Graveyard of the Hesperides (16 page)

“She is never coming back.” I wondered whether to say we thought we had found Rufia's body, but stalled at the woman's next remark.

“No. That's what the other one said.”

 

XXIV

She had turned around and was making her way downstairs again. Although our discussion about Rufia ought to have been sad, she seemed to take it matter-of-factly. I cast a rapid glance back at the room before I started down but there was nothing there to detain me longer.

“Who was it?” I demanded, once we reached the ground again. “This other one?”

“That Menendra. I told you, I didn't take to her.”

“She came here, and recently?”

“She came yesterday.”

“
Yesterday?
What did she want?”

“To see the room, like you. Only I just showed
her
from the doorway and wouldn't let her go inside. I never liked her attitude.”

“You knew her already? I have been told she was something to do with Rufia, I don't know what that was—friends, or they worked together?”

“They worked. That was all. I met her once with Rufia. That was enough for me, thank Juno.”

The landlady had a tight mouth, disapproving of the other woman. Somehow I knew she regarded me more favorably. With luck, she would talk to me.

“I have not met Menendra yet, though I shall have to.” I spoke openly, on equal terms. “I am not sure what to expect. Can you tell me what she's like?”

“Pushy. You won't like her. I can tell you're not that kind.” That would be news to my friends and family, who all thought me an obstreperous fiend.

“Is she foreign like some of the others?”

“Something. Speaks with a funny accent. Don't they all?”

“Barmaids, you mean?”

She let out a hard laugh, loaded with meaning. “And the rest!”

“She is a prostitute?”

Now my informant retracted. “Not for me to say!” Her voice told me, however, just how she regarded Menendra; whether she thought the same of Rufia was unclear, though I thought not.

“So why did this Menendra come now? Why was she interested in Rufia's room?”

The worn landlady drew herself up, becoming a pillar of rectitude. “That I don't know. I wouldn't want to know her reasons. But what I can say is this, young lady. That Menendra came here in the morning. I gave her the runaround and saw her on her way, quick as I could. The same night, and yes I mean last night, someone else came and they tried to break in on us!”

I was shocked. This was a harmless couple with nothing to steal. “That's terrible. What did you do?”

“Our son was here,” she replied, relishing this. “Bad luck for them! He calls in to see us most days. He had his three big dogs with him—they are sloppy things but they bark loud. So whoever it was, they stopped trying to get in the door and they scrammed.”

“Did any of you see them properly?”

“No, they hopped it too quick. Our lad ran down the alley after them, but it was no good. He'll be back this evening,” she assured me, seeing I felt great concern for the besieged couple, especially the frail old man. “He's going to bring materials to make the door safer. One of the dogs will stay here with us; the other two cry if they're not in their own bed.”

Rome was full of mosaics saying beware of the dog, with portraits of fierce curs in big spiked collars. Few houses actually had a guard dog, or if they owned one, he was gentler than his portrait. Of course we had the usual men who wanted to look tough, leading about horrible curs they could not properly handle—and also families with much-loved pets who wanted to greet strangers with ferocious licking.

“That's good. All good. I'm very glad you have someone to look out for you.” I let the woman see me thinking hard. “What's your name?”

“Annina.”

“Look, Annina, if the people who tried to break in had something to do with Menendra's visit, they must want to find something.”

“That was what we thought.” These people were savvy. She and her husband and son had debated this. Their conclusions were the same as mine. The burglars and Menendra were connected, and they all wanted something. Something they thought Rufia had had, something they wanted to get to before me.

“Did any of you go up and search?”

“We know there's nothing.”

“May I take another look?”

She nodded at once, almost as if she had been hoping I would ask. She let me go back by myself. This time I searched hard, scoured the room like a professional. I went through everywhere, hunting for hidey-holes. Not simply under the mattress and behind the cupboard, but seeking out loose boards, removable bricks, hollows in plaster above architraves. I found the secret places that Rufia may have used when she lived there. But they were all empty.

 

XXV

As I left Mucky Mule Mews I remembered to stay alert. When preoc- cupied by odd discoveries, it is all too easy to become so abstracted you fall prey to villains. Wise informers wait to start their brooding.

Even so, I was wondering what people might think Rufia could have left behind.

I walked carefully back to the Vicus Longus. The main thoroughfare, which had once seemed so insalubrious, suddenly felt familiar, populated and safe. I took a long breath and relaxed, as if I had narrowly escaped a scare. It was ridiculous. Nothing had happened, not to me. But I had enough experience to know what was possible in obscure places.

I went along to where Tiberius and I had enjoyed breakfast. I sat down with refreshments, fruit juice and a complimentary almond biscuit. Of the two who ran the stall, the mother was alone today, so she joined me in the sunlight. We exchanged names. She was Lepida, a good Latin designation, so I asked whether she had lived around here long.

“Born and bred.”

“That seems fairly unusual. A lot of people I've spoken to are incomers.”

“Too many slaves and foreigners,” Lepida grumbled. It was a classic complaint: unwanted low-class persons flooding in from overseas, taking all the work.

I decided not to mention Britain. With brown hair and despite blue-gray eyes, I had no really alien features. No stuck-out Pictish ears, no eastern steppes high cheekbones, no unusual skin tone. No one could tell my origins, unless I told them. Any bright occupant of the Empire can soon pick up Roman gestures and habits, learn to speak conventionally, then blend in. If anything, what marked me out was having too well-bred an accent nowadays.

I kicked out to scatter pigeons as they pecked too near. One of the automatic traits you soon learn eating out in the Mediterranean.

Cradling my beaker, I sat deep in thought, letting my jadedness show. “How is it going?” asked Lepida sympathetically. I pulled a face. “You're trying to find out what happened at that bar, aren't you?” she asked. I agreed, deliberately leaving her to take the initiative. I remembered how yesterday, with her daughter present, she had held back.

“Working as an informer,” I said, when she stalled, “isn't always easy.”

“What are you stuck over?”

“Oh pretty well everything!” I sipped my drink, gazing vacantly across the street. “Who died? Who killed them? Why? Five men and a woman vanished from their daily lives, yet nobody seems to have missed them. I know a few people who admit being in the Hesperides that night, but they are all keeping mum. I'm sensing fear—which is understandable. And now an innocent couple, who merely happened to be Rufia's landlords, have been attacked in their own home.”

“That's terrible!” breathed Lepida, wide-eyed.

“It's connected. Has to be. Digging up those sad old bones from the bar is starting to have repercussions.”

We sat in silence for a while. I knew when not to apply pressure.

The street lay bathed in August sunshine. At noon, this was an ordinary-looking thoroughfare. Sounds and scents of people having lunch at home in apartments all around us. Mothers nagging children to eat their bread nicely. Men whose work involved late shifts rousing from sleep, starting to make their presence felt in a world that had managed without them for the past few hours; wives resisting as they tried throwing their weight about. Dogs standing up and stretching their long backs. Dogs lying down again in diminishing patches of shade. Shops closing up for a lengthy siesta.

“I never knew that Rufia.” Lepida was opening up. “I never spoke to her.”

“You knew who she was, though?”

“I had seen her. If you pointed her out, I could have told you her name. I was young then. But I never mingled with women of that sort.”

“Barmaids?”

She pursed her lips and didn't answer. We drank our juice.

*   *   *

After a while she suddenly came out with, “Things are not the same around here.” She paused, reflectively. “It's all got very rough.”

Although I was surprised, I merely said some people would think the whole Subura had always been a rough area.

“Oh, it wasn't too bad,” answered Lepida, who had presumably never lived anywhere else. She seemed unaware her local district was historically notorious. “All the usual things went on, but it was … oh, I don't know. In a bar like the Garden of the Hesperides, yes, if a man wanted to go upstairs, the landlord probably had a daughter or a cousin who would oblige for a copper. But it was casual, you know what I mean. More of a favor than a business. Now it's all much more … professional.”

I absorbed this. “Was Rufia like somebody's daughter or cousin?”

“Yes, I think she was one of those types to start with.”

“She changed?”

“Oh I would think so!” Lepida exclaimed, though I could not see why she was so exercised. “Don't you, Flavia Albia?”

“You mean she worked here a long time and acquired some respect?” I remembered I had been told Rufia was not native-born. “Somebody told me she came from overseas; Illyria was mentioned.”

“I don't know about that.”

“So why do you think she changed?”

“Maybe she got used to running things.”

“The bar?”

“Anything that needed sorting.”

I started to doubt that Lepida knew anything useful. This conversation was meant to steer my investigation in a friendly way, yet her attempt to help was pretty vague.

“So is it your impression, Lepida, that what happened at the bar was connected to the rougher elements who have come in?”

“I don't know. I'm just saying what I think.”

No, she was
not
saying much, and perhaps not even thinking. But that's witnesses.

 

XXVI

Sometimes when you are looking for someone, they come looking for you. This is generally bad news.

I had finished my juice and said friendly farewells to Lepida. Tiberius and I would be back for more breakfast another day. With no clear plan for taking things forward, I had wandered back toward the Garden of the Hesperides. I reached the bar, but hesitated, because there was no reason for me to go in. I could hear our workmen inside, talking in low voices, chipping with spades. From where I stood I could not actually see them, nor they me.

“Here, you!”

A hoarse female voice accosted me. I knew it was me she wanted. There was nobody else around. It was Menendra. As Lepida had said, like so many in Rome she had a heavy foreign accent. Earlier she had avoided me. Now, from her stance, feet apart and arms folded, she had sought me out deliberately. Her attitude was not friendly.

Behind her stood two large men. They never directly threatened me. Their presence was enough. Everyone understands a pair of heavies like that.

Instinctively I glanced back to the bar, but we all knew that by the time I could attract attention, it would be too late. I had better cooperate.

 

XXVII

I felt as distrustful as when I had seen her earlier with the Dardanians. Close to, she was around fifty, with the air of an angry matriarch even if in fact she was not a mother. She was at least as old as Lepida, and much unhappier in her spirit.

She carried a powerful aura, full of confidence. She looked like someone who would matter-of-factly drown unwanted kittens. She might also drown me, if I happened to offend her and there was a handy barrel.

From time to time, people passed in the street, though nobody gave us a second glance. That could mean that once they identified Menendra, they were careful to look away.

“You!” Her voice was throaty. Either she made a habit of yelling at people or she had spent too much time amid the smoky oil of late-night lamps.

“Me?” I queried demurely, stalling.

“Yes, you! The magistrate's bint.” Faustus would smile at that. I gave her my
I am my own woman
stare. My attempt was as much use as trying to wash a dog that's rolled in dung without getting dirty yourself.

She came nearer. I would have stepped back but I was already against the bar counter. Menendra was a hard-faced ratchet who could not be called attractive, though she looked as if she had never been held back by that. She wore a dark green gown with a fierce belt, but she had let her body run to seed so her belly flopped over it. The necklace hanging heavily from her dry, creased neck must have cost plenty, though if she had money she did not waste it on skin lotions. She also wore large metal earrings of an exotic ethnic type. Taking those together with her accent, wherever she originated was a long way from Rome.

I never despised anyone for that.

“You want to speak to me?”

“Yes, I do, if you can find me a moment, dearie.” I could see this woman forcing herself to sound milder. She wanted something, or she wanted to make me do something; it would be bad policy for her to start out too rough. I was equally uncomfortable. Everything about her, including the lurking heavies, made me feel too dainty. The urge to simper and tuck in locks of hair felt strong, though I have never been a hair-twiddler, thank you, Juno.