The Deadliest Lie

by June Trop

  “The secutor’s helmet both protects him from and makes him vulnerable to the retiarius’s net. Enclosing his entire head, the helmet is smooth and with a rounded top so the net can slide off easily, but its tiny eyeholes narrow his field of vision. So the secutor has to get close to the retiarius, well within the reach of the net. Now that’s what I call a match!

  “And you should see what happens when it looks like a gladiator’s been killed in the arena. A ‘Mercury’ or ‘Charon’ presses a red-hot iron to his body, and if he moves, the faker’s throat is cut then and there before he’s dragged off to the spoliarium. You know what that is, right, Sis? That’s the pit where the bodies of the slain beasts and gladiators are dumped until the mass burial.”

  I continued to hear his words. I suppose I could have even repeated them, but I no longer had the forbearance to make sense of them, let alone challenge them with an objection that Papa hadn’t already preached a million times. So I just let him talk, listening only when he mentioned Papa again.

  “Papa knew how much I loved the games, but would he ever take me? Would he ever enroll me in a collegium iuvenum so I could study the martial arts? Oh, no. That wouldn’t be appropriate for a son of his. I had to become an ephebe. That’s Papa. So, if he says you’re going to marry Noah, then knowing you, Sis, that’s exactly what you’re going to do.”

  Splotches of sweat now stained the front of his tunic where it clung to his chest. Shaking his head and pressing his eyelids shut with his fingertips, he was silent so long I wondered whether he’d continue. When he did, the sun had already inched past him to illuminate his stylus, and his voice was thick with guilt.

  “You know, I understand Papa. I really do. I did a heinous thing, ripping open our mother’s belly like that, killing her as surely as if I’d cut her throat in the arena. But you forgave me, you who’d also lost a mother and had to grow up in the shadow of that pokerfaced idol of his. He never has. To him, I’m a killing machine, like one of Hero’s gadgets. Tighten the valve here, adjust the spring there, and you can count on Binyamin to kill anything.”

  His eyes lost their focus for a while, as if he were recollecting a long forgotten nightmare, but then their focus returned.

  “So, yes, Sis, one way or another, I’m going away, and I’m going soon. I just have to work out the details. Why shouldn’t I do what I was meant to do and, in the process, become a celebrity? I’m not his son, and I don’t want anything from him, not his name, his house, his money, nothing, not now, not ever.”

  I knew I’d live to regret it, if I lived at all, but I couldn’t help myself. Right then and there, dream or no dream, I resolved to follow Binyamin to find out how he was going to finance his voyage. And if someone was buying the scrolls, I vowed to recover and return them to Judah before it was too late.

  Chapter 20

  Tuesday Night

  “BY THIS TIME tomorrow, Phoebe, I’ll have the scrolls.”

  “Really?” she asked, tipping her head back, clapping her dumpling-like hands, her girlish face wreathed in a smile that outshined the candlelight in my sitting room.

  “Binyamin has them. He took them to finance his voyage to Rome. I think he plans to sell them to a broker tonight since you heard nothing about them yesterday in the agora.”

  “Binyamin would do such a thing to you? I can hardly believe it.”

  “I know, Phoebe. I’m sure he still doesn’t grasp the significance of the scrolls to me and every other Jew in the Empire. He’s just so desperate to get to Capua.”

  “So how will you recover them? Are we going to sneak into his suite and, under cover of darkness, steal them back?” Phoebe rubbed her palms together with conspiratorial glee while her voice melted into a soft giggle.

  “No, Phoebe. I’m going to follow Binyamin tonight to see who the broker is. Besides, Binyamin wouldn’t have the scrolls on his person or, for that matter, in this house. By now, he’d have secured them in the Public Records Office. But by tonight, I’ll have proof that he has them, and when I explain why I need them, I’m sure he’ll give me the token to claim them.”

  “So why not just ask for the scrolls now?”

  “Because I need proof. Soon he’ll be leaving, and I may never see him again. The last thing I’d want him to remember is that I accused him of something without proof, even though I understand only too well his need to get away from Papa.

  “Besides, tonight won’t be like last night. He’ll be meeting a businessman, not a bunch of thugs.”

  “Miriam, you must not go.”

  “You know I have to.”

  “At least take the bodyguard. Your father already knows you’re intent on recovering the scrolls.”

  “But he mustn’t know that Binyamin’s departure is imminent, and besides, one person can slip through a darkened street more easily than two.”

  Phoebe drew her eyebrows together and shook her head as if to ward off the prospect of my going. Then she sat down, slumped forward, and her shoulders began to shake.

  “Miriam, I know you’ll be killed tonight. How could the scrolls be worth your life?”

  “They are my life, Phoebe, and you can help me save them. Just keep watch and signal me with a knock on my door as soon as Binyamin leaves.”

  She let out an extravagant sigh to tell me that yes, she’d do it, but no, she didn’t like it one bit.

  I should have listened to her Cassandra-like prophecy.

  GAZING THROUGH one of my sitting room windows waiting for Phoebe’s signal, I watched the moon slide behind the cypress trees and the navy blue sky surrender the last of its color to a star-speckled blackness. Sure that Binyamin would be meeting the broker in a respectable neighborhood and realizing that once I heard them negotiating, I’d no longer need to hide, I wore my himation rather than a disguise over my tunic.

  But instead of wrapping the himation around my body, I veiled my face. I centered the thick, woolen rectangle across my nose and mouth, wrapped the tails around the crown of my head, fastened them under my chin with my mother’s fibula, and let the ends drape behind my back. Then, as soon as I heard the knock, I grabbed the portable lantern, jumped from the window, and like last night, scrabbled through the arbor, using the fire of the lighthouse to orient me toward the street.

  Savoring the clarity of the night air despite its chill, I followed the shaft of light from Binyamin’s lantern and the soft tread of his boots in a silence that was otherwise absolute save for the treetops sighing in the sea breeze. Passing the occasional gauzy yellow square that was a candle-lit window—perhaps the home of a colicky baby or a worried couple—we soon found ourselves on the torch-lit Canopic Way. Surely we were nearing his destination.

  But no. Binyamin was not slowing his pace. On the contrary, his strides had lengthened so much that I could hear my breathing labor in concert with the trees’ obbligato, and I could feel a gloss of perspiration coat my chest despite the sharpening chill. Having long since crossed the Street of the Soma and turned south, the lighthouse was now well behind me. The buildings speeding past me were no longer faced with marble and stone, not even with plaster painted to resemble stone, but with mud bricks scarred with graffiti.

  A sinister smell seeping out of the darkness alerted me that we were near the canal. That and our position farther west than I was last night meant only one thing: We were inside the malignant Rhakotis Quarter.

  Binyamin’s pace slowed.

  What in the Name of G-d was he doing here?

  He looked around, perhaps for the broker, although why they’d meet in this canyon of squalid buildings I couldn’t fathom. A moment later someone shouted from a marble-topped counter opening onto the street. Upon closer inspection, I saw the counter was the front of a cookshop tucked between a dilapidated tenement—its shutters bashed in, its door weathered to silver—and an empty warehouse.
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  A primordial giant as menacing as a Cyclops stepped outside to fill the beam of Binyamin’s lantern. Inasmuch as he wore an exomis, a short, left-sleeved, laborer’s tunic that bares the right side of the wearer’s chest, I fixed on the stump that had been his right arm. But when Binyamin swept the giant’s face with his lantern, I was fascinated more by the purple wart perched on the end of his nose and the ichor trickling from his swollen eyes. Try as I might, I couldn’t tear my gaze from that weepy discharge. When he called to Binyamin again, this time by name and with a roar that ripped the stillness, I recognized him as the illustrious ex-gladiator Sergius.

  Stories about Sergius still surface amid the swirl of gossip in and about the agora. That he’d been seen here or there, at the games or at the theater. That a retiarius had once stabbed him near his left ear with a trident, a blow that, notwithstanding his helmet, had cost him his hearing in that ear and dented his skull. That Eppia had given up her several hundred slaves, her villa in Rome, and her seaside estate at Antium after falling hopelessly in love with him. And that her husband, the senator, was still searching for them. Don’t tell me they’ve been hiding these last three years in some flea-infested, piss-soaked apartment in the Rhakotis Quarter!

  So Sergius was going to broker the sale of the scrolls. He escorted Binyamin into the cookshop and waved him toward one of two chairs around a table just behind the counter. Once Binyamin was seated, Sergius poured him a tankard of henket and offered him hunks of a steamy cardamom bread and skewers of roast lamb that released a whisper of mint.

  Well within their aromatic range, I longed for some of Phoebe’s sesame cakes.

  I scooted low and in close, wrapping myself in the tails of my himation, crouching behind the charcoal-burning furnace recessed into the cookshop’s marble-topped counter, grateful for the steady fire that kept the kettle sputtering and the sharpening chill at bay. Only occasionally did I dare lift my shoulders to peek inside.

  The counter, open to the street, crossed the front of the cookshop from its doorway to its side wall, a distance of about seven feet. Then it turned into the shop at a right angle to offer several more feet of counter space along the side wall. The rest of the wall was fitted with graduated marble shelves for storing the shop’s glassware, cutlery, and crockery. Several large paintings, all of men in a latrine, covered the back wall, each with a descriptive title, none leaving anything to the imagination.

  The portly counterman, probably the owner, must have just finished washing the tableware in the basin under the counter, because the sink gurgled as he rubbed his hands across the long, once-white, grease-spattered apron that dipped below his paunch. Then he lifted its skirt to wipe the sweat that had accumulated on the single shaggy eyebrow that spanned the bridge of his nose, and with a corner of that skirt, he traced the notches and grooves inside each oversized ear. After that, he began to refill the clay wine jars distributed at intervals along the counter and embedded in the masonry beneath them.

  At first I heard only Sergius and Binyamin’s wolfish intake of food and drink, their utensils grating against the tin plates, their greedy gulps and smacking lips punctuated by grunts of satisfaction. But after a while, Sergius pushed his chair back from the table, and they began to converse. I could understand Sergius despite the harsh vowels of Vulgar Latin that peppered his Greek, because his tone was strident, common enough among the hearing-impaired, and facing the front of the shop, his words rolled over the counter and into the street.

  “Yes, I still have a contact there: Rufinus, the lanista. He manages the ludus in Capua along with buying, selling, and hiring out his own gladiators. Anyway, he’ll decide how you’ll be trained and assign you to a coach, an ex-gladiator who specializes in that weaponry. With a face like yours, he’ll probably assign you to train as a retiarius, since they fight without a helmet.”

  Another glimpse told me that Binyamin had squared his shoulders.

  “As a volunteer rather than a slave, criminal, or prisoner of war, you’ll sign a contract that specifies your period of obligation, your earnings, which will be no more than twenty-five percent of your prize money, and how often you’ll fight—probably once a month. At the point of signing and for the duration of the contract, you’ll be the property of the lanista and the school. You’ll live locked in a windowless cell about three yards by four yards. You’ll share the cell with another gladiator and spend most of your time within the solid brick walls of the school. You’ll train in a small, elliptical arena guarded by men wielding clubs and whips, and you’ll take your meals with the other gladiators. You’ll eat a high-energy diet of beans, dried fruit, and barley, the barley to coat your arteries with fat. That’s to reduce bleeding. You might travel to distant cities, but you’ll always be brought back to Capua.”

  Binyamin interrupted with questions, but Sergius dominated the conversation, with, so far, no mention of the scrolls.

  “Your exit visa will cost you about four drachmas (the value of eighty pounds of barley) if you register as an unskilled laborer.”

  Now at least they were talking about money, but still nothing about the scrolls. Sergius went through all the incidental arrangements and costs, beginning with boarding Binyamin and storing his provisions at The Pegasus—the waterfront inn and warehouse likely to be closest to his pier—until the ship’s herald announces her departure. I missed most of the other details. I was so distracted by the tributaries of henket dribbling from the sides of his mouth and washing into that nasty humor leaking from his eyes, but he ended with Binyamin’s overland transportation from the Roman port of Ostia to the school in Capua.

  He explained that there’s no way to predict a ship’s departure date. First, the winds have to be favorable. Then the pre-sail sacrifice of a bull has to go well. Next, the time of the month has to be auspicious. No Roman skipper would depart at the end of a month. And the omens must be propitious. A sneeze on the gangplank, a wreckage on the shore, or a croaking crow or magpie perched on the rigging would delay any departure. So would someone’s uttering a foreboding word or dreaming of turbid waters or goats, especially black ones. Similarly, dreams of wild boars or bulls, owls or other night birds portend a storm, pirate attack, or worse yet, a shipwreck. Consequently Binyamin might have to wait at the inn for weeks.

  “And don’t forget,” Sergius continued, “If a storm approaches, be sure to cut your nails or your hair and throw the clippings overboard. That might avert a disaster. But if you’re caught in the storm, tie any jewelry you have to your body so anyone finding your corpse would have the money for your funeral.”

  That’s when Binyamin dropped his skewer of roast lamb and looked up.

  I had trouble assimilating all the details—my legs had cramped in the crouch and I’d started to shiver—but I gathered that a ship from Alexandria to Rome has to take a roundabout course to counter the Etesians. She has to sail along the southern coast of Asia Minor to Crete, Malta, and Sicily rather than head directly for Rome. In other words, under the best of circumstances, the voyage would take at least two months.

  Sergius offered more details, and then, after a string of mumbles from Binyamin and my mounting doubts about learning anything about the scrolls, he mentioned financing.

  “So, yes, I’ll accept your mother’s jewelry as collateral for my stake, which will cover the entire cost of your trip from here to Capua. As soon as you sign this promissory note, based on your talent as an athlete and in exchange for five percent of your prize money and half of your signing fee, I’ll advance you the cost of your exit visa and book deck passage for you on the next grain ship to Rome.”

  Binyamin exhaled a long breath.

  “Deck passage means that you, like most of the passengers, will sleep on the deck. The ship will supply only water and a hearth in the galley for you to use during certain hours after the crew has finished. I’ll supply a tent to shelter you on deck, along wi
th a mattress and bedding. I’ll order your shipboard provisions for eating, bathing, even defecating, and I’ll arrange for everything to be transported from the inn’s warehouse and loaded onto your ship. And I’ll have your supplies replenished in Crete and again in Malta. Once you get to Rome, I’ll advance you the funds to hire a mule and carriage to take you to Capua, outfit yourself for the journey, and stay at inns along the way.”

  As if he’d recited the list a million times, he was ticking off each point by folding a finger of his left hand into his palm.

  “Depending on the weather, you’ll stop in Aricia, Bovillae, Tres Tabernae, and Forum Appii. You’ll have your choice of inns at any of these places. Don’t worry; they’ll be easy to identify. Even if you arrive late at night, you’ll spot them. They all keep a lamp burning above their door. In the daytime, you’ll recognize them by the erotic scenes painted on their façades. Wait till you see the ones on The Camel in Aricia and The Sword in Tres Tabernae. I guarantee you’ll get a kick out of those!”

  Knowing Binyamin, I’d guarantee it too.

  Sergius’s face had split into a wide smile, but then, a businessman again, he wiped his mouth and continued.

  “Anyway, you’ll get food, wine, and lodging in a room with a cot, chamber pot, and candle holder. Of course, you’ll have to share the bed with as many fellow travelers as can cram in, but you’ll have an opportunity to change your mule and carriage, relax in the public baths, and hire a prostitute. Just watch out for the copa. She’s the woman who runs the inn. She’ll be no more scrupulous than the captain of the ship or the owner of the livery stable, even though she’s a woman. Every one of them is notorious for adulterating the wine, and that’s just the beginning. Believe me.

  “Oh, yeah. I almost forgot the most important thing. I’ll give you a letter of introduction to Rufinus.”

  So why weren’t they discussing the scrolls? Why was Binyamin offering his share of our mother’s jewelry for collateral and promising Sergius a cut of both his prize money and signing fee? What other use could he be planning for the scrolls? And then a thought came to me like a final, shameful, crushing blow: that I’d been lying to myself all along. Neither Papa nor Binyamin had taken the scrolls, and I was never going to recover them. But before I’d let that despair immobilize me, I was going to find my way out of this pestilential underbelly of the city.