Past Crimes: A Compendium of Historical Mysteries

by Jennifer Ashley

  “I told him you wouldn’t,” Marcianus said, looking satisfied. “I will convey your answer.”

  I said nothing, only scooped up another handful of almonds.

  Cassia seated herself at the table again, opening her tablet and taking up a stylus. She made a note—I wondered if she’d marked down the exact day and time I’d turned down my old trainer’s offer to return and make him some money.

  I knew why Marcianus had come. I’d told the man in the tunnels to seek him, and that Cassia would pay the fee, if we had any money to give Marcianus, that is. What I did not know was why Marcianus wanted to speak to me. He hadn’t come to convey the message that my lanista wanted me to fight for him again—he wouldn’t have bothered to trudge all the way across Rome for that.

  “Who was the man you sent to me?’ Marcianus asked. “It was a straightforward fracture—you twisted his wrist to block a knife thrust. Why did he try to kill you?”

  Cassia’s eyes widened, and she sucked in a breath. I’d fallen asleep before I could tell her about the man with the knife, and obviously this was the first Marcianus had mentioned it. “He attacked me in the tunnels,” I said. “They are part of the sewers, I think. It was very dark, and he must have been hungry.”

  “Hungry and terrified,” Marcianus said. “I set his wrist and gave him something to eat. He wouldn’t say his name, and he ran off as soon as I let him go. But he was impressed with you.”

  I shrugged. “I hurt him pretty badly. I didn’t want him to die.”

  Marcianus acknowledged this. “The wound didn’t bleed much. As I say, it was clean. Very professional.”

  I shrugged again. I didn’t admit how much the blood on the man’s tunic, put there by me, had unnerved me.

  Marcianus gave me a keen eye, as though he knew what was going on in my head. “I heard the vigiles were looking for you last night. They must have given up.”

  “They sleep during the day,” Cassia said sourly. “I have no doubt they or the urban cohorts will try again later.”

  “I didn’t kill Selenius.” I spoke in a firm voice. I didn’t think Marcianus would be sitting here so calmly if he thought I’d murdered a man, but I wanted to make certain he knew the truth. “I don’t know who did.”

  “Tell me about his body,” Marcianus said, interested. “I’ll look at it if I can—who is his family?”

  “I only heard of him yesterday,” I began with a growl, but Cassia pulled another wax tablet to her and opened it.

  “Gaius Selenius was unmarried,” she said as she consulted her notes. “His house is on the Esquiline, where he lived with his sister, Selenia, and his nephew, who is also called Gaius Selenius—he adopted this nephew. The sister collected Selenius for burial, so I imagine his body is still at the house. Selenia and her son will inherit the business. I believe young Gaius is already having the shop cleaned.”

  Marcianus snorted. “He wastes no time.”

  Cassia did not look as disapproving. “Selenius’s rivals will waste no time taking his customers. If the Selenia and Gaius need the business to live, they will have to make sure they don’t lose too many punters to the taint of Selenius getting murdered in his own shop. You know how superstitious Romans are.”

  Marcianus’s smooth face split into a smile. “So are Greeks, dear lady. But in a different way, I grant you. The sister and nephew will have to appease Selenius’s spirit, yes, and any other spirits who took the opportunity of the violent death to flock in. And you are right. Such a thing should not be delayed. However …” Marcianus returned his attention to me. “If I cannot convince the poor woman to let me have a look at her brother’s body, we have only you, Leonidas, who can tell me of him. So please describe what you saw. Leave nothing out.”

  I didn’t want to revisit the room awash with blood, even in my mind, but did want to hear what Marcianus made of the death.

  I closed my eyes.

  If I concentrated on a thing I could remember it in its entirety. I don’t know whether this came from my training to always know where an enemy stood, or simply something in my humors, but I could picture a scene vividly for some time if I tried. Probably why I had so many nightmares. A curse from the gods, I thought it. Maybe one day I’d assuage whatever god I’d offended and be granted the blissful ability to forget.

  “Selenius’s shop,” I said. “Ten feet on a side, and in height. Light came through the open wall above his counter, from the atrium in the center of the macellum. He was lying under the counter, head bent against the wall, feet spread. His right sandal had one thong broken. His tunic must have been recently laundered, or it would not have been so white. That made the blood on it so much more vivid.”

  I broke off, bile rising. If I hadn’t been so worried about Sergius as I’d stood at the edge of the pool of blood, I’d have been out in a back lane, vomiting until there was nothing left.

  Marcianus’s tone gentled. “Can you describe the patterns the blood made? Think of it as paint—where had it been stroked?”

  I swallowed. Paint and blood might look similar, but paint smelled clean in comparison.

  “A line around his neck,” I said. “A stream down his throat, though some had dried and was caked. His tunic soaked with it, like it had caught a wave from the sea.” I swallowed again. “It spread from under his body, past his feet, to collect in a pool. It lapped almost all the way to the walls to either side of him. Only a small patch was left bare.” I’d used that patch to step around the room to Sergius.

  “Hmm.” I heard Marcianus’s interest but didn’t open my eyes. “What else?”

  I didn’t want to mention Sergius. I trusted Marcianus with my life, but he was a conscientious man. If he decided Sergius had killed Selenius, or at least had witnessed the death, he’d hunt the child down and take him to a magistrate.

  I wiped Sergius from the picture in my head. “There was a door on the other side of the room. I thought it led to the shop next to Selenius’s, but it didn’t. It went to tunnels that came out on a street not far from the fountain of Orpheus.”

  “Hmm,” Marcianus said again.

  “Hmm, what?” Cassia asked. “Your hmms have me most intrigued.”

  “It was a warm day,” Marcianus said. “And yet you say the cut on his neck was black, the blood there dried. I can’t be certain until I see this man myself, but I would guess he died somewhere in the fourth hour. Possibly close to the fifth, but no later.”

  Cassia gave a little victory hop in her chair. “Ha! Leonidas was asleep—sleeping quite soundly—until nearly the fifth hour yesterday. It took me the longest time to wake him. He left at a few minutes past the fifth hour—I made a note of it.” She pulled out a tablet filled with scratches to show Marcianus.

  Marcianus had seen Cassia’s records before, but he still looked awed upon viewing them. By habit, every day, Cassia noted every single time I came and went from the house, and every time she did, every place we walked, every coin we spent, and on what. She claimed she did this to keep us from running out of money, but I suspected she simply enjoyed it. A person can make a note of an expense without writing a lengthy record of every moment of the day.

  “If your notes can convince a magistrate, then Leonidas has nothing to worry about,” Marcianus concluded. “A witness to Leonidas’s sleep or Selenius’s death would be better though.” He meant a witness to my sleep other than Cassia. A slave’s testimony was not always regarded as relevant.

  “Our neighbors,” Cassia said in perfect seriousness. “They likely heard Leonidas snoring.”

  Marcianus chuckled. “You will have to ask, my dear. Leonidas, let me see your hands.”

  I frowned a bewildered moment, and then held them out, palm-up. Salt from the almonds sparkled on my skin. I hadn’t had time to bathe, so I carried the dirt from walking through the tunnels, my journey to Marcella’s farm, my ride on the merchants’ wagon, and whatever I’d touched between the Porta Capena and home last night.

  Marcianus clasped m
y wrists and dragged my hands to him, bending close to examine them.

  His strength always surprised me. Marcianus was a small man, but he could yank a reluctant gladiator around with ease. I didn’t like others touching me—I’d been pushed, shoved, and manhandled since I was a boy—but I’d learned to put up with Marcianus.

  He leaned over my right palm until his nose nearly touched it, and then ran a fingernail over the crease between my forefinger and wrist. “No blood there. Even if you wash carefully, blood can linger in the tiniest grooves in the skin. If you’d killed Selenius, you’d have had it all over you.”

  Marcianus released me with satisfaction. He rose with his usual vigor, lifted his bunched toga, and looped it around his arms. He’d need more help to position it correctly, but Cassia remained seated. Draping togas, she’d told me, was no more one of her talents than dressing hair.

  Marcianus drained his cup of wine, dabbed his mouth with the back of his hand, and headed for the door.

  “I will visit the man’s sister and try to examine the body,” he said, pausing on the threshold. “Don’t worry, lad. I’ll make sure you aren’t taken for it.”

  I’d stood up to see him out, though Marcianus was already halfway down the stairs before I reached the door. He waved up at me, turned the corner of the landing, and was gone.

  Cassia remained on her stool. She studied her tablet, her smiles gone, her expression troubled.

  I sat down on the stool Marcianus had vacated. “What?”

  Cassia let out a sigh. “Nonus Marcianus will do his best, but the only thing that will clear you for certain, Leonidas, is finding out who truly did this.”

  I agreed with her, but there was no use restating it. “Why didn’t you mention the forged vouchers?” I asked. When she hadn’t, I didn’t bring them up either, because I knew she’d have a reason why not.

  “They may have nothing to do with the murder, and Marcianus might have asked why I hadn’t alerted a magistrate about them right away. He is a stickler for the rules.”

  I reached into the bowl of almonds and closed my large hand around its remaining contents. “So are you.”

  Cassia gave me a prim look. “Only when it’s expedient. Ah, well, I suppose we’d better make a start.”

  I dumped the handful almonds into my mouth and chewed. “You make a start,” I said. “I’m for the baths.”

  Chapter 6

  I heard Cassia’s light steps behind me as I walked out the door.

  “Why on earth are you going to the baths when you’re a wanted man?” she asked, quieting her voice so the patrons of the wine shop wouldn’t hear. “You’ll be dragged to prison.”

  I looked back at her. Cassia’s dark eyes held fear, a lock of her hair escaping to brush her cheek.

  “No one has come to fetch me is because they know I won’t run,” I said. “If I’m arrested at the baths, at least I’ll be clean.”

  I turned away before she could argue. Strangely, she did not. When her voice came to me as I reached the landing, it was hushed.

  “I’ll prove it wasn’t you, Leonidas,” she said. “Marcianus and I will prove it.”

  I believed her. I’d never met a person with as much clarity of thought as Cassia. She’d explained, when I’d remarked upon this once upon a time, that if I considered her intelligent, it was because her father had been a brilliant teacher and writer, and he’d taught Cassia how to think. She didn’t believe herself to be unusually clever—she thought she’d never live up to her father’s greatness.

  No matter. I had faith in Cassia. She, a Greek woman and a slave, had more honor and loyalty in her than most Roman men who’d been raised to such concepts. She’d not thank me for the comparison, but it was true.

  Instead of heading for the small bath complex I usually frequented, I walked to the Campus Martius and the Baths of Agrippa.

  I preferred my friendly bathhouse near the old wall under the shadow of an aqueduct, where slaves and freedmen, along with plebs from the Aventine and the lower slopes of every hill, mingled without inhibition.

  The more ostentatious baths, like the ones built by Agrippa seventy and more years ago, also welcomed slaves and freedmen. But it was understood, if not ruled, that we’d keep to ourselves and not interfere with the enjoyment of our betters. The patricians and equestrians also saw no reason not to order any slave they saw to do their bidding, even if it was said slave’s afternoon off.

  I sought the Baths of Agrippa today because large bath complexes were founts of all gossip. If anyone knew anything about Selenius and his murder, it would be discussed in the caldarium.

  I made for the Campus Martius via the Pallacinae neighborhood and its lines of shops shaded by colonnades. I welcomed the coolness under the arches, fading into the crush of shoppers and merchants on this fine summer morning.

  Rome would celebrate the festival of Fortuna soon, and Cassia and I would join the festivities, which would involve the death of unfortunate animals, a feast, and plenty of wine. I’d eat a morsel of meat to honor the gods, but I didn’t have much taste for cooked flesh. The wine I’d drink until I couldn’t stand.

  I skirted the enormous portico of the Saepta Julia, which had seen gladiatorial games in its vast center. A building crane rose somewhere behind it, men on a high rooftop manipulating a stone block into place on some new edifice, while the crane’s great wheel slowly turned.

  I walked past the Pantheon of Agrippa, funded by the man who’d dedicated many public buildings to the honor of the great Augustus. Cassia told me Agrippa was to have been Augustus’s heir and the next princeps, but he’d died too soon. Perhaps the uncertainty of these times could have been mitigated, she liked to say, if he had lived.

  I paid little attention to politics except to avoid the intrigues that swept the city from time to time, resulting in entire families dead or exiled. I preferred to be a nobody not doing anything in particular, rather than a patrician in a hilltop villa wondering when the Praetorian Guard would come for him.

  The bath complex I entered on the other side of the Pantheon was grand. Columns soared to a lofty ceiling held up by caryatids, paintings of lavish landscapes and villas covered the walls, and a mosaic of Neptune in his chariot pulled by sea serpents flowed across the main floor.

  I stripped down in the apodyterium—the changing room—and found an eager attendant who helped me rub oil into every inch of my grimy skin. I even poured oil over my head, my hair kept shaved close enough that I could clean it that way. The attendant, who asked me incessant questions about what it had been like in the amphitheatres smacking my sword into my friends’ guts, finally turned away to the next bather. I left for the gymnasium, which was under the open air.

  I’d been to these baths only once before, but one of the trainers there, a former gladiator himself, long retired, welcomed me. He had wooden practice swords in a rack, and he and I hacked at posts set up at intervals around the room while the sun poured down on us.

  The routine of the thrusts and steps returned to me, so familiar I could go through them while my mind floated.

  The exercise shook off my fog. As it did, I realized something that others might not—a gladiator doesn’t slice with his sword—he stabs. We’d been taught that a hard thrust was more effective than a swipe. I would have stuck my sword straight into Selenius’s throat, not tried to cut him open.

  The killer, I reasoned, must have come and gone through the tunnels. The shopkeeper and the two Gauls in the macellum had seen me enter, but they’d seen no one else, according to Cassia. That meant the murderer had either been a person they saw in the market every day and so didn’t notice, or he’d come in and gone out through the tunnels, as I had. An avenue I would explore this afternoon, when the shops were quiet again.

  The trainer admired my patterns and asked me to show him a few moves. We sparred in slow motion, attracting much attention from the other bath-goers. I kept my movements slow and deliberate, knowing that if my body felt the moves
of true combat, I might instinctively go for the kill, no matter that our swords were carved from wood.

  I ended the bout first, saying I needed to get on with my day. The trainer took my sword, slapped me on the shoulder and told me I could spar with him any time—he’d welcome the relief from tedium.

  We parted. I fetched my strigil and had another attendant scrape the dirt and sweat I’d raised from my body, the oil taking it easily away.

  I drew a crowd during this ritual. Each time the attendant flicked away the accumulated gunk, men would dive for it, scooping it in a cloth or small dish. The oiled sweat of a gladiator could be made into an unguent, which was believed to heal and give strength. The blood of a dying gladiator had even more potency, but I had no intention of giving them any of that.

  I ended the entertainment by walking to the tepidarium, plunging into the pool to wash away what remained of the oil. Then I swam, stretching my limbs. I’d learned to swim as a boy fishing in the Tiber, far upstream of Rome. I remembered little of my childhood, but the cool rushing water under the sunshine came back to me as I floated across the pool.

  I refreshed myself with a quick dunk in the cold pool in the next room, then walked to the caldarium and eased myself into the scalding hot water. Many bathers choose to move from cold to tepid to hot, but I preferred to go from freezing directly to heat.

  My muscles softened and relaxed as I lolled on a bench in the water. I leaned my head against the tiled wall and let myself doze.

  “Did you do it, Leonidas?” A man’s voice drifted to me. “Did you kill the money-changer?”

  I opened my eyes. I first saw the reds, yellows, and blues of the painted wall, a faux window opening to green trees of a lavish garden.

  Next I saw who’d spoken, a youngish man with his short dark hair plastered to his head by the water, his limbs slim but muscled.

  I didn’t know him, but in a city of a million inhabitants it wasn’t surprising. His question meant word had spread. The fact that I hadn’t been dragged off to the Tullianum to await trial and execution meant there was doubt.