Murder on the Appian Way (51 page)

Cicero, in a loud voice, quipped, "Not nearly soon enough!"

In the immediate silence that followed there was some scattered laughter, but also expressions of shock among the jurors, and then a sudden welling of outrage among the spectators. Cicero's icy grin vanished. Milo stiffened. Even Antony, who had faced barbarians in battle and had no cause to feel threatened by the crowd, backed away from the Rostra and turned pale. I looked behind me to see what they saw: a sea of upraised fists and angry, shouting faces. The fury on those faces was not of the opportunistic sort one sees on looters or soldiers; it had a kind of fiery purity, like the madness of religious ecstatics. It was a fearsome thing; even some of Pompey's soldiers visibly flinched to see it. These were Clodius's people, the angry and dispossessed, the degraded, the hopeless. They were a force to be reckoned with.

I thought in that instant that the trial was about to come to an abrupt end. There would be a riot, murder, mayhem, massive bloodshed, no matter that Pompey's troops were everywhere; the crowd would swallow up the soldiers along with everyone else. But even in the act of cursing and shaking their fists, the Clodians restrained their violence. The climax of the day promised them a deeper satisfaction: their dead leader's vindication and the final destruction of Milo. The soldiers banged the butts of their spears against the paving stones and clanged their swords against their greaves until the crowd eventually quieted down.

Antony managed a smile. "The time, in fact, Cicero, was the tenth hour of the day." The crowd roared with laughter. Cicero's face was like wax.

Antony finished his speech. Appius Claudius delivered his encomium to his uncle, which drove much of the crowd, and even some of the jurors, to tears. Better that they should grieve than riot, I thought.

And then it was time for Cicero to speak.

Surely it must be some sort of ruse, I thought, as Cicero knocked his wax tablet to the ground and stumbled against his chair. Was he feigning clumsiness in a bid for sympathy from a hostile audience? The same people who had been weeping only moments before began to laugh and make catcalls. Milo scowled, crossed his arms tightly across his chest and rolled his eyes up to heaven. Tiro bit his lower lip and pressed his hands against the sides of his face, then seemed to realize what he was doing, drew back his hands and made his face like a statue's.

Cicero's voice shook as he began his speech. It had quavered in just that way the first time I heard him speak in public, at the trial of Sextus Roscius; but that had been a lifetime ago, and since then Cicero had become the leading orator of his time, moving from triumph to triumph. Even in his darkest days, when Clodius was working to have him exiled, his defiance and sense of self-righteousness had always given him a steady voice, if not always steady friends.

But now his voice shook. "Distinguished jurors! Distinguished... what an opportunity you have today! What a vital decision is yours to make ... yours to make, and yours alone. Shall a good man, an upstanding citizen, an untiring servant of the state .. . should he be forced to pine away in miserable hardship ... indeed, shall Rome herself be made to suffer endless, ongoing humiliations ... or shall you put an end — that is, by your staunch, courageous, wise decision, shall you put an end to the long persecution of both the man and his city by lawless hooligans?"

There was another outburst from the crowd. The noise was almost like a physical assault. Cicero appeared to quail before it, shrinking back on the Rostra. Where was the strutting cock who tended to swagger rather than fret before a hostile crowd? I was still inclined to think that his timidity was some sort of pose. What other possibility was there?

The furore at last quieted enough for him to continue. "When my client... and myself... when we first took up politics ..."

"Yes, but when will you give it up?" shouted someone in the crowd.

"Not soon enough!" answered a chorus of voices, to raucous laughter.

"When we first took up politics," Cicero went on at a higher pitch, "we held high hopes that honourable rewards for honourable service would come our way. Instead we suffer a constant burden of fear. Milo has always been especially vulnerable, for he has deliberately ... deliberately and bravely ... placed himself on the foremost... I mean to say, in the forefront... in the struggle of true patriots against enemies of the state —"

There was another outburst, so loud it hurt my ears. Milo had sunk so low in his chair and hugged himself so tightly that he appeared to have melted. His expression was one of utter disgust. Tiro flinched every time Cicero stammered, and began to bite his nails.

From that point on the roar of the crowd was almost constant. "Whenever Cicero did manage to make himself heard, he seemed to be uttering confused fragments from more than one speech. On several occasions he clearly lost his place, muttered to himself, and started at some point he had already covered. His voice continually shook. Even knowing his general intention - to accuse Clodius of an ambush and to exonerate Milo completely — it was impossible for me to make any sense of his argument. From the looks on their faces, the jurors were equally confounded.

Cicero's orations had roused many reactions in me over the years — outrage at his willingness to twist the truth, admiration approaching awe at his ability to construct a logical argument, simple wonder at his prodigious ego, grudging respect for his loyalty to his friends, dismay at his shameless demagoguery, for Cicero was always ready to exploit his listeners' religious sentiments and sexual prejudices to his own-ends. Now I began to feel something I had never felt before, something I would have thought impossible: I began to feel embarrassed for Cicero.

This should have been his finest hour. When he defended Sextus Roscius and risked offending the dictator Sulla, he had been too young to know better; inciting the people against Catilina had been almost too easy; destroying Clodia in his speech for Marcus Caelius had been an act of personal vengeance. This was a situation that required true bravery and heroic stamina. If he could have stood his ground against the angry mob, if he could have stared them down and by the sheer power of his oratory compelled them to listen, what a crowning accomplishment that would have been, whether he won the case or not. He could have attained a kind of glory even in failure. . Instead, he was the very portrait of a man cowed by fear. He stuttered, averted his eyes, broke out in a sweat, stumbled over his lines. He was like an actor crippled by stage fright. No man could be blamed for being intimidated by that crowd, but from Cicero such a reaction was difficult to stomach. The wretchedness ofhis performance robbed his words of any weight they might have possessed. The few audible portions of his speech seemed disconnected, forced, artificial, insincere. I seemed to be watching a second-rate actor doing a poor parody of Cicero. More than feeling embarrassed, I almost felt pity for him.

Milo became increasingly agitated until he seemed about to come out of his skin. He kept jumping towards Tiro, engaging him in whispered arguments. Milo, I suspected, wanted to call Cicero from the Rostra and speak extemporaneously in his own defence; Tiro managed to argue him out of it.

The crowd soon learned to make a game of their outbursts. I have seldom seen a mass of people act with such seeming single-mindedness. They would grow just quiet enough to allow Cicero to be heard, then would laugh when he stuttered or misspoke, then would wait until the critical moment of the point he was making and let out a deafening roar. Their performance was uncanny, as if orchestrated by an invisible hand. The spirit of Clodius himself seemed to guide them that day.

The debacle seemed to go on forever. In fact, it lasted for considerably less than the three hours allotted for the defence. Eventually Cicero neared the end of his speech. "Milo was born to serve his country. Surely it cannot be right that he should be forbidden to die within her boundaries —"

"Then let him take his own life, right now!" someone shouted.

"Distinguished jurors, can you possibly see fit to banish him from our soil? Send a man such as Milo into exile, and he would be eagerly welcomed by every other city in the world —"

"Then send him! Send him! Exile! Exile!" The word became a chant that echoed all through the Forum.

Cicero did not wait for the chant to die down in order to finish his speech. He continued in a hoarse voice amid the growing roar of the crowd. I strained to hear him. "Urgently I ask you, honourable jurors, when you cast your votes, be brave enough to act as you truly think is right. Do that, and believe me, your integrity. .. and courage ... and sense of justice will surely please the one who chose this jury by fixing on the best and bravest and wisest men in Rome."

Was that, then, the ultimate appeal? That a vote to acquit Milo would be pleasing to the Great One, the sole consul and selector of judges and juries? If that was his final argument, it was just as well that Cicero's voice was drowned out by the mob.

Once the speeches were finished, each side was allowed to excuse fifteen of the jurors. This was done quickly, as both prosecution and defence had already drawn up their lists of those they considered undesirable.

All that remained was for the fifty-one remaining jurors to vote. Each was given a tablet with wax on each side, with the letter A (for absolve) stamped on one side and the letter C (for condemn) stamped on the other. The juror wiped out one of the letters, leaving the other to show his judgment These were collected before they were counted, so that the vote of each juror was kept secret Domitius presided over the counting of the tablets as they were separated into two groups. From where I sat, I could see that one group was about three times higher than the other.

Domitius announced the results. The vote to condemn was thirty-eight. The vote to absolve was thirteen.

The defeat was crushing. Even so, Milo had gathered more support from the jury than I expected. Strangely enough, I felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for him. He was responsible for some of the darkest days of my life; he had deliberately separated me from my family and treated me like an animal. Yet the time I had spent in captivity had also made me consider the harsh reality of the exile's existence, ait off forever , from his heartland, from the places of his childhood and the people he loves, from the only life he has known, forbidden ever to return, even in death. I had had a taste of that despondency, at Milo's hand. Now Milo's world was at an end. Just as I had almost felt pity for Cicero, I almost felt it for Milo.

There was an outcry of triumph from the crowd. Expressionless, Milo rose stiffly from his chair and went directly to the closed litter in which he had arrived. Cicero, looking dazed, followed him. In addition to their own bodyguards, Pompey's soldiers formed a cordon around the litter to ensure its safe passage out of the Forum.

Pompey must be pleased, I thought After a shaky beginning on the first day of the trial, he had managed to establish order, and order, of a sort, had prevailed to the end. The question of Milo had been settled; Milo would trouble him no more, and neither would Cicero, at least for a while. Now the Great One could turn his attention to the Glodian radicals. What punishment would be appropriate for those who instigated the burning of the Senate House? Rome craved law and order, and Rome was about to get it — in the short term, at least.

Taverns reopened as soon as the trial was over. The Clodians would drink to celebrate. Milo's supporters would drink to drown their misery. I decided to stay behind locked doors.

Over dinner, I revealed to the family what I had discovered the previous night regarding Milo's responsibility for abducting Eco and me, and Cicero's knowledge of it. Eco was not surprised. Bethesda and Menenia were outraged. Diana began to cry and left the room.

We discussed the trial, which had done the job of punishing Milo for us; he was already being penalized to the full extent of the law, and there was nothing more that we could do to him. As for Cicero, Bethesda vowed to put an Egyptian curse on him. I myself was less certain about how to deal with him. Certainly, there could be no more friendly commerce of any kind between our houses ever again. I had come close to making a full break with Cicero in the past; now it was done. But beyond that, it was difficult to see what sort of satisfaction we might obtain against him, at least for the time being.

We discussed and argued long into the night. The lamps grew dim and the slaves refilled them. We had eaten our fill, but gradually grew hungry again. Bethesda produced another course. We discussed and argued some more. At some point I realized how inexplicably happy I was. I was safe in my home, in the heart of the city, content with my family, finally out of harm's way. Was everyone else in Rome like myself, heaving a great sigh of relief?

The world had been turned upside down and given a great rattling shake. Soldiers had been given the run of a Roman court, a man who called himself sole consul was acting suspiciously like a dictator, and Cicero — Cicero! — had fallen apart during the most important speech of his life. These were grave omens, surely more meaningful and menacing than the usual run of omens, those dubious fires and strange cloud formations seen in the sky by professional mystics. But now I felt that the world was at last right side up again, and my feet were finally back on solid ground. The immediate, overwhelming problem of Milo had been taken care of) however messily. Things could only get better.

Even Bethesda looked especially beautiful that night. Perhaps some of this was the glow of the wine, or even the glow ofher warm cooking in my belly. Looking at her in the lamplight made me think of Diana. Where was Diana?

I would send Davus to go and find her, I thought, but Davus wasn't in the room either. I would go and find her myself.

I knocked on the wall outside her curtained door. There was no answer. I thought she must be asleep or not in the room at all, but as I pushed the curtain aside there was a shuffling noise. The room was dimly lit by a single lamp. Diana seemed to be in the act of throwing a coverlet off her bed. She slipped back onto the bed and sat against the wall. "Papa, what are you doing here?"