Gary Corby - Death Ex Machina

“We have another problem, Pericles,” I said.

He frowned. “Yes?”

I explained about the problem with paying for Phellis’s treatment. “He was injured through no fault of his own,” I finished.

“This is a duty for the play’s choregos,” Pericles said.

“He denies it.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting that I should be paying for this?” Now Pericles sounded truly upset.

“No.”

“Good. Because I’m already funding the public feast.”

“How’s that going?”

“I’ve ordered my estate manager to strip my lands of everything edible. Even so, I have buyers at every farm within cart distance of Athens. You wouldn’t believe what this is costing me,” he said, and he shuddered. “I said it before about Salaminia , but I’ll say it again about the public feast. Nicolaos, this had better be worth it.”

We decided to make best use of our time before we left for Rhamnus by investigating Socrates’s theory: that one man acting alone could not have murdered Romanos; not unless the victim was drugged. I pointed out, also, that we’d yet to inspect the scene of the crime, as we would with any normal murder.

Diotima snorted and said, “Good luck with that. How many people have trampled over the theater?”

Socrates was already there, looking closely at the machine. So were Kiron and Akamas. They were hanging around, Kiron said, because in the absence of a running festival they had nothing better to do.

“Excellent, I’m glad to see you,” I said. “You can help us with an important point about how the machine works in Sisyphus -”

“Don’t say that name!” Akamas almost shouted. He looked about suspiciously, before saying in a more normal voice, “You mean The Corinthian Play.”

“The what?” I asked.

“The Corinthian Play,” Akamas repeated.

“That’s what all the crew are calling it now,” Kiron said in exasperation. “On account of Sisyphus being set in Corinth.” Kiron shrugged as expressively as one of his actors. “They’ve reached the point that they think even saying the name of the accursed play will bring back the Ghost of Thespis and all the bad luck.”

I’d never heard anything so ridiculous in my life, but there was no point in arguing about it. Instead, we got on with our work.

We used Akamas to stand where Romanos must have stood, or lain, when the long arm of the machine rose during the murder. Kiron fitted Akamas with the harness and attached the rope. I took hold of the short arm backstage and tried to move it.

By heaving with all my might, I could raise Akamas into the air, but I was unsteady. Akamas was heavier than Romanos, but not so much that it would make a big difference, especially considering that the killer must have worked in the dark. The short arm I held was heavily weighted at the end, to balance the longer arm over the skene, but it wasn’t enough to make my job simple. It was easy to see why during plays they used two men. When I said as much, Kiron nodded.

“That’s why we use three,” he said. “Two men to hold the actor steady, so there are no mistakes. The third man to direct the arm sideways.” He paused, then added, “Plus me, of course. I have to make sure those idiots don’t let go of the arm.”

“Does that happen?” Diotima asked.

The stage manager turned to her. “Only once per idiot. If a man lets go of the machine while the actor’s in the air, I beat him senseless to remind him not to do it again, and then I fire him.”

“That seems a little harsh.”

“You wouldn’t think so if you were the actor.” He rubbed his sweaty face with a thick cloth. “Look, you probably think I’m a tough boss-”

Diotima and I said nothing.

“But you know what my job is? It’s to make sure nothing goes wrong. Nobody notices when everything goes right, but when something goes wrong, it’s always the stage manager’s fault.” He wiped his brow again.

Socrates tugged on my clothing. “Nico? There’s the other problem for the killer.” He pointed to the spot in the mechanism where the killer had placed a chock, to keep the long arm in the air. Socrates went on, “You can’t both raise someone and chock the machine.”

I tried. I wasn’t a large man, but I was a strong one. My strength came from helping my father heave blocks of stone, from the training that Pythax had given me, and from my chosen profession. It would be an unusual killer who was stronger than me, and yet I didn’t dare let go with either hand or Akamas would have crashed to the ground. My attempts to do so caused several anguished screams from Akamas, who suffered this experiment hanging in the air. Even half-drunk, he knew enough to be terrified with me at the controls.

I tried to reach from the end of the machine arm to the center where it pivoted. The distance I had to reach was simply too great. All this supposed that Romanos was waiting quietly to be hanged, or else was unconscious.

Socrates had made his point.

“What if the killer added more weight to the end of the short arm?” I said.

“That might work,” Kiron said, “But see here …” He demonstrated the end of the short arm. “There are no rope marks, no peg holes, no nothing.”

“The killer wrapped rags around the arm and then tied on weights?” Socrates suggested. “That would work.”

“Getting a little complex here, aren’t we, lad?” Kiron said.

Indeed we were. It seemed an extravagant way to kill someone. We needed a simpler explanation.

We abandoned the machine for the moment and turned to the next item: the search for any other clues.

It went as badly as Diotima had predicted. The plays this year included an axe murder (that was Aeschylus’s contribution), various stabbings (Chorilos), and scenes of torture and incest (thank you, Sophocles). The comedies were barely any better. The props for all these evil deeds were scattered across the area behind the skene.

“Dear Gods,” I said, “I never realized how violent these plays are.”

Diotima held a stylus and a wax tablet on which she’d listed everything that would have been a clue at a normal crime scene, including all the potential murder weapons lying about. It was a long list.

Diotima chewed her lip and stared at the list. “I’ve been imprisoned in dungeons that were safer than this place,” she said.

I nodded. I was beginning to understand why Akamas and the other theater crew lived in such fear of bad luck.

“Does your list of murder weapons include the machine?” I asked.

Diotima looked up at the machine that loomed above us. “Thanks. I forgot that one.” She added another line.

I noticed that the prop knives and swords were sharp enough for battle, the cudgels were properly weighted to smash a skull, the axe propped in the corner was good enough to chop down a tree, or to chop down Agamemnon in his bath.

I queried Kiron about the lethal array. “Why don’t you blunt them?”

He looked at me as if I were insane. “Every man in the audience is a serving soldier or a veteran.”

“Yes, of course. All citizens are. So?”

“So to any man who’s ever stood in the line, a blunt sword will look like a blunt sword. They know what a sharp sword looks like in the hand of a man who’s coming at them. They’ve seen it often enough.”

“Oh. I see what you mean.”

“If we send the actors on stage with swords and spears too blunt to hurt a fly, the audience couldn’t miss it. They’d complain later. Or they’d boo the actor, which would be even worse.” The stage manager threw his hands in the air. “You have no idea what lengths we go to, to get these details right.”