Murder on the Appian Way (45 page)

"But if I'd known how to ride a horse -"

"I've ridden horses all my life, and they pulled me off my mount with no trouble at all."

"But nobody pulled me off my horse. I was thrown! If I'd stayed on, I could have ridden for help."

"Nonsense. You'd have stayed and fought, and they'd have killed you for certain. You did your best, Davus."

"And it wasn't good enough."

Where had he come by such a conscientious nature, having been a slave all his life? "Davus, Fortune smiled on you. The horse threw you, you were left for dead, and you're alive today. Fortune smiled on all of us. We're still here, aren't we? You should let that be enough."

He finally looked me in the eye. "Master, there's something I have to say. You said you were glad to find out I was still alive, but you can't know how glad I was today, when you showed up at the door! Because - well, I can't explain it. I wish I could, but I can't. May I go now?"

"Of course, Davus. Get some sleep." He lumbered away, tongue-tied and close to tears. I thought I understood. Minerva, who could see everything from the place where she had fallen, must have had quite a laugh at me that night.

The next morning I asked Diana to show me the note she had mentioned in her letter to Meto, the one that had arrived by anonymous courier addressed to her mother. It was just as she had transcribed it:

Do not fear for Gordianus and his son. They have not been harmed. They will be returned to you in time.

I showed it to Eco. "Does the handwriting look familiar to you?" "No."

"Nor to me. Still, it tells us something. The parchment is of good quality, as is the ink; it didn't come from a poor household. Moreover, the spelling is correct, and the letters are properly made, so we may assume that the writer is educated."

"Probably a slave, taking dictation."

"Do you think so? To send a message such as this, I imagine a man might actually write the note himself. I think it might profit us to look among my records and correspondence, to see if we can find another example of this handwriting."

"I don't have many such specimens, and neither do you, Papa. Most letters come on wax tablets, so that you can write over them and send them back."

"Yes, but we may find something—a bill, a receipt, anything. Do you see how he's made the letter G in my name? That's rather distinctive. If we could find the man who makes his Gs that way ..."

"We'd find a man who must know something about our captivity."

"Exacdy."

Eco smiled. "I need to clean my study and sort through my correspondence, anyway. Shall we start here, or at my house on the Esquiline?"

"Here, I think. Unless of course you want to drop by your house just to have a look at it, since you've been away so long. Of course, we should report to the Great One, sooner or later -"

As if responding to a cue in a play, Davus appeared in the doorway.

"A caller, Master."

"Anyone I know?"

"I think you gave him a nickname. Something silly ..." Davus looked thoughtful. "Oh, I remember: Baby Face!"

I turned to Eco. "It looks like we shall be seeing the Great One sooner then, not later. Should we take cloaks, Davus?"

"No, it's mild this morning, Master, and the sky is clear. Shall I ... shall I come with you?"

"I doubt if there's any need, Davus, with Baby Face and his men to look after us. Stay here. You've done such a good job of looking after the women in our absence."

I thought this would cheer him up, but my words of praise only seemed to plunge Davus into a deeper gloom.

XXVIII

As consul, despite the fact that he retained command of his legions in Spain, Pompey was now legally able to enter the city and might have taken up residence in his old family house in the Carinae district. Instead he chose to remain in his villa out on the Pincian Hill, probably because it was more defensible, I thought, as we ascended through the terraced gardens ringed with soldiers keeping watch among the statuary. Was this how a king would live, if Rome had a king?

The Great One received us in the same room as before. He sat in a corner with a pile of documents on his lap, dictating to a secretary, but as we entered he put the documents aside and dismissed the secretary. He showed us onto the terrace, which was bright with morning sunlight. No columns of smoke marred the skyline of the city. Pompey had vowed to restore order, and so he had.

"You've been gone for a very long time, Finder. I must confess, I had almost given up on you. It was a pleasant surprise when I received news of your return yesterday. You both look well enough, if a bit thinner than when I last saw you. I managed to keep myself informed of your circumstances, thanks to your wife. You were waylaid down by the Monument of Basilius, I understand. And not too many days ago she received some sort of note advising her not to worry, promising that you would eventually be freed. And here you are."

"Except that our captors didn't free us, Great One. We escaped."

"Really?" Pompey raised an appreciative eyebrow. "You've had an adventure, then. Here, sit. I could use a good story to distract me from my own affairs for a while. Begin at the beginning."

If Pompey preferred to call it a story rather than a report, I had no objection, though it was clear from his frequent questions that he wanted complete details of everything we had seen, heard and done on the Appian Way. He didn't call his secretary to take notes, apparently preferring to hold the relevant details in his head and to keep the information entirely to himself. I held very little back from him. We had struck a bargain, after all. The payment he had offered could never make up for the days I had lost in captivity, but he had fulfilled his guarantee to keep my family safe while I was gone.

About certain points, especially regarding the actual encounter between Milo and Clodius, he questioned us intently. Eco and I had gone over the evidence so many times in our captivity that we could have answered his questions in our sleep. Indeed, I was sick of talking and thinking about it, and Pompey apparently sensed this, for now and then he would sit back and fall into easy conversation for a while, asking if we had enjoyed the amenities of his Alban villa and the skills of his cook, before delving back into our discoveries along the Appian Way. The conversation assumed a certain rhythm, intense for a while and then relaxed, and before I realized it the entire morning had passed. Pompey was not a great orator, but he was a skilled interrogator. Long experience as a general had taught him how to brief and debrief his men. No wonder his judicial reforms had placed greater emphasis on questioning witnesses and less on rhetorical summations. If anything I reported startled or alarmed him, including the details of our incarceration, he had the control not to show it.

I ended my report with a brief account of our escape and a few words about our stay at Caesar's headquarters in Ravenna. Pompey seemed impressed that we had met with the commander himself.

"He said that I should convey to you his warmest regards," I said.

"Did he?" Pompey seemed vaguely amused. "Tell me, how did he treat Cicero?"

While I was considering how to answer this, Pompey noticed the smirk on Eco's face and nodded knowingly. "Pretty shabbily, then?"

"Caesar seemed to be very busy, and kept putting him off" I said carefully.

"Ha! You mean he did everything he could to make Cicero feel like an idiot. It's because I sent him,
of course." "I beg your pardon, Great One?"

"Cicero was there to represent me. You didn't realize that, Finder? What, did he tell you he was acting all on his own?"

"Not exactly ..."

"He fooled you, then. Admit it! Well, Cicero has fooled all of us at one time or another, so why not you, too? What a, fox he is. I'm sure he put on quite an air, acting the great saviour of the state who must dash here and there, making sense of all the strife and linking everything together. The fact is, I sent Cicero to Ravenna, to bargain with Caesar for me. Right now, you see, I have the power I need to do certain things that need doing. But Caesar's faction in the Senate could still cause me an awful lot of headaches. They're wary of me. They fret about this sole consulship of mine. To balance things out, they insist that Caesar have a chance to stand for consul next year, even if he's absent in Gaul. Well, why not? Caelius was the sticking point, threatening to veto the special exemption for Caesar. That made things interesting. Then there's this new uprising among the Gauls; Caesar is eager to tidy things up in Rome before he heads north. That made things even more interesting. Oh, I'll give Caesar what he wants, of course, but one must always negotiate a bit. So I thought, who better to send as my envoy than Cicero? There's Caesar, harried and pressed and getting ready to leave on a dangerous campaign, and who should show up for an audience but a man he absolutely can't stand, Marcus Cicero! Caesar will take out his irritation on poor Cicero, but at the same time he'll have to acknowledge that I've done him a favour. Meanwhile, Cicero will have a chance to feel that he's powerful and important, since he's the only person who can knock any sense into that blockhead, Caelius, and he'll feel absurdly beholden to me for giving him such a grave responsibility - letting him into the game, making him a mediator between Caesar and myself. And if nothing else, the trip has got Cicero out of my hair for a while!"

I blinked and nodded, thinking that I really had no understanding of politics and politicians at all.

"Well, Finder, I appreciate your honesty and thoroughness. I also appreciate your suffering at the hands of your captors. If you were a soldier, I would say that you had served beyond the call of duty. You shall be rewarded. I don't forget these things."

"Thank you, Great One."

"If you wish, you may keep my guards at your house."

"I would appreciate that, Great One. For how long?"

"For the duration of the current crisis. There will be a resolution rather soon now, I think." He took a long sip of wine. "You know, Finder, you and your son are not the only ones who've faced danger in the last month or so. I've had my own small adventures, trying to keep my head attached to my shoulders. I dare say I could have used a man of your skills here in Rome to help me make sense of it all." "Adventures, Great One?"

"There are those who say Milo is quite determined to do me in." "Really?"

"Don't blanch, Finder! I won't assign you to investigate Milo's intentions. I have enough people looking into that already, and you deserve a rest. Still, I rather wish you had been here to help me deal with the episode of Licinius the butcher-priest."

"I beg your pardon, Great One?"

"Licinius; the man's a butcher and a priest. He's a popa, the one who actually cuts an animal's throat when the priests make a sacrifice; this Licinius does the bloody work while the others tend to the chanting and incense. But in his own time, he runs a butcher shop in the arcade along the Circus Maximus. Convenient, eh? I dare say some of the flesh that's been sacrificed to the gods one day ends up being sold to mere hungry mortals the next. But the fellow seems to be fairly respectable, for a priest. My dealings with him started a few days before the Senate voted to make me sole consul. Licinius showed up at my door one night, explaining who he was and begging to see me, for the sake of my own safety, he said. I had to think twice before admitting a professional slaughterer into my presence!"

He took a sip of wine. "Licinius apparently has a regular clientele of bodyguards and gladiators from the Circus — his place is something of a gathering place for big meat-eaters. That day a group came in to gorge themselves on blood sausages and wine. They got very drunk, on the blood as much as the wine, Licinius said, and let it slip that they were part of a plot by Milo to assassinate me. When they realized the butcher was listening, they backed him against a wall and put a knife to his ribs, saying they'd kill him if he told anyone.

"After he closed up his shop for the day he came here, quite distraught. I heard him out, then summoned Cicero, to see what he had to say in Milo's defence. Before Licinius was halfway through his story, Cicero launched into a blistering assault on the man's character. Called him a butcher masquerading as a priest, said he'd drawn more blood with his knife than any of the men he was accusing, said he was likely to be a paid assassin himself because he was bankrupt and desperate for money, and on and on.

"Do you see the lapse in logic, Finder? How was it that Cicero happened to know so much about this obscure butcher from the

Circus Maximus? How was it that he arrived at my house already armed with arguments against him — unless there really was a plot and Cicero already knew something about it? I don't accuse Cicero; I don't believe he would actively take part in a conspiracy to kill me. But I think Milo's gladiators must have warned Milo that the butcher had overheard them, and Milo must have mentioned it to Cicero, so that Cicero wasn't entirely surprised when he saw Licinius. When the butcher lifted up his tunic to show where the gladiator's dagger had been pushed against his ribs, Cicero brayed like a donkey. 'That little scratch? Do you expect us to be impressed with that? You want us to believe a big, strong gladiator made that tiny scratch? You've obviously used one of your wife's hairpins and scratched yourself and even then not much. For a butcher you've awfully squeamish about drawing any of your own blood!'

"Then, while Cicero was still ranting, a man claiming to be a friend of the butcher showed up, wanting to see him. I let Licinius meet the fellow in the anteroom, but of course I had the anteroom watched, and a moment later a guard came in to tell me that Licinius's so-called friend was trying to bribe him to keep his mouth shut. Right here, under my own roof! That was quite enough for one day. I sent Licinius home under guard, I locked up the fellow who tried to bribe him — who was a mere errand runner and knew nothing - and I told Cicero to get out of my sight before I throttled him.''

"And what came of all this?" I said.

"Eventually I put the evidence before the Senate. When Milo spoke he claimed that he'd never seen most of the gladiators in question. Some of them he admitted to having owned at one time, but he said he had manumitted them long ago and was no longer responsible for them. As citizens, they couldn't be tortured for evidence, of course, and they kept their mouths shut. Milo suggested that Licinius the butcher had overheard a drunken fantasy and misunderstood most of it. I had no real proof to the contrary. And that's where the matter rests... for now." Pompey gazed at the city below. "Perhaps I could have used your help to get at the truth of the matter, Finder, but you weren't here."