Death of an Eye

by Dana Stabenow

Her jaw dropped. “Reliable,” she said. “Reliable?”

  Apollodorus and Laogonus and Debu and Pert and Leon and Bolgios looked at each other and laughed uproariously, and she could only shake her head in disbelief. “The queen employs madmen on her most important business. Certainly someone should tell her.”

  “Oh, she knows,” Laogonus said, his teeth white against his beard, and they all laughed and laughed.

  “Madmen,” she said with conviction.

  *

  The agent’s second-in-command, a short, thin Greek with thick, dark, badly cut hair and delicate hands, had been visibly vibrating with anxiety since first sight of the Eye. Tetisheri made a soothing gesture. “Peace,” she said. “If you are innocent of any complicity in this crime you have nothing to fear.”

  He wasn’t a slave, he was a freedman, but there was an excellent chance he would be interrogated anyway, and harshly because as they both knew the Shurta had been beating confessions out of the guilty and innocent alike for four thousand years. There was an even better chance that he would be demoted and possibly out of a job entirely, and they both knew that, too. “Here, sit down, Gelo. Apollodorus, some wine, please.” She waited as the freedman gulped it down. “Tell me about the coins. When did the order for them come?”

  “When we received the dies.”

  When he said nothing further she said, “And that was…?”

  “The first month of Shemu,” he said obediently. “I think the Second Week.”

  “Do the dies always come from Alexandria?”

  He nodded. “They are always designed and cut by the Royal Coiner in Alexandria. We create molds from the dies, smelt the bronze, and stamp out the coins here, and then ship them to Alexandria.”

  The Ptolemys’ coins had always been made on Cyprus because copper and tin were plentiful there and because there was wood for fuel. “Who knew about the order?”

  “Paulinos. Myself. Harmon, the master of the workshop, because he makes them, and the men who work for him.”

  “How many employees does he have?”

  “Twenty men—smelters, punchers, strikers, and engravers.”

  “Have there been any changes in personnel recently? Anyone quit due to a grievance?”

  He shook his head and said vehemently, “No. Nothing. We are all of us freedmen and well paid. Most of us are married with children and homes. We have too much to lose to engage in theft.” His lip actually curled on the word.

  Like Laogonus and his crew, Tetisheri thought. The queen made sure those essential to the realm had too much to lose to be tempted into betrayal.

  “And the carrier who took the coins from the forge to the port?”

  “Almost always the same company and has been for years. And they are always accompanied by the same guards so that nothing happens between the forge and the ship.”

  “Almost always?”

  “Oh.” He was relaxed enough now to roll his eyes. “Last year a new carrier convinced Paulinos to give them a try. They’d imported some camels from Jaffa. It was a disaster.” He made a face. “They may be great in the desert but the island is better suited to donkeys.”

  “Where is Paulinos?”

  “He hasn’t been in all week. The news of the theft hit him pretty hard.”

  “How did that news arrive and when?”

  “A messenger from Alexandria, on…” His eyes narrowed in thought. “The Eighth Day? No, the Seventh Day. Of the Second Week.”

  The same day Khemit had received a visitor in her shop. “We have to find Atet upon our return,” she said to Apollodorus.

  “We do,” he said. “Gelo, did this messenger have a name?”

  Gelo shook his head. “As soon as Paulinos saw him the two of them left together.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I only saw him from a distance. I got the impression of a thin, dark man.” He considered. “With a very long nose that drooped at the end. Like a flamingo’s.”

  Polykarpus. “And Paulinos has not been back to the shop since?”

  “No.”

  “Is that normal for him?”

  Gelo looked puzzled. “Why, I—well, no, I suppose it isn’t. He takes weeks off occasionally but he always tells us when he won’t be in, and of course he never does when we have a new issue in process. None of us do.”

  Tetisheri exchanged a glance with Apollodorus, who said, “Take us to his home. Now.”

  *

  Paulinos lived in a stuccoed villa overlooking the town, with a terrace along the front, a small, well-tended garden at the side, and six tiers of grape vines that climbed the hill behind the house. It was reached by a series of trails connected by flights of stairs switching back and forth on the face of the hillside. There were no houses built above his.

  “Idyllic,” Apollodorus said.

  Tetisheri climbed the last few steps to the terrace and paused to catch her breath. “He has to be in good health.”

  Gelo, puffing along in the rear, said between gasps, “He says he doesn’t like being bothered.”

  “Is he married?”

  “He was. She died last year.”

  “Any children?”

  “One, a daughter, in Rome. Sent to live with a cousin, I think he said. After his wife died. The door’s around this way.”

  They followed him around through the garden, where a patch of seedlings were wilting by the row and even the leaves of the rosemary bush were curling. Gelo paused. “That’s odd. Paulinos loved his garden. Why would he—”

  His head turned as Tetisheri went swiftly past him with Apollodorus hard on her heels.

  The door stood slightly ajar and the smell hit them well before they reached the source of it. Tetisheri looked at Apollodorus with wide eyes and he gave a grim nod. “Wait outside, Gelo,” he said.

  “Why? What’s wrong? I—” And then the smell hit him, too, and his face went white and he turned to vomit into the hedge of verbena that lined the walkway. Well, Tetisheri thought, trying not to follow suit, it needed watering like everything else.

  Apollodorus pushed the door wide. “Wait here,” he said, and went in. She heard the dull thuds of shutters being thrown wide and other doors opening. Apollodorus reappeared with a corner of his cloak held to his nose. “I’m sorry, Sheri, but you need to see this.”

  “See what?” Gelo said. “Is it Paulinos? Is he—”

  “Paulinos is dead,” Apollodorus said, “and for some time now.” He disappeared back inside and Tetisheri stiffened her spine and followed him.

  It was a small house, perfectly proportioned, with no atrium, just one long room with the wall facing seawards made of a row of windows with sills wide enough to sit on. The view of the town and harbor of Lemesos was panoramic and spectacular. In the back were two bedrooms. The bathroom between them had a hypocaust to heat the water and a bronze strigil hanging from an ornate hook on the wall next to the bath. A man Tetisheri assumed to be Paulinos was in the bath, and although his flesh had darkened and collapsed onto his bones it was obvious how he had died. His left wrist had been sliced open to the bone, which gleamed white between the curled-back lips of severed flesh. His right hand was lying on the tile, a dagger next to it. The cut wrist was in the water in which Paulinos was reclining and the blood from it had colored the water a dull pink.

  Tetisheri swallowed hard. “How long, do you think?”

  Apollodorus picked up the dead man’s right hand and let it fall. It dropped loosely, smacking into the tiles. “It has been long enough for the death stiffness to wear off, and for the rot to set in. And for the flies to lay eggs.”

  Paulinos’ mouth was open in a soundless scream and the flesh of his face seemed to move, as if he would say more, until Tetisheri realized it was the maggots eating the soft tissue. She bolted from the bathroom into the living room and leaned out of the first open window and gripped the sill. There was a cool breeze off the sea and it felt wonderful on her hot face. After a few moments she had the nause
a under control and turned back to the room.

  Apollodorus had followed her and was waiting. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “No. You were right. I had to see.” She took a deep breath, still breathing shallowly through her mouth, although the smell in the living room was mercifully weaker than in the room where the body lay. “What else is there?”

  In the main room two long couches faced each other with a low table between them. The table held a lamp, a carafe, and two cups. There was also a small brazier, the coals long dead. It held a charred curl of papyrus that surprisingly didn’t disintegrate when Tetisheri plucked it out. Very carefully she flattened the papyrus and Apollodorus came to look over her shoulder.

  “—I—N—A,” she spelled out. “Ina?”

  “Perhaps Paulina,” Gelo said from behind them. “His daughter. The one in Rome?”

  “Why write down her name and then burn it?” Tetisheri said.

  Gelo peered over her shoulder. “Oh, that isn’t his writing.”

  They both looked at him. “Are you sure?” Tetisheri said.

  “Y-yes,” he said, his fear returning at the sharpness of her tone. “He and I and Harmon can all write. It’s necessary for the job. Every step of the process must be recorded for our report back to Alexandria. I know his hand like I know my own.”

  “Whose writing is it, then?” Tetisheri said.

  He nearly wet himself. “I don’t know! It isn’t mine! You can ask Harmon, he’ll tell you! I never saw this hand before!”

  “Calm down.” Apollodorus was as exasperated as Tetisheri was with Gelo’s histrionics. “No one has offered you harm.” The yet was unspoken but understood.

  Gelo sniffed and gulped and heaved out a shuddering sigh, and then fell into a coughing fit as the smell of the decaying corpse hit his nostrils again. He looked over his shoulder at the bath. “Is he in there?”

  “I told you to wait outside,” Apollodorus said.

  Gelo hesitated, and in his face Tetisheri could see relief that it wasn’t him, not this time, along with a natural curiosity to look on the face of death.

  “Go,” Apollodorus said, his deep voice implacable.

  There was no gainsaying that order. Gelo went, unwillingly, but he went.

  “The bedrooms,” Tetisheri said. They searched them and found nothing. The lean-to on the back of the house that was the kitchen yielded no information, either, other than that it looked like Paulinos had been cooking for himself, and not well. They met again in the living room.

  “This house hasn’t been cleaned in a while,” Tetisheri said. “Dust in the corners, cobwebs in the windows, the covers on the bed look like they haven’t been washed in a month. Did the man have no slaves?”

  “Gelo said his wife died last year,” Apollodorus said. “He may have sold them after his daughter left for Rome. A lot of men don’t know how to manage after they lose a spouse.”

  Tetisheri looked at the table. “Two cups indicates two drinkers. Does the body look like Paulinos might have killed himself on the same day he received the visitor from Alexandria?”

  “I’m no doctor but I’ve watched enough people die and seen more than my share of their bodies afterward,” Apollodorus said. “Given the condition of the corpse, I would guess his visitor could actually have watched him die.”

  Tetisheri looked at the curl of papyrus she still held. “What can I put this in that will keep it safe until we get home?”

  They rummaged about in the kitchen and found a small clay jar with a stopper used for dried thyme. Tetisheri emptied it and packed the scrap of papyrus in straw and sealed the stopper with wax. They quit the house with relief.

  Gelo was waiting for them on the walkway, the sour smell of his vomit still faint on the air. He was looking at the house with a speculative expression, almost as if he were measuring the windows for curtains. “Does the house come with the job?” Tetisheri said.

  He flushed. “Uh, well, yes, it does.”

  “Congratulations,” Apollodorus said.

  Gelo, totally missing the sarcasm, actually made a small bow. “Thank you. It is a very nice house. Paulinos Longinus—poor man, we shall miss him—Paulinos Longinus was very happy here. At least until his wife died. He seemed to fall apart after that, poor—”

  “Paulinos Longinus?” Tetisheri said.

  Gelo looked taken aback. “That was his name.”

  “Paulinos Longinus?”

  Mystified, Gelo said, “Paulinos Longinus was his full name, lady. Have I not said so?”

  “Not soon enough,” Tetisheri said, and turned to Apollodorus. “We have to go.”

  “Now?”

  “Right now.” She turned on her heel and headed for the path down the hill. Her feet slipped on loose dirt and pebbles but she took the corners as if she were entered in the pankration at Olympia.

  Gelo, panting along in the rear, said, “Wait, aren’t you going to report this to the local authorities?”

  “No time,” Tetisheri said.

  “But what will I tell them?” His wail made him sound like a frightened child.

  “Whatever you like!”

  Behind her Apollodorus said, “Tell them a report will come from the Shurta in Alexandria.”

  “But when?”

  “When one is written!”

  11

  on the Eighth Day of the Third Week

  at the Second Hour…

  The first day of their journey back to Alexandria the Thalassa had skated across the top of the Middle Sea like an eagle, its sail swung out at a right angle to the ship. It took everything Laogonus had to hold the tiller on course, and at that one of the crew and Apollodorus had to spell him every other hour.

  “No wonder you don’t need oars!” Tetisheri had said, wiping the spray from her eyes. In spite of her forebodings, she was beginning to enjoy this mode of travel.

  His teeth bared in his perpetual grin, the captain laughed. “Poseidon is with us this day!”

  Poseidon, however, could be a fickle god, and he deserted them altogether on the second day. The wind faltered at the Sixth Hour and failed them entirely by the Eighth. There was no cloud from horizon to horizon and Ra was merciless as he shone down on a sea that reflected their own faces back at them in perfect detail when they looked over the side.

  “Perfect weather for pirates,” Laogonus said.

  He didn’t appear anywhere near as worried at the prospect as Tetisheri thought he ought to be. She felt like the target in the sand pit in the back of the Five Soldiers. Insubstantial zephyrs danced tantalizingly around the ship to the point that she began to take it personally, and to wonder just whose side Poseidon was on. She gripped the amulet of Bast hung round her throat but cats were notoriously averse to water so there would be no help from that quarter.

  It helped, a little, that she couldn’t stop thinking about the theft and all the things they had discovered related to it over the past week. She wanted, she needed, it was almost a physical necessity to get back to Alexandria to apprise the queen of their findings, and to apprehend the rest of the thieves and the murderer and bring them to justice. She paced up and down the deck as if that might bring her closer to their destination. In truth the water looked flat enough to walk upon and hard enough to bear her weight.

  Her perambulations followed a somewhat less than a straight line, by necessity forced to avoid the large piece of equipment in the center of the ship hidden beneath a lashed tarp. No one had bothered to explain what it was. Certainly there was no such thing on board Uncle Neb’s Hapi. Although the Hapi did have oarsmen, seven a side, and this afternoon Thalassa’s lack of them felt injudicious in the extreme.

  Apollodorus joined her on her tenth trip to the bow. “Longinus?” he said.

  “Who else do we know who shares that family name?”

  He was silent for a full length of the ship. “Skatos,” he said. “Cassius. The man who was with Cotta and Caesar the morning I fetched you to the queen’s presenc
e.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And he was at the kinglet’s dinner party that evening,” he said slowly. “Sitting at Ptolemy Theos’ right hand, too. His guest of honor.”

  “With his two sons,” she said. “And on the other side of the Longinus family was…”

  He stopped pacing, and she turned to watch his expression change. “Hunefer.”

  “Exactly.” She resumed pacing, only to stub her toe on the piece of equipment sitting beneath the lashed tarp for the third—or was it the fourth?—time. “Ouch! What is this thing, anyway, and why does it have to be right in the middle of where I’m walking?”

  “Temper,” he said mildly.

  She gave him an unfriendly look and started pacing again, this time with the addition of a slight limp. “We have Paulinos Longinus in charge of making coin for Alexandria and Egypt. We have Cassius Longinus in Caesar’s train but dining with Cleopatra’s brother and sworn enemy, in company with an Alexandrian noble family known for its allegiance to Ptolemy and not coincidentally in financial trouble of its own.”

  “More for its hatred of Cleopatra,” he said. “What did she do to them, anyway?”

  “They backed Arsinoë in the late rebellion,” she said, and this time she stopped. “Polykarpus. He was the fourth man in the group of Ptolemy’s advisors, with Linos, Thales, and Philo, remember? And Philo is known to be the head of the faction of nobles that most vehemently opposes Cleopatra’s rule. The Alexandrian nobles resented the tax levy last year, in spite of her summoning all of them to that conclave to explain why they were necessary. They live their lives in Alexandria, they raise their children there, the whole world visits and trades and studies there, you’d think they’d want the sewers to work properly.”

  “It’s not about the sewers,” Apollodorus said. “They’re afraid she’s going to spend all their money on books for the Library, in particular books to replace the ones that were lost in the fire when Caesar burned his ships.”

  “Why would they think that?”

  “Because someone has been saying it, repeatedly, in marketplaces and tavernas and in every wealthy home within and without the walls of Alexandria ever since she levied the tax.”