Saturnalia Part 27

We were going to see Cleander.

The streets were a nightmare, full of revellers who could not understand our need to pa.s.s through the crowds quickly. Petro had brought a few men, but most were too busy attending fires that night.

The smell of smoke hung on the air, as thickly as the noise of merriment. We found the house. It seemed to be in darkness, but after muted knocking by a vigilis who pretended to be a patient, Cleander himself opened the door.

Petronius Longus led him back inside and began to interrogate him. In response, Cleander only glared haughtily. We were all beneath him. He treated the charge of murdering the runaways with chilly contempt. Soon he began refusing to answer any questions at all. Petronius eventually had him taken away to the patrol house.

'Seen it before, Marcus. He will never confess. I can put Sergius to work on him, but this man is so arrogant he will think it a challenge to withstand the pain.'

'Maybe his slaves--or his patients--will give up information.'

'I bet they'll protest his innocence just as much as he does.'

'All his patients thought he was wonderful.'

'And his household won't admit that they should have seen what he was doing.'

'Well, keep at it, lad. If you let it be known among the vagrants that he's in captivity, you may just find more witnesses. His activities were known among the runaways, but fear kept them silent. Even Zosime should help. He trained her, but I never had the impression she was particularly loyal to him. She hates what has been done to the runaways, for one thing. Shock her with the facts; she'll give evidence. '

Petronius was called away. He left a man to guard the house, ready for a full search of the property next day. Justinus and I cast a quick eye over various rooms, and were about to leave ourselves. Then the vigilis called to us; he had found a locked closet. We could not discover a key to it; Cleander must have taken it. For half a beat we nearly left it for the lads to search the following day. But in the end, Justinus put his shoulder to the door and forced it open.

The interior was in darkness. As we crashed in, a faint groan alerted us to human presence. We ran for lights. Then we saw that Cleander had left a patient, or a victim, strapped to a pallet. He was gagged, and blood trickled inexorably from his arm into a by now very full bowl.

We could have left him there. Sometimes afterwards, I wished we had. But even when we recognised the patient as Anacrites, our humanity won. We removed the gag. We held his arm in the air until the blood flow stopped, then the vigilis, who knew basic bandaging, swathed his arm in tom cloth.

'I thought Cleander strangled his victims, Marcus.'

'He did normal doctoring as well, Quintus. Mastarna letting Scaeva die may have given him the idea. Perhaps Cleander hated Anacrites as an ex-slave, but thought a spy should die slowly... Drip, drip, drip--softly, safely, and sweetly over the Styx to the Underworld...' Anacrites was reviving enough to glare at me. We sat him up. He fainted, but we soon revived him. We were not gentle.

'There is always the chance of getting the b.a.s.t.a.r.d next time,' I told Quintus drily, letting the Spy overhear me. Anacrites hated having his life saved by me. Nothing good could come of it.

But for now, my a.s.sistant was overcome by kinder feelings. Since Camillus Justinus had left Claudia Rufina throwing herself into revelry at our house, he was returning there with me. Perhaps he felt that his time as Anacrites' house guest had given him a host/guest bond of duty; perhaps he wished to explain about the turnip. Whatever the reason, everyone else in Rome was indoors with happy ti-iends and relatives. Anacrites had no friends and probably no relatives. So I heard Justinus issue a good-natured invitation to the enfeebled Chief Spy. He asked Anacrites to come home with us and share our family celebration on the last night of the festival...

Io, my dear Quintus. my dear Quintus. Io, Io, Saturnalia! Saturnalia!

AFTERWORD--'ALL POSY POSY ON THE VIA DERELICTA'.

'Words are real,' says Falco to Albia in Chapter XVIII of this novel, 'if other people understand their meaning.'

'Is this,' enquires my editor in the margin of the ma.n.u.script, 'your defence for your many neologisms?' (most of which he has singled out with underlining and exclamation marks). I pacify him with a promise of an Afterword and talk of lunch.

I write about another culture, where people spoke another language, one which has mainly survived either in a literary form or as tavern wall graffiti. Many an argot must have existed in between. People sometimes discuss whether the Romans would really sound as I portray them--forgetting firstly that the Romans spoke Latin not English, and that on the streets and in the provinces they must have spoken versions of Latin that did not survive. I have to find my own ways to make narrative and dialogue convincing. I use various methods. Much of it is done by 'ear', and is difficult to describe even if! wanted to reveal the secret. Sometimes I merely deploy metaphors and similes, but even that can cause difficulties; I treasure the conversation with my Swedish translator who was puzzled by Thalia referring to male genitalia as 'a three-piece manicure set' and who had gone so far as to consult a medical friend...

Sometimes I invent words; sometimes I am not even aware I have done it, but through nineteen books my British editor has diligendy challenged me when he believes I have erred. Some years ago we reached an agreement that each ma.n.u.script might contain one neologism, or Lindseyism. Lindseyism.

For a time I stuck to that. Once, there was even a compet.i.tion where readers could identify the invented words. It foundered rather, because many American readers suggested perfectly good items of English vocabulary and in any case I could no longer remember what some of the allowed Lindseyisms were; however, I feel that 'nicknackeroonies' was identified at that time as the word some of us would most like to see absorbed into real life. (Let me credit my late Auntie Gladys with providing the inspiration.) A movement to establish 'nicknackeroonies' in current idiom began in Australia, where delicate finger-food is of course a speciality.

Then there was Fusculus. He loves words as much as I do. It has always been clear to me that there must have been Roman street language, specialist underworld cant in Latin and vigiles' slang expressions, all of which are so far lost to us but all of which Fusculus would know. It is no use hoping that the carbonised papyri from Herculaneum that are now being so painstakingly unravelled by scholars will produce clues; so far they are all Greek to me, and indeed to everyone. If Calpurnius Piso, thought to be the villa's owner, owned a Slang Thesaurus, we have not found it. I am on my own with this. I cannot use the rich seams of English and American equivalent terms from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, for the secret languages of coney-catchers, spivs and drug barons are tied too closely to their periods. So when Fusculus speaks, odd words appear.

It will be noted by bean-counters that Chapter XVIII of Saturnalia Saturnalia contains more than my strict allowance of neologisms. Chapter XVIII is a celebration of the tolerance and understanding that have always been shown to me by my editors. Literary novelists, fuelled by booze and their own pretensions, are customarily permitted to write gobbledegook yet to be praised for their high-flown inventiveness, but in the field of the light page-turner, it is generally a.s.sumed that nothing offered by an author will offend a publisher's standard spellchecker. Time and again I have been allowed to deviate. Apart from the lady who felt 'The' was 'too heavy' for her readers in the United States (a severe prescription that I constantly bear in mind, I promise), my editors have been models of restraint in the face of heartless prose misrule. In this Afterword, I salute them. In particular I salute Oliver Johnson, who is a serious, cultured Englishman and in his heart does not want flighty bits of author messing him about with funny stuff. This man has spent nearly twenty years patiently training me in plot development and chronological description, listening to my prejudice against Chardonnay, and crossing out distasteful s.e.x. He knows I can't spell 'alter', when it's 'altar'. He accepted the one-word chapter. He let me kill the lion. He himself devised 'tribute plagiarism', which we hope will become recognised legal terminology for bandit usage of another author's material. (Of course I know 'bandit' is improper adjectival use of a noun. Still- good, isn't it?) I am rightly devoted to my editor, and this is where I get the chance to say: don't blame him! contains more than my strict allowance of neologisms. Chapter XVIII is a celebration of the tolerance and understanding that have always been shown to me by my editors. Literary novelists, fuelled by booze and their own pretensions, are customarily permitted to write gobbledegook yet to be praised for their high-flown inventiveness, but in the field of the light page-turner, it is generally a.s.sumed that nothing offered by an author will offend a publisher's standard spellchecker. Time and again I have been allowed to deviate. Apart from the lady who felt 'The' was 'too heavy' for her readers in the United States (a severe prescription that I constantly bear in mind, I promise), my editors have been models of restraint in the face of heartless prose misrule. In this Afterword, I salute them. In particular I salute Oliver Johnson, who is a serious, cultured Englishman and in his heart does not want flighty bits of author messing him about with funny stuff. This man has spent nearly twenty years patiently training me in plot development and chronological description, listening to my prejudice against Chardonnay, and crossing out distasteful s.e.x. He knows I can't spell 'alter', when it's 'altar'. He accepted the one-word chapter. He let me kill the lion. He himself devised 'tribute plagiarism', which we hope will become recognised legal terminology for bandit usage of another author's material. (Of course I know 'bandit' is improper adjectival use of a noun. Still- good, isn't it?) I am rightly devoted to my editor, and this is where I get the chance to say: don't blame him!

I would also like to apologise to all my translators and to acknowledge their ingenuity in their constant battle with my vocabulary. It will take real woozlers to devise graceful equivalents for 'fragonage' and 'ferrikin' in Spanish, Turkish, j.a.panese and all the other languages in which Falco novels are published; the special use in the Fusculus context of 'nipping' and 'foisting'--though real words in theory--won't be easy either. Sometimes one of you honest men and women is drawn to approach me diffidently about a really impossible word or phrase and I want to say thank you for the courtesy with which you do this--and for not gloating when it turns out that the answer is, 'That is not a Lindseyism; it is a previously undiscovered typing error.'

'Wonk' is real, by the by. My new American editor used it, then defined it for me, and it is here to fulfil my promise to try and 'get it past Oliver'. (He saw it. He exclaimed at it, but he has not crossed it out, so it stays.) Chapter XVIII was a deliberate bit of fun. There is an official Lindseyism in another chapter. I know my rights.

I think very carefully about my choice of words--even when I make them up. When I do, I think they work. Try them out if you like, though do heed Falco's caution: it is not necessary to know these words to be a Roman and you don't want people thinking you are eccentric...