Ode to a Banker

XXXV

In the morning, just after breakfast, I was whistled up by Petronius. I was in the middle of whispering to Helena about Maia and Anacrites; Marius, who had slept the night on our living-room floor, had taken his bowl of chopped fruit into the bedroom to check on the pup.

'The spy is right in there, after her. Maia appears to go along with it.'

'What about Anacrites?' asked Helena, staying calm.

'He's playing it quietly; he looks as if he is not sure his luck will hold,' I complained bitterly.

'Leave it; he won't last.' Helena seemed far less worried than I was. 'Maia needs to adjust. She will never stay with the first man who takes an interest.'

Petronius had despaired of attracting my attention. He came up and stood listening as he waited to break in on the conversation. Something was up; I was on my feet by then, strapping up a boot.

'Maia won't be an easy catch for anyone. Marcus, listen,' Helena insisted, 'don't drive her to him!'

I shook myself, breaking free of my worries. 'Petro – what's the excitement?'

'Report of a corpse, possible suicide. Hanging from the Probus Bridge.'

'Some poor family man, no doubt…Am I interested?' Still frazzled by my wrath over Anacrites, I enjoyed a hope that it might be him strung up.

Petro nodded. 'I'm paying you to be fully involved, Falco. The corpse may be one of the authors in the Chrysippus case.'

We walked down to the river at an even pace. Dead men wait. It was an early hour, when it seemed natural to walk along in silence. Otherwise, I might have thought Lucius Petronius was preoccupied. Any other bridge in Rome would have been out of the Fourth Cohort's remit. We were lucky, if you cared to look at it that way.

The boundary of the Thirteenth district touched the Tiber just below the Trigeminal Gate, which was the way we approached from the Aventine; the Probus lay just south of that. Beside the great wharf called the Marble Embankment and close to the bustle of the Emporium, it was a favourite spot for suicides.

Across the river we could see the Transtiberina, the lawless quarter into which only brave men ventured. Coming towards us from the far side of the bridge were red-clad members of the Seventh Cohort, in whose jurisdiction that lay. Their patrol-house stood not far from this bridge. Fusculus was also visible going to meet them, his rotund figure unmistakable.

'A confrontation?' I asked Petro.

'I'm sure the Seventh will see it our way.'

'Are they looking for work?'

'No – but if they get the idea we are keen to have this one, they may argue just to be difficult.'

'Where is the dividing line between cohorts?'

'Halfway across the river, officially.'

'Where was the corpse found?'

'Oh, about halfway,' answered Petronius sardonically.

'I see it's walked to this side!' Petro's men were clustered at the Thirteenth's end of the bridge. 'I suppose normally if a bloated jumper drifts ashore in the Emporium reaches, you would try to poke the body with an oar until it ends up on the other side and the Seventh have to deal with it?'

'What a shocking suggestion, Falco.' True, though.

The Seventh must have been bored with fishing floaters out, because before Petronius and I fetched up at the scene properly, they had already turned away. Fusculus started walking back towards us with a grin. I made no comment on these delicate issues.

The body was lying on the bridge now. A group of vigiles clustered round it casually. One was still eating his breakfast – half a fatty-looking pie.

'What have we got?' asked Petronius. He glanced at the man who was eating – who, far from feeling the reproof, instead offered him a bite. Petro took the pie from him. I assumed it was confiscated; next minute he had sunk his choppers into it and was handing on the item to Fusculus, while brushing crumbs off his chin. As I was an informer, they made sure there was nothing left when it came to my turn – but they did apologise. Nice fellows.

The vigiles discussed the event with Petro in their own terse code. 'Suicide.'

'A jumper?'

'Hung himself.'

'That straight?'

'No, chief; he made it really obvious.'

'Too obvious?'

'He was dangling from a noose looped over a corbel. We're just simple vigiles. Of course we rush to the obvious conclusion. That means self-hanging to us.'

'Suicide note?'

'No.'

Petronius grunted. 'I was told something about an identification clue?'

'Correspondence in a bag fastened to his belt. Addressed to Avienus. That's a name from the Chrysippus case.'

'He's a writer; he should have been able to do us a note then,' Petro scoffed.

I could do cemetery humour too: 'Avienus was not good on deadlines.'

'Well, he's one less on our suspects list,' Petro replied.

'You think he killed himself out of guilt, after murdering Chrysippus?' I wondered

Then Fusculus laughed. The vigiles wanted to impart something more sensational. 'No – there's more to this! He's the first suicide I ever saw who climbed under a bridge – when most desperate people jump off the top. Then he not only tied himself to the stonework in a very awkward position, but roped a massive bundle of roof tiles to himself. Now it could be in case his nerve failed and he suddenly wanted to climb back up -'

'Or not!' muttered one of the others.

The men stood aside. Petro and I approached the corpse. It was Avienus all right; I identified him formally. The skinny frame and beaky face were definitely his. He was dressed in black as previously, the cloth of his tunic rumpled in awkward folds.

They had cut away the rope from around his throat as a courtesy, in case he gasped his way back to life. The vigiles normally did that with hanged bodies; I think it made them feel better. It would have been pointless in this case. Avienus had been dead for some hours when he was found by a cart-driver in the early hours.

'However did the driver see him there?'

'He had climbed off his cart to do a pee over the edge.'

'Noticing a body must have quenched the flow! Did he see anyone else lurking about?'

'No. We took a statement and let him go.'

The noose was an old-looking piece of nautical goat's hair twist, still tarry in places. It might have been found lying handy on a wharf. Suicides, in my experience, turn up at their chosen spot fully equipped.

I had seen suicides by hanging before and the results here did to some extent look right. Apart, that is, from two large bundles of shaped sun-baked pantiles which were strapped to him. They had been parcelled together in the form of a double panther, which Fusculus said had been placed over his head with two ropes on his shoulders, and then other strands knotted each side at his waist. It would have taken some time to organise. Still, some suicides do spend hours formally preparing themselves.

'Ever picked up one of those?' asked Fusculus, indicating the tiles.

'They weigh some,' I agreed. One, falling from sufficient height, can kill a man. Plenty of spines have been ruined for ever by lifting 'roofers' hods.

'What do you think?'

'This is an odd one, right enough. If you don't think about it too much, it looks as though he wanted to be certain he would drop properly – making sure the weight dragged him down when he jumped, so the rope would snap his neck.'

Petronius tried waggling the historian's head to test if his neck was broken, but rigor had set in. 'Get Scythax to check that, will you?' Scythax was the cohort doctor. He examined both wounded and dead, mending whichever he could. His nature was dour and to me he seemed fonder of the dead. 'There are failed hangings sometimes; Avienus might have wanted to make sure, so he chose to take elaborate precautions.'

'But,' I said, leaning over the low wall to see the place of death, 'he could not easily have climbed over this parapet with such a weight attached to him.'

'Desperate men can amaze you. Would it be quite impossible?' asked Petro.

'Where we found him,' Fusculus replied, 'he needed to get out there first, cling on somehow, with no real foothold, yet have free hands to fasten his rope.'

'Want to leg yourself over and demonstrate?'

'No thanks! You can't reach the fixing point properly before you have climbed the parapet. But once he climbed over, so weighted down, tying his noose on the corbel would never have been feasible.'

'So he had help?' suggested Petro.

'Help – whether he wanted it or not,' I agreed sombrely. Murdered then.

I knelt down beside the body, and detected a faint mark on his forehead, possibly a bruise left by a knockout blow. 'Put the word out that we have accepted this as suicide.'

Everyone nodded.

'What about that correspondence?'

Fusculus handed me a document. It was a letter to Avienus from his mother, obviously an elderly and frail widow, fretting about what might happen to the property she lived in. She was afraid of losing her home. I had asked Lucrio what security Avienus had offered for his bank loan, but Lucrio had never reported back to me. This told me the answer.

There was nothing else we could do. Petronius made arrangements to remove the corpse. Somebody would have to go and tell the old lady that she had even more worries now.

'Why,' I asked, still puzzled, 'did they hang him? You could make sure of killing him just as convincingly by tying on the weights, then throwing him over and letting him sink to the bottom. That too could look like a very determined suicide.'

'Somebody wanted to make sure the corpse was visible,' decided Petro. 'They wanted him found – quickly.'

'And something worse.' I was thinking it through. 'They wanted the event talked about. What happened to him is a warning to others.'

'A warning – from whom, Falco?' I could see one possibility. It seemed to me, we might just have found another curious custom of the banking world – though whether this was the traditional punishment for defaulters, or a response to some more serious threat to solvency, I did not know.

I went to see Lucrio.