Three Hands In The Fountain

`What's this then?' demanded the interviewee. 'What's gone wrong about the money?'

`Nothing,'; said Petro.

`Everything,' said I:

`I heard you was giving' rewards,' he complained accusingly.,

`Depends what for.' I was hopping mad, yet experience had taught me to stand by any promise that had lured a hopeful here. Nobody climbs six flights of stairs to see an informer unless they are either in desperate trouble or believe' that what they know is worth hard cash.

I glared at Petro's catch. He was a foot shorter than average, malnourished and filthy. His tunic was threadbare, a mucky brown garment that hung on his shoulders by a few rags of wool His eyebrows met in the middle. Wiry black stubble ran from his jutting chin right up his cheekbones to the bags under his eyes. His ancestors may have been high kings of Cappadocia, but without doubt this man was a public slave.

On his feet, which looked as flat as bread-shovels, he was wearing rough clogs. They had thick soles but they had not kept him dry; his felt leggings were. black and had oozed water everywhere; A trail of puddles marked his path through our door, and a dark little pond was slowly gathering around the spot where he had come to rest.

`What's your name?' asked Petronius haughtily, trying to reassert his authority. I leant on the table with my thumbs in my belt. I was annoyed. The informant didn't need to be told about it, but Petronius would pick it up from my stance.

`I said, what's your name?'

`Why do you need to know?'

Petro scowled. 'Why do you need to keep it a secret?'

`I've nothing to hide.'

`That's commendable! I'm Petronius Longus; he's Falco.' 'Cordus,' admitted the applicant grudgingly.

`And you're a public slave, working for the Curator of Aqueducts?'

`'How did you know that?'

I saw Petro control himself. `Given what you brought me, it fits.' We all looked at the new hand. We looked away again rapidly. `What family do you work in?' asked Petro, to avoid discussing the relic.

`The state.' The water board used two groups of public slaves, one derived from the original organisation set up by Agrippa and now in full state control, the other established by Claudius and still part of the household of the Emperor. There was no rationale in perpetuating these two `families'. They ought to be part of the same workforce. It was a classic bureaucratic mess with the usual openings for corruption. The inefficiency was worsened by the fact that nowadays major work programmes were carried out by private contractors instead of direct slave labour anyway. No wonder the Aqua Appia always leaked.

`What's your job, Cordus?'

`Masonry. Vennus is my foreman. He doesn't know I found that-,'

We all reluctantly looked at the hand again.

This one was a dark, pungent, rotted nightmare, recognisable only because we were in the mood to see what it was. It was in desperate condition, only half there. Like the first, the fingers were missing but the thumb remained, attached by a thread of leathery skin though its main joint had parted.

Maybe the fingers had been gnawed off by rats. Maybe something even worse had happened to them.

The relic now lay on a dish – my old supper dish, I was annoyed to notice – which had been placed on a stool between Petronius and his interviewee, as far as possible, from both of them. In the small room that was still too close. I edged further along the table, in the opposite direction. A fly buzzed in to have a look, then flew off fast in alarm. Gazing at this object changed the atmosphere for all of us.

`Where did you find it?' Petronius enquired in a low voice.

`In the Aqua Marcia.' Tough luck, Glaucus. So much for crystal-clear bathing. `I went in through a top hatch with a surveyor to check if we needed to scrape the walls.' `Scrape them?'

`Full-time job. They get coated with lime, legate. Thick as your leg, if we leave it. We have to keep chipping it away or the whole works would clog up.'

`So was there water in the aqueduct at the time?'

`Oh, yes. Shutting the Marcia's next to impossible. So much depends on it, and if we send inferior water because we're running a diversion, nobs start jumping up and down.'

`How did you find the hand then?'

`It just came floating along and said hello.'

Petronius stopped asking questions. He looked as if he would be happy for once if I interrupted him, but there was nothing I was burning to' interject. Like him, I felt slightly ill.

`When it knocked' my knee I jumped a mile, I can tell you. Do you know' who it belongs to?' asked the water board, slave curiously. He seemed to think' we had answers to the impossible.

`Not yet.'

`I expect you'll find out.' The slave was consoling himself. He wanted to believe something proper would come out of this.

`We'll try.' Petro sounded depressed He and I both knew it was hopeless.