Ode To A Banker (21 page)

Ma and Helena were sewing. That's always a way for women to look preoccupied and superior.

'Greetings, dear females of my family circle.' They surveyed their work at arm's length and waited for me to amuse them by grovelling. 'How pleasant to find you so chastely engaged in the duties of devoted wives.'

'Look who it is,' sniffed Ma. And don't call me a devoted wife!'

'Yes, I know; I'm a disgrace - sorry.'

'Guilt, Falco?' Helena was being reasonable, to make me feel worse. I tipped up her chin on one finger and kissed her lightly. She shuddered. 'Do I detect breath pastilles?'

'I am always perfumed with violets.' Not to mention recent applications of tooth powder, skin toner, hair slick and body oils. A man can live well in Rome.

'You stink like an apothecary!' commented my mother.

Helena was looking particularly fresh and tidy, a dutiful matron plying the bronze needle as she helped Ma neaten tunic hems. Whoever taught her to sew? As a senator's daughter it cannot have been in her regular training. She probably asked Ma to give her a rapid lesson this morning just to make me feel bad.

Her eyes danced slightly with mockery as I inspected her. Neatly pinned gown in demure pale blue; particularly modest brooches holding together the sleeves; only a hint of gold neck chain; no finger rings, except for the silver band I once gave her as a love token. Hair in a simple bundle, with a plain republican centre parting.

'I see you're acting the injured party.'

'I don't know what you mean, Falco.'

She always knew exactly what I had in mind.

'I hope we're not quarrelling '

'We never quarrel,' Helena said, sounding as if she meant it too.

We did, of course. Rampaging over nothing was how we acted out the daily domestic round. We both tussled for ascendancy. We both enjoyed surrendering too.

I explained quietly all that had occurred last night at the patrol-house, and was allowed to retrieve my usual status as an unsatisfactory stop-out who was probably hiding a secret life. 'Back to normal then.'

'Romancing again,' said Helena, throwing her eyes up.

Then I said I was going out to interview a suspect in the Chrysippus case. And since Julia seemed perfectly happy feeding wax to Marcus Baebius, Helena said she would leave the baby for a while and come with me. Obviously, I could not object.

Outside my mother's apartment Helena penned me in a corner of the stairwell and subjected me to a body search. I stood still and patiently let it happen. She examined each arm, scanned my legs, pulled up parts of my tunic, turned me round, twisted my head each way, and looked behind my ears.

'Caught anything with lots of legs?'

'I'm sniffing you over like Nux does.' Nux in fact was looking at her own tail in a bored manner.

'I told you where I've been.'

'
And I'm making sure,' Helena said.

She touched various bruises one by one, as if counting them up. No army doctor could have been more thorough. Eventually I passed the fitness test. Then she put her arms round me and held me close. I hugged her back like a good boy, meanwhile seeing how much of the smooth republican bun I could demolish before she sensed what I was playing at and felt the hairpins being pulled out.

Good relations re-established, we set off together to find Urbanus Trypho, the playwright Chrysippus had supported, that sneak who thought he could lie low and avoid being interviewed.

XXX

OUTSIDE THE apartment where I had failed to find the playwright last time, a woman was on her knees, washing the common areas. She had her back to us, and since she was being thorough, she had tucked her skirts through her legs and into her girdle - thus giving me a startling view of rump and bare legs.

Helena coughed. I looked away. Helena asked the woman if Urbanus was in, so she stood up, freeing her garments unashamedly, and took us indoors. Apparently, she lived with him.

'Anna,' she said when I asked her name.

'Like Queen Dido's sister!' I suggested, trying to interject a literary note. She gave me a level stare that I did not quite like.

Urbanus was an improvement on his colleagues. I could see that he was reasonable, sociable, not too colourful, but unlike most of the others, vividly alive. He looked like a man you could have a drink with, though not one who would annoy you by returning for a party every day.

He was writing - or at least revising a manuscript. Well, that was a new development in the unproductive Chrysippus group. When we came in, he looked up, not annoyed but intensely curious. Anna went across and cleared the scroll away protectively.

He could have been any age in the prime of life. He had an oval face with a balding forehead, and deeply intelligent eyes. The eyes watched everyone and everything.

'I'm Falco, checking witnesses in the Aurelius Chrysippus death. This is Helena Justina.'

'What do you do?' he asked her instantly.

'I check on Falco.' Her easy answer intrigued him.

'Married?'

'We call it that.'

She sat down with us. Anna, the wife, might have done the same but she had to vanish into another room whence came the cries of squalling children. It sounded like very young twins, at least, and probably another one.

'You manage to work like this?' I grinned at Urbanus. 'I thought poets ran away from domesticity to the city.'

'A dramatist needs a family life. The big plots always feature interesting families.' Fighting and breaking up, I thought, but refrained from saying it.

'Maybe you should have married a girl at home and left her there,' suggested Helena, with the merest hint of criticising males. He smiled, wide-eyed, like a man who had just been given the idea.

'And home is where?' I put to him, though Euschemon had told me.

'Britain, originally.' I raised my eyebrows, as he would expect, and he snapped in, 'Not all the good provincial writers come here from Spain.'

'I know Britain somewhat,' I answered, avoiding the natural urge to shudder. 'I can see why you left! Where are you from?'

'The centre. Nowhere any Roman has heard of.' He was right. Most Romans only know the Britons are painted blue and that they harvest good oysters on the southern coast (oysters which can be not quite so good after a long trip to Rome in a brine barrel).

'I might know it.'

'A forested place, with no Roman name.'

'So what's the local tribe? The Catuvellauni?' I was being stupid. I should not have asked.

'Further west. A nook between the Dobunni, the Cornovii, and the Corieltauvi.'

I fell silent. I knew where that was.

That central area of Britain had no desirable mineral mines to attract us, or none that we had yet discovered. But in the Great Rebellion it was somewhere not far north of Urbanus' home forest that Queen Boudicca and her burning, killing hordes were finally stopped.

'That's where the frontier runs,' I commented, trying not to sound as if I regarded it as a wild area. Trying, too, not to mention the great cross-country highway up which the rebels had streamed on their savage spree.

'Good pasture,' said Urbanus briefly. 'How do you know Britain, Falco?'

'The army.'

'There in the troubles?'

'Yes.'

'What legion?' It was the polite thing to ask. I could hardly object. 'A sensitive subject.'

'Oh the Second!' he responded instantly. I wondered if he had been hoping to get in a dig.

The Second Augusta had disgraced themselves by not taking the field in the Rebellion; it was old news, but still rankled with those of us who had suffered the ignominy imposed on us by inept officers.

Helena broke in, taking the heat off me. 'You follow politics, Urbanus?'

'Vital to my craft,' he said; he had the air of a jobbing professional who would roll up his sleeves and tackle any dirt, with the same gusto as his wife cleaned their hallway.

I took back the initiative: 'Urbanus Trypho is the name of the hour. I hardly expected such a successful playwright to let his wife scrub floors.'

'Our landlord is not lavish with services,' said Urbanus. 'We live frugally.'

'Some of your scriptorium comrades are really struggling to keep alive. I was talking yesterday to Constrictus... I watched for a reaction, but he seemed indifferent to his colleagues' affairs. 'He reckons a poet needs to save up his cash so one day he can give it all up, return to his home province and enjoy his fame in retirement.'

'Sounds good.'

'Oh really! So after the excitement of Rome, you are aiming to go back to some valley among the Cornovii and live in a round but with a few cows?'

'It will be a very large hut, and I shall own a great many cows.' The man was serious.

Admiring his candour, Helena said, 'Excuse me for asking but I too know Britain; I have relatives in diplomatic posts and I have been there. It is a relatively new province. Every governor aims to introduce Roman society and education but I was told that the tribes view all things Roman with suspicion. So how did you manage to reach Rome and become a well-known dramatist?'

Urbanus smiled. 'The wild warriors on the fringes probably believe they will lose their souls if they wash in a bathhouse. Others accept the gifts of the Empire. Since becoming Roman was inevitable, I grabbed it; my family had means, luckily. The poor are poor wherever they are born; the well-to-do, whoever they are, can choose their stamping ground. I was a lad who could have turned awkward in adolescence; instead, I saw where the good life lay. I went hotfoot for civilisation, all the way south through Gaul. I learned Latin - though Greek might have been more useful as my leaning was to drama; I joined a theatregroup, came to Rome, and when I understood how plays work, I wrote them myself '

'Self-taught?'

'I had a good acting apprenticeship.'

'But your gift for words is natural?'

'Probably,' he agreed, though modestly.

'
The trick in life is to see what your gifts are,' Helena commented. 'I hope it is not rude to say this, but your background was very different. You had to learn a completely new culture. Even now you would, say, find it difficult to write a play about your homeland.'

'Intriguing thought! But it could be done,' Urbanus told her genially. 'What a joke, to dress up a set of pastoral Greeks, modernise an old theme, and say they are prancing in a British forest!'

Helena laughed, flattering him for his daring. He took it like a spoonful of Attic honey from a dripping cone. He liked women. Well, that always gives an author twice the audience. 'So you write plays of all types?' she asked.

'Tragical, comical, romantic adventure, mystical, historical.'

'Versatile! And you must really have studied the world.'

He laughed. 'Few writers bother.' Then he laughed again. 'Theywill never own as many cows as me.'

'Do you write for the money or the fame?' I enquired.

'Is either worth having alone?' He paused, and did not answer the question. He must have the money already, yet we knew there was public muttering about his reputation.

'So,' I put in slyly, 'what did Chrysippus have to say to you the day he died?'

Urbanus stilled. 'Nothing I wanted to hear.'

'I have to ask '

'I realise.'

'Was your conversation amicable?'

'We had no conversation.'

'Why not?'

'I did not go.'

'You are on my list!'

'So what? I had been told that the man wanted to see me; I had no reason to see him. I stayed away.'

I consulted my notes. 'This is a list of visitors, not just people who had been invited.'

Urbanus did not blink. 'Then it is a mistake.'

I drew a long breath. 'Who can vouch for what you say?'

'Anna, my wife.'

As if responding to a cue she appeared again, nursing a baby. I wondered if she had been listening. 'Wives cannot appear in a Roman law court,' I reminded them.

Urbanus shrugged, with wide-open hands. He glanced at his wife. Her face was expressionless. 'Who wants to prosecute me?' he murmured.

'I do, if I think you are guilty. Wives don't make good alibis.'

'I thought that was all wives were for,' muttered Helena, from her stool. Urbanus and I gazed at her and allowed the jest. Anna was nuzzling her child. A woman who was used to sitting quietly and listening to what went on around her, one perhaps who could be so unobtrusive you forgot she was there. . .

'I had no reason to meet Chrysippus,' the playwright reiterated. 'He is - was - a bastard to work for. Plays do not sell well, not modern plays anyway; the Classics are always desired reading. But I manage to be marketable, unlike most of the sad mongrels Chrysippus supported. As a result, I found a new scriptorium to take my work.'

'So you were dumping him? Were you on contract?'

He humphed. 'His mistake! He had not allowed it. I did think - that is, Anna thought - he might be seeking to tie me in. That was another reason to keep out of his way.'