Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (120 page)

‘For the last shipment of goods, he talked me into taking my payment in gold vessels – pitchers and bowls and such – while he took his in coin. He needed the ready money to spend on certain investments of his own, he said, and what did it matter anyway, so long as we both received the same weight? Secretly, I thought I must be getting the better deal, because worked gold is more valuable than its weight in coinage. Agathinus was counting on my own greed, you see, and he used it against me. He cheated me. The devious bastard cheated me! Last night, with Archimedes’ help, I proved it.’

‘Proved that your gold vessels weren’t made of solid gold?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Perhaps Agathinus didn’t know.’

‘Oh, no, he knew. After we went into the thicket and found the tomb this morning, I confronted him. He denied the deception at first – until I dragged him on to the cube and threatened to throw him on the cone. Then he confessed, and kept on confessing, with the sight of that spike to goad him. It didn’t begin with this transaction! He’d been pilfering and corrupting my shares of gold for years, in all sorts of devious ways. I always knew that Agathinus was too clever to be honest!’

‘And after he confessed—’ I shuddered, picturing it.

Dorotheus swallowed hard. ‘I could say that it was an accident, that he slipped, but why? I’m not proud of it. I was angry – furious! Anger like that comes from the gods, doesn’t it? So the gods will understand. And they’ll understand why I had to get rid of you, as well.’ He reached into the folds of his tunic and pulled out a long dagger.

I coughed. My throat was bone-dry. ‘I thought you intended to buy my silence.’

‘I’ve changed my mind.’

‘But you said—’

‘You never agreed, so there was never a bargain. And now I withdraw that offer.’

I looked around the room for something that might equalize the situation, but saw nothing remotely resembling a weapon. The best I could do was to pick up the tub. I threw the water on him, then threw the tub, which he knocked aside. All I managed was to make him furious and dripping wet. All trace of the laughing, genial dinner companion of the previous night had vanished. Seeing his face now, I would not have known him.

It was at that moment that the door behind him gave a rattle and burst open.

Cicero entered first, followed by a troop of well-armed Roman peacekeepers who surrounded Dorotheus at once and took his dagger. Eco trailed behind, leaping in the air in great excitement, the anxious look on his face turning to jubilation when he saw that I was unharmed.

‘Eco fetched you?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Cicero.

‘You heard Dorotheus confess?’

‘I heard enough.’

Eco opened his mouth wide and moved his lips, but managed only to produce a stifled grunt.

‘What’s the boy trying to say?’ asked Cicero.

‘I think it must be
“Eureka! Eureka!
” ’

‘Greed!’ I said to Eco the next morning, as we made ready to vacate our room at Cicero’s house. ‘Last night I read that idyll of Theocritus, the poem that Cicero quoted from at dinner the other night. The poet certainly got it right:

Men no longer aspire to win praise for noble deeds,

but think only of profit, profit, profit.

Clutching their coinbags, always looking for more,

too stingy to give away the tarnish that comes off their coins!

‘Thanks to greed, Agathinus is dead, Dorotheus awaits trial for his murder, and Margero the poet has lost both of his patrons in one stroke, which means he’ll probably have to leave Syracuse. A disaster for them all. It’s very sad; enough to make a man want to leave behind the grubby human cares of this world and lose himself in pure geometry, like Archimedes.’

We gathered up our few belongings and went to take our leave of Cicero. There was also the matter of collecting my fees, not only for finding Archimedes’ tomb, but for exposing Agathinus’ killer.

From the atrium, I could hear Cicero in his office. He was dictating a letter to Tiro, no doubt intending for me to deliver it when I got back to Rome. Eco and I waited outside the door. It was impossible not to overhear.

‘Dear brother Quintus,’ Cicero began, ‘the fellows I was so strongly advised to cultivate here in Syracuse turned out to be of no account – the unsavoury details can wait until we meet again. Nonetheless, my holiday here has not been entirely unproductive. You will be interested to learn that I have rediscovered the lost tomb of one of our boyhood heroes, Archimedes. The locals were entirely ignorant of its location; indeed, denied its very existence. Yesterday afternoon, however, I set out with Tiro for the old necropolis outside the Achradina Gate, and there, sure enough, peeking out above a tangle of brambles and vines, I spied the telltale ornaments of a sphere and cylinder atop a column. You must recall that bit of doggerel we learned from our old math tutor:

A cylinder and ball

atop a column tall

mark the final stage

of the Syracusan sage.

‘Having spotted the tomb, I gave a cry of
“Eureka!
” and ordered a group of workers with scythes to clear the thicket all around. Now the tomb of Archimedes can be seen and approached freely, and has been restored to its rightful status as a shrine to all educated men.’

Cicero did not mention the cube and cone, I noticed. They had been removed along with the thicket, lest someone else meet Agathinus’ fate.

Cicero cleared his throat and resumed dictating. ‘Ironic, brother Quintus, is it not, and sadly indicative of the degraded cultural standards of these modern Syracusans, that it took a Roman from Arpinum to rediscover for them the tomb of the keenest intellect who ever lived among them?’

Ironic indeed, I thought.

DEATH BY EROS

‘The Neapolitans are different from us Romans,’ I remarked to Eco as we strolled across the central forum of Neapolis. ‘A man can almost feel that he’s left Italy altogether and been magically transported to a seaport in Greece. Greek colonists founded the city hundreds of years ago, taking advantage of the extraordinary bay, which they called the
Krater
, or Cup. The locals still have Greek names, eat Greek food, follow Greek customs. Many of them don’t even speak Latin.’

Eco pointed to his lips and made a self-deprecating gesture to say,
Neither do I!
At fifteen, he tended to make a joke of everything, including his muteness.

‘Ah, but you can
hear
Latin,’ I said, flicking a finger against one of his ears just hard enough to sting, ‘and sometimes even understand it.’

We had arrived in Neapolis on our way back to Rome, after doing a bit of business for Cicero down in Sicily. Rather than stay at an inn, I was hoping to find accommodations with a wealthy Greek trader named Sosistrides. ‘The fellow owes me a favour,’ Cicero had told me. ‘Look him up and mention my name, and I’m sure he’ll put you up for the night.’

With a few directions from the locals (who were polite enough not to laugh at my Greek) we found the trader’s house. The columns and lintels and decorative details of the facade were stained in various shades of pale red, blue and yellow that seemed to glow under the warm sunlight. Incongruous amid the play of colours was a black wreath on the door.

‘What do you think, Eco? Can we ask a friend of a friend, a total stranger really, to put us up when the household is in mourning? It seems presumptuous.’

Eco nodded thoughtfully, then gestured to the wreath and expressed curiosity with a flourish of his wrist. I nodded. ‘I see your point. If it’s Sosistrides who’s died, or a member of the family, Cicero would want us to deliver his condolences, wouldn’t he? And we must learn the details, so that we can inform him in a letter. I think we must at least rouse the doorkeeper, to see what’s happened.’

I walked to the door and politely knocked with the side of my foot. There was no answer. I knocked again and waited. I was about to rap on the door with my knuckles, rudely or not, when it swung open.

The man who stared back at us was dressed in mourning black. He was not a slave; I glanced at his hand and saw a citizen’s iron ring. His greying hair was dishevelled and his face distressed. His eyes were red from weeping.

‘What do you want?’ he said, in a voice more wary than unkind.

‘Forgive me, citizen. My name is Gordianus. This is my son, Eco. Eco hears but is mute, so I shall speak for him. We’re travellers, on our way home to Rome. I’m a friend of Marcus Tullius Cicero. It was he who—’

‘Cicero? Ah, yes, the Roman administrator down in Sicily, the one who can actually read and write, for a change.’ The man wrinkled his brow. ‘Has he sent a message, or . . . ?’

‘Nothing urgent; Cicero asked me only to remind you of his friendship. You are, I take it, the master of the house, Sosistrides?’

‘Yes. And you? I’m sorry, did you already introduce yourself? My mind wanders . . .’ He looked over his shoulder. Beyond him, in the vestibule, I glimpsed a funeral bier strewn with freshly cut flowers and laurel leaves.

‘My name is Gordianus. And this is my son —’

‘Gordianus, did you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘Cicero mentioned you once. Something about a murder trial up in Rome. You helped him. They call you the Finder.’

‘Yes.’

He looked at me intently for a long moment. ‘Come in, Finder. I want you to see him.’

The bier in the vestibule was propped up and tilted at an angle so that its occupant could be clearly seen. The corpse was that of a youth probably not much older than Eco. His arms were crossed over his chest and he was clothed in a long white gown, so that only his face and hands were exposed. His hair was boyishly long and as yellow as a field of millet in summer, crowned with a laurel wreath of the sort awarded to athletic champions. The flesh of his delicately moulded features was waxy and pale, but even in death his beauty was remarkable.

‘His eyes were blue,’ said Sosistrides in a low voice. ‘They’re closed now, you can’t see them, but they were blue, like his dear, dead mother’s; he got his looks from her. The purest blue you ever saw, like the colour of the Cup on a clear day. When we pulled him from the pool, they were all bloodshot . . .’

‘This is your son, Sosistrides?’

He stifled a sob. ‘My only son, Cleon.’

‘A terrible loss.’

He nodded, unable to speak. Eco shifted nervously from foot to foot, studying the dead boy with furtive glances, almost shyly.

‘They call you Finder,’ Sosistrides finally said, in a hoarse voice. ‘Help me find the monster who killed my son.’

I looked at the dead youth and felt a deep empathy for Sosistrides’ suffering, and not merely because I myself had a son of similar age. (Eco may be adopted, but I love him as my own flesh.) I was stirred also by the loss of such beauty. Why does the death of a beautiful stranger affect us more deeply than the loss of someone plain? Why should it be so, that if a vase of exquisite workmanship but little practical value should break, we feel the loss more sharply than if we break an ugly vessel we use every day? The gods made men to love beauty above all else, perhaps because they themselves are beautiful, and wish for us to love them, even when they do us harm.

‘How did he die, Sosistrides?’

‘It was at the gymnasium, yesterday. There was a citywide contest among the boys – discus-throwing, wrestling, racing. I couldn’t attend. I was away in Pompeii on business all day . . .’ Sosistrides again fought back tears. He reached out and touched the wreath on his son’s brow. ‘Cleon took the laurel crown. He was a splendid athlete. He always won at everything, but they say he outdid himself yesterday. If only I had been there to see it! Afterwards, while the other boys retired to the baths inside, Cleon took a swim in the long pool, alone. There was no one else in the courtyard. No one saw it happen . . .’

‘The boy drowned, Sosistrides?’ It seemed unlikely, if the boy had been as good at swimming as he was at everything else.

Sosistrides shook his head and shut his eyes tight, squeezing tears from them. ‘The gymnasiarchus is an old wrestler named Caputorus. It was he who found Cleon. He heard a splash, he said, but thought nothing of it. Later he went into the courtyard and discovered Cleon. The water was red with blood. Cleon was at the bottom of the pool. Beside him was a broken statue. It must have struck the back of his head; it left a terrible gash.’