Graveyard of the Hesperides

XXXVI

Chia was wanted. A large tanner came to her door. He seemed diffident, asking politely if she was busy at the moment or could she could “do” him? He was ordinary, almost likeable, though he did stink of his work.

I left.

Before I thanked her for our chat and freed her to ply her trade with the tanner, the girl had told me how to find the cookshop where Menendra lodged. I came upon it easily enough, but when I went up the stairs at the side of the building, her door was firmly locked. She had a name sign on a hook, like those I had seen in the brothel, but when I turned it, the back was blank, no “engaged” notice. So people came to find her here, but not to fornicate.

Retreating, I bought a pie from the busy cookshop. It was surprisingly good, given the area. That’s Rome for you.

I walked slowly back to the Garden of the Hesperides, eating as I went. I could not help thinking what a wondrous treat it would once have been for me to eat a warm pie in the street. Once, when I was homeless in dreary Londinium.

Today the weather was mixed, with small clouds scudding in between gladdening bursts of sunlight. The temperature was cooler than earlier in the week, so walking about was more comfortable. Still, this was the Golden City, with its climate so different from the one I grew up with: Rome, where you could go bare-armed even while the sun was hidden. Rome, where my family all laughed at me because if the sun peeked out in December, I would throw off my cloak, raise my face to the warmth and start smiling …

Tiberius, still at the bar, caught me brushing pastry crumbs from my lips. Since he looked envious, I walked over to the Brown Toad to ask if they could supply a bowl of their stew for him. Nobody was about. People could walk past and not be accosted by the transvestites. Any lunchtime clientele had gone. I went inside, looking for the lethargic waitress. She wasn’t there, but I found an aged woman washing out food bowls; she must be the granny who cooked up the daily cauldron.

“Where is the girl?”

“Having a lie-down.” I interpreted that the lewd way. Maybe I had spent too much time investigating bars.

“Any of your meaty hot pot left? I have a hungry man to feed over the road.” I did not mention that he was an aedile who ought to enforce the pulses-only rule. Not knowing who I wanted it for, she obligingly scraped the last of it out of her cauldron.

I grinned. “If you’re like my old gran on the Aventine, you’re pleased to see the clean bottom of the pot.”

She was like my old gran all right. Beaming, she let me run a finger around the inside of the cauldron, cleaning up the last of the gravy. I thought I had better try some, since I had not tasted this famous broth when the Macedonians had lunch on me. Anyway, I had a long history of licking out cooking pots. All my family liked to do it; when a bunch of us gathered in a kitchen, there could be squabbles.

I congratulated her on the flavor. I was polite; besides, it really was good. I liked remembering that eating places were supposed to be for eating in.

She had a small bowlful set aside under a cover, put away for herself, but she was eager to see her labor being enjoyed by someone else; she pushed me onto a stool, insisting I have it. Despite my pie, I downed the stew as well. Brides need nourishment. Both my own grandmothers would have said that. At the moment, I was feeling nostalgic for them.

“What do people call you?”

“Gran.”

“Can I have your recipe, Gran? My aunt runs a caupona up on the Aventine; they could really do with serving up meals as delectable as this. You’ve made the meat really tender!”

Naturally she pretended she just threw in whatever was to hand that day. That might be true, but she knew how much to throw and what else would taste well with it. “It’s top beef. I get it from the victimarii.”

“No, really? You mean Costus and company?”

“You know them?”

“They are doing the augury for my wedding.”

“Oh, that will be lovely for you. Just tell old Staberius what you want him to prophesy.” I managed to assume the correct dreamy look, as if I was really looking forward to the ceremony. Grandmothers have standards. They know marriage is a lottery, but they expect a bride to be full of joy on the day. There will be plenty of time later for her to admit she has made a horrible mistake.

“So how come the handsome sacrifice boys have a butcher’s shop?”

The granny tapped her nose, but told me. “Oh, they have a lot of little sidelines. One of my grandsons is in that crew; I have to stop him telling me the horrible things that go on … It’s not a shop. You have to come round to the back gate on the right day…” So if a sacrifice went wrong, if a large bull was slaughtered and there were leftovers, if a beast came up from their country farm and then was not wanted by a fickle client, Costus let favored neighbors buy choice cuts on the quiet.

“If the gods don’t get a sniff of altar smoke, they won’t know what they’ve lost?” I smiled.

“Gods only have wafts of offal anyway. The main meat is handed out-after the bastard priests have had a good dinner first!”

“My grandma on the Aventine reckoned offal was the best meat.”

“She was brought up poor if she thought that!”

“Yes, she was,” I agreed soberly.

“All the better for it, girl.”

“She had a hard life.”

“But she lived to see her grandchildren thrive.”

“Yes.” Including the interloper from Britain. Junilla Tacita had viewed me at first with intense suspicion, in case I did down her “real” family-but she mellowed.

She, too, would have come and wept at this wedding I was to have. She enjoyed a good cry on a happy occasion. I suppose it made up for all the tears she had bravely bitten back during tragic times. She had known plenty of those.

I gazed at the Brown Toad’s cooking granny. “So tell me, old one: did you know the famous Rufia?”

She cackled with loud laughter. “Who didn’t?”

I took a chance. I decided she was honest and would speak her mind. “This is an unpleasant thing to ask but I have to: did Rufia run a vice ring from that bar?”

That was when the granny snatched back the bowl of stew intended for Faustus. For a moment I thought she was offended and he had lost his lunch-but she only wanted to stand his bowl on the brazier to keep it warm. It suggested we were in for a long chat. Excellent! (Faustus could wait.) She pulled up another stool for herself and squatted, groaning as her joints protested.

“So! You’re wanting to find out what happened over at that place.” This old dame kept up with gossip and was brazen about doing so. Luckily, I had never seen much point in keeping our investigation a secret. The crime was old and it helps to have the neighborhood aware that you are open to offers of information.

My companion was now behaving as if I was a granddaughter whose schoolwork needed to be supervised-by someone less indulgent than her goofy parents. “I daresay other people have been giving you the runaround. You should have come to me first, Albia.”

I felt a surge of hope. “Six dead. It must have been a ghastly night. Do you know what it was all about?”

“I do not! I keep my nose out of things like that.”

After this outburst of sanctity, she paused. I had to encourage her into talking anew: “Gran, like what? I can’t tell what kind of bar the Hesperides is because it’s closed for works. The new landlord may intend it to be respectable-or he thinks he does. But did it have a very different history?”

“No worse than other places,” she assured me complacently. I managed not to look around the Brown Toad, which had lousy staff and low customers, especially at night. It gave bench room to the Macedonian whores, while the waitress who had gone from sight could herself now be having her “lie-down” upstairs with a paying customer. Judging by those I had seen catcalling outside, the lethargic waitress could even really be a boy.

Unlikely; she was not pretty enough.

My confidante settled in to share her knowledge. Close to, she was no piece of art. Most of her teeth had fallen out, her hair was going the same way and nowadays she was warty. She wore an old tunic that might have belonged to a couple of other people before she picked it out as a bargain on a recycled clothes stall.

According to her, in Old Thales’ time the Hesperides pretended to be quite reputable-“If you didn’t look too close.”

“There are rooms upstairs.”

“And they used them.”

“For regular prostitution? Was it organized?”

“Oh no.” She was dismissive. “If men wanted it, they could get it-but not from full-time prostitutes. Apart from the fact there wasn’t a lot of very dirty activity in those days, Old Thales hadn’t the gumption to organize a piss in a public latrine.”

“You didn’t like him?”

“I never really knew him. My husband did, and called him lazy, all talk, and not trustworthy. He puffed himself up as the happy landlord, but Rufia was the busy one at that place.”

“What was the relationship between her and Thales?”

“She worked there. He made out he was the big wheel, while he let her get on with it. The place would have gone to the wall without Rufia.”

“No affair?”

“Oh no. Not between them. I don’t think Rufia trusted men. She never had a regular fellow, and never any children.”

“Did she go upstairs with customers?”

“If she had to. I don’t count that.”

I did wonder if Gran had ever done the same herself. I could not ask. She would have denied it indignantly. Nowadays she was grandmother to many and had a decent reputation to sustain. The past was formally quashed.

“Routine services? Did she do anything else, anything involving the other bars?”

My witness leaned forward confidingly. She had sweet breath as if she sucked apothecaries’ pastilles for some ailment. “Other business? Not like you mean. What she did was act as a mother to all the women.”

“‘Mother’ as in brothel madam?”

“No, more ‘mother’ as in mother! You know…”

I did not.

“She looked after them. Plenty of the girls who have to do that work are very young and ignorant. She taught them how to take care of themselves. Keep their spirits up. Keep as clean as possible. Watch out for each other, especially if they knew there were any nasty types of men around. How to deal with violence. And, if they was unlucky and fell for a you-know-what, Rufia quietly took them somewhere private and did the necessary.” I gazed at her. “So that the baby went away. You know!”

“Yes, I know.” So it was Rufia who taught Menendra, who now carried this out for the White Chickens girls. “What about Nona?”

“So you know Nona? She’s all right, though I hear she charges enough … Nona came in afterward. Same thing, of course. Well, she makes the babies go away; I don’t think she bothers with the other stuff. She really doesn’t care for men. She doesn’t much like the girls either. She does what she does to make money out of them and their misery. That was what made Rufia special around here. Her proper motherly approach.”

“She had no family, you said. Was that because she got rid of her own too?”

“Oh no, I don’t think so. Well, you get a feel for these things-I always thought she was one of those women who just couldn’t conceive. She had plenty of chances. Being a barmaid-you can imagine!”

“Did she want children?”

“I suspect so. She always spoke really nicely to my little ones if she met us in the street.”

“So, Gran, she looked after the good-time girls instead?”

“That’s right. That brought out her caring nature. She was a hard woman in many ways. I expect if she’d had her own, she might have been quite different.” The granny laughed, reminiscing. “Well, you have to stay calm then, don’t you? I say she was hard, but that was just her attitude. She talked hard. She stood no nonsense. But you knew where you were with her, and she was never unfair. People liked her for it.”

I put aside my food bowl. “Somebody failed to appreciate her. She was killed at the Hesperides.”

“Was she?” The granny assumed a vague, watery-eyed look. It was the kind of disassociation my own would have used. I am just a poor old body who can’t answer anything difficult … “Well, I don’t know about that, dear.”

“So you know nothing about the five men either, whose bodies we have dug up?” She shook her head with determination. I tried pressing her, though I knew it was hopeless. “They could have been salesmen-it’s been suggested. I don’t know what they were trying to sell.”

To my surprise, the old one suddenly perked up. “Oh, that would have been the cladding-sellers,” she cried. “Gavius and his crew. They were always coming round in them days. They used to love a night out drinking at the Hesperides.”

“Oh! But that was in the past?”

“Fell out with Thales. He was like that. Took against people for no reason, never mind if they was good customers. Stupid kind of man.”

“Or they stopped coming because they are all dead, Gran.” She looked at me quizzically. “If they fell out, would Thales have gone so far as to have them murdered?”

She now stared as if I were barmy. “No,” she explained, with a pitying manner. “Old Thales was a coward. But none of those men are dead. Whatever gave you that idea, Albia? They are as alive as you or me, same as always. Alive and decent-enough boys, for salesmen. They live in Mucky Mule Mews. As I recall, Rufia used to lodge in a cheap room above Gavius and his parents, when he lived with them.”

I drew in a deep breath. Then, since she seemed to have no more to tell me, I took the warm hot pot off the brazier and carried it across the road to give my man his lunch.