Three Hands in The Fountain

XXXII

Outside Pia's tenement Petro and I parted company. As I had expected, he was off for a word with the Fifth Cohort. Their headquarters was right at the end of this street – and also pretty well adjacent to the reservoir in the Arch of Dolabella. I suggested he ask them to be particularly watchful every night after the Games ended, in case our maniac killer was polluting the water supply right under their noses.

'All right, I don't need you to write my speech for me.' 'Just a few rhetorical points, partner.'

'You're an interfering bastard.' He was looking thoughtful again. Then he said, even more defiantly, 'Pia's lying about something, Falco, or I'm the Colossus of Rhodes.'

'You're just a colossal bighead,' I grinned, and since we were almost at the Fifth's station house I left him, so he could sustain the myth of representing his own cohort. Turning up with an informer would be a dead giveaway that he was freelancing.

Cyclops Street is only two away from the Street of Honour and Virtue, another run-down and ineptly named sanctuary for drabs with appalling histories: including Marina, the flaky pastry who had been my late brother's girlfriend and brought my niece Marcia into the world. I took responsibility for Marina, since she had made it clear she had no intention of ever being responsible herself. Since I was so close that it seemed unavoidable, I forced myself to go to see her and the child.

Useless. I should have known it would be while the Games were on. Marina had gone to the Circus. Trust her to home in on a place that contained two hundred thousand men. She must have dumped Marcia somewhere. I could find hardly anyone to ask, and no one I did roust out could tell me. I left a message to warn Marina there was a bad character abducting females in her locality. She wouldn't care about that. But if she thought I was prowling about nearby on surveillance it might scare her into looking after my niece more carefully.

Marcia was nearly six now. She seemed a happy, well-adjusted, vibrant child. That was just as well. Helena and I were not in a position to rescue her.

A handful. My brother Festus had died in Judaea without knowing he had fathered Marcia. For various reasons, a few of them noble, I tried to take his place.

The day had heated up to scorching, but a chill ran over me. I hoped the aqueduct killer was not tempted to turn to paedophilia. Marcia was too friendly with everyone. I dreaded the thought of my favourite little niece scampering around these streets with her innocent gregarious smile while a perverted butcher was roaming the same neighbourhood looking for unprotected female flesh.

Nobody was safe. When we found the first badly decayed hand its anonymous owner had seemed so remote that Petro and I could stay neutral. We were never going to identify that one – or the next. Now we were getting closer. This was where the nightmares started. I had learned enough about a victim to feel I knew her. I had seen how her death was affecting her family and friends. Asinia, wife of Caius Cicurrus, aged twenty, had a name and a personality. Soon it would be all too easy to wake in the night sweating in case the next person was somebody close to me.

I walked back again to the Fifth Cohort's billet; Petronius had already left. Being so close I went to see Bolanus at his hut, but he was somewhere out on site. I wrote him a message to say the snatched women might be disappearing in his immediate vicinity so I would like to talk to him about it. I was wondering whether there was any feasible access to the Appia Claudia or any other water system nearby.

Having failed to find three different people I followed up my bad fortune with an old informers' trick: I went home for lunch.

I did not see Petronius again until late that evening. When the swallows were at their busiest before the light started dimming, I went across to the office, where he was just clearing up his dinner. Like me he was dressed to go out. We wore white tunics and togas to look like regular idlers at the Games, but underneath we had working boots that were good for kicking scoundrels. He took a thick stick twisted through his belt under the toga. I relied on the knife in my boot.

We strolled down to the Temple of the Sun and Moon, hardly talking. Petro parked himself on the steps of the Temple. I went back a bit and took the Street of the Three Altars. By day it was a business quarter, with a fairly open aspect despite the proximity of the Circus Maximus. The valley between the Aventine and the Palatine is broad and flat-bottomed, with not much through trade since people try to avoid having to walk all the way round the Circus to get anywhere else. It may be quick in a quadriga drawn by snorting steeds with the roar of the crowd to spur them on, but it's murder on foot.

At dusk the atmosphere deteriorated. Foodshops that had seemed smarter than you expected at midday suddenly looked dingy again. Beggars – runaway slaves, probably – came out to annoy the departing crowds. Old grafliti became more obvious on buildings that seemed worse kept. As the Circus vomitaria disgorged the tired hordes, for a time the noise was atrocious; this was why it could never be a select domestic area. People shouting their loud farewells after having a good time are a deep annoyance to others who have not been entertained. And who wants racegoers who have had too much sun and too many snacks being sick on their front doormat fifteen nights in a row?

The first to exit were simply large groups going home. Friends or family parties, or workmates on an outing, they came out briskly, sometimes pushing a bit if the crush was bad, then rapidly dispersed. The dawdlers were more varied, and more raucous too. Some were drunk; forbidding wine in an arena had no effect anywhere in the Empire, and those who smuggled it in always took enough to swamp themselves. Gambling was illegal too, yet it was the whole point of the Circus. Those who had won liked to celebrate around the Temple of the Sun and Moon where Petro was stationed, or the nearby Temple of Mercury, before they reeled off through the streets dangerously happy, thieves flitting hopefully after them in the shadows. Those who had lost their stakes were either maudlin or aggressive. They hung about looking for heads to bash. Finally, when the gates of the Circus were about to close, out sauntered the silly girls wanting to ruin their reputations and the show-off males they were hoping to attract.

Most of the girls were in pairs or little groups. They usually are. It gives them confidence, which in my experience they don't need. Sooner or later they home in on a set of layabouts, planning to sort out one target each, though there is sometimes a plain, clumsy wench whose traditional role is to tell the others she thinks they are asking for trouble, then stomp off alone while her brazen friends fling themselves into it.

I watched a few of the plain ones, and even followed them discreetly for a short distance, to see if they were tailed by anyone sinister. I soon gave it up. For one thing I had no wish to frighten them. Worse, someone I knew might have noticed me dogging unattractive women; it could have ruined my good name.

The transport situation interested me. At the start of the debouchment commercial chairs seemed to be everywhere, but the prudent who came straight out in search of transport home soon snapped them up. Only a few chairs returned for second fares and by then anyone still waiting was desperate so they quickly vanished again. There were a few private conveyances; they of course had instructions to park up waiting for their specific owners, so they were theoretically unavailable – though the slaves in charge of them seemed to receive plenty of requests to moonlight, and I saw some accept.

The fashion was for either sit-up-and-beg chairs with two carriers or shoulder-high litters with four or even eight hefty men on the corners. Carriages were rare. In the city they were so much less versatile. Wheeled vehicles are barred from Rome in the daytime, apart from builders' carts working on public monuments and the Vestal Virgins' ceremonial carpentaria.

As far as I knew no Vestal had ever in living memory offered a stray kitten a lift. A woman could be giving birth in a gutter and the Virgins would loftily ignore her. So with no money, once she left Pia that fatal night, Asinia would almost certainly have stayed on foot. This was no place for a lone woman. I imagined how it must have been: a black girl, very pretty but endearingly unaware of it, looking nervous perhaps, shyly pulling her stole close and staring at the pavement. Even if she walked quickly she would be easily marked as vulnerable. The quick walk might actually attract attention. Maybe whoever stalked her had already been gawking at Pia, but had been beaten to it; then when Asinia demurely set off on her own, so much more respectable than the friend she had rashly abandoned, he cannot have believed his luck.

All around the arena tonight prostitutes were plying their trade with gusto. The working girls looked vicious, but once they gathered that my business was nothing which involved them they left me alone. They had too much to do. These long hot nights meant there were good denarii to be made under the shadow of the Circus. Being obnoxious to me would be a bad advertisement – and, more important, a waste of earning time.

What struck me about the other young women, and the not-so-young ones too, was that many were more threatening than the bands of youths. A row of sauntering, swearing maidens swinging their yellow Parasols, all white-lead eyelids and looking for action, scared even me. At their approach, any sexual inadequate who found women difficult would jump behind a pillar and wet himself.

I saw nobody who fitted that description. But down there in the Street of the Three Altars, I began to feel certain someone like that must be habitually drawn to this spot. I could imagine him being scorned and insulted. And I could understand how his brooding spirit might savagely foment thoughts of revenge.