside with her bare hand.
I walked closer to the fig. It was professionally maintained, unlike Pa's shaggy mess; I guessed here even the new fruits had been hand thinned for over-wintering. A wall ran behind the tree. Beyond, other properties stood close. I could smell lye, the distillation used for bleaching; one of the premises must be a laundry or a dyer's. Two unseen women were having a long, loud conversation that sounded like an argument, the kind of excited declamation over nothing that echoes around stairs, porticoes and light-wells all over Rome. We were in a small sanctum of nature up against the Embankment, but the city surrounded us.
On the wall was fastened a new-looking, inscribed limestone plaque. I did not remember seeing it before, though it may have been there yesterday when I was preoccupied with Birdy and Perseus. I walked closer. It was a memorial to Rubirius Metellus – in some ways quite standard. Ostensibly in the name of a loyal freedman, praising his master in conventional terms, it ran:
