“Did you know Rufia?”
“Who told you that?”
“I can’t remember,” I bluffed. A wise informer protected her sources. Otherwise, if Menendra got to them with her hints about keeping quiet, backed up with her heavies’ meaningful looks, those sources would dry up rapidly. “Several people.”
“Yes, I knew Rufia, knew her very well. What of it?”
“Do you believe one of those bodies they dug up is her?”
“Well she vanished, didn’t she?”
“She did so quite unexpectedly?”
“I heard that.”
“Somebody tried to burgle her old room last night. I wonder what they were looking for?”
“Oh, what can it have been?” sneered Menendra, not even troubling to deny her involvement.
“Rufia isn’t the only puzzle. There are five more bodies. That night she disappeared a group of salesmen were in the bar. You’re in commerce. Do you know anything about them, or who they were?”
“I never heard about any salesmen.” Really? Nothing she said was reliable; she actually flaunted that.
“Rufia looked after them.”
“You seem to know all about it, Flavia Albia!”
I knew damn all, and this witness was not helping. I recognized what was going on. Her aim was to find out how much I did know, but not to enlighten me further.
I toughened up again. “Oh I think you are the one who knows, Menendra. So if I can hand out quiet advice myself, it is let me find out by my own civilized methods. Don’t compel me to call in the men with hot irons and weights.”
“You don’t scare me!” She leaned toward me, full of menace. “I said, leave it all alone!” She intended to petrify me. She turned to her two heavies, her intention plain.
“Call them off, Menendra.” Measuring distances by eye, I let her know I could get to her before her men could get to me. Then I spoke like a street urchin who had taken part in every kind of street fight: “Scram them! Or I’ll pull out your eyes with my bare hands before your brutes can move a step.”
XXVIII
Everything shifted.
I took a step forward, pointing my right forefinger. “Move them back!” My tone made her believe I would carry out my threat to her eyes. It almost made me believe it too. That’s all you need.
Now she saw that I too had an unforgiving past. No one crossed her; nobody crossed me.
After a beat of disbelief, she made a slight, angry movement to her men; the heavies slowly walked across to the Medusa, leaving us.
A chill sweat trickled down my neck and under my tunic, but I made sure no anxiety showed. I was not so foolish as to think I had outfaced this woman. “That’s good. Now answer my questions, Menendra. Better to speak to me than officials. It’s your choice, but you are not stupid.”
Her chin came up though she did not object.
“Tell me how things were in those days, back when Rufia vanished. Thales owned the Hesperides, Rufia worked there. What about you? Were you providing your ‘supplies’ in those days?”
“Not me.”
“Too young? You hadn’t started?”
“I built up my little business afterward,” she acknowledged.
I looked her up and down. From the way she dressed, her business could not be so little; she was comfortably decked out. “Everything was more casual back then?” That was what the woman at the snacks stall had told me.
“I suppose so.”
“Where do you come from, Menendra? Where were you born?”
“Lycia.” In the northeastern Mediterranean. Pirate country. Not much else there.
“Slave or free?”
“I am no slave!”
“Never have been?”
“Wash your mouth out.” I saw her scanning me, wondering. Plenty of people assumed I myself must have slave origins. It was a possibility. I would have to live the rest of my life not knowing. In moments of depression, I felt that any slave had better luck than me; at least they understood their place in the world. Still, I was a happy bride now. Happy and fortunate. Happy, fortunate and free.
“All right. So you came to Rome of your own accord, for the pickings-was that when you met Rufia?” She begrudged me a curt nod. “You were friends?”
“She was decent to me. Took me under her wing. Taught me how to survive here.”
“Oh, all girls together then? I’m trying to imagine how it was.”
“You’re wrong.” Menendra cackled as she anticipated my discomfiture when she explained. “Way wrong. Rufia was hardly a girl. She must have been easily fifty. Could have been older. She had worked at the Hesperides for decades. She was older than Old Thales himself, and she looked every day of it. She was like a grandmother to me. So you haven’t been seeing the picture at all, have you, dearie?”
I pulled a face, openly admitting that I had misjudged everything. Believe me, I was cursing.
XXIX
Our conversation ended. I was too nonplussed to sustain it.
Menendra turned on her heel and made off down the main road. A jerk of her head drew the two heavies after her. If I managed to interview her again, she would gloat and I would flail. The only option next time was an official interrogation. She would resist and only if we had direct evidence could she be leaned on. I had lost this game.
I was left to feel I had so far been foolish. Nobody ever told me Rufia was young; that was my own stupid misapprehension. Now I knew, I had to work through everything all over again. I had quite wrongly perceived the kind of event that must have happened here; I understood nothing about it.
Nowhere in the Twelve Tables is it legally enshrined that in the city of Rome a barmaid must be some cute young girl. Of course they generally are, unless the landlord can acquire others so much more cheaply that he puts up with a lack of youth or beauty. Some landlords have to employ their own relatives, who may be any age from eight to eighty and look as ugly as their employers.
I wouldn’t care how old Rufia was, except that all my previous theories about her fate suddenly became unlikely. The kind of predator I had imagined attacking a barmaid would want young flesh; that kind of sexual killer hardly ever stalks an older woman. Even if he is brave enough to take her on, her tough maturity insults his manhood. Perverts want them luscious. They need to snatch youth, which is for them unobtainable because of their own oddness; they yearn to punish the lively women they have seen with other men.
The idea that Old Thales had bumped off Rufia also took a new twist. If she and her employer had had any relationship, it could not have been as I once thought. If they had quarreled, it must have been a different kind of quarrel. Why Rufia was then killed along with five men became an even more intractable puzzle.
At least the stories of her quelling any trouble in the bar now seemed more natural. Experienced women tend to know how to quash obstreperous men. I could easily envisage this Rufia throwing out troublemakers. I could see them meekly leaving as soon as she said go. Regulars who knew her would probably not even start being loud while she was serving. She had been here for years. This bar ran the way she decreed.
Nipius and Natalis groaning at her bossiness now made more sense too. And I could see why they had sounded so astonished when I suggested they had gone upstairs with her. Menendra could not have been the only one who saw Rufia as an old woman.
While I was coming to terms with all this, Sparsus and Serenus, two of the workmen, appeared from behind me with one of their baskets of rubble, which they dumped in the gutter. Perhaps a cart had been arranged to pick up the mess later. Perhaps not. I was too preoccupied even to give them a reproving glance.
They asked if I was all right. From habit, I immediately said yes. I had looked after myself for twelve years as an informer. It would be hard to accept that I was becoming part of a family group, with staff who might take an interest, people who might want to protect me. Even so, I followed them back into the bar and through it to the courtyard, where I sat down, feeling more secure in their company.