I nodded. I was beginning to understand why Akamas and the other theater crew lived in such fear of bad luck.
“Does your list of murder weapons include the machine?” I asked.
Diotima looked up at the machine that loomed above us. “Thanks. I forgot that one.” She added another line.
I noticed that the prop knives and swords were sharp enough for battle, the cudgels were properly weighted to smash a skull, the axe propped in the corner was good enough to chop down a tree, or to chop down Agamemnon in his bath.
I queried Kiron about the lethal array. “Why don’t you blunt them?”
He looked at me as if I were insane. “Every man in the audience is a serving soldier or a veteran.”
“Yes, of course. All citizens are. So?”
“So to any man who’s ever stood in the line, a blunt sword will look like a blunt sword. They know what a sharp sword looks like in the hand of a man who’s coming at them. They’ve seen it often enough.”
“Oh. I see what you mean.”
“If we send the actors on stage with swords and spears too blunt to hurt a fly, the audience couldn’t miss it. They’d complain later. Or they’d boo the actor, which would be even worse.” The stage manager threw his hands in the air. “You have no idea what lengths we go to, to get these details right.”
“Even in the plays set long ago?” Diotima asked.
“Especially in the plays set long ago. If we get something wrong in those, every man, woman, and child will be backstage to tell us we got it wrong. Historical accuracy is very important.”
“Doesn’t anything ever go wrong, with all this stuff lying about?”
Kiron and Akamas both laughed.
“You better believe it. There was one time we had a man in the air-he was playing Zeus-the takeoff was as bad as you could get and he slammed into the skene and the entire wall fell over.”
“What did you do?”
“Luckily we had Romanos with us that day. He played it for a comedy. He was on stage doing his lines about tragic death as the entire skene fell slowly forward, revealing us backstage crew and a man in the air swinging like a dying fish. Quick as lightning, Romanos grabbed someone’s walking stick from the audience, then he chased us around the stage, whacking us with the stick while he repeated lines from some comedy he once played. This was in Pella, in Macedon. Those barbarians wouldn’t know fine art if it hit them.” Kiron hawked and spat in the dust. “The Macedonians laughed until they fell off their seats, and then they paid us extra ’cause it was so funny.”
“Romanos saved us that day,” said Akamas.
“Romanos was a good actor, I’ll say that for him,” said Kiron. He sighed. “We’ll miss him. Who would murder a man like that? I can’t believe it was one of our own.”
“That’s what the evidence says,” Diotima pointed out. She was unsympathetic. “I’m sorry, Kiron, but it’s one of your colleagues who’s causing all the trouble.”
“I’ve said this before,” I told Kiron. “There are three possible victims: the man, the actor, and the character in the play. If Romanos the actor is the victim, then almost certainly his killer belongs to the theater.”
“You forgot another reason to kill Romanos,” said the stage manager.
I sighed. Everybody thinks they can be a detective.
“What reason?” I asked him.
“Creepy fans. Men who want to be best friends with the actors.”
“Does that happen?” Diotima asked.
The stage manager laughed. “Yes. Have you noticed how elegant actors are? Men get drawn to that. When I say these fans want to be best friends, I mean they want to be really close friends, if you get my meaning.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Mostly they’re older men, but not always. You can spot them straight away. They linger about and try to look like they belong, but you can tell they’re nervous as all Hades and when they get up the nerve to approach an actor-it’s always the protagonist-they hold some love offering.”
“Was there anyone like that yesterday?” I asked.
“Several.”
“Anyone in particular?” I asked.
“No.” Then Kiron thought again and said, “Wait, what about the strange kid?”
“What strange kid?” Diotima and I said simultaneously.
Kiron looked from one to the other of us. “There’s a kid hangs about the theater like a bad smell. Stares at everything like he’s never seen it before, even though I know he’s watching almost every day. There’s something weird about this guy. He’s kind of intense.”
“Does he go backstage?”
“Not since I caught him once and told him to bugger off.”
Creepy, intense, and at the scene of the crime. That sounded like a killer to me.
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” I complained.
“Was I supposed to?” He looked insulted. “That happened long ago. When I said he hung around here, I didn’t mean only recently.”
Diotima said, “I think I know who you mean. When we expelled the ghost, we saw someone in the audience who didn’t seem to quite belong.” Diotima described the man she’d spotted that day. “Was that him?”
“Yeah, that’s the kid,” the stage manager said.
It was the man Diotima had pointed out to Pythax and me. I remembered what he looked like. When the stage manager had said “kid,” what he’d meant was someone my own age. It made me wonder what the stage manager thought of me.
“Was he here today?” I asked. “Maybe we can catch him when he comes.”
“Well that’s a funny thing,” said Kiron. “I haven’t seen him since the murder.”
Diotima and I shared a glance.
I said to Kiron, “I think we might need to talk to him. Does this ‘kid’ have a name?”
“Yeah, I heard someone talk to him, once. What was it?” The stage manager scratched his head. “I dunno. I can’t remember.”
“Do you know anything about him?” Diotima asked.
“Well, his mother sells vegetables in the agora. Woman has a voice like the Furies on a bad day.”
“How do you know that?”
“She came here once, looking for her son. You should have heard what she had to say to the poor fellow. Apparently he was supposed to be moving boxes of vegetables instead of watching us work. Every man present could hear what she said, and it wasn’t pretty.” He paused. “Mind you, with her projection, if she’d been a man she could have had a career on stage.”
SCENE 26
Diotima and I went to the agora in search of a woman stall holder who had a voice like the Furies on a bad day.
Unfortunately, that description fit many of those who worked behind the stalls. Haggling with agora shoppers every day wasn’t the kind of job that led to gentle feelings. The fishwives were the worst. They used language that would make a soldier blush. I wondered why. Was it their husbands? Was it all that salt?
Next for rudeness after the fishwives came the farmwives. I supposed it was all the dirt.
There’s no official rule, but people who sold the same things tended to cluster in the same parts of the agora. I wasn’t quite sure how this arrangement had come about, but like so many things it was traditional and thus no one questioned it. One area in the northwest held all the bronzeware stalls. The smell of fish came from another in the southwest, close to the road that leads to Piraeus port town. The east side serviced the many people who passed by along the Panathenaic Way. That was where the sellers of fashionable cloth and the wine sellers and the people selling ready food set themselves. They made a small fortune at inflated prices. Toward the center, behind the fashionable vendors, were the unfashionable vegetables.
Patches of dark clouds had been threatening all day. Now there was a sudden clap of thunder and it poured down, as it had the night before Romanos died. Everyone ran for the cover of roofs and awnings. With all the stalls up there were plenty of sunshades, under which people squeezed.