Vita Brevis (7 page)

“I expect absolute loyalty and discretion.”

“I do my best for my patients,” Ruso assured him, suspecting it was wise to define the difference between
absolute loyalty
and
utter servitude
, “and I don’t discuss what I know about them with anyone else.”

“Not even Publius Accius?”

Ruso tried to imagine a situation in which Accius might be interested in other people’s fevers and fractures and bunions. Then it occurred to him that the state of Balbus’s health would be of enormous interest to Accius if he succeeded in marrying Horatia. Presumably she would inherit all this wealth when her father died. “Not even Publius Accius.”

“Good. You can fill in until Kleitos gets back. I’ll see to it that my people look after you and your wife and daughter.”

Ruso’s “Thank you, sir,” was heartfelt. For however brief a period, he had got Tilla out of that crumbling, verminous tenement.

“But if you let me down, believe me—I will find out.”

Ruso did not doubt it.

Balbus was reaching under the folds of the toga. “To business.” He held out a square green bottle with a dribble of dark liquid in the bottom. “I’ve run out of this.”

The glass was warm to the touch. There was no label. Ruso twisted out the stopper and sniffed. He could detect several kinds of foulness but could only identify poppy. He held the bottle upside down so the liquid trickled down toward his waiting finger. It tasted bitter and sickly at the same time, and he longed to spit it
out and rinse his mouth under one of the streams of the fountain. “What is it?”

Instead of answering, Balbus raised a hand to gesture around himself. “All that you see here,” he announced, “is the fruit of one generation. My father was a slave, my mother was a slave, and I was born here as another man’s property.” He indicated the purple stripe on his toga. “Now I’m master in the house I served in, I’m a priest in the cult of Augustus, and young Accius isn’t the only eligible suitor with designs on my daughter.”

So Balbus was a freedman. That explained the determination to swelter under the hard-earned toga even at home on a sunny morning. Ruso made the expected murmur of admiration and wondered if Accius knew he had competition for the hand of the dimpled Horatia.

“I have forty-three domestic slaves,” Balbus continued, “and fourteen apartment blocks spread across the city with another three hundred or so slaves and freedmen working in the business. And it’s no secret how I did it.”

As he paused for effect, Ruso guessed that the next words were unlikely to be
fraud
or
extortion
or
befriending rich people with not long to live
.

“Hard work.”

“Very impressive,” Ruso agreed.

“And providing what people need,” added Balbus. “The property business is all about demand and supply.”

Ruso, realizing he was expected to comment, said, “Ah.”

“You’ll see it yourself if you stay long enough. Every year, thousands of slaves freed and thousands of outsiders coming to Rome, expecting to walk under showers of gold. Like you did, didn’t you?”

Ruso cleared his throat, hoping this was a rhetorical question.

“And when they don’t,” Balbus continued, “do they go home? No. They stay here, cluttering up the streets, looking for somewhere to live. And that’s where I come in. I know what they say about some of my properties, and I wouldn’t like to live in them either, but answer me this. Where else are those people going to go?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“No. Nobody does. Not a lot of landlords are prepared to put up with what I put up with, especially for what my tenants are paying. And are they grateful? Of course not. You give most of
those complainers somewhere decent and it’ll be a midden within a week.”

Perhaps seeing Ruso glance at the glittering fountain, Balbus continued. “Hard work, Doctor. Hard work. I’ve scrubbed floors and carried loads and tied scaffolding. You do whatever it takes.”

“Yes.”

“And now you’re wondering what this has got to do with poisons.”

“Yes.”

Balbus shifted his weight on the bench. “I don’t know what it’s like out in the provinces,” he said, “but here, there are men who don’t like to see another man succeed. Men who think—wrongly—that I’m standing in their path.” He paused, watching the bodyguard pacing the perimeter of the courtyard, half-hidden by rose bushes and trailing vines. “Latro is good. Very good. But he has his limits.”

Wondering suddenly if the fountain—which worked much better than Accius’s—was there to protect Balbus from eavesdroppers, Ruso turned the bottle on its side. “This is a theriac?”

Instead of answering, Balbus said, “A lot of people, Doctor, think the secret of success is getting rid of your enemies. They’re wrong. The secret”—he raised a callused forefinger to emphasise his point—“is being one step ahead of them.”

“Do you have a taster?”

“I can hardly take a taster out to dinner with me tomorrow. It’s an insult to my host. Besides, they’re no use against a slow-acting poison.”

The bottle glinted in the sunlight. Ruso said, “Does this have a name?”

“Not one that I know.”

“I’ll check Kleitos’s records, sir,” he said, hoping some existed. A sole practitioner who saw the same patients week in, week out would work very differently from a legionary medic who was used to sharing information with a team. Kleitos probably had most of his patient records stored in his memory, and he had seen no sign of any hand-over notes. “You may have to wait until he gets back, though.”

“I need my daily medicine, Doctor.”

Ruso swallowed. He certainly wasn’t about to start trying to mix up theriac himself. The universal antidote that had allegedly
prevented King Mithridates from poisoning himself—even when he had wanted to—contained at least forty ingredients, several of them highly toxic and some only required in the sort of quantity you could scrape up under a fingernail. The recipe developed by Nero’s doctor contained even more, including a large quantity of roasted and matured vipers’ flesh. He supposed the patient would build up slowly to a full dose.

At the other end of the scale were the cheaper mixtures sold to nervous travelers venturing away from home. Ruso had no idea which recipe Balbus had been taking. The names Kleitos had given him were of simple herb sellers. Ruso didn’t want to kill his new patient by accident before he found someone who could supply the correct mixture.

“So you can’t help me?” Balbus prompted.

“Sir, if Kleitos hasn’t left a record of the recipe, prescribing a different one could put you in just as much danger as the poison you’re trying to avoid.” Balbus responded with a cold stare that he had probably honed on tenants who were late with the rent. Ruso, who had spent years dealing with angry centurions, concentrated his gaze on the top of the man’s bald head. “If I can’t trace it,” he continued, “I don’t want to ask around and publicize the fact that you’ve run out.”

Only Balbus’s lips moved. “I was hoping you would be useful.”

“If I can’t find it, I can mix up something harmless that looks like it. That way you’ll be seen taking your regular protection until Kleitos comes back.”

Balbus’s expression softened very slightly. “And nobody will get any clever ideas.”

“Exactly, sir.”

“And you’ll keep this conversation to yourself.”

“I will, sir.”

Balbus shifted his position on the bench. “Deliver it to me in person at the building site on the Vicus Cuprius just before the tenth hour.”

Ruso agreed, wondering whether Balbus really did have dangerous rivals around every corner, or whether he made enemies by insinuating that his hosts were trying to poison his dinner. Maybe gangs of angry tenants were plotting against him. Maybe he just had a vivid imagination.

“Two things for you to remember,” Balbus added. “Don’t tell anyone else you don’t know much about poisons. And don’t ever speak to my daughter again without my permission.”

Firmicus appeared beside Ruso on the way out, eyebrows raised in query. “Everything all right, Doctor?”

“I’m delivering some medicine to your master just before the tenth hour at a building site on the Vicus Cuprius.”

The steward showed no surprise at this complicated arrangement, saying only, “Make sure you get there on time. Horatius Balbus is a man who means what he says.”

Ruso’s pleasure at seeing his wife in a decent home— albeit a sparsely furnished one—was tempered by the news that he had missed several potential patients and that his choices for a late lunch were

  I.
bread, kindly donated by the neighbor upstairs, or

 II.
bread and fried onion, or

III.
bread and raw onion, or

IV.
bread with oil

“Or just onion,” Tilla offered, putting the finishing touches to a pile of kindling under the grill. He went to shove Kleitos’s document box back beneath the workbench after a quick and fruitless search. It was half full of battered scrolls, fragments of parchment, and writing tablets. He suspected someone in a hurry had picked out all the important items and thrown the rest back in the box.

Tilla called through from the kitchen, “I could fry it if you like.”

“Onion soup?”

There were not enough sound onions for soup. There had been no time to buy anything else, and Tilla had very little money, because she had spent it all paying the porters.

He swatted at a fly before handing over a couple of sesterces without comment. She must already know she had been swindled, and the porters were long gone. So was the acquaintance of Accius’s doorman, who had recommended them to him in exchange for an undeserved tip.

Tilla slid the coins into her purse. “Will you watch Mara while I fetch something from the bar?”

“Can’t you take her with you? I’m working.”

She said, “It is only next door!”

“Exactly!”

“I will not be gone long.”

Ruso sighed. Ever since Mara had been weaned and the wet nurse had left for other duties, he and his wife had become the servants of a small and highly unreasonable mistress. It was ridiculous. Surely no man—certainly no former legionary officer—should have to participate in games of pass-the-baby like this? Tilla had been desperate for a child, but now that they had one, she did not seem anywhere near as desperate to look after her all the time, and she kept expecting him to help.

He weighed his purse in his palm. Most of it was copper, but presumably Balbus would pay him something for the theriac—genuine or otherwise—and Accius might be prepared to give him an advance now that he had work. It was clear from the emptiness of the apartment that Doctor Kleitos was expecting to be away for some time. “Tomorrow,” he called, “I’m going to find us a slave.”

Tilla paused in the doorway. “Sabella from the bar says if the debt collectors come, tell them the other doctor is gone away and everything here is ours, and if they don’t believe you, to send them to her. She will frighten them off. And we must do something about that barrel out there.”

He looked up from Mara’s attempts to sink both her teeth into a fistful of bread crust. “What debt collectors?”

Tilla flapped a hand across her face to get rid of a fly. “They might not come.”

Debt collectors. Ruso glanced around the half-empty living space with fresh understanding. The story about the sick father had
been a polite fiction. The family had taken everything of value that they could carry and fled. Yet even in the midst of disaster Kleitos had remembered the needs of his patients, and of a colleague who was out of work.
Be careful who you trust
was probably a warning not to borrow money from people who would turn nasty if you couldn’t pay them back. Best not to risk taking loans from strangers. If Accius didn’t come up with the cash to buy a slave, Ruso would have to sell his army kit after all.

“I’ll call you if she cries,” he said, because it was important to establish the proper order of domestic life.

When his wife had gone, he propped the baby up on her sheepskin and cushions in the corner of the surgery where she could reach up to play with the dangling bandages. Then he tore off a chunk of bread for himself and began to work his way methodically around the room, starting with the left wall. He had bought himself some time with Balbus by suggesting a substitute, but he needed to find that medicine, or else some note of its name in Kleitos’s records. The trouble was, while Kleitos had handed over his practice and his lodgings, there was no sign of any attempt to hand over any information about his patients.

The workbench creaked under his weight as he scrambled up to check the top shelf. The scatter of jars there held only dust and the shambolic corpses of spiders. Lower, the bowing of the shelves testified to a store of medicines far greater than the sparse collection of green glass bottles that now remained, not all of which were labeled.

A wail from the corner caused him to glance down. Two chubby feet were kicking from beneath a mound of white linen.

“Oh hell!” He leapt down, lifted off the tangle of bandages that should have been rolled and put away, and prized the end of one out of his daughter’s hand. “You weren’t supposed to pull them off the line,” he told her. He piled them on the operating table, the white now soiled with dirt from the floor. Mara’s chunk of bread had fallen on the floor and was filthy. He tossed it into the waste bucket and fetched her a fresh piece. That slave could not come soon enough.

Along the back of the bench, a perfect row of dust-free circles in diminishing sizes betrayed the absence of a set of bronze cupping vessels. Above and to one side was an empty hook exactly where
he would have stored his own leather apron to protect his clothes during surgery.

Eyeing a tattered broom propped against a half-empty sack of sawdust—both of them cumbersome, low value, and not worth taking—Ruso thought about the number of hasty and desperate decisions Kleitos’s family must have taken, and how much worse that same process would have been for his own ancestors.

Rome’s Great Fire had been a catastrophe, but for Ruso’s forebears it was a timely blessing. They never found out who had denounced them to Nero’s brutal enforcers. It could have been a business rival. It could have been the couple next door, taking malicious revenge for the family’s complaints about their noisy parties and drunken quarrels. It could have been a distant acquaintance, giving up a name that meant nothing to him in the hope of saving himself. The result had been the same.