Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (123 page)

‘What papers?’

‘The love poems he’d written to Cleon, the ones Cleon returned to him – they’ve vanished. I suppose the master was embarrassed at the thought of anyone reading them after he was gone, and so he got rid of them. So perhaps it’s not so strange after all that he left no farewell note.’

I nodded vaguely, but it still seemed odd to me. From what I knew of poets, suicides and unrequited lovers, Mulciber would almost certainly have left some words behind – to chastise Cleon, to elicit pity, to vindicate himself. But the silent corpse of the tutor offered no explanation.

As the day was waning, I at last returned to the house of Sosistrides, footsore and soul-weary. A slave admitted us. I paused to gaze for a long moment at the lifeless face of Cleon. Nothing had changed, and yet he did not look as beautiful to my eyes as he had before.

Sosistrides called us into his study. ‘How did it go, Finder?’

‘I’ve had a productive day, if not a pleasant one. I talked to everyone I could find at the gymnasium. I also went to the house of your children’s tutor. You do know that Mulciber hanged himself yesterday?’

‘Yes. I found out only today, after I spoke to you. I knew he was a bit infatuated with Cleon, wrote poems to him and such, but I had no idea he was so passionately in love with him. Another tragedy, like ripples in a pond.’ Sosistrides, too, seemed to assume without question that the tutor’s suicide followed upon news of Cleon’s death. ‘And what did you find? Did you discover anything . . . significant?’

I nodded. ‘I think I know who killed your son.’

His face assumed an expression of strangely mingled relief and dismay. ‘Tell me, then!’

‘Would you send for your daughter first? Before I can be certain, there are a few questions I need to ask her. And when I think of the depth of her grief, it seems to me that she, too, should hear what I have to say.’

He called for a slave to fetch the girl from her room. ‘You’re right, of course; Cleio should be here, in spite of her . . . unseemly appearance. Her grieving shows her to be a woman, after all, but I’ve raised her almost as a son, you know. I made sure she learned to read and write. I sent her to the same tutors as Cleon. Of late she’s been reading Plato with him, both of them studying with Mulciber . . .’

‘Yes, I know.’

Cleio entered the room, her mantle pushed defiantly back from her shorn head. Her cheeks were lined with fresh, livid scratches, signs that her mourning had continued unabated through the day.

‘The Finder thinks he knows who killed Cleon,’ Sosistrides explained.

‘Yes, but I need to ask you a few questions first,’ I said. ‘Are you well enough to talk?’

She nodded.

‘Is it true that you and your brother went to your regular morning class with Mulciber yesterday?’

‘Yes.’ She averted her tear-reddened eyes and spoke in a hoarse whisper.

‘When you arrived at his house, was Mulciber there?’

She paused. ‘Yes.’

‘Was it he who let you in the door?’

Again a pause. ‘No.’

‘But his slave was out of the house, gone for the day. Who let you in?’

‘The door was unlocked . . . ajar . . .’

‘So you and Cleon simply stepped inside?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were harsh words exchanged between your brother and Mulciber?’

Her breath became ragged. ‘No.’

‘Are you sure? Only the day before, your brother had publicly rejected and humiliated Mulciber. He returned his love poems and ridiculed them in front of others. That must have been a tremendous blow to Mulciber. Isn’t it true that when the two of you showed up at his house yesterday morning, Mulciber lost his temper with Cleon?’

She shook her head.

‘What if I suggest that Mulciber became hysterical? That he ranted against your brother? That he threatened to kill him?’

‘No! That never happened. Mulciber was too – he would never have done such a thing!’

‘But I suggest that he did. I suggest that yesterday, after suffering your brother’s deceit and abuse, Mulciber reached the end of his tether. He snapped, like a rein that’s worn clean through, and his passions ran away with him like maddened horses. By the time you and your brother left his house, Mulciber must have been raving like a madman—’

‘No! He wasn’t! He was—’

‘And after you left, he brooded. He took out the love poems into which he had poured his heart and soul, the very poems that Cleon returned to him so scornfully the day before. They had once been beautiful to him, but now they were vile, so he burned them.’

‘Never!’

‘He had planned to attend the games at the gymnasium, to cheer Cleon on, but instead he waited until the contests were over, then sneaked into the vestibule, skulking like a thief. He came upon Cleon alone in the pool. He saw the statue of Eros – a bitter reminder of his own rejected love. No one else was about, and there was Cleon, swimming facedown, not even aware that anyone else was in the courtyard, unsuspecting and helpless. Mulciber couldn’t resist – he waited until the very moment that Cleon passed beneath the statue, then pushed it from its pedestal. The statue struck Cleon’s head. Cleon sank to the bottom and drowned.’

Cleio wept and shook her head. ‘No, no! It wasn’t Mulciber!’

‘Oh, yes! And then, wracked with despair at having killed the boy he loved, Mulciber rushed home and hanged himself. He didn’t even bother to write a note to justify himself or beg forgiveness for the murder. He’d fancied himself a poet, but what greater failure is there for a poet than to have his love poems rejected? And so he hung himself without writing another line, and he’ll go to his funeral pyre in silence, a common murderer—’

‘No, no, no!’ Cleio clutched her cheeks, tore at her hair, and wailed. Eco, whom I had told to be prepared for such an outburst, started back nonetheless. Sosistrides looked at me aghast. I averted my eyes. How could I have simply told him the truth, and made him believe it? He had to be shown. Cleio had to show him.

‘He
did
leave a farewell,’ Cleio cried. ‘It was the most beautiful poem he ever wrote!’

‘But his slave found nothing. Mulciber’s poems to Cleon had vanished, and there was nothing new—’

‘Because I took them!’

‘Where are they, then?’

She reached into the bosom of her black gown and pulled out two handfuls of crumpled papyrus. ‘These were his poems to Cleon! You never saw such beautiful poems, such pure, sweet love put down in words! Cleon made fun of them, but they broke my heart! And here is his farewell poem, the one he left lying on his threshold so that Cleon would be sure to see it, when we went to his house yesterday and found him hanging in the foyer, his neck broken, his body soiled . . . dead . . . gone from me forever!’

She pressed a scrap of papyrus into my hands. It was in Greek, the letters rendered in a florid, desperate hand. A phrase near the middle caught my eye:

One day, even your beauty will fade;

One day, even you may love unrequited!

Take pity, then, and favour my corpse

With a first, final, farewell kiss . . .

She snatched back the papyrus and clutched it to her bosom.

My voice was hollow in my ears. ‘When you went to Mulciber’s house yesterday, you and Cleon found him already dead.’

‘Yes!’

‘And you wept.’

‘Because I loved him!’

‘Even though he didn’t love you?’

‘Mulciber loved Cleon. He couldn’t help himself.’

‘Did Cleon weep?’

Her face became so contorted with hatred that I heard Sosistrides gasp in horror. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘he didn’t weep. Cleon laughed! He laughed! He shook his head and said, “What a fool,” and walked out the door. I screamed at him to come back, to help me cut Mulciber down, and he only said, “I’ll be late for the games!” ’ Cleio collapsed to the floor, weeping, the poems scattering around her. ‘ “Late for the games!” ’ she repeated, as if it were her brother’s epitaph.

On the long ride back to Rome through the Campanian countryside, Eco’s hands grew weary and I grew hoarse debating whether I had done the right thing. Eco argued that I should have kept my suspicions of Cleio to myself. I argued that Sosistrides deserved to know what his daughter had done, and how and why his son had died – and needed to be shown, as well, how deeply and callously his beautiful, beloved Cleon had inflicted misery on others.

‘Besides,’ I said, ‘when we returned to Sosistrides’ house, I wasn’t certain myself that Cleio had murdered Cleon. Accusing the dead tutor was a way of flushing her out. Her possession of Mulciber’s missing poems were the only tangible evidence that events had unfolded as I suspected. I tried in vain to think of some way, short of housebreaking, to search her room without either Cleio or her father knowing – but as it turned out, such a search would have found nothing. I should have known that she would keep the poems on her person, next to her heart! She was as madly, hopelessly in love with Mulciber as he was in love with Cleon. Eros can be terribly careless when he scatters his arrows!’

We also debated the degree and nature of Cleon’s perfidy. When he saw Mulciber’s dead body, was Cleon so stunned by the enormity of what he had done – driven a lovesick man to suicide – that he went about his business in a sort of stupor, attending the games and performing his athletic feats like an automaton? Or was he so cold that he felt nothing? Or, as Eco argued in an extremely convoluted series of gestures, did Mulciber’s fatal demonstration of lovesick devotion actually stimulate Cleon in some perverse way, inflating his ego and inspiring him to excel as never before at the games?

Whatever his private thoughts, instead of grieving, Cleon blithely went off and won his laurel crown, leaving Mulciber to spin in midair and Cleio to plot her vengeance. In a fit of grief she cut off her hair. The sight of her reflection in Mulciber’s atrium pool gave her the idea to pass as a boy; an ill-fitting tunic from the tutor’s wardrobe completed her disguise. She carried a knife with her to the gymnasium, the same one she had used to cut her hair, and was prepared to stab her brother in front of his friends. But it turned out that she didn’t need the knife. By chance – or guided by Eros – she found her way into the courtyard, where the statue presented itself as the perfect murder weapon.

As far as Cleio was concerned, the statue’s role in the crime constituted proof that she acted not only with the god’s approval but as an instrument of his will. This pious argument had so far, at least as of our leaving Neapolis, stayed Sosistrides from punishing her. I did not envy the poor merchant. With his wife and son dead, could he bear to snuff out the life of his only remaining offspring, even for so great a crime? And yet, how could he bear to let her live, knowing she had murdered his beloved son? Such a conundrum would test the wisdom of Athena!

Eco and I debated, too, the merits of Mulciber’s poetry. I had begged of Sosistrides a copy of the tutor’s farewell, so that I could ponder it at my leisure:

Savage, sullen boy, whelp of a lioness,

Stone-hearted and scornful of love,

I give you a lover’s ring – my noose!

No longer be sickened by the sight of me;

I go to the only place that offers solace

To the broken-hearted: oblivion!

But will you not stop and weep for me,

If only for one moment . . .

The poem continued for many more lines, veering between recrimination, self-pity, and surrender to the annihilating power of love.

Hopelessly sentimental! More cloying than honey! The very worst sort of dreck
, pronounced Eco, with a series of gestures so sweeping that he nearly fell from his horse. I merely nodded, and wondered if my son would feel the same in another year or so, after Eros had wounded him with a stray arrow or two and given him a clearer notion, from personal experience, of just how deeply the god of love can pierce the hearts of helpless mortals.

A GLADIATOR DIES ONLY ONCE