Graveyard of the Hesperides

XIII

“I was wondering when you would deign to show your faces. Do come and join us. Now that you are ready to socialize, I have a few questions.”

“Oh, shitty shit!” observed the first one, immediately identifiable as a whore who cost less on a tavern bill than donkey fodder.

“You said the nosy cow had gone!” groused her disheveled friend. She was refined (she thought); she had a snake bracelet with red glass eyes. She wore it on her ankle.

“Don’t be like that,” answered Faustus in a mildly reproachful tone. “Flavia Albia only wants to know what you know about Rufia. Where is the harm-unless you were the killers?”

This produced indignant denials. Faustus made a soothing gesture, palms spread. I just gazed at the couple thoughtfully. The first one noticed my coolness. She believed she could bamboozle men, but grasped that I would be more difficult.

We established their names, Artemisia and Orchivia, and that they were not from Italy. They said their homeland was Dardania.

“What shitty place is that?” I asked, deciding on a Dardanian adjective in the hope we could communicate. She looked blank.

“Part of Moesia,” Faustus told me. Moesia is one of the eastern provinces, bordering on barbarian Dacia, where our Emperor was currently at war with a ferocious king who cut off the heads of Roman officials and merrily slaughtered our armies. This king, Decebalus, had made several attempts to expand his territory into Moesia. A troubled mix of Thracians, Dacians and Illyrians, which made a curious slurry at the best of times, Moesia clung on as a Roman province by bloodied fingertips. We sent tough legions and not very renowned governors, men who could be spared if they should happen to be decapitated.

Apparently Moesia’s chief export was bar girls. Artemisia was short, wide-faced, grubby and stroppy. She wore a slouched tunic that showed off her big bust and sturdy legs, and she was topped by a high-piled, tangled mop of black hair. No bathhouse coiffeuse had ever attempted to tame it. Orchivia was squinty, with even stragglier, browner hair. She had at some point asked a stylist to tackle it, but the results were hopeless.

The girls told me in their high-minded way that Rome was shitty, Roman men were shitty shits and Roman women shittier. I decided to wait before asking what they thought of Rufia.

They were not slaves. They had been lured here by professional traffickers of sex-trade workers, who promised them a better life than anything available to young women of poor background (that is, all of them) in Moesia. So, compared with slaves, they came of their own free will. Using a rough and ready business plan, before that they had learned their craft by servicing the legionaries who defended their home province from its annexation by whooping head-loppers. These noble men with money to lavish in the shanty towns that clustered outside their forts had spoken of Rome-a city, I knew, many soldiers in the legions had never actually seen in their lives. Nevertheless, they eulogized its monuments, palaces, theaters-and its golden opportunities. Artemisia and Orchivia had listened to the squaddies then joined a mule train to Italy.

Now they worked here, taking customers upstairs. They did not mind telling us. They said someone had to do it, though the job was disgusting, the old landlord wanted horrible favors and the new one was a shitty nobody, while both then and now their earnings stank. No need to ask of what.

Faustus questioned them about their hopes for the future. They responded to him better than I expected, saying they would go home, but they still owed fare money to the man who brought them here, a toothless drover in a hairy cloak who had told them he knew their parents. Everything he said was shit. However, they were scared of him and what he could do to their families. Besides, in their hearts they still hankered to find those golden opportunities the legionaries had promised, which they still believed existed somewhere.

While they were answering Faustus, I tried to gauge how old they were. They pretended to be nymphs but had the faces of hags. This was a common result of poverty, let alone the work they did. Bad diet and degradation had left both with poor skin, dull eyes, bruises, pocks and a washed-out, gray appearance under whatever poisonous potions they painted on. I could see a lot of that; they would die before their time. But they were too young to have known Rufia.

They were too young to die too, though I concede that was irrelevant to my inquiry.

They confirmed they never met the missing woman. However, they knew people who had. Well, for one thing, they screwed Nipius and Natalis. From the waiters, if from no one else, they had heard the rumors about their luckless predecessor’s fate.

“Was she Dardanian, or any other kind of foreigner?”

“Who knows?” said Artemisia.

“I do!” boasted Orchivia. “She was a shitty Illyrian.”

“Who the buggery told you that?” demanded her colleague scornfully.

“Menendra.”

“What does she know?”

“She knew Rufia.”

“Shit!”

“Is there,” I interposed quickly, “any way I can speak to this Menendra?”

A shadow came over Artemisia and Orchivia, as if they regretted mentioning her.

“She’s around,” Orchivia muttered. “Off and on.”

“Well, if you see her, will you please push her my way?”

Orchivia said she might do, though Artemisia looked as if she did not like the idea that this other woman might find out they had been talking about Rufia with me.

“Is Menendra another scary one, like Rufia?” I asked, on the off chance. They laughed. They were pretending to dismiss that suggestion-while obviously agreeing with it.

“Does she also serve drinks at the Hesperides?”

“No.”

“Where then?”

“Nowhere special.”

“So how does she earn a living-assuming she doesn’t own a fancy man?” Few waitresses had pimps; in general their custom was straightforwardly controlled by the bar owners, who saw no reason to let others muscle in.

“She supplies the bars,” said Artemisia.

“Supplies what?” asked Faustus, butting in. He so much adored finicky detail.

I like detail myself; I prefer to work up to it my own way. “Supplies what?” I echoed, putting my own stamp on the question.

“Anything they need,” Orchivia replied dismissively.

“That’s nice and vague.”

Both women gave high-shouldered shrugs, as if my insistence was unreasonable. What passed for expressive in Dardania meant nothing in Rome. Faustus and I stared.

“Fruit,” explained Artemisia glibly. “Menendra is a fruit-seller.”

That, I felt certain, was a barefaced Dardanian lie.

Getting nowhere, and hoping I could track down Menendra myself, I went back to Rufia. Did the women have any idea of when she disappeared? Surprisingly, they put a date on it. Someone had told them it happened in the first year of the Emperor Titus. Titus only reigned for two years, which was sad for him, but helpful here.

I joked with Faustus, “I remember his inauguration, plus all the festivities when he opened the Flavian Amphitheater, made it necessary for bars to obtain a great deal of fruit!”

“Happy hour,” he returned lightheartedly. “Raining pomegranates. Cornucopia with every wine cup. Can you two remember anything else about when Rufia disappeared?”

Artemisia and Orchivia reminded him they had not been in Rome then; it was even before they left their mountainous birthplace and went north to sell their valuable young virginities to the Fifth Macedonica and other fine legions in the Danube forts.

“Despite the pleas of your weeping relatives?” Faustus suggested, being wicked as he went back to probing their lives.

“Oh, they couldn’t see us off fast enough.”

“They were heartbroken but they knew none of us had anything else to sell; for everyone’s benefit we had to sacrifice our little cherries. We were young. We looked as if we could be real virgins.”

“And how many times did you manage to peddle those precious commodities before the randy soldiers twigged?”

“About six or seven.”

Orchivia claimed she could still sell hers if she put her mind to it, on a good night in winter when the lamps weren’t lit.

Artemisia laughed hysterically at that. Then she mused, “One trumpeter bought mine twice.”

“Why was that?” inquired Faustus. “Because he enjoyed it so much the first time?” For a serious man, he could come out with comments that were very funny. But only I saw the joke.

These were hard, untrustworthy, filthy, foreign working girls, yet Tiberius and I were in danger of feeling sorry for them. They, on the other hand, would lie, dodge, and diddle us at every opportunity. I saw no likelihood of squeezing anything more useful out of Artemisia and Orchivia today, so I said they could be off to wait at tables in the Four Limpets or wherever they had employment.

“The Brown Toad.”

“Juno! You don’t care what dump you work in … I expect you know the old phrase, don’t leave town.”

They looked puzzled.

As they were leaving, their paths crossed with those of two very different damsels. Strangely, both pairs nodded as they passed, each without being at all affronted by the other.

Artemisia and Orchivia sashayed off, while we were joined by a dainty couple of young girls who shrieked, “Ooh what a horrible place!” They were thrilled.

The Dardanians called back over their saucily bare shoulders that the Hesperides was indeed shitty. I would get the blame at home for this: my little sisters had learned a new catchphrase. “Just so shitty!”

Orchivia popped back. “If you two think you’re going to work here, don’t even try it. We own the franchise!”

I could feel Tiberius shaking with laughter.