WE HAD NO domestic water supply. Like most of Rome we inhabited an apartment where the nearest fountain was around a corner in another street. For our daily ablutions we went to the public baths. They were plentiful, sociable, and in many cases nee. The more luxurious parts of the Aventine boasted large detached mansions with their own private bathhouses, but in our slum we had a long walk with our strigil and oil-flask. Our street was called Fountain Court, but that was an administrative joke.
Across the road, in the huge gloomy block where I had once lived myself: stood Lenia's laundry, which did possess a deep, rather fitful well. Its murky water was usually available in winter, and big cauldrons were always on the fires in the back yard. Because I was supposed to be helping Lenia arrange her divorce I felt able to cadge what remained of her warn1 water after the laundry closed for the night. She had been married a whole year now having lived with her husband for all of a fortnight-so in accordance with local custom it was well time she shed her spouse.
Lenia was married to Smaractus, the most stinking, greedy, heartless and degenerate Aventine landlord. Their union, which all her friends had been denouncing from the moment she proposed it, had been cobbled together out of their mutual hopes of defrauding each other of property. The wedding night had ended with the nuptial bed on fire, the husband in jail accused of arson, Lenia in acrimonious hysterics, and everyone else drunk out of their minds. An occasion to remember-as the wedding guests now insisted on reminding the unhappy pair. They did not thank us for it.
Their curious start should have provided years of nostalgic stories to retell happily around the fire at Saturnalia. Well, perhaps not around the fire, since Smaractus had been rather badly frightened by his adventure in the flaming bed. Around a festive table, with the lampwicks all trimmed neatly, perhaps. But from their night being rescued by the vigiles they had descended into a hell from which nobody could save them. Smaractus came home from jail in a foul temper; Lenia pretended she had had no idea he was so violent and unpleasant; he accused her of setting fire to the bed deliberately with a view to grabbing a big inheritance if she killed him; she said she wished she had done it, even if there was no inheritance. Smaractus made a few feeble attempts to claim rights in the laundry (the one freehold he had omitted to acquire in our district), then he stole what he could carry and fled back to his own grimy apartment. Now they were getting divorced. They had been talking about it for the past twelve months without any progress, but that was typical of the Aventine.
Lenia had been in her office where black winter mould, encouraged by the laundry steam, had encased the walls in a sinister patina. Hearing us, she swayed to the door. She seemed subdued, which meant either she had not yet drunk enough to liven her up this evening, or she had tippled so much she had poisoned herself Her unusual red hair, product of violent substances unknown to most cosmetics vendors, hung either side of her white, bleary-eyed face in frizzled hanks as she dithered at the doorway.
While Helena slipped past me to avail herself of the still-warm tubs, I planted myself in Lenia's path with a well-placed verbal tackle. “Hello! I see your hot-blooded lover's here.”
“Falco, when the bastard comes down, trip him up and make him talk about my settlement.”
“Call me when you hear him coming, and I'll make another attempt to reason with him.”
‘Reason? Don't make me laugh, Falco! Just you put a noose around his throat and pull it tight; I'll hold the agreement so he can sign it. Then you can finish strangling him.”
She meant it too.
Smaractus must be collecting rent from his hapless tenants. We could tell that from the angry shouting upstairs and also because the two dwindling stars of his back-up team, Rodan and Asiacus, were flat out with a wineskin in Lenia's front portico. Smaractus ran what he called a gladiators' school, and these punch-drunk specimens were part of it. He took them around for protection; I mean, to protect the rest of the populace from what these idiots might get up to if Smaractus left them unattended.
There was no need to drag Rodan and Asiacus up all the six storeys of leasehold hovels, because Smaractus himself was perfectly capable of forcing his debtors to turn out their purses if he caught them in.
He didn't scare me though. Nor did his thugs.
Giving Julia her bath was my job (hence the jibes about Cato the Elder and the late hour I had slunk home).
“I want her to grow up knowing who her father is,” said Helena.
“Is that to ensure she will be rude and defiant to the right person?”
“Yes. And so you will know it is all your own fault. I don't want you ever to say ‘Her mother brought her up and ruined her'!”
“She's a bright child. She should manage to ruin herself.”
It took me at least twice as long to clean up the baby as it took Helena to rinse out her little tunics in another cauldron. Helena disappeared, perhaps to console Lenia, though I hoped she had gone to prepare my dinner back at home. I was left to make my usual failed attempt to interest Julia in the floating ship I had whittled for her, while she played instead with her favourite toy, the cheesegrater. We had to bring it or there was screaming. She had perfected how to smack it down on the water apparently aimlessly, though with a true knack of soaking her papa.
The cheesegrater had a curious history. I had swiped it at Pa's warehouse, thinking it looked like an ordinary product of a house clearance. When Pa noticed it at our apartment one day, he told me it had in fact come from an Etruscan tomb. Whether he was himself the tomb robber remained vague, as usual. He reckoned it might be five hundred years old. Still, it worked all right.
By the time I had dried Julia and dressed her, then dried myself I felt exhausted but there was to be no peaceful relaxation because when I clutched the wriggling baby under my cloak and gathered up all her accessories I found Helena Justina, my supposedly refined girlfriend, leaning on one of the crooked pillars in the outside portico, rewinding her stole around her shoulders and risking serious assault by actually talking to Rodan and Asiacus.
The ugly pair shined nervously. They were ill-fed, unhealthy specimens, kept on short rations by Smaractus' meanness. He had owned them for years. They were slaves, of course, pallid bruisers in leather skirts and with their arms wrapped in grimy bandages to make them look tough. Smaractus still made a pretence of exercising them at his seedy training barracks, but the place was just a cover and he could never dare risk them in the arena; for one thing, they fought even more dirtily than the Roman crowd liked.
There were no graffiti from lovelorn manicure girls scrawled on the walls of that particular gladiators' barracks, and no gold-laden ladies stopped their litters surreptitiously around the comer while they slipped inside with presents for the hulk of the month. So Rodan and Asiacus must have been startled when they found themselves accosted by Helena Justina, who was well-known in these parts as Didius Falco's snooty piece, the girl who had stepped down two ranks to live with me. Most people on the rough side of the Aventine were still trying to fathom where I could have bought the powerful love potion to bewitch her. Sometimes at the dead of night, I woke up in a sweat and wondered that myself
“So how is the world of gladiating?” she had just asked, quite as calmly as if she were enquiring of a Praetorian friend of her father's how his latest court case was progressing at the Basilica Julia.
It took the clapped-out wrecks a few minutes to interpret her cultured vowels, though not long to compose replies. “It stinks.”
“It bloody stinks.” From them that was sophisticated repartee.
“Ah!" Helena responded wisely. The fact that she seemed unafraid of them was giving them the jitters. It was not doing much for me. “You both work for Smaractus, don't you?”
She could not yet have seen me lurking in the shadows, anguishing how I could possibly protect her if the rancid pair heaved themselves upright and got lively. They were trouble. They always had been. They had beaten me up several times in the past, trying to make me pay my rent; I had been younger then, and not normally impeded by carrying a baby as I was now.
“He treats us worse than dogs,” grumbled Rodan. He was the one with the broken nose. A tenant had hit him in the face with a mallet when Rodan tried to forestall a moonlit flit. Any desperate tenant who had finally glimpsed escape from Smaractus was likely to fight for it fiercely.
“You poor things.”
“Still it's better than being an informer!” giggled Asiacus, the rude one with the pustular skin complaint.
“Most things are,” Helena smiled.
“What are you doing shacked up with one?” They were bursting with curiosity.
“Falco spun me some fables; you know how he talks. He makes me laugh.”
“Oh he's a clown, all right!”
“I like looking after him. Besides, we have a baby now.”
“We all thought he was after your money.”
“I expect that's it.” Maybe by this time Helena had guessed I was, listening in She was an evil tease. “Speaking of money, I suppose Smaractus is hoping to make some out of the Emperor's new project?”
“That big place?”
“Yes, the arena that they are building at the end of the Forum, where Nero had his lake. The Flavian Amphitheatre, they are calling it. Won't it provide good opportunities when it opens? I should imagine there will be a big ceremony, probably lasting weeks, with regular gladiatorial shows-and probably animals.”
“You're talking real spectacle,” replied Asiacus, trying to impress her with size.
“That should be healthy for people in your line.”
“Oh Smaractus thinks he'll be rolling-but he'll be lucky!” sneered Asiacus. “They'll be wanting class acts there. Besides, the big operators will have all the contracts well sewn up long before.”
“Are they manoeuvring already?”
“You bet.”
“Will there be a lot of competition?”
“Sharp as knives.”
“Who are the big operators?”
“Saturninus, Hanno-not Smaractus. No chance!”
“Still, there should be plenty of profit to go round-or do you think things might turn nasty?”
“Bound to,” said Rodan.
“Is that a well-educated guess, or do you know for sure?”
“We know it.”
Helena sounded in awe of their inside knowledge: “Has trouble started?”
“Plenty,” Rodan said, boasting like a Celtic beer-swiller. “It's not so bad among the fighters' lanistae. Supplying men can be fixed without much trouble-though of course they have to be trained,” he remembered to say, as if he and his filthy partner were talented experts not simple brutes. “But the word is that there's going to be a huge venatio-as many big cats as the organisers can get hold of: and they are promising thousands. That's got the beast importers shitting bricks.”
Helena ignored the obscenity without flinching. “It's going to be a wonderful building, so I suppose they will inaugurate it with appropriately lavish shows. Are the beast importers afraid they cannot meet the demand?”
“More like, each one is afraid the others will meet it and he'll lose out! They all want to make a killing!” Rodan collapsed, laughing hoarsely, overcome by his wit. “make a killing, see-”
Asiacus put on a show of greater intelligence, bashing Rodan sideways in disgust at the terrible pun. They sprawled over even more of the pavement while Helena politely stepped back to make more room for them.
“So what are the importers up to at the moment?” she asked, still as if she were simply gossiping. “Have you heard any stories?”
“Oh there's plenty of stories!” Asiacus assured her (which meant he had heard absolutely nothing definite).
“Blackening each other's character,” suggested Rodan.
“Dirty tricks,” added Asiacus.
“Oh you mean like stealing each other's animals?” Helena asked them innocently.
“Well, I bet they would if they thought of it,” Rodan decreed. “Most of ‘em are too thick to have the idea. Besides,” he went on, “nobody's going to tangle with a great big roaring lion, are they?”
“Falco saw something very peculiar today,” Helena decided to confess. “He thinks some dirty trick with a lion may have happened.”
“That Falco's an idiot.”
I decided it was time to step forward and show myself before Helena Justina heard something else a well brought-up senator's daughter should not be told.