Arms of Nemesis (26 page)

'Of course.' I stood and began to turn, then stopped. 'One other thing, if I may impose on your patience for another moment, Marcus Crassus. I see that you've been looking over Lucius Licinius's documents.'

'Yes?'

'I wonder if you've come across anything . . . untoward?' 'What do you mean?'

'I'm not sure. Sometimes a man's records can reveal unexpected things. There might be something among all those documents that might have a bearing on my own work.'

'I can't imagine how. The truth is, Lucius usually kept impeccable records; I required him to do so. When I was here in the spring I looked over his ledgers and found everything accounted for, using the methods I had prescribed. Now it's all a puzzle.'

'In what way?'

'Expenses have been entered with no explanation. There are contradictory indications of how often he used the
Fury,
and on what errands. Stranger still, it seems to me that some documents must be missing altogether. I thought at first that I could reconstruct and make sense of them by myself, but I think I shall be unable to. I'd have brought along my chief accountant from Rome if I'd known the state of things, but I had no idea that Lucius's affairs were in such chaos.'

'And do you find any of this suggestive?'

'Suggestive of what?' He looked at me quizzically, then snorted. 'With you, everything comes back to the murder. Yes, it suggests something to me - namely, that the old secretary Zeno had made such a muddle of things that Lucius decided to give him a sound beating, whereupon the hotheaded young stableman Alexandros exploded in a Thracian rage and killed his master, where upon the two slaves fled into the night, only to find themselves swallowed up by the Jaws of Hades. There, I've done your work for you, Gordianus. Now you can go to bed content.'

From the tone of his voice I knew that Crassus insisted on having the final word. I was at the door, reaching to open it, when my hand froze. Something had been not quite right from the moment I entered the room; I had felt an apprehension so vague that I had dismissed it as one blinks away a mote of dust. At that instant I knew what it was, and that I had seen it not once, but over and over as I had sat listening to Crassus and letting my eyes wander about the room.

I turned and walked to the little statue of Hercules in his lion hood.

'Marcus Crassus, was there a guard on this room during the day?'

'Of course not. My bodyguards go where I go. The room was empty, so far as I know. No one has legitimate business to come into this room except me.'

'But someone might have entered?'

'I suppose. Why do you ask?'

'Marcus Crassus, you mentioned the blood on this statue to no one?'

'Not even to Morpheus,' he said wearily, 'with whom I have a meeting long overdue.'

'And yet someone else in the house knew of it. Because since last we spoke someone has done a thorough job of removing the dried blood from the lion's mane.'

'What?'

'See here, where last night there was plentiful evidence of blood trapped in the sculpted furrows, someone has since then deliberately and carefully scraped them clean. You can even see where the metal has been newly scratched.'

He pursed his lips. 'What of it?'

'The rest of the room isn't freshly cleaned; I see dust on the shelves, and a circle from a wine cup on the table. It seems unlikely that a slave would have given such a thorough cleaning to this particular object in this particular room, with so much other work to do in preparation for the funeral. Besides, any domestic slave fit for this house would have known how to clean a statue without scarring the metal. No, I think this was done hurriedly by someone who didn't know that the blood had already been noticed, and hoped to prevent us from seeing it. That someone was not Alexandros, and it surely was not Zeno. "Whereby it follows that the murderer of Lucius Licinius, or someone who knows something about die murder, is here among us, actively concealing evidence.'

'Possibly,' Crassus admitted, sounding weary and cross. 'It's getting chilly,' he complained, plucking his chlamys from the centaur statue and wrapping it across his shoulders.

'Marcus Crassus, I think it might be a good idea to place a guard inside this room at all times, to make sure that nothing else is taken or altered without our knowledge.'

'If you wish. Now, is there anything else?'

'Nothing, Marcus Crassus,' I said quietly as I left the room, walking backwards and nodding my head in deference.

XVI

Why you?
asked Eco, signing sceptically the next morning when I told him of my midnight conversation with Crassus. I took the question to mean:
Why should such a great man confide so much to a man like you?

'Why not?' I said, splashing my face with cold water. 'Whom else can he talk to in this house?'

Eco squared his shoulders and mimed a beard on his face.

'Yes, Marcus Mummius is his old friend and confidant, but at the moment they're feuding about the fate of the slave, Apollonius.'

Eco stuck his nose in the air and painted tendrils of hair swept back from his forehead.

'Yes, there's Faustus Fabius, but I can't imagine Crassus showing weakness to a patrician, especially a patrician who happens to be his subordinate.'

Eco circled his arms in a hoop before him and puffed his cheeks. I shook my head. 'Sergius Orata? No, Crassus would be even less likely to show weakness to a business associate. A philosopher would be a natural choice, but if Crassus has one, he's left him behind in Rome, and he despises Dionysius. Yet Crassus desperately needs someone, anyone, to listen to him — here and now, because the gods are too far away. He faces a great crisis; he is full of doubt. Doubt hounds him from hour to hour, moment to moment, and not just about his decision to take on Spartacus. I think he secretly doubts even his decision to massacre Gelina's slaves. He's a man used to absolute control and clear-cut decisions, counting up tangible profits and losses. The past haunts him - bloody chaos and the death of those he loved most. Now he's about to step into a dark and uncertain future -a terrible gamble, but one worth taking, because if he succeeds he may at last become so powerful that no power on earth can ever harm him again.'

I shrugged. 'So why not tell everything to Gordianus the Finder, from whom no one can keep a secret anyway? As for confidentiality, I'm famous for it - almost as well known for keeping my mouth shut as you are.'

Eco splashed me with a handful of water.

'Stop that! Besides, there's something about me that compels others to empty their hearts.' I said it jokingly, but it was true; there are those to whom others quite naturally confide their deepest secrets, and I have always been one of them. I looked at myself in the mirror. If the power to pull the truth from others resided somewhere in my face, I couldn't see it. It was a common face, I thought, with a nose that looked as if it had been broken, though it had not, common brown eyes and common black curls streaked with more and more strands of silver every year. With the passing of time it had come to remind me of my father's face, as best as I could recall it. My mother I barely remembered, but if my father told the truth when he insisted she had been beautiful, then I had not inherited her looks.

It was also a face that badly needed a shave, if I was to put in a decent appearance at the funeral of Lucius Licinius.

'Come, Eco. Surely out of ninety-nine slaves Gelina has one who's a decent barber. You shall have a shave as well.' I said it just to please him, but when I glanced at his smiling face in the morning sunlight, I saw that there actually was a faint shadow across his jaw.

'Yesterday you were a boy,' I whispered, under my breath.

Ironic as it sounds, there is nothing quite so alive as a Roman household on the day of a funeral. The villa was full of guests, who thronged the atrium and the hallways and spilled over into the baths. While Eco and I reclined on couches, submitting our jaws to be shaved, naked strangers loitered about the pools, refreshing themselves after hard morning rides from points as distant as Capua and the tar side of Vesuvius. Others had arrived by boat, ferried across the bay from Surrentum, Stabiae, and Pompeii. After my ablutions I stood on die terrace of the baths and looked down on the boathouse, where the short pier was too small for all the arrivals; skiffs and barges were lashed to one another, so that the later arrivals had to walk to the pier over a small floating city of boats.

Metrobius, draped in a voluminous towel, joined me on the balcony. 'Lucius Licinius must have been a popular man,' I said.

He snorted. 'Don't imagine they've all come just to see poor Lucius go up in smoke. No, all these wealthy merchants and landowners and vacationing nobility are here for quite a different reason. They want to impress you-know-who.' He glanced over his shoulder toward the heated pool, where the slave Apollonius was helping an old man emerge from the water. 'I had to push and shove all through the house to get here. The atrium is already so crowded I could hardly cross it. I haven't seen so much black in one place since Sulla died over in Puteoli. Though I noticed,' he said, wrinkling his nose, 'that most of the visitors were giving the corpse a wide berth.' He laughed softly. 'And they're already whispering jokes; usually that doesn't start until
after
the ceremony, when the eating begins.'

'Jokes?'

'You know - stepping up to the bier, peering into the corpse's mouth, then sighing, "The coin is still there! Imagine that, with Crassus in the house!" And don't you dare repeat that to Crassus,' he quickly added. 'Or at least don't tell him that you heard it from me.' He stepped away with a dry smile. Apparently he had forgotten that he had told me the same joke the day before.

I peered over the balcony again, wondering how I would ever manage to discover what had been dumped off the pier with so many vessels moored there. Many of the rowers were still in their boats, or loitered about the boathouse, waiting for their masters to return.

Eventually I found Eco, who had disappeared into one of the cubicles for a cool bath to follow his hot one. We dressed in the sombre black garments that had been laid out for us that morning. The slave Apollonius assisted us with the various tucks and folds. His bearing was grave, as suited the occasion, but his eyes were a clear and dazzling blue, unclouded by the fear that haunted the eyes of the other slaves. Was it possible that Mummius had somehow kept him from knowing what the next day might bring? More likely, I thought, Mummius had secredy assured him that he himself would be spared. Did he know that Mummius had failed to sway Crassus?

As he dressed me, I took the opportunity to study him more closely. That he was beautiful was obvious at a glance, and yet the closer and longer I looked the more beautiful he seemed. His perfection was almost unreal, like the famous Discus Thrower of Myron come to life; as he moved, the shifting planes of light across his face highlighted a succession of cameos, each more striking than the last. Where many youths of his age have a stumbling gait, he moved like an athlete or a dancer, without any trace of artifice. His hands were nimble, infusing every movement with an innate and unassuming grace. When he stood close to me, I felt the heat of his hands and smelled the warm sweetness of his breath.

There are rare moments when one senses not the surface of other men and women, but the very life force which animates their being, and by extension all life. I have glimpsed it in moments of passion with Bethesda, and on a few other occasions, in the presence of men or women in great extremity, in the throes of orgasm or close to death or otherwise reduced by crisis to their very essence. It is a frightening and an awesome thing to see beyond the veils of the flesh into the soul. Somehow the force of life in Apollonius was so great that it rent through those veils, or else suffused them with the perfect physical embodiment of itself. It was hard to look at him and imagine that something so alive, so perfect could ever grow old and die, much less be snuffed out in an instant merely for the aggrandizement of a politician's career.

I suddenly felt a great pity for Marcus Mummius. On the journey from Rome, aboard the
Fury,
I had callously remarked that he had no poetry in his soul. I had spoken rashly and in ignorance. Mummius had touched the face of Eros and been stricken; no wonder he was so desperate to save the boy from a senseless death at the hands of Crassus.

Little by little the guests emptied the house and lined the road that led away from the villa. Those who had been closest to Gelina or Lucius congregated in the courtyard to become part of the procession. The Designator, a small wizened man whom Crassus had hired and brought over from Puteoli, set about arranging the participants in their places. Eco and I, having no place in the procession, walked on ahead to find a sunny spot on the crowded tree-lined road.

At length we heard the strains of mournful music. The sound grew louder as the procession came into view. The musicians led the way, blowing on horns and flutes and shaking bronze rattles. In Rome, deference to public opinion and the ancient Law of the Twelve Tables might have restricted the number of musicians to ten, but Crassus had hired at least twice that number. Clearly, he meant to impress.

Next came the hired mourners, a coterie of women who walked with a shuffling gait, wore their hair undressed and chanted a refrain that paraphrased the playwright Naevius's famous epitaph: 'If the death of any mortal saddens hearts immortal, the gods above must this man's death bemoan.. . .'They stared straight ahead, oblivious of the crowd; they shivered and wept until great torrents of tears streamed down their cheeks.

There was a small gap in the procession, just long enough for the plaintive song of the mourners to recede before the buffoons and mummers arrived. Eco brightened at their approach, but I inwardly groaned; there is nothing quite so embarrassing as a funeral procession marred by incompetent clowns. These, however, were quite good; even at the end of the holiday season, there is no lack of first-rate entertainers on the Cup, and the Designator had hired the best. While some of them resorted to crude but effective slapstick, drawing polite laughter from the crowd, there was one among them with a stirring voice who recited snatches of tragic poetry. Most of the standard passages used in funeral processions are familiar to me, but these words were from some fresh and unfamiliar poet of the Epicurean school: