Ode to a Banker

XXX

Outside the apartment where I had failed to find the playwright last time, a woman was on her knees, washing the common areas. She had her back to us, and since she was being thorough, she had tucked her skirts through her legs and into her girdle – thus giving me a startling view of rump and bare legs.

Helena coughed. I looked away. Helena asked the woman if Urbanus was in, so she stood up, freeing her garments unashamedly, and took us indoors. Apparently, she lived with him.

'Anna,' she said when I asked her name.

'Like Queen Dido's sister!' I suggested, trying to interject a literary note. She gave me a level stare that I did not quite like.

Urbanus was an improvement on his colleagues. I could see that he was reasonable, sociable, not too colourful, but unlike most of the others, vividly alive. He looked like a man you could have a drink with, though not one who would annoy you by returning for a party every day.

He was writing – or at least revising a manuscript. Well, that was a new development in the unproductive Chrysippus group. When we came in, he looked up, not annoyed but intensely curious. Anna went across and cleared the scroll away protectively.

He could have been any age in the prime of life. He had an oval face with a balding forehead, and deeply intelligent eyes. The eyes watched everyone and everything.

'I'm Falco, checking witnesses in the Aurelius Chrysippus death. This is Helena Justina.'

'What do you do?' he asked her instantly.

'I check on Falco.' Her easy answer intrigued him.

'Married?'

'We call it that.'

She sat down with us. Anna, the wife, might have done the same but she had to vanish into another room whence came the cries of squalling children. It sounded like very young twins, at least, and probably another one.

'You manage to work like this?' I grinned at Urbanus. 'I thought poets ran away from domesticity to the city.'

'A dramatist needs a family life. The big plots always feature interesting families.' Fighting and breaking up, I thought, but refrained from saying it.

'Maybe you should have married a girl at home and left her there,' suggested Helena, with the merest hint of criticising males. He smiled, wide-eyed, like a man who had just been given the idea.

'And home is where?' I put to him, though Euschemon had told me.

'Britain, originally.' I raised my eyebrows, as he would expect, and he snapped in, 'Not all the good provincial writers come here from Spain.'

'I know Britain somewhat,' I answered, avoiding the natural urge to shudder. 'I can see why you left! Where are you from?'

'The centre. Nowhere any Roman has heard of.' He was right. Most Romans only know the Britons are painted blue and that they harvest good oysters on the southern coast (oysters which can be not quite so good after a long trip to Rome in a brine barrel).

'I might know it.'

'A forested place, with no Roman name.'

'So what's the local tribe? The Catuvellauni?' I was being stupid. I should not have asked.

'Further west. A nook between the Dobunni, the Cornovii, and the Corieltauvi.'

I fell silent. I knew where that was.

That central area of Britain had no desirable mineral mines to attract us, or none that we had yet discovered. But in the Great Rebellion it was somewhere not far north of Urbanus' home forest that Queen Boudicca and her burning, killing hordes were finally stopped.

'That's where the frontier runs,' I commented, trying not to sound as if I regarded it as a wild area. Trying, too, not to mention the great cross-country highway up which the rebels had streamed on their savage spree.

'Good pasture,' said Urbanus briefly. 'How do you know Britain, Falco?'

'The army.'

'There in the troubles?'

'Yes.'

'What legion?' It was the polite thing to ask. I could hardly object. 'A sensitive subject.'

'Oh the Second!' he responded instantly. I wondered if he had been hoping to get in a dig.

The Second Augusta had disgraced themselves by not taking the field in the Rebellion; it was old news, but still rankled with those of us who had suffered the ignominy imposed on us by inept officers.

Helena broke in, taking the heat off me. 'You follow politics, Urbanus?'

'Vital to my craft,' he said; he had the air of a jobbing professional who would roll up his sleeves and tackle any dirt, with the same gusto as his wife cleaned their hallway.

I took back the initiative: 'Urbanus Trypho is the name of the hour. I hardly expected such a successful playwright to let his wife scrub floors.'

'Our landlord is not lavish with services,' said Urbanus. 'We live frugally.'

'Some of your scriptorium comrades are really struggling to keep alive. I was talking yesterday to Constrictus… I watched for a reaction, but he seemed indifferent to his colleagues' affairs. 'He reckons a poet needs to save up his cash so one day he can give it all up, return to his home province and enjoy his fame in retirement.'

'Sounds good.'

'Oh really! So after the excitement of Rome, you are aiming to go back to some valley among the Cornovii and live in a round but with a few cows?'

'It will be a very large hut, and I shall own a great many cows.' The man was serious.

Admiring his candour, Helena said, 'Excuse me for asking but I too know Britain; I have relatives in diplomatic posts and I have been there. It is a relatively new province. Every governor aims to introduce Roman society and education but I was told that the tribes view all things Roman with suspicion. So how did you manage to reach Rome and become a well-known dramatist?'

Urbanus smiled. 'The wild warriors on the fringes probably believe they will lose their souls if they wash in a bathhouse. Others accept the gifts of the Empire. Since becoming Roman was inevitable, I grabbed it; my family had means, luckily. The poor are poor wherever they are born; the well-to-do, whoever they are, can choose their stamping ground. I was a lad who could have turned awkward in adolescence; instead, I saw where the good life lay. I went hotfoot for civilisation, all the way south through Gaul. I learned Latin – though Greek might have been more useful as my leaning was to drama; I joined a theatregroup, came to Rome, and when I understood how plays work, I wrote them myself '

'Self-taught?'

'I had a good acting apprenticeship.'

'But your gift for words is natural?'

'Probably,' he agreed, though modestly.

'The trick in life is to see what your gifts are,' Helena commented. 'I hope it is not rude to say this, but your background was very different. You had to learn a completely new culture. Even now you would, say, find it difficult to write a play about your homeland.'

'Intriguing thought! But it could be done,' Urbanus told her genially. 'What a joke, to dress up a set of pastoral Greeks, modernise an old theme, and say they are prancing in a British forest!'

Helena laughed, flattering him for his daring. He took it like a spoonful of Attic honey from a dripping cone. He liked women. Well, that always gives an author twice the audience. 'So you write plays of all types?' she asked.

'Tragical, comical, romantic adventure, mystical, historical.'

'Versatile! And you must really have studied the world.'

He laughed. 'Few writers bother.' Then he laughed again. 'Theywill never own as many cows as me.'

'Do you write for the money or the fame?' I enquired.

'Is either worth having alone?' He paused, and did not answer the question. He must have the money already, yet we knew there was public muttering about his reputation.

'So,' I put in slyly, 'what did Chrysippus have to say to you the day he died?'

Urbanus stilled. 'Nothing I wanted to hear.'

'I have to ask '

'I realise.'

'Was your conversation amicable?'

'We had no conversation.'

'Why not?'

'I did not go.'

'You are on my list!'

'So what? I had been told that the man wanted to see me; I had no reason to see him. I stayed away.'

I consulted my notes. 'This is a list of visitors, not just people who had been invited.'

Urbanus did not blink. 'Then it is a mistake.'

I drew a long breath. 'Who can vouch for what you say?'

'Anna, my wife.'

As if responding to a cue she appeared again, nursing a baby. I wondered if she had been listening. 'Wives cannot appear in a Roman law court,' I reminded them.

Urbanus shrugged, with wide-open hands. He glanced at his wife. Her face was expressionless. 'Who wants to prosecute me?' he murmured.

'I do, if I think you are guilty. Wives don't make good alibis.'

'I thought that was all wives were for,' muttered Helena, from her stool. Urbanus and I gazed at her and allowed the jest. Anna was nuzzling her child. A woman who was used to sitting quietly and listening to what went on around her, one perhaps who could be so unobtrusive you forgot she was there…

'I had no reason to meet Chrysippus,' the playwright reiterated. 'He is – was – a bastard to work for. Plays do not sell well, not modern plays anyway; the Classics are always desired reading. But I manage to be marketable, unlike most of the sad mongrels Chrysippus supported. As a result, I found a new scriptorium to take my work.'

'So you were dumping him? Were you on contract?'

He humphed. 'His mistake! He had not allowed it. I did think – that is, Anna thought – he might be seeking to tie me in. That was another reason to keep out of his way.'

'And would it have been a reason to kill him?'

'No! I had nothing to gain by that and everything to lose. I earn ticket money, remember. He was no longer important to me. I deal separately with the aediles or private producers when my work is performed. When I was younger royalties on scrolls were make or break, but now they are just incidentals. And my new scriptorium is one with a Forum outlet – much better.'

'Did Chrysippus know?'

'I doubt it.'

I wondered what happened to the heaped chests of box office money, after the family paid the bills for their frugal life. 'Do you bank with him?'

Urbanus threw back his head and roared. 'You must be joking, Falco!'

'All bankers screw their clients,' I reminded him.

'Yes, but he made enough from my plays. I saw no reason to be screwed by the same man twice over.'

While I sat thinking, Helena contributed another question: 'Falco is looking at motives, of course. You seem more fortunate than the others. Even so, there are jealous murmurs against you, Urbanus.'

'And what would those be?' If he knew, he was not showing it.

Helena looked him in the eye. 'You are suspected of not writing your plays yourself '

It was Anna, the wife, who growled angrily at that.

Urbanus leaned back. There was no visible annoyance; he must have heard this accusation before. 'People are strange – luckily for playwrights, or we would have no inspiration.' He glanced at his wife; this time she ventured a pale half-smile. 'The charge is of the worst kind – possible to prove, if true, yet if untrue, quite impossible to refute.'

'A matter of faith,' I said.

Urbanus showed a flash of anger now. 'Why are mad ideas taken so seriously? Oh of course! Certain types will never accept that literate and humane writing with inventive language and depth of emotion can come from the provinces – let alone from the middle of Britain.'

'You're not in the secret society. "Oh only an educated Roman could produce this"…

'No; we are not supposed to have anything to say, or to be capable of expressing it… Who do they say writes for me?' he roared scornfully.

'Various improbable suggestions,' Helena said. 'Maybe Scrutator had told her; maybe she had pursued the gossip herself. 'Not all of them even alive.'

'So who am I – this man before you – then supposed to be?'

'The lucky dog who counts in the ticket money,' I grinned. 'While the mighty authors you are "impersonating" let you spend their royalties.'

'Well, they are missing all the fun,' Urbanus responded dryly, suddenly able to let the subject rest.

'Let's get back to my problem. It could be argued,' I put to him quietly, 'that this is a malicious rumour, which Chrysippus began spreading because he knew he was losing you. Say you were so affronted by the rumour you went to his house to remonstrate, then the two of you argued and you lost your cool.'

'Far too drastic. I am a working author,' the playwright protested in a mild way. 'I have nothing to prove and I would not throw away my position. And as for literary feuds – Falco, I don't have the time.'

I grinned and decided to try a literary approach: 'Help us, Urbanus. If you were writing about the death of Chrysippus, what would you say had happened? Was his money a motive? Was it sex? Is a frustrated author behind it, or a jealous woman, or the son perhaps?'

'Sons never rise to action.' Urbanus smiled. 'They live with the anger for too long.' From personal experience, I agreed with him. 'Sons brood, and fester, and permanently tolerate their indignities. Of course, daughters can be furies!'

Neither woman present took him up on that. His wife, Anna, had not contributed to the discussion, but Urbanus now asked her the question: whom would she accuse?

'I would have to think about it,' Anna said cautiously and with some interest. Some people say that as a put-off; she sounded as if she meant she really would mull it over. 'Of course,' she put to me, with a teasing glint, 'I may have killed Chrysippus, for my husband's sake.' Before I could ask if she did it, she added crisply, 'However, I am too busy with my young children, as you see.'

I was satisfied that Urbanus would have been stupid to kill Chrysippus. He was in the clear, but he interested me. The conversation drifted into more general matters. I confessed to having experience as a working playwright in a theatre troupe myself. We talked about our travels. I even asked advice on The Spook Who Spoke, my best effort at drama. From my description, Urbanus thought this brilliant farce ought to be turned into a tragedy. That was rubbish; perhaps he was not such an incisive master of theatre after all.

While we chatted, Anna was still holding the small baby on her shoulder, smoothing its gown over its back when it grew fractious. Both Helena and I noticed that she had inky fingers. Helena told me afterwards that she thought it might be significant. 'Have the rumourmongers picked up something genuine? Is it Anna who has the way with words?'

Nice thought. You could make a play about a woman taking on a man's identity. If it turned out to be a woman who actually wrote Urbanus' plays, now that really would be a piece of theatre!