Crassus called to the guard outside the door and issued instructions, then had him bring in the sword that Apollonius had retrieved. From the open door came the noise of the funeral guests in the atrium. Crassus waited for the door to shut before he spoke.
‘Curious,’ he said. ‘This was made at one of my own foundries here in Campania, from ore that came from one of my mines in Spain; you can see by this stamp on the pommel. How did it come to be here?’
‘More to the point,’ I said, ‘where was it supposed to end up?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If we assume that these things were being stored in the boathouse, and had been put there by Lucius Licinius, then what need did he have for so many weapons?’
‘None.’
‘Had he gathered them for your use?’
‘If I had wanted Lucius to divert weapons from one of my foundries and to bring them here, I would have told him so,’ said Crassus curdy.
‘Then perhaps these weapons were being stored here for someone else. Who could possibly have a need for so many spears and swords?’
Crassus looked at me sternly, comprehending but unwilling to say the name aloud.
‘Consider the valuables,’ I went on, ‘the coins and jewellery and metalwork all hoarded together in sacks like a pirate’s booty. Assuming that Lucius didn’t somehow steal it all, then perhaps it was delivered to him as payment.’
‘Payment for what?’
‘For something he himself didn’t need but could obtain -weapons.’
Crassus looked at me, ashen-faced. ‘You dare to suggest that my cousin Lucius was smuggling weapons to an enemy of Rome?’
‘What else is a reasonable man to assume when he comes upon a hoard of weapons and valuables all lumped together in a hidden place? And the boathouse may not have been the only place where such things were stored in transit. The slave boy Meto mentioned to me that he sometimes saw swords and spears stored in the annexe behind the stables, the place where the slaves are now imprisoned. That annexe may have been empty of such wares when you arrived here, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t housed shipments of weapons in the past. And not only weapons; Meto also mentioned seeing stacks of shields and helmets. I hear that some of the Spartacans are reduced to wearing dried melon husks for helmets. Spartacus has a desperate need for well-made armour.’
Crassus glared at me and took a deep breath, but did not speak.
‘I also hear that Spartacus has forbidden the use of money among his men. They’re a nation without currency. The necessities of life they take from the land and the people on it, but they have no use for luxuries. Everything is shared. Spartacus believes that money will only corrupt his warriors. To what better use could he put all the pretty coins and trinkets he’s accumulated than to smuggle them outside his zone of influence in return for things that he and his warriors truly need ��� things like swords, shields, helmets, and spears?’
Crassus considered for a long moment. ‘But it couldn’t have been Lucius who dumped these things off the pier,’ he objected. ‘You’ve just told me that you heard them being dropped into the water on the night you arrived. You said that whoever was doing it then attacked and tried to drown you. It certainly wasn’t Lucius, unless you believe that his shade was stalking you on the pier that night.’
‘No, not his shade. But perhaps his partner.’
‘A partner? In such a disgusting enterprise?’
‘Perhaps not. Perhaps Lucius was innocent of the affair, and the whole business was being conducted right under his nose, without his knowledge. Perhaps he found out and that’s why he was killed.’
‘My cousin’s nose cast a considerable shadow, but not long enough to hide a business like this. And why do you insist on linking this discovery to his death? You know as well as I that he was murdered by those escaped slaves, Zeno and Alexandros.’
‘Do you honestly believe that, Marcus Crassus? Did you ever believe it? Or is it simply so convenient to your own schemes that you refuse to see any other possibility?’ The words came out in a rush, louder and harsher than I intended. Crassus drew back. The door opened and the guard looked inside. I stepped back from Crassus, biting my tongue.
Crassus dismissed the guard with a wave of his hand. He crossed his arms and paced the room. At length he stopped before one of the shelves and stared at a stack of scrolls.
‘There are more than a few documents missing from Lucius’s record,’ he said in a slow, cautious voice. ‘The log which should account for all the trips taken by the Fury this summer, the inventories of her cargo
‘Then summon the ship’s captain, or one of her crew.’
‘Lucius dismissed the captain, and the crew, only a few days before I arrived. Why do you think I manned the vessel with Mummius and my own men to fetch you? I’ve sent messengers to look for the captain in Puteoli and Neapolis, but without success. Even so, there’s evidence that Lucius sent the vessel on a number of trips which are not accounted for.’
‘What other documents are missing?’
‘Records to account for all sorts of expenses. Without knowing what was here before, it’s impossible to know what’s missing now.’
‘Then what I say is possible, isn’t it? Lucius Licinius could have been transacting clandestine business without your knowledge. Treasonable business.’
Crassus was silent for a long moment. ‘Yes.’
‘And someone knows of this besides ourselves, because someone was trying to conceal the evidence by hiding the weapons and booty underwater, just as someone cleaned the blood from the statue that killed Lucius - the same person who must have pilfered the incriminating records. Isn’t it far more likely that this person was responsible for Lucius’s death, rather than two harmless slaves who suddenly decided to run off and join Spartacus?’
‘Prove it!’ said Crassus, turning his back to me.
‘And if I can’t?’
‘You still have a day and a night in which to do your work.’ ‘What if I fail?’
‘Justice will be done. Retribution will be swift and terrible. I announced my pledge at the funeral, and I intend to fulfil it.’
‘But, Marcus Crassus, the death of ninety-nine innocent slaves, to no purpose���’
‘Everything I do,’ he said slowly, emphasizing each word, ‘has a purpose.’
‘Yes. I know.’ I bowed my head in defeat. I tried to think of some final argument. Crassus walked to one of the windows and gazed out at the funeral guests who milled about in the courtyard.
‘The little slave boy - Meto, you call him - is running about, announcing to the guests that the banquet is about to begin,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s time to trade our black garments for white. You’ll excuse me while I go to my room and change, Gordianus.’
‘One last word, Marcus Crassus. If it comes to the crisis -if what you have determined comes to pass - I ask that you consider the honesty of the slave Apollonius. He might have kept his discovery of the silver a secret���’
‘Why, when he’s scheduled to die tomorrow? The silver is of no value to him.’
‘Still, if you could see your way to pardon him, and perhaps the boy Meto���’
‘Neither of these slaves has done anything of extraordinary merit.’
‘But if you could show mercy���’
‘Rome is in no mood for mercy. I think you will leave me now, Gordianus.’ While I left the room he stood stock-still, his arms crossed, his shoulders stiff, staring through the window at nothing. Just before I stepped through the door, I saw him turn and gaze at the little pile of silver coins I had left on the table. His eye glimmered and I watched the comer of his mouth quiver and bend into what might have been a smile.
The atrium was once again crowded with guests, some still in black, some already changed into white for the banquet. I made my way through the crush, ascended the steps, and walked towards my room.
The little hallway was deserted and quiet. The d
oor to my room was slightly ajar. As I drew close I heard strange noises from within. I paused, trying to make sense of them. It might have been the sound of a small animal in pain, or the nonsensical babbling of an idiot with his tongue cut out. My first thought was that Iaia had committed some further sorcery in my room, and I approached cautiously.
I looked through the narrow opening and saw Eco seated before the mirror, contorting his face and emitting a series of uncouth noises. He stopped, scrutinized himself in the mirror, and tried again.
He was trying to speak.
I drew back. I took a deep breath. I walked halfway up the hall, then banged my elbow against the wall, to make a noise so that he would hear. I walked back to the room.
I found Eco inside, no longer before the mirror but sitting stiffly on his bed. He looked up at me as I stepped inside and smiled crookedly, then frowned and quickly looked out of the window. I saw him swallow and reach up to touch his throat, as if it hurt.
‘Did Crassus’s guards come to take your place at the boathouse?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘Good. Look, here on my bed, our white garments for the banquet, neatly laid out for us. It should be a sumptuous feast.’
Eco nodded. He looked out the window again. His eyes were hot and shiny. He bit his lip, blinked, and drew in a shallow breath. Something glistened wetly on his cheek, but he quickly brushed it away.
XIX
The banquet was held in three large, connected rooms along the eastern side of the house, each with a view of the bay. The guests flowed in like a ride of white sea foam. The murmur of the crowd hummed in the high-ceilinged rooms like a faint ocean roar.
As his final duty, the Designator assigned the seating and saw that a slave showed each guest to his place. Crassus, resplendent in white and gold, held court in the northernmost room, where he was joined by Fabius, Mummius, Orata, and the more important businessmen and politicians from the various towns around the Cup. Gelina presided over the central room, with Metrobius at her side, surrounded by Iaia and Olympias and the more prominent female guests.
To the third room, the biggest and the farthest from the kitchens, belonged those of us who belonged nowhere else, the junior partners and second sons, the leftovers and hangers-on. I was amused to see Dionysius assigned to our company; he balked when the slave showed him to his couch, quietly demanded to see the Designator, and was then summarily sent back to his place across the room from Eco and me, stuck away in a corner, not even beside a window. In any normal circumstance the household’s resident philosopher would have been seated close to the master or mistress. I suspected it was Crassus who had instructed the Designator to stick Dionysius away in a dark corner, as a deliberate snub. He truly despised the philosopher.
Since the time was as near to midday as evening, Dionysius elected to have his green potion before rather than after the meal. To assuage his dignity, he made quite a show of demanding it immediately and was unnecessarily rude to the young slave girl who ran to the kitchens to fetch it for him. A few moments later she returned with trembling hands and set the cup on the little table in front of him.
I looked around the room, at the various couches clustered about the little tables. I saw no one I knew. Eco was pensive and withdrawn and had no appetite. I was content to nibble at the delicacies placed before me and contemplate my course of action over the remaining hours.
From where I lay, I could see straight into the farther rooms. If I rose onto my elbow I could glimpse Crassus sipping his wine and conferring with Sergius Orata. It was Orata who had first told me that Lucius Licinius had come into unexplained wealth; did he know more than he had told me? Could he indeed have been the shadowy partner involved in Lucius’s smuggling scheme? With his round, blandly self-satisfied face, he hardly looked capable of murder, but I have often found that rich men are capable of anything.
Marcus Mummius, reclining close to Crassus, looked nervous and unhappy ��� and why not, considering that all his pleas for the salvation of Apollonius had been rebuffed by Crassus? It struck me as unlikely that Mummius could have been Lucius’s shadow partner, given the bad blood between them over the matter of Apollonius. Yet it occurred to me that Mummius could have ridden up from the camp at Lake Lucrinus and back again on the night of the murder. What if he had done so, to give himself a chance to approach Lucius again about buying the slave? If Lucius was half as stubborn as his cousin, he would have refused once more to sell the slave; could that have sent Mummius into a murderous rage? If so, then by killing Lucius, Mummius would have inadvertently set in motion the destruction of the very person he desired, the young Apollonius ��� and the only way to save the boy would be to admit his own guilt. What a pit of misery that would plunge him into!
My eye fell on Crassus’s ‘left arm’, Faustus Fabius of the haughty jaw and the flaming hair. He had met Lucius Licinius on the same occasions as Mummius, and thus had had the opportunity and the connections to have become Lucius’s shadow partner and to embark on what must have been a fabulously lucrative, if extraordinarily dangerous, enterprise. Mummius had told me that Fabius came from a patrician family of limited means, but of his character I knew very little; such men face the world wearing masks more rigid than the waxen masks of their dead ancestors. The Fabii had been present at the birth of the Republic; they had been among the first elected consuls, the first to wear the toga trimmed with purple and to sit in the ivory chair of state wrested from the kings. It seemed presumptuous even to suspect a man of such high birth of treachery and murder, but then, such traits must run in the blood of patricians, or else how did their ancestors pull down the kings, stamp down their fellow Romans, and become patricians in the first place?
Nearer at hand, in the middle room, my eyes fell on Gelina. She seemed the least likely candidate of all. Everything indicated that her love for her husband had been genuine, and that her grief was deep. Iaia, however low her opinion of Lucius, also seemed unlikely; besides, she and Olympias had been in Cumae on the night of the murder, or so I had been told. Would any of the women in the house, even Olympias, have had the strength to smash Lucius’s skull with the heavy statuette, and then to drag his body into the atrium? Or to carry the bundles of weapons from the boathouse to the pier, and to knock me into the water?
The same might be asked of Metrobius, given his age, but he bore watching. He had been a part of Sulla’s inner circle, and thus could possess few scruples, even about murder. He was a man who held long and festering grudges, as I knew from his tirade against Mummius. Retired from the stage, bereft of his lifelong benefactor, deprived by the passing years of his legendary beauty, in what secret pursuits did he invest his restless energies? He was devoted to Gelina and had despised Lucius; could he have used Gelina’s misery as an excuse to kill her husband? Was he the shadow partner? His hatred for Lucius wouldn’t necessarily have kept him from investing a part of his accumulated fortune in Lucius’s schemes. It was even possible, I thought, that he might have foreseen Crassus’s decision to annihilate the slaves, including Apollonius, as a consequence of the murder; thus, by killing Lucius and letting events take their course, he could wreak a terrible revenge on Mummius. But was even his subtle and conniving mind capable of such a vicious and convoluted plot?
Of course, despite my discoveries at the boathouse and all evidence to the contrary, it could still be that���
‘It was the slaves who did it! Knocked off half of Lucius’s head and then ran off to Spartacus!’
For an instant I thought it was a god who spoke, reprimanding me for my lurid speculations and reminding me of the one possibility I refused to consider. Then I recognized the voice, which came from the couch behind me. It was the man I had overheard gossiping with his wife at the funeral. They were gossiping again.
‘But remember Crassus’s oration? The slaves won’t go unpunished - and a good thing!’ said the woman, smacking her Lips. ‘One has to draw a line. Slaves of the lower sort can never b
e relied upon to know their place; let them witness an atrocity such as this one in their own household and they’re spoiled forever ��� no use to anyone for anything. Once they’ve seen another of their kind get away with murder, from that point on you can never turn your back on them. Best to put them out of their misery, I say, and if you can turn that to setting a good example for other slaves, then all the better! That Marcus Crassus knows the right way to do things!’
‘Well, he certainly knows how to run his own affairs,’ the man agreed. ‘His wealth speaks for that. They say he wants the command against Spartacus, and I hope those fools in the Senate for once have the wisdom to give the right job to the right man. He’s a tough nut, no doubt about that; it takes a hard man to put a household of his own slaves to death, and that’s just the sort we need right now - a stem hand to deal with the Thracian monster! My dear, could you pass me one of those green olives? And perhaps a spoonful more of the apple sauce for my calf s brains? Delicious! Alas, that Crassus should have to put such splendid cooks to death, as well!’
‘But he’s going to do it, even so. That’s what I’ve heard ��� and poor, pitiful Gelina shaking her head the whole time and wishing it wasn’t so. She’s always had a soft heart, just like Lucius had a soft head, and you see what’s come of that! But not Marcus Crassus - hard head and an even harder heart. He allows not a single exception to Roman justice, and that’s as it should be. You can’t make exceptions in times like these.’
‘No, you certainly can’t. But a man would have to be as unflinching as Cato to put to death a cook who can create a dish as exquisite as this.’ The man smacked his lips.
‘Shhh! Don’t speak the word.’
Arms of Nemesis - Roman Sub Rosa 02 Page 23