With them was another villainous character who introduced himself as Hiram, a friend of theirs. Hiram could speak Greek.
Lucius had been an indifferent student, his schoolboy Greek was rusty, but he could get by. “What do you want of me?” he asked curtly. “What’s in that box you’ve got with you?”
Hiram removed the soiled cloth in which it was wrapped and offered it for Lucius’ inspection. It was a doctor’s kit, made of sycamore wood, with a brass lock, which had been pried open, and a leather shoulder strap. Where had he seen this before?
Hiram explained: “It belonged to the man your father tortured to death with the help of my three mates, a job for which he agreed to pay ’em one thousand sesterces, their usual fee. I happened to make their acquaintance in a tavern last night and agreed to speak for ’em, since they’re shy of you.” Hiram’s gold tooth gleamed when he smiled. “If they don’t get their money they’ll make trouble.”
“Will they, indeed!” Lucius snatched the box-he expected it to be heavy, but it wasn’t-and lifted the lid. “It’s empty. Where are all the instruments, the drugs?”
“They sold the instruments on the street, the little bottles they threw away,” answered the gold tooth. “They had nothing in ’em but colored water and sand.”
“You don’t say? Well, the box alone is damned near worthless and I haven’t got a thousand in cash, so there!”
“The name on the bottom might mean something to you?”
Lucius turned the box over and read the inscription: Iatrides son of Philemon, carved in Greek letters. That gave him a start. The invalid woman’s physician had some such name as this. “What did this man look like? Heavy set? Bearded?” Lucius had scarcely noticed the doctor during the brief time that he and the lady had stayed with them, but, yes, it did seem like him. But why torture him? Turning the box over again, his ear caught a little rattle within it. He peered inside more closely. A pin embedded in a bit of cork lay on the bottom. Help me Hercules! It was the twin of the one that Pliny had shown them yesterday. Trying to conceal his excitement, he scowled and said, “I’ll have to know more details.”
The thugs jabbered away all at once, and Hiram translated. “They were told to waylay the man at a certain street corner where he always passed. They took him by cart, rolled up in a rug, to your little farm across the Tiber, where your father met them. They all went into the woods beyond the house and worked him over. He screamed a lot, but no one lives out that way. When they got to singeing his balls, he died on ’em. Weak heart, I’d say.”
“What did my father want from him? Did he say anything?”
Hiram consulted his companions. “They’re not paid to listen. They don’t understand much anyway. Your father wanted to know who this man was and why he was in his house. The man was harder to understand. He spoke Latin with an accent and he was, you know, screaming. He begged your father to be merciful. They understood the word ‘ clemens.’ And something too about clothing-they think they heard ‘vestis.’ But maybe they heard wrong, these fellows ain’t very smart.” The three torturers, not understanding Hiram’s speech, smiled hopefully at Lucius.
“After the man died,” Hiram continued, “your father told ’em to bury him and the box-they can show you the spot if you like. He went back to the farmhouse for something to eat. While he was gone they hid the box under some straw in their cart, thinking it might be worth something.”
Lucius wasted no time in paying the Syrians off with some silver spoons, which were worth considerably more than a thousand sesterces. He wanted no trouble from them. No, indeed. He wanted time to think. Clemens? Of course! Not “merciful,” but Flavius Clemens, the God-fearer whom his father had denounced. Vestis he could make no sense of. Still, something connected this Amatia and her physician to the Clemens affair. Whoever they were, they weren’t what they seemed, and Verpa had found them out.
Lucius took the kit back to his room and sent a slave to fetch one of Scortilla’s cats. There were half a dozen in the house, all of them “sacred,” more of her Egyptian nonsense. He picked the animal up by its neck and pressed the pin into its blue-gray flank. It twisted and made strangling sounds, and in a moment it was dead. Satisfied with his experiment, he went looking for Valens. Pliny had warned him to cooperate and cooperate he would. His life might depend on it.
He found the centurion in the garden, not alone. A bosomy, unkempt woman was seated next to him on the bench beside the pool where three sun-burned, naked little boys were engaged in pushing one another’s heads under the water and shrieking at the top of their lungs.
“The family, sir,” Valens explained, looking a trifle apologetic. “Been after me for days to let ’em come over for a look round. Thought it wouldn’t do any harm.”
Lucius suppressed an urge to swear at the man. “I want you to go to the vice-prefect’s house and ask him to come here without delay. I have urgent news for him.”
“Now, sir?”
“Yes, now. And I want this rabble out of my garden.”
The centurion’s face darkened, and for an awful moment Lucius feared the man might hurt him. But his woman was up at once, dragging the children out, and Valens, tight-lipped, turned smartly and marched off.
He was back in half an hour. “Vice-prefect’s not at home, as it happens,” he said in his surliest tone of voice. “His wife says he’s left town and she doesn’t know where. Didn’t seem too happy about it either. Anything else you want done, you ask your own people.” He returned to the garden, now emptied of his family, drew his sword and set to sharpening it with vicious strokes against the edge of a stone bench.
Chapter Twenty-four
The seventeenth day before the Kalends of Domitianus.
Day eleven of the Games.
The white napkin, released from the praetor’s fingertips, fluttered down, simultaneously a horn sounded, the restraining rope dropped, and a dozen four-horse chariots shot out of the starting boxes. A roar rose from a quarter of a million throats. The drivers, distinguished by their team colors – green, blue, red, white, purple, and gold-stretched out almost horizontally over their horses’ backs, cracking their whips, twisting their bodies, turning their heads for brief seconds to see who was beside or behind them, searching for an opening to the left, closer to the barrier.
As they dashed around the first turn, a Green driver tried to foul one of the Reds by crowding him but wasn’t skillful enough and lost control of his own chariot, careening into the barrier. The chariot flipped up and over, throwing the driver out. His horses plunged on, dragging him, still tied to the reins, into the path of another team. The roar of the crowd redoubled. This was what they had come to see.
Martial and his four friends rose to their feet, screaming with the rest, although from high up in the cheap stands of the vast Circus Maximus it was hard to see what had happened. The surviving chariots disappeared around the turn and up the back stretch in a cloud of dust. They sat again on the benches, prodded by elbows in their ribs, knees in their backs.
“Purple’s going to carry off the honors today,” Priscus shouted in his ear over the rumble of voices. “The emperor’s team. That’s where I put my money.” They could just make out the distant figure of the emperor in the imperial box, swathed in the folds of his purple toga, surrounded by his courtiers, Parthenius, no doubt, among them. “Who’s your money on, then?”
But Martial wasn’t listening. The momentary excitement past, he had sunk back into his own thoughts, which, like those chariots, went round and round in an endless circle. Where was Pliny? Why had he left the city yesterday morning without warning, telling no one where he was going? He would have to meet Stephanus tonight at the popina, but what could he tell him? Stephanus. That man gave him the shudders with his cold eyes and sallow cheeks and that perpetually bandaged arm. And what if Parthenius refused to believe that Pliny hadn’t confided his plans to him? What if Parthenius dropped him after all this? He doubted that anything he had reported so fa
r had really been of much interest to the grand chamberlain. It was that woman Amatia he seemed most interested in.
And there, Martial had simply drawn a blank. An ordinary and harmless provincial matron was all he saw. Rather reserved, rather sad, a bit foolish on the subject of religion. None of the gossip-mongers knew anything about her, naturally, since she hadn’t been in Rome more than a couple of weeks. But in that case, why did Parthenius care? And yet he did care. Which must mean that there was more to Amatia than he had guessed. The thought pounced on him like a cat leaping from cover upon an astonished mouse. Amidst the din of a mindless crowd, Martial’s mind suddenly gained clarity. The woman was lying to them. As simple as that. But what was he to do with this new idea? Martial, who had always thought himself so clever, so knowing, suddenly felt out of his depth, baited and hooked like a fish into betraying his friend and patron for reasons he couldn’t fathom.
He must tell Pliny, as he should have done in the first place. But how could he do so without confessing to his deal with Parthenius and all of his small betrayals over the past days? No, he couldn’t afford that. He would lose both Pliny and Parthenius as patrons.
Thirty years in Rome, grasping for a fame always just out of reach, had changed him into a man that he didn’t like any more. But “the die was cast,” as the Deified Julius had once famously said. There was no alternative now. He would go back to Pliny’s house tonight, play the dutiful client, make himself agreeable to the little wife, and see whether he could pry any information loose from the mysterious Amatia.
The chariots thundered past and Diadumenus, sitting beside him, clutched his arm and screamed, “On, the Greens!” in a transport of excitement, Martial tried hard to look attentive. ???
A second day’s journey by coach brought Pliny and Zosimus to the lovely hill town of Ameria, where they were met by the bailiff of the farm, who had brought saddle horses for them. The farm lay about four miles west of the town.
At a walking pace, they took their way through the rolling country, thick with oak and poplar. Away on their right, Mt. Soracte, a towering wedge of granite, soared above the hills; behind them on the distant horizon stretched the folded masses of the Apennines. In the deep shade of leafy trees the air was autumn crisp, while Rome, sixty miles below, still sweltered through the last days of summer. Rome. Pliny shook himself to drive the image from his mind; he would not think of Rome, not today. Though his purpose was “business,” he savored his illicit freedom like a truant schoolboy. How good it was just to have a horse between his legs again! He breathed deeply-more deeply, he felt, than he had in weeks.
They reached the farm toward evening. Pliny was ravenously hungry. The food was plain, but satisfying. After dinner he dictated a note to Calpurnia to tell her that he had arrived safely, though being careful not to say where. Then he went to bed and slept more soundly than he had in days, lulled by the croaking of the frogs.
The next morning he was up with the sun. He spent an hour with the bailiff, a good-natured and capable man, going over accounts and the rest of the day riding with him round the property. The farm pleased him; it was well worth the asking price-and Pliny was canny about such things. Barley and wheat stood high in the well-watered fields and the tenants were already at work with their sickles getting in the harvest. He stopped and talked with some, though he could barely understand their Umbrian patois. But they seemed to be prospering. What a delight to be here, rubbing soil between his fingertips, slapping a cow’s backside. Weren’t all Romans farmers at heart, born for this life!
But the next morning Pliny-Roman senator, respected lawyer, acting vice prefect, loving husband, expectant father-awoke feeling ill at ease. How long could he prolong this holiday? There was really nothing more to be done here. He had written his report to Fabatus, urging him to buy. What now? Must he return to Rome today? The thought depressed him.
But the bailiff, who was a repository of local lore, had thought of a small diversion for him. He described a certain lake in the neighborhood, sacred to the local folk. “Lake Vadimon it’s called, on t’other side Tiber and worth the seeing, your honor. Funny things happen in that lake. I’ll say no more,” he winked mysteriously, “but ye ought visit it before ye go.”
Pliny was happy to comply. Was not investigating marvels in his blood, after all? His uncle had, of course, been a prodigious collector of them, though he had never heard him speak of this one as far as he could recall. With directions from the bailiff, he and Zosimus mounted up, carrying a picnic lunch and a jar of the local wine in their saddle bags.
They struck off toward the Tiber, across fields and through dripping woods. Where the ground fell away sharply, they put their horses down the slope and splashed across the river, surprising an ox who had come down for its morning drink. A raw chill was in the air, making their horses’ nostrils steam. Here Father Tiber wound between high, narrow banks, overhung with willows, honeysuckle, and wild vine. They followed its twisting course downstream about five miles, then stopped in a clearing and ate their lunch. After resting, they continued on their way, took a wrong turning and got lost for a time.
But toward evening, at last, they came upon the lake. In fact, they smelled it before they saw it, so strong was the stench of its sulfurous water. Lake Vadimon was of moderate size and perfectly even all around, like a wheel lying on its side. Pliny and his young companion pushed through bulrushes waist-high down to the water’s edge, and Pliny knelt and cupped the water in his hand. It was whitish and thick to the touch, and tasted like medicine. And yet the cows drank it; he could see six or seven of them crowding down to the shore on the farther side.
“Patrone,” said Zosimus, “it’s a marvelously nasty place.” He batted at a cloud of gnats that hung about their heads. “But I can see no other marvels hereabouts.” They were just turning to go. The air had been dead still, but suddenly a breeze sprang up, ruffling the water. “Patrone!” Pliny turned back and stared, rubbed his eyes and stared again. “Yes, I see! Extraordinary!”
As they watched in astonishment, a floating island of reeds sailed toward them across the lake. Upon it one of the cows, sensing itself adrift, lifted its head and bellowed in fright. Then more islands detached themselves from the shore and, driven before the breeze, glided here and there across the water. Wherever an island came to rest against the shore, it seemed to add to the solid land on that side, until it separated again and drifted on. What a trick was played upon their eyes! Solid land not solid at all. Whatever the explanation of this wonder, and Pliny could imagine none, it showed how easily the eye could be fooled.
And then, in a swift instant, as though the solution had been there all along, just waiting for this key to unlock it, the thought flashed like an arrow through his mind. “ Mehercule, that’s how she did it!”
“Who, Patrone?” asked Zosimus, startled.
“Scortilla, of course!”
His inner eye saw the form of a murderess, not creeping through Verpa’s window; rather someone there all along, in plain view but unseen because she was a part of the background, just like these little islands. Amazing how Fate arranged things! He had come here to escape from the investigation and, by doing so, he had stumbled on the solution. Oh, but really! Could it be so? This notion, when you really thought about it, was even more outlandish than his earlier one. Pliny was quite surprised at himself. To have lived thirty-five years untroubled by an imagination, then suddenly to find himself embarrassed by one that flourished exuberantly like some strange, unwholesome plant! Is this what police work did to one? But everything fit. Scortilla and Lucius were accomplices. Their mutual hatred was all an act. One murder was used to conceal the other. And now he saw how it was done. All that remained was to prove it and the slaves would be saved.
As they left the lake, he knew already how he would put his theory to the test, and he was certain-his heart beating fast as he thought of it-certain that this time he could make Scortilla convict herself, because she was, though
full of cunning, really quite a stupid woman. “And I will play her a trick that’ll drag the truth out of her lying throat!” He laughed aloud.
There was no time to lose. “Mount up,” he cried to Zosimus. “It’s back to the town to hire a fast two-wheeler and then to Rome! If we ride through the night, we’ll arrive before tomorrow’s dawn-just the right moment for what I have in mind.”
Chapter Twenty-five
The fifteenth day before the Kalends of Domitianus.
Day thirteen of the Games. Night.
Under a bright harvest moon a team of tired horses galloped along the Via Cassia between rows of tall poplars, drawing the light, two-wheeled gig toward Rome. Zosimus held the reins and urged the team on, while Pliny, beside him on the seat, fretted and devoured the road with his eyes. They would change the horses for fresh ones two or three more times before reaching the city. It was impossible to know the hour with any certainty. He could only pray they would be in time. ???
The eleventh hour of the night.
“I think we are all here. Anyone who is not we must treat as an enemy from this hour on. There’s no time now for second thoughts. Are we agreed?” Parthenius, all smiling blandness, looked from face to face, allowing none of them to avoid his eyes.
Here, in Corellius Rufus’ house, some of the conspirators were seeing others for the first time, astonished to find themselves together in the same room, and some of them secretly wishing they were somewhere, anywhere, else: Corellius himself, prostrate on his couch, his face etched with pain, his mouth set in a grim line; Titus Petronius, the Praetorian commandant, a big blustering man, but subdued now, cracking his knuckles to release tension; sleek Entellus, the emperor’s secretary for petitions, with two other imperial freedmen, the three of them sitting close together and trying not to look intimidated by the company they were in; Cocceius Nerva, his handsome, long-nosed face pale and drawn, drumming his fingers on the tabletop and exchanging worried looks with two other senators who were as nervous as he was; and finally the empress, Domitia Augusta, looking more manly than any of them, her large hands resting motionless on the arms of her chair and not a muscle in her body betraying the strain she must be feeling. She was dressed in a plain stola, without jewelry. She had arrived in a long, hooded cloak, and when she removed it, the bruises on her face were unmistakable even through her face powder.
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