Vita Brevis (24 page)

“No,” Ruso agreed. “Evidently we’ve cured them all.”

Metellus was to make discreet enquiries about what had happened during the dinner at Cossus’s house. Ruso took this to mean that he would pick out a vulnerable member of Cossus’s staff and then decide whether to use bribery or threats. Meanwhile, since Balbus’s body had showed no obvious sign of being poisoned (a fact Ruso found far less disappointing than did Metellus) Ruso had offered to see what else he could discover about the death. If Metellus had sensed his anxiety, he’d pretended not to.

The scene of last night’s tragedy took longer to find than he expected, because even when he thought he was in the right place, he recognized very little in daylight. All the shops that had been shuttered were now open with their wares spilling onto the pavement. Weaving his way around a few shoppers and a couple of heavily laden mules, he passed displays of cabbages and onions, cooking pots and wooden spoons, sandals and children’s toys, painted clay gods, and billowing festoons of fabric. One doorway seemed to offer nothing but strings of sausages.

Higher up, apartment windows and balconies stared at one another across the narrow street. He paused, wondering what the
people who lived in those rooms thought of Horatius Balbus. And whether it would have been possible to act upon those thoughts if they’d seen him passing along the street below.

Ruso walked all the way around the block and then back past the same displays again. He paused in front of the toys.

A voice said, “Boy or girl?”

He wondered if Mara would appreciate a wooden doll, then decided she would only chew it and give herself splinters or use it as a weapon. “She’s not old enough yet.”

“She soon will be.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Ruso said, looking ’round. “Is this the place where there was the disturbance last night?”

The man finished painting a smile on a jovial-looking wooden dog, and placed it on the display. “Disturbance here every bloody night,” he observed, rinsing the paintbrush before wiping it on a rag and upending it in a pot. “Drunks singing and fighting and pissing in the doorways. Traffic. Animals. Take your pick.”

Evidently the painting of smiles did not cheer the heart. “Someone was injured.”

“He’s not injured. He’s dead.” The man leaned out and called to his neighbor, “Oi! Someone here about last night!”

The strings of sausages parted to reveal a small wrinkled man with greasy hair. “Where is it, then?” he demanded, looking Ruso up and down.

“Where’s what?”

“Somebody’s supposed to bring back my door.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“They’ve been told twice already. You tell them I want it done tonight. I’m not going on some waiting list. I did old Balbus a favor, which is more than he ever did for me. You tell them I’m not having some cheap bodge. It’s got to fit.”

“I will,” Ruso promised. He had last seen the door propped against the garish paintwork of Balbus’s bedroom wall. “Does he own all of this block?”

“And the one across the street,” said the sausage man.

The toy seller said, “Not anymore.”

“Tonight,” the sausage man repeated. “I can’t be up another night guarding my stock.”

“I’ll tell them.” Now that he had a fixed point he scanned the
street again, getting his bearings. Balbus’s last steps in this world had taken him past that weaver’s workshop on the corner. A shoemaker’s bench now looked out across the pavement where the injured man had lain while Ruso shouted for light and made frantic and hopeless efforts to save him.

“Did you see what happened last night?” he asked.

“Hard not to, with no door.”

“Before that,” he said. “I’m trying to find out what happened to Horatius Balbus.”

The toy seller and the sausage man exchanged a glance. The sausage man ventured the opinion that their visitor wasn’t from around here.

“What happens around here?” Ruso asked.

The toy seller said, “around here, when the sun’s down, you bar the door and mind your own business.”

“There were people looking out of their windows,” Ruso told them. “Up there.” He pointed at the apartments above the shoemaker’s workshop. “And up there.” He indicated the balcony directly overhead. Many of the higher windows had no grilles or glass: Instead there were shutters that could be opened wide enough for someone to lean out and fling a missile.

“If you were here,” the sausage man pointed out, “then why ask?”

“I came later,” Ruso explained. “The staff want to know if there was anything more they could have done.”

“You mean the family want to know whether to have them flogged.”

Ruso shrugged. “You know how it is.” It was a statement that he had found to be both meaningless and useful. People rarely admitted that they didn’t know how it was.

“He got what was coming to him,” observed the sausage man. “That’s how it is. But you didn’t hear it from me.”

“Or me.” The toy seller wished him luck in a tone that suggested luck was in short supply around here.

The caretaker of the block was busy introducing a scantily clad young woman to a large jug of wine, and their brief conversation left Ruso none the wiser. Tramping up and down smelly stairs and corridors taught him three things: that nobody who was prepared to speak to him had seen anything at all, that nobody knew anyone
else who had seen anything, and that a surprising number of apartments were occupied not by people but by angry dogs who, fortunately, did not know how to open the door.

The shoemaker—another potential witness who had seen nothing—agreed that one of his boys had indeed washed the pavement this morning. “And every morning,” he added. “You’re not from the street cleaning people, are you?”

Ruso assured him he was not. The boy in question was fetched. He pointed to the sharp edge of the curb where he had washed away blood.

“Right on the edge?”

“There,” the boy said, pointing again. Asked if he had cleared away any sort of unexpected stone or heavy object, he looked blank and then scuttled back into the safety of the shop.

Ruso surveyed the big flat cobbles that had been fitted together to make up the surface of the street. There was nothing obvious to trip over. He waited until there was no one coming and said “Excuse me” to the shoemaker before lying down where the boy had indicated. The stone was warm and smooth against the skin of his temple.

“You all right, mate?” demanded a voice from behind the counter.

“Oi!” called the toy seller. “You can’t lie there!”

“What about my door?”

Somewhere behind him, a small child announced to her mother that the man had had too much wine.

Ruso lifted his head from the edge of the curb. Then he turned and lay at a different angle, still facing the same way with the side of his head on the curb, and a couple of old cabbage leaves and a squashed cockroach a few inches from his nose.

If Balbus had hit his head on the curb, he had fallen at a very unlucky angle. But in the absence of any sign that he tried to save himself, perhaps the blow had come before he fell, not after. A bald head would have made a clear target in torchlight. The two men with him might never have seen a missile flying toward them from the surrounding dark.

When he had gathered enough of a crowd he got up again, dusted off the worst of the grime, and surveyed his audience. There were two or three men who might be military veterans. A
stone was not a glamorous weapon, but any recruit who had survived basic training would know that in the right hands it could be both accurate and deadly.

“I’m the doctor from the Vicus Sabuci, outside the entrance to Trajan’s baths,” he told them. “I treated a man who fell here last night. I’m trying to find somebody who saw what happened.”

He was expecting the silence but with luck, behind the blank faces, the neighbors would not be as united as they appeared. His hope was that if there was something to tell, someone would contact him privately later in search of a reward. What he was not expecting was, “I know you.”

He spun ’round to see the man with the bad haircut who had baited him outside Sabella’s bar.

“He’s the one who started that trouble down at the amphitheater,” the man informed his neighbors. “Pushing women and kids out of the way to get to the front.”

Later, he would rationalize his denial. He had meant,
It wasn’t like that
.
I am not a man who would start trouble and push women and children.
But what came out was, “Not me.” And then it was too late to explain.

“He got that other doctor run out of Rome. Then he couldn’t save old Balbus. Now he’s looking for somebody to blame.”

“I didn’t—”

“He said he served in the Legions,” put in somebody else.

“It’s him all right,” insisted the man with the bad haircut.

“But I didn’t—”

“You didn’t serve in the Legions?”

“No, I meant—”

“Bloody veterans! Always picking fights.”

“Coming ’round here making trouble,” put in a voice behind him. “Time you learned some manners.”

They were closing in now, fists at the ready. The shoemaker was clutching a hammer. Another man was drawing something from the back of his belt.

He held his hands up in surrender. “I was just trying to find out what happened.”

To his relief a couple of women moved aside to let him escape.

As he forced himself to walk rather than run away, a voice called after him, “So what sort of a doctor are you, then?”

It was a good question.

He reached the main road and turned to look back. His accusers had dispersed into the long shadows of the street, making their way home to eat their meals, bar their doors, and mind their own business for another night. With luck, they would forget about him when the next victim came along. Nobody would remember as clearly as he would the exact moment when Gaius Petreius Ruso, former military surgeon, had decided he would rather be somebody else.

Passing the massive porch of Trajan’s baths, Ruso wanted to stride in across the polished marble and fling himself into the cold plunge. The shock would wash away all memories of the incident at the amphitheater, of Horatius Balbus and his wretched medicine, of the body in the barrel, and of an afternoon that had got worse as it went on. Unfortunately there was one last mission to complete.

The eerie wails of the women mourning for Balbus were audible from the street outside his house, and the air inside the entrance hall was still heavy with incense.

Beneath the heavy brows, Firmicus’s eyes were creased with fatigue. Reminded about the borrowed door, he observed that the man should be grateful the night watch hadn’t smashed it down.

“He said he needs it put back before dark.”

“You’d think they’d show some respect.”

“It’s in your master’s bedroom.”

Firmicus sighed and beckoned over a junior slave to fetch one of the carpenters. “Latro can show him where to take it. Tell him I said it’s urgent.”

When the slave was gone Ruso said, “How’s Horatia?”

“The lettuce hasn’t helped.”

Seeing Firmicus trying to stifle a yawn, Ruso found himself yawning in echo. “Sorry. I know this isn’t the moment, but I’d like to talk to you sometime about last night.”

“You’re one of the men Publius Accius is sending to help?” Firmicus sounded resigned rather than grateful. Before the steward could ask whether Accius had the permission of the family to interfere, Ruso added, “I need to talk to Latro as well.”

Firmicus massaged the inner corners of his eyes with the tips of his fingers. “Now is as good a time as any. The undertakers seem to know what they’re doing.” He led Ruso down a narrow service corridor. “You won’t get any sense out of Latro. I’ve been finding him things to do all day. He’s afraid he’ll be sent to the mines for not saving his master.” He pushed open a door. “I’d take you up to my office, but this is farther away from the racket. Those women’s throats must be raw. The things people do for money.”

The light from the barred window above their heads showed a jumble of furniture and a priapic satyr with a missing nose and one arm broken off. Firmicus said, “Shall I have Publius Accius called?”

“No, thanks. Who else is out there?”

“Who isn’t?” Firmicus shut the door and leaned back against it, gazing around the abandoned furniture. “I can remember my father buying some of this.”

“You were brought up here?”

“Pa was steward to the old master. Balbus kept most of us when he bought the property.”

“That must have been strange. Wasn’t he a slave here once himself?”

The steward’s drawn face eased into half-smile. “Pa used to send him to run errands. I was there when he got his freedom. I can see the look on his face now.”

“How did that happen?”

“Reward for catching one of the clerks dipping into the master’s money chest.” He looked up. “People said he was a hard bastard, and he was, but he wasn’t bad to work for. To be honest the old master let things go a bit. Wouldn’t make decisions, wouldn’t let anyone else do it, either. Balbus got the place for a fraction of what it was worth and turned everything around. We’ve done very—” He stopped. “Up till now, we’ve done very well. The gods alone
know what’ll happen after this. The cousin is the nearest male relative. He runs a butcher’s shop out in Fidenae. Hasn’t a clue about the business.”

“But won’t all the property go to Horatia?”

Firmicus sniffed. “She’ll have to learn fast if she’s going to manage it. There’s not much call for Greek poetry in the rented property business.” He folded his arms. “Between you and me, Doctor, right now I think I’m the only one who realizes how much of a disaster this is.”

“Could you manage the business for her?”

“I’d do my best, if the cousin agrees. I’m guessing he’ll want to hand her over to a husband and get rid of the responsibility. Which brings us to why you’re here, doesn’t it? Publius Accius wants us to tell you that the master was poisoned by Curtius Cossus.”

He hoped Accius had been more discreet outside the household. “Would Cossus have any reason to want him dead?”

“A lot of his competitors wanted him …” Firmicus paused, searching for the right word. “Under control.” Before Ruso could ask what that meant, he went on, “I keep going over what happened. Trying to work out what the boss was trying to tell us.”