Arms of Nemesis (7 page)

The dark hallway opened into an atrium. The space was square, surrounded by a colonnaded portico on the ground floor and a narrow walkway on the floor above. Cobblestone pathways meandered through a low garden. There was a small fountain at the centre, where a bronze faun threw back his head in delight as tiny jets of water splashed from his pipes. The workmanship was exquisite. The creature seemed to be alive, ready to leap and dance; the sound of bubbling water was almost like laughter. At our approach, two yellow birds who were bathing themselves in the tiny pool flew in a startled circle about the faun's prancing hooves, then upwards to perch nervously on the balustrade that circled the upper storey, and then upwards again into the blue sky.

I watched them ascend, then lowered my eyes to the garden again. That was when I saw the great funeral bier at the far end of the atrium, and the body that lay upon it.

Fabius walked through the garden, where he paused to dip his fingers into the basin at the faun's feet and then touch them to his forehead. Eco and I followed his example and joined him before the body. 'Lucius Licinius,' said Fabius in a low voice.

In life, the dead man had possessed great wealth; either that or his funeral arrangements were being provided by someone with a remarkable purse. Even very wealthy families are usually content to lay their deceased upon a wooden bed with ivory legs and perhaps some decorative ivory inlays. This elegantly carved bed was made entirely of ivory, from head to foot. I had heard of such lavishness, but had never before seen an example. The precious substance glowed with a waxen paleness almost as smooth and colourless as the flesh of the dead man himself.

Purple blankets embroidered with gold lay upon the bed, along with adornments of asters and evergreen branches. The corpse was dressed in a white toga with elegant green and white embroidery. The feet were clad in freshly oiled sandals and pointed toward the door of the house, as prescribed by tradition.

Eco wrinkled his nose. An instant later I did the same. Despite the perfumes and unguents with which the body had been anointed, and the pan of incense set above a low brazier nearby, there was a decided odour of decay in the air. Eco moved to cover his nose with the hem of his sleeve; I batted his hand away and frowned at his rudeness.

Fabius said in a low voice, 'This is the fifth day.' It would be two more days until the funeral then, to allow the seven days of public mourning. The body would be quite pungent by then. With such an ostentatious display of wealth, surely the family had paid for the best anointers to be found in Baiae, or more likely had brought them over from bustling Puteoli, but their skill had not been good enough. There was an added irony in the carelessness with which the deceased was displayed; a few stray tendrils of ivy had fallen over his head, obscuring not only half his face but any laurel crown that he might have been wearing in remembrance of some earthly honour.

'This ivy,' I said, 'looks almost as if it had been placed over his face on purpose . . .'

Fabius did not stop me as I gently lifted the green tendrils that had been so skilfully arranged to hide the dead man's scalp. The wound beneath was of the sort that makes anointers of the dead throw up their hands in despair — almost impossible to purify and seal, too large to be hidden in any subtle way, too deep and ugly to be looked at for long. Eco made an involuntary sound of disgust and turned his face away, then leaned back to take a closer look.

'Hideous, isn't it?' whispered Fabius, averting his face. 'And Lucius Licinius was such a vain man. A pity he can't look his best in death.'

I steeled myself to look at the dead man's face. A sharp, heavy blow or blows had destroyed the upper right quadrant of his face, tearing the ear, smashing the cheekbone and jaw and ruining the eye, which despite any efforts to close it after death remained narrowly opened and clotted with blood. I studied what remained of the face and was able to imagine a handsome man of middle age, greying slightly at the temples, with a strong nose and chin. The Lips were slightly parted, showing the gold coin that had been placed on his tongue by the anointers - the fee for the boatman Charon to ferry him across the river Styx.

'His death was not an accident?' I offered.

'Hardly.'

'An altercation that came to blows?'

'Possibly. It happened late at night. His body was found here in the atrium the next morning. The circumstances were obvious.'

'Yes?'

'A runaway slave — some fool following the example of Spartacus, it appears. Someone else will explain the matter to you in more detail.'

'This was done by an escaped slave? I am not a slave hunter, Faustus Fabius. Why was I brought here?'

He glanced at the dead man, then at the bubbling faun. 'Someone else will explain.'

'Very well. The victim — what did you call him?' 'Lucius Licinius.'

'He was the master of the house?' 'More or less,' said Fabius. 'No riddles, please.'

Fabius pursed his lips. 'This should have been Mummius's job, not mine. I agreed to escort you to the villa, but I never agreed to explain the matter to you once you arrived.'

'Marcus Murnmius isn't here. But I am, and so is the corpse of a murdered man.'

Fabius grimaced. Patrician or not, he struck me as a man used to being stuck with unpleasant jobs, and he did not like it. What had he called himself — the left hand of Crassus? 'Very well,' he finally said. 'This is the way things were with Lucius Licinius. He and Crassus were cousins, closely linked by blood. I gather they hardly knew one another growing up, but that changed when they became men. Many of the Licinii were wiped out in the civil wars; once things got back to normal under Sulla's dictatorship, Crassus and Lucius formed a closer relationship.'

'Not a friendship?'

'It was more in the nature of a business partnership.' Fabius smiled. 'But then everything is business with Marcus Crassus. Anyway, in any relationship there must be a stronger and a weaker partner. I think you must know enough about Crassus, if only by hearsay, to imagine which of them was subservient.'

'Lucius Licinius.'

'Yes. Lucius was a poor man to start with, and he would have stayed that way without Crassus's help. Lucius had so little imagination; he wasn't the sort to see an opportunity and seize it, unless he was pushed. Meanwhile, Crassus was busy making his millions in real estate up in Rome — you must know the legend.'

I nodded. When the dictator Sulla finally triumphed in the civil wars, he destroyed his enemies by seizing their property and rewarded his supporters, Pompey and Crassus among them, with villas and farms; thus had Crassus begun his ascent, driven by an apparently boundless appetite for property. Once in the streets of Rome I had come upon a burning building, and there was Crassus bidding on the tenement next to it. The owner, confused and desperate and believing he was about to lose his property to the spreading flames, sold it to Crassus on the spot for a song, whereupon the millionaire called out his private fire brigades to put out the flames. Such tales about Crassus were commonplace in Rome.

'Everything Crassus touched seemed to turn to gold,' Fabius explained. 'His cousin Lucius, on the other hand, muddled about trying to make a living off the land, like all good, old-fashioned plebeians. He lost and lost until he was bankrupt. Finally he begged Crassus to save him, and Crassus did. He made Lucius a kind of factotum, a representative to look after some of Crassus's business enterprises on the Cup. In a good year - without pirates or Spartacus - there's a great deal of business transacted on the Cup; it's not all luxurious villas and oyster farms. Crassus owns mines in Spain, and a fleet of ships that bring the ore to Puteoli. He owns metalworkers in Neapolis and Pompeii who turn the ore into utensils and weapons and finished works of art. He owns ships that transport slaves from Alexandria to Puteoli. He owns farms and vineyards all over Campania, and supplies the hordes of slaves that ate needed to work them. Crassus can't oversee all these small details himself; his interests extend from Spain to Egypt. He delegated responsibility for local business here on the Cup to Lucius, who oversaw Crassus's investments and enterprises in a plodding but adequate manner.'

'The running of this house, for example?'

'Actually, Crassus himself owns the house and all the land around it. He has no need for villas; he scoffs at the idea of retreating to the countryside or the coast to relax and read poetry. And yet somehow he keeps acquiring them, dozens of villas by now. He can't keep empty houses all over Italy, so he prefers to rent them to his family and his factotums. Then, when he travels, he can reside in them when and as he needs to, a guest and yet more than a guest.'

'And the household slaves?'

'They are also the property of Crassus.'

'And the
Fury,
the trireme in the harbour that brought me from Ostia?'

'That belongs to Crassus, too, although it was Lucius who oversaw its use.'

'And the deserted vineyards and fields we rode through on the way from Misenum?'

'Property of Crassus. Along with numerous other properties and manufactories and gladiator schools and farms in the region, from here to Surrentum.'

'Then to call Lucius Licinius the master of this house—'

'Licinius gave the orders and acted independently in his own home, to be sure. But he was nothing more than Crassus's creature. A servant, really, if a privileged and very pampered one.'

'I see. Is there a widow?'

'Her name is Gelina.'

'And children?'

'Their marriage was barren.'

'No heir?'

'Crassus, as his cousin and patron, will inherit Licinius's debts and possessions.' 'And Gelina?'

'She now becomes Crassus's dependent.'

'From the way you speak, Faustus Fabius, it seems that Crassus owns the whole world.'

'I sometimes think he does. Or will,' he said, raising an eyebrow.

V

There was a loud booming at the door. A slave hurried to answer it. The door swung ponderously open, illuminating the dim hallway with a wedge of muted sunlight that framed a stocky, broad-shouldered silhouette in the flowing red cape of a military officer. Marcus Mummius marched towards us through the little garden, trampling on a bed of herbs and banging his elbow against the delicate faun.

He stopped before the body and scowled at the sight of the exposed wound. 'You've already seen it, then,' he said, reaching out to replace the camouflage of ivy and making a mess of it. 'Poor Lucius Licinius. I suppose Fabius has explained everything to you.'

'Not at all,' I said.

'Good! Because it's not his job to brief you. I wouldn't have thought he could keep his lips sealed around a stranger, but perhaps we'll make a soldier of him yet.' Mummius smiled broadly.

Fabius gave him a withering look. 'You seem to be in high spirits.'

'I raced my men all the way up from Misenum. A swift ride to loosen the joints after a few days at sea — that and the air of the Cup should put any man in high spirits.'

'Still, you might lower your voice just a little, in deference to the dead.'

Mummius's smile disappeared in his beard. 'Sorry,' he muttered,

and returned to the fountain to dab at the water and touch his moistened fingers to his bowed forehead. He looked uneasily at the body, and then at each of us, waiting for any notice of his impiety to the shade of Lucius Licinius to pass.

'Perhaps we should call on Gelina,' he finally said.

'Without me,' Fabius said. 'I have business to attend to in Puteoli, and not much time if I'm to get there and back before sundown.'

'And where is Crassus?' Mummius called after him.

'In Puteoli as well, on business of his own. He left this morning with word that Gelina should not expect him back before dinner this evening.' The door opened for him, pulled by an invisible slave in the shadows so that it seemed to open by magic at his approach. He stepped into the light and disappeared.

'What a prig,' Mummius muttered under his breath. 'And for all his high-flown attitude, they say his family could barely afford to buy him a decent tutor. Good blood, but one of his ancestors emptied the family coffers and no one ever filled them up again. Crassus took him on as a lieutenant only as a favour to Fabius's father; he hasn't turned out to have much talent as a military man, either. I could name a few plebeian families who've made more of a mark in the last hundred years or so.' He smiled a bit smugly, then called to a little slave boy who was crossing the atrium: 'You there, Meto, go and find your mistress and tell her I've arrived with her guest from Rome. As soon as we've refreshed ourselves in the baths, we shall call on her.'

'Is that necessary?' I asked. 'After the insane rush to get me here, do you really think we should spend time in a tub of water?'

'Nonsense. You can't meet Gelina smelling like a sea horse.' He laughed at his own joke and put a hand on my shoulder to lead me away from the corpse. 'Besides, taking the waters is the first thing anyone does when he arrives in Baiae. It's like praying to Neptune before setting out to sea. The waters here are alive, you know. Homage must be paid.'

It seemed that the relaxing airs of the Cup could loosen even Mummius's staid and stodgy discipline. I put my arm around Eco's shoulders and followed our host, shaking my head in wonder.

What Mummius had casually referred to as the baths was in fact an impressive installation within the house that seemed to have been built over a natural terrace on the side of the hill, facing the bay. A great coffered dome lacquered with gold paint arched over the space, pierced by a round hole at the summit that admitted a beam of pure white light. Beneath this was a round pool with concentric steps leading into its depths, its surface obscured by roiling masses of sulphurous steam. An archway on the eastern side opened onto a terrace furnished with tables and chairs, with a view of the bay. A series of doors around the pool defined a semicircular arcade; the doors were of wood painted dark red, the handles were of gold in the shape of fish with their heads and tails attached to the wood. The first door led into a heated changing room; the other rooms, so Mummius explained as we shed our tunics, contained pools of various sizes and shapes, filled with water of various temperatures.