Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (151 page)

I looked out at the bay and Vesuvius beyond. ‘I see. That’s why the murder of Lucius Licinius is more than just a tragedy.’

‘It’s an incredible embarrassment, that’s what it is!’ said Mummius. ‘To have slaves murdering and running free from one of his own households, even as he’s asking the Senate to hand him a sword to punish Spartacus – in the Forum, they’ll laugh until they weep. That’s why he feels compelled to exact the sternest judgment possible, to fall back on tradition and ancient law, the harsher the better.’

‘To turn an embarrassment into a political boon, you mean.’

‘Exactly. What might have been a disaster could turn into just the sort of propaganda victory he needs. “Crassus, soft on runaway slaves? Hardly! The man slew a whole household of them down in Baiae, men, women, and children, showed no mercy at all, made a public spectacle of it, a feast day – just the sort of man we can trust to take on Spartacus and his murderous rabble!” That’s what people will say.’

‘Yes. I see.’

‘But Zeno and Alexandros are innocent,’ said Gelina wearily. ‘I know they are. Someone else must have murdered Lucius. None of the slaves should be punished, yet Crassus refuses to listen. Thank the gods for Marcus Mummius, who understands. Together we convinced Crassus to at least let me summon you from Rome. There was no other way to get you here in time, except to send the
Fury;
Crassus made a great show of his generosity in allowing me to use it. He offered to pay for your services as well, just to humour me. I can ask no more favours of him, no postponements. We have so little time. Only three days until the funeral games, and then—’

‘How many slaves are there in all, not counting Zeno and Alexandros?’ I asked.

‘I lay awake last night counting them: ninety-nine. There were a hundred and one, counting Zeno and Alexandros.’

‘So many, for a villa?’

‘There are vineyards to the north and south,’ she said vaguely, ‘and of course the olive orchards, the stables, the boathouse . . .’

‘Do the slaves know?’ I asked.

Mummius looked at Gelina, who looked at me with her eyebrows raised high. ‘Most of the slaves are being kept under guard in the annexe on the far side of the stables,’ she said quietly. ‘Crassus won’t allow the field slaves to go out, and he’s let me have only the essential slaves here in the house. They’re in custody, they know that, but no one has told them the whole truth. Certainly you must not tell them. Who knows what might transpire if the slaves suspected . . .’

I nodded, but I saw no point in secrecy. Except for young Apollonius in the baths, I had hardly glimpsed the face of a single slave in the household, only a succession of bowed heads and averted eyes. Even if they had not been told, somehow they knew.

We took our leave of Gelina. The interview had exhausted her. As we left the semicircular room, I glanced back to see her silhouette reaching for the ewer to replenish her cup with wine.

Mummius led us back to the atrium and showed me where the letters SPARTA had been scrawled into the flagstones. Each letter was as tall as my finger. As Mummius had said, they appeared to have been hastily made, crudely scraped rather than chiselled. I had stepped right over them without noticing when Faustus Fabius had first shown us into the house. In the dim light of the hallway they were easily overlooked. How strange the hallway and atrium suddenly seemed, with the death masks of the ancestors staring from their niches, the piping faun prancing in his fountain, the dead man on his ivory bier, and the name of the most dreaded and despised man in all of Italy half-scrawled on the floor.

The light in the atrium was beginning to grow soft and hazy; it would soon be time to light the lamps, but there was still enough sunlight before dinner to ride out and see where the bloodied cloak had been found. Mummius summoned the boy Meto, who fetched the cloak and the slave who had found it, and we rode out past the pylons onto the northern road.

The cloak was as nondescript as Gelina had indicated, a dark, muddy-coloured garment neither tattered nor new. There was no decoration or embroidery to indicate whether it might be locally made or from far away, the cloak of a rich man or a poor one. The bloodstain covered a great deal of it, not just in one place but spattered and smeared all about. One corner appeared to have been cut away – to eradicate an identifying insignia or seal?

The slave had found it along a secluded, narrow section of road that clung to a steep cliff above the bay. Someone must have cast it from the cliffs edge, trying to throw it into the water below; the crumpled cloak had been caught on a scraggly tree that projected from the rocky hillside, several feet below the road. A man on foot or horseback could not have seen it without stepping to the edge of the cliff and peering over; the slave, mounted atop a high wagon, had barely glimpsed it on his way to market, and indeed had left it there until his return from Puteoli, when he took a closer look and realized that it might be important.

‘The fool says that he wasn’t going to bother getting it, because he could see it had blood on it,’ said Mummius under his breath. ‘He figured it was ruined and of no use to him; then it occurred to him that the blood might have come from his master.’

‘Or from Zeno or Alexandros,’ I said. ‘Tell me, who else knows that this cloak was found?’

‘Only the slave who found it, Gelina, and the boy, Meto. And now yourself, Eco, and I.’

‘Good. I think, Marcus Mummius, that there may be some cause for hope.’

‘Yes?’ His eyes lit up. For a hardened military man who could treat his galley slaves so harshly, he seemed oddly eager to save the slaves of Gelina’s household.

‘I say this not because I have any solution, but because things as they stand are more convoluted than they should be. For instance, though it has not been found, it appears that the killer used a bludgeon of some sort to murder Lucius Licinius. Why, when a knife was at hand?’

‘A knife?’

‘The killer must have used some sort of blade to scrape the letters. And why was the body dragged into position instead of being left where it fell?’

‘Why do you think it was dragged at all?’

‘Because of the posture Gelina described. Think: legs straight, arms above the head – not likely to be the pose of a man who collapses to the ground after being struck in the head, but exactly the posture of a body that has been dragged feet first across a floor. Dragged from where, and for what reason? Then there is the matter of this cloak.’

‘Yes?’

‘There is no way of knowing whose blood is on it, but for now, and because there is so much blood, we shall assume that it came from the dead man. Gelina told us that there was not much blood on the floor beneath the wound, and yet Lucius must have bled profusely; it seems likely this cloak was used to absorb the blood. And yet this garment could hardly have belonged to Lucius himself; having seen the extravagant sort of house he lived in, I can hardly believe that he would choose such a drab garment. No, this is the very best cloak that a common man might own, or the sort of common cloak that a rich man with pretensions to old-fashioned Roman virtue might affect to wear, or simply the sort of dark, common cloak that a man or woman might choose so as to move about unseen at night – an assassin’s cloak.

‘Somehow, this cloak must be incriminating. Otherwise, why carry it away from the scene of the crime, and why attempt to cast it into the sea? And why cut away a corner of it? If the escaped slaves did indeed kill Lucius, they were evidently bold enough to brag about it by inscribing the name of Spartacus on the floor; why would they bother to hide the cloak after so brazenly proclaiming their allegiance? Why wouldn’t they leave it behind for all to look at in horror? I think we must be very careful to see that no one else discovers this cloak has been found. The true killer must continue to think that it was successfully cast into the water. I shall take it and hide it among my own things.’

Eco, who had been listening intently, tugged on my tunic. At his insistence, I handed him the bloodstained cloak, whereupon he pointed to the various patches of blood, and mimed a series of motions with his open palm.

Mummius looked on, baffled. ‘What is he saying?’

‘Eco makes an excellent point! See here, where the blood is most concentrated, roughly in a circle – as if it had been placed under a gushing wound to catch the blood? While elsewhere the blood is smeared in swathes about the width of a man’s hand – as if it had been used to wipe up blood, perhaps from a floor.’

Eco pantomimed again, lying backward and putting his hands behind his head, then extending both arms as if dragging a heavy object, all done so enthusiastically that I feared he might fall from his horse.

‘And what is all that about?’ said Mummius.

‘Eco points out the possibility that the cloak was first placed under the dying man’s head, so as to catch the blood while his body was dragged across the floor. Then the murderer might have used the clean portion of the cloth to wipe up the spatters of blood from the room where the blows were actually delivered, as well as what had been smeared on floor in transit.’

Mummius crossed his arms. ‘Is he really that eloquent?’

‘I scarcely do him justice. So much for the cloak. Most disturbing of all is the fact that the two missing horses returned to the stable the next day. Surely Zeno and Alexandros would not have relinquished them willingly – unless they obtained horses elsewhere.’

Mummius shook his head. ‘My men made inquiries. No horses have been stolen in the area.’

‘Then Zeno and Alexandros would have been reduced to travelling on foot. In an area as civilized as this, with so much traffic on the roads, so much suspicion and fear of escaped slaves among the populace, and with your men actively searching, it seems hardly possible that they could have escaped.’

Eco intersected one hand with the other in pantomime of a sail on the sea. Mummius looked puzzled for a moment, then glowered. ‘Of course we inquired among the ship owners. None of the ferries to Pompeii or Herculaneum would have taken two runaway slaves, and there have been no stolen vessels. Neither of them would have known the first thing about sailing a boat, anyway.’

‘Then what possibilities remain?’ I said.

Mummius shrugged. ‘They’re still somewhere in the area, hiding.’

‘Or else, more likely, they are both dead.’ The light had begun to fade rapidly. The cliff cast a long shadow onto the water. I looked back towards the villa, and above the trees could see only a few tiles of the rooftop and some plumes of smoke; the evening fires were being stoked. I turned my horse around.

‘Tell me, Mummius, ‘who currently resides in the villa?’

‘Besides Gelina, only a handful of people. This is the end of the holiday season in Baiae. There weren’t that many visitors this year even in the spring. I was here myself in May, along with Crassus and Fabius and a few others. Baiae seemed a shadow of itself. Between Spartacus and the pirates, everyone is afraid to leave Rome.’

‘Yes, but who is staying here
now
?

‘Let me think. Gelina, of course. And Dionysius, her philosopher in residence – calls himself a polymath, writes plays and histories and pretends to make witty conversation, but he puts me right to sleep. Then there’s Iaia, the painter.’

‘Iaia? A woman?’

He nodded. ‘Originally from Cyzicus. Crassus says she was all the rage when he was a boy, with paintings in the best houses in Rome and all around the Cup. Specialized in portraits, mainly women. Never married, but seems to have made quite a success on her own. She’s retired now and paints for pleasure, together with a young assistant she’s instructing. They’re here doing some project as a favour for Gelina, painting an anteroom in the women’s baths.’

‘And who is Iaia’s assistant?’

‘Olympias, originally from Neapolis across the bay.’

‘A girl?’ I asked.

‘A very beautiful girl,’ Mummius assured me, at which Eco’s eyes lit up. ‘Iaia treats her like a daughter. They have their own small villa on the sea coast up in Cumae, but they often stay here for days at a time, working in the mornings and keeping Gelina company at night.’

‘Were they in the house on the night Lucius was killed?’

‘Actually, no. They were up in Cumae.’

‘Is that far?’

‘Not very; an hour away on foot, closer on horseback.’

‘Besides the philosopher and the painters, are there any guests in the house?’

Mummius thought. ‘Yes, two.’

‘And they were here on the night of the murder?’

‘Yes,’ Mummius said slowly, ‘but neither of them could possibly be suspected of murder.’

‘Even so . . .’

‘Very well, the first is Sergius Orata. I mentioned him to you before, the builder of the baths in the south wing. He comes from Puteoli and has villas all around the Cup, but as often as not you’ll find him staying in other people’s houses; that’s the way they do it here, the rich move about playing guest in each other’s villas. Gelina says he was here talking business with Lucius when word came that Crassus was on his way from Rome and wanted to consult with them both. Orata decided to stay on, so that the three of them could transact their business together in one place. He was here on the night of the murder and is stall here, staying in a suite of rooms in the north wing.’