Three Hands in The Fountain

XLVI

Flaccida's disappearance from home gave me a chance to show off.

There was a day's pause before we left Rome, so I used that to investigate for Milvia. Needless to say, it was not as much fun as pursuing widows can be. All the widows for whom I had previously worked were not merely provided with twinkling inheritances, but highly attractive and susceptible to a handsome grin. In fact since I met Helena I had given up that kind of client. Life was risky enough.

The pause occurred while I waited for my travel companion to clear his private affairs, which were necessarily more complex than mine. He had a few million sesterces invested in land to demand his attention, and a Senate reputation to cultivate, not to mention his imminent posting to Britain. The preparations for three years at the edge of the Empire couldn't be left to his underlings; his toga folders and secretaries might not yet appreciate how terrible the province was.

Frontinus had insisted on supervising the Tibur investigations. So long as he didn't try to supervise me I wasn't arguing. As a Roman I had little neighbourhood knowledge and no remit except as a member of his aqueduct investigation team. His presence would strengthen my hand. Given the status of the landowners who patronised that district, resistance to enquiries was quite likely The filthy rich have more secrets to guard than the poor.

Seizing my chance, therefore, while his honour sorted out his own business, I took myself down to the Florius homestead and spied around outside. A slave trotted out to go shopping, so I collared him, slipped him a small coin, added a few more at his suggestion, and asked what the word was about the missing dame. He clearly hated Flaccida, and willingly revealed that no one in the household knew anything of her whereabouts. I did not trouble to knock and speak to Milvia.

There was definitely no vigiles presence in the street, or I would have spotted them. So I took a stroll back up the Aventine, barged in on Marcus Rubella in the Fourth Cohort's Twelfth District headquarters, and asked him outright what had happened to his surveillance team.

'The Balbinus exercise is finished, Falco. He's dead and we wouldn't want to be accused of harassment. What surveillance team?'

Rubella was an ex-chief centurion, with twenty years of legionary experience behind him and now in command of a thousand hard-bitten ex-slaves who formed his fire-fighting cohort. He had a shorn head, a stubbly chin, and still, dark eyes that had witnessed unreasonable amounts of violence. He liked to think of himself as a dangerous spider twitching the strands of a large and perfectly formed web. I reckoned he thought too much of himself, but I made sure never to underestimate or cross the man. He was no fool. And he wielded a great deal of power in the district where I lived and worked.

I sat down in his office uninvited, leaned back in a relaxed manner, and placed my boots gently on the rim of his officer- quality work table, letting my heel nudge his silver inkwell as if I might deliberately knock it off.

'What team? The surveillance outfit that any intelligent tribune like yourself, Marcus Rubella, will have installed to observe the Balbinus widow, Cornella Flaccida.'

Rubella's brown eyes dawdled on his desk set. His long army career had left him with a respect for equipment; it persisted even now that he held a post where officially there was none. He always kept his inkpot full and his sand tray topped up. A jerk of my insolent foot could make a fine mess of his office. I smiled at him like a man who had no intention of doing it. He looked uneasy.

'I cannot comment on any ongoing investigation, Falco.' 'That's all right. Stuff your comments; I'm not the clerk who edits the Daily Gazette searching for a sensational paragraph. I just want to know where Flaccida has parked herself. It's in your long-term interests.' I could rely on that argument to find favour here. Rubella was a born officer. He never moved unless it was in his own interests, but if it was he jumped.

'What's the score?'

I came clean. He was a professional and I respected that too much to mess him about. Anyway, offering to share a confidence always bothered him, which was pleasing enough. 'Flaccida has had a big fight with her son-in-law, dopey Florius. She's bunked off from home. Dim little Milvia thinks the aqueduct killer has nabbed her mama – nonsense of course. The aqueduct killer likes his victims juicier; that's the one thing about him we do know.'

'So how far have you got?' asked Rubella. 'Is it true a severed head washed up in the Cloaca yesterday?'

'Not quite what the excellent Etruscan engineers originally allowed for – yes, it's true. And a torso in the Tiber the same morning. To tell the truth we seem to be getting nowhere – and that's with full co-operation from all cohorts of the vigiles, and two separate investigations under way. The one for the Curator of the Aqueducts appears to have run into the ground completely; I'm not sorry to hear it, since it's being led by the Chief Spy.'

Rubella snorted quietly. 'You don't like him.'

'I just don't approve of his methods, his attitude, or the fact that he's allowed to pollute the earth… The team I'm on -' Tactfully, I omitted to specify that I was working with Petronius, whom Rubella himself had suspended from duty. 'My team does have a few leads. I'm just off to Tibur with the ex-Consul in charge. Frontinus; do you know him?' No; one up to me. 'Some missing sections of corpses have apparently turned up. Maybe you can tell me, Rubella – what's the set-up for law enforcement out there?'

'In Latium?' The tribune spoke of the countryside with a townsman's disgust. He was scathing about its local administration too: 'I suppose the better villages may have someone like a duovir who organises a posse if they happen to be beset by particularly virulent chicken-rustlers.'

'In foreign provinces the army does the job.'

'Not in sacred Italy, Falco. We are a nation of free men; can't have soldiers giving orders – people might ignore them, and how would the poor lads feel? There's a cohort of the Urban Guard out at Ostia, but that's an exception because of the port.'

'Protecting the newly arrived corn supply,' I added. 'There are Urbans at Puteoli too, for the same reason.'

Rubella looked annoyed at my knowing so much. 'You won't find much regular policing anywhere else.'

'It stinks.'

'They claim there's no crime in the country.'

'And all their goats have human heads, and their horses can swim under the sea!'

'The Campagna's wild – and the worst thing about it is the people who live there. That's why you and I inhabit the big city, Falco, where nice friendly fellows in red tunics ensure we can sleep safe at night.'

This was a romantic view of the vigiles and their effectiveness, but he knew that.

I could cope with Latium. Unknown to Rubella I had spent half my childhood there. I knew the right way up to plant garlic. I knew that mushrooms grow nicely in cowpats, but best not to mention it when you serve them. And he was right; I preferred Rome.

I went back to my original enquiry. 'I doubt if Flaccida has been abducted by a killer. He would have to be brave – and sharp, too. Petronius Longus would probably say we should suspect Florius of wanting her dead. He has his fingers in the gangs now, so he could try to organise it. And he has a motive a mile high. My own cynical theory is that Milvia herself would like to see her nagging parent out of the way -'

'How about Petro?' joked Rubella. 'I always thought he was big, and quiet – and deep!'

'He'd like to see the back of the old hag, but he'd rather catch her out in a felony and throw her to a judge. Milvia's story is that she wants Petronius to find out where her darling mother is. If I can tell her the old bitch is safe, it helps keep the young girl away from Petro.'

'Is it true that somebody put him on his back?' Rubella usually knew the score of any draughts game on his patch.

'Florius heard about the affair. Flaccida told him; that's why they had their bust-up. He decided to make his presence felt at last.'

'Rome can do without Florius thinking big.' The thought of Florius flexing his muscles was sufficient to worry Rubella. Will it affect Petro's attitude to the woman?'

'We can only hope so.'

'You don't sound optimistic.'

I had known Petro a long time. 'Well, I do believe he wants his job back.'

'Funny way of showing it. I gave him an ultimatum, which he seems to have ignored.'

'And you know that,' I pointed out gently, 'because Petronius has been seen going to Milvia's house – by your men. Ever since the Balbinus trial you have had a full-time set of peepers following every move made by Flaccida. But then presumably when she flew away, your man tightened his boot-thongs and followed her to her new roost?'

'I've had to call them off,' Rubella complained. 'She's too clever to give us any leads. It's too expensive watching her – and without Petronius Longus I'm seriously short of manpower.'

'So did you call off the surveillance before she did her flit? Or have the Fates finally smiled on me for once?'

He enjoyed keeping me waiting. Then he grinned. 'They pull out at the end of today's shift.'

I lifted my feet from his table, carefully avoiding his inkpot and sand tray. To add emphasis, I leant forwards and adjusted their positions slightly, aligning them neatly. I don't know whether the bastard felt any gratitude for my restraint. But he did give me an address for Cornella Flaccida.

She had taken herself an apartment in the Vicus Statae, below the Esquiline, near the Servian Walls. To reach it, I had to walk down past the apsidal end of the Circus, through places which had featured so strongly in our hunt for the aqueduct killer: past the Temple of the Sun and Moon, through the Street of the Three Altars, around the Temple of the Divine Claudius. I detoured via the Street of Honour and Virtue and called in hoping to see Marina; she was out. Knowing Marina, I was not surprised.

Flaccida's new doss was a second-floor spread in a clean apartment block. When her husband was convicted and his wealth forfeited to the Treasury, she would have been allowed to keep any money that she could prove was her own – her dowry, for instance, or any purely personal inheritance. So although she was claiming to be destitute, she had already set herself up with slaves, beaten black and blue as her staff always were, and basic furniture. The whole show had been decorated with co-ordinating frescos and the kind of Greek-style vases that are turned out in sets in Southern Italy for householders who just want to fill up space aesthetically without the bother of hunting in flea-markets. It looked as if Flaccida had established her bolthole some time previously. I bet neither Milvia nor Florius had ever been told it was here.

She was in. I could tell that because her vigiles tail was lurking in a street food shop opposite. Pretending I didn't know his presence was supposed to be a secret, I called out and waved to him. Flaccida probably knew he was there. If the surveillance was about to be lifted, blowing his cover could do no harm in any case.

I was allowed in, if only to prevent me alarming the neighbours. It was not a home where one was offered sesame cakes and mint tea. Just as well. I would have felt unsafe accepting anything into which poison could have been stirred.

To celebrate her freedom from the younger generation, the doughty dame must just have had her hair touched up, in not quite the same blonde as its previous shade. She lay sprawled on an ivory couch, wearing garments in clashing purple and deep crimson whose purchase must have made a large number of fullers and dyers extremely happy. When she sent this outfit to the laundry there was going to be an outcry from other customers whose clothes came back streaky after the hideous colours bled.

She made no attempt to rise and greet me. That may have been because her shoes had platform soles several inches deep which must have been crippling to stand or walk on. Or maybe she thought I wasn't worth it. Well, the feeling was mutual.

'This is a surprise! Cornella Flaccida, I'm delighted to see you alive and well. The word is you've been grabbed for dissection.'

'Who by?' Flaccida obviously supposed it was some underworld enemy. She must have plenty.

'Could be anyone, don't you think? So many people harbour a fantasy of hearing that you've been tortured and massacred -'

'Oh, you always get do-gooders!' She rasped with laughter that set my teeth on edge.

'My money would be on Florius or Milvia – though oddly enough it was your daughter who sent out the bloodhound. Her affection for you is so great, she's actually employing me. I shall have to report to her that you are flourishing – though I don't necessarily have to reveal your whereabouts.'

'How much?' she demanded wearily, assuming I wanted a bribe to keep quiet.

'Oh, I couldn't take money.'

'I thought you were an informer?'

'Let's say, I'll be perfectly happy if you join the general move in your family to lay off my good friend Lucius Petronius. I'm just relieved I don't have to add you to the women who have been hacked to pieces and dumped in the aqueducts.'

'No,' Flaccida agreed, unmoved. 'You wouldn't want to see me grinning up at you from a fountain bowl. And I don't want to come plopping out in the hot room of some men's baths, giving the bastards an excuse to make dirty cracks.'

'Oh, don't worry,' I assured her. 'This killer likes his morsels young and fresh.'