Free Four for a Boy by Mary Reed, Eric Mayer

suggest that those that nobody sees might possibly be more forthcoming?”
    The other regarded him with a tired frown. “What do you mean?”
    “The people who live on the streets. They’re so much part of the scenery that most of the time we don’t see them unless they hold a hand out. However, they always see us. And since they see us, who else might they have seen?”
    “Not a bad idea, I suppose. You think well on your feet.” He gave John an appraising look. “I noticed that last night. And when you borrowed my sword, I could swear you handled it as if you’d used a blade to better purpose than slicing a bit of pork off a haunch. You’re in excellent condition too. Visit the gymnasium much?”
    John did not take Felix’s interest as a sign of friendliness. That the other was trying to draw him out about his past was obvious.
    “I exercise daily at the baths.” He didn’t mention that he found such bodily exertion helped still the furies that bedeviled him and thus enabled him to present at least a nominally calm face to the world.
    “And a cautious man too. You occasionally have an almost military look about you. If I didn’t know what sort of man you were…” Felix appeared hopeful of further revelations.
    John said nothing, but instead pointed to the beggar in the doorway. “I saw that man sitting right there the day Hypatius was murdered.”
    “I don’t know how you can tell one bag of rags from the next. But if you saw him in the same place he might know something. There’s a good view of the Augustaion from this part of the street.” Felix started across the Mese. “He must at least have seen where that enormous Blue went.”
    The beggar appeared to be less a bag of rags than a disorganized pile of them with a pair of incongruously newish boots protruding from it. Strangely, he did not jump up and run off, as most did when they realized they were about to become the objects of official attention. On the contrary, the eyes set in a web of wrinkles brightened with anticipation. As John and Felix approached, he held out a dirty, three-fingered hand.
    Felix ignored it. Anxious to get back indoors, he began to question the mendicant brusquely.
    The man looked up, his face fixed in a grimace that mixed a vacant smile with an expression of bafflement. Again he waved his open hand at Felix and then at John.
    Felix roughly slapped the hand down. “We’re looking into a death! You will answer me or answer for it!”
    The beggar shook his head, grunted and pointed to his throat and finally extended his hand hopefully again.
    Felix looked puzzled. “What do you mean? You’re hungry? So are we. And cold. So for the final time…”
    The man grunted even more loudly. A panic-stricken note entered his strangled noises.
    John stepped to Felix’s side. “Your questions are fruitless. The man cannot speak.”
    With an oath, Felix turned away. “Naturally! How can I be surprised when everyone else around here is blind and deaf?”
    “There is one person we can be sure saw something.”
    “Is that so? Who would that be?”
    “The church doorkeeper who was stabbed just after Hypatius was murdered.”

Chapter Seven
    The brick-built Hospice of Samsun crouched like a squat, homely beggar in the shadow of the Hagia Eirene. Devoted to healing the sick and broken bodies of the city’s poor, the hospice’s low-ceilinged rooms were inevitably crowded past capacity.
    “It’s the doorkeeper of the Great Church I wish to talk to, Gaius,” Felix informed a ruddy-faced, harried-looking man in a bloodstained tunic. “Is he in fit shape to be questioned?”
    They were standing in the entrance to Gaius’ surgery. The physician, an acquaintance of Felix’s, set a pottery bowl down with a thud on the long wooden table against one wall.
    “Why bother to ask? Even if the poor man were at death’s door, you’d still insist on grilling him like St Lawrence. Doesn’t the Gourd have better things to do than pester