Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (173 page)

The atrium was once again crowded with guests, some still in black, some already changed into white for the banquet. I made my way through the crush, ascended the steps, and walked towards my room.

The little hallway was deserted and quiet. The door to my room was slightly ajar. As I drew close I heard strange noises from within. I paused, trying to make sense of them. It might have been the sound of a small animal in pain, or the nonsensical babbling of an idiot with his tongue cut out. My first thought was that Iaia had committed some further sorcery in my room, and I approached cautiously.

I looked through the narrow opening and saw Eco seated before the mirror, contorting his face and emitting a series of uncouth noises. He stopped, scrutinized himself in the mirror, and tried again.

He was trying to speak.

I drew back. I took a deep breath. I walked halfway up the hall, then banged my elbow against the wall, to make a noise so that he would hear. I walked back to the room.

I found Eco inside, no longer before the mirror but sitting stiffly on his bed. He looked up at me as I stepped inside and smiled crookedly, then frowned and quickly looked out of the window. I saw him swallow and reach up to touch his throat, as if it hurt.

‘Did Crassus’s guards come to take your place at the boathouse?’ I said.

He nodded.

‘Good. Look, here on my bed, our white garments for the banquet, neatly laid out for us. It should be a sumptuous feast.’

Eco nodded. He looked out the window again. His eyes were hot and shiny. He bit his lip, blinked, and drew in a shallow breath. Something glistened wetly on his cheek, but he quickly brushed it away.

XIX

The banquet was held in three large, connected rooms along the eastern side of the house, each with a view of the bay. The guests flowed in like a tide of white sea foam. The murmur of the crowd hummed in the high-ceilinged rooms like a faint ocean roar.

As his final duty, the Designator assigned the seating and saw that a slave showed each guest to his place. Crassus, resplendent in white and gold, held court in the northernmost room, where he was joined by Fabius, Mummius, Orata, and the more important businessmen and politicians from the various towns around the Cup. Gelina presided over the central room, with Metrobius at her side, surrounded by Iaia and Olympias and the more prominent female guests.

To the third room, the biggest and the farthest from the kitchens, belonged those of us who belonged nowhere else, the junior partners and second sons, the leftovers and hangers-on. I was amused to see Dionysius assigned to our company; he balked when the slave showed him to his couch, quietly demanded to see the Designator, and was then summarily sent back to his place across the room from Eco and me, stuck away in a corner, not even beside a window. In any normal circumstance the household’s resident philosopher would have been seated close to the master or mistress. I suspected it was Crassus who had instructed the Designator to stick Dionysius away in a dark corner, as a deliberate snub. He truly despised the philosopher.

Since the time was as near to midday as evening, Dionysius elected to have his green potion before rather than after the meal. To assuage his dignity, he made quite a show of demanding it immediately and was unnecessarily rude to the young slave girl who ran to the kitchens to fetch it for him. A few moments later she returned with trembling hands and set the cup on the little table in front of him.

I looked around the room, at the various couches clustered about the little tables. I saw no one I knew. Eco was pensive and withdrawn and had no appetite. I was content to nibble at the delicacies placed before me and contemplate my course of action over the remaining hours.

From where I lay, I could see straight into the farther rooms. If I rose onto my elbow I could glimpse Crassus sipping his wine and conferring with Sergius Orata. It was Orata who had first told me that Lucius Licinius had come into unexplained wealth; did he know more than he had told me? Could he indeed have been the shadowy partner involved in Lucius’s smuggling scheme? With his round, blandly self-satisfied face, he hardly looked capable of murder, but I have often found that rich men are capable of anything.

Marcus Mummius, reclining close to Crassus, looked nervous and unhappy – and why not, considering that all his pleas for the salvation of Apollonius had been rebuffed by Crassus? It struck me as unlikely that Mummius could have been Lucius’s shadow partner, given the bad blood between them over the matter of Apollonius. Yet it occurred to me that Mummius could have ridden up from the camp at Lake Lucrinus and back again on the night of the murder. What if he had done so, to give himself a chance to approach Lucius again about buying the slave? If Lucius was half as stubborn as his cousin, he would have refused once more to sell the slave; could that have sent Mummius into a murderous rage? If so, then by killing Lucius, Mummius would have inadvertently set in motion the destruction of the very person he desired, the young Apollonius – and the only way to save the boy would be to admit his own guilt. What a pit of misery that would plunge him into!

My eye fell on Crassus’s ‘left arm’, Faustus Fabius of the haughty jaw and the flaming hair. He had met Lucius Licinius on the same occasions as Mummius, and thus had had the opportunity and the connections to have become Lucius’s shadow partner and to embark on what must have been a fabulously lucrative, if extraordinarily dangerous, enterprise. Mummius had told me that Fabius came from a patrician family of limited means, but of his character I knew very little; such men face the world wearing masks more rigid than the waxen masks of their dead ancestors. The Fabii had been present at the birth of the Republic; they had been among the first elected consuls, the first to wear the toga trimmed with purple and to sit in the ivory chair of state wrested from the kings. It seemed presumptuous even to suspect a man of such high birth of treachery and murder, but then, such traits must run in the blood of patricians, or else how did their ancestors pull down the kings, stamp down their fellow Romans, and become patricians in the first place?

Nearer at hand, in the middle room, my eyes fell on Gelina. She seemed the least likely candidate of all. Everything indicated that her love for her husband had been genuine, and that her grief was deep. Iaia, however low her opinion of Lucius, also seemed unlikely; besides, she and Olympias had been in Cumae on the night of the murder, or so I had been told. Would any of the women in the house, even Olympias, have had the strength to smash Lucius’s skull with the heavy statuette, and then to drag his body into the atrium? Or to carry the bundles of weapons from the boathouse to the pier, and to knock me into the water?

The same might be asked of Metrobius, given his age, but he bore watching. He had been a part of Sulla’s inner circle, and thus could possess few scruples, even about murder. He was a man who held long and festering grudges, as I knew from his tirade against Mummius. Retired from the stage, bereft of his lifelong benefactor, deprived by the passing years of his legendary beauty, in what secret pursuits did he invest his restless energies? He was devoted to Gelina and had despised Lucius; could he have used Gelina’s misery as an excuse to kill her husband? Was he the shadow partner? His hatred for Lucius wouldn’t necessarily have kept him from investing a part of his accumulated fortune in Lucius’s schemes. It was even possible, I thought, that he might have foreseen Crassus’s decision to annihilate the slaves, including Apollonius, as a consequence of the murder; thus, by killing Lucius and letting events take their course, he could wreak a terrible revenge on Mummius. But was even his subtle and conniving mind capable of such a vicious and convoluted plot?

Of course, despite my discoveries at the boathouse and all evidence to the contrary, it could still be that—

‘It was the slaves who did it! Knocked off half of Lucius’s head and then ran off to Spartacus!’

For an instant I thought it was a god who spoke, reprimanding me for my lurid speculations and reminding me of the one possibility I refused to consider. Then I recognized the voice, which came from the couch behind me. It was the man I had overheard gossiping with his wife at the funeral. They were gossiping again.

‘But remember Crassus’s oration? The slaves won’t go unpunished – and a good thing!’ said the woman, smacking her lips. ‘One has to draw a line. Slaves of the lower sort can never be relied upon to know their place; let them witness an atrocity such as this one in their own household and they’re spoiled forever – no use to anyone for anything. Once they’ve seen another of their kind get away with murder, from that point on you can never turn your back on them. Best to put them out of their misery, I say, and if you can turn that to setting a good example for other slaves, then all the better! That Marcus Crassus knows the right way to do things!’

‘Well, he certainly knows how to run his own affairs,’ the man agreed. ‘His wealth speaks for that. They say he wants the command against Spartacus, and I hope those fools in the Senate for once have the wisdom to give the right job to the right man. He’s a tough nut, no doubt about that; it takes a hard man to put a household of his own slaves to death, and that’s just the sort we need right now – a stern hand to deal with the Thracian monster! My dear, could you pass me one of those green olives? And perhaps a spoonful more of the apple sauce for my calf’s brains? Delicious! Alas, that Crassus should have to put such splendid cooks to death, as well!’

‘But he’s going to do it, even so. That’s what I’ve heard – and poor, pitiful Gelina shaking her head the whole time and wishing it wasn’t so. She’s always had a soft heart, just like Lucius had a soft head, and you see what’s come of that! But not Marcus Crassus – hard head and an even harder heart. He allows not a single exception to Roman justice, and that’s as it should be. You can’t make exceptions in times like these.’

‘No, you certainly can’t. But a man would have to be as unflinching as Cato to put to death a cook who can create a dish as exquisite as this.’ The man smacked his lips.

‘Shhh! Don’t speak the word.’

‘What word?’

‘Death. Can’t you see the serving girl is just over there?’

‘So?’

‘It’s bad luck to say the word out loud where a doomed slave can hear.’

They were quiet for a moment, then the woman spoke again. ‘Draughty in here, isn’t it?’

‘Now, woman, don’t start . . .’

‘The food gets cold having to come so far from the kitchens.’

‘I think you’re eating fast enough that you needn’t worry about that.’

‘Well, even so, that self-satisfied Designator might have put us in one of the better rooms if you’d had the nerve to ask, as I told you to.’

‘My dear, don’t start on that again. The food’s the same, I’m sure, and you can’t complain about that.’

‘The food, maybe, but you can’t say the same for the company. You’re twice as rich as anybody in this room! We really should have been put closer to Crassus, or at least in the middle room with Gelina.’

‘There are only so many rooms and so many couches,’ sighed the man. ‘And there are more people here than I’ve seen at a funeral banquet in many a year. Still, you have a point about the people in this room. Not exactly the cream, are they? Look over there, at that philosopher fellow who lives here. Dionysius, I think he’s called.’

‘Yes, like half the Greek philosophers in Italy,’ the woman grunted. ‘This one’s not particularly distinguished, from what I hear.’