House Of The Vestals (4 page)

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 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; 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.

"Yes! Yes!" Statilius cried, and held out his palms. The others handed over their coins.

I grabbed him by the collar of his tunic and pulled him squawking into the hall.

"I should think you're deeply enough in debt already," I said.

"Quite the contrary!" he protested, smiling broadly. His face was flushed and his forehead beaded with sweat, like a man with a fever.

"Just how much do you owe Flavius the moneylender?"

"A hundred thousand sesterces."

"A hundred thousand!" My heart leaped into my throat.

"But not any longer. You see, I'll be able to pay him of now!" He held up the coins in his hands. "I have two bags full of silver in the other room, where my slave's looking after them. And-can you believe it?-a deed to a house on the Caelian Hill. I've won my way out of it, don't you see?"

"At the expense of another man's life."

His grin became sheepish. "So, you've figured that out. But who could have foreseen such a tragedy? Certainly not I. And when it happened, I didn't rejoice in Panurgus's death-you saw that. I didn't hate him, not really. My jealousy was purely professional. But if the Fates decided better him than me, who am I to argue?"

"You're a worm, Statilius. Why didn't you tell Roscius what you knew? Why didn't you tell me?"

"What did I know, really? Someone completely unknown might have killed poor Panurgus. I didn't witness the event."

"But you guessed the truth, all the same. That's why you wanted me backstage, wasn't it? You were afraid the assassin would come back for you. What was I, your bodyguard?"

"Perhaps. After all, he didn't come back, did he?"

"Statilius, you're a worm."

"You said that already." The smile dropped from his face like a discarded mask. He jerked his collar from my grasp.

"You hid the truth from me," I said, "but why from Roscius?"

"What, tell him I had run up an obscene gambling debt and had a notorious moneylender threatening to kill me?"

"Perhaps he'd have loaned you the money to pay off the debt." '

"Never! You don't know Roscius. He thinks I'm lucky just to be in his troupe; believe me, he's not the type to hand out loans to an underling in the amount of a hundred thousand sesterces.

And if he knew Panurgus had mistakenly been murdered instead of me-oh, Roscius would have been furious! One Panurgus is worth ten Statilii, that's his view. I would have been a dead man then, with Flavius on one side of me and Roscius on the other. The two of them would have torn me apart like a chicken bone!" He stepped back and straightened his tunic. The smile flickered and returned to his lips. "You're not going to tell anyone, are you?"

"Statilius, do you ever stop acting?" I averted my eyes to avoid his charm.

"Well?"

"Roscius is my client, not you."

"But I'm your friend, Gordianus."

"I made a promise to Panurgus."

"Panurgus didn't hear you."

"The gods did."

Finding the moneylender Flavius was a simpler matter-a few questions in the right ear, a few coins in the right hands. I learned that he ran his business from a wine shop in a portico near the Circus Flaminius, where he sold inferior vintages imported from his native Tarquinu. But on a festival day, my informants told me, I would be more likely to find him at the house of questionable repute across the street.

The place had a low ceiling and the musty smell of spilled wine and crowded humanity. Across the room I saw Flavius, holding court with a group of his peers-businessmen of middle age with crude country manners, dressed in expensive tunics and cloaks of a quality that contrasted sharply with their wearers' crudeness.

Closer at hand, leaning against a wall (and looking strong enough to hold it up), was the moneylender's bully. The blond giant was looking rather drunk, or else exceptionally stupid. He slowly blinked when I approached. A glimmer of recognition lit his bleary eyes and then faded.

"Festival days are good drinking days," I said, raising my cup of wine. He looked at me without expression for a moment, then shrugged and nodded.

"Tell me," I said, "do you know any of those spectacular beauties.?" I gestured to a group of four women who loitered at the far corner of the room, near the foot of the stairs.

The giant shook his head glumly.

"Then you are a lucky man this day." I leaned close enough to smell the wine on his breath. "I was just talking to one of them. She tells me that she longs to meet you. It seems she has an appetite for men with sunny hair and big shoulders. She tells me that for a man such as you…" I whispered in his ear.

The veil of lust across his face made him look even stupider. He squinted drunkenly. "Which one?" he asked in a husky whisper.

"The one in the blue gown," I said.

"Ah…" He nodded and burped, then pushed past me and stumbled toward the stairs. As I had expected, he ignored the woman in green, as well as the woman in coral and the one in brown. Instead he placed his hand squarely upon the hip of the woman in yellow, who turned and looked up at him with a surprised but not unfriendly gaze.

"Quintus Roscius and his partner Chaerea were both duly impressed by my cleverness," I explained later that night to Bethesda. I was unable to resist the theatrical gesture of swinging the little bag of silver up in the air and onto the table, where it landed with a jingling thump. "Not a pot of gold, perhaps, but a fat enough fee to keep us all happy through the winter."

Her eyes became as round and glittering as little coins.

They grew even larger when I produced the veil from Ruso's shop.

"Oh! But what is it made of?"

"Midnight and moths," I said. "Spiderwebs and silver." She tilted her head back and spread the translucent veil over her naked throat and arms. I blinked and swallowed hard, and decided that the purchase was well worth the price.

Eco stood uncertainly in the doorway of his little room, where he had watched me enter and had listened to my hurried tale of the day's events. He seemed to have recovered from his distemper of the morning, but his face was somber. I held out my hand, and he cautiously approached. He took the red leather ball readily enough, but he still did not smile.

"Only a small gift, I know. But I have a greater one for you…"

"Still, I don't understand," protested Bethesda. "You've said the blond giant was stupid, but how can anyone be so stupid as to not be able to tell one color from another?"

"Eco knows," I said, smiling ruefully down at him. "He figured it out last night and tried to tell me, but he didn't know how. He remembered a passage from Plato that I read to him months ago; I had forgotten all about it. Here, I think I can find it now." I reached for the scroll, which still lay upon my sleeping couch.

" 'One may observe,'" I read aloud," 'that not all men perceive the same colors. Although they are rare, there are those who confuse the colors red and green, and likewise those who cannot tell yellow from blue; still others appear to have no perception of the various shades of green.' He goes on to offer an explanation of this, but I cannot follow it."

"Then the bodyguard could not tell blue from yellow?" said Bethesda. "Even so…"

"The moneylender came to the theater yesterday intending to make good on his threat to murder Statilius. No wonder Flavius gave a start when I leaned over and said, 'Today you'll see The Pot of Gold'-for a moment he thought I was talking about the debt Statilius owed him! He sat in the audience long enough to see that Statilius was playing Megadorus, dressed in blue; no doubt he could recognize him by his voice. Then he sent the blond assassin backstage, knowing the alley behind the Temple of Jupiter would be virtually deserted, there to lie in wait for the actor in the blue cloak. Eco must have overheard snatches of his instructions, if only the word blue. He sensed that something was amiss even then, and tried to tell me at the time, but there was too much confusion, with the giant stepping on my toes and the audience howling around us. Am I right?"

Eco nodded, and slapped a fist against his palm: exactly right.

"Unfortunately for poor Panurgus in his yellow cloak, the color-blind assassin was also uncommonly stupid. He needed more information than the color blue to make sure he murdered the right man, but he didn't bother to ask for it; or if he did, Flavius would only have sneered at him and rushed him along, unable to understand his confusion. Catching Panurgus alone and vulnerable in his yellow cloak, which might as well have been blue, the assassin did his job-and bungled it.

"Knowing Flavius was in the audience and out to kill him, learning that Panurgus had been stabbed, and seeing that the hired assassin was no longer in the audience, Statilius guessed the truth; no wonder he was so shaken by Panurgus's death, knowing that he was the intended victim."

"So another slave is murdered, and by accident! And nothing will be done," Bethesda said moodily.

"Not exactly. Panurgus was valuable property. The law allows his owners to sue the man responsible for his death for his full market value. I understand that Roscius and Chaerea are Is each demanding one hundred thousand sesterces from Flavius. If Flavius contests the action and loses, the amount will be doubled. Knowing his greed, I suspect he'll tacitly admit his guilt and settle for the smaller figure."

"Small justice for a meaningless murder."

I nodded. "And small recompense for the destruction of so much talent. But such is the only justice that Roman law allows, when a citizen kills a slave."

A heavy silence descended on the garden. His insight vindicated, Eco turned his attention to the leather ball. He tossed it in the air, caught it, and nodded thoughtfully, pleased at the way it fit his hand.

"Ah, but Eco, as I was saying, there is another gift for you." He looked at me expectantly. "It's here." I patted the sack of silver. "No longer shall I teach you in my own stumbling way how to read and write. You shall have a proper tutor, who will come every morning to teach you both Latin and Greek. He will be stern, and you will suffer, but when he is done you will read and write better than I do. A boy as clever as you deserves no less."

Eco's smile was radiant. I have never seen a boy toss a ball so high.

The story is almost done, except for one final outcome.

Much later that night, I lay in bed with Bethesda with nothing to separate us but that gossamer veil shot through with silver threads. For a few fleeting moments I was completely satisfied with life and the universe. In my relaxation, without meaning to, I mumbled aloud what I was thinking. "Perhaps I should adopt the boy…"

"And why not?" Bethesda demanded, imperious even when half asleep. "What more proof do you want from him? Eco could not be more like your son even if he were made of your own flesh and blood."

And of course she was right.

"Tell me a story, Bethesda."

It was the hottest night of the hottest summer I could ever remember in Rome. I had pulled my sleeping couch out into the peristyle amid the yew trees and poppies so as to catch any breeze that might happen to pass over the Esquiline Hill. Overhead the sky was moonless and full of stars. Still, sleep would not come.

Bethesda lay on her own divan nearby. We might have lain together, but it was simply too hot to press flesh against flesh. She sighed. "An hour ago you asked me to sing you a song, Master. An hour before that you asked me to wash your feet with a wet cloth."

"Yes, and the song was sweet and the cloth was cool. But I still can't sleep. Neither can you. So tell me a story."

She touched the back of her hand to her lips and yawned. Her black hair glistened in the starlight. Her linen sleeping gown clung like gossamer to the supple lines of her body. Even yawning, she was beautiful-far too beautiful a slave to be owned by a common man like myself, I've often thought. Fortune smiled on me when I found her in that Alexandrian slave market ten years ago. Was it I who selected Bethesda, or she who selected me?

"Why don't you tell a story?" Bethesda suggested. "You love to talk about your work."

"Now you're wanting me to put you to sleep. You always find it boring when I talk about my work."

"Not true," she protested sleepily. "Tell me again how you helped Cicero in resolving the matter of the Woman of Arretium. Everyone down at the market still talks about it, how Gordianus the Finder must be the cleverest man in Rome to have found the solution to such a sordid affair."

"What a schemer you are, Bethesda, thinking you can flatter me into being your storyteller. You are my slave and I order you to tell me a story!"

She ignored me. "Or tell me again about the case of Sextus Roscius," she said. "Before that, great Cicero had never defended a man charged with murder, much less a man accused of killing his own father. How he needed the help of Gordianus the Finder! To think it would end with you killing a giant who came out of the Cloaca Maxima while Cicero was giving his speech in the Forum!"

"I would hate to have you for my biographer, Bethesda. The man was not exactly a giant, it was not exactly I who killed him, and while it happened in the public latrine behind the Shrine of Venus, the giant-that is, the man-did not come out of the sewer. And it wasn't the end of the affair, either!"

We lay for a long moment in the darkness, listening to the chirring of the crickets. A shooting star passed overhead, causing Bethesda to mutter a low incantation to one of her strange Egyptian animal-gods.

"Tell me about Egypt," I said. "You never talk about Alexandria. It's such a great city. So old. So mysterious."

"Ha! You Romans think anything is old if it came before your empire. Alexander and his city were not even a dream in the mind of Osiris when Cheops built his great pyramid. Memphis and Thebes were already ancient when the Greeks went to war with Troy."

"Over a woman," I commented.

"Which shows that they were not completely stupid. Of course they were idiots to think that Helen was hiding in Troy, when she was actually down in Memphis with King Proteus the whole time."

"What? I never heard such a thing!"

"Everyone in Egypt knows the story."

"But that would mean that the destruction of Troy was meaningless. And since it was the Trojan warrior Aeneas who fled Troy and founded the Roman race, then the destiny of Rome is based on a cruel joke of the gods. I suggest you keep this particular story to yourself, Bethesda, and not go spreading it around the market."

"Too late for that." Even in the darkness, I could see the wicked smile on her lips.

We lay in silence for some moments. A gentle breeze stirred amid the roses. Bethesda finally said, "You know, men such as you are not the only ones who can solve mysteries and answer riddles."

"You mean the gods can do so as well?"

"No, I mean that women can."

"Is that a fact?"

"Yes. Thinking about Helen in Egypt reminded me of the story of King Rhampsinitus and his treasure house, and how it was a women who solved the mystery of the disappearing silver. But I suppose you must already know that story, Master, since it is so very famous."

"King Rhampsi-what?" I asked.

Bethesda snorted delicately. She finds it difficult sometimes, living in a place as culturally backward as Rome. I smiled up at the stars and closed my eyes. "Bethesda, I order you to tell me the tale of King Rhampsi-whatever and his treasure house."

"Very well, Master. King Rhampsinitus came after King Proteus (who played host to Helen), and before King Cheops."

"Who built the great pyramid. Cheops must have been a very great king."

"An awful king, the most hated man in all the long history of Egypt."

"But why?"

"Precisely because he built the great pyramid. What does a pyramid mean to common people, except unending labor and terrible taxes? The memory of Cheops is despised in Egypt; Egyptians spit when they say his name. Only visitors from Rome and Greece look at his pyramid and see something wonderful. An Egyptian looks at the pyramid and says, 'Look, there's the stone that broke my great-great-great-great-grandfather's back,' or, 'There's the ornamental pylon that bankrupted my great-great-great-great-granduncle's farm.' No, King Rhampsinitus was much more to the people's liking."

"And what was this Rhampsinitus like?"

"Very rich. No king in any kingdom since has been even half so rich."

"Not even Midas?"

"Not even him. King Rhampsinitus had great wealth in precious stones and gold, but his greatest treasure was his silver. He owned plates of silver and goblets of silver, silver coins and mirrors and bracelets and whole bricks made of pure, solid, shining silver. There was so much of it that he decided to built a treasure house just for his silver.

"So the king hired a man to design and build this treasure house in a courtyard outside his bedchamber, incorporating it into the wall that surrounded his palace. The project took several years to complete, as the wall was hollowed out and the massive stones were cut and polished and hoisted into place. The architect was a man of strong mind but frail health, and though he was only of middle age he barely lived long enough to see his design completed. On the very day that the great silver hoard was moved piece by piece into the chamber and the great doors were closed and sealed, the architect died. He left behind a widow and two sons who had just come into manhood. King Rhampsinitus called the sons before him and gave each of them a silver bracelet in token of his gratitude to their father."

"A rather small gift," I said.

"Perhaps. They say that King Rhampsinitus was prudent and evenhanded to a fault, neither tightfisted nor overly generous."

"He reminds me of Cicero."

Bethesda cleared her throat, demanding silence. "Once a month the king would have the seals broken away and would spend an afternoon in his treasure house, admiring his silver wares and counting his silver coins. Months passed; the Nile flooded and receded, as happens every summer, and the crops were good. The people were happy. Egypt was at peace.

"But the king began to notice something quite disturbing: pieces of silver were missing from his treasure house. At first he thought he only imagined it, since there was no way that the great doors could be opened without breaking the seals, and the seals were broken only for his own official visits. But when his servants tallied up the inventory of his silver, sure enough, there were a great number of coins missing, and other small items as well.

"The king was sorely puzzled. On his next visit there was even more silver missing, including a solid silver crocodile the size of a man's forearm, which had been one of the king's most treasured pieces.

"The king was furious, and more baffled than ever. Then it occurred to him to set traps inside the treasure house, so that anyone sorting through the coins and coffers might be caught and held fast in an iron cage. And this he did.

"Sure enough, on his next visit, the king discovered that one of the traps had been sprung. But inside the cage, instead of a desperate, pleading thief, there was a dead body." Bethesda paused ominously.

"But of course," I murmured, looking up sleepily at the stars. "The poor thief had starved, or else been frightened to death when the cage landed on him."

"Perhaps. But he had no head!"

"What?" I blinked.

"His head was nowhere to be found."

"How strange."

"Indeed." Bethesda nodded gravely.

"And was more silver missing?"

"Yes."

"Then there must have been another thief with him," I deduced.

"Perhaps," Bethesda said shrewdly. "But King Rhampsinitus was no closer to solving the mystery.

"Then it occurred to him that perhaps the hapless thief had relatives in Memphis, in which case they would want to have his body back so that they could purify it and send it on its journey to the afterlife. Naturally, no one could be expected to come forward to claim the body, so Rhampsinitus decided to have the headless corpse put on display before the palace wall. This was announced as a warning to the thieves of Memphis, but the true purpose was to capture anyone who might know the truth of the thief's strange fate. The king's two most trusted guards-big, bearded fellows, the same ones who usually protected the seals at the treasure house-were assigned to stand watch over the corpse day and night and to seize any person who broke into weeping or lamentation.

"The next morning, as soon as he had risen, King Rhampsinitus hurried to the palace wall and looked over the edge, for the mystery of the missing silver had come to dominate his thoughts, whether sleeping or awake. And what should he see but the two guards lying fast asleep, each of them with half his face clean-shaven-and the headless body gone! "Rhampsinitus ordered that the guards be brought before him. They stank of wine and their memories were muddled, but they did remember that a merchant passed by just as the sun was going down, pushing a cart full of wineskins. One of the wine-skins had sprung a leak. The guards each seized a cup and caught some of the flowing wine, thanking their good luck. The merchant had been outraged-for no good reason, since it was hardly the guards' fault if the wineskin had broken. They managed to calm the merchant with some peaceful words, and he paused for a while by the palace wall, explaining that he was weary and irritable from a long day's work. To make up for his rudeness, he offered each guard a cupful of his very best wine. After that, neither of the guards could quite remember what happened, or so they both maintained. The next thing they knew, it was dawn, King Rhampsinitus was screaming down at them from the palace wall, their faces had been half-shaven, and the headless body had vanished."

"Bethesda," I interrupted, giving a slight start at the sudden leap of a cricket amid the yew trees, "I do hope that this will not turn out to be one of those Egyptian horror stories where dead bodies go walking about on their own."

She reached over and playfully danced her long nails over my naked arm, giving me gooseflesh. I batted her fingers away. She leaned back and laughed a low, throaty laugh. After a moment she continued.

"When it came to describing the wine merchant, the guards were vague. One said he was young, the other said he was middle-aged. One said he had a beard, the other insisted he had only stubble on his jaw."

"The wine, or whatever was in it, must have befuddled their senses," I said. "Presuming they were telling the truth."

"However that may be, Rhampsinitus had all the wine merchants in Memphis rounded up and paraded before the guards."

"And did the guards recognize the culprit among them?"

"They did not. King Rhampsinitus knew no more than he had before. To make matters worse, the two sleeping, half-shaven guards had been seen by some of the merchants opening their shops that morning, and word had quickly spread that the king's chosen guards had been made fools of. Rumors about the headless corpse and the pilfered treasure spread through the city, and soon all Memphis was gossiping behind the king's back. King Rhampsinitus was very displeased."

"I should think so!"

"So displeased that he ordered that the guards should remain half-shaven for a month, for all to see."

"A mild punishment, surely."

"Not in the old days in Memphis. To be seen half-shaven would have been as shameful as for a Roman noble to be seen in the Forum wearing sandals instead of shoes with his toga."

"Unthinkable!"

"But fortune is a blade with two edges, as you Romans say, and in the end it was a good thing for the king that this gossip spread, for it quickly reached the ears of a young courtesan who lived over a rug shop very near the palace gates. Her name was Naia, and she was already privy to whisperings about the mystery within the palace walls, as not a few of her clientele were members of the royal entourage. Mulling over all she had heard about the affair, and everything she knew about the treasure house and the manner in which it was built and guarded, she believed she saw the solution to the mystery.

"Naia might have gone straight to the king and named the thieves, but two things gave her pause. First, she had no real proof; and second, as I've already told you, the king was not famous for generous rewards. He might have merely thanked her and given her a silver bracelet and sent her on her way! So when she went to Rhampsinitus, she said only that she had a plan for solving the mystery, and that to implement this plan would cost her time and money; if her scheme came to nothing, she would pay her own losses-"

"A terrible idea! I always demand expenses and a fee, no matter whether I solve the mystery or not."

"-but if she was able to identify the thieves and explain how the silver had been stolen, then Rhampsinitus would have to pay her as much silver as her mule could carry and grant her a wish besides.

"At first this struck the king as too steep a price, but the more he thought about it, the fairer it seemed. After all, more silver than a mule could carry had already vanished from his treasure house, and would go on vanishing until the thieving was stopped. And what sort of wish could a courtesan make that the king of all Egypt could not grant with a mere wave of his hand? Besides, it seemed unlikely that a young courtesan would be able to solve the mystery that had confounded the king and all his advisors. He agreed to the bargain.