A Gladiator Dies Only Once (16 page)

“The statue had been here for years, you say?”

“That’s right.”

“Sitting here on this pedestal?”

“Yes. Never budged, even when we’d get a bit of a rumble from Vesuvius.”

“Strange, then, that it should have fallen yesterday, when no one felt any tremors. Even stranger that it should fall directly onto a swimmer . . .”

“It’s a mystery, all right.”

“I think the word is murder.”

Caputorus looked at me shrewdly. “Not necessarily.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ask some of the boys. See what they tell you.”

“I intend to ask everyone who was here what they saw or heard.”

“Then you might start with this little fellow.” He indicated the broken Eros.

“Speak plainly, Caputorus.”

“Others know more than I do. All I can tell you is what I’ve picked up from the boys.”

“And what’s that?”

“Cleon was a heartbreaker. You’ve only seen him laid out for his funeral. You have no idea how good-looking he was, both above the neck and below. A body like a statue by Phidias, a regular Apollo—he took your breath away! Smart, too, and the best athlete on the Cup. Strutting around here naked every day, challenging all the boys to wrestle him, celebrating his wins by quoting Homer. He had half the boys in this place trailing after him, all wanting to be his special friend. They were awestruck by him.”

“And yet, yesterday, after he won the laurel crown, he swam alone.”

“Maybe because they’d all finally had enough of him. Maybe they got tired of his bragging. Maybe they realized he wasn’t the sort to ever return a shred of love or affection to anybody.”

“You sound bitter, Caputorus.”

“Do I?”

“Are you sure you’re talking just about the boys?”

His face reddened. He worked his jaw back and forth and flexed his massive shoulders. I tried not to flinch.

“I’m no fool, Finder,” he finally said, lowering his voice. “I’ve been around long enough to learn a few things. Lesson one: a boy like Cleon is nothing but trouble. Look, but don’t touch.” His jaw relaxed into a faint smile. “I’ve got a tough hide. I tease and joke with the best, but none of these boys get under my skin.”

“Not even Cleon?”

His face hardened, then broke into a grin as he looked beyond me. “Calpurnius!” he yelled at a boy across the courtyard. “If you handle the javelin between your legs the way you handle that one, I’m surprised you haven’t pulled it off by now! Merciful Zeus, let me show you how!”

Caputorus pushed past me, tousling Eco’s hair on his way, leaving us to ponder the broken Eros and the empty pool where Cleon had died.

I managed that day to speak to every boy in the gymnasium. Most of them had been there the previous day, either to take part in the athletic games or to watch. Most of them were cooperative, but only to a point. I had the feeling that they had already talked among themselves and decided as a group to say as little as possible concerning Cleon’s death to outsiders like myself, no matter that I came as the representative of Cleon’s father.

Nevertheless, from uncomfortable looks, wistful sighs, and unfinished sentences, I gathered that what Caputorus had told me was true: Cleon had broken hearts all over the gymnasium, and in the process had made more than a few enemies. He was by universal consensus the brightest and most beautiful boy in the group, and yesterday’s games had proven conclusively that he was the best athlete as well. He was also vain, arrogant, selfish, and aloof; easy to fall in love with and incapable of loving in return. The boys who had not fallen under his spell at one time or another disliked him out of pure envy.

I managed to learn all this as much from what was left unsaid as from what each boy said, but when it came to obtaining more concrete details, I struck a wall of silence. Had anyone ever been heard uttering a serious threat to Cleon? Had anyone ever said anything, even in jest, about the potentially hazardous placement of the statue of Eros beside the pool? Were any of the boys especially upset about Cleon’s victories that day? Had any of them slipped away from the baths at the time Cleon was killed? And what of the gymnasiarchus? Had Caputorus’s behavior toward Cleon always been above reproach, as he claimed?

To these questions, no matter how directly or indirectly I posed them, I received no clear answers, only a series of equivocations and evasions.

I was beginning to despair of uncovering anything significant, when finally I interviewed Hippolytus, the wrestler whose backside Caputorus had playfully snapped with his towel. He was preparing for a plunge in the hot pool when I came to him. He untied his leather headband, letting a shock of jet-black hair fall into his eyes, and began to unwrap his wrists. Eco seemed a bit awed by the fellow’s brawniness; to me, with his babyish face and apple-red cheeks, Hippolytus seemed a hugely overgrown child.

I had gathered from the others that Hippolytus was close, or as close as anyone, to Cleon. I began the conversation by saying as much, hoping to catch him off his guard. He looked at me, unfazed, and nodded.

“I suppose that’s right. I liked him. He wasn’t as bad as some made out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wasn’t Cleon’s fault if everybody swooned over him. Wasn’t his fault if he didn’t swoon back. I don’t think he had it in him to feel that way about another boy.” He frowned and wrinkled his brow. “Some say that’s not natural, but there you are. The gods make us all different.”

“I’m told he was arrogant and vain.”

“Wasn’t his fault he was better than everybody else at wrestling and running and throwing. Wasn’t his fault he was smarter than his tutors. But he shouldn’t have crowed so much, I suppose. Hubris—you know what that is?”

“Vanity that offends the gods,” I said.

“Right, like in the plays. Acquiring a swollen head, becoming too cocksure, until a fellow’s just begging to be struck down by a lightning bolt or swallowed by an earthquake. What the gods give they can take away. They gave Cleon everything. Then they took it all away.”

“The gods?”

Hippolytus sighed. “Cleon deserved to be brought down a notch, but he didn’t deserve that punishment.”

“Punishment? From whom? For what?”

I watched his eyes and saw the to and fro of some internal debate. If I prodded too hard, he might shut up tight; if I prodded not at all, he might keep answering in pious generalities. I started to speak, then saw something settle inside him, and held my tongue.

“You’ve seen the statue that fell on him?” Hippolytus said.

“Yes. Eros with his bow and arrows.”

“Do you think that was just a coincidence?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ve talked to everyone in the gymnasium, and nobody’s told you? They’re all thinking it; they’re just too superstitious to say it aloud. It was Eros that killed Cleon, for spurning him.”

“You think the god himself did it? Using his own statue?”

“Love flowed to Cleon from all directions, like rivers to the sea—but he turned back the rivers and lived in his own rocky desert. Eros chose Cleon to be his favorite, but Cleon refused him. He laughed in the god’s face once too often.”

“How? What had Cleon done to finally push the god too far?”

Again I saw the internal debate behind his eyes. Clearly, he wanted to tell me everything. I had only to be patient. At last, he sighed and spoke. “Lately, some of us thought that Cleon might finally be softening. He had a new tutor, a young philosopher named Mulciber, who came from Alexandria about six months ago. Cleon and his sister Cleio went to Mulciber’s little house off the forum every morning to talk about Plato and read poetry.”

“Cleio as well?”

“Sosistrides believed in educating both his children, no matter that Cleio’s a girl. Anyway, pretty soon word got around that Mulciber was courting Cleon. Why not? He was smitten, like everybody else. The surprise was that Cleon seemed to respond to his advances. Mulciber would send him chaste little love poems, and Cleon would send poems back to him. Cleon actually showed me some of Mulciber’s poems, and asked me to read the ones he was sending back. They were beautiful! He was good at that, too, of course.” Hippolytus shook his head ruefully.

“But it was all a cruel hoax. Cleon was just leading Mulciber on, making a fool of him. Only the day before yesterday, right in front of some of Mulciber’s other students, Cleon made a public show of returning all the poems Mulciber had sent him, and asking for his own poems back. He said he’d written them merely as exercises, to teach his own tutor the proper way to write a love poem. Mulciber was dumbstruck! Everyone in the gymnasium heard about it. People said Cleon had finally gone too far. To have spurned his tutor’s advances was one thing, but to do so in such a cruel, deliberately humiliating manner—that was hubris, people said, and the gods would take vengeance. And now they have.”

I nodded. “But quite often the gods use human vessels to achieve their ends. Do you really think the statue tumbled into the pool of its own accord, without a hand to push it?”

Hippolytus frowned, and seemed to debate revealing yet another secret. “Yesterday, not long before Cleon drowned, some of us saw a stranger in the gymnasium.”

At last, I thought, a concrete bit of evidence, something solid to grapple with! I took a deep breath. “No one else mentioned seeing a stranger.”

“I told you, they’re all too superstitious. If the boy we saw was some emissary of the god, they don’t want to speak of it.”

“A boy?”

“Perhaps it was Eros himself, in human form—though you’d think a god would be better groomed and wear clothes that fit!”

“You saw this stranger clearly?”

“Not that clearly; neither did anybody else, as far as I can tell. I only caught a glimpse of him loitering in the outer vestibule, but I could tell he wasn’t one of the regular boys.”

“How so?”

“By the fact that he was dressed at all. This was just after the games, and everyone was still naked. And most of the gymnasium crowd are pretty well off; this fellow had a wretched haircut and his tunic looked like a patched hand-me-down from a big brother. I figured he was some stranger who wandered in off the street, or maybe a messenger slave too shy to come into the changing room.”

“And his face?”

Hippolytus shook his head. “I didn’t see his face. He had dark hair, though.”

“Did you speak to him, or hear him speak?”

“No. I headed for the hot plunge and forgot all about him. Then Caputorus found Cleon’s body, and everything was crazy after that. I didn’t make any connection to the stranger until this morning, when I found out that some of the others had seen him, too.”

“Did anybody see this young stranger pass through the baths and the changing room?”

“I don’t think so. But there’s another way to get from the outer vestibule to the inner courtyard, through a little passageway at the far end of the building.”

“So Caputorus told me. It seems possible, then, that this stranger could have entered the outer vestibule, sneaked through the empty passage, come upon Cleon alone in the pool, pushed the statue onto him, then fled the way he had come, all without being clearly seen by anyone.”

Hippolytus took a deep breath. “That’s how I figure it. So you see, it must have been the god, or some agent of the god. Who else could have had such perfect timing, to carry out such an awful deed?”

I shook my head. “I can see you know a bit about poetry and more than a bit about wrestling holds, young man, but has no one tutored you in logic? We may have answered the question of
how,
but that hasn’t answered the question of
who.
I respect your religious conviction that the god Eros may have had the motive and the will to kill Cleon in such a cold-blooded fashion—but it seems there were plenty of mortals with abundant motive as well. In my line of work I prefer to suspect the most likely mortal first, and presume divine causation only as a last resort. Chief among such suspects must be this tutor, Mulciber. Could he have been the stranger you saw lurking in the vestibule? Philosophers are notorious for having bad haircuts and shabby clothes.”

“No. The stranger was shorter and had darker hair.”

“Still, I should like to have a talk with this lovesick tutor.”

“You can’t,” said Hippolytus. “Mulciber hanged himself yesterday.”

“No wonder such a superstitious dread surrounds Cleon’s death,” I remarked to Eco, as we made our way to the house of Mulciber. “The golden boy of the Cup, killed by a statue of Eros; his spurned tutor, hanging himself the same day. This is the dark side of Eros. It casts a shadow that frightens everyone into silence.”

Except me,
Eco gestured, and let out the stifled, inchoate grunt he sometimes emits simply to declare his existence. I smiled at his self-deprecating humor, but it seemed to me that the things we had learned that morning had disturbed and unsettled Eco. He was at an age to be acutely aware of his place in the scheme of things, and to begin wondering who might ever love him, especially in spite of his handicap. It seemed unfair that a boy like Cleon, who had only scorn for his suitors, should have inspired so much unrequited infatuation and desire, when others faced lives of loneliness. Did the gods engineer the paradox of love’s unfairness to amuse themselves, or was it one of the evils that escaped from Pandora’s box to plague mankind?

The door of the philosopher’s house, like that of Sosistrides, was adorned with a black wreath. Following my knock, an elderly slave opened it to admit us to a little foyer, where a body was laid out upon a bier much less elaborate than that of Cleon. I saw at once why Hippolytus had been certain that the short, dark-haired stranger at the gymnasium had not been the Alexandrian tutor, for Mulciber was quite tall and had fair hair. He had been a reasonably handsome man of thirty-five or so, about my own age. Eco gestured to the scarf that had been clumsily gathered about the dead man’s throat, and then clutched his own neck with a strangler’s grip: To
hide the rope marks,
he seemed to say.

“Did you know my master?” asked the slave who had shown us in.