Graveyard of the Hesperides

LVIII

After Macer had asked if that was everything, he said Liberalis would be taken to make a statement. As he was an accessory after murder, he would be held in custody. Furious protests ensued, to which the officer calmly responded, “I don’t believe I promised you a let-off. What witness heard me say that?”

“What about the ‘soft option?’”

“There’s no soft option with the vigiles. A serious note about you will be sent up to the prefect. Only he can decide whether you go to court. If you’re lucky, he’ll let you out on remand-seeing as you are such a respectable property-owner and businessman!” sneered Macer.

I kept my eyes cast down, taking no part. I wanted Liberalis to be secured somewhere. There were plenty of stupid things he might do in the aftermath of breaking his ten-year-old silence. Now he had cracked, he was going to pieces rapidly.

I reckoned my one last hope of solving this was to let it be known around the neighborhood that he had been arrested. I would suggest he had told us more than he actually did. Imply further arrests were imminent. Unnerve any others involved in the crime.

Of course it never works. Every previous contact made sure they were invisible. Menendra never put in an appearance all day, nor her escorts, who were presumably lurking wherever she was. Perhaps they were trawling another area with their voluminous list of chickpeas, bulgar, meal flour, sesame and lentils.

The snack stall was now locked up. I could not further challenge Lepida over her story that Rufia had left town. But I received no word on my hoped-for meeting with the aged barmaid. That was never going to happen.

At the Brown Toad, two of the boy-girls were lounging outside, plucking their eyebrows and other, much more intimate places. As I winced and tried not to watch, they told me no one had seen Gran there that day. The staff had been stuck with leftovers for lunch-“Salad leaves!”-though they had been promised mutton broth tomorrow, as one of Prisca’s many grandsons was doing the sacrifice at a wedding.

“Could that be my wedding? Is her grandson Costus? Costus who runs the victimarium?”

“No, it’s his man, Erastus. He’s got himself beaten up in a bar, as usual. We’re lending him a face poultice so he’ll look pretty.”

This was horrible. My cultrarius was blue with bruises, which had to be disrespectful to the gods, and these importuning transvestites would be eating my sheep, Snowy!

I went along to complain to Costus, but his place was shuttered and he was nowhere to be seen. A boy kicking a ball around outside said Costus had gone to have a tooth pulled; the hunks were in attendance in order to hold him down. I made sure not to look too closely; the lad’s misshapen football appeared to be a blown-up sheep’s bladder. No doubt part of another sacrifice.

In a desultory mood, I wandered back to the Hesperides. Tiberius and the men were frantically trying to make the water feature work. I sat and watched. First, no water appeared. A red-faced Sparsus conducted the traditional plumbing moves: he banged pipes loudly with a hammer. When the others cried “Steady on!” he threw down his tools and refused to do anything else.

Larcius and Tiberius went down on their knees, heads together, taking over like men with more experience, men about to do something much more technical. Tiberius hit the pipe.

“That’s never going to shift it.”

“Shut it, Sparsus.”

“Ow!” My loved one had mis-aimed the hammer; he whacked his thumb. “Ow, ow!” As he recoiled, in bringing the hammer up he hit his forehead too.

Larcius took the tool; he struck an expert blow, at which water rushed out. “Jupiter, turn the stopcock, Serenus!” Water rapidly filled the feature channel. It was soon overflowing. “Adjust it, adjust it! Other way, you idiot!”

They turned off the torrent. All sat down, panting. There were grins, with the endearing mix of sheepishness and triumph that workmen acquire after narrowly changing failure into success. Sparsus applied a filthy rag to Tiberius’ brow, where a large cut was now splashing blood. He was also sucking a blood blister on his battered thumb. I said, “Well done, all,” while going to his assistance. Now I would have a bridegroom who looked like a dying gladiator.

“We should have put in an isolation valve, chief.”

“The client’s in jail. Let him sort that one out for himself, another day.”

“He’ll call us back.”

“We’ll be too busy to come.”

“Promise?”

“Absolute promise!” Tiberius lolled against me as I pressed on his cut forehead. “We’ll clear up, hand him back his bloody bar-or lock up if he isn’t here-and get out forever tonight.”

The others had finished their breather, so they jumped up and began floating little dishes down the canal. Most of them sank. I claimed I had always said it would happen. Serenus knocked Sparsus over, so he fell in the water, splashing everyone. We were all glad to be cooled down, because the afternoon had become stifling.

When they settled again, they began tidying up and removing rubbish. All their tools and usable materials were put on handbarrows to wheel off to the yard at the Aventine. Everything superfluous was taken from the site and dumped in the back lane. Transport was supposed to come along that evening to take it; it had been ordered and would possibly even turn up. They conducted endless builders’ sweeping. Larcius arranged the beaten-up wooden furniture like a meticulous housewife. An oil lamp was placed at the exact center of each table. The struggling fig tree was carefully watered. The Oceanus mosaic had all its dust washed off so it ended up sparkling.

That was it. Tiberius and I saw the men off. We would see them tomorrow, all in our celebration clothes. “With big thirsts on!” We two walked slowly to the hired room to pack. Dromo, who yearned for familiar routines, was so eager to go home, he piled everything on his handcart and straightaway went off; we heard him moaning about the weight. Tiberius had reminded the boy that tomorrow he could stuff himself with cake made by the fabulous elite chef, Genius.

“Can he cook?”

“No.”

When he left, husband-to-be and I lay down on the appalling bed, intending to wait until the outdoor temperature cooled. Both of us were preoccupied, thinking too much about the lifelong enterprise on which we would embark tomorrow. With a marriage apiece behind us, and after a decade of waiting to risk a repeat, neither could afford this to go wrong. There was no need to talk about it. We were too subdued in any case.

We fell asleep. When we awoke, it was already evening. People were expecting us for dinner; by the time we could reach the Aventine, it would probably be over. None who knew us would be much surprised. Any investigation made us unreliable timekeepers; they had yet to hear how this one had run itself into the ground, maddeningly incomplete.

We left the room tidy, locked up, took back the key to the owner. We passed Menendra and a couple of her donkeys laden with grain sacks. They were delivering to the Four Limpets, outside which lolled a group of Macedonian prostitutes, bantering with a tambourine player in the absence of clients.

As we left the Ten Traders for the final time, we passed by the bar. In the course of that afternoon, it had somehow been made ready for business, so it was already open and operating.

Just as it had been when I started this account, the Garden of the Hesperides was a large but otherwise typical eating house on a busy street corner, with two marble counters, five pot-holes for food jars, three shelves of cracked beakers, an unreadable price list on a flaking wall and a faded picture of nude women unsuccessfully guarding an apple tree. This bar had waiters who were very slow to serve anyone and pretty girls who did all the work. A room upstairs was used for assignations; you could bring your own or hire the staff.

Little had changed. Only bodies had been dug up from the back garden and identified. Regulars would no doubt continue to harp on the old tragedy to strangers who might buy a round. I bet they still claimed one body put out there was a barmaid called Rufia.

We could not see whether the new landlord had been released by Macer and was inside, setting about his chosen role of becoming a local character. We did spot the gangster enforcer, Gallo. Both the waiters, Nipius and Natalis, reverently shook his hand as if he were a man of consequence. He accepted their greetings like a lord, passing through the gap in the counters as he made his way indoors. Perhaps he was intending to enjoy a drink in the courtyard, under the pergola beside the water feature, gazing at the lopsided sea-god mosaic. He would probably not give a thought to the murdered waitress who had once been buried where he sat, or her five long-dead companions.

In a strangely muted mood, Tiberius and I set off together for our long walk home. We would saunter down the Vicus Longus, past the White Chickens, ignoring the brothels; we would walk into the Argiletum, gazing at the famous Subura scroll-sellers, cobblers, false-teeth- and wig-makers, though not stopping to browse. We would avoid the Forum Transitorium, which was still partly a building site, but would sidle past the Fora of Augustus and Caesar, emerging into the main Forum close to the rostra. Around the Capitol at the north end, we would pass into the meat market, holding our noses. Thence a quick pass to the Trigeminal Gate, along its elegant porticus on the Marble Embankment, before we stopped short of the Emporium, below the cliffside of the Aventine, at my parents’ town house.

Tiberius would leave me, going on to stay at his uncle’s.

That evening, I was supposed to dedicate my locket to my father’s household gods (I had never had a locket; Falco never owned Lares). I should put away my childish things. Since I was already fourteen when they took me in, childish things never happened either.

In the small, high-up bedroom I had had as a young girl, where I had once written lovelorn poetry and raged against the world’s injustice, I would spend this last night before marriage. Traditionally, I should dream of the day that was to follow.

I, being thoroughly professional, merely cursed and brooded that I had not solved my case.

31 August

The day before the Kalends of September (pridie Kal. Sept.)

The wedding day of Tiberius Manlius Faustus and Flavia Albia