White murder marcus corv.., p.47
White Murder (Marcus Corvinus Book 7), page 47
I went home.
44.
I called in at Renatius’s on the way to the Caelian to tell the guy the news. Also to get quietly smashed, because although Cammius’s death hadn’t been any of my doing – quite the reverse – it had still left me depressed as hell. Charax and his pals, I noticed, had finished renovating the tenement opposite. Or at least the scaffolding and other signs of building work had gone. The place still looked pretty scruffy, though, and I wondered if the old pennypincher who owned it had finally realised what a pack of skivers he’d landed himself with and cancelled out on the contract.
Whatever the reason, Charax and Co. were in residence at their usual table. The god of building sites and odd-job plasterers knew where they got the money from, but it must’ve been in some sort of regular supply because even the placid Renatius wouldn’t’ve put up with his wineshop being used as a headquarters by the trade’s biggest cowboys rent-free, and whatever shining points of character were writ large on Charax’s roll of fate pleasantness of personality weren’t exactly prominent.
They gave me the big wave. ‘Afternoon, consul,’ Charax said. ‘Haven’t seen you around for a while. How’s it going?’
‘Okay.’ I moved over to the counter where Renatius himself was tucking into a plate of sausage and a cup of wine. ‘Jug of Spoletian, Renatius. A full one.’
He raised his eyebrows, got up and reached for the jug shelf without a word. I pulled up a stool and sat down. ‘You finished with the tenement, Charax?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Charax said. One of the acolytes sniggered. ‘The job sort of came to a natural halt.’
‘Yeah? Old what’s-his-name – Atellius, wasn’t it? – given you the boot?’
‘Nah. He’s dead. Had a bit of an accident.’
Renatius was decanting the wine. ‘Fell through the floorboards on the second floor while he was inspecting the building and broke his neck,’ he said neutrally.
‘Well, we hadn’t started up there, had we?’ Charax lifted his winecup and sipped. ‘The floor was riddled with dry rot. Silly bugger went up without telling us. If he’d said where he was going we’d’ve warned him.’
‘You weren’t around to ask,’ Renatius grunted. ‘You were all in here.’
‘Yeah, true, but we couldn’t be on the job all the time, could we? ‘S not reasonable to expect that.’
I sighed and poured myself a cup.
‘So the old guy’s heir dispensed with their services.’ Renatius went back to his sausage. ‘They were lucky not to be prosecuted.’
‘Oh, I reckon the heir thought we’d done him a favour.’ Charax beamed. ‘Atellius might’ve been in his seventies but he was a wiry old stick. Could’ve gone on for years.’
‘Didn’t get the chance, did he?’ Renatius turned to me. ‘So. How’s the Pegasus business doing?’
‘It’s over.’ I drank. ‘The murderer was the Whites’ boss Cammius. He killed himself a couple of hours ago.’
That got a respectful silence, even from Charax: faction leaders are big figures in Rome, even the two minor ones. Consuls, city judges and the like don’t even come close.
‘You want to tell us the details?’ Renatius said eventually.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think maybe I’ll keep these private.’ The guy had a right to know who’d knifed his customer, but the ins and outs of the Polydoxus scam were another matter. That was between Natalis and Cario; how they would settle it I didn’t know and I didn’t much care, but it wasn’t for wineshop consumption. ‘You ever notice something interesting, Renatius? Villains – real villains – never seem to get really hurt. It’s the half-villains that end up nailed, or nailing themselves.’ I took a long swallow of wine. ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’
‘ “Justice with her even steps has passed from out the world”,’ Charax said.
I turned, frowning. ‘What?’
‘It’s poetry, consul. Means the lady with the scales isn’t here any more. She’s long gone.’ He raised his cup to his lips. ‘Well-known mythological fact, is that.’
‘Yeah. Right.’ Jupiter! I turned back to Renatius. ‘He wasn’t a bad man, Cammius, not compared with some of the other bastards in the case, like your Watch pals Valgius and his sidekick Delicatus’ – let alone Pegasus himself, only I couldn’t say that – ‘yet he’s the one who ends up chopped.’
Renatius shrugged. ‘You said it yourself, Corvinus. He was a murderer. He deserved all he got.’
I grunted and topped up my cup. Sure, that was a fair way of looking at it, especially if you didn’t know the background, but I had the nagging suspicion that Cammius would’ve finished by killing himself anyway, even if I hadn’t interfered. That was the point; he’d judged himself, and no mistake, without my help, and when I’d covered the guy’s face with his cloak I’d felt just a little bit guilty on my own account. Maybe our homespun plasterer-poet was right: there wasn’t any justice any more, she was long gone. Look at Eutacticus; that bastard must’ve been responsible for dozens of deaths. And Acceptus. He’d pay in some way, I was sure, but I was willing to bet the price would be no more than he could afford.
The trouble with rooting around in dirty linen is that whether you like it or not your hands pick up the smell.
‘Panta rhei, consul.’ That was Charax again. ‘Everything flows. The old giveth place to the new. Bit like plaster, really.’
Oh, shit. I had to grin, though. I turned round again, holding my winecup. ‘Is that so, now, pal?’ I said.
‘Sure. Take Atellius. Arriving on site while we were having lunch, going upstairs and falling through the sodding floor was what you might call a fortuitous concatenation of circumstances. For the heir, anyway. The old bugger might’ve been close enough to skin a flint but he was a cheery soul and I’d nothing against him personal. It was a complete accident, right? Nothing anyone could do about it.’ He beamed. ‘We may not have justice any longer, consul, but we’ve still got luck. Me, I’m one for the vagaries of fate, myself. The cosmic googlies. Like that millionaire up your way who’s hitching up with his housekeeper, for instance.’
‘Yeah?’ I set the winecup down. ‘Who’s that, now?’
‘Guy called Petillius. Owns half the mantle-dyeing businesses in Rome.’
I stared at him. ‘What?’
‘Truth. You hadn’t heard? The story was all round the city this morning.’
My guts went cold. Holy Jupiter! This was no time for soul-searching and maudlin wine-binges. If Charax was right – and the guy had an ear for gossip that would’ve put Midas’s donkey version to shame – then all hell would currently be breaking out on the Caelian.
I paid for the undrunk wine and made a bolt for the door.
It was true, all right: I knew that as soon as I saw Bathyllus’s face. I’d been wrong about the hell, though, because he had on his noble self-sacrificing look. An expression somewhere between that of a boiled trout and of a high priest with piles.
‘Tyndaris is marrying Titus Petillius, right?’ I said as I took off my cloak and gave it to him.
‘Yes, sir. She told me this morning. I understand they had agreed to keep it quiet until she had been officially freed and the engagement could be announced legally.’ He folded the cloak carefully. ‘Which was yesterday.’
‘You, uh, were round there yesterday evening, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And she didn’t mention it?’
‘No, sir.’
I took the cup of wine from the tray he’d set on the hall table. ‘This would be a sudden decision, would it? Or reasonably sudden, anyway?’
He put his lips together. You could’ve used the line to cut marble. ‘On the gentleman’s side, sir, yes. I have the impression that his own proposal – made while we were in Sicily – came as rather a surprise to himself.’
‘I’m sorry about this, little guy,’ I said.
‘Sympathy isn’t necessary, sir.’ He gave a distinctly Bathyllus-type sniff that had nothing to do with tear-duct activity. ‘I have been tricked and deluded throughout. My only role by that woman’s design, right from the first, was to rouse jealousy in her intended suitor and precipitate an avowal of an equal devotion on his part. I am well rid of her.’
I paused, the cup half-way to my lips. Jealousy? Jupiter, the mind boggled! Certainly no dramatist worth his salt would’ve touched that kind of love-triangle with a bargepole. Still, Petillius was marrying the lady, you couldn’t get round that. Unlikely as it sounded, Bathyllus was probably right. ‘Even so, you have my condolences,’ I said. ‘It’s a pity things haven’t worked out.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
I picked up the jug and went through to the living-room. Perilla was on the couch. I kissed her.
‘You’ve heard, then,’ she said.
‘Yeah. Seemingly the news is all over town.’ I settled on my own couch. ‘The guy seems quite philosophical about it.’
‘I think it’s simply dreadful. The woman used him.’
I shrugged. ‘He’ll get over it. Me, I think he had a lucky escape. She would’ve eaten him alive. You can’t trust those culture-vultures as far as you can throw them.’
‘You don’t think so?’ She was grinning.
‘Present company excepted. Mind you, for that lady you’d’ve needed a legion-strength ballista.’
‘How did your business at the stables go?’
‘Okay.’ I kept my voice neutral. ‘We went on to Cammius’s place afterwards. He’s dead. Suicide.’
The grin vanished. ‘Oh, Marcus, no!’
‘There wasn’t anything I could do. He wanted to go.’ I took a swallow of wine. ‘Maybe it’s for the best. That’s what my pal Charax would say, anyway.’
‘Charax?’
‘A pain-in-the-backside plasterer. Thank your stars you don’t know him.’ Bathyllus oozed in. Taking things philosophically or not, the poor bugger still looked like Socrates – the original one, not Natalis’s gatekeeper – after he’d downed the hemlock. ‘Oh, hi, sunshine.’
‘A message from the kitchen, sir. Dinner will be late. Meton has had a major crisis with the sauce.’
Well, to do a Charax, as someone said somewhere: ‘You can pitch Nature out with a fork, but the lady always comes back.’ It was nice to think life still had some certainties, and domestic crises came high on the list. The googlies just provided the ups and downs that made things interesting. I sank another mouthful of Setinian and refilled the cup.
‘That’s okay, little guy,’ I said. ‘We’re happy here with the wine.’
_______________
Author’s Note
A fair modern-day parallel for the position of chariot-racing in AD 34 Rome would be a combination of horse racing and football: the first, obviously, for the general background of racing stables, betting and doping scams etc., all of which were present at the time, and the second for the sport’s popularity: the Latin tag panem et circenses – bread and Games – as a summing-up of the primary interests of the Roman lower classes being well-merited (the ‘bread’ part of it refers to the government-issued corn dole to low-income earners). Not that interest in the Games was confined to that group only, of course: as I’ve indicated in the book, many of the upper classes, including the imperials themselves, were keen if not fanatical racegoers, the most notable being the later emperor Gaius (Caligula) who was an ardent Green. Besides supplying us with the most widely-known racing-related story about Gaius, that he planned to make the horse Incitatus (‘Speedy’) consul, his biographer Suetonius also reports that he regularly had the neighbourhood of the stables picketed overnight by troops so that Incitatus could sleep undisturbed by the noise of passing carts, that he gave the driver Eutychus (‘Lucky’) presents worth 20,000 gold pieces, and that his most famous (or infamous) vitriolic quote (‘If only the Roman mob had just one neck!’) derived from an occasion in the Circus when the crowd cheered for the wrong team. The prospective consul, incidentally, was provided with a marble stable, an ivory manger, purple blankets, furniture and a full set of household slaves, all at Gaius’s expense.
As to the factions themselves, first-century Rome was only the beginning of their influence. By the sixth century in Byzantium – which had become after the split into eastern and western empires and the decline of the west Rome’s de facto successor – the Blue and Green factions had developed into political parties of immense consequence within the state; the most notable instance of their power being the so-called ‘Nika Revolt’ in 532 (Nika! means ‘Win!’ in Greek, and was the battle-cry of the rioters).
A brief word on names in racing. Chariot-drivers, like the golden-age Hollywood film stars, chose for themselves – or were given by their faction-masters – ‘performing names’ which would attract the interest (and so the bets) of the punters, and I have used this as a central detail of the plot. Similarly, the names of the horses (compare Incitatus above) were carefully chosen to appeal: Polydoxus simply means ‘Famous’. Which last raises another point, because the word is Greek, not Latin, and there was an actual horse of that name, although not at the time I have set the story. The fact that both drivers and horses often had Greek, rather than Latin, names at Rome may seem odd at first sight considering that chariot-racing was a mass-appeal sport. There are three (at least!) explanatory reasons: first, that the Circus (as opposed to the gladiatorial games) was as much a Greek tradition as a Roman one; second, that many of the horses and drivers came from the ‘Greek’ parts of Italy such as Campania and Sicily; and third, going back to golden-age Hollywood, that a Greek name had a certain cachet for the Roman crowd; compare the box-office pull of ‘Lamour’ or ‘Valentino’.
I have invented Crocinium on the slopes of Etna, or rather I’ve adopted a real village/small town which may not for all I know have existed in Roman times but occupies the same position, Zafferana: my name is simply the Latin form of the Italian, and it means ‘Crocus-’ or ‘Saffron-place’. Similarly, my ‘Ox Valley’ is the Val del Bove. I haven’t been there – I hope it doesn’t show in the writing, and readers who have will, I hope, be indulgent towards any topographical gaffes – but I did find two marvellous period books written by travellers in Sicily in the very early years of last century, which I recommend (if they can track them down) to anyone interested. Both books are simply entitled ‘Sicily’; one is by a Hamilton Jackson and the other by the splendidly-named pair Augustus J C Hare and St Clair Baddeley, and they provide a fascinating account of the difficulties and dangers involved in an ascent of Etna in days when tourists had to fend for themselves and take the rough with the rough. The mountain, by the way, exerted just as much of a touristic pull on ancient Romans as it does today (remember that, for pre-AD 79 Romans, Vesuvius was not an active volcano); and although the real fillip to the Etna tourist industry came later than my period when the scholarly Emperor Hadrian made the ascent – and had built, probably, the still-extant Torre del Filosofo (named for the philosopher Empedocles, who threw himself into the crater) as a memorial to his visit – I don’t think I’m stretching things too much by giving it an established status. Perilla, certainly, wouldn’t’ve passed up the chance of a closer look.
My thanks, as ever, to my wife Rona; to Carnoustie library; to Roy Pinkerton of the Department of Classics at Edinburgh University; to his research colleague Sinclair Bell for his information on the Circus side of things; to Alan and Angela Dunlop; to Sam Duff of the Provost Veterinary Group in Ceres, Fife (no connection with the Roman corn-goddess; I’ve checked); to Mark Jarvis of the Horse Doping Forensic Lab in Fordham, Cambridgeshire; and particularly to Jenny Paterson of just-round-the-corner who put me on to cassia senna. Any mistakes – especially in connection with horses – are mine. I hope they don’t spoil the story.
David Wishart, White Murder (Marcus Corvinus Book 7)
