Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (75 page)

Eco put his hands on his hips and his nose in the air and began to strut haughtily.

‘Ah, Chaerea; I was coming to him. He claims not to have arrived until after the play was over, and yet he hardly seemed taken aback when he saw the corpse. He seems almost too unflappable. He was the slave’s original owner. In return for cultivating Panurgus’ talents, Roscius acquired half-ownership, but Chaerea seems to have been thoroughly dissatisfied with the arrangement. Did he decide that the slave was worth more to him dead than alive? Chaerea holds Roscius culpable for the loss, and intends to coerce Roscius into paying him half the slave’s worth in silver. In a Roman court, with the right advocate, Chaerea will likely prevail.’

I leaned back against the olive tree, dissatisfied. ‘Still, I wish we had uncovered someone else in the company with as strong a motive, and the opportunity to have done the deed. Yet no one seems to have borne a grudge against Panurgus, and almost everyone could account for his whereabouts when the victim screamed.

‘Of course, the murderer may be someone from outside the company; the privy where Panurgus was stabbed was accessible to anyone passing through the alley behind the temple. Yet Roscius tells us, and the others confirm, that Panurgus had almost no dealings with anyone outside the troupe – he didn’t gamble or frequent brothels; he borrowed neither money nor other men’s wives. His craft alone consumed him; so everyone says. Even if Panurgus
had
offended someone, the aggrieved party would surely have taken up the matter not with Panurgus but with Roscius, since he was the slave’s owner and the man legally responsible for any misdeeds.’

I sighed with frustration. ‘The knife left in his heart was a common dagger, with no distinguishing features. No footprints surrounded the body. No telltale blood was found on any of the costumes. There were no witnesses, or none we know of. Alas!’ The shower of silver in my imagination dried to a trickle; with nothing to show, I would be lucky to press Roscius into paying me a day’s fee for my trouble. Even worse, I felt the shade of dead Panurgus watching me. I had vowed I would find his killer, and it seemed the vow was rashly made.

That night I took my dinner in the ramshackle garden at the centre of my house. The lamps burned low. Tiny silver moths flitted among the columns of the peristyle. Sounds of distant revelry occasionally wafted up from the streets of the Subura at the foot of the hill.

‘Bethesda, the meal was exquisite,’ I said, lying with my usual grace. Perhaps I could have been an actor, I thought.

But Bethesda was not fooled. She looked at me from beneath her long lashes and smiled with half her mouth. She combed one hand through the great unbound mass of her glossy black hair and shrugged an elegant shrug, then began to clear the table.

As she departed to the kitchen, I watched the sinuous play of her hips within her loose green gown. When I bought her long ago at the slave market in Alexandria, it had not been for her cooking. Her cooking had never improved, but in many other ways she was beyond perfection. I peered into the blackness of the long tresses that cascaded to her waist; I imagined the silver moths lost in those tresses, like twinkling stars in the blue-black firmament of the sky. Before Eco had come into my life, Bethesda and I had spent almost every night together, just the two of us, in the solitude of the garden . . .

I was startled from my reverie by a hand pulling at the hem of my tunic.

‘Yes, Eco, what is it?’

Eco, reclining on the couch next to mine, put his fists together and pulled them apart, up and down, as if unrolling a scroll.

‘Ah, your reading lesson. We had no time for it today, did we? But my eyes are weary, Eco, and yours must be, too. And there are other matters on my mind . . .’

He frowned at me in mock dejection until I relented. ‘Very well. Bring that lamp nearer. What would you like to read tonight?’

Eco pointed at himself and shook his head, then pointed at me. He cupped his hands behind his ears and closed his eyes. He preferred it (and secretly, so did I) when I did the reading, and he could enjoy the luxury of merely listening. All that summer, on lazy afternoons and long summer nights, the two of us had spent many such hours in the garden. While I read Piso’s history of Hannibal, Eco would sit at my feet and watch elephants among the clouds; while I declaimed the tale of the Sabine women, he would lie on his back and study the moon. Of late I had been reading to him from an old, tattered scroll of Plato, a cast-off gift from Cicero. Eco understood Greek, though he knew none of the letters, and he followed the subtleties of the philosopher’s discourses with fascination, though occasionally in his big brown eyes I saw a glimmer of sorrow that he could never hope to engage in such debates himself.

‘Shall I read more Plato, then? They say philosophy after dinner aids digestion.’

Eco nodded and ran to fetch the scroll. He emerged from the shadows of the peristyle a moment later, gripping it carefully in his hands. Suddenly he stopped and stood statuelike with a strange expression on his face.

‘Eco, what is it?’ I thought for a moment that he was ill; Bethesda’s fish dumplings and turnips in cumin sauce had been undistinguished, but hardly so bad as to make him sick. He stared straight ahead at nothing and did not hear me.

‘Eco? Are you all right?’ He stood rigid, trembling; a look which might have been fear or ecstasy crossed his face. Then he sprang towards me, pressed the scroll under my nose and pointed at it frantically.

‘I’ve never known a boy to be so mad for learning,’ I laughed, but he was not playing a game. His expression was deadly serious. ‘But Eco, it’s only the same volume of Plato that I’ve been reading to you off and on all summer. Why are you suddenly so excited?’

Eco stood back to perform his pantomime. A dagger thrust into his heart could only indicate the dead Panurgus.

‘Panurgus and Plato – Eco, I see no connection.’

Eco bit his lip and scrambled about, desperate to express himself. At last he ran into the house and back out again, clutching two objects. He dropped them onto my lap.

‘Eco, be careful! This little vase is made of precious green glass, and came all the way from Alexandria. And why have you brought me a bit of red tile? This must have fallen from the roof. . .’

Eco pointed emphatically at each object in turn, but I could not see what he meant.

He disappeared again and came back with my wax tablet and stylus, upon which he wrote the words for red and green.

‘Yes, Eco, I can see that the vase is green and the tile is red. Blood is red . . .’ Eco shook his head and pointed to his eyes. ‘Panurgus had green eyes . . .’ I saw them in my memory, staring lifeless at the sky.

Eco stamped his foot and shook his head to let me know that I was badly off course. He took the vase and the bit of tile from my lap and began to juggle them from hand to hand.

‘Eco, stop that! I told you, the vase is precious!’

He put them carelessly down and reached for the stylus again. He rubbed out the words
red
and
green
and in their place wrote blue. It seemed he wished to write another word, but could not think of how to spell it. He nibbled on the stylus and shook his head.

‘Eco, I think you must have a fever. You make no sense at all.’

He took the scroll from my lap and began to unroll it, scanning it hopelessly. Even if the text had been in Latin it would have been a tortuous job for him to decipher the words and find whatever he was searching for, but the letters were Greek and utterly foreign to him.

He threw down the scroll and began to pantomime again, but he was excited and clumsy; I could make no sense of his wild gesturing. I shrugged and shook my head in exasperation, and Eco suddenly began to weep with frustration. He seized the scroll again and pointed to his eyes. Did he mean that I should read the scroll, or did he point to his tears? I bit my lip and turned up my palms, unable to help him.

Eco threw the scroll in my lap and ran crying from the room. A hoarse, stifled braying issued from his throat, not the sound of normal weeping; it tore my heart to hear it. I should have been more patient, but how was I to understand him? Bethesda emerged from the kitchen and gazed at me accusingly, then followed the sound of Eco’s weeping to the little room where he slept.

I looked down at the scroll in my lap. There were so many words on the parchment; which ones had keyed an idea in Eco’s memory, and what could they have to do with dead Panurgus?
Red, green, blue
– I vaguely remembered reading a passage in which Plato discoursed on the nature of light and colour, but I could scarcely remember it, not having understood much of it in the first place. Some scheme about overlapping cones projected from the eyes to an object, or from the object to the eyes, I couldn’t remember which; was this what Eco recalled, and could it have made any sense to him?

I rolled through the scroll, looking for the reference, but was unable to find it. My eyes grew weary. The lamp began to sputter. The Greek letters all began to look alike. Normally Bethesda would have come to put me to bed, but it seemed she had chosen to comfort Eco instead. I fell asleep on my dining couch beneath the stars, thinking of a yellow cloak stained with red, and of lifeless green eyes gazing at an empty blue sky.

Eco was ill the next day, or feigned illness. Bethesda solemnly informed me that he did not wish to leave his bed. I stood in the doorway of his little room and spoke to him gently, reminding him that the Roman Festival continued, and that today there would be a wild beast show in the Circus Maximus, and another play put on by another company. He turned his back to me and pulled the coverlet over his head.

‘I suppose I should punish him,’ I whispered to myself, trying to think of what a normal Roman father would do.

‘I suppose you should not,’ whispered Bethesda as she passed me. Her haughtiness left me properly humbled.

I took my morning stroll alone – for the first time in many days, I realized, acutely aware that Eco was not beside me. The Subura seemed a rather dull place without ten-year-old eyes through which to see it. I had only my own eyes to serve me, and they had seen it a million times before.

I would buy him a gift, I decided; I would buy them each a gift, for it was always a good idea to placate Bethesda when she was haughty. For Eco I bought a red leather ball, such as boys use to play trigon, knocking it back and forth to each other using their elbows and knees. For Bethesda I wanted to find a veil woven of blue midnight shot through with silver moths, but I decided to settle for one made of linen. On the street of the cloth merchants I found the shop of my old acquaintance Ruso.

I asked to see a veil of dark blue. As if by magic he produced the very veil I had been imagining, a gossamer thing that seemed to be made of blue-black spiderwebs and silver. It was also the most expensive item in the shop. I chided him for taunting me with a luxury beyond my means.

Ruso shrugged good-naturedly. ‘One never knows; you might have just been playing dice, and won a fortune by casting the Venus Throw. Here, these are more affordable.’ He smiled and laid a selection before me.

‘No,’ I said, seeing nothing I liked, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

‘Then something in a lighter blue, perhaps? A bright blue, like the sky.’

‘No, I think not – ’

‘Ah, but see what I have to show you first. Felix . . . Felix! Fetch me one of the new veils that just arrived from Alexandria, the bright blue ones with yellow stitching.’

The young slave bit his lip nervously and seemed to cringe. This struck me as odd, for I knew Ruso to be a temperate man and not a cruel master.

‘Go on, then – what are you waiting for?’ Ruso turned to me and shook his head. ‘This new slave – worse than useless! I don’t think he’s very smart, no matter what the slave merchant said. He keeps the books well enough, but here in the shop – look, he’s done it again! Unbelievable! Felix, what is wrong with you? Do you do this just to spite me? Do you want a beating? I won’t put up with this any longer, I tell you!’

The slave shrank back, looking confused and helpless. In his hand he held a yellow veil.

‘All the time he does this!’ wailed Ruso, clutching his head. ‘He wants to drive me mad! I ask for blue and he brings me yellow! I ask for yellow and he brings me blue! Have you ever heard of such stupidity? I shall beat you, Felix, I swear it!’ He ran after the poor slave, brandishing a measuring rod.

And then I understood.

My friend Statilius, as I had expected, was not at his lodgings in the Subura. When I questioned his landlord, the old man gave me the sly look of a confederate charged with throwing hounds off the scent, and told me that Statilius had left Rome for the countryside.

He was in none of the usual places where he might have been on a festival day. No tavern had served him and no brothel had admitted him. He would not even think of appearing in a gambling house, I told myself – and then knew that the exact opposite must be true.

Once I began to search the gaming places in the Subura, I found him easily enough. In a crowded apartment on the third floor of an old tenement I discovered him in the midst of a crowd of well-dressed men, some of them even wearing their togas. Statilius was down on his elbows and knees, shaking a tiny box and muttering prayers to Fortune. He cast the dice; the crowd contracted in a tight circle and then drew back, exclaiming. The throw was a good one: III, III, III and VI – the Remus Throw.