Ruth Downie - Terra Incognita

“You’re Albanus’s officer.”

“I’ve come to see Susanna,” he said.

The girl disappeared into the gloom. “It’s all right; it’s not him! It’s the doctor!”

A distant voice shouted, “Which one?”

“The new one!”

A reply came from somewhere in the back of the building. “She says she didn’t call for you,” translated the girl, returning to the door.

“I didn’t say she did,” pointed out Ruso. “I need to have a word with her. But if it’s not a good time-”

“It’s the day of rest, sir.”

“Right,” said Ruso, baffled by Susanna’s apparent lack of business acumen. “So can I talk to her, or not?”

The girl pondered that for a moment, then turned and called, “He won’t go away!”

“Oh, all right!”

The girl retreated and Susanna appeared from a back room. “Excuse this,” she said, pointing at the towel wrapped around her head.

Ruso noticed the pale splashes down the substantial expanse of her tunic and wondered if she bleached her hair herself.

“Still, you’re a doctor,” continued Susanna, reaching down behind the counter. “You’ll have seen worse.” She produced a flagon of ordinary wine, a water jug, and a cup. “What’s so urgent?”

“Sorry to disturb you on the Sabbath,” he said. “I didn’t realize.”

One unbleached eyebrow rose. “How do you know?”

“A guess,” said Ruso, whose knowledge of her people’s customs came from a grim visit to Cyrenaica, where the local Jews had practiced their tradition of rebellion with such fervor that the army had performed its equally time-honored response of massacring them. “Are there many of you here?”

She shook her head. “Just me. Singing the Lord’s song in a foreign land, and largely unappreciated.” She led him across to a table under a small window, and seated herself on the bench opposite him. “I can’t say I’m doing very well at it, but I didn’t ask to be widowed and stranded here among a bunch of quarreling pagans, did I? And so far I’ve been blessed with a good living. Now. What was it?”

Ruso poured himself a drink. “I’m hoping you can tell me some more about Dari.”

Susanna sighed. “Why is it that men always need to talk about Dari?”

“I don’t know,” said Ruso. “I’ve never met her.”

“Wait there,” she said, and headed for the kitchen door.

Seconds later a remarkable bosom was followed out of the kitchen by a pert nose attached to a cheerful face.

Ruso suddenly understood the appeal of arm wrestling.

The girl placed both hands on the edge of the table and leaned forward in a manner that placed a fathomless cleavage exactly at Ruso’s eye level. “Susanna says you want me.”

“Please,” said Ruso, gesturing to the bench and forcing himself to look the girl in the eye, “sit down.”

In the privacy of the closed bar she seated herself with her back to him, then curled both knees up to her chest and swiveled around in a flurry of skirts. She used both hands to shift the bosom so it was resting on the table, and inquired, “What can I do for you?”

Ruso tried to concentrate. “I’m making some inquiries,” he said, “about the murder of a soldier the other day.”

“Poor Felix,” she said, frowning. “I only found out last night. What a shock, eh?”

“So you haven’t spoken to anyone else about this?”

“ ’Course I have. Everybody’s talking about it. It’s not a secret, is it?”

“Anyone official, I mean.”

“Only you, sir.” She leaned closer and dropped her voice to a husky whisper. “Ask me anything you want.”

Ruso cleared his throat again and said, “You were working here that night?”

She nodded.

“Tell me what happened.”

The account she gave added little to what he already knew. A busy night, a beer shortage, Rianorix shouting at Felix and twice being thrown out into the street.

“You know Rianorix?”

“Everybody knows him. He’s the good-looking one who sells baskets at the market.”

Ruso was already having enough difficulty focusing on the facts without being reminded of the charms of Rianorix. “And afterward?”

The girl wrapped a dark curl around her finger and pulled it toward her mouth. “Well, that was it, wasn’t it? If Rianorix came back for a third go, I didn’t see him.”

“And when did Felix leave?”

“A bit later on.”

“With his friends?”

“No,” said Dari, suddenly monosyllabic. The curl sprang back into place.

“I heard he stayed to talk to you.”

“What if he did?”

“What were you talking about?”

The bosom lifted off the table. The girl sat back and folded her arms beneath it. “What happened wasn’t anything to do with me,” she said.

“We talked, and then he left. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t go anywhere. I was clearing up. Then we all went to bed. Ask Susanna.”

“You were talking about money, weren’t you?”

“Who’s been-?” She stopped. “Her, I suppose? Nosy cow.”

Ruso said nothing.

“Felix gave me a loan a few weeks ago to buy some new shoes. I said I would pay him that night and I did. That’s all.”

“And a few hours later he was dead.”

“I told you, it’s nothing to do with-”

“Did he say where he was going when he left?”

“It was a business arrangement, all right? He wasn’t my boyfriend.”

“What did you pay him?”

“Does it matter?”

Had the girl been more cooperative Ruso would not have bothered questioning her much further. As it was, she was giving the impression of having something to hide.

“Why did you leave town the next morning?”

“My mother was ill.”

“And if I check with her neighbors they’ll confirm that, will they?”

The girl sucked in her lower lip and chewed at it for a moment.

“It doesn’t look good for you, does it?” prompted Ruso. “You’re the last to see him, you hand over some money you probably don’t want to part with-”

“How many times? It wasn’t me! I was here all the time!”

“So why run away?”

Dari glanced around to make sure nobody was listening. “I had a reason,” she said. “I can’t tell you what it was.”

“If they take you in for questioning,” he said, “you’ll have to tell them. And it will hurt. If you tell me, I may be able to keep it quiet.”

“That’s not much of a choice.”

“It’s the best offer you’ll get.”

The bosom sagged onto the table. “I didn’t steal it,” she muttered. “I found it. Finding’s not stealing.”

“You found some money?”

She frowned. “Of course not. I wouldn’t have to tell you that, would I? Money all looks the same. I found a ring. Under a bench in the bathhouse. A gold ring. Felix wanted his money and I didn’t have any. So I used it to pay him.”

Susanna emerged from the kitchen and gave Ruso a look that said she was disappointed in him. He pretended not to see it. “Tell me about this ring,” he said.

“It was one of those lattice patterns,” she said. “So it looks fancy but it doesn’t use much gold. There were letters in the pattern.”

“Did you know what they said?”

She shrugged. “Not a clue. But it can’t have been anybody’s name or he’d have asked me how I got it, wouldn’t he?”

Not, reflected Ruso, if Felix was simply going to use it to buy off Rianorix, who doubtless couldn’t read either.

“It wasn’t really stolen,” she insisted, “but I knew there might be a fuss when he tried to sell it. So I thought I’d stay out of town for a while. Then I heard he’d been murdered the same night.”

“So you guessed it was safe to come back.”