Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4)

by Steven Saylor

  Lucius nodded. ‘The important thing is, Deci is safe and out of danger.’

  ‘He was always safe; never in danger.’

  ‘Rude of him, though, not to pay you the balance of your fee.’

  I shrugged. ‘When I saw him at his house yesterday evening, after the races, I had nothing more to report to him. He hired me to uncover a plot against his life. I failed to do so.’

  And what, I thought, if I had reported everything to the consul – Sempronia’s adultery, the racing fix, the betting scheme, Scorpus’ attempted blackmail and his murder, Sempronia’s seditious support of Sertorius? Terrified of scandal, Decimus Brutus would merely have hushed it all up. Sempronia would have been no more faithful to him than before, and no one’s wagers would have been returned. No, I had been hired to save the consul’s life, discreetly; and as far as I was concerned, my duty to Decimus Brutus ended when I discovered there was no plot against his life after all. My discretion would continue.

  ‘Still, Gordianus, it was niggardly of Deci not to pay you …’

  Discretion forbade me from telling Lucius that the other half of my fee had indeed been paid – by Sempronia. It was the only way I could see to save my own neck. I had convinced her that by paying the fee for my investigation she purchased my discretion. Thus I avoided the same fate as Scorpus.

  At the same time, I had requested a refund of Lucius’ wagers, which seemed only fair.

  Lucius cupped his hands around a pile of coins, as if they emitted a warming glow. He smiled ruefully. ‘I tell you what, Gordianus – as commission for recouping my gambling losses, what if I give you … five percent of the total?’

  I sucked in a breath and eyed the coins on the table. Bethesda would be greatly pleased to see the household coffer filled to overflowing. I smiled at Lucius and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Gordianus, don’t give me that look!’

  ‘What look?’

  ‘Oh, very well! I shall give you ten percent. But not a sesterce more!’

  IF A CYCLOPS COULD VANISH IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE

  Eco was incensed. That was all I could tell at first – that he was angry and frustrated almost to the point of tears. At such a time, I felt acutely aware of his muteness. He was usually quite skilled at expressing himself with gestures and signals, but not when he was flustered.

  ‘Calm down,’ I said quietly, placing my hands on his shoulders. He was at that age when boys shoot up like beanstalks. It seemed to me that not long ago, placing my hands at the same height, I would have been patting his head. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘what is the problem?’

  My adopted son took a deep breath and composed himself, then seized my hand and led me across the overgrown garden at the centre of the house, under the portico, through a curtained doorway and into his room. By the bright morning light from the small window I surveyed the few furnishings – a narrow sleeping cot, a wooden folding chair and a small trunk.

  It was not to these that Eco directed my attention, but to a long niche about knee-high in the plastered wall across from his bed. The last time I had ventured into the room, a hodgepodge of toys had been shoved into the niche – little boats made of wood, a leather ball for playing trigon, pebbles of coloured glass for Egyptian board games. Now the space had been neatly cleared – the cast-off toys put away in the trunk along with his spare tunic, I presumed – and occupying the shelf were a number of tiny figurines made of fired clay, each representing some monster of legend with a horrible visage. There was a Medusa with snakes for hair, a Cyclops with one eye, a Nemean lion, and numerous others.

  They were crudely made but tinted with bright colours, and I knew that Eco treasured them. A potter with a shop down by the Tiber made them in his spare time out of bits of leftover clay; Eco had been doing occasional odd jobs for the man and accepting the figurines as payment. He insisted on showing them off to me and to Bethesda whenever he brought a new one home. I always made a point of admiring them, but my beloved concubine made no secret of her disdain for them. Her upbringing in Egypt had given her attitudes different – dare I say more superstitious? – than those of a Roman, and where I found the figurines to be harmless and charming, she saw in them something distasteful, even sinister.

  I had not realized how large Eco’s collection had grown. I counted fifteen figurines, all lined up in a row.

  ‘Why do you show me these?’ I asked.

  He pointed to three gaps in the evenly spaced row.

  ‘Are you telling me that three of your monsters are missing?’

  Eco nodded vigorously.

  ‘But where have they gone?’

  He shrugged and his lower lip began to tremble. He looked so desolate.

  ‘Which ones are missing? When were they taken?’

  Eco pointed to the first gap, then performed a very complicated mime, snarling and gnashing his teeth, until I grasped that the missing figurine was of three-headed Cerberus, the watchdog of Pluto. He passed an open palm behind a horizontal forearm – his gesture for sundown – and held up two fingers.

  ‘The day before yesterday your Cerberus went missing?’

  He nodded.

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me then?’

  Eco shrugged and made a long face. I gathered that he presumed he might have mislaid the figurine himself.

  Our exchange continued – me, asking questions; Eco, answering with gestures – until I learned that yesterday his Minotaur had disappeared, and that very morning his many-headed Hydra had vanished. The first disappearance had merely puzzled him; the second had alarmed him; the third had thrown him into utter confusion.

  I gazed at the gaps in the row of monsters and stroked my chin. ‘Well, well, this is serious. Tell me, has anything else gone missing?’

  Eco shook his head.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He rolled his eyes at me and gestured to his cot, his chair and his trunk, as if to say, With so little to call my own, don’t you think I’d notice if anything else was gone?

  Eco’s figurines were of little intrinsic value; any serious burglar would surely have been more likely to snatch one of Bethesda’s bracelets or a scroll from my bookcase. But as far as I knew, nothing else in the house had gone missing in the last few days.

  At that time, I was without a slave – other than Bethesda, whom I could hardly justify calling my slave anymore, considering that she tended to prevail in any contest of wills between us – so the only occupants of the house were Bethesda, Eco and myself. In the last three days, no tradesmen had come calling; nor, sadly for my purse, had any client come to seek the services of Gordianus the Finder.

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘Fortunately for you, Eco, I happen to be between cases at the moment, so I can bend all my efforts towards solving this mystery. But the truth can never be hurried. Let me ponder this for a while – sleep on it, perhaps – and I’ll see if I can come up with a solution.’

  Bethesda was out most of the day, shopping at the food markets and taking a pair of my shoes to be resoled by a cobbler. I had business to attend to in the Forum, as well as a special errand to take care of on the Street of the Plastermakers. Not until that night, after Eco had retired to his room and the two of us reclined on our dining couches after the evening meal – a simple repast of lentil soup and stuffed dates – did I find time to have a quiet word with Bethesda about Eco’s problem.

  ‘Disappearing? One at a time?’ she said. By the warm glow of the nearby brazier, I thought I saw a subtle smile on her lips. The same light captured wine-coloured highlights in her dark, henna-treated hair. Bethesda was beautiful at all hours of the day, but perhaps most beautiful by firelight. The black female cat she called Bast lay beside her, submitting to her gentle stroking. Watching Bethesda caress the beast, I felt a stab of envy. Cats were still a novelty in Rome at that time, and keeping one as a house pet, as others might keep a dog, was one of the peculiar habits Bethesda had imported with her from Egypt. Her last cat, also called Bast, had expired some time
ago; this one she had recently acquired from a sailing merchant in Ostia. The beast and I got along passably well, as long as I didn’t attempt to interpose myself between Bast and her mistress when it was the cat’s turn to receive Bethesda’s caresses.

  ‘Yes, the little monsters seem to be vanishing, one by one,’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘I don’t suppose you know anything about it?’

  ‘I? What makes you think I might have anything to do with it?’ Bethesda raised an eyebrow. For an uncanny moment, her expression and the cat’s expression were identical – mysterious, aloof, utterly self-contained. I shifted uneasily on my couch.

  ‘Perhaps …’ I shrugged. ‘Perhaps you were cleaning his room. Perhaps one of the figurines fell and broke—’

  ‘Do you think I’m blind as well as clumsy? I think I should know if I had broken one of Eco’s figurines,’ she said coolly, ‘especially if I did such a thing three days in a row.’

  ‘Of course. Still, considering the way you feel about those figurines—’

  ‘And do you know how I feel about them, Master?’ Bethesda fixed me with her catlike stare.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Well, I know you don’t like them—’

  ‘I respect them for what they are. You think they’re just lumps of lifeless clay, a child’s toys made by a clumsy potter. You Romans! You’ve put so much of your faith in the handful of gods who made you great that you can no longer see the tiny gods who populate your own households. There’s a spark of life in every one of the figurines that Eco has brought into the house. It’s unwise to bring so many into the house at once, when there’s so little we know about any of them. Do you know what I think? I think the three who’ve gone missing may have left of their own volition.’

  ‘What? You think they jumped from the shelf and scampered off?’

  ‘You scoff, Master, but it may be that the three who left were unhappy with the company in which they found themselves. Or perhaps the others ganged up on them and drove them off!’ As her voice rose, so did Bethesda, sitting upright on the couch. Bast, disliking the change in her mistress’s disposition, jumped from her lap and ran off.

  ‘Bethesda, this is preposterous. They’re only bits of painted clay!’

  She recovered her composure and leaned back. ‘So you say, Master. So you say.’

  ‘The point is, those figurines are of great value to Eco. He’s very proud of them. They’re his possessions. He earned them by his own labour.’

  ‘If you say so, Master. Being a mere slave, I wouldn’t know much about earning and owning.’

  Her tone expressed no empathy for Eco at all, and certainly no remorse. I became more determined than ever to make good on my pledge to Eco to solve the mystery of his disappearing monsters.

  That night, after Bethesda was asleep, I slipped out of bed and stole to the garden at the centre of the house, which was lit by a full moon. In an inconspicuous spot beside one of the columns of the portico, I located the purchase I had made earlier that day on the Street of the Plastermakers. It was a tightly woven linen bag containing a handful or so of plaster dust. Carrying the bag, I slipped through the curtained doorway into Eco’s room. The moonlight that poured in through the small window showed Eco soundly asleep on his cot. Reaching into the bag, I scattered a very fine layer of plaster dust on to the floor in front of the niche that contained his figurines. The dust was so fine that a tiny cloud rose from my hand and seemed to sparkle in the moonlight.

  My eyes watered and my nose twitched. I slipped out of Eco’s room, put away the bag of plaster dust, and stole back to my bed. I slipped under the covers beside Bethesda. Only then did I release a sneeze that broke the silence like thunder.

  Bethesda murmured and rolled on to her side, but did not wake.

  The next morning I woke to the sound of birds in the garden – not pleasant singing, but the shrill cawing of two magpies squabbling in the trees. I covered my ears with my pillow, but it was no good. I was up for the day.

  Stepping out of bed, I inadvertently kicked a shoe – one of the pair that Bethesda had brought home from the cobbler the previous day – and sent it skittering under the bed. Dropping to my hands and knees to retrieve it, I was stopped short by the sight of four objects on the floor beneath the bed, directly underneath the space where Bethesda slept, against the wall. They were clustered in a little group, lying on their sides. Joining the missing figurines of Cerberus, the Minotaur, and the Hydra was a fourth, Eco’s one-eyed Cyclops.

  Well, well, I thought, getting to my feet. Sprinkling the plaster dust had been superfluous, after all. Or had it? If Bethesda wouldn’t own up to pilfering Eco’s figurines, the evidence of her footsteps in the dust, and of the dust adhering to soles of her shoes, would compel her to do so. I couldn’t help but smile, anticipating her chagrin. Or would she maintain her fiction that the figurines had walked off by themselves, with the curious goal, as it turned out, of congregating beneath our bed?

  Whistling an old Etruscan nursery tune and looking forwards to a hearty breakfast, I strolled across the garden towards the dining room at the back of the house. Above my head, the magpies squawked in dissonant counterpoint to my whistling. Bast sat in a patch of sunlight, apparently oblivious of the birds, cleaning a forepaw with her tongue.

  No sooner had I settled myself on the dining couch than Eco came running out of his room, a look of confusion and alarm on his face. He ran up to me and waved his arms, making inchoate gestures.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said, raising one hand to calm him and gently restraining him with the other. ‘Don’t tell me – your Cyclops has gone missing.’

  Eco was briefly taken aback, then frowned and peered at me inquiringly.

  ‘How do I know? Well …’

  At that moment, Bethesda appeared from the kitchen, bearing a bowl of steaming porridge. I cleared my throat.

  ‘Bethesda,’ I said, ‘it seems that another of Eco’s figurines has vanished. What do you say to that?’

  She put the bowl on a small tripod table and began to ladle porridge into three smaller bowls. ‘What would you have me say, Master?’ She kept her eyes on her work. Her face was utterly expressionless, betraying not the least trace of guilt or guile.

  I sighed, almost regretting that she had forced me to expose her little charade. ‘Perhaps you could begin …’ By apologizing to Eco, I was about to say – when I was abruptly interrupted by a sneeze.

  It was not Bethesda who sneezed. Nor was it Eco.

  It was the cat.

  Bethesda looked up. ‘Yes, Master? I could begin by saying … what?’

  My face turned hot. I cleared my throat. I pursed my lips.

  I stood up. ‘Eco, the first thing you must remember, if you ever wish to become a Finder like your father, is always to keep a cool head and never to jump to conclusions. Last night I laid a trap for our culprit. If we now examine the scene of the crime, I suspect we shall discover that she has left a clue behind.’

  Or several clues, as it turned out, if one wished to call each tiny, padded paw print in the fine plaster dust an individual clue. The paw prints led up to the niche; the paw prints led away. Following a barely discernible trail of dusted prints, Eco and I tracked the thief’s progress out of his room, around the colonnaded portico and into the room I shared with Bethesda. The trail disappeared under the bed.

  I left it to Eco to discover the pilfered figurines for himself. He let out a grunt, scampered under the bed, and reemerged clutching the clay treasures in both hands, a look of mingled relief and triumph on his face.

  Greatly excited, he put down the figurines so that he could communicate. He pinched his forefingers and thumbs beneath his nose and drew them outwards, making his sign for Bast by miming the cat’s long whiskers.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was Bast who took your figurines.’

  Eco made an exaggerated shrug with his palms held upright.

  ‘Why? That I can’t tell you. We Romans don’t yet know that much about cats
. Not like the Egyptians, who’ve been living with them – and worshipping them – since the dawn of time. I suppose, like dogs and ferrets – and like magpies, for that matter – some cats display a tendency to pilfer small objects and hide them. One of those figurines would fit quite neatly between Bast’s jaws. I’m sure she meant no harm, as none of them seems to have been damaged. She obviously treated them with great respect.’

  I glanced at the cat. She stood in the doorway beside Bethesda and peered back at me with a bland expression that admitted no guilt. She rubbed herself against Bethesda’s ankles, whipped her tail in the air, and sauntered back towards the garden. Bethesda raised an eyebrow and looked at me steadily, but said nothing.

  That night, after a very busy day, I slipped into bed beside Bethesda. Her mood seemed a bit cool, but she said nothing.

  The silence stretched. ‘I suppose I owe you an apology,’ I finally said.

  ‘For what?’

  The best course, I decided, was to make light of my mistake. ‘It was foolish of me, really. Do you know, I almost suspected you of taking Eco’s figurines.’

  ‘Really?’ By the pale moonlight, I couldn’t quite decipher the expression on her face. Was she angry? Amused? Unconcerned?

  ‘Yes, I actually suspected you, Bethesda. But of course it wasn’t you. It was the cat, all along.’ The creature abruptly jumped on to the bed and crawled over both of us to settle between Bethesda and the wall, purring loudly.

  ‘Yes, it was Bast who took the figurines,’ said Bethesda. She rolled away from me and laid her hand upon the cat, who responded with a purring that was almost a roar. ‘But how do you know that it wasn’t I who put her up to it?’

  For that, I had no answer.

  THE WHITE FAWN

  The old senator was a distant cousin of my friend Lucius Claudius, and the two had once been close. That was the only reason I agreed to see the man, as a favour to Lucius. When Lucius let it slip, on the way to the senator’s house, that the affair had something to do with Sertorius, I clucked my tongue and almost turned back. I had a feeling even then that it would lead to no good. Call it a premonition, if you will; if you believe that such things as premonitions exist.