Murder on the Appian Way (26 page)

"I thought I saw someone come in." She peered at us with a squint that I took to be almost hostile until I realized she was waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. She was a strong-looking woman with meaty arms and a round, open face surrounded by a tangle of greying red hair. "That's your fellow with the horses over by the trough?"

"Yes," I said.

"Three altogether, are you?" "Yes, travellers."

"Hungry travellers," added Eco, leaning against the bar.. She showed the hint of a smile. "We can take care of that, as long as you have something that jingles." Eco produced his coin purse.

She nodded. "I've got a couple of rabbits roasting. It'll be a little while before they're done, but I can bring you some bread and cheese in the meantime." She reached under the bar and produced two cups, then went back to the storage room and returned with a pitcher of wine and a pitcher of water.

"Could you take some food out to the fellow under the trees, too?" I said. "I can hear his stomach growling from here."

"Certainly. I'll send one of my boys to take care of him. They're out in the cookhouse watching the fire. With my husband," she added, as if making of point of letting us know that she was not a woman alone. "Travellers, you say. Headed north or south?"

"South."

"You've come from Rome, then?" She poured out generous portions of wine, then added splashes of water.

"We left early this morning."

"What's it like up in the city?"

"An awful mess. We're glad to be away from it."

"Well, it's been an awful mess around here, too, let me tell you. Ever since that accursed day ..." She sighed and shook her head.

"Ah, yes, we must be close to where it happened — the skirmish up the road."

She snorted. "Call it a skirmish if you like, but I'd call it an all-out battle, to judge from the damage that was done and the dead bodies lying all about. And it may have started up the road, but right here's where it ended." She slapped the top of the counter.

"What do you mean?"

"Aren't we talking about the same thing? Milo and Clodius and all the blood that was spilled?"

I nodded. "No one in Rome talks about anything else these days. But everything is so confused and jumbled. Every new version contradicts the last one. Something happened on the Appian Way and Clodius ended up dead — that's about the only thing all the stories agree on. Where, when and how, nobody knows for sure."

She rolled her eyes. "So much suffering and destruction, you'd think people would at least bother to find out what really happened, if only to be glad it didn't happen to them. But you said you were hungry. I'll get you some bread, hot from the oven."

Eco opened his mouth to call her back, but I squeezed his arm and shook my head. "The woman is eager enough to tell us what she knows," I said in a low voice. "Let her do it at her own pace."

She returned with a steaming loaf of bread in a basket and a piece of cheese the size of a brick, then went back to the storeroom and returned with a heaped bowl of black and green olives. She put her elbows on the bar, leaned towards us and resumed her tale without any prompting. "It was my brother-in-law who owned this tavern, my little sister's husband. A hard-working fellow, from a long line of hard workers. Inherited the place from his rather; the family's owned this inn for generations. He wept with joy the day my sister gave him a son to leave it to." She sighed. "Who could have known how soon he'd be passing the place along? The boy's still a baby, and now that his papa is dead there's not another grown man on either side of the family to run the place. So we've taken it over, my husband and I, with our boys helping us, while my poor widowed sister stays with her baby. Ah, poor Marcus! That was her husband's name. There's always some danger when you run a place like this on the road, always the risk of being raided by bandits or runaway slaves who'd slash your throat without a thought. But Marcus was a big, stout fellow, not afraid of anything, and this inn was his whole life. Always had been, since he was a child. I think he didn't realize the danger that day when Clodius's men came running in, all bloody and out of breath. He didn't turn them away, he just asked them what he could do to help. Clodius staggered inside, wounded and bleeding, and told him to bolt the doors. Then they laid Clodius right here, flat on his back." She slapped the counter, hard enough to cause ripples in our cups. By the dim light I studied the mottled, stained surface of the old wood. A lot of wine must have been spilled on that counter over the years, I told myself but there were stains which might have been something else.

"Marcus should have sent them all right back out into the road, that's what my husband says. But what does he know? He wasn't here. But my poor sister was. She told me all about it. She'd left her baby with me that day. Oh, how she loved working in this tavern, as much as Marcus did; nothing could keep her away. When Clodius and his men showed up, she was upstairs, shaking out blankets and sweeping the floors. If only her little boy had been sick; if only something, anything, had kept her at home that day. The shock of what happened to Marcus was bad enough, but for her to have been here, to have seen and heard — it's broken something inside her. Ah, well, that's why we have to do everything we can to keep the place going until little Marcus is big enough to take his father's place."

I nodded. "So the skirmish — the battle - began up the road, but Clodius ended up here. Had he ever been in the tavern before? Did he know your brother-in-law, Marcus?"

"Oh, certainly. Publius Clodius stopped in here plenty of times, on his way to that villa of his up on the mountain. I met him myself a few times over the years. So charming - you could tell right away that he was highborn, there was no hiding that. Just a certain way he had of carrying himself, and always such fine clothes and fine horses, and how his hair and fingernails were always so nicely groomed. You don't often see a man who keeps his fingernails so well cared for. But he was never aloof. He always remembered Marcus's name, always asked him how little Marcus was coming along. He had a young son himself."

"So I've heard."

"Of course, not everybody liked Publius Clodius. He stirred up some hard feelings around here, back when he started building his villa." "Hard feelings?"

"Well, there were some who said that the way he got hold of the surrounding land wasn't completely honest, and others who complained that some of the trees he cut down were part of the sacred grove of Jupiter. And the Vestals had to move out of their old house. But Clodius gave them money to build their new house, which is only a little farther from the Temple of Vesta than their old one, so I could never see what all their complaining was about." She shook her head. "But I'll speak no ill of the dead, especially when the poor man's lemur left his body within the sound of my voice."

"So your brother-in-law was friendly with Clodius, despite any hard feelings that some of your neighbours might have had?"

"Oh, yes. I suppose that's why Clodius ran to this place when he found himself in trouble. If only he hadn't brought the trouble with him! But I don't blame the dead. I blame the other."

"The other?"

She picked up a rag from behind the bar and began twisting it, clenching her fists until the knuckles turned white. "The one whose men were after Clodius that day. He's the bastard to blame for what happened here."

"Titus Annius Milo, you mean."

She made a noise in her throat as if she might spit. "If you want to call him that. Milo! He chose that name for himself,
didn't he? What a vain fellow, thinking he takes after some great Olympic hero. Well, no one is overawed by your so-called Milo in these parts. He's just another fellow from the far side of the mountain who went off to Rome to make his fortune. He comes from Lanuvium, did you know that?"

"Yes, I think I'd heard that."

"Titus Annius Milo, you call him. He wasn't born with that name either. He wasn't even born with the name Titus! The fellow was born plain Gaius Papius, like his father before him, and let me assure you that the Papii of Lanuvium never did a single thing of importance that anyone can remember. By birth he's as common as dirt But when his father died, his grandfather adopted him. That was his mother's father, Titus Annius, the one with the noble ancestors. So Milo took the old man's names and added a name of his own, and Gaius Papius turned into Titus Annius Milo. Now everyone's heard of him. He inherited his grandfather's money, too, when the old man died, but they say he's squandered it all on those fancy funeral games he put on to impress the voters in Rome. The things a man will do to get himself elected to high office! Well, no man among my relatives would ever vote for the fellow. Always pretending and putting on airs, as fake as all three of his names. No, we never had any use for Milo."

She paused for breath and began to wipe the counter with her rag, as if she could rub away the bloodstains. "Oh, Milo would stop in here from time to time on his way home to Lanuvium, buy a round of wine for everybody, say a few pretty words, make sure everyone noticed him. The local boy who'd become such a powerful fellow in Rome, friend of Cicero, ally of Pompey, sure to become consul one of these days! But if you ask me, Milo hasn't got a speck of Clodius's charm. Clodius would come into this room and it would be as if someone had lit candles all around - everything suddenly had a glow to it. Milo would come in, blustering and grinning, and it was like someone blowing bad breath in your face. His charm was all for show. You could practically see him gritting his teeth at having to mix with the common folk he'd left behind. As for that wife of his, what's her name —"

"Fausta, I believe," said Eco.

"Ah, yes, Fausta Cornelia — well, there's a case of a man marrying upward if ever there was one! Now how did the old dictator Sulla's daughter ever end up hitched to Gaius Papius from Lanuvium? All a game of money and politics, I suppose. Marriage between people like that always comes down to a cold calculation, doesn't it? They say it hasn't stopped her from having all the lovers she wants. They say Fausta's more of a slut now than she was with her first husband. For all that, let me tell you, she never pretended to have the common touch. When she and Milo would come parading up the Appian Way and he'd stop in here to buy drinks for everyone, the great Fausta

Cornelia would stay most firmly ensconced in that fancy carriage of hers, rigid as a statue, staring straight ahead, as if it might give her a gas pain just to look at a person like myself Well, I could understand her staying out of the tavern, a lady like that — Clodius's wife, Fulvia, was the same, she and her women would always keep to themselves when Clodius stopped in, but you'd see her on the grass under the trees, playing with her little boy or nursing the little gid, behaving like a normal person. Not like Fausta Cornelia, too good to even exchange a glance with the likes of myself. But there was one time, one time —"

The woman suddenly shook and choked with laughter. "Nature gets the better of everybody in the end, eh?" she managed to say, regaining herself. "I remember the time — oh, she must have needed to relieve herself very badly, because she actually sent a slave to ask me where the toilets were. So I sent a girl to show her the way to the little building over by the stream, past the stables. And the girl came back, saying that Fausta Cornelia hadn't found the toilets to her liking and that she'd refused to use them. You can bet that Milo left the tavern and set out pretty soon after that. I suppose she held it in all the way to Lanuvium! But how? Even the Appian Way has a few bumps in it. We all talked about it afterwards, wondering whether she'd had an accident in the carriage, and how Milo would react. Oh, can you imagine the look on the man's face —"

She burst out laughing again, until tears flowed down her cheeks. Finally she recovered and stood wiping away the tears with the backs of her hands. "Ah! The rabbit! It'll be done by now, surely."

And with that she disappeared again through the back door.

Eco raised an eyebrow. "It seems that Clodius and Milo were both rather well known in these parts."

"Yes, the ambitious local boy, and the aristocratic outsider with money and charm. Two types bound to excite strong reactions in people. Admiration, respect -"

"Envy, hatred...."

"Yes," I said, "and both of them politicians, not shy about putting themselves forwards. We know how skilful Clodius was at laying on the common touch; he made an art of it. Milo, who really did have common roots, seems to have been rather clumsy at it."

"So our hostess says, Papa, but she's obviously biased. And what's this about Clodius cutting down sacred trees, displacing the local Vestal Virgins-"

Kicking open the back door, out hostess returned bearing a steaming platter. A tall, hulking figure came in after her, carrying a steaming bowl. The fellow was so large that I felt a little apprehensive until I realized who it was.

"Davus! What are you doing? You're supposed to be watching the horses. A fine thing if we were to finish our meal and find them gone. I don't care to walk the twelve miles back to Rome."

"Don't worry," said the woman. "I sent one of my boys to take his place. Your horses will be safe, you have my word for it. Isn't it all right for your slave to come inside? The clouds are starting to creep down from the mountaintop, and a fellow can catch a chill, sitting out in the open air. Let him warm up a bit." She cast a look at Davus such as women, alas, have all too rarely cast at me. Just because a fellow happens to be nineteen, has wavy black hair, oxlike shoulders and a profile like a Greek statue ...

"She's brought him inside so that she can look at him!" said Eco from the corner of his mouth.

"Obviously," I agreed. "This is the woman who preferred Clodius to Milo, remember."

The woman put plates and-utensils before the three of us and filled our cups. The steaming platter turned out to be the roasted rabbit. Rabbit is not my favourite flesh - too greasy and bony - but it was well cooked and I was too hungry to quibble. The steaming bowl was full of glazed turnips. I complimented our hostess on the sauce.