Poseidon_s Gold

XL

In Fountain Court everything lay still. That was worrying. Even in the dead of night there was usually some husband receiving brain damage from an iron pot, a pigeon being tortured by delinquent youths, or an old woman screaming that she had been robbed of her life savings (Metella, whose son regularly borrowed them; he would pay her back, if the string of prostitutes he ran worked double shifts for a fortnight). It must be nearly dawn. I was too old for this.

As I reached the laundry, the tired trudge of my feet brought more trouble: Lenia, the drab proprietress, flung open a half-shutter. Her head flopped out, all tangles of madly hennaed hair. Her face was white; her deportment unstable. She surveyed me with eyes that needed an oculist and screeched: 'Oi, Falco! What are you doing up so late?'

'Lenia! You put the scares on me. Is Smaractus there?'

Lenia let out a pathetic wail. She would wake the whole street, and they would blame me. 'I hope he's at the bottom of the Tiber. We had a terrible row!'

'Thank the gods for that. Now kindly close up your dentistry-' We were old friends; we could dispense with compliments. She knew I despised her fiancIt had something to do with him being my landlord-and more with the fact he was as savoury as a pile of hot mule-dung. 'Is this goodbye to the wedding?'

'Oh no.' She calmed down immediately. 'I'm not letting him off that! Come in, come in-'

Resisting was useless. When a woman who spends her life heaving around monstrous troughs of hot water grabs your arm, you fly in the direction she pulls or lose a limb. I was dragged into the sinister cubicle where Lenia fiddled her accounts and accosted her friends, then pushed on to a stool. A beaker of cheap red wine fixed itself in my fist.

Lenia had been drinking, like the whole of Rome this wintry night. She had been drinking on her own, so she was hopelessly miserable. With a cup banging against those awful teeth again, she cheered up, however. 'You look rough too, Falco!'

'Been boozing with painters. Never again!'

'Until the next time!' Lenia jibed raucously. She had known me a long while.

'So what's with Smaractus?' I tried her wine, regretting it as much as I had feared. 'Cold feet about the matrimonial benefits?'

I was joking, but of course she nodded mournfully. 'He's not sure he's ready to commit himself.'

'Poor soul! Pleading his tender youth, I suppose?' Whatever age Smaractus was, his notorious life had left him looking like some desiccated hermit half dead in a cave. 'Surely that miser can see that he'll make up for what he's losing as a bachelor by gaining a prosperous laundry?'

'And me!' Lenia retorted snootily.

'And you,' I smiled. She needed someone to be kind.

She gulped at her cup, then ground out vindictively, 'How are your own affairs moving along?'

'Perfectly, thanks.'

'I don't believe that, Falco!'

'My arrangements,' I stated pompously, 'are moving to their conclusion with efficiency and style.'

'I haven't heard about this.'

'Quite. I'm keeping clammed up. If you don't let people interfere, things don't go wrong.'

'What does Helena say?'

'Helena needn't be bothered with details.'

'Helena's your bride!'

'So she has enough worries.'

'Gods, you're a mad devil… Helena's a nice girl!'

'Exactly. So why warn her she's doomed? This is where you went wrong, Lenia. If Smaractus had stayed blissfully ignorant of your approach with the sacrificial pig, you could have forged his name on a contract one night when he was sleeping off a flagon and he would never have felt the pain. Instead you've put the wind up him, and given him a thousand opportunities to wriggle free.'

'He'll be back,' Lenia cracked morbidly. 'The careless prick left his beryl signet-ring.'

I managed to steer the subject away from marriage and cheap jewellery. 'If you want to upset me, try my arrest by Marponius.'

'News spreads!' Lenia agreed. 'We all heard you stabbed a soldier and ended up in manacles at a judge's house.'

'I did not stab the soldier.'

'That's right, one or two crazy types do reckon you might be innocent.'

'People are wonderful!'

'So what's this fable, Falco?'

'Bloody Festus has landed me in it as usual.'

I told her the tale. Anything to stop her drinking. Anything to stop her pouring more for me.

When I finished she hooted with her usual grating derision. 'So it's a fine-art mystery?'

'That's right. I strongly suspect that most of the statues and all of the people are fakes.'

'You do talk! Did he find you that night, then?'

'What night, Lenia?'

'This night you've been talking about. The night Festus left for his legion. He came here. I thought I told you at the time… Late, it was. Really late. He banged on my door, wanting to know if you had staggered home so drunk you couldn't make the stairs and were curled up in my washtub.' Since six flights do hurt after revelry, it had been known.

'I wasn't here-'

'No!' giggled Lenia, knowing about the Marina fiasco.

'He should have known where I was… You never told me this-' I sighed. One more in a long string of undelivered messages.

'You talking about him tonight just reminded me.'

'Five years late!' She was unbelievable. 'So what happened?'

'He flaked out in here, making a nuisance of himself.'

'He had had some.' Much like us this evening.

'Oh I can handle soaks; I get enough practice. He was broody,' complained the laundress. 'I can't stand miserable men!' Since she had elected to marry Smaractus, who was a long-faced, insensitive, humourless disaster, she was gaining practice in tolerating misery too-and with more yet to come.

'So what was Festus on about?'

'Confidential,' sneered Lenia. 'He groaned, "It's all too much; I need little brother's strong right arm", and then he shut up.'

'Well that was Festus.' Sometimes, however, my secretive brother would be gripped by a bacchic drive to talk. Once the mood was on him, once he decided to display his inner being, he would usually open up to anyone who got in the way. He would ramble for hours-all rubbish, of course. 'It's too much to hope he revealed any more?'

'No. Tight bastard! Most people find me easy to talk to,' Lenia boasted. I remembered to smile graciously.

'So then what?'

'He got fed up of waiting for his precious brother who had stayed out playing around with Marina, so he cursed me, cursed you a few times, borrowed one of my washtubs, and disappeared. He went off muttering that he had work to do. Next day I heard he had left Rome. You weren't around much afterwards yourself.'

'Guilt!' I grinned. 'I bummed off to the market garden until the heat died down.'

'Hoping Marina would have a convenient lapse of memory?'

'Maybe. What did he want a washtub for?'

'Juno, I don't know. It turned up again on the doorstep covered with mud or cement or something.'

'He must have been rinsing his smalls… Why did you never tell me this before?'

'No point. You would have been upset!'

I was upset now.

It was one of those pointless, tantalising events that sting you after someone dies. I would never really know what he had wanted. I could never share his problem; never help. Lenia was right. Better not to know these things.

I found an excuse to leave (yawning heavily) and staggered upstairs.

Six flights give you a lot of time for thinking, but it was not enough.

Both missing and hating my brother, I felt exhausted, dirty, cold and depressed. I could have dropped on the stairs, but the landings were freezing and stank of old urine. I was heading for my bed, knowing that all too soon I had to be up out of it again. Despair made my feet heavy; I was chasing a hopeless puzzle, with disasters fast closing in on me. And when I reached my own apartment I groaned even more, because more trouble was waiting for me. Under the ill-fitting door a gleam of light showed. That could only mean someone was in there.

I had already made too much noise to start creeping up and springing surprises. I knew I was too drunk for an argument and too tired for a fight.

I did everything wrong. I forgot to be careful. I could not be bothered to organise a possible escape. I was too tired, and too angry to follow my own rules, so I just walked straight in and kicked the door shut after me.

I was staring at the lamp that burned on the table quite openly, when a small voice murmured from the bedroom, 'It's only me.'

'Helena!' I tried to remember that one of the reasons I loved her was her startling knack of surprising me. Then I tried to play sober.

I snuffed the light, to disguise my state. I dropped my belt and fumbled off my boots. I was icy cold, but as a gesture to civilised living I shed a few layers of clothing. As soon as I stumbled to bed Helena must have realised my condition. I had forgotten the bed was new; in the darkness it was wrongly aligned for the path my feet knew, and the wrong height. Besides, we had moved it to avoid the great hole in the roof, which Smaractus had still not repaired.

When I finally found the bed, I fell in awkwardly, almost falling out. Helena kissed me once, groaned at my foul breath, then buried her face in the safer haven of my armpit.

'Sorry… had to suborn some witnesses.' Warmth and comfort greeted me alluringly as I tried to be stern. 'Listen, you disobedient rascal, I left you at Mother's. What's the excuse for this?'

Helena wound herself around me more closely. She was welcome and sweet, and she knew that I was not complaining much. 'Oh Marcus, I missed you…'

'Missing me could get you hurt, woman! How did you get here?'

'Perfectly safely. With Maia's husband. He came right up and checked the room for me. I've spent an evening going around your sisters' houses asking about the knife from the caupona. I dragged your mother with me, though she wasn't keen. Anyway, I thought you would want to know the results,' she excused herself weakly.

'Bamboozler! So what's the good news?'

I felt a small, but obvious, belch escaping. Helena shifted further down the bed. Her voice came faintly through the coverlet. 'None, I'm afraid. Not one of your relatives can remember taking that knife from home, let alone ever using it at Flora's.'

Even in the dark I could feel my head spinning. 'The day's not a total disaster. I heard a couple of things. Censorinus had a companion in Rome-Laurentius. It's good. Petro will have to find him before he can indict me.'

'Could this be the murderer?'

'Unlikely, but possible…' Talking was difficult. 'And there is, or was once, a sculptor called Orestes-no, Orontes. He's disappeared, but it's given us another name…' In the new bed, already warmed for several hours by Helena, relaxation was seeping gloriously through my frozen limbs. I wrapped myself around her more conveniently. 'Dear gods, I love you…' I wanted her safe, but I was glad she was here. 'I hope Famia was sober when he brought you.'

'Maia wouldn't send me home without safe protection. If she had known it was a drunk I would be waiting for she would not have let me come at all!' I tried to think up a rejoinder, but none came. Helena stroked my cheek. 'You're weary. Go to sleep.'

I was already doing so.

Hazily I heard her saying, 'Your father sent a message. He suggests that tomorrow morning he should take you to visit Carus and Servia. He says, Dress up. I've put a toga out for you…'

I wondered who in Hades were Carus and Servia, and why I should allow these unbidden strangers to bother me with such formality. Then I knew nothing until I woke the next day with a splitting head.