Murder on the Appian Way (57 page)

Was I a fool, leaving Davus outside and going to face Milo alone? I braced myself for the confrontation. I was not sure how I would feel when I saw him. He had done me a great wrong, and I had every reason to despise him, and yet, oddly, the experience of my incarceration made me feel a kind of sympathy for him. It is a terrible thing, for a man to lose all his dreams, to have everything taken away from him except the bare means of sustenance. Milo had risen from obscurity to a position of great power. The consulship itself had been within his grasp — then his world had been shattered in a moment and his destiny had gone spiralling out ofhis control. He had played a dangerous game, and in the end had lost eveiything. Whether he deserved his fate or not, the totality ofhis ruin moved me. Nevertheless, I intended to tell him what I thought ofhis treatment of me, and to demand restitution.

The slave showed me to a room with a decidedly feminine atmosphere. The walls were painted with scenes of peacocks in full fan strutting across wildly blooming gardens. A low dresser was covered with little cosmetics boxes, jewellery cases, brushes and burnished hand mirrors all made of fine woods and metals inlaid with precious stones. Across the room, a riot of colourful gowns and stolas spilled from an open wardrobe. Dominating the room was a large sleeping couch with a diaphanous red canopy. The air was scented with jasmine and musk.

Sounds of splashing and laughter came from a doorway at the far side of the room, which evidently led to a private bath. I could hear both male and female voices. Where had the doorkeeper taken me, and why had he gone off without announcing me? I cleared my throat as loudly as I could.

The laughter and splashing stopped. There was dead silence. I cleared my throat again and called out, "Milo?" The response was silence, then a burst of laughter and splashing louder than before.

"Wait there," called a woman's voice. I heard whispered conversation and more laughter. Finally she appeared in the doorway, wearing a loose, unbelted gown which did very little to conceal the plump, voluptuous contours of her body. Masses of ginger-coloured hair were piled and pinned atop her head. Whatever she had been doing in her bath, she had managed not to get her hair wet.

I had met her father once long ago. The dictator Sulla had been near the end of his life; Fausta Cornelia must have been no more than a child then. Thirty years later, she was still too young to show the ravages of severe dissipation, which had ruined her father's looks, but there was a decided family resemblance — the same fair complexion, the same carnivorous smile, the same wilful fire behind the eyes. She was not graceful; when she moved, some part of her body always seemed to jiggle or sway. Instead of grace, she exuded a ripe fleshiness, and even from a considerable distance I could feel the radiant heat of her body, flushed and pink from her hot bath. Her high birth had attracted two promising husbands; other attributes had attracted a steady string of lovers, and I was being given a good look at them.

"So, you're the Finder," she said.

"Yes. I came to see your husband on a matter of business." "My husband isn't here."

"No?" I looked towards the door to the bath. I could still hear an occasional splash and the sound of voices.

"If Milo were here, do you think I'd be taking a bath with two of his gladiators?"

She looked to see if her candour would shock me. I did my best to keep a blank expression.

"I realize that Milo must be very busy during his last days in Rome," I said. "It isn't absolutely necessary that I see him face to face, but I do want to make sure that he receives this." I held up the little scroll with Pompey's seal.

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, not another bill! Thank the gods I kept my own income, even if it is in my brother's name." She took the scroll from me and walked down a short hallway. She jiggled a good deal behind as well, I noticed. We came to a cluttered room filled with documents. "My husband's study," she announced, with an air of distaste. "From here, he was going to run the Republic. What a joke that turned out to be! I suppose there'll never be another man like my father, a real man who can bring this unruly town to heel."

"I'm not so sure of that," I said quietly, thinking of Pompey, and of Caesar.

She didn't hear. "This is the latest pile of bills," she said, indicating a tall box overflowing with scrolls and scraps of parchment. "Shall we toss yours on top? There. But don't be surprised if it gets moved to the bottom, or lost altogether."

"Who's attending to sorting out all these bills? Is your husband doing it himself?"

"Gods, no! Milo's a wreckage; he can hardly sort out which shoe to put on first in the morning. One peek inside this room and he's reduced to a blubbering baby. No, this will all be dealt with after he leaves. Cicero will take care of it. Or Tiro will, I should say; Tiro is a wonder at organizing things."

"I see. Here, then, let's put my request aside from all the rest. If
you would, tell Cicero to honour it first. Tell him that Gordianus the Finder insists. Cicero will know why. So will Tiro."

She looked at me wryly. "And you think I don't? I know who you are, Finder. I'm more aware of my husband's affairs than you seem to think. He was quite bent on killing you, you know. It was all he talked about for days."

"Really?" Her candour about her lovers was not nearly as startling as her candour about her husband's plots.

"Oh, yes. Milo considered you to be quite a menace. You should be honoured, I suppose. Of course, towards the end, he was seeing an assassin in every cupboard and a spy behind every bush. You obsessed him for a while. Cicero kept telling him that he was blowing any threat you posed out of all proportion. Cicero said that your reputation was grossly inflated, that you were barely competent, really, and that Milo should stop worrying about you."

"How kind of Cicero."

"He was trying to protect you, you fool. But Milo was determined to see you dead, in a cold sweat about it. In the end Cicero made him agree to a compromise, and Milo simply had you abducted But you must be as clever and persevering as he thought - you escaped before the trial came up. By Hercules, what a fright you must have given Cicero when you popped up on the road right in front of him!" She emitted a short, barking laugh.

"I only wish I could have appreciated the humour at the time."

"Can't we all say that, in retrospect? If only I'd known that marrying Milo would turn into such a joke! And that horrible day on the Appian Way, when I thought I was living through a nightmare, it was really all a grotesque farce from beginning to end. The cruellest irony of all was that Milo never intended to kill Clodius. The fight broke out on its own, and when Milo sent his men after Clodius, he ordered them to spare him! The gladiators still swear that they didn't touch Clodius at the inn."

"Is that a fact?"

"Do you doubt it? Come, I'll let them tell you the story themselves." She took me back to her room. "Boys! You can come out of the bath now. My visitor has promised not to bite you."

First one appeared, then the other; the two of them could not possibly have fitted through the door at once. They wore-loincloths but were otherwise naked and still damp from their bath, two great steaming masses of hairy flesh, each of them twice the size of an ordinary man. I noticed that they were nicked with little scars here and there, but were mostly unmarked, as one might expect of gladiators who had never lost a match. They moved with surprising lightness and grace considering their bulk. Unlike Fausta, nothing shook or jiggled when they walked; for all their fleshiness, their muscles were as solid as marble.

I winced to see their famously ugly faces so close. "Eudamus and Birria," I whispered.

They walked across the room with supreme nonchalance, pushed aside the diaphanous drapery and lay down side by side on Fausta's sleeping couch. The frame groaned and sagged under their weight.

"My husband intends to take them with him to Massilia," said Fausta wistfully. "He'll need protection, of course. But gods, I shall miss the two of them!"

"I take it that you don't intend to accompany your husband into exile?"

"Follow Milo to Massilia, to live among Greeks and Gauls and washed-up Roman windbags? I had sooner live out my days on Milo's pig farm down in Lanuvium."

I looked at Eudamus and Birria warily. "Are you sure they can talk?"

"It seems almost too much to expect, doesn't it, given all their other talents? But yes, they can actually speak - though it's Birria who does all the talking. Eudamus is the shy one, because he's so much prettier, I suppose." The less repulsive of the two made a simpering smile and actually blushed. The uglier one wrinkled his nose and grunted. "Boys, this is Gordianus. I was telling him a few things about the day that Clodius died, and he didn't believe me."

"Do you want us to tear his head off his shoulders?"

"No, Birria. Perhaps some other time. Do you remember how the fight started that day?"

"Of course." Birria crossed his arms behind his head, showing off biceps as big as his head. "We met that fool Clodius on the road, which might have been trouble right off
,
but we passed without a hitch, everything as smooth as silk. But the fool couldn't let the opportunity pass to shout an insult at us at the last moment."

"And you lost your temper, didn't you?" Fausta commiserated.

"I did. I threw my spear at him. I meant it to whizz by his head, but he made a move and it hit his shoulder." Birria laughed. "Knocked him clean off his horse, and I didn't even mean to. Then it was Mars in charge and every man for himself. We got the best of them. Pretty soon they were running like rabbits into the woods and down the road."

"Then the master sent you after them," prompted Fausta.

"After he threw his tantrum," agreed Birria.

"And what were his instructions?"

Birria stretched on the couch. His legs reached so far over the end that he was almost able to touch his toes to the floor. "The master said, 'Kill all the rest if you have to, but take Clodius alive. Don't harm a hair on his head, or I'll send the lot of you off to the mines.' So we chased the fool down to Bovillae, where he was holed up inside the inn. We had to go in and drag his men out, one by one. The stupid innkeeper got in the way; Eudamus took care of him. We had the situation under control, and all that was left was to drag Clodius out of the inn by the scruff of his neck. Then that fellow Philemon and his friends came along. He pitched a fit, shouted some threats and shook his fist at us, but as soon as we took two steps towards him he let out a squeal and turned tail. He and his friends scattered all over the place. So we went after them. What else could we do? Eudamus chased one, I chased another, and all our men followed along. You'd think that someone would have had the sense to stay and keep a watch on Clodius, but no one thought to." He shrugged, bunching a great mass of muscles around his oxlike neck. "Everything was crazy that day."

I shook my head at the simplemindedness of it. "And when you finally rounded up the witnesses and came back -"

"Clodius was gone."

I nodded. "Because Sextus Tedius had already come along and dispatched him to Rome in his litter, while you were off chasing Philemon ..."

"Yes, but we didn't know that," protested Birria. "When we got back to the inn, we couldn't figure out where in Hades Clodius had got to."

"So you argued about it for a while; that was the hushed argument Philemon only half overheard without understanding."

Birria shrugged. "We decided to head back and ask the master what to do. Clodius was wounded. We figured he couldn't get far."

"And on the way, you passed Sextus Tedius, resting below the House of the Vestals, and he saluted you, while his daughter -"

"We just ignored the old senator and hurried back to the master. He took one look at the prisoners, saw that we didn't have Clodius, and threw another tantrum. While he paced up and down we loaded the prisoners into a wagon and sent them on to the master's villa at Lanuvium, along with the mistress. Then the master decided that Clodius would probably make a run back to his villa on the mountain, so that's where we headed."

"But when you got there, you didn't find Clodius."

"We searched everywhere - in the stable, behind the rock piles, all through the house. We started threatening the slaves in charge, the foreman and that fellow Halicor. 'Where's Publius Clodius?' the master kept yelling."

"You were looking for Clodius at the villa — not for his son!"

"That was a dirty lie the Clodians put out afterwards, saying the master went on a hunt for Clodius's little boy. What would we have done with him? We didn't even know the boy was there, and we certainly never saw him. It was Clodius himself we were hunting for. The master was frantic that we couldn't find him. He kept asking us how badly Clodius was wounded. He figured that Clodius must be hiding in the hills-"

"And my dear husband dreaded what would happen next," added Fausta, "now that blood had been spilled and Clodius would be mad for revenge. Milo didn't know that Clodius was dead until he sneaked back into the city the next day. Then of course we heard the story about how Sextus Tedius had found the body, and we figured out what must have happened."

"Did you really?" I said. "And the next step was for Milo to concoct his own fanciful version of the incident - all that nonsense about Clodius setting an ambush for him."

"It was a good try," said Fausta wistfully. "But there was no way for him to wriggle out of it in the end, was there? Not even with Cicero on his side — and what a mess he made of things! The irony, you see, is that Milo never intended to have Clodius killed, nor to harm his little boy. Once Clodius was wounded - by you, Birria, you very, very naughty boy - Milo simply wanted Clodius to be taken alive, to keep him safe and quiet until we could figure out what to do next. But Philemon drew the men away from the inn. Either Clodius's wounds were worse than everyone thought, or else ..."

"Yes?"

"Milo suggested to Cicero that someone else might have actually finished him off."