“Did you know her?”
“Not to speak to.”
Further questions were clearly unwelcome.
I crossed the alley, nearly turning my ankle in a rut. Thumping the door eventually brought a fragile, stooped man, who said I should speak to his wife. He closed the door on me. Just when I was about to give up and leave, it reopened; she emerged, looking fearful.
“It’s all right, I’m not a door-to-door fishwife, so you don’t have to pretend you have no call for razor clams.” She looked baffled. I reined in my wit. “Forget it. I am so sorry to bother you. I am an investigator. I have been told that Rufia used to live here.”
I could have pretended Rufia was a friend, but I was too young for the claim to look convincing and I knew too little about her. Everyone thinks informers are constantly adopting disguises, but you can tangle yourself up for no purpose that way, while you inhibit witnesses. So I use an honest approach.
Unexpectedly, the woman unbent. I wondered if she had been waiting all these years for somebody, anybody, to show an interest. But perhaps not, because she asked, “Menendra sent you?”
I was startled. “No. I’ve never met her.”
“I don’t like that one.”
“Any reason?” I demanded, recovering.
“No. Better come in then.” She let me through the door. I saw a room to one side that must be where she lived with her husband; I could hear him wheezing inside. Narrow stairs led upward. “You can take a look, if you have to. But I’ll come in with you. It isn’t right. There’s all her things.”
“Have you kept her possessions all this time?” I was amazed. “Was she your lodger?” I asked. As we went up the woman confirmed it, though she was too breathless to elaborate. “And you have never re-let the room? Really?” They were clearly as poor as most people in Rome. If the old fellow had ever worked, he was past it now. She looked younger, though none too sprightly.
“I didn’t like to. I’m not in a hurry to have other people. We get by. And who knows?”
Who knows what? I was struck by the oddity of this, but we had reached the top landing so I wanted to give all my concentration to where Rufia had lived. There were no more stairs beyond us even though I had seen from outside that the building had further stories. Anyone who lived higher up must have another entrance. I guessed that when Mucky Mule Mews had had more life, this part had once been a self-contained shop or a workshop, with living quarters above it.
The peeling door was not locked. The landlady pushed it open, then sent me in first. She followed only as far as the threshold, watching closely, but she let me enter to look around unhindered.
Sometimes such a room can feel as if its occupant, the dead person, has only just left that morning. Not here. There was no sense of her.
“Have you touched anything since Rufia disappeared?”
“No, it’s all just the same.”
Despite the landlady’s claim that I would find “all her things,” there was not much.
“Did anyone else ever come and take away possessions?”
She shook her head. I gazed at her, not so much doubting her as puzzled. She was, as I now took in properly, a worn, faded soul who looked as if she had worked hard all her life, probably for other people. She had thin colorless hair, scraped untidily together, brown liver spots, bony hands, a scrawny neck poking out of the loose opening to a dingy tunic. While she stood watching me, she plucked at her long sleeves and reorganized her tunic neck, pulling it tighter as if she felt cold.
I turned back to my survey of the room. It was small, of course. As a single working woman, I might have lived somewhere like this, had I not been fortunate to have a father with a tenement he wanted to fill. Otherwise I too would have spent my days in a dire cubicle that was part of someone else’s home, with no cooking facilities, a bucket for washing and sanitary purposes, a small high window I could not see out of though it had a pigeon looking in, one bed, one cupboard, a stool, a hook behind the door and a moth-eaten rag floor mat. Most of those, I guessed, came with the room.
So what was Rufia’s? An inventory of personal possessions could be written in three lines. Of course a barmaid would earn little and own little. But if I assumed Rufia had gone to work in her clothes the day she died, she had left behind hardly any other personal items. No spare tunic (well, that might be correct on a barmaid’s wages), no accessories, no cloak for winter.
At least she owned her food bowl, beaker, cheap bent cutlery. There was a pair of beaten-up backless slippers, kicked under the bed, one with a sole long gone. She had had small feet. With no other clothes to guide me, I could not picture the rest of her. On the rag rug, I noticed a hairpin. That was surprisingly nice. Probably some ordinary bone, though it masqueraded as ivory. I picked it up. Sniffed it, finding no relic of perfume, not that there could have been after all this time.
“Tell me about her.” I was holding the hairpin on the palm of my hand. “Was Rufia a girl who used cosmetics?”
“Don’t they all?”
“Where are her paints and powders then?” For heavens’ sake, everyone owns at least a pot of cream. Rufia almost certainly had to wash the Hesperides’ bowls and beakers, because I could not imagine Nipius and Natalis doing that; so she would have had dry, cracked hands.
“I told you, I’ve taken nothing!”
“I was not accusing you.”
“She kept her stuff at the bar where she worked, I suppose. That was where she would have wanted to look nice. Nice for the customers.”
Hmm! “Did she ever have a boyfriend?”
“I never knew of one.”
“And she never wore jewelry?” People who do, however basic it is, generally have more than one piece so they can swap around.
“Don’t look at me! She had a bangle that she always wore. I never took it.”
Fine.
“I was just thinking,” I said sadly after a while, “this is so little to show for a life.”
The woman from downstairs settled; she liked me showing sympathy. “I took her pillow. That was all I ever came and took out. For the old one down below, when he has trouble sleeping. I could have returned it if she ever came back.”
“She is never coming back.” I wondered whether to say we thought we had found Rufia’s body, but stalled at the woman’s next remark.
“No. That’s what the other one said.”
XXIV
She had turned around and was making her way downstairs again. Although our discussion about Rufia ought to have been sad, she seemed to take it matter-of-factly. I cast a rapid glance back at the room before I started down but there was nothing there to detain me longer.
“Who was it?” I demanded, once we reached the ground again. “This other one?”
“That Menendra. I told you, I didn’t take to her.”
“She came here, and recently?”
“She came yesterday.”
“Yesterday? What did she want?”
“To see the room, like you. Only I just showed her from the doorway and wouldn’t let her go inside. I never liked her attitude.”
“You knew her already? I have been told she was something to do with Rufia, I don’t know what that was-friends, or they worked together?”
“They worked. That was all. I met her once with Rufia. That was enough for me, thank Juno.”
The landlady had a tight mouth, disapproving of the other woman. Somehow I knew she regarded me more favorably. With luck, she would talk to me.
“I have not met Menendra yet, though I shall have to.” I spoke openly, on equal terms. “I am not sure what to expect. Can you tell me what she’s like?”
“Pushy. You won’t like her. I can tell you’re not that kind.” That would be news to my friends and family, who all thought me an obstreperous fiend.
“Is she foreign like some of the others?”
“Something. Speaks with a funny accent. Don’t they all?”
“Barmaids, you mean?”