A Gladiator Dies Only Once (24 page)

“It was Cicero who recommended me, then?” In the ten years since I had met him, Cicero had sent quite a bit of business my way.

Poplicola nodded. “I told him I needed an agent to investigate . . . a private matter. A man from outside my own household, and yet someone I could rely upon to be thorough, truthful, and absolutely discreet. He seemed to think that you would do.”

“I’m honored that Cicero would recommend me to a man of your exalted position and—”

“Discretion!” he insisted, cutting me off. “That matters most of all. Everything you discover while in my employ—
everything
—must be held in the strictest confidence. You will reveal your discoveries to me and to no one else.”

From beneath his wrinkled brow he peered at me with an intensity that was unsettling. I nodded and said slowly, “So long as such discretion does not conflict with more sacred obligations to the gods, then yes, Censor, I promise you my absolute discretion.”

“Upon your honor as a Roman? Upon the shades of your ancestors?”

I sighed. Why must these nobles always take themselves and their problems so seriously? Why must every transaction require the invocation of dead relatives? Poplicola’s earth-shattering dilemma was probably nothing more than an errant wife or a bit of blackmail over a pretty slaveboy. I chafed at his demand for an oath and considered refusing, but the fact was that my daughter, Diana, had just been born, the household coffers were perilously depleted, and I needed work. I gave him my word, upon my honor and my ancestors.

He produced something from the folds of his purple toga and placed it on the little table between us. I saw it was a small silver bowl, and in the bowl there appeared to be a delicacy of some sort. I caught a whiff of almonds.

“What do you make of that?” he said.

“It appears to be a sweet cake,” I ventured. I picked up the little bowl and sniffed. Almonds, yes; and something else . . .

“By Hercules, don’t eat any of it!” He snatched the bowl from me. “I have reason to believe it’s been poisoned.” Poplicola shuddered. He suddenly looked much older.

“Poisoned?”

“The slave who brought me the cake this afternoon, here in my study—one of my oldest slaves, more than a servant, a companion really—well, the fellow always had a sweet tooth . . . like his master, that way. If he shaved off a bit of my delicacies every now and then, thinking I wouldn’t notice, where was the harm in that? It was a bit of a game between us. I used to tease him; I’d say, ‘the only thing that keeps me from growing fat is the fact that you serve my food!’ Poor Chrestus . . .” His face became ashen.

“I see. This Chrestus brought you the cake. And then?”

“I dismissed Chrestus and set the bowl aside while I finished reading a document. I came to the end, rolled up the scroll, and filed it away. I was just about to take a bite of the cake when another slave, my doorkeeper, ran into the room, terribly alarmed. He said that Chrestus was having a seizure. I went to him as quickly as I could. He was lying on the floor, convulsing. The cake!’ he said. The cake!’ And then he was dead. As quickly as that! The look on his face—horrible!” Poplicola gazed at the little cake and curled his lip, as if an adder were coiled in the silver bowl. “My favorite,” he said in a hollow voice. “Cinnamon and almonds, sweetened with honey and wine, with just a hint of aniseed. An old man’s pleasure, one of the few I have left. Now I shall never be able to eat it again!”

And neither shall Chrestus, I thought. “Where did the cake come from?”

“There’s a little alley just north of the Forum, with bakery shops on either side.”

“I know the street.”

“The place on the corner makes these cakes every other day. I have a standing order—a little treat I give myself. Chrestus goes down to fetch one for me, and I have it in the early afternoon.”

“And was it Chrestus who fetched the cake for you today?”

For a long moment, he stared silently at the cake. “No.”

“Who, then?”

He hunched his thin shoulders up and pursed his lips. “My son, Lucius. He came by this afternoon. So the doorkeeper tells me; I didn’t see him myself. Lucius told the doorkeeper not to disturb me, that he couldn’t stay; he’d only stopped by to drop off a sweet cake for me. Lucius knows of my habit of indulging in this particular sweet, you see, and some business in the Forum took him by the street of the bakers, and as my house was on his way to another errand, he brought me a cake. The doorkeeper fetched Chrestus, Lucius gave Chrestus the sweet cake wrapped up in a bit of parchment, and then Lucius left. A little later, Chrestus brought the cake to me . . .”

Now I understood why Poplicola had demanded an oath upon my ancestors. The matter was delicate indeed. “Do you suspect your son of tampering with the cake?”

Poplicola shook his head. “I don’t know what to think.”

“Is there any reason to suspect that he might wish to do you harm?”

“Of course not!” The denial was a little too vehement, a little too quick.

“What is it you want from me, Censor?”

“To find the truth of the matter! They call you Finder, don’t they? Find out if the cake is poisoned. Find out who poisoned it. Find out how it came about that my son . . . “

“I understand, Censor. Tell me, who in your household knows of what happened today?”

“Only the doorkeeper.”

“No one else?”

“No one. The rest of the household has been told that Chrestus collapsed from a heart attack. I’ve told no one else of Lucius’s visit, or about the cake.”

I nodded. “To begin, I shall need to see the dead man, and to question your doorkeeper.”

“Of course. And the cake? Shall I feed a bit to some stray dog, to make sure . . . “

“I don’t think that will be necessary, Censor.” I picked up the little bowl and sniffed at the cake again. Most definitely, blended with the wholesome scent of baked almonds, was the sharper odor of the substance called bitter-almond, one of the strongest of all poisons. Only a few drops would suffice to kill a man in minutes. How fiendishly clever, to sprinkle it onto a sweet almond-flavored confection, from which a hungry man with a sweet tooth might take a bite without noticing the bitter taste until too late.

Poplicola took me to see the body. Chrestus looked to have been fit for his age. His hands were soft; his master had not overworked him. His waxy flesh had a pinkish flush, further evidence that the poison had been bitter-almond.

Poplicola summoned the doorkeeper, whom I questioned in his master’s presence. He proved to be a tightlipped fellow (as doorkeepers should be), and added nothing to what Poplicola had already told me.

Visibly shaken, Poplicola withdrew, with instructions to the doorkeeper to see me out. I was in the foyer, about to leave, when a woman crossed the atrium. She wore an elegant blue stola, and her hair was fashionably arranged with combs and pins atop her head into a towering configuration that defied logic. Her hair was jet black, except for a narrow streak of white above her left temple that spiraled upward like a ribbon into the convoluted vortex. She glanced at me as she passed, but registered no reaction. No doubt the censor received many visitors.

“Is that the censor’s daughter?” I asked the doorkeeper.

“No.”

I raised an eyebrow, but the tightlipped slave did not elaborate. “His wife, then?”

“Yes. My mistress Palla.”

“A striking woman.” In the wake of her passing, a kind of aura seemed to linger in the empty atrium. Hers was a haughty beauty that gave little indication of her age. I suspected she must be older than she looked, but she could hardly have been past forty.

“Is Palla the mother of the censor’s son, Lucius?”

“No.”

“His stepmother, then?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” I nodded and took my leave.

I wanted to know more about Poplicola and his household, so that night I paid a visit to my patrician friend Lucius Claudius, who knows everything worth knowing about anyone who counts in the higher circles of Roman society. I intended to be discreet, honoring my oath to the censor, and so, after dinner, relaxing on our couches and sharing more wine, in a roundabout way I got onto the topic of elections and voting, and thence to the subject of census rolls. “I understand the recent census shows something like eight hundred thousand Roman citizens,” I noted.

“Indeed!” Lucius Claudius popped his pudgy fingers into his mouth one by one, savoring the grease from the roasted quail. With his other hand, he brushed a ringlet of frizzled red hair from his forehead. “If this keeps up, one of these days citizens shall outnumber slaves! The censors really should do something about restricting citizenship.”

My friend’s politics tend to be conservative; the Claudii are patricians, after all. I nodded thoughtfully. “Who are the censors nowadays, anyway?”

“Lentulus Clodianus. . .” he said, popping a final finger into his mouth, “. . . and old Lucius Gellius Poplicola.”

“Poplicola,” I murmured innocently. “Now why does that name sound familiar?”

“Really, Gordianus, where is your head? Poplicola was consul two years ago. Surely you recall that bit of unpleasantness with Spartacus? It was Poplicola’s job as consul to take the field against the rebel slaves, who gave him a sound whipping—not once, but twice! The disgrace of it, farm slaves led by a rogue gladiator, thrashing trained legionnaires led by a Roman consul! People said it was because Poppy was just too old to lead an army. He’s lucky it wasn’t the end of his career! But here it is two years later, and Poppy’s a censor. It’s a big job. But safe—no military commands! Just right for a fellow like Poppy—been around forever, honest as a stick.”

“Just what do the censors do?”

“Census and censure, their two main duties. Keep the roll of voters, assign the voters to tribes, make sure the patrician tribes carry the most weight in the elections—that’s the way of it. Well, we can hardly allow those seven hundred and ninety nine thousand common citizens out there to have as much say in electing magistrates as the thousand of us whose families have been running this place since the days of Romulus and Remus; wouldn’t make sense. That’s the census part.”

I nodded. “And censure?”

“The censors don’t just say who’s a citizen and who’s not; they also say what a citizen should be. The privilege of citizenship implies certain moral standards, even in these dissolute days. If the censors put a black mark for immoral conduct by a man’s name in the rolls, it’s serious business. They can expel a fellow from the Senate. In fact. . .” He leaned forward and lowered his voice to emphasize the gravity of what he was about to say. “In fact, word has it that the censors are about to publish a list of
over sixty men
they’re throwing out of the Senate for breach of moral character—taking bribes, falsifying documents, embezzling. Sixty! A veritable purge! You can imagine the mood in the Senate House. Everyone suspicious of everyone else, all of us wondering who’s on the list.”

“So Poplicola is not exactly the most popular man in the Forum these days?”

“To put it mildly. Don’t misunderstand, there’s plenty of support for the purge. I support it myself, wholeheartedly. The Senate needs a thorough housecleaning! But Poppy’s about to make some serious enemies. Which is ironic, because he’s always been such a peacemaker.” Lucius laughed. “Back when he was governor of Greece in his younger days, they say Poppy called together all the bickering philosophers in Athens and practically pleaded with them to come to some sort of consensus about the nature of the universe. ‘If we cannot have harmony in the heavens, how can we hope for anything but discord here on earth?’” His mimicry of the censor’s reedy voice was uncanny.

“Census and censure,” I murmured, sipping my wine. “I don’t suppose ordinary citizens have all that much to fear from the censors.”

“Oh, a black mark from the censor is trouble for any man. Ties up voting rights, cancels state contracts, revokes licenses to keep a shop in the city. That could ruin a man, drive him into poverty. And if a censor really wants to make trouble for a fellow, he can call him before a special Senate committee to investigate charges of immorality. Once that sort of investigation starts, it never ends—just the idea is enough to give even an honest man a heart attack! Oh, yes, the censorship is a powerful office. That’s why it has to be filled with men of absolutely irreproachable character, completely untainted by scandal—like Poppy.” Lucius Claudius suddenly frowned and wrinkled his fleshy brow. “Of course, there’s that terrible rumor I heard only this afternoon—so outrageous I dismissed it out of hand. Put it out of my mind so completely that I actually forgot about it until just now . . .”

“Rumor?”

“Probably nothing—a vicious bit of slander put about by one of Poppy’s enemies . . . “

“Slander?”

“Oh, some nonsense about Poppy’s son, Lucius, trying to poison the old man—using a sweet cake, if you can believe it!” I raised my eyebrows and tried to look surprised. “But these kinds of stories always get started, don’t they, when a fellow as old as Poppy marries a woman young enough to be his daughter, and beautiful as well. Palla is her name. She and her stepson, Lucius, get along well—what of it? People see them out together now and again without Poppy, at a chariot race or a play, laughing and having a good time, and the next thing you know, these nasty rumors get started. Lucius, trying to poison his father so he can marry his stepmother—now that would be a scandal! And I’m sure there are those who’d like to think it’s true, who’d love nothing better than to see Poppy pulled down into the muck right along with them.”

The attempted poisoning had taken place that afternoon—and yet Lucius Claudius had already heard about it. How could the rumor have spread so swiftly? Who could have started it? Not Poplicola’s son, surely, if he were the poisoner. But what if Poplicola’s son were innocent of any wrongdoing? What if he had been somehow duped into passing the deadly cake by his father’s enemies, who had then gone spreading the tale prematurely . . .

Or might the speed of the rumor have a simpler explanation? It could be that Poplicola’s doorkeeper was not nearly as tightlipped as his terse answers had led me to think. If the doorkeeper told another slave in the household about the poison cake, who then told a slave in a neighbor’s house, who then told his master . . .