Graveyard of the Hesperides

XXV

As I left Mucky Mule Mews I remembered to stay alert. When preoc- cupied by odd discoveries, it is all too easy to become so abstracted you fall prey to villains. Wise informers wait to start their brooding.

Even so, I was wondering what people might think Rufia could have left behind.

I walked carefully back to the Vicus Longus. The main thoroughfare, which had once seemed so insalubrious, suddenly felt familiar, populated and safe. I took a long breath and relaxed, as if I had narrowly escaped a scare. It was ridiculous. Nothing had happened, not to me. But I had enough experience to know what was possible in obscure places.

I went along to where Tiberius and I had enjoyed breakfast. I sat down with refreshments, fruit juice and a complimentary almond biscuit. Of the two who ran the stall, the mother was alone today, so she joined me in the sunlight. We exchanged names. She was Lepida, a good Latin designation, so I asked whether she had lived around here long.

“Born and bred.”

“That seems fairly unusual. A lot of people I’ve spoken to are incomers.”

“Too many slaves and foreigners,” Lepida grumbled. It was a classic complaint: unwanted low-class persons flooding in from overseas, taking all the work.

I decided not to mention Britain. With brown hair and despite blue-gray eyes, I had no really alien features. No stuck-out Pictish ears, no eastern steppes high cheekbones, no unusual skin tone. No one could tell my origins, unless I told them. Any bright occupant of the Empire can soon pick up Roman gestures and habits, learn to speak conventionally, then blend in. If anything, what marked me out was having too well-bred an accent nowadays.

I kicked out to scatter pigeons as they pecked too near. One of the automatic traits you soon learn eating out in the Mediterranean.

Cradling my beaker, I sat deep in thought, letting my jadedness show. “How is it going?” asked Lepida sympathetically. I pulled a face. “You’re trying to find out what happened at that bar, aren’t you?” she asked. I agreed, deliberately leaving her to take the initiative. I remembered how yesterday, with her daughter present, she had held back.

“Working as an informer,” I said, when she stalled, “isn’t always easy.”

“What are you stuck over?”

“Oh pretty well everything!” I sipped my drink, gazing vacantly across the street. “Who died? Who killed them? Why? Five men and a woman vanished from their daily lives, yet nobody seems to have missed them. I know a few people who admit being in the Hesperides that night, but they are all keeping mum. I’m sensing fear-which is understandable. And now an innocent couple, who merely happened to be Rufia’s landlords, have been attacked in their own home.”

“That’s terrible!” breathed Lepida, wide-eyed.

“It’s connected. Has to be. Digging up those sad old bones from the bar is starting to have repercussions.”

We sat in silence for a while. I knew when not to apply pressure.

The street lay bathed in August sunshine. At noon, this was an ordinary-looking thoroughfare. Sounds and scents of people having lunch at home in apartments all around us. Mothers nagging children to eat their bread nicely. Men whose work involved late shifts rousing from sleep, starting to make their presence felt in a world that had managed without them for the past few hours; wives resisting as they tried throwing their weight about. Dogs standing up and stretching their long backs. Dogs lying down again in diminishing patches of shade. Shops closing up for a lengthy siesta.

“I never knew that Rufia.” Lepida was opening up. “I never spoke to her.”

“You knew who she was, though?”

“I had seen her. If you pointed her out, I could have told you her name. I was young then. But I never mingled with women of that sort.”

“Barmaids?”

She pursed her lips and didn’t answer. We drank our juice.

* * *

After a while she suddenly came out with, “Things are not the same around here.” She paused, reflectively. “It’s all got very rough.”

Although I was surprised, I merely said some people would think the whole Subura had always been a rough area.

“Oh, it wasn’t too bad,” answered Lepida, who had presumably never lived anywhere else. She seemed unaware her local district was historically notorious. “All the usual things went on, but it was … oh, I don’t know. In a bar like the Garden of the Hesperides, yes, if a man wanted to go upstairs, the landlord probably had a daughter or a cousin who would oblige for a copper. But it was casual, you know what I mean. More of a favor than a business. Now it’s all much more … professional.”

I absorbed this. “Was Rufia like somebody’s daughter or cousin?”

“Yes, I think she was one of those types to start with.”

“She changed?”

“Oh I would think so!” Lepida exclaimed, though I could not see why she was so exercised. “Don’t you, Flavia Albia?”

“You mean she worked here a long time and acquired some respect?” I remembered I had been told Rufia was not native-born. “Somebody told me she came from overseas; Illyria was mentioned.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“So why do you think she changed?”

“Maybe she got used to running things.”

“The bar?”

“Anything that needed sorting.”

I started to doubt that Lepida knew anything useful. This conversation was meant to steer my investigation in a friendly way, yet her attempt to help was pretty vague.

“So is it your impression, Lepida, that what happened at the bar was connected to the rougher elements who have come in?”

“I don’t know. I’m just saying what I think.”

No, she was not saying much, and perhaps not even thinking. But that’s witnesses.