The Macedonian sex slaves knew it wasn’t true for them. That was the worst aspect of the life that had been imposed on them. They had absolutely no hope.
As I left I ventured to ask whether they were afraid of ending up like Rufia. I was surprised that they showed no fear of sharing her fate. Any one of them was vulnerable to being beaten up, all of them risked death on a daily basis. Presumably they had to blank that.
I left them and went back to the Hesperides. The workmen were still hard at it, with Tiberius in charge. He broke off when he saw me returning.
I sat down and told him some of what I had learned. I said that increasingly I thought this bar might once have been the center of a prostitution racket, with Rufia strongly implicated.
“All bars are brothels, officially,” he answered.
“Well this one has only three rooms upstairs. I am wondering if Rufia carved out a wider empire.” That would fit with what witnesses had told me, how everyone in the neighborhood knew her.
“So who would the five dead men have been? Clients? Someone who decided not to pay?”
“I don’t know.”
If a whore’s customer refused to hand over her fee, he had to expect a violent reaction-though killing five would seem extreme, and the neat, organized burial at the Hesperides surely argued for advance planning. As a general rule in business, if somebody fails to honor a bill, you don’t kill them-you want them alive to pay up. Mind you, there had probably been plenty of Roman executors who were asked to settle debts for sexual favors procured by the deceased. I expect favorite prostitutes were sometimes even passed on as bequests.
“If Thales was a brothel-keeper, wouldn’t it be recorded somewhere?” I asked Tiberius.
“Brothel-keeping is not illegal. Prostitution neither. If Old Thales profited from vice, so long as he declared his income at the census, and duly paid his taxes, that was his only responsibility. The state’s interest is not moral, merely fiscal.”
I laughed gently. “The government never minds the source, so long as cash clinks into the Treasury! But I thought prostitutes counted as outlawed noncitizens, along with actors, gladiators and the like?”
“Whores only. Their masters not. Perfectly ‘respectable’ people fund their lives by the sex trade. You would be surprised how many society people have fortunes that come from brothels.” I could see Tiberius thought as I did, that this was hypocrisy. He added, “The Emperor Caligula levied a direct tax too; each prostitute has to pay a one-off to the Treasury, whatever she charges per man. It was an unheard-of measure when he introduced it-but quickly became accepted, given how lucrative it is.”
I kept niggling. “I know you have records. Aediles keep them. So who does have to be registered?”
“Any woman acting as a prostitute.”
Again, Tiberius saw my disapprovaclass="underline" I thought it typical that only the women were monitored so closely. That was in addition to their being tied to pimps and brothel-keepers. Everyone had power but them. Meanwhile, those who organized the game escaped censure. “I want to understand the rules. Tell me?”
Tiberius shifted uncomfortably. “This has not been my favorite aspect of the job…”
“All right, I’m not accusing you.”
“Every prostitute has to register with the aediles. She must present herself, give her correct name, her age, her place of birth, and the pseudonym under which she intends to practice. If a girl turns up who looks young and respectable, we try to persuade her to change her mind.”
I shot him a look. He managed not to squirm. “Look, we do our best! Well, I have tried always to … If she is adamant,” he continued, still looking abashed, “we are bound to issue her a license. She tells us what price she intends to charge. We enter her name in the roll.”
“Can she be removed if she gives up the trade?”
“No. Never. It’s permanent.”
“So no prostitute, even if she is forced into it at a very young age, by other people, can ever repent, reinstate her good name or be forgiven by society?”
Tiberius agreed dourly.
I knew better than to blame him for this. He acted as an instrument of government policy. If he refused the task, someone else would do it. I would rather he was checking the legality of market weights, but if an aedile had to be involved, better it was Manlius Faustus. He was straight. He had a charitable attitude.
I bet there had always been different magistrates, men who exacted a trick when they registered a woman. Their free sample. “Checking that her price is value for money.” These men had a duty to protect the public from rip-offs, after all. They would claim they must test out the goods. Compared to the majority, mine was oddly innocent.
I gave him a hug, to show I did not regard him as tainted. Then, without telling him my plans, I left him at the Hesperides while I went by myself to have a look around the district the Macedonians had mentioned, where both they and Menendra lived. From what they said, I too would soon feel soiled, merely from going there.
XXXV
Some people know Ad Gallinas Albas as the whimsical name of the elegant imperial Villa of Livia at Prima Porta. Supposedly an eagle soaring overhead once dropped a white hen in the empress’s lap, bearing a sprout of olive in its beak. Waste not, want not, so the great lady kept both, planting an olive grove and keeping a poultry farm, with the bonus that on occasions they presaged the deaths of emperors. So useful. If I ever have my own olive tree, I want it to wilt when the daggers are about to be plunged into Domitian.
The poultry area by the Ten Traders may boast the same name, but it is as different as anything could be from the fine rural retreat on the Via Flaminia that was once the possession of Livia Augusta. Forget the desirable residential areas that did exist on the Viminal further on. Was Gallinae Albae ever a farm? If there had once been hens, they must have been hoarse, pox-ridden laying-fowl that produced soft-shelled eggs. Their eyes would weep, their lungs would clog with the foul seepage of diseases of the dirt. The human birds who lived in this sour valley bottom now, scrawny creatures pecking for clients, were little different.
Not all the prostitutes were brought in from abroad. Not all were slaves. A few were freeborn women, lured here by want, vulnerable souls in distress who were so desperate they had to turn to vice. They disappeared from their former lives, in total thrall to their procurers.
More often than you may want to believe, the people who controlled their daily acts were women. Many of those women had once been working girls too. They were callous; they felt no pity for the new generation. I suppose they were simply glad they themselves had grappled their way into a slightly better position. By then, abuse was all they knew. When perversion was not being imposed on them, they imposed it on someone else.
I was coming to see this as Rufia’s way of life, and Menendra’s too. This pair, I decided, were power players in the sordid game.
I wished I had not gone to the White Chickens alone. It gave me a terrible sense of dread. The reason I knew all about what went on here was that thankfully brief period when I myself had been kidnapped by a brothel owner. It had only lasted a day, though it was the worst of my life. At the time I was a forlorn child, who believed his lie that he would take me to a safe place. But when he violently turned on me it was no surprise. Living on the streets had taught me what goes on.
I would have given in and done whatever that man made me do, because I had no other recourse. No friends, no family, no home. At that time, to be wanted for his filthy purposes was better than not to be wanted at all. I could have pretended to myself that his lies were real. I could have spent the rest of my existence on earth in that dire condition.