The Venus Throw - Roman Sub Rosa 04

by Steven Saylor

  "Etruria, actually. But that was a while ago. I've been back in Rome for several years now."

  "Still retired?"

  "Yes and no. I take on simple cases now and then, just to keep myself busy. Rather like you writing your history, I imagine."

  From the flash in his squinting eyes, I saw that Lucceius took his role as historian more seriously than his self-deprecation indicated. "So,' he said curtly, "Cicero has sent you around to collect my statement. Afraid it's not ready."

  I stared at him blankly.

  "Well, so much else to do," he said. "That is why you're here, isn't it? This business about young Marcus Caelius being brought to trial by those rascals claiming he tried to do in Dio?"

  "Yes," I said slowly. "That is why I'm here."

  "Surprised me—well, surprised everybody, I imagine—when I heard that Cicero was going to handle the boy's defense. Thought those two had fallen out for good, but there you have it. Things get dicey and the naughty schoolboy goes running back to his tutor. Rather touching, really."

  "Yes, it is," I said quietly. Was it really possible that Cicero had taken on Caelius's defense? The news was startling, but made perfect sense. Cicero had successfully defended Asicius, probably to please Pompey. Pompey would be pleased to see Caelius acquitted as well, and Cicero was the man to do it. As for the feud between Caelius and Cicero, the same pragmatism that can make friends into enemies in the blink of an eye can do the reverse as well. "So your statement for Cicero isn't ready yet?" I said.

  "No. Come back tomorrow. Actually, surprised he sent you to fetch it instead of that secretary of his, the one who picks over all the tiny details."

  "Tiro?"

  "That's the one. Clever slave."

  "Yes, well, I suspect Tiro will be the one who comes to collect your statement eventually. But as long as I'm here, perhaps I could ask you a few questions."

  "Go on."

  "About Dio."

  He waved his hand. "It will all be in the statement."

  "Still, perhaps it could save us all some time—you, me, Tiro, Cicero—if you could give me an idea of what exactly will be in the statement."

  "Just what I told Cicero. Dio was my houseguest for a while, and then moved on. As simple as that. All this nonsense about poisoning— 'Nasty rumors spread like olive oil, and leave a stain like red wine.' "

  "But there was a death in this house, wasn't there? Dio's slave, his taster—"

  "Worthless slave died of natural causes, and that's the end of it." "Then why did Dio move on to the house of Titus Coponius?" "Because Dio was frightened by his own shadow. Saw a stick on

  the ground, swore it was a snake." Lucceius snorted. "Dio was as safe here as a virgin in the House of the Galli. That's the beginning and end

  of it."

  "And yet, Dio believed that someone in this house tried to poison

  him."

  "Dio had no damned sense. Look what happened to him at Coponius's house, then tell me where he was safer!"

  "I see your point. You were good friends, then, you and Dio?"

  "Of course! What do you think, I'd ask an enemy to sleep under my roof? He'd sit here during the day, where you're sitting now, and we'd talk about Aristotle, or Alexandria, or Carthage in the days of Hannibal. Gave me some good ideas for my history." Lucceius looked aside and bit his lip. "Wasn't a bad fellow. Sorry to see him go. Of course he did have some nasty habits." He smiled grimly. "Picking the fruit before it's ripe and all that."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Never mind. No point gossiping about the dead." " 'Picking the fruit ...'?"

  "Liked them young. One of those. Nothing wrong in that, except a man should keep his hands off what belongs to his host. I'll say no more." From his face I could see that he meant it.

  "You said that Dio's slave died of natural causes. What killed him?"

  "How should I know?"

  "But a death in the house —"

  "The death of a slave, and another man's slave at that." "Surely someone noted the symptoms."

  "What do you think, I summon a fancy Greek physician every time a slave has a stomach ache? Slaves take ill every day, and sometimes they die."

  "Then you can't be sure that it wasn't poison. Dio thought so."

  "Dio thought lots of things. Had quite an imagination—made a better philosopher than historian."

  "Still, if someone in the household could tell me exactly how the slave died, what he complained of before the end—"

  I was stopped by the look on Lucceius's face. He stared at me for a long moment. His bushy eyebrows gathered above his squinting eyes. "Who sent you here?"

  "I'd rather not say."

  "Wasn't Cicero, was it?"

  "I come as a friend of Dio's."

  "Meaning that I wasn't? Get out."

  "My only interest is discovering the truth about Dio's death. If you were truly his friend—"

  "Get out! Well, go on. Up! Out!" Lucius Lucceius picked up a stylus and waved it like a dagger, glowering at me as I stood and walked to the door. I left him bent over his scrolls, muttering angrily to himself.

  The slave who had shown me in was waiting in the hallway to show me out, but before we reached the foyer a formidably large woman stepped into the hallway and blocked our path.

  "Go on, Cleon," she said to the slave. "I'll show the visitor out myself." From the tone of her voice she was clearly the mistress of the house, and from the slave's obsequious manner as he backed away I gathered she was not the sort of Roman matron who allowed her slaves much latitude.

  Lucceius's wife was as ugly as her husband, though she looked nothing like him. Instead of bristling eyebrows she had only two lines painted above her eyes. Her hair might have been as white as his, had it not been dyed red with henna. She wore a voluminous green stola and a necklace of green glass with matching earrings. "So, you're Gordianus the Finder," she said abruptly, appraising me with a caustic gaze. "I heard the slave announce you to my husband."

  "What else did you hear?" I said.

  She appreciated my bluntness. "Everything. You and I should talk." I looked over my shoulder.

  "Don't worry," she said, "no one eavesdrops on me in this house. They know better. Come this way."

  I followed her into another wing of the house. I might as well have entered another world. Where Lucceius's study had been an austere museum of war trophies and musty documents, his wife's quarters were flamboyantly decorated with intricately embroidered hangings and precious objects of metal and glass. One long wall was painted to show a spring garden in bloom, all pale greens and soft pinks and yellows.

  "You deceived my husband," she said wryly.

  "He thought I came from Cicero. I didn't contradict him."

  "So you merely let him believe what he wanted to believe. Yes, that's the best way to handle Lucius. He wasn't intentionally lying to you, you know. He's convinced himself that nothing untoward took place in this house. Lucius has a hard time dealing with the truth. Like most men, most of the time," she said under her breath. She walked about the room, picking things up and putting them down.

  "Please, go on," I said.

  "Appearances matter more than facts to Lucius.

  To have had a houseguest poisoned under his roof, or even a houseguest's slave, is thinkable to him. So it simply never happened, you see.

  Lucius will never, ever admit otherwise."

  "But such a thing did happen?"

  She stepped to a small table covered with a number of identical clay figurines. They were about the size of a child's fist and brightly painted. She picked one of them up and idly turned it over in her hand. "Who sent you here asking questions?"

  "As I told your husband, a friend of Dio's."

  She snorted.

  "Never mind. I can guess who sent you."

  "Can you?"

  "Clodia. Am I right? Don't bother to answer. I can read your face as easily as I can read Lucius's."

  "How could you possib
ly guess who hired me?"

  She shrugged and twirled the little clay figurine between her fore-finger and thumb. It was a votive statue of Attis, the eunuch consort of the Great Mother, Cybele, standing with his hands on his plump belly and wearing his red Phrygian cap with its rounded, forward-sloping peak. "We have ways of sharing what we know."

  'We'?"

  "We women."

  I felt a prickling sensation in my spine, a sense of having had the same conversation before—with Bethesda, when she told me that Clodia and Caelius were no longer lovers, and I asked her how she could possibly know such a thing: We have ways of sharing what we know. For an instant I had a glimmer of insight, as if a door had been opened just enough to let me catch a glimpse of an unfamiliar room. Then she started to talk again and the door was shut.

  "There's no doubt that Dio's slave was poisoned. You should have seen the poor wretch. If Lucius had kept his eyes open instead of looking away when the man was dying, he might have a harder time making that glib pronouncement about 'natural causes.' But then Lucius has always been squeamish. He can write his little accounts of women being spitted on stakes and children being chopped into pieces at the fall of Carthage, but he can't stomach watching a slave throw up."

  "Was that one of the symptoms?"

  "Yes. The man turned as white as marble and went into convulsions."

  "But if the slave was poisoned by tasting food intended for Dio, how did the poison get into the food?"

  "It was put there by some of the kitchen slaves, of course. I think I know which ones."

  "Yes?"

  "Juba and Laco. Those two fellows were always up to something. Too smart for their own good. Had fantasies of buying their freedom some day. Juba must have sneaked out of the house that afternoon, because I caught him sneaking back in, and when I questioned him he tried to get out of it by playing stupid and spouting a lot of double-talk, the way slaves do. He said he'd gone to the market to fetch something, I don't remember what, and even held up a little bag to show me. What nerve! It was probably the poison. Later I caught him whispering to Laco in the kitchen and I wondered what they were up to. They're the ones who prepared the dish that killed Dio's slave."

  "Dio told me your husband had a visitor that day."

  "Publius Asicius. He's the one who was later accused of stabbing Dio at Coponius's house, though they couldn't prove it at the trial. Yes, he came by to visit Lucius at just about the time Juba must have been sneaking out. But I don't think Asicius delivered the poison, if that's what you think. He didn't go near the kitchen slaves."

  "But he could have been here as a distraction, to keep your husband busy while Juba sneaked out of the house to get the poison from someone else."

  "What an imagination you have!" she said wryly.

  "Where is Juba now? Would you let me speak to him?"

  "I would if I could, but he's gone. Juba and Laco are both gone."

  "Gone where?"

  "After his taster died, Dio was quite upset. He screamed and ranted and demanded that Lucius determine which of the slaves had tried to poison him. I pointed out the suspicious behavior of Juba and Laco, but Lucius wouldn't hear of any suggestion that there was poison involved. Even so, a few days later he decided that Juba and Laco—trained kitchen slaves—would be of more use doing manual labor in a mine. Lucius owns an interest in a silver mine up in Picenum. So off the slaves went, out of reach, out of mind."

  She held up the clay figurine of Attis and stroked it with her forefinger. "But this is the most curious fact: when Lucius made his pronouncement about sending Juba and Laco to Picenum, they suddenly offered to buy their freedom. Somehow, from the few coppers Lucius gave them every year to celebrate the Saturnalia, the two ofthem had managed to save up their own worth in silver."

  "Was that possible?"

  "Absolutely not. Lucius accused them of pilfering from the house-hold coffers."

  "Could they have done that?"

  "Do you think I'm the sort of woman whose slaves could steal from her?" She gave me a look calculated to make a slave soil himself. "But that was the explanation Lucius decided on, and nothing will ever sway him from it. He took the silver away from them, sent them off to an early death in the mines, and that was the end of it."

  "Where do you think the slaves obtained the silver?"

  "Don't be coy," she said. "Someone bribed them to poison Dio, of course. Probably they received only partial payment, since they didn't finish the job. If I were the master of this house I'd have tortured them until the truth came out. But the slaves belong to Lucius."

  "The slaves know the truth."

  "The slaves know something. But they're far away from Rome now." "And they can't be compelled to testify anyway without their master's consent."

  "Which Lucius will never give."

  "Who gave them the silver?" I muttered.

  "How can anyone find

  out?"

  "I suppose that's your job," she said bluntly. She walked back to the little table and replaced the clay figurine of Attis. I drew alongside her and studied the tiny statues.

  "Why so many, all alike?" I asked.

  "Because of the Great Mother festival, of course. These are images of Attis, her consort. For gift-giving." "I never heard of such a custom." "We exchange them among ourselves." "'We'?"

  "It has nothing to do with you."

  I reached to pick up one of the figurines, but she seized my wrist with a startlingly strong grip.

  "It has nothing to do with you, I said." After a moment she released me, then clapped her hands. A girl came running. "Now you had better go. The slave will show you out."

  Chapter Thirteen

  The easiest route to the house of Titus Coponius, where Dio had died, took me back the way I had come. Passing the former residence of Marcus Caelius again, I noticed that the FOR SALE announcement was untouched, but the obscene graffito beneath it had already been daubed over with paint.

  Clodius's henchmen could be accused of many things, but not idleness.

  Titus Coponius saw me at once, and soon I was seated in his study with a cup of wine in my hand. If the study of Lucius Lucceius was a hoary homage to the conquest of Carthage, the study of Titus Coponius was a tribute to the enduring triumph of Greek culture. Black-on-red drinking cups, too ancient and precious for use, were displayed on shelves. Small statues of the great heroes and busts of the great thinkers were displayed on pedestals against the walls. A pigeonhole scroll case was full of cylindrical leather slipcases, and on the little colored tags hanging from each cylinder I glimpsed the names of the old Greek playwrights and historians. The room itself was impeccably appointed, with high-backed Greek chairs and a Greek carpet with a geometrical design, all harmoniously in proportion to the space they occupied.

  Coponius was a tall man with a long rectangular face and a hand-some nose; even seated he had an imposing air. His hair was clipped short and was very curly, black on top but gray on the sides. His clothing and manner were as elegant as the room in which we sat. "I suppose you've come about Dio," he began.

  "What makes you think so?"

  "Come now, Gordianus. I know you by reputation. I also know that Bestia's son has brought charges against Marcus Caelius for trying to poison Dio, among other things. It hardly takes a philosopher to figure out your reason for coming to the house where Dio died. What I don't know is who sent you—Bestia's boy for the prosecution, or Caelius for his defense."

  "Neither, actually."

  "Now that's a puzzle."

  "Not to everyone, apparently," I said, thinking of Lucceius's wife. "Does it matter who sent me, so long as I seek the truth?"

  "Most men have some ulterior motive, even in seeking for truth. Revenge, vindication, power—"

  "Justice. For Dio."

  Coponius put down his wine cup and folded his long, elegant hands in his lap. "Some day, when we both have a great deal more time, we should discuss that word, 'justice,' and see if we can come up
with a mutually acceptable definition. For the short term, I assume you mean you seek the truth in order to identify Dio's killer. A straightforward enough ambition—but I don't think I can help you."

  "Why not?"

  "I can't tell you what I don't know." "Perhaps you know more than you realize." "A conundrum, Gordianus?" "Life is full of them."

  Coponius contemplated me with a catlike gaze. "As I understand it, the charges against Caelius involve attacks on the Egyptian entourage on its way to Rome, and an alleged attempt to poison Dio at Lucceius's house. What happened in this house isn't even cited in the formal list of charges."

  "Technically, it is. But the prosecution intends to concentrate on the attempted poisoning, and use the actual murder of Dio as a corroborative detail."

  "Then you do come from the prosecution." Coponius gave me a brittle smile. "Don't misunderstand. I don't mind you coming around asking questions. I went through all this before, when Asicius was pros-ecuted. I shared all I know with both sides, and in the end I helped neither. The simple fact is that the killers left nothing behind to give themselves away. Asicius was prosecuted on hearsay, not evidence. Yes, 'everyone knows' that he was somehow involved, just as 'everyone knows' that King Ptolemy must be at the back of it, but the proof was never put forward, and you won't find it in this house."

  "Still, I should like to know what happened here."

  Coponius took a sip of wine and turned his catlike gaze on me again. "I knew Dio in Alexandria," he finally said. "A few years ago, my brother and I spent some time there. Gaius, always the practical one, was interested in studying the financial workings of the grain markets. I found myself drawn instead to the steps of the library at the Temple of Serapis, where philosophers discussed the very things we're talking about—truth, justice, conundrums. That was how I met Dio."

  "That was how I met him as well," I said.