Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (47 page)

I walked down the long, dark hallway. Every board I stepped on creaked and groaned above the muffled voices from the cubicles. Who would huddle inside in the dark in the middle of such a day? The sick, the old, the infirm and crippled, the weak and starving, the lame. Ancients beyond any use, infants unable yet to walk. There was no reason that Polia and her son should be home at all, and yet my heart caught in my throat as I rapped on the door.

A young girl pulled the door wide open, giving me a view of the whole room. An ancient crone huddled amid blankets in one corner. A little boy knelt in the open window. He glanced over his shoulder at me, then went back to watching the street below. Except for its size and shape, everything about the room was different.

Two watery eyes looked out from the blankets. ‘Who is it, child?’

‘I don’t know, Grandmother.’ The little girl stared at me suspiciously.

‘What do they want?’

The little girl made an exasperated face. ‘My grandmother says, what do you want?’

‘Polia,’ I said.

‘Not here,’ said the boy in the window.

‘I must have the wrong room.’

‘No,’ said the little girl crossly. ‘Right room. But she’s gone.’

‘I mean the young widow and her son, the little mute boy.’

‘I know that,’ she said, looking at me as if I were an imbecile. ‘But Polia and Eco aren’t here any more. First she left, and then he left.’

‘Gone,’ added the old woman from the corner. ‘That’s how we finally got this room. Lived across the hall before, but this room is bigger. Big enough for all five of us – my son and his wife and the two little ones.’

‘I like it better like this, when Mommy and Daddy are out and it’s just us three,’ said the boy.

‘Shut up, Appius,’ snapped the girl. ‘One day Mommy and Daddy will go out and never come back, just like happened to Eco. They’ll disappear, like Polia. You’ll run them off because you’re always crying. We’ll see how you like that.’

The little boy started crying. The old woman clucked her tongue. ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Polia left without taking the boy?’

‘Abandoned him,’ said the old woman.

‘I don’t believe it.’

She shrugged. ‘Couldn’t pay the rent. The landlord gave her two days to get out. The next morning she was gone. Took everything she could carry and left the boy all alone to fend for himself. Next day the landlord showed up, took what little was left of their things, and threw the boy into the street. Eco hung around here for a few days. People felt sorry for him, gave him scraps to eat. But the doorkeepers finally ran him off. Are you a relative?’

‘No.’

‘Well, if Polia owed you money, you’d best forget it.’

‘We didn’t like them, anyway,’ said the little girl. ‘Eco was stupid. Couldn’t say a word, even when Appius would hold him down and sit on him and I’d tickle him till he turned blue. He’d just make a noise like a pig.’

‘Like a pig getting poked,’ said the little boy, suddenly laughing instead of crying. ‘That’s what Daddy said.’

The old woman scowled. ‘Shut up, both of you.’

Business was brisk at the House of Swans, especially for so near to midday. The proprietor attributed the traffic to a slight change in the weather. ‘The heat riles them all up, sets a man’s blood boiling – but too much heat can cause even a vigorous man to wilt. Now that the weather is at least tolerable again, they’re back in droves. All those pent-up fluids. You’re certain you have no interest in the Nubian? She’s new, you know. Ah!’ He gave a sigh of relief as a tall, well-dressed man entered the vestibule from the inner corridor. The sigh meant that Electra was no longer occupied and would be able to see me, which meant that the tall stranger must have been her previous client. He was a handsome man of middle age with touches of grey at the temples. He made only a faint, compressed smile of satisfaction as he nodded to our mutual host. I felt a stupid twinge of jealousy and told myself that the reason he smiled with his mouth shut was because his teeth were bad.

In a perfect house of this sort we should never have seen one another, being consecutive customers of the same whore, but the perfect house of this sort does not exist. Our host at least had the decorum to step between us, nodding first to the stranger as he passed and then spinning back around to me. His wide body made a formidable screen. ‘Just another moment,’ he said softly, ‘while the lady composes herself. Like a fine Falerian wine, one wouldn’t want to open the bottle too quickly. Haste might spoil the bouquet with bits of cork.’

‘Do you really imagine there’s anything of Electra’s cork left intact?’ said one of the girls from the corner of her mouth as she passed behind me. My host made no sign that he heard, but his eyes flashed and his fingers twitched. I could see he was accustomed to using his hands on his whores, but not in front of a paying customer.

He left me for a moment and then returned, smiling unctuously. ‘All ready,’ he said, and waved me into the corridor.

Electra was as striking as I had remembered, but there was a weariness about her eyes and mouth that cast a shadow on her beauty. She reclined on her couch with one knee raised and her elbow balanced atop it, her head thrown back on the pillows amid the great mass of her dark hair. At first she failed to recognize me, and I felt a pang of disappointment. Then her eyes brightened a bit and she reached up self-consciously as if to compose her hair. I flattered myself that for another man she would not have cared how she looked, and in the next instant I wondered if she pulled the same subtle trick on every man who came to use her.

‘You again,’ she said, still acting, using a low, sultry voice that she might have used with anyone. And then, as if she suddenly, finally remembered exactly why I had come before and what I had sought, she unmasked her voice and gave me a look of such naked vulnerability that I trembled. ‘This time you came alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Without your bashful little slave?’ A trace of wickedness, easy and lilting rather than studied, came back into her voice.

‘Not only bashful, but naughty. Or so his master thinks. And too busy to come with me today.’

‘But I thought he belonged to you.’

‘He doesn’t.’

Her face was suddenly naked again. ‘Then you lied to me.’

‘Did I? Only about that.’

She raised her other knee and clasped them both against her breasts as if to hide herself from me. ‘Why did you come here today?’

‘To see you.’

She laughed and arched one eyebrow. ‘And do you like what you see?’ Her voice was sultry and false again. It seemed to change back and forth beyond her control, like the closing of a lizard’s inner eyelid. She stayed just as she was, but her pose seemed suddenly coy rather than shielded. When I had first met her she had seemed so strong and genuinely lusty, almost indestructible. Today she seemed weak and broken, fragile, old, dreamless. A part of me had been excited at the prospect of seeing her again, alone and at my leisure; but now her beauty only caused me a kind of pain.

She shivered and looked away. The slight motion caused the gown to part across her thigh. Against the pale, sleek flesh there was a slender stripe, red at the edges and purple at the centre, like the mark of a cane or a stiff leather thong. Someone had struck her there, so recently that the bruise was still forming. I remembered the vaguely smiling noble who had left with his nose in the air.

‘Did you find Elena?’ Electra’s voice had changed again. Now it was husky and thick, like smoke. She kept her face averted, but I could see it in the mirror.

‘No.’

‘But you found out who took her, and where.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she all right? In Rome? And the child . . . ?’ She saw me watching her in the mirror.

‘The child died.’

‘Ah.’ She lowered her eyes.

‘At birth. It was a hard birth.’

‘I knew it would be. Only a child herself, such slender hips.’ Electra shook her head. A tendril of hair fell across her face. Her image, captured just so in the mirror, was suddenly too beautiful to look at.

‘Where was this?’ she said.

‘In a small town. A day or two from Rome.’

‘The town where Sextus Roscius came from – Ameria, is that the name?’

‘Yes, it was in Ameria.’

‘She dreamed of going there. Ah, I think she must have liked that, the fresh air, the animals, and trees.’

I thought of the tale Felix and Chrestus had told me, and felt almost sick. ‘Yes, quite a lovely little town.’

‘And now? Where is she now?’

‘Elena died. Not long after the birth. It was the birth that killed her.’

‘Ah, well. She chose it then. She wanted to have his child so badly.’ She turned her shoulder to me, making sure I couldn’t see her in the mirror. How long had it been since Electra had allowed a man to see her weep? After a moment she turned back and laid her head against the pillows. Her cheeks were dry, but her eyes glistened. Her voice was hard. ‘You might have lied to me. Did you consider that?’

‘Yes.’ Now it was I who lowered my eyes, not out of shame but because I was afraid she would see the whole truth.

‘You lied to me before. You lied about the slave boy being yours. So why not this time?’

‘Because you deserve the truth.’

‘Do I? Am I that awful? Why not mercy instead? You might have told me Elena was happy and alive, with a healthy baby at her breast. How would I have known it was a lie? Instead you told me the truth. What good is truth to me? Truth is like a punishment. Do I really deserve it? Does it give you pleasure?’ Tears streamed from her eyes.

‘Forgive me,’ I said. She turned away and said nothing.

I left the House of Swans, pushing past the grinning whores and tense-lipped, leering customers who lingered in the vestibule. The host veered by, smiling like a grotesque mask from a comedy. In the street I stopped to catch my breath. A moment later he came running after me, shouting and clenching his fists.

‘What did you do to her? Why is she crying like that? Crying and refusing to stop. She’s too old to cry and get away with it, even with her looks. Her eyes will puff up and she’ll be useless for the rest of the day. What sort of man are you, anyway? There’s something indecent about you, unnatural. Don’t bother to come back. Go to another place. Find another man’s girls to play your little games.’ He stormed back into the house.

A little way down the road, close enough to have heard everything, stood the cool noble who had left before me, surrounded by a pair of bodyguards and a small retinue; he must have been at least a minor magistrate. The whole company guffawed and grinned as I passed by. Their master gave me a thin, condescending smile, the kind of look a powerful man gives to an inferior to acknowledge that despite the gulf between them the gods have given them the same appetites.

I stopped and stared at him, long and hard enough that he finally stopped smiling. I imagined him broken-jawed, bent over, and bleeding, shocked by an avalanche of pain. One of the guards growled at me like a hound sniffing invisible threats. I clenched my fists inside my tunic, bit my tongue so hard it bled, stared straight ahead, and forced myself to keep walking.

I walked until I longed to stop walking, through crowded squares where I felt a total stranger, past taverns I could not stand to enter. The illusion of invisibility descended on me again, but with it there was no sense of strength or freedom, only emptiness. Rome became a city of endless squalor, shrieking babies, the stench of raw onions and rotted meat, the grime of unwashed paving stones. I watched a legless beggar drag himself across the street while a pack of children followed behind, pelting him with pebbles and taunting him with insults.

The sun descended. I felt a gnawing in the pit of my stomach, but I could not stand to eat. The air became thin and cool in the gathering twilight. I found myself before the entrance to the Baths of Pallacina, that favoured haunt of the late Sextus Roscius.

‘Busy day,’ said the young attendant as he took my clothing. ‘Hardly any business at all the past few days – too hot for it. No hurry this evening. We’ll be staying open late to make up for the loss.’ He returned with a drying cloth. I took it from him and said something to distract him while I draped the towel over my left arm, making sure it concealed my knife. Even naked I had no intention of going unarmed. I stepped into the caldarium, and he shut the door behind me.

The fading sunset cast a strange orange glow through the high window. An attendant with a burning taper lit a single lamp recessed in one wall, then was called away before he could light the others. The room was so dim and the steam on the water so thick that the score or so of men who lounged about the pool were as indistinct as shadows, like statues seen through a dull orange mist. I lowered myself into the water slowly, bit by bit, hardly able to tolerate the heat, until the swirling water lapped at my throat. Around me men groaned as if they were in pain or ecstasy. I groaned with them, merging into the obscurity of the warmth and vapour. The glow from the window failed by imperceptible degrees. The attendant never returned to ignite the lamps, but no one complained or shouted for light. The darkness and the heat were like lovers whom no one dared to separate.