When I reached the part of the Clivus Suburanus where Aviola had lived, I looked around carefully from the shelter of a doorway, telling Dromo to stand close and not draw attention to himself. He knew what had happened to Camillus Justinus, so was prepared to follow orders temporarily. But the butterfly-brain would not keep still for long.
I carefully checked for gangsters, though identified none.
Everyone appeared to be going about their normal business. It was just a street. Elderly women muttering abuse after young men who had barged into them; young men staring at young women as if they had never seen anything female before; one girl and her mother brushed mud off their skirt hems where they had accidentally stepped in a gutter puddle. Overhead, someone invisible inside an apartment pulled a cross-street washing-line hand over hand as they hung wet clothes out. A clean tunic fell off into the same puddle, followed by a magnificently inventive torrent of screaming curses. A door slammed. A couple of pigeons lifted themselves laboriously from a sill, flew in a half-hearted circle and landed in fluffed lumps, to continue their midday drowsing.
A dopey-looking boy stood outside the leather shop, which was closed for lunch. A couple of feet away from him sat a very hairy black dog. It had fleas. I could tell from here, by the intent way it was scratching among its long matted fur. It was loose, so could have belonged to anyone or no one, but kept looking at the boy as if it half hoped for a titbit and half feared a kick.
‘Cosmus,’ said Dromo, catching the direction of my gaze.
‘Who is he?’
‘Their lamp boy yesterday. And Panther.’
‘His dog?’ Constans had told me that the boy went home to see his dog.
‘Right. You’re good at this,’ Dromo declared, mock-admiring. ‘Have you thought about making guessing-games your career?’
‘No. I’m too busy thinking, when shall I get around to beating you for cheek?’
The last thing I wanted today was careers advice.
Panther might be the beast I had heard barking when I called at Polycarpus’ apartment. His wife, Graecina, had said ‘the boy’ took the dog out for a walk, so at the time I assumed she meant their son. Cosmus must be about fourteen, quite a lot older than the child I had heard wailing when I visited. Graecina must have meant ‘boy’ in the other sense. As a freedman, Polycarpus was entitled to possess slaves. Mind you, someone who had been a slave himself ought to know how to buy better. It’s one thing for an adolescent son to loaf about the streets looking for trouble but a slave ought to be kept better occupied. This one looked impervious to training.
Graecina came down from their apartment. She spoke to Cosmus, though I could not hear what was said. He hunched up and stayed put by the leather shop, looking lethargic. Graecina waited a moment, then she walked to one of the other retail outlets. It was where Polycarpus had pulled open a shutter to produce Mucia’s chair for me yesterday.
The shutter was obviously not locked but now it refused to move freely. As best she could, Graecina hauled on it then said something, as if someone — Polycarpus presumably — was inside. It looked like a routine exchange between a wife and her husband. He might be continuing the process of cleaning up the seat cushion, and she might be calling him upstairs for lunch.
I was intending to exchange greetings as I went into the apartment. As I came closer, Graecina spoke again, more impatiently. Seeming on the clumsy side with physical mechanics, she failed to apply her weight properly so could not heave the heavy folding door any further open. I went forwards to help. Giving up, Graecina squeezed through anyway, muttering. It was a tight fit. She was a fleshy woman. She would have acquired bruises.
I reached the shutter; I was standing on the threshold when, within the dim interior, the steward’s wife let out a shriek.
31
The scream sounded more like surprise than anguish, but sometimes you recognise trouble. With a great struggle, I pressed myself through the narrow gap, following Graecina inside. Through the gloom, I saw why the shutter was so hard to open. Polycarpus was lying against it, in a partly bent position with his shoulders and upper body pressed against the inside of the wooden leaf, his weight jamming it.
I joined his wife as she knelt beside him. He was warm, though lifeless. Graecina was breathing fast, but she held herself together, a loyal wife and mother, refusing to give way to hysteria while there might be something necessary to do.
No chance. No pulse. No breath. No life left. I said nothing, but the wife knew too.
Together we lifted Polycarpus away from the shutter, so I could pull it open properly. We hauled him out and laid him on his back in the street. I checked again, but it was pointless. Light and air failed to revive him or alter my verdict.
I sent for a doctor anyway. A widow needs to be sure. Graecina provided an address and I told Dromo to go; I reckoned Cosmus would be unreliable.
Having brought back the cloak Graecina lent me the day before yesterday, I folded it and placed it beneath the steward’s head. It was too soon to cover over the body, not while his wife was still reluctant to accept he was dead.
Though the corpse was recognisably Polycarpus, with the same build and desert-dweller’s chin stubble, all the spry bonhomie had vanished. To me, it was no longer him.
Graecina and I sat side by side on the kerb; I held her hand. I had taken to her on first acquaintance and, unbeknown to her, we shared this hard experience. I too had once had my husband abruptly despatched, in the middle of what had seemed an ordinary, bright and sunny day. So, as the world went about its business unaware of her tragedy, I knew all too painfully what Graecina was going through.
She stayed silent. Some people immediately become stupefied. Others of us clench up and fall into deep thoughts, planning ahead, already readjusting because we need to be ready, we need to be strong.
She would be thinking about her children — how to tell them, how to console them, how then to provide for them, on her own, in whatever difficult future lay ahead. I had not had that worry, but on the other hand, when my husband died suddenly, he left me to a life alone. That’s hard, even if you call yourself tough. As far as I knew, her children were still young, and so Graecina would at least have someone to talk to, cry with, even snap at when everything became too difficult. The infants would grow up. They would grow up fairly well, I thought, from the little I had seen of her. She would have her family.
The hairy dog came over and licked Polycarpus gently. His manner was sad and respectful, as if he realised he was saying farewell. This is why I like dogs.
He sat down beside the body, a couple of feet from Graecina and me, sharing our vigil. Occasionally he had to scratch at a flea, but he did so unobtrusively. He seemed to understand our sadness, and wanted to be part of the scenario.
The dog’s behaviour contrasted with that of the slave Cosmus, who had mooched to a new spot outside a cutler’s shop. He was staring at the goods on show, as if he had not seen us bring his master’s body out. I worry about young boys who gawp at knives — though many of them do it, some never actually reaching the stage of owning one.
When Dromo brought the doctor, he said Polycarpus had died of heart failure. The man needed to see an oculist.
It must be true that the steward’s heart had failed at some point. He had told me he had been freed for five years, making him in his mid to late thirties, young for this to happen unexpectedly. There had been no sign that his heart was diseased, no warning that his body was liable to fail him. He had never lived foolishly. Yet plenty of people leave the world at his age or younger.
Stress could have caused a heart attack. If he had been in an argument prior to his death, it was not with Graecina; I myself saw her arrive on the scene. Watching her discover the body, I had witnessed true shock.