A Body in the Bathhouse by Lindsey Davis Page A

it happened in the town. The body was not brought here.” He was patient, but he thought me a time-waster.
    “Alexas, don’t misread me. I’m not looking for trouble. I just heard that the death count was too high here and it might be significant.”
    “Significant of what? Slack management?”
    Well, that would do as an explanation until I found a more precise definition. If that was ever possible.
    I left him to stanch a workman’s blood-dripping finger. I noticed that he carried out the task with calmness—just as he faced everything, including me jumping about looking for scandals.
    Now that I had talked to him, I thought I understood him. He was a man in his middle twenties, with drab coloring and a dull personality, who had found a niche as a specialist. He was happy. He seemed to know that in rougher areas of life he would have ended up a nobody. Some lucky chance had brought him to work at the routine end of medicine. He dispensed herbal remedies, stanched blood on straightforward wounds. Decided when a surgeon ought to be sent for. Listened to depressives with a helpful manner. Perhaps once in his career he would encounter a real maniac who needed tying down in a hurry. Perhaps his ignorance killed off a few patients, but that’s true of more doctors than doctors will admit. On the whole, society was the better for his existence and that knowledge pleased him.
    I suppose it pleased
me
to think that Alexas would regard it as a matter of professional competence to report any irregularity. I would find no clues otherwise. I would have to rely on Alexas for information on the past “accidents.”
    But the situation was covered now: I was here. That should reassure anyone who had the misfortune to be done in in murky circumstances!
    When I left the medical post, somebody was hanging about outside in a way that made me look twice at him. I felt he was intending to quiz Alexas about me. When I stared straight at him, he changed his mind. “You’re Falco?”
    “Can I help you?”
    “Lupus.”
    Broad-browed and squat-bodied, with a tan that said he had lived out of doors in all weathers for maybe forty years, he seemed familiar. “And your position is?”
    “Labor supervisor.”
    “Right!” He had been at the project meeting; Cyprianus pointed him out to me. “Local or foreign workers?”
    Lupus looked surprised that I knew there were two. I just waited. He muttered, “I do the overseas.”
    There were benches outside the bandage house for queuing patients. I sat down and encouraged Lupus to do likewise. “And where are you from yourself?”
    “Arsinöe.” It sounded like a hole at the back of a gully in the desert.
    “Where’s that?”
    “Egypt!” he said proudly. Reading my mind, the loyal sand flea added, “Yes, yes; it’s the place they call Crocodilopolis.”
    I took out my note-tablet and a stylus. “I need to talk to you. Was Valla one of your men? Gaudius? Or the man who died in the knife fight at the canabae?”
    “Valla, Dubnus, and Eporix were mine.”
    “Eporix?”
    “A roof feature fell on him.” The heavy finial Alexas showed me.
    “And tell me about the knife victim? That was Dubnus, wasn’t it?”
    “Big Gaul. A complete ass. How he managed not to get himself slaughtered twenty years before this, I’ll never know.”
    Lupus spoke matter-of-factly. I could accept that half his workforce were madhats. Almost certainly they came from poor backgrounds. They led a grueling life with few rewards. “Give me the picture.” I left off the stylus to look informal.
    “What do you want?”
    “Background. How things work. What are the good and bad aspects?
    Where does your labor hail from? Are they happy? How do you feel yourself?”
    “They come from Italy mostly. Along the way a few Gauls are recruited. Spaniards. Eporix was one of my Hispanians. The fine trades get workers from the east or central Europe; they pick up on the orders for materials in the marble yards or wherever,