Last Act in Palmyra (32 page)

‘So he put himself in hock to Heliodorus?'

‘Yes. The man is an idiot.'

‘I'm starting to believe it…' He was also a liar. Chremes had told me Heliodorus spent all his cash on drink. ‘I thought Heliodorus drank all his wages?'

‘He liked to cadge other people's flagons.'

‘At the scene of his death I found a goatskin and a wicker flask.'

‘My guess would be the flask was his own, and he probably drained it himself too. The goatskin may have belonged to whoever was with him, in which case Heliodorus would not have objected to helping the other party drink what it contained.'

‘Going back to Chremes' debt, if it was a substantial sum, where did the money come from?'

‘Heliodorus was a private hoarder. He had amassed a pile.'

‘And he let Chremes borrow it in order to gain the upper hand?'

‘You're brighter than Chremes was about his reasoning! Chremes walked right into the blackmail: borrowed from Heliodorus, then had no way to pay him back. Everything could have been avoided if only he had come clean with Phrygia instead. She likes good things, but she's not stupidly extravagant. She wouldn't ruin the company for a few touches of luxury. Of course, they discuss everything – except what matters most.'

‘Like most couples.'

Obviously hating to dump them in trouble, Davos blew out his cheeks, as if breathing had become difficult. ‘Oh gods, what a mess … Chremes didn't kill him, Falco.'

‘Sure? He was in a tight spot. Both you and Phrygia were insisting that the inkblot should be kicked out of the company. Meanwhile, Heliodorus must have been laughing up his tunic sleeve because he knew Chremes could not repay him. Incidentally, is this why he was kept on for so long in the first place?'

‘Of course.'

‘That and Phrygia hoping to extract the location of her child?'

‘Oh she'd given up expecting him to tell her that, even if he really knew.'

‘And how did you find out about the situation with Chremes?'

‘At Petra. When I marched in to say it was Heliodorus or me. Chremes cracked and admitted why he couldn't give the playwright the boot.'

‘So what happened?'

‘I'd had enough. I certainly wasn't going to hang around and watch Heliodorus hold the troupe to ransom. I said I would leave when we got back to Bostra. Chremes knew Phrygia would hate that. We have been friends for a long time.'

‘She knows your value to the company.'

‘If you say so.'

‘Why not just tell Phrygia yourself?'

‘No need to. She would certainly insist on knowing why I was leaving – and she'd make sure she heard the right reason. If she pressed him, Chremes would crumble and tell her. He and I both knew that.'

‘So, I see what your plan was. You were really intending to stick around until that happened.'

‘You get it.' Davos seemed relieved now to be talking about this. ‘Once Phrygia knew the situation, I reckoned Heliodorus would have been sorted – paid off somehow, and then told to leave.'

‘Was he owed a large amount?'

‘Finding it would have hit us all very hard, but it was not unmanageable. Worth it to get rid of him, anyway.'

‘You were confident the whole business could have been cleared up?' This was important.

‘Oh yes!' Davos seemed surprised that I asked. He was one of life's fixers; the opposite of Chremes, who collapsed when trouble flared. Davos did know when to cut and run in a crisis (I had seen that when our people were in jail at Gadara), but if it were possible, he preferred to face a bully out.

‘This is the crux then, Davos. Did
Chremes
believe that he could be rescued?'

Davos considered his answer carefully. He understood what I was asking: whether Chremes felt so hopeless he might have killed as his only escape. ‘Falco, he must have known that telling Phrygia would cause some harrowing rows, but after all these years, that's how they live. She wasn't in for any surprises. She knows the man. To save the company she – and I – would rally round. So, I suppose you are asking, ought he to have felt privately optimistic? In his heart, he must have.'

This was the only time Davos actively sought to clear another person. All I had to decide now was whether he was lying (perhaps to protect his old friend Phrygia), or whether he was telling the truth.

XLV

We never did put on a show at Abila. Chremes learned that even when the local amateurs had finished impressing their cousins we would still be waiting in a queue behind some acrobats from Pamphilia.

‘This is no good! We're not dawdling in line for a week only to have some damned handstand boys wobble on ahead of us –'

‘They were already ahead,' Phrygia put him straight, tight-lipped. ‘We happened to arrive in the middle of a civic festival, which has been planned for six months. Unfortunately, no one informed the town councillors that they needed to consult you! The good citizens of Abila are celebrating the formal entry into the Empire of Commagene –'

‘Stuff Commagene!'

With this acid political commentary (a view most of us shared, since only Helena Justina had any idea where Commagene was, or whether well-informed men should afford it significance), Chremes led us all off to Capitolias.

*   *   *

Capitolias had all the usual attributes of a Decapolis town. I'm not some damned itinerary writer – you can fill in the details for yourselves.

You can also guess the results of my search for Sophrona. As at Abila, and all the other towns before, there was no trace of Thalia's musical prodigy.

I admit, I was starting to feel bad-tempered about all this. I was sick of looking for the girl. I was tired of one damned acropolis after another. I didn't care if I never saw another set of neat little city walls with a tasteful temple, shrouded in expensive scaffolding, peeping Ionically over them. Stuff Commagene? Never mind it. Commagene (a small, previously autonomous kingdom miles to the north of here) had one wonderful attribute: nobody had ever suggested M. Didius Falco ought to pack his bags and traipse around it. No, forget harmless pockets of quaintness that wanted to be Roman, and instead just stuff the whole pretentious, grasping, Hellenic Decapolis.

I had had enough. I was sick of stones in my shoes and the raw smell of camels' breath. I wanted glorious monuments and towering, teeming tenements. I wanted to be sold some dubious fish that tasted of Tiber grit, and to eat it gazing over the river from my own grubby nook on the Aventine while waiting for an old friend to knock on the door. I wanted to breathe garlic at an aedile. I wanted to stamp on a banker. I wanted to hear that solid roar that slams across the racecourse at the Circus Maximus. I wanted spectacular scandals and gigantic criminality. I wanted to be amazed by size and sordidness. I wanted to go home.

‘Have you a toothache or something?' asked Helena. I proved that my teeth were all in working order by gnashing them.

*   *   *

For the company, things looked brighter. At Capitolias we acquired a two-night booking. We first put on the Hercules play, since that was newly rehearsed; then, as Davos had prophesied, Chremes became keen on this horrible species and handed us a further ‘Frolicking Gods' effort, so we did see Davos do his famous Zeus. Whether people liked it depended on whether they enjoyed farces full of ladders at women's windows, betrayed husbands helplessly banging on locked doors, divinity mocked relentlessly, and Byrria in a nightgown that revealed pretty well everything.

Musa, we gathered, either liked this very much indeed, or not at all. He went silent. In essence it was hard to tell any difference from normal, but the quality of his silence assumed a new mood. It was brooding; perhaps downright sinister. In a man whose professional life had been spent cutting throats for Dushara, I found this alarming.

Helena and I were uncertain whether Musa's new silence meant he was now in mental and physical agony over the strength of his attraction to the beauty, or whether her bawdy part in the Zeus play had completely disgusted him. Either way, Musa was finding it hard to handle his feelings. We were ready to offer sympathy, but he plainly wanted to work out his solutions for himself.

To give him something else to think about I drew him more closely into my investigations. I had wanted to proceed alone, but I hate to abandon a man to love. My verdict on Musa was twofold: he was mature, but inexperienced. This was the worst possible combination for tackling a hostile quarry like Byrria. The maturity would remove any chance of her feeling sorry for him; the lack of experience could lead to embarrassment and bungling if he ever made a move. A woman who had so ferociously set herself apart from men would need a practised hand to win her over.

‘I'll give you advice if you want it.' I grinned. ‘But advice rarely works. The mistakes are waiting to be made – and you'll have to walk straight into them.'

‘Oh yes,' he replied rather vacantly. As usual, his apparent affirmative sounded ambiguous. I never met a man who could discuss women so elusively. ‘What about our task, Falco?' If he wanted to lose himself in work, frankly that seemed the best idea. As a lad about town Musa was hard work to organise.

I explained to him that asking people questions about money would be as difficult as advising a friend on a love affair. He screwed out a smile, then we buckled down to checking on the story Davos had told me.

I wanted to avoid questioning Chremes about his debt directly. Tackling him would be useless while we had no evidence against him for actually causing either death. I had strong doubts whether we would find that evidence. As I told Musa, he remained a low priority on my suspects list: ‘He's strong enough to have held Heliodorus down but he was not on the embankment at Bostra when you were pushed in the water, and unless someone is lying, he was also out of the picture when Ione died. This is depressing –and typical of my work, Musa. Davos has just given me the best possible motive for killing Heliodorus, but in the long run it's likely to prove irrelevant.'

‘We have to check it, though?'

‘Oh yes!'

I sent Musa to confirm with Phrygia that Chremes really had been packing his belongings when Heliodorus was killed. She vouched for it. If she still didn't entertain any notion that Chremes had been in debt to the playwright, then she had no reason to think we might be closing in on a suspect, and so no reason to lie.

‘So, Falco, is this story of the debt one we can forget?' Musa pondered. He answered himself: ‘No, we cannot. We must now check up on Davos.'

‘Right. And the reason?'

‘He is friendly with Chremes, and especially loyal to Phrygia. Maybe when he found out about the debt he himself killed Heliodorus – to protect his friends from the blackmailing creditor.'

‘Not only his friends, Musa. He would have been safeguarding the future of the theatre group, and also his own job, which he had been saying he would leave. So yes, we'll check on him – but he looks in the clear. If he went up the mountain, then who packed the stage props at Petra? We know
somebody
did it. Philocrates would think himself above hard labour, and anyway, half the time he was off screwing a conquest. Let's ask the Twins and Congrio where they all were. We need to know that too.'

I myself tackled Congrio.

‘Yes, Falco. I helped Davos load the heavy stuff. It took all afternoon. Philocrates was watching us some of the time, then he went off somewhere…'

The twins told Musa they had been together in the room they shared: packing their belongings; having a last drink, rather larger than they had anticipated, to save carrying an amphora to their camel; then sleeping it off. It fitted what we knew of their disorganised, slightly disreputable lifestyle. Other people agreed that when the company assembled to leave Petra the Twins had turned up last, looking dozy and crumpled and complaining of bad heads.

Wonderful. Every male suspect had somebody who could clear him. Everyone, except possibly Philocrates during the time he was philandering. ‘I'll have to put pressure on the rutting little bastard. I'll enjoy that!'

‘Mind you, Falco, a big-brimmed hat would swamp him!' Musa qualified, equally vindictively.

This clarified one thing anyway: Philocrates spent several scenes in the Zeus play cuddling up to the lovely Byrria. Musa's anger appeared to clinch the question of
his
feelings for the girl.

XLVI

A restless mood hit the company once we performed at Capitolias. One reason for it was that decisions now had to be taken. This was the last in the central group of Decapolis cities. Damascus lay a good sixty miles to the north – further than we had been accustomed to travelling between towns. The remaining place, Canatha, was awkwardly isolated from the group, far out to the east on the basalt plain north of Bostra. In fact, because of its remote position, the best way to get there was going back via Bostra, which added half as much again to the thirty- or forty-mile distance it would have been direct.

The thought of revisiting Bostra gave everyone a feeling that we were about to complete a circle, after which it might seem natural for ways to part.

It was now deep summer. The weather had grown almost unbearably hot. Working in such temperatures was difficult, though at the same time audiences seemed to welcome performances once their cities cooled slightly at night. By day people huddled in whatever shade they could find; shops and businesses were shuttered for long periods; and no one travelled unless they had a death in the family, or they were idiotic foreigners like us. At night, the locals all came out to meet one another and be entertained. For a group like ours, it posed a problem. We needed the money. We could not afford to stop working, however great a toll of our energy the heat took.

Chremes called everyone to a meeting. His vagabond collection squashed together on the ground in a ragged circle, all jeering and jostling. He stood up on a cart to give a public address. He looked assured, but we knew better than to hope for it.