Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (110 page)

‘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.