Murder in Megara (13 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

Both Bacchus and Fortuna frowned on John.

Posing as a petty thief and talking loudly about his grudge against a man who dealt in iron shipments, he stopped at every tavern he could locate. But a sip of wine in this tavern, two sips in another, made him sleepy before he chanced upon anyone with anything useful to pass on. No farther forward, he carefully groped his way up the creaking staircase at his lodgings as dawn ushered in another day for the swarming residents of Lechaion.

It was afternoon before he rose, prepared to resume his search. Given it seemed likely those who might have information for sale would not emerge from their dark corners and squalid rooms until the day was further advanced, John spent a few hours sitting on the steps of a church watching passersby and catching fragments of conversation as the crowd ebbed to and fro along the dusty thoroughfare.

Occasionally he heard enough to distinguish the topic under discussion. By and large they represented the cosmopolitan nature of the port. There was a heavily bearded, wide-shouldered man with a rolling gait suggesting his profession was that of a sailor, whose shorter, blond companion recommended a certain house on the other side of the sacred building as one where a lonely stranger could find all the comforts of home.

A man with a broad Germanic accent strolled by, singing a war-like song, beating time with a large fist, pausing to glare at a woman who accosted him. However, John noted, they went off together after a short conversation.

Two wine merchants stood at the foot of the steps bewailing their losses, with dark references to a certain captain whose transport fees were ruining their business and furthermore was not reliable in his promises, no doubt because, as one remarked to the other, it's empty barrels that sound the loudest.

A pale, stooped fellow carrying two tablets hurried by, perhaps a clerk in one of the warehouses around the harbor. Occasionally a priest left or entered the building behind John, sparing no glance for the nondescriptly dressed lounger on their steps. A man breathing wine fumes advised John to trust no one but his own person and his horse if he had one, and if he had one he was a rich man indeed, before sprawling in the shadow of the building and falling asleep in the dirt.

The streets and forums of a great city presented an epic richer than Homer could, for anyone who cared to sit quietly and keep his ears open. Not surprisingly, however, on this day, in this part of Greece, Theophilus did not appear in the story.

The inebriate snored and shifted fitfully, as the descending sun gradually pulled the shadow away from him. John got to his feet, walked to the docks, and purchased a meal of hot peas. After that he began his quest again, seeking out taverns and inns he had not visited the night before.

“Looking for that swine Theophilus, if that's his real name,” he would announce in a loud voice on entering each establishment. “Owes me money. Ran off without paying. Him and his so-called iron shipments! Silk in them crates, I'll be bound. Anyone know him? There's a coin or two in the telling.”

In one place a little man who looked and smelled as if he'd just crawled out of a hole in the scabrous wall sidled up to John. “Theophilus? I seen the man. Scar on his cheek, like you said.”

John turned a hopeful look toward the fellow. “Heavy, black beard?”

“That's him!”

“Theophilus doesn't have a beard.”

The man's whiskery face twitched. “The light was bad.”

John reached for his blade. “Stop wasting my time.”

The man vanished as quickly as a rat caught in the sudden light of a lamp.

The scene recurred with variations more than once.

And so the afternoon wore away. Shortly after sunset, John decided to return to his room for a short rest. The landlord's agent dozed at his post, hardly stirring as John passed. The lamp at the bottom of the stairs had sputtered out and John started up gingerly, clutching the wobbly handrail as his heels threatened to slide backward on the weirdly tilted steps.

He wasn't prepared for the figure that came flying out of the dimness, shrieking and clawing at his garment. Knocked backward, he managed to twist around so he slammed into the wall rather than falling down the stairs.

The hands stopped clawing and clung instead. A miasma of cheap wine and cheaper perfume enveloped him. “Demons take these stairs!” the woman said in a hoarse voice. “I lost my balance, sir!”

John grasped a pair of bony shoulders and pushed her gently away. In the glimmer of illumination from the corridor above he made out an elderly face framed in red hair. The same woman he'd briefly seen lying in the street when he'd first arrived.

“Your name is Maritza?”

What he could see of her face in the shadows registered surprise. “You are a sharp one, aren't you? I heard you were looking for that bastard Theophilus. I have information for a price. He has a scar here—” She indicated its location.

“A black beard too?”

Maritza gave a cawing laugh. “Beard? I doubt that miserable worm is man enough to grow a beard.”

“Do you know where Theophilus lived?”

“Do I know where he lived? With me, sir. I'm his wife.”

***

The residence she claimed to have shared with John's stepfather was a room in a tenement situated behind a looming building whose strong odor penetrated every corner and identified its trade as that of a tannery.

“We were married last year, or was it the year before?” she said, lighting a lamp set on the floor beside a rusted brazier. “I forget. Of course, he will deny it. In any event, what do you know about the swine?”

“I thought you were going to give me information, not the other way round?”

“Well, my personal charms are somewhat faded and I had to say something to get you here, didn't I? He's deserted me and I want to find him. He took some jewelry of mine.”

John wondered if she were more interested in finding the man or her jewelry. “I see. But he hasn't deserted you, he—”

A flush of anger darkened her pallid face. “What do you mean? Do you know something I don't? Gone off with another woman is it, gave her my jewelry?”

“He has not deserted you or anyone else. He's dead.”

“So you say.”

“I do say. Believe me, Theophilus is dead. I saw his body myself.”

She went silent. The set of her mouth made it obvious she was more angry that the man she claimed was her husband had managed to escape her wrath. “Didn't happen to have my jewelry on him when you found him, did he?”

John shook his head.

“You weren't really looking for him then?”

“Only for anything I can find out about him.”

“Well, this is where he lived. That must be worth something.”

John gazed pointedly around the room. Two chairs, a bed, a couple of battered chests, a table cluttered with bottles and jars of cosmetics. Whatever schemes Theophilus had taken part in couldn't have been very profitable. Unless he'd spent all his money on jewelry. “In the circumstances, I'd be happy to buy anything he left behind.”

Maritza let loose a polyglot torrent of curses she must have learned from sailors. John recognized several that had traveled from Egypt where he had spent considerable time during his youthful career as a mercenary. “Bastard keeps on cheating me after he's dead. He left very little behind. There's a couple of odds and ends, but I'm keeping them to pay for what he stole off me. Oh, and a bit of parchment. He was always reading it and swore it would make his fortune but I can't read so it's no good to me.” She stopped. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Could it be that what you're really after?”

John half closed his own eyes. The smell from the tannery was making them water. “No. But it might be helpful to me, worth money to you. Let me see it.”

She rummaged in a chest and finally produced a grubby sheet of parchment. Reluctantly she placed it in John's hand and waited anxiously, as if she expected him to bolt off with it.

John carried it nearer to the lamp and read:

“My father on his deathbed told me in his youth he saw Corinth looted and razed at Alaric's command, and described deeds that should have been cloaked in merciful darkness seen on every street by the glare of burning buildings, and how he aided certain priests to flee from the bloody chaos, thereby learning they intended to place gold and silver sacred vessels, and such diverse holinesses as they had been able to rescue, into the care of she who wails her daughter, the unwilling bride, and thereafter make pact the burial place would remain secret until they could restore such glorious tributes to the church, and though he became separated from them by the grace of heaven he escaped capture, yet none with whom he fled returned, he believing they were caught and put to the sword or sold as slaves along with such inhabitants of Corinth as were not slaughtered, and although he had dug here and there in many places over the years after his return the sacred treasures remain hidden to this day, and he told me…”

It appeared to be nothing more than a page from a history, or considering the rather poor quality of the penmanship a copy of such a page. Holding it closer to the light, he could discern traces of the erased writing over which the account of the sacking of Corinth had been penned.

“I thought it was nothing but nonsense, that the fool was fooling himself,” Maritza said. “But perhaps I was wrong. If you are willing to buy, it is valuable.”

John couldn't make out the words beneath the historical account but he could easily read the greed written on Maritza's face.

He showed her a handful of coins, of a denomination she rarely glimpsed. “This scrap is worth something to me, along with everything you know about what Theophilus was doing before he left.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

Everything Maritza knew about Theophilus' activities before his disappearance turned out to amount to nothing. Or so she insisted. Even the emperor himself, pleading from a gold nomisma, could not jar any memories loose.

“'Man's work' is all he ever told me. We kept our noses out of each other's business.”

“You must have known he was a thief,” John insisted.

“I do now,” was her sharp reply.

John had put the gold coin back in his pouch and left, telling her the emperor would be happy to see her again if she suddenly recalled anything. He wasn't surprised Theophilus had kept her in the dark about his schemes. Her sort might easily have betrayed him to the authorities for less than John had paid her already.

Walking back to his lodgings he tried not to think about his mother being married to a man who would marry the woman he had just interviewed.

Although Maritza had told him very little, he hoped the scrap of parchment would have something to say to him—or rather the faint writing he could see beneath the historical note would. The message about the iron shipment had been hidden under words engraved in the tablet's wax. Perhaps Theophilus had regularly employed such concealment.

John passed through light spilling from the door of a tavern. He had decided against further investigations tonight. Word about the man looking for Theophilus had obviously spread, as evidenced by Maritza's approaching him.

This time John approached the dim stairway at his lodgings with caution. He didn't want to fall prey to a real attack. As always the steps creaked loudly enough to drown out any sound made by someone lying in wait in the shadows above. He arrived at the upper hallway unscathed and pushed open the warped door to his room, which, as with most of the doors in the place, hung partly ajar in its crooked frame.

The man seated on John's bed gestured for him to come in with a wave of the long-bladed knife in his hand. “Please shut the door quietly behind you. We don't want to disturb the other guests, do we?”

“You're the fellow on the church steps who told me to trust no one except myself and my horse,” John said.

“I'm glad you remembered me. I forgot to add one should also trust a man with a drawn blade.”

“You were not so intoxicated or sleepy as you appeared, it seems.”

“No one pays much attention to public drunkards.”

The man was right, John thought ruefully. Now he noticed that aside from apparently being nothing more than a pathetic fellow reeling about in a haze of wine fumes, the speaker was a big, solidly built man in early middle age, with close cropped hair and enough scars showing on his face and the backs of his hands to indicate an intimate knowledge of the weapon he displayed.

“I've been keeping an eye on you,” the man went on. “You claim to know Theophilus, which I wouldn't have believed except that I saw you leaving Maritza's room.”

But he had not, seemingly, seen her going into John's lodgings or John and her leaving.

“Do you know where the bastard is?”

“You don't think I believe your story, do you? You're no petty thief. I don't know what you are, or who you are, but a simple thief? No.”

“Why don't you try asking who I am?”

“Because you won't tell me the truth, any more than I would tell who I am.”

John was still standing in front of the closed door. Could he yank it open and escape downstairs before the man with the knife could leap off the bed? Could he get his own weapon out in time to defend himself?

The long blade waggled at him. “Away from the door, friend. Have a seat.”

John lowered himself onto the indicated stool.

The blade pointed at him from the bed, not much more than an arms-breadth away. “Good. Now we are face to face. Let's just call ourselves businessmen.”

“And our business is…what?”

“According to you, it is iron.”

“That's right. Theophilus hasn't paid me for the assistance I gave him with his last shipment.” John repeated what he had been proclaiming in various taverns. “But then you said you didn't believe I was a petty thief, so why would you believe I am telling the truth?”

“I don't believe you're a petty thief, but I might entertain the idea that you are involved in the iron trade, and as far as the matter of Theophilus cheating you—well, I would take that as a given. Which shipment was it?”

John related the details so far as he knew them, watching the other's face. “Theophilus cheated you too, didn't he? Being cheated is the price of working with him!”

The blade plunged into John's bedding and ripped across it. Cloth tore with a high thin noise. “Wait until I find the swine! I've been waiting for him to get back for over a week. If he's taken flight with my share I'll be joining you in your search with the intention of slipping sharp metal, and not necessarily iron, between his ribs.”

“I could use a man who enjoys using a knife,” John said. “As for this iron…I'm not so much interested in the money as the principle. We businessmen need to maintain certain standards. What I want is to see the bastard brought to justice. If you can take care of that, you can have whatever money you can carve out of him, and I'll throw in something for good measure.”

“You'll admit to being more than a thief? But what of it? You don't know where the swine went to any more than I do.”

“I have contacts in many fields of commerce, only I'm not sure who to ask. These are busy men, you understand. They don't like being disturbed over nothing. So one of the things I want to know is what else was Theophilus involved in, besides this iron business?”

The man on the bed studied his knife and smiled faintly, as if he were imagining what it would look like in Theophilus' throat. “Oh, he was a very busy man. Anything you could smuggle, he smuggled. Iron, silks, counterfeit coins, forged religious relics.”

“And you assisted him?”

“I'm not saying any more.”

“Good, because I don't work with men with loose lips. I will make further inquiries. Come back in a few days.”

When the stranger had gone, John sat on the edge of the bed and ran his finger along the rent in the fabric. Mithra! He'd just more or less arranged to have his own stepfather killed as far as his visitor was concerned.

Did it matter that his stepfather was already dead?