The Venus Throw (42 page)

Caelius was deferential but not servile; modest but not cringing; adamant about his innocence, but not self-righteous; saddened by the wickedness of his enemies but not vindictive. He was the model of an upstanding citizen falsely accused and confidently looking to the revered institutions of the law to give him justice.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see the bloodshot eyes of Catullus. “I don’t suppose I’ve missed much blood and gore yet,” he said.

“Milk and honey is more like it,” quipped a man nearby. “This fellow Caelius wouldn’t harm a fly!” There was a ripple of laughter, then a round of shushing from those who wanted to hear every word of the speech.

“Mille can curdle,” Catullus whispered in my ear, “and sometimes you find a bee drowned in the honey, with its stinger intact.”

“What do you mean?”

“Caelius fights better with a sword than with a shield. Wait and listen.”

Sure enough, the tone of Caelius’s speech began to change, as if, having gotten the necessary business of humbling himself out of the way, it was time for him to go on the offensive. The shift was so gradual, the insinuations of sarcasm so subtle, that it was impossible to say exactly when the speech was transformed from a meek protestation of innocence into a biting invective against his accusers. He attacked the speeches that had been made against him, pointing out their reliance on hearsay and circumstantial evidence, their lapses of logic, their obvious intent to besmirch his character. The prosecutors were made to look not just vindictive, but petty as well, and slightly absurd, not least because Caelius himself managed to maintain an aura of impeccable
dignity while he insulted their logic and motives and assaulted them with vicious puns.

“Stingers in the honey,” whispered Catullus.

“How did you know?”

He shrugged. “You forgot how well I know Caelius. 1 could lay out the entire course of his speech for you. For example, he’ll be turning to
her
next.” He looked toward the bench where Clodia sat, and the sardonic smile on his lips faded until he looked as grim as she did.

Sure enough, Caelius proceeded to make a veiled attack on Clodia, though not by name. Behind the prosecution and its sham arguments, he said, there was a certain person intent on doing him harm—not the other way around, as she had charged. The judges would know whom he meant—“Clytemnestra-for-a-quadrans.” The crude joke, implying that Clodia was both a husband-killer and a cheap whore, elicited a wave of raucous laughter. Where had I heard it before?

“I make no claim to being ignorant of the lady,” said Caelius. “Yes, I know her—or knew her—quite well. To my discredit, alas, and to my dismay. But little to my profit; sometimes Cos in the dining room turns out to be Nola in the bedroom.” This elicited more laughter and even some appreciative applause. The pun was multiple and all the more stinging for its wicked intricacy. Cos suggested the island from which Clodia’s transparent silks had come, and therefore the open, vulgar allure of sex; Nola was famous for its impregnable fortress, which had resisted not just Hannibal but a siege by Clodia’s own father. Cos also punned with
coitus
, sex, and Nola with
nolo
, or no sex. In other words, what the lady lewdly promised at dinner was later frigidly withheld in the bedroom. With a single turn of phrase, and without saying anything explicit, Caelius had managed to suggest that Clodia was not just a temptress but a tease (likely to give poor value even for a quadrans!), to suggest that he had never actually slept with her, and to remind the court of one of her father’s military defeats, the
siege of Nola. After a moment’s pause there was another smattering of applause, as more listeners realized just what a gem of compression Caelius had delivered.

Catullus didn’t laugh or applaud, I noticed. “Wickedly clever,” I said, wondering if he had missed the pun.

“Thank you,” he muttered, apparently not listening. His eyes were on Clodia, who looked distinctly uncomfortable. Catullus smiled sadly.

Caelius expanded on the metaphor. Just as a man could be in the vicinity of Nola without breaching her walls (more laughter from those finally getting the joke), so one could be in the vicinity of Neapolis or Puteoli without being guilty of staging an attack on foreign visitors; or take an innocent stroll across the Palatine at night without dropping in to murder an ambassador. “Has it come to this?” said Caelius. “Not guilt by association, but guilt by geographical proximity? Shall a man’s enemies follow his footsteps, note any crimes which happen to take place in the immediate area, and then accuse him so that he has no alibi? It seems hardly credible that even the most inept of advocates could expect a panel of Roman judges to take this kind of ‘evidence’ seriously. Assumptions should be based on what is seen, not unseen; known, not merely ‘suspectecd.’ ”

He pulled a small object from the folds of his toga. A few spectators in the front rows laughed out loud when they saw what it was. “For instance,” he went on, holding up the object so that it glinted in the sunlight, “when one sees a simple little pyxis such as this, what does one assume that it contains? A medicinal unguent of some sort, or a cosmetic powder, or a perfume infused into wax, perhaps—the sort of thing that anybody might take along to the baths. Or so a reasonable person might assume. A person of a more morbid state of mind might guess that something else was in the box—poison, perhaps. Especially if that person was herself well acquainted with using poison.” From my distant vantage, there was no way I could be sure of what the pyxis
looked like. It must have been only my imagination that perceived it to be made of bronze, with little raised knobs and inlays of ivory that caught the sunlight—identical to the pyxis that Caelius’s confederate Licinius had brought to the Senian baths, and that had been left, filled with something unspeakable, on Clodia’s doorstep as she lay poisoned in her house.

More laughter spread through the crowd. I looked at Clodia. Her eyes were aflame and her jaw like granite.

“An imagination of a particularly lewd bent might imagine something even more outrageous in such an innocent little pyxis—a token of spent desire, perhaps, deposited by a frustrated lover weary of trying to shimmy up Nola’s walls.” At this there were outright hoots of laughter. Somehow the story of the pyxis and its obscene contents must already have spread through the city. Who had repeated such a scandalous story—a slave in Clodia’s household? Or the man who had sent her the box? It was clear from the look on Clodia’s face that Caelius’s brazen allusion to the indecent gift had taken her completely by surprise, and the callous amusement of the spectators appalled her even more. Caelius, never once looking at her, put the pyxis away and smiled blandly.

“Master!” Belbo tugged at my toga.

“Belbo, I’m trying to listen.”

“But Master, he’s here!”

I turned about, prepared to snap at him, then felt a surge of joy. Not far away, at the edge of the crowd, Eco stood on his toes peering into the sea of heads.

“Belbo, you sharp-eyed lookout! Come, he’ll never spot us in this crowd. We’ll go to him.”

“You’re not leaving, are you?” said Catullus.

“I’ll be back.”

“But the best is yet to come.”

“Memorize the jokes for me,” I said.

We came upon Eco just as he was beginning to push his
way into the throng. His tunic was dirty and his brow pasted with sweat, as might be expected of a man who had just finished a hard ride up from Puteoli. His face was haggard but when he saw us his eyes lit up and he managed a weary smile.

“Papa! No, don’t hug me, please. I’m filthy. And sore! I rode all night, knowing the trial must have already started. It’s not over, is it?”

“Not yet. Another full day of speeches—”

“Good. Perhaps there’s still time, then.”

“Time for what?”

“To save Marcus Caelius.”

“If he needs saving,” I said, thinking Caelius was doing a pretty good job of defending himself. “If he deserves to be saved.”

“I only know that he doesn’t deserve to be punished for Dio’s murder.”

“What are you saying?”

“Caelius didn’t kill Dio.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes. I found the slave girl, Zotica, the one who was with Dio the night he died . . .”

“If it wasn’t Caelius and Asicius, then who?”

“I brought the girl back with me . . .” Eco suddenly looked very tired.

“The girl killed Dio?” I frowned. We had considered and rejected that possibility already.

“No.”

“But she knows who did?”

“Not exactly.” Why would Eco not look me in the eye? “All I can say is that your intuition was right, Papa. The girl was the key.”

“Well? What did you find out?”

“I think you’d better talk to her yourself, Papa.”

The crowd behind us laughed at something, then laughed again, louder. I looked over my shoulder. “Caelius is just
getting to the heart of his speech. Then Crassus will speak, then Cicero—”

“Still, I think you’d better come, Papa. Quickly, before the trial gets any further along.”

“Can’t you just tell me what the girl told you?”

His face darkened. “I don’t think that would be wise, Papa. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“To whom, the slave girl?”

“Please, Papa! Come with me.” The look on his face convinced me. What terrible secret had so unnerved my son, who had seen all the corruption and duplicity that Rome had to offer?

He had left the girl at his house in the Subura. We walked there as quickly as we could, threading our way through streets crowded with food vendors, acrobats and merrymakers.

“Where did you find her?” I asked, stepping out of the way of a drunken band of gladiators coming up the street. They snarled at Belbo as they passed.

“In one of the hill towns of the far side of Vesuvius, miles from Puteoli. It took some looking. First I had to find the brothel-keeper who’d bought the allotment of slaves that included Zotica. Do you have any idea how many establishments like that there are down on the bay? One after another told me he’d never seen Zotica, and they all wanted a bribe just to tell me that much, and even then they all seemed to be lying just to spite me. Finally I found the man who’d purchased her. But she’d been useless to him, he said. ‘Worse than useless—nobody wants a girl with scars on her,’ he told me, ‘not even the mean ones.’ Besides that, she’d turned wild.”

“Wild?”

“That’s what he calls it. I suppose a man like that tends to see slaves in conditions that most of us don’t, or not very often. Her mind isn’t quite right. Maybe she was always a
little addled; I don’t know. I think she must have been treated well enough in Coponius’s house at the beginning, though the other slaves tended to pick on her. Then Dio came along. The girl was innocent, naive, maybe even a virgin. She had no idea of the kinds of things that Dio had in mind for her. She couldn’t understand why he wanted to punish her when she’d done nothing wrong. She kept quiet about it at first, too afraid of Dio to resist him, too ashamed to tell anyone. When she finally did complain to the other slaves, some of them tried to intercede for her, but Coponius couldn’t be bothered. Then, after Dio was killed, Coponius couldn’t get rid of the girl fast enough. Since then she’s been traded from hand to hand, abused, ill treated, unwanted. It must have seemed like a nightmare from which she couldn’t wake up. It’s done something to her mind. She can be perfectly lucid sometimes, but then . . . you’ll see. It’s made her unfit to be any kind of slave. When I finally found her she was living in the fields outside a farmer’s house. He’d bought her for a kitchen slave and found her useless even for that. ‘The girl’s a scratcher and a biter,’ he told me. ‘Scratches and bites for no reason, like an Egyptian cat. Even beating won’t do any good.’ No one around would buy her, so the farmer turned her loose, like people do to old or crippled slaves, making them fend for themselves. I didn’t even have to pay for her. I just had to find her, and then make her come with me. I thought I’d gained her trust, but even so she tried to run away twice, first outside of Puteoli and then again as we got close to Rome this morning. You see why it’s taken me so long to get home. And I thought you were sending me on an easy job, Papa!”

“If the girl told you what we needed to know, maybe you should have let her go.”

Darkness shadowed his face again. “No, Papa. I couldn’t just repeat her story to you. I had to bring her back to Rome, so you could hear her for yourself.”

Menenia was waiting for us at the door, with folded arms
and an uncharacteristically sour look on her face. I thought the look must be for Eco, for having brusquely. rushed off to find me after dropping off the slave girl—young wives expect a bit more attention from husbands arriving home after a trip. But then I realized that the look was aimed at me. What had I done, except quarrel with my wife and not come home last night? Menenia couldn’t possibly know about that already—or could she? Sometimes I think that the ground beneath the city must be honeycombed with tunnels where messengers constantly run back and forth carrying secret communications between the women of Rome.

Eco had locked the girl in a small storage room off the kitchen. At the sight of us, she jumped up from the wooden chest where she’d been sitting and cowered against the wall.

“I imagine she’s frightened of Belbo,” said Eco.

I nodded and sent him out of the room. The girl relaxed, but only a little.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. I already explained that to you, didn’t I?” said Eco, in a voice more exasperated than comforting.

Under better circumstances, the slave girl Zotica might have been at least passably pretty. She was far too young for my taste, as flat and bony as a boy, but one could see the delicate beginnings of a woman’s face in her high cheekbones and dark eyebrows. But now, with her unwashed hair all sweaty and tangled and dark circles beneath her eyes, it was hard to imagine her as the object of anyone’s desire. She certainly had no place in a brothel. She looked more like one of those furtive, abandoned children who haunt the city’s streets looking for scraps of food and run in packs like wild beasts.