Parts of the Ramp are like a tunnel, densely shaded by overhanging yew trees. It was in one of these patches, looking up ahead, that for the second time in two days I thought I saw Tiro.
I couldn’t see the man’s face, only the back of his head. The climb had apparently warmed him, for he was in the process, never breaking his stride, of pulling a dark cloak from his shoulders, revealing a green tunic beneath. It was something about the way he moved that seemed to stir my memory, keying that unsettling, powerful yet fleeting sensation that one sometimes has of reliving a moment already experienced. Had I once walked up the Ramp behind Tiro, perhaps thirty years ago, and seen him shrug off a cloak in that exact same way? Or was my mind playing tricks? You’re an old man, I told myself, slightly out of breath with spots before your eyes, looking at the back of someone under the shade of a dense tree on an overcast day. The idea that I was seeing an old friend who was supposed to be hundreds of miles away across the sea was hardly worth a second thought. Still, if only I could see the man’s face, I could at least be satisfied of my mistake.
I quickened my stride. The path grew steeper and my breath shorter. More spots danced before my eyes. Other pedestrians blocked my view. I lost sight of the man ahead of me, until I thought I had lost him entirely. Then I caught a glimpse of the green tunic, farther ahead of me than before.
‘Tiro!’ I called out.
Did the man pause for a moment, cock his head, then hurry on? Or did I imagine it?
‘Tiro!’ I shouted, gasping for breath.
This time, the man in the green tunic didn’t pause. If anything, he walked faster. He reached the top of the Ramp well ahead of me. Before he vanished, it seemed to me that he turned to the right, in the direction of Cicero’s house.
I reached the top of the Ramp and sat heavily on a yew stump. The stately tree had stood in that spot for years, since long before I came to live on the Palatine; I had been able to see the top of it from my garden courtyard. Early that winter, a particularly violent storm had blown the tree over. The limbs had been cut up for firewood, but the stump had been left as a convenient spot to sit and rest after the climb from the Forum. Poor old yew, I thought, not good for much but still good for something. I would have laughed, had I breath to spare. Pompey expected me to track down a killer for him. I couldn’t even follow a man up the Ramp.
Begrudgingly, a glowering Cicatrix admitted me to my own house. ‘You’ve got a visitor,’ he said in a surly voice, breathing garlic at me.
In the garden, I found Bethesda, Diana, and little Aulus waiting for me. They had been joined by Eco.
‘Papa!’ He gave me a forlorn look and a bruising hug. ‘I’ve heard the news about Davus. Damn Pompey to Hades!’
‘Not so loud. Pompey’s man is only a few steps away.’
‘Yes, I saw him on the way in. Mother and Diana explained about that, too. Pompey is such a bully.’
‘Lower your voice.’
Instead Eco spoke louder, as if intentionally pitching his voice for Cicatrix to hear. ‘Absurd, that a citizen in his own home should have to whisper every time he makes reference to the so-called Great One!’
I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen my even-tempered son in such a belligerent mood. The crisis was provoking reactions in all of us. ‘Did you bring Menenia and the twins with you?’ I asked.
‘Through that mob in the Forum? No, they’re safe at home.’
‘How are they taking things?’
‘Titus and Titania are old enough to know that something’s very wrong – you can’t hide much from two eleven-year-olds. But they don’t really understand what’s happening, or likely to happen.’
‘I’m not sure anyone does, not even Caesar or Pompey. And their mother?’
‘Serene as the face of Lake Alba, even though the Menenii are as divided as any family in Rome – some for Pompey, some for Caesar, the rest trying to find a hole to hide in till it’s all over. But don’t worry about us, Papa. After the Clodian riots, I put a lot of effort and expense into making the old family house secure. It’s practically a fortress now, there are so many bars on the doors and spikes around the roof. It sounds as if you could have used something to keep climbers off the roof here.’ He turned his eyes up to the roof surrounding the courtyard. ‘Too bad about Pompey’s unfortunate kinsman. And the outrage of it, that Pompey should use such a tragedy to force you into his service, and practically kidnap Davus –’
‘What’s done is done,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Just another problem to be solved, eh? You always told me there was no such thing as a big problem, just lots of smaller problems intertwined, like knots in a rope. Start at one end and work your way to the other. A good attitude to have when the whole world is falling apart. Where shall we start?’
‘You should start by going home to Menenia and the twins. We may be in for a dangerous night.’
‘But what about our problem with –’
‘Satisfying Pompey and getting Davus back is not our problem, Eco. It’s my problem. I’m responsible for what happened. I’ll find a way out of it.’
Diana spoke up. ‘Papa, don’t be silly. You’ll need Eco to –’
‘No. I won’t have him involved in this. So far, neither Pompey nor Caesar has any particular claim on Eco. Let’s keep it that way.’
Eco shook his head and started to speak, but I raised my hand. ‘No, Eco. You have your own family, your own problems. Who knows what may happen in the coming days and months? It’s best that you remain as independent as you can, for as long as you can. In the long run, that may help to save us all.’
I could see they were not satisfied, but even in a family as unconventional as mine, as unmindful of ‘traditional Roman values’, as the report in Numerius’s shoe had put it, there is a point beyond which the will of the paterfamilias cannot be disputed. I had a hard time seeing myself as a stern Roman father in the mould of the elder Cato, but if pressed I can perform a convincing enough imitation. Eco and Diana fell silent.
Two others in the garden were unawed, however. Little Aulus, paying no attention to me at all, tripped over one of his feet and burst into screams. Bethesda crossed her arms and peered at me. ‘What about tonight?’ she said. ‘If the city is as dangerous as you say, what shall we do? Without Davus there’s not a bodyguard in the house, unless you count that monster Pompey left at the front door.’
‘I doubt if anyone is likely to slip by Cicatrix, wife.’
‘Unless they come over the roof, husband,’ she said wryly.
‘I suppose Mopsus and Androcles could at least keep watch,’ I said dubiously.
‘I can spare a man to come over and help protect the house,’ offered Eco. ‘You could post him here in the courtyard, or up on the roof.’
‘For that I’d be grateful,’ I said, laying aside my mantle as paterfamilias with the relief one feels at taking off an uncomfortable pair of shoes.
‘And if things grow even worse?’ asked Bethesda.
‘Perhaps we’ll all take refuge in Eco’s house on the Esquiline, since it’s more defensible. But it may not come to that. These rumours about Caesar may be only rumours. He may have withdrawn beyond the Rubicon, for all we know.’
‘But with so many abandoned houses, isn’t there likely to be looting?’ observed Diana, between making faces at Aulus to distract him.
‘Perhaps not. The rich have left factotums and gladiators to guard their property. A few would-be looters hung in the streets may be enough to keep things quiet.’
Bethesda looked down her nose. ‘Rome is as bad now as Alexandria was when I was a girl. Worse! Riots and assassinations and insurrections, one after another, and no end in sight.’
‘I suppose it will end only when either Pompey or Caesar is dead,’ said Eco. He lowered his voice without being asked.
‘I’m afraid that might be only the beginning,’ I said. ‘If Cicero is right, it’s inevitable that one or the other will make himself dictator, and
not for a year or two as Sulla did, but for life. Romans may have forgotten how to run a republic, but they certainly can’t remember how to live under a king. The end of this crisis may mark the start of another, far worse.’
‘What a time for Aulus to grow up in,’ said Diana. Cicero had expressed the same anxiety for his expected grandchild. She turned her face away, hiding sudden tears from Aulus, but the boy was not to be fooled. Confusion crossed his face, then he opened his mouth to join her quiet weeping with a pitiful wail of his own. Bethesda hurried over and spread her arms to embrace them both, shooting a sharp glance at me over her shoulder.
Eco and I, with Androcles and Mopsus surreptitiously peering from the doorway, looked on helplessly. What good was the much vaunted power of the paterfamilias, if it could not stop a woman from weeping?
VII
As it turned out, Caesar did not lay siege to Rome that day, nor the next, nor the day after. The remaining days of Januarius slipped past. Every dawn spawned new rumours and fresh panic. Every sunset faded without the arrival of Caesar before the gates.
From south of the city came news that Pompey had joined the loyalist legions in Capua, had appointed Cicero to organize resistance along the Campanian seacoast, and was daily consulting the consuls and the coterie of senators who had fled with him.
The talk of Rome for several days had to do with the famous training school for gladiators in Capua owned by Caesar and notorious for the ferocity of its pupils. First I heard that five thousand gladiators, promised freedom by their master, had broken out, massacred Pompey’s troops, and were marching on Rome to rendezvous with Caesar. Then word spread that Pompey had anticipated Caesar’s gambit, freed the gladiators himself and enlisted them in his army – over the furious objections of his advisors, who argued that wholesale manumission of slaves in a time of crisis set a dangerous precedent. The last rumour to trickle in – least spectacular and most likely – claimed that the school had been shut down and the gladiators dispersed to various new masters throughout the region, purely as a precautionary measure.
Daily, Bethesda asked what progress I had made in getting Davus back from Pompey. I explained to her that staging a serious inquiry into the death of Numerius was virtually impossible. Both Caesar’s and Pompey’s partisans had left Rome to join their respective leaders. Anyone with reason enough to kill Numerius, or to know who did, was probably in one camp or the other, and miles from Rome.
Bethesda was not impressed. ‘Pompey won’t give back Davus until you find his kinsman’s killer. If you lack the energy, husband, why don’t you ask Eco to do it?’
‘It occurs to me, wife, that your job is to see that this household is kept warm and fed – which so far you have done brilliantly, in spite of the shortages and outrageous prices at the markets. Are those duties not enough to keep you busy, and out of my affairs?’
A chill settled between us in those first days of Februarius, making the house as cold inside as out. Around us the crisis wore on.
Despite my protests to Bethesda, I was not entirely idle. If Rome was a foundering ship from which captains, crew, and paying passengers had fled, the rats remained aboard – and rats have keen eyes and ears. I called upon old contacts and put out feelers among the lower orders of the city – petty thieves, poison-dealers, pimps and tavernkeepers – seeking knowledge of Numerius’s shady dealings.
The few scraps of information I was able to find – or more precisely, purchase, at prices as outrageously inflated as everything else for sale in the city – were piecemeal and second-hand, largely unreliable and mostly useless. Repeatedly, I was told what I already knew, that Numerius had spent most of his time running errands for Pompey, which meant that he had frequently been seen all over the Forum and on the doorsteps of senators and wealthy merchants. His contacts among the powerful ranged far and wide. But at least occasionally the Great One’s favourite cousin had patronized far more humble surroundings; more than one of my contacts claimed to have seen Numerius entering or leaving a particularly notorious establishment in the seedy warehouse district between the Forum and the river. I knew the place from previous investigations: the Salacious Tavern.
I had not been to the tavern for a long time; it had been over two years since I last spent an afternoon there, with Tiro of all people, drowning our sorrows after the trial of Milo. On the chilly afternoon I decided to pay a visit I almost got lost in the maze of narrow streets surrounding it. Once I found the right alley, it was impossible to miss the familiar sign, an upright post surmounted by an erect marble phallus. A phallus-shaped lamp hung over the door, sputtering fitfully beneath the overcast sky. I knocked.
A peephole slid open, then shut. The door swung open to reveal a fleshy eunuch in a capacious white tunic, ostentatiously bedecked with glass jewellery. Rings glittered like little rainbows across his fingers. Baubles of faux topaz, amethyst, and emerald were strung around his neck and dangled from his elongated earlobes. The long, dimly lit room behind him exhaled the warm smell of mouldering wood, oily smoke and sour wine. To my eyes, unadapted to the dark, the place looked as black as a cave.
‘Citizen!’ The eunuch smiled. ‘Do I know you?’
‘I think not. I don’t know you. I take it the tavern is under new management?’
‘Yes! Did you know it before?’
‘I came here once or twice.’
‘Then you’ll find it much improved. Come in!’ He shut the door behind us.
‘Funny, it smells the same.’ I wrinkled my nose. ‘Same rancid lamp oil, smoking up the place. Same foul wine, stinking up the floors.’
The eunuch’s smile wavered.
My eyes adjusted a bit to the dimness. Leaning against a wall a few feet behind the eunuch, I made out a bored-looking redhead. She, too, was familiar. Ipsithilla was already a fixture in the tavern the first time I stepped foot in the place, six years before, with the drunken poet Catullus. By the orange glow of a nearby lamp she still looked relatively young and fresh, testament to just how dim the lighting was. ‘Even the girls are the same!’ I said.
The eunuch shrugged. ‘There are only so many pleasures to be had in this world, citizen. But you’ll find them all here, I promise – for a price.’
‘What I really crave is a bit of information. Might I find that here, for a price?’
The eunuch raised an eyebrow.
I left the Salacious Tavern that day without having indulged a single vice, but with a few intriguing bits of information. Numerius Pompeius had indeed been a frequent patron; the eunuch knew him by sight, and had heard the news of his death. Numerius, the eunuch told me, always arrived at the tavern alone and left alone. He always sat in the same corner. Sometimes he met with others, but what they discussed, and who those others were, the eunuch couldn’t say; it was his practice never to eavesdrop, and the men Numerius met with were strangers to the Salacious Tavern who never came again – except for one.
‘Ah, yes,’ the eunuch told me, ‘I remember, one day Numerius shared his corner bench with that fellow Soscarides.’
‘Soscarides?’
‘Odd name, isn’t it? Greek, I suppose. From Alexandria. Swarthy little fellow with a beard. Been coming in for a couple of months now. A philosopher – rather famous, to hear him tell it. Perhaps you know him, citizen?’
‘I’m sure I don’t.’
‘Well, Numerius Pompeius did. They sat in the corner for a long time that day, he and Soscarides, talking and drinking, drinking and talking.’
‘Talking about what?’
‘Alas, citizen, I never eavesdrop, and neither do my girls. A man’s secrets are safe in the Salacious Tavern, even from the gods.’
‘When was this?’
‘Oh, let me think – why, just before Pompey fled the city, so I suppose it must have been only a day or two before Numerius was murdered.’
I nodded and mouthed the name Soscarides. I was sure I had never heard of him. A philosopher; a dark, swarthy little fellow with a beard . . .
The eunuch, fingering his already-swollen com purse, was eager to be helpful. ‘As I said, Soscarides comes in here every so often. When I see him next, shall I tell him you’re looking for him, citizen?’
I shook my head. ‘I was never here.’ I gave him another coin, to be sure he understood.
Several days of stormy weather followed my visit to the Salacious Tavern. The weather was so foul that no one went abroad in the city; even the Forum was deserted. I spent those days holed up in my study, reading philosophy. In rare moments when the ram broke I paced in the garden, gazing up to contemplate Mmverva’s inscrutable features. She was the only witness to everything that happened the day Numerius Pompeius died. She had heard his final words, had seen the face of his killer. ‘What shall I do next?’ I asked her. She gave no indication of hearing.
The storm passed. Two days after the Ides of Februarius I made my way down to the Forum to catch the latest flock of rumours. At Bethesda’s insistence, I took Mopsus and Androcles along with me, to give the boys a chance to use up some of their pent-up energy from being housebound by the storm. Going down the Ramp, they ran ahead of me and then back up to me over and over, making a game of it. Just watching them exhausted me.
The daily panic over an immediate occupation by Caesar receded. Reliable reports now placed him to the north-east, along the Adriatic coast. All of Picenum had surrendered to him. It was said that the people of the towns he passed through had welcomed him jubilantly, offering prayers as if he were a god. He had garrisoned strategic cities with troops, and now was heading south, where Pompey and the loyalist forces had occupied the region of Apulia, but were split in two. Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus – who by the Senate’s decree was supposed to have replaced Caesar as governor of Gaul at the first of the year – had occupied the central city of Corfinium, only seventy-five miles east of Rome, with thirty cohorts, eighteen thousand men. Pompey, in the meantime, had moved farther south. There seemed to be a tug of war between the two loyalist generals, Domitius wanting Pompey to reinforce him in Corfinium, Pompey demanding that Domitius abandon the city and join him.
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