Three Hands in The Fountain

XI

'Listen, you idiot, – if you're doling out rewards in the name of my business, you'd better put up your own collateral!' 'Settle down, Falco.'

'Show me the colour of your denarii.'

'Just shut up, will you? I'm interviewing a visitor.'

His visitor was exactly the kind of unprepossessing lowlife I would expect to come crawling up here looking for a bribe. Petronius had no idea. For a man who had spent seven years apprehending villains he remained curiously innocent. Unless I stopped him, he would ruin me.

'What's this then?' demanded the interviewee. 'What's gone wrong about the money?'

'Nothing,' said Petro.

'Everything,' said I.

'I heard you was giving rewards,' he complained accusingly.

'Depends what for.' I was hopping mad, yet experience had taught me to stand by any promise that had lured a hopeful here. Nobody climbs six flights of stairs to see an informer unless they are either in desperate trouble or believe that what they know is worth hard cash.

I glared at Petro's catch. He was a foot shorter than average, malnourished and filthy. His tunic was threadbare, a mucky brown garment that hung on his shoulders by a few rags of wool. His eyebrows met in the middle. Wiry black stubble ran from his jutting chin right up his cheekbones to the bags under his eyes. His ancestors may have been high kings of Cappadocia, but without doubt this man was a public slave.

On his feet, which looked as flat as bread-shovels, he was wearing rough clogs. They had thick soles but they had not kept him dry; his felt leggings were black and had oozed water everywhere. A trail of puddles marked his path through our door, and a dark little pond was slowly gathering around the spot where he had come to rest.

'What's your name?' asked Petronius haughtily, trying to reassert his authority. I leant on the table with my thumbs in my belt. I was annoyed. The informant didn't need to be told about it, but Petronius would pick it up from my stance.

'I said, what's your name?'

'Why do you need to know?'

Petro scowled. 'Why do you need to keep it a secret?' 'I've nothing to hide.'

'That's commendable! I'm Petronius Longus; he's Falco.' 'Cordus,' admitted the applicant grudgingly.

'And you're a public slave, working for the Curator of Aqueducts?'

'How did you know that?'

I saw Petro control himself. 'Given what you brought me, it fits.' We all looked at the new hand. We looked away again rapidly. 'What family do you work in?' asked Petro, to avoid discussing the relic.

'The state.' The water board used two groups of public slaves, one derived from the original organisation set up by Agrippa and now in full state control, the other established by Claudius and still part of the household of the Emperor. There was no rationale in perpetuating these two 'families'. They ought to be part of the same workforce. It was a classic bureaucratic mess with the usual openings for corruption. The inefficiency was worsened by the fact that nowadays major work programmes were carried out by private contractors instead of direct slave labour anyway. No wonder the Aqua Appia always leaked.

'What's your job, Cordus?'

'Masonry. Vennus is my foreman. He doesn't know I found that

…'

We all reluctantly looked at the hand again.

This one was a dark, pungent, rotted nightmare, recognisable only because we were in the mood to see what it was. It was in desperate condition, only half there. Like the first, the fingers were missing but the thumb remained, attached by a thread of leathery skin though its main joint had parted. Maybe the fingers had been gnawed off by rats. Maybe something even worse had happened to them.

The relic now lay on a dish – my old supper dish, I was annoyed to notice – which had been placed on a stool between Petronius and his interviewee, as far as possible from both of them. In the small room that was still too close. I edged further along the table, in the opposite direction. A fly buzzed in to have a look, then flew off fast in alarm. Gazing at this object changed the atmosphere for all of us.

'Where did you find it?' Petronius enquired in a low voice.

'In the Aqua Marcia.' Tough luck, Glaucus. So much for crystal-dear bathing. 'I went in through a top hatch with a surveyor to check if we needed to scrape the walls.'

'Scrape them?'

'Full-time job. They get coated with lime, legate. Thick as your leg, if we leave it. We have to keep chipping it away or the whole works would clog up.'

'So was there water in the aqueduct at the time?'

'Oh, yes. Shutting the Marcia's next to impossible. So much depends on it, and if we send inferior water because we're running a diversion, nobs start jumping up and down.'

'How did you find the hand then?'

'It just came floating along and said hello.'

Petronius stopped asking questions. He looked as if he would be happy for once if I interrupted him, but there was nothing I was burning to interject. Like him, I felt slightly ill.

'When it knocked my knee I jumped a mile, I can tell you. Do you know who it belongs to?' asked the water board slave curiously. He seemed to think we had answers to the impossible.

'Not yet.'

'I expect you'll find out.' The slave was consoling himself. He wanted to believe something proper would come out of this.

'We'll try.' Petro sounded depressed. He and I both knew it was hopeless.

'So what's this about the money then?' Cordus was looking embarrassed. No doubt if we did produce any payment, he would overcome his reserve. 'To tell you the truth, it wasn't for the reward that I come here, you know.' Petronius and I listened with an air of decent concern. 'I heard you was asking questions so I thought you ought to have it… but I wouldn't want the bosses to hear -'

Petronius surveyed the slave with his friendly look. 'I suppose,' he suggested, 'if you find anything of this nature, the rule is you have to keep it quiet to avoid upsetting public confidence?'

'That's it!' agreed Cordus excitedly.

'How many castoff bits of corpse have you found before?' I asked. Now a second person was starting to take an interest he cheered up. Maybe we liked his offering after all. It might increase what we paid him.

'Well, not me myself, legate. But you'd be surprised. All sorts of things turn up in the water, and I've heard of plenty.'

'Any handless bodies?'

'Arms and legs, legate.' It was hearsay, I reckoned. I could tell Petro agreed.

'Ever seen any of them?'

'No, but a mate of mine has.' Everyone in Rome has a mate whose life is much more interesting than his own. Funny; you never get to meet the mate.

'The hand is your own first big discovery?' I made it sound like something to be proud of.

'Yes, sir.'

I glanced openly at Petronius. He folded his arms. So did I. We pretended to be holding a silent conference. Really we were both as gloomy as sin.

'Cordus,' I ventured, 'do you know if the waters of the Aqua Appia and the Aqua Marcia originate in the same place?'

'Not me, legate. Don't ask me nothing about the aqueducts. I'm just a mutt who works in the wet, chipping off clink. I don't know nothing technical.'

I grinned at him. 'That's a pity! I was hoping you could spare us having to talk to some long-winded hydraulic surveyor.'

He looked crestfallen.

He was probably a villain but he had convinced us he meant well. We knew how hard life was for public slaves so Petro and I both dug in our pockets and arm-purses. Between us we managed to find him three quarters of a denarius, all in smalls. Cordus seemed delighted. Half an hour in our den above Fountain Court had warned him that the best he could expect from a pair of duds like us might be a kick on the backside and an empty-handed trudge downstairs. A few coppers was better than that, and he could see he had cleaned us out.

After he had gone, Petronius pulled on his outdoor boots and vanished: running off to remove his reward poster. I carefully lifted the stool with the hand on it on to the balcony, but a pigeon flew down for a nibble almost straight away. I brought it back in and used Petro's smart mess tin upside-down over the hand as a lid.

He would curse me, but by then I would be across the road peacefully closeted with Helena. The good thing about having a work partner was that I could leave him to fret all night over any new evidence. As senior executive I could forget it then stroll in tomorrow, refreshed and full of unworkable ideas, to ask in an annoying tone what solutions my minion had come up with.

Some of us are born to be managers.