Last Act in Palmyra (33 page)

‘Well, we've completed a natural circuit. Now we have to decide where to go next.' I believe somebody suggested Chremes might try Hades, though it was in a furtive undertone. ‘Wherever is chosen, none of you are bound to continue. If needs be, the group can break up and reform.' That was bad news for those of us who wanted to keep it together in order to identify the murderer. That blowfly would be early in the queue for terminating contracts and flitting away.

‘What about our money?' called one of the stagehands. I wondered if they had sniffed out a rumour that Chremes might have spent their season's earnings. They had said nothing to me when we discussed their grievances, but it would explain some of their anger. I knew they had been suspicious that I might be reporting back to the management, so they might well have kept their fears on this subject to themselves.

I noticed Davos fold his arms and gaze at Chremes sardonically. Without a blush Chremes announced, ‘I'm going to settle up now for what you've earned.' He was absurdly confident. Like Davos, I could smile over it. Chremes had diced with disaster, and been rescued in the nick of time by the maniac who killed his creditor. How many of us can hope for such luck? Now Chremes had the satisfied air of those who are constantly saved from peril by the Fates. It was a trait I had never been favoured with. But I knew these men existed. I knew they never learned from their mistakes because they never had to suffer for them. A few moments of panic were the worst effects Chremes would ever know. He would float through life, behaving as badly as possible and risking everyone else's happiness, yet never having to face responsibility.

Of course he could produce the money his workforce was owed; Heliodorus had bailed him out. And although Chremes ought to have paid the playwright back, he blatantly had no intention of remembering the debt now. He would have diddled the man himself, if he could have got away with it, so he would certainly rob the dead. My question about heirs, and Phrygia's easy answer that Heliodorus was assumed to have had none, took on a dry significance. Not knowing about her husband's debt, even Phrygia could not understand the full irony.

This was the moment when I looked at the manager hardest. However, Chremes had been cleared as a suspect pretty convincingly. He had alibis for both murders, and had been somewhere else the night Musa was attacked. Chremes had a serious motive for killing Heliodorus, but for all I knew so did half the group. It had taken a long time for me to unearth this debt of Chremes'; maybe there were other lurking maggots if I turned over the right cowpat.

As if by chance, I had seated myself at our manager's feet, on the tail of the same cart. This put me staring out at the assembly. I could see most of their faces – among which had to be the one I was looking for. I wondered whether the killer was gazing back, aware of my complete bafflement. I tried to look at each one as if I was thinking about some vital fact he was unaware I knew: Davos, almost too reliable by half (could anyone be
quite
so straight as Davos always seemed?); Philocrates, chin up so his profile showed best (could anyone be so totally self-obsessed?); Congrio, undernourished and unappealing (what twisted ideas might that thin, pale wraith be harbouring?); Tranio and Grumio, so clever, so sharp, each so secure in his mastery of their craft – a craft that relied on a devious mind, an attacking wit, and visual deceit.

The faces returning my gaze all looked more cheerful than I liked. If anyone had worries, they had not been posed by me.

*   *   *

‘The options,' stated Chremes importantly, ‘are, firstly, to go around the same circuit again, trading on our previous success.' There were a few jeers. ‘I reject this,' the manager agreed, ‘on the grounds that it poses no dramatic challenge –' This time some of us laughed outright. ‘Besides, one or two towns hold bad memories…' He subsided. Public reference to death was not in his style of speechmaking. ‘The next alternative is to move further afield in Syria –'

‘Are there good pickings?' I prompted in a not very quiet mutter.

‘Thanks, Falco! Yes, I think Syria still holds out a welcome for a reputable theatre group like ours. We still have a large repertoire which we have not properly explored –'

‘Falco's ghost play!' suggested a satirist. I had not been aware that my idea for writing a play of my own was so widely known about.

‘Jupiter forfend!' cried Chremes as raucous merriment erupted and I grinned gamely. My ghost play would be better than these bastards knew, but I was a professional writer now; I had learned to keep my smouldering genius quiet. ‘So where shall we take ourselves? The choices are various.'

His options had turned into choices, but the dilemma remained.

‘Do we want to complete the Decapolis towns? Or shall we travel north more quickly and tackle the sophisticated cities there? We won't want to go into the desert, but beyond Damascus there is a good route in a fairly civilised area, through Emesa, Epiphania, Beroia, and across to Antiochia. On the way we can certainly cover Damascus.'

‘Any drawbacks?' I queried.

‘Long distances, mainly.'

‘Longer than going to Canatha?' I pressed.

‘Very much so. Canatha would mean a detour back through Bostra –'

‘Though there would be a good road up to Damascus afterwards?' I had already been looking at itineraries myself. I never rely on anyone else to research a route.

‘Er, yes.' Chremes was feeling hard-pressed, a position he hated. ‘Do you particularly want us to go to Canatha, Falco?'

‘Taking the company or not is up to you. Myself, I've no option. I'd be happy to stay with you as your playwright but I have my own business in the Decapolis, a commission I want to clear up –'

I was trying to give the impression my private search for Sophrona was taking precedence over finding the murderer. I wanted the villain to think I was losing interest. I hoped to make him relax.

‘I dare say we can accommodate your wish to visit Canatha,' Chremes offered graciously. ‘A city which is off the beaten track may be ripe for some of our high-class performances –'

‘Oh, I reckon they are starved of culture!' I encouraged, not specifying whether I thought ‘culture' would be a product handed out by us.

‘We'll go where Falco says,' called one of the stagehands. ‘He's our lucky talisman.' Some of the others gave me nods and winks that proclaimed in a far from subtle manner that they wanted to keep me close enough to protect them. Not that I had done much on their behalf so far.

‘Show of hands then,' answered Chremes, as usual letting anybody other than himself decide. He loved the fine idea of democracy, like most men who couldn't organise an orgy with twenty bored gladiators in a women's bathhouse on a hot Tuesday night.

As the stagehands shuffled and glanced around them it seemed to me the killer must have detected the widespread conspiracy building up against him. But if he did, he uttered no protest. A further quick scan of our male suspects revealed nobody visibly cursing. No one seemed resentful that the chance to shed me, or to break up the troupe altogether, had just been deferred.

So to Canatha it was. The group would be staying together for two more Decapolis cities, Canatha, then Damascus. However, after Damascus – a major administrative centre, with plenty of other work on offer – group members might start drifting off.

Which meant that if I was to expose the killer, time was now running out.

XLVII

The temperature was definitely bothering all of us now. Travel by day, previously inadvisable, had become quite impossible. Travel in the dark was twice as tiring since we had to go more slowly while drivers constantly peered at the road, needing to concentrate. Our animals were restless. Fear of ambush was increasing as we re-entered Nabataea and ahead of us lay expanses of desert where the nomads were by our standards lawless and their livelihood openly depended on a centuries-old tradition of robbing passers-by. Only the fact that we were obviously not a caravan of rich merchants gave us any protection; it seemed to suffice, but we could never be off guard.

All the time the heat grew daily. It was relentless and inescapable – until night fell abruptly, bringing fierce cold as the warmth lifted like a curtain under open skies. Then, lit by a few flares, we had to set off on the road again, on journeys that seemed far longer, more uncomfortable and more tiresome than they would have been in daylight.

The climate was draining and dehydrating. We saw little of the country, and met hardly anyone to talk to; Musa told us the local tribes all migrated towards the mountains in summer. At roadside stops, our people stood about stamping their feet to get the blood running, miserably taking refreshments and talking in hushed voices. Millions of stars watched us, probably all wondering just what we were doing there. Then, by day, we collapsed in our tents, through which the baking heat soon breathed with suffocating strength, killing the sleep we needed so desperately. So we tossed and turned, groaned and quarrelled with each other, threatening to turn around, head for the coast and go home.

On the road it was difficult for me to continue reinterviewing people. The conditions were so unpleasant everyone stuck with their own camels or waggons. The strongest and those with the best eyesight were always needed for driving. The quarrelsome were always bickering with their friends too angrily to listen to me. None of the women were interested in handing out personal favours, so none of them developed the kind of jealousies that normally bring them running to confide in a handy informer. None of the men wanted to stop threatening to divorce their wives long enough to answer rational questions, especially if they thought the questions might be about the generous Ione. Nobody wanted to share food or precious water, so hitching a lift on another waggon was discouraged. At stops on the road everyone was too busy feeding themselves and their animals or swatting flies.

I did manage one useful conversation, just as we were heading into Bostra. Philocrates lost the pin from one wheel of his waggon. Nothing was broken, luckily; it had just loosened and dropped out. Davos, in the cart behind, saw it happen and shouted a warning before the whole wheel fell off. Davos seemed to spend his life averting disasters. A cynic might have suspected it was some kind of bluff, but I was in no mood for that kind of subtlety.

Philocrates managed to halt his smart equipage gently. He made no attempt to ask for help; he must have known how unpopular this would be after all the times he had refused assistance to the rest of us. Without a word, he jumped down, inspected the problem, cursed, and started to unload the cart. Nobody else was prepared to help him out, so I volunteered. The rest drew up on the road ahead, and waited while I helped with the repair.

Philocrates had a light, zippy two-wheeler – a real fast chaser's vehicle – with flashy spokes and metal felloes welded on to the rims. But whoever sold him this hot property had passed on a salvage job: one wheel did have a decent hub that was probably original, but the other had been cobbled together with a museum-piece arrangement of a linchpin on the axle.

‘Somebody saw you coming!' I commented. He made no reply.

I had expected Philocrates to be useless, but it turned out he could be a pretty handy technician if his alternative was to be abandoned on a lonely road in Nabataea. He was small but muscular, and certainly well exercised. We had to unhitch his mule, which had sensed trouble, then we improvised blocks to support the weight of the cart. Philocrates had to use some of his valuable water supply to cool down the axle-bush. Normally I would have peed on it, but not with a jeering audience.

I pushed against the good wheel while Philocrates straightened the loose one, then we hammered in the pin. The problem was to bang it in hard enough to stay there. One of the stagehands' children brought us a mallet just when we were pondering how to tackle it. The child handed the tool to me, probably under instructions, and waited to take it straight back to her father afterwards. I reckoned I would be the best hitter, but Philocrates grabbed the mallet from me and swung down on the pin himself. It was his cart, so I let him. He was the one who would be stuck with a broken axle and shattered wheel if the pin worked loose again. He did have a small tent-peg hammer of his own, though, so I took that and put in alternate blows.

‘Phew! We're a good team,' commented the actor when we stopped to take a breath and contemplate our work. I gave him a dirty look. ‘I reckon that should hold it. I can get a wheelwright to look at it at Bostra. Thanks,' he forced out. It was perfunctory, but no less valid for that.

‘I was brought up to pull my weight in the community!' If he knew this crack of mine was a hint, no flicker showed on his haughty, high-cheeked face.

We returned the mallet to the urchin. She scampered off, and I helped Philocrates reload his cart. He owned a lot of fancy stuff – presents from grateful women, no doubt. Next came the moment I had been waiting for all along: he had to rehitch the mule. This was exquisite. After having watched me chase my stupid ox that time, I felt he owed me the privilege of sitting at the roadside doing nothing while he stumbled around offering straw to his frisky beast. Like most mules, it applied all its high intelligence to leading the life of a bad character.

‘I'm glad of a chat,' I offered, as I squatted on a rock. It was not what Philocrates wanted to hear at that moment, but I was ready to have some fun. ‘It's only fair to warn you, you're chief suspect in the murder case.'

‘What?' Philocrates stopped stock-still in outrage. His mule saw its moment, snatched the straw and skipped away. ‘I never heard such rubbish –'

‘You've lost him,' I pointed out helpfully, nodding at his animal. ‘Obviously you ought to be given a chance to clear yourself.'