The Ides of April (5 page)

He took the corpse. I promised Nepos I would go to the funeral. It’s a good time to claim fees, before the heirs disperse.

I finished up much later in the day than I had expected when I set out earlier to visit the aediles. But that is common in the work I do. Dusk was falling and I needed food, so I went to see my family; they would ply me with supper, in a real home full of warmth, light, comfort and lively conversation. It would improve my mood. I could consult about Salvidia too – not that anyone was able to add any useful thoughts, it turned out. We all agreed I had made the only possible enquiries. If that produced nothing, there must be nothing to find.

W
hen I rolled up back at my own building, it was seriously late. Much of Rome was sleeping. Those awake were sick, making love, committing suicide or burglarising. I would leave them to it.

We had a routine. After dark, moneyed families send home their visiting daughters by carrying chair, with burly slaves and blazing torches. I went along with that. The lurching made me queasy but accepting an escort kept the peace at home. Once the chair reached Fountain Court, we were in my territory and I made the rules. The bearers knew to drop me by the kitchenware potter’s. His lock-up shop was diagonally opposite the entrance to my building and he left a flickery taper to show his display. One night the taper would burn down the premises, cindering his lopsided stacks of grape-drainers and grit-bottomed mortars, but in the meantime it gave one faint point of light. I hopped out and stood in silence, listening and making sure that no prowler was likely to jump me.

At the corner, before they left the alley, the bearers always looked back; if I signalled all clear, they would go on their way. If anything in the street felt wrong, I recalled them. I never took chances. This was Rome. Half the people who are mugged at midnight are attacked on their own doorstep.

You may think the bearers could have seen me all the way indoors. Oh yes − and tell every Aventine villain which doorway was mine? A lone female, finely dressed on this occasion, coming back exhausted and a little tipsy . . . I was ready for bed. I didn’t want to have to stick a carving knife in some thief or rapist.

Own up, Albia
: all right, I could have coped with that. I just couldn’t face having to sit until dawn in some cold interview room at the vigiles station house, being driven mad by a barely literate bonehead trying to spell ‘self-defence’. Rufinianus, no doubt. The man was straight, but indisputably a halfwit.

Yes, I had once stabbed an intruder and stupidly reported it.

Yes, after lingering a little, he died.

No, I do not regret it.

The Eagle Building, Fountain Court. Everyone still called it the old laundry, though it had not been a wash house for years and nobody knew what had become of the proprietor. Some would have retired on the profits, but it was rumoured ours had drunk them.

I gazed up at the hulking apartment block, half unoccupied as usual these days, though barely a crack of light showed, even from parts that I knew were lived in. Tenants who had work would be up at first light for their back-breaking labours; skivers and the otherwise destitute could not afford lamp oil. Six storeys of ramshackle misery loomed over me, therefore, like a hideous black fortress where prisoners-of-war were being tortured all night. Maybe it was a trick of the darkness, but the whole lump sometimes seemed to lean over the alley as if on the verge of crumpling. It was the kind of building where solitary people died, then their bodies lay undiscovered for weeks. If someone was not seen for a while, we just assumed they were hiding from an estranged spouse or from the authorities. What was one bad smell among so many?

A typically rancid slum landlord had owned this place for many years, until he was bought out by people with consciences. Well-intentioned plans to renovate had come to nothing, defeated by structural failings that were discovered to go right down into the foundations, such as the foundations were. The new owner employed a builder; the builder summoned an architect; the architect brought an engineer; the engineer said stuff it, keep the fee, because even with danger-money he wouldn’t touch this place.

So far, the Eagle Building was still there, just about holding itself up. If any tenant had a bad cough, they were asked to go and stay with friends in case reverberation dislodged a crucial structural element.

I lived in the building rent-free. My nostalgia-prone father saw this ghastly building as the home of his carefree youth. My unusual mother humoured him. So it was my crazy family who had bought the lease.

Originally, they had benevolent dreams of filling the apartments with deserving tenants who would be grateful; this crackpot idealism foundered when the first layabouts ‘forgot’ to pay their rent and used the stairs as a lavatory. Now the intention was to demolish the teetering wreck, then sell the empty plot to a millionaire senator, duping him with claims it had potential for a private home. It would happen. An ambitious general from the provinces would be bamboozled by smooth talk of how secluded the Aventine was, a little-known refuge from the city bustle, a historic Roman district where this prime land was ripe for development at a reasonable cost, a rarely available opportunity to build a
custom-designed town house . . .

Don’t think we had smoke in our eyes with this plan. We had someone lined up. His name was Trajanus.

Yes, you may have heard of him, and yes, nowadays he does possess a discreet private mansion on the Aventine. My father may look like a barking-mad fantasist, but he comes from a brazen line of hucksters who can sell nuts to people who own their own almond orchards. My grandfather, for example, was a rich auctioneer which − allowing the customary discretion when listing his income for taxation purposes − meant he was as well off as anybody ever needs to be. After he died we all benefited, even me.

Available cash did not help the Eagle Building. Investment would have been wasted on it. A flank wall was shifting and the dirt grew blacker annually. It was no longer safe to use the balcony outside my upstairs office, even though that was the only good feature of the rooms I had there. I ought to move, but lived here because I was used to it. The hideaway at the top had always been an informer’s office, so would-be clients had heard of it and could find it. Once they staggered up six flights of stairs, even the ones who thought they were coming to see my father gave in and settled for me.

Hidden away –
much
lower down, believe me – I had my own apartment, a refuge most people never knew existed. It was where I had lived for the three happy years of my marriage. I stayed there alone afterwards because although life went on, I never thought that fate would favour me a second time. I stopped there with my memories. This was all I had. Happiness had been and gone.

My husband was killed in an accident. I was already an informer by then, earning my own living as a gesture of independence, even though Grandfather’s legacy had left my family comfortably off. I was only twenty when I was widowed. The family offered me security back at home; I refused the offer gently. I was rooted here. Before I was adopted, my childhood had been harsh. It mattered that during my short marriage I had made a good life for myself. I had lived alone for eight years now, and I coped well enough.

Many people would settle for an easy time. I continued to work because finding solutions to problems had a logical appeal. I could, sometimes, direct other people towards peace of mind. You need goals, when you have already had all your joy and expect destiny to grant nothing further.

I must be more tired than I had realised. It was making me maudlin.

Time to move. I knew how to melt into shadows, and there were plenty of those. Luckily nobody here put out street lanterns, so any prowlers would have to look very hard to see me.

I crossed the road. From experience, I moved cautiously. In Fountain Court at night, I generally found my way by smell. Even with practice, I could end up stepping into something in my gold sandals. Perhaps putting bare toes against something that was still moving, even though it was half dead . . .

The building had a crumbling fire porch, attached to a portico that ran along the street. Inside the porch an iron grille had been added a few years back. I was not surprised to find Rodan had stupidly left it unlocked.

Either side of the vestibule were a couple of rooms that guarded old stone stairs which pretty well held up the block. Little more than cubbyholes, in one room we stored brooms and buckets and in the other my father had installed a porter-cum-bouncer who was supposed to scrutinise visitors while using the brooms and buckets. As usual, someone he felt sorry for had pleaded for work. Rodan. Not one of Father’s best appointments − but he was hopeless at selecting staff and it was by no means his worst.

One dim lamp stood on the floor outside the nook where Rodan was allowed to live. I think it had once been where the laundress hid from angry women whose saffron yellow tunics had been accidentally dyed streaky green; there she swigged from her flagon to keep back the grim reality of life. Even now, occasionally some vague customer turned up and asked Rodan about a sheet they had left for washing five years ago.

‘Not so fast!’

‘Oh bloody hell, Rodan!’ I had been stopped by my own concierge. He popped out of his cubicle and shoved me backwards out of the porch. Pointless to hope he was as efficient as this when strangers came. He was large, but looked sleepy and stupefied. ‘What are you doing up in the middle of the night, you idiot?’

Rodan was an ex-gladiator. He couldn’t frighten a housefly. He must be the oldest ex-gladiator in the world. Normally even those who gain their freedom are so worn out by the arena they don’t survive long in retirement, but if he kept eating his lentils Rodan was going to reach ninety. He did have a hideously broken nose, but he’d got that from a tenant who hit him in the face with a mallet. The truth was he had lasted precisely because he had never sustained any injuries professionally. As a gladiator he was so useless, the trainer he worked for would not put him into fights. For most of his life, Rodan had just ambled about the Aventine, acting as a bodyguard and rent collector. Now he was dwindling into natural senility, too bleary-eyed to see when he was barring the woman who handed over his wages. Father should do it, but he loathed having to deal directly with Rodan.

‘Oh it’s you,’ he muttered. The furious way I kicked his ankle when he tried to shoulder me out of the porch should have told him that. ‘It’s been a right night of it. Some fellow came to see you.’

‘One visitor? You call that a night?’

‘I was having my dinner,’ Rodan complained pathetically. ‘I had to take him all the way up to the office, and then bring him down again. My chitterlings got properly cold but after all that, he wouldn’t even tip me for my trouble.’

‘Who was he, a client? Works late and can’t come in office hours? I can wait in tomorrow for him; I hope you said so. What is he called?’

Rodan sniffed. Not hard enough. He wiped his nose on his arm. ‘He never told me.’

Dear gods. This was why in family tradition Rodan was a creature to despise. How simple is it to enquire, ‘who shall I say visited?’ Especially after several years of me kindly explaining how to do it? He didn’t even have to write down names. Rodan could not write.

A thought struck. Could this be the archivist from the aediles’ office? If so, he was really keen. Almost too keen, a cynic might say. I described Andronicus. ‘Friendly fellow. Bright-eyed and gingery.’ Rodan gave me his vague look. ‘Wore a white tunic with blue braid?’

Sometimes I wondered if he was irritating on purpose. ‘He might have done.’

I said if the man came back, Rodan was to bring him straight up to the office and be nice to him. ‘If I am not there, make a proper appointment.’ I would be there. I would hang around on purpose, in case this was the archivist.

The idiot doorman finally owned up that the visitor had promised to return tomorrow. This made me so cheerful I made no attempt to kick him again as I said goodnight.

Rodan may never have had his brain pulped in the arena, but he was born addled. I was pretty sure he had never noticed my living arrangements. If so, that was good, because he could not reveal them to anybody else.

I lived on the second floor. I had a front door. It was blocked by dusty flower troughs, with the plants dying as though the last tenant had done a moonlit flit. It was feasible to climb over the troughs, but I rarely went in or out that way.

Instead, I walked up only one flight, turning out of the sight of Rodan or anybody else in the entrance. They would hear me go into an apartment that was occupied by a North African family, immigrants from Mauretania. Well, most of the family. The mother lived there, with increasing numbers of little ragged children, who came in a variety of skin colours. None of them could speak a word of our language, which saved me ever having to ask after their father.

They had four rooms, arranged along a corridor, but they only lived in three; using my prerogative as the landlord’s daughter, I myself used the last room. I even kept a couch and other things there. But its main purpose was to give me access out onto a decrepit wooden walkway that had been built as a fire escape. Back when this place was a laundry, the lowest steps descended to a cluttered drying area at ground level; now that was a derelict courtyard with access to both the street and a back lane. Anyone who ever followed me into the Africans’ apartment would find my room empty and assume I had gone out and escaped downstairs.

It may sound as if I was obsessed with fears of being followed home. That was the legacy of the intruder I stabbed. Home invasion leaves permanent damage. You never really recover from it.

Like most Roman tenements, the Eagle Building had minimal safety provisions. Apart from the first level which had been constructed more robustly, the fire-escape stairs to upper floors had rotted and not been replaced. In a fire, everyone upstairs would be trapped. But the old walkway gave me more than my personal flight route. If I popped along it a short distance, an old screen leaned against the wall. Secreted behind it were steep, narrow steps. They led inside, up to my real home.