Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4)

by Steven Saylor

  He managed to nod.

  ‘And then what? Threats, bribes?’ I asked, knowing it was something much worse.

  The boy wrenched himself from my grip. Sobbing, whining, he began slapping his own face back and forth. Tiro huddled next to me, watching horrified. The boy finally stopped. He stamped his foot and looked me straight in the eye. Gritting his teeth, contorting his face into a mask of hate, he raised both arms. His hands moved slowly, stiffly, as if against his will. He made an obscene gesture, then crumpled his hands into fists as if they had been withered by fire.

  They had raped his mother, Polia who had seen nothing, who would have known nothing of the crime if he had not told her, whose only crime was spreading secondhand gossip to an old lady across the street. They had raped her, and Eco had seen it happen.

  I looked at Tiro to see if he understood. He covered his mouth and averted his eyes.

  The boy suddenly pushed me aside and ran to the knife in the street. He snatched it up and ran back to me, taking my hand in his and pressing my fingers around the hilt. Before I could pay him, before I could make any gesture of comfort or understanding, he ran back into the tenement, pushing aside the gaunt watchman who was stepping out of the doorway for a breath of air.

  I looked at the knife in my hand. I sighed and closed my eyes, suddenly dizzy from the heat. ‘For his revenge,’ I whispered. ‘He thinks we bring justice, Tiro.’

  XI

  We sat out the worst of the afternoon’s heat in a small tavern. I had meant to press on to find the whore Elena – the House of Swans could be only a short distance beyond the scene of the murder – but I lacked the heart. Instead we turned back, trudging up the narrow street until we reached the open square.

  The concourse was almost deserted. Shopkeepers had closed their stalls. The heat was so intense that even the vendors with their carts had disappeared. Only a few vagrant children and a dog remained, playing in puddles about the public cistern. They had pushed back the iron cover, and one of the boys was standing dangerously close to the edge. Without even a glance over his shoulder, he hitched up his tunic and began urinating into the hole.

  A mosaic of a bunch of red grapes inlaid above the cornerstone of a small tenement advertised a nearby tavern. A sprinkling of purple and white tiles led around the corner and down a short flight of steps. The tavern was a small, musty room, dark and dank and deserted.

  The heat had exhausted me beyond speech. After so much walking I should have eaten, but I had no appetite. I ordered water and wine instead, and cajoled Tiro into sharing. I ordered more, and by that time Tiro needed no persuasion. With his tongue loosened and his guard down, I felt an urge to ask him outright about his tryst with the daughter of Sextus Roscius. If only I had! But for once I stifled my curiosity.

  Tiro was unused to the wine. For a while he became quite animated, talking about the events of the morning and the previous day, interrupting himself every now and again to say a word of praise for his wise master, while I sat bemused in my chair, only half-listening. Then he abruptly grew silent, staring at his cup with a melancholy look. He took a final sip, put down the cup, leaned back in his chair, and fell fast asleep.

  After a while I closed my eyes, and while I never quite slept, I dozed fitfully for what seemed a very long time, opening my eyes occasionally to the unchanging sight of Tiro splayed slack-jawed in the chair across from me, sleeping the absolute sleep of the young and innocent.

  The half dreams I dreamed, partly submerged in them, partly aware that I dreamed, were gnarled and uneasy, far from innocence. I sat in the house of Caecilia Metella, interviewing Sextus Roscius; he babbled and muttered, and though he seemed to speak Latin I could hardly make out a word he said. When he rose from his chair I noticed that he wore a heavy cloak, and when he walked towards me it was with a terrible limp, dragging his left leg behind him. I turned away from him, horrified, and ran into the hallway. Corridors branched and merged like passages in a maze. I was lost. I parted a curtain and saw him from the back. Beyond him the young widow was pinned against the wall, naked and weeping as he violently raped her.

  But as happens in dreams, what I first saw changed into something else, and I realized with a start that the woman was not the widow; it was Roscius’s own daughter, and when she saw that I watched she was unashamed. Instead she kissed the empty air and flicked her tongue at me.

  I opened my eyes and saw Tiro sleeping across the table. A part of me wanted to awaken, but was too weak. My eyes were too heavy, and I lacked the will to keep them open. Or perhaps this was only another part of the dream.

  In the storeroom of Caecilia’s house, the man and the woman continued to copulate. I watched them from the doorway, as timid as a boy. The man in the cloak looked over his shoulder. I smiled to myself, for now I expected to see Tiro’s face, flushed with excitement, innocent, embarrassed. Instead I saw Sextus Roscius, leering and transfixed with an unspeakable passion.

  I covered my mouth and started back, appalled. Someone tugged at my sleeve. It was the mute boy, his eyes red from weeping, biting his lips to keep himself from simpering. He tried to hand me a knife, but I refused to take it. He shoved me aside angrily, then hurled himself at the copulating figures.

  The boy stabbed at them brutally, indiscriminately. They refused to stop, as if the stabbing were a minor bother, not worth the pleasure it would cost them to pull apart and slap the boy aside. I knew somehow that they could not pull apart, that their flesh had in some way become merged and indistinct. Even as they heaved and writhed a pool of blood ran from their mingled bodies. It spread across the floor like a rich red carpet. It slithered beneath my feet. I tried to step forward but was frozen to the spot, unable to move or even to speak, as rigid as a corpse.

  I opened my eyes, but it seemed to make no difference. I saw only an inundation of red. I realized that I had not opened my eyes at all and still dreamed against my will. I reached up to push my eyes open with my fingers, but the lids held fast together. I struggled, panting and out of breath, unable to will myself out of the dream.

  Then, in an instant, I was awake. My eyes were open. My hands were on the table, trembling. Tiro sat across from me, peacefully napping.

  My mouth was as dry as alum. My head felt stuffed with wool. My face and hands were numb. I tried to call for the taverner and found I could hardly speak. It made no difference; the man was dozing himself, sitting on a stool in the corner with his arms crossed and his chin on his chest.

  I stood. My limbs were like dry wood. I staggered to the entrance and up the stairs to the alley, around the corner and into the square. The open concourse was blindingly bright and utterly deserted; even the urchins had abandoned it. I made my way to the cistern, knelt beside it and peered into the blackness. The water was too deep to give back any reflection, but I felt the rising coolness on my face. I pulled up the bucket, splashed my face, poured it over my head.

  I began to feel remotely human, but still weak. I wanted only to be at rest in my own home, beneath the portico, gazing out at the sunshine in the garden, with Bast slinking against my feet and Bethesda bringing a cool cloth to soothe my forehead.

  Instead I felt a tentative hand on my shoulder. It was Tiro.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  I drew in a deep breath. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s the heat. This terrible, unnatural heat. Like a punishment. It dulls the brain, Cicero says, and parches the spirit.’

  ‘Here, Tiro, help me up.’

  ‘You should lie down. Sleep.’

  ‘No! Sleep is a man’s worst enemy in this kind of heat. Terrible dreams …’

  ‘Shall we go back to the tavern, then?’

  ‘No. Or yes; I suppose I owe the man something for the wine.’

  ‘No, I paid from your purse before I left. He was asleep, but I left the money on the counter.’

  I shook my head. ‘And woke him up before you left, so that no thieves could step in on him?’

  ‘Of co
urse.’

  ‘Tiro, you are a paragon of virtue. You are a rose among thorns. You are the sweet berry in the midst of brambles.’

  ‘I am merely the mirror of my master,’ he said, sounding proud rather than humble.

  XII

  For a while the sun, though still high, was concealed behind a mantle of white clouds which blossomed from nowhere. The worst of the heat had passed, but what the city had absorbed throughout the day it now gave back. The paving stones and the bricks were like the walls of an oven, radiating heat. Unless another thunderstorm came to quench them, the stones would give off warmth throughout the night, baking the city and all who lived in it.

  Tiro urged me to turn back, to hire a litter to take me home or at least to return by foot to Cicero’s house on the Capitoline. But there was no point in coming so near the House of Swans without making a visit.

  We walked down the narrow street again, past the little cul-de-sac where the assassins had hidden, now covered over by the open door of the food shop. From its dim recess came the too-sweet smell of rotted fruit; I did not look inside. We stepped around the bloodstain and walked by the door that led to the widow’s apartment. The gaunt watchman sat dozing on the steps. He opened his eyes as we passed and gave me a puzzled, disgruntled look, as if our interview had been so long ago he had forgotten our faces.

  The House of Swans was even closer than I had thought. The street narrowed and veered to the left, closing off the view behind us. Abruptly, on our right, unmistakable in its gaudy attempt at opulence, was our destination.

  How glamorous it must have appeared to men of modest means who made their way here by word of mouth, arriving by night, following the torches and the crude swan emblems that lined the street. How deliriously tawdry it must have appeared to a man of some refinement like old Sextus Roscius, how inviting to a man possessed of his overripe carnal appetites.

  The facade stood out in sharp contrast to all around it. The surrounding buildings were plastered over and washed in quiet shades of saffron, rust, or mottled cream. The plastered front of the House of Swans was a bright, gaudy pink, embellished here and there, as about the window pediments, with red tiles. A semicircular portico intruded into the street. A statue of Venus was perched atop the half-dome, too small to match the space; the quality of the workmanship was truly painful to look at, almost blasphemous. Even Tiro snickered when he saw it. Within the portico a large lamp hung from the half-dome; one might charitably have said it was boat-shaped, though I suspect the gentle curvature and blunted tip were intended to suggest a human appendage rendered obscenely out of scale. How many nights had Sextus Roscius followed its light like a beacon, up the three marble steps to the black grille, where I now stood with Tiro, shamelessly knocking in broad daylight?

  A slave answered the door, a tall, muscular young man who looked more like a bodyguard or gladiator than a doorkeeper. His manners were disgustingly servile. He never stopped smiling, bowing and nodding as he led us to a low divan in the gaudily appointed anteroom. We had to wait only a few moments before the proprietor himself arrived.

  My host presented an appearance of roundness in all his aspects, from his belly to his nose to the balding crown of his head. What little hair remained had been industriously oiled and coiffed, and his jowls were grotesquely powdered and rouged. His taste in jewellery seemed as overwrought as his taste in furnishings. All in all he presented the spectacle of an Epicurean gone to seed, and his attempts to recreate the air of a Levantine brothel bordered on parody. When the Romans attempt to mimic the East, they seldom succeed. Grace and true luxury cannot be so easily copied, or purchased wholesale.

  ‘Citizen,’ he said, ‘you come at an unusual time of the day. Most of our clients arrive closer to sundown. But all the better for you – you shall have your choice of the girls, with no waiting. Most of them are sleeping now, but I shall happily rouse them from their beds. That’s how I find them most attractive myself, newly risen, still fresh and fragrant with sleep, like morning roses moist with dew.’

  ‘Actually, I had a specific girl in mind.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She was recommended to me. A girl called Elena.’

  The man stared at me blankly and took his time answering. When he spoke I detected no guile, only the sincere forgetfulness of a man who has bought and sold so many bodies over the years that he cannot be expected to remember them all. ‘Elena,’ he said, as if it were a foreign word whose definition he could not quite recall. ‘And was she recommended to you recently, sir?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s been some time since my friend last visited her. He’s away from Rome, busy at his country estates. Business affairs keep him from visiting the city, but he writes to me with fond memories of this Elena, saying he wishes he could find a country woman whose caresses could satisfy him even a fraction as well.’

  ‘Ah.’ The man touched his fingertips together, pursed his lips, and seemed to count the rings on each hand. I found myself staring at the painting on the opposite wall, in which Priapus paid court to a band of naked courtesans, all of whom seemed appropriately awed by the overgrown stalk that rose rampant from between the god’s legs.

  ‘Perhaps you could describe this Elena.’

  I thought for a moment, then shook my head. ‘Alas, my friend makes no mention of her appearance, oddly enough. He only gives me her name, and a guarantee that I won’t be disappointed.’

  My host brightened. ‘Ah, well, I assure you that I can make the same guarantee for any of my girls.’

  ‘Then you’re certain you have no Elena?’

  ‘Actually, the name is familiar. Yes, I seem to remember the girl, dimly. But I’m sure there’s been no Elena here for quite some time.’

  ‘But what could have happened to her? Surely your girls are healthy.’

  ‘Of course they are; I’ve never lost a girl to illness. She was sold, as I recall – to a private citizen, not to a rival house,’ he added, as if to forestall me from searching for her elsewhere.

  ‘A private citizen? My friend will be disappointed to hear it. I wonder if I know the buyer – perhaps there’s some joke afoot behind my back. You couldn’t tell me who the man was?’

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly recall any details without consulting my accountant. And I should tell you that as a matter of policy I never discuss the sale of slaves except with a prospective buyer.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Ah, here, Stabius is bringing a selection now. Four beautiful girls. Your only problem will be deciding which you want most. Or perhaps you’ll insist on two at once. Or perhaps you’ll want to try all four, one after the other. My girls turn even ordinary men into satyrs, and you, sir, look like no ordinary man to me.’

  Compared to the brothels of Antioch or Alexandria, my host’s initial offering was disappointingly humdrum. All four were brunettes. Two of them struck me as ordinary, almost homely, though for men who look only below the neck they possessed ample charms. The other two were attractive enough, though neither was as beautiful as the widow Polia, or at least as beautiful as the young widow must have been before her face was scarred by suffering. All four wore sleeveless coloured gowns of a fabric so clinging and sheer that only the finest details of their bodies remained a mystery. My host touched the youngest and prettiest on the shoulder and ushered her forward.

  ‘Here, sir, I offer you the tenderest bud in my garden, my newest, my freshest blossom: Talia. As pretty and playful as a child. But already a woman, have no doubt.’ He stood behind her and gently lifted the gown from her shoulders. It parted down the middle and for a brief moment she was displayed to me nude, her head bowed and her eyes averted. Behind me I heard Tiro gasp.

  The brothel master gently fondled her breasts and ran his fingers down to her abdomen. I watched the gooseflesh rise from the downy skin below her navel. ‘She blushes, you see – what a colour it gives her cheeks. Talia blushes in other places as well, too delicate to mention.’ He covered he
r up. ‘But despite her girlish modesty, I assure you she is shameless in bed.’

  ‘How long has she been with you?’

  ‘Oh, not long at all, sir. Only a month. Almost a virgin still, and yet astonishingly skilled with every orifice. Her mouth is especially talented—’

  ‘I’m not interested.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I had my heart set on Elena.’

  My host clenched his teeth.

  ‘Still, if she isn’t here, then bring me your most experienced whore. I care nothing about looks. These girls are too young to know what they’re doing; I’ve no interest in children. Bring me your most veteran whore. Show me a fullblown woman, a hot-blooded woman, no stranger to every imaginable scheme of love. And she must speak passable Latin. Exchanging words is half my pleasure. Is there such a woman in the House of Swans?’

  My host clapped his hands. The slave called Stabius ushered the girls out of the room. Talia, the young blossom whom our host had unveiled for us, who had blushed and looked away with such conviction, covered her mouth with her hand as she left, yawning.

  ‘Stabius!’

  The slave turned back.

  ‘Stabius, bring us Electra.’

  The woman called Electra took her time. When my host at last announced her, I knew at once that she was the woman I wanted.

  Her hair was her most striking feature, a great mass of black tresses accented with a spray of white at each temple. She wore her makeup with a skill attainable only by years of practice; my host might have done well to take lessons from her. If her features were too bold to be called delicate, if her skin was no longer pristine, still, under the soft light of the atrium, one could say with complete conviction that she was beautiful. With age she had earned the dignity to wear a gown less revealing than those of the younger girls, a loose, long-sleeved white robe belted with a sash at the waist. The curves of her hips and breasts were alluring enough without being glimpsed through gossamer.

  There is at least one such woman in every brothel, and in those cities dedicated to the specializations of pleasure one may find entire houses of them. Electra was the Great Mother. Not the mother of a grown man, but the mother one remembers from childhood; not old but wise, with a body neither lean and girlish nor old beyond beauty, but fulsome, primed, nourishing.