Graveyard of the Hesperides (37 page)

I breathed in and let it out, a demonstration of staying steady. “Calm down. Unburden yourself and you may feel better. You have decided to cooperate, remember. So what happened next?”

“Thales had just finished stripping all the clothes off them. He stood up, looked around, and saw me. I couldn't believe his attitude. He treated the scene as if it was nothing extraordinary. He seemed to think I should have been expecting it. He told me he was waiting for navvies who were coming to dig the graves. I could help if I wanted to. I refused. So he said, ‘Bugger off home to bed then.' And I did.”

“So simple! Could happen any night in any bar … Who were those navvies?” demanded Macer.

“I don't know. A man was sending them.”

“What man?”

“Never said. I don't think Old Thales knew the diggers, but that man was sending them. Thales called it his contribution.”

“What for?”

“Thales never told me.”

“Didn't you ask?”

“Too risky to know. I didn't want to end up lying dead under the pergola myself.”

“Thales cannot have killed six people all alone. So, somebody else, someone you never saw, must have helped him?” I pondered. “Someone who arranged the bodies in a close line afterward, out of the way of the gravediggers—but the actual killers left the scene before you came? Then another person was sending diggers?”

“That sounds right.”

“You are quite sure you hadn't seen anybody in the street as you approached?”

“No. Most of the bars were dark then. I might have heard people indoors at the Brown Toad, but that never closes.”

“What happened to the pile of clothes?” Macer snorted. The vigiles have their preoccupations. In a way they are right; at the time those clothes would have been clues to the victims' identity. Still would be, if they existed.

Liberalis went white at this memory.

“Six very bloody tunics and a pregnant girl's bust-band!” Macer chuckled. “They must have been sopping with blood?”

“We washed them. In the public fountain. Hung them on the trellis to dry overnight.”

“You are joking me? Why not chuck them or destroy them?”

Liberalis confessed meekly: “The next morning, I was made to get rid of the evidence. Thales told me to go over to Agrippina's Granary. I took the clothes to various secondhand stalls there and sold them.”

“Jupiter! What did you do with the money?”

“I had to give it to Thales.”

“You sound a right little slave baby then! Did you always jump, whatever that bastard said to do?” No answer. “Is this all you know about the crime?”

“Yes.”

“Really? Didn't Thales explain to you what had gone down here?”

“No. I never asked. I did not want to know. I had nightmares for years, seeing those bodies. I still do.”

“And next time you came here,” I said, sounding hard, “all the bodies were gone? Was absolutely nothing ever said about them?”

Liberalis shook his head.

“Never?” asked Macer.

“Never. Thales never talked about it.” He paused. “I didn't even know they were put here. I assumed they would have been taken away and buried so they would never be connected with us. I would never have had work done … I was horrified when the workmen started finding bones.”

We all breathed.

“And what about the other barmaid? Rufia?” I asked.

“I never saw her again after that night.”

“She wasn't here when you walked in?”

“No.”

“She is still alive. Did you know that?”

“Not always.” He shook his head. “I found out from Thales' papers, after he died.” Seeing how traumatized he was, I guessed it was Liberalis who panicked when our workmen turned up skeletons, so he was the person who sent a message to warn Rufia. Detecting his hysteria, perhaps she thought she had best come back to supervise.

“What did Thales tell you about her disappearance?”

“Only what he said to everyone. ‘The bitch has gone.' He never explained it.” That did match what Nipius and Natalis had told me about Thales, right at the beginning of my searches.

“And you never questioned any of this?” Macer nagged at him, showing amazement. “You never told anybody what you had seen? I am puzzled, man. Why not? Why ever not?”

The answer was so tame it seemed quite truthful: “I never wanted to annoy Old Thales,” admitted Liberalis. “He was going to leave me the bar one day, but he could change his mind. I kept quiet so he would let me have the bar.”

“It came with a large sum of money?” I suggested.

“It came with some.”

“Profits from gambling?”

“Could have been. I was not privileged to know about the finances.” That had always been his story: he was a young man, forced to stay out of the business arrangements. He sat in a corner dreaming of the day it would all come to him—but had no real idea of anything.

It could not be true. No one hankering after a legacy is ever so vague about what it comprises. People make sure they find out.

“But you always knew there was cash? I am wondering, Julius Liberalis, whether your hopes of a fortune might in fact have lured you into murder?”

For the first time, the only time, he stood up for himself. “In that case,” Liberalis put to me, “if I murdered anyone, wouldn't it have been Thales?”

He had a point. I nodded in acknowledgment.

“I was surprised when the will was opened,” he maintained, looking innocent. “The amount of the money was all new to me. I only knew about the bar. It was the bar I had always yearned for; I dreamed of being a bar owner. That is all I ever wanted: the Garden of the Hesperides.”

 

LVIII

After Macer had asked if that was everything, he said Liberalis would be taken to make a statement. As he was an accessory after murder, he would be held in custody. Furious protests ensued, to which the officer calmly responded, “I don't believe I promised you a let-off. What witness heard me say that?”

“What about the ‘soft option?'”

“There's no soft option with the vigiles. A serious note about you will be sent up to the prefect. Only he can decide whether you go to court. If you're lucky, he'll let you out on remand—seeing as you are such a respectable property-owner and businessman!” sneered Macer.

I kept my eyes cast down, taking no part. I wanted Liberalis to be secured somewhere. There were plenty of stupid things he might do in the aftermath of breaking his ten-year-old silence. Now he had cracked, he was going to pieces rapidly.

I reckoned my one last hope of solving this was to let it be known around the neighborhood that he had been arrested. I would suggest he had told us more than he actually did. Imply further arrests were imminent. Unnerve any others involved in the crime.

Of course it never works. Every previous contact made sure they were invisible. Menendra never put in an appearance all day, nor her escorts, who were presumably lurking wherever she was. Perhaps they were trawling another area with their voluminous list of chickpeas, bulgar, meal flour, sesame and lentils.

The snack stall was now locked up. I could not further challenge Lepida over her story that Rufia had left town. But I received no word on my hoped-for meeting with the aged barmaid. That was never going to happen.

At the Brown Toad, two of the boy-girls were lounging outside, plucking their eyebrows and other, much more intimate places. As I winced and tried not to watch, they told me no one had seen Gran there that day. The staff had been stuck with leftovers for lunch—“Salad leaves!”—though they had been promised mutton broth tomorrow, as one of Prisca's many grandsons was doing the sacrifice at a wedding.

“Could that be
my
wedding? Is her grandson Costus? Costus who runs the victimarium?”

“No, it's his man, Erastus. He's got himself beaten up in a bar, as usual. We're lending him a face poultice so he'll look pretty.”

This was horrible. My cultrarius was blue with bruises, which had to be disrespectful to the gods, and these importuning transvestites would be eating my sheep, Snowy!

I went along to complain to Costus, but his place was shuttered and he was nowhere to be seen. A boy kicking a ball around outside said Costus had gone to have a tooth pulled; the hunks were in attendance in order to hold him down. I made sure not to look too closely; the lad's misshapen football appeared to be a blown-up sheep's bladder. No doubt part of another sacrifice.

*   *   *

In a desultory mood, I wandered back to the Hesperides. Tiberius and the men were frantically trying to make the water feature work. I sat and watched. First, no water appeared. A red-faced Sparsus conducted the traditional plumbing moves: he banged pipes loudly with a hammer. When the others cried “Steady on!” he threw down his tools and refused to do anything else.

Larcius and Tiberius went down on their knees, heads together, taking over like men with more experience, men about to do something much more technical. Tiberius hit the pipe.

“That's never going to shift it.”

“Shut it, Sparsus.”

“Ow!” My loved one had mis-aimed the hammer; he whacked his thumb. “Ow, ow!” As he recoiled, in bringing the hammer up he hit his forehead too.

Larcius took the tool; he struck an expert blow, at which water rushed out. “Jupiter, turn the stopcock, Serenus!” Water rapidly filled the feature channel. It was soon overflowing. “Adjust it, adjust it!
Other way, you idiot!
”

They turned off the torrent. All sat down, panting. There were grins, with the endearing mix of sheepishness and triumph that workmen acquire after narrowly changing failure into success. Sparsus applied a filthy rag to Tiberius' brow, where a large cut was now splashing blood. He was also sucking a blood blister on his battered thumb. I said, “Well done, all,” while going to his assistance. Now I would have a bridegroom who looked like a dying gladiator.

“We should have put in an isolation valve, chief.”

“The client's in jail. Let him sort that one out for himself, another day.”

“He'll call us back.”

“We'll be too busy to come.”

“Promise?”

“Absolute promise!” Tiberius lolled against me as I pressed on his cut forehead. “We'll clear up, hand him back his bloody bar—or lock up if he isn't here—and get out forever tonight.”

The others had finished their breather, so they jumped up and began floating little dishes down the canal. Most of them sank. I claimed I had always said it would happen. Serenus knocked Sparsus over, so he fell in the water, splashing everyone. We were all glad to be cooled down, because the afternoon had become stifling.

When they settled again, they began tidying up and removing rubbish. All their tools and usable materials were put on handbarrows to wheel off to the yard at the Aventine. Everything superfluous was taken from the site and dumped in the back lane. Transport was supposed to come along that evening to take it; it had been ordered and would possibly even turn up. They conducted endless builders' sweeping. Larcius arranged the beaten-up wooden furniture like a meticulous housewife. An oil lamp was placed at the exact center of each table. The struggling fig tree was carefully watered. The Oceanus mosaic had all its dust washed off so it ended up sparkling.

That was it. Tiberius and I saw the men off. We would see them tomorrow, all in our celebration clothes. “With big thirsts on!” We two walked slowly to the hired room to pack. Dromo, who yearned for familiar routines, was so eager to go home, he piled everything on his handcart and straightaway went off; we heard him moaning about the weight. Tiberius had reminded the boy that tomorrow he could stuff himself with cake made by the fabulous elite chef, Genius.

“Can he cook?”

“No.”

When he left, husband-to-be and I lay down on the appalling bed, intending to wait until the outdoor temperature cooled. Both of us were preoccupied, thinking too much about the lifelong enterprise on which we would embark tomorrow. With a marriage apiece behind us, and after a decade of waiting to risk a repeat, neither could afford this to go wrong. There was no need to talk about it. We were too subdued in any case.

We fell asleep. When we awoke, it was already evening. People were expecting us for dinner; by the time we could reach the Aventine, it would probably be over. None who knew us would be much surprised. Any investigation made us unreliable timekeepers; they had yet to hear how this one had run itself into the ground, maddeningly incomplete.

We left the room tidy, locked up, took back the key to the owner. We passed Menendra and a couple of her donkeys laden with grain sacks. They were delivering to the Four Limpets, outside which lolled a group of Macedonian prostitutes, bantering with a tambourine player in the absence of clients.

*   *   *

As we left the Ten Traders for the final time, we passed by the bar. In the course of that afternoon, it had somehow been made ready for business, so it was already open and operating.

Just as it had been when I started this account, the Garden of the Hesperides was a large but otherwise typical eating house on a busy street corner, with two marble counters, five pot-holes for food jars, three shelves of cracked beakers, an unreadable price list on a flaking wall and a faded picture of nude women unsuccessfully guarding an apple tree. This bar had waiters who were very slow to serve anyone and pretty girls who did all the work. A room upstairs was used for assignations; you could bring your own or hire the staff.

Little had changed. Only bodies had been dug up from the back garden and identified. Regulars would no doubt continue to harp on the old tragedy to strangers who might buy a round. I bet they still claimed one body put out there was a barmaid called Rufia.

We could not see whether the new landlord had been released by Macer and was inside, setting about his chosen role of becoming a local character. We did spot the gangster enforcer, Gallo. Both the waiters, Nipius and Natalis, reverently shook his hand as if he were a man of consequence. He accepted their greetings like a lord, passing through the gap in the counters as he made his way indoors. Perhaps he was intending to enjoy a drink in the courtyard, under the pergola beside the water feature, gazing at the lopsided sea-god mosaic. He would probably not give a thought to the murdered waitress who had once been buried where he sat, or her five long-dead companions.