The Venus Throw - Roman Sub Rosa 04

by Steven Saylor

  "So much in love that he would do anything for her?"

  "Any at all, without question."

  "So much in love that he might be blinded by jealousy?" "Driven mad by it!"

  "He could be dangerous. Unpredictable ... "

  "Not nearly as dangerous as Lesbia." Catullus was suddenly giddy, trotting ahead of me and circling back, leaping up to swing at lamps hung from upper-story windows along the street. "Damned bitch! The Medea of the Palatine!"

  "Medea was a witch, as I recall, and rather wicked."

  "Only because she was 'sick at heart, wounded by cruel love,' as the playwright says. A witch, yes, and wounded—only it's me she's bewitched, and Caelius who wounded her. Medea of the Palatine! Clytemnestra-for-a-quadrans!"

  "A quadrans? As cheap as that?"

  "Why not? The price of admission to the Senian baths." "But Clytemnestra murdered her husband."

  "Agamemnon deserved it!" He whirled like a frenzied gallus. "Medea of the Palatine! Clytemnestra-for-a-quadrans!" he chanted. "Who calls her such things?"

  "I do!" said Catullus. He abruptly stopped his whirling and staggered ahead of me, gasping for breath. "I just made them up, out of my head. What do you think? I'll need some fresh invectives if I'm to get her attention again."

  "You're a strange suitor, Catullus."

  "I love a strange woman. Do you want to know a secret about her? Something that no else in all the world knows, not even Lesbius? I wouldn't know myself, if I hadn't spied on her one night. Do you know that giant monstrosity of a Venus in her garden?"

  "I happened to notice it, yes."

  "The pedestal appears to be solid, but it's not. There's a block that slides out, opening a secret compartment. It's where she keeps her trophies."

  "Trophies?"

  "Mementos. Keepsakes. One night in bed with her, happily dozing after hours of making love, I felt a tickling at my groin. I opened one eye to see her clipping away a bit of my pubic hair! She stole out of the room with it. I followed her to the garden. From the shadows I watched her open the pedestal and put what she had taken from me inside. Later I went back and figured out how to open the compartment, and I saw what she kept there. Poems I had sent her. Letters from her other lovers. Bits of jewelry, clippings of hair, childish gifts her brother must have given her when they were little. Her love trophies!"

  He suddenly staggered against a wall and clutched his face. "I wanted to destroy it all," he whispered hoarsely. "I wanted to scoop up all her treasures and throw them on the brazier and watch them burst into flame. But I couldn't. I felt the eyes of the goddess on me. I stepped back from the pedestal and looked up at her face. I left her mementos alone. If I destroyed them, I knew she would never forgive me."

  "Who would never forgive you—Venus or Lesbia?"

  He looked at me with tragic eyes. "Is there any difference?"

  Chapter Eighteen

  The wrath ofAchilles would pale beside the wrath ofBethesda.

  Her anger runs cold, not hot. It freezes rather than scalds. It is invisible, secretive, insidious. It makes itself felt not by blustering action, but by cold, calculated inaction, by words unspoken, glances unreturned, pleas for mercy unheeded. I think Bethesda shows her anger in this passive way because she was born a slave, and remained a slave for much of her life, until I manumitted and married her to bear our daughter in freedom. Her way is the way of slaves (and the hero of Homer's Iliad): she sulks, and broods, and bides her time.

  It was bad enough that I had sent Belbo home alone from Clodia's house, leaving myself without a bodyguard to cross the Palatine by night. Bad enough, too, that I eventually came home smelling of cheap wine and the rancid smoke of tavern lamps. But to have spent the night with that woman!

  This was ridiculous, of course, and I said so, especially as I hadn't even seen Clodia all night.

  How then did I explain the lingering smell of perfume on me?

  A smarter man (or even myself, less worn out and sleepy) would have thought twice before explaining that the perfume came from a blanket that the lady in question must have put over him when he unwittingly dozed off in her garden-

  That was that. I spent what little remained of the night trying to find a comfortable position on a cramped dining couch in my study. I'm used to sleeping with a warm body next to me.

  I'm also used to sleeping until at least daybreak, especially after having stayed up half the night. This was not to be. It wasn't that Bethesda woke me; she simply made it impossible for me to go on sleeping. Was it really necessary to send the scrub maid to clean my study before dawn?

  Once I was awake, Bethesda didn't refuse to feed me. But the millet porridge was lumpy and cold, and there was no conversation to warm it up.

  After breakfast, I shooed the scrub maid from my study and shut the door. It was a good morning, I decided, to write a letter.

  To my beloved son Meto, serving under the command ofGaius Julius Caesar in Gaul, from his loving father in Rome, may Fortune be with you.

  I write this letter only three days after my last; Martius is gone and the Kalends of Aprilis is upon us. Much has happened in the meantime, all revolving about the murder of Dio.

  Our neighbor Marcus Caelius (now our former neighbor; Clodius evicted him) has been accused of the murder of Dio, and related crimes having to do with the harassment of the Egyptian envoys, as well as a previous attempt (by poison) on Dio's life. I have been hired by friends of the prosecution to help find evidence against Caelius. My only interest is to determine who killed Dio, so that I can put this nagging affair to rest, for my own peace of mind if not for justice's sake.

  I will attempt to explain the details later. (Perhaps after the trial, which begins the day after tomorrow.) What is foremost in my mind now, what I would long to discuss if you were here with me, is something else.

  What is this madness which poets call love?

  What power compels a man to thrust himself against the lacerating indifference of a woman who no longer loves him? What drives a woman to seek the absolute destruction of a man who rejects her? What cruel appetite makes a man of rational intellect crave the debasement of his helpless partners in sex? How does a eunuch, supposedly impervious to love, become enamored of a beautiful woman? Is it natural for a brother and sister to share a bed, as we are told the gods and goddesses of Egypt sometimes do? Why do the worshipers of the Great Mother emasculate themselves in religious ecstasy? Why would a woman steal a lock of her lover's pubic hair to cherish as a keepsake?

  You must wonder if I'm mad to pose such questions. But in fact they may have as much to do with the murder of Dio and the upcoming trial of Caelius as do the intrigues of Egyptian politics, and I find myself baffled. I fear I have become too old for this kind of work, which requires a mind in empathy with the world around it. I like to think I am wiser than I used to be, but what use is wisdom in making sense of a world that follows the dictates of mad passion? I feel like a sober man on a ship of drunkards.

  We say it is the hand of Venus that compels these strange behaviors, as if that put the matter to rest, when in fact we say "the hand of Venus" precisely because we do not understand these passions and cannot explain them, only suffer them when we must and watch, perplexed, the suffering of others . . .

  There was a rapping at the door. I steeled myself for a chill wind and called, "Come in." But it was not Bethesda who entered. It was Diana.

  She closed the door behind her and sat in the chair across from my writing table. There was a shadow on her face. Something was troubling her.

  "Mother is angry at you," she said. "Is she? I hadn't noticed." "What are you doing?" "Writing a letter to Meto."

  "Didn't you write to him just a few days ago?" "Yes."

  "What does the letter say?"

  "This and that."

  "Is it about your work?"

  "In a way. Yes, it's about my work."

  "You're writing to Meto because you've sent Eco on a trip, and you need someone to ta
lk to. Isn't that it?" "You're very perceptive, Diana."

  She lifted her hand and pushed back a strand of hair that had fallen over her cheek. What remarkably lustrous hair she had, like her mother's before the strands of gray began to dull it. It fell past her shoulders almost to her breasts, framing her face and throat. In the soft morning light her skin shone like dusky rose petals.

  "Why don't you share your troubles with me, Papa? Mother does. She tells me everything."

  "I suppose that's the way of the world. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons."

  She looked at me steadily. I tried to look back at her, but found myself looking away. "The boys are older than you, Diana. They've shared my work, my travels." I smiled. "Half the time when I begin a sentence, Eco finishes it."

  "And Meto?"

  "Meto is different. You're old enough to remember some of what happened while we were on the farm—Catilina, the trouble between Meto and me, Meto's decision to become a soldier. That was a great test of the bond between us. He's his own man now and I don't always understand him. Even so, I can always tell him what I think."

  "But Eco and Meto aren't even your flesh. You adopted them. I carry your blood, Papa."

  "Yes, Diana, I know." Why then are you so mysterious, I thought, and why is there such a gulf between us? And why do I keep these thoughts to myself instead of speaking them aloud?

  "Can I read the letter, Papa?"

  This took me aback. I looked down at the parchment, scrutinizing the words. "I'm not sure you'd understand, Diana." "Then you could explain."

  "I'm not sure I'd want to. If you were older, perhaps."

  "I'm not a child anymore, Papa."

  I shook my head.

  "Mother says I'm a woman now."

  I cleared my throat. "Yes, well, then I suppose you have every right to read your mother's personal letters."

  "That's cruel, Papa. You know that Mother can't read or write, which is hardly her fault. If she had been raised as a Roman girl ..."

  Instead of an Egyptian slave, I thought. Was that what was disturbing Diana, her mother's origins, the fact that she was the child of a woman born in slavery? Diana and I had never really talked about this, but I assumed that Bethesda had discussed it with her, in some way. They certainly spent enough time talking to each other in private. Did Diana bear some resentment against me, for having bought her mother in an Alexandrian slave market? But I was also the man who had freed Bethesda. It all seemed terribly complicated, suddenly.

  "Even most Roman women don't learn to read, Diana."

  "The woman you're working for can read, I imagine."

  "I'm sure she can."

  "And you made sure I was taught to read."

  "Yes, I did."

  "But what good is the skill, if you forbid me to use it?" She looked at the letter in front of me.

  It was uncanny, the way she used her mother's stratagems to get what she wanted—circular logic, stubborn persistence, the uncovering of guilts I hadn't known I felt. They say the gods can put on the guise of someone we know and move among us without anyone guessing. For a brief, strange moment a veil seemed to drop, and I sensed that it was Bethesda herself in the room with me, disguised to confound me. Who was this creature Diana, after all, and where had she come from?

  I handed her the letter and watched her read it. She read slowly, moving her lips slightly. She had not been taught as well as Meto.

  I expected her to ask the identity of the people I referred to, or perhaps for a clearer explanation of the passions I described, but when she put down the letter she said, "Why do you want so badly to find the person who killed Dio, Papa?"

  "What is it I say in the letter? 'For my own peace of mind.' "

  "But why should your mind be unsettled?"

  "Diana, if someone who was close to you had been hurt, wouldn't you want to avenge that person, to redress the wrong done to them, if you could?"

  She thought about this. "But Dio wasn't close to you." "That's presumptuous of you, Diana." "You hardly knew him."

  "In a way, that's true. But in another way—"

  She picked up the letter. "Is he the one you mean, when you speak of the 'man of rational intellect'?" "Yes, as a matter of fact." "Wasn't he a cruel man, then?" "I don't really know." "But in the letter, you say—"

  "Yes, I know what I say." I cringed at the idea of hearing her read it aloud.

  "How do you know such a thing about him?" She peered at me intently.

  I sighed. "From certain things I was told by the men who played host to him. Dio apparently took liberties with some of their slave girls. He may have been rather abusive. But I don't really know. People don't like to talk about that sort of thing."

  "He wasn't that way when you knew him in Alexandria?"

  "If he was, I knew nothing about it. I saw a very different side of

  him."

  She looked at me thoughtfully for a long moment. It was not a look she had learned from Bethesda. It was a keen, pensive look, very deep and entirely her own—or perhaps she had picked it up from me, I thought, flattering myself. How foolish and remote it suddenly seemed, that strange, disoriented moment when I had imagined she was her mother in disguise.

  She stood and nodded gravely. "Thank you for letting me read the letter, Papa. Thank you for talking to me." Then she left the room.

  I picked up the letter and read it through again. I winced at the catalogue I had made of other people's passions, and especially at what I had said of Dio:

  What cruel appetite makes a man of rational intellect crave the debasement of his helpless partners in sex?

  What had I been thinking, to put such thoughts in a letter?

  I would wait until after the trial to write to Meto, when I had something of substance to relate. I called on one of the slaves to light a taper from the fire in the kitchen and bring it to me. When she returned I took the taper from her, put the parchment into the empty brazier and burned it to ashes.

  I spent the day snooping.

  If Caelius had indeed plotted to poison both Dio and Clodia, where had he obtained the poison?

  Poisonings have become lamentably common in Rome, and in re-cent years I have become more familiar with deadly potions and powders than I would have dreamed possible. From time to time considerable quantities of various kinds of poison pass through my own hands, and I have a strongbox especially for storing them; clients, having seized a quantity of poison as evidence, prefer to safeguard the stuff with me rather than in their own homes, especially if they suspect a family member or a slave of wanting to do them in.

  For a price, anyone can obtain poison in Rome, but the reliable, discreet sources—the sort to which I imagined Caelius would go—are relatively few. Over the years my work has acquainted me with most of them to one degree or another. Interviewing these creatures was a job I would rather have left to Eco, but since Eco was away I set out to do it myself, with a purse full of coins for bribes and Belbo for protection. It was a miserable task, rather like hunting for snakes under rocks. Since I happened to know which stones the snakes preferred, I simply went from one to the next, lifting them up and bracing myself for a succession of unpleasant encounters.

  The search took me to a number of disreputable shops on the outskirts of the Forum; over to the old, run-down baths near the Circus Flaminius; to the waterfront shipyards and warehouses of the Navalia; and finally, following the advice of an informant, back to the place that Catullus had called the Salacious Tavern. By the light of day it had an air more decrepit than salacious; the gamblers were gone and the whores looked ten years older. The only patrons were a few unshaven drunkards who looked incapable of getting up from their benches; some, whom I recognized from the previous night, had apparently never left.

  I had been told to seek out a man who called himself Salax ("The tavern is named after him," my source had joked). He was easy enough to spot, since in place of a real nose he wore a leather one. ("Whatever you do, don't ask
him how he lost his nose!" I had been warned.) He admitted readily enough to knowing Marcus Caelius—a frequent visitor to the tavern—but about poisons he declared himself completely ignorant, and became no more knowledgeable even when I rattled my coin purse. Instead he pointed toward the idle whores and suggested another way to lighten my purse.

  I had looked under all the rocks I knew. The snakes had all bared their fangs and hissed, but for better or worse not one of them had produced any poison.

  It was possible, even likely, that Caelius had obtained poison not on his own but from the same source which had hired or compelled him to harass the Alexandrian envoys—directly from King Ptolemy, or per-haps from the king's friend Pompey. In that case I could expect no luck at all in tracking the poison. The network of spies and lackeys who worked for Pompey and the king would reveal nothing to an outsider.

  If Caelius killed Dio at the bidding of Dio's enemies, why had he done so? Because he was in debt to Pompey? That seemed distinctly possible. If so, I might be able to find someone who at least knew of the debt. I returned to the Forum and sought out a different set of sources, more conversant with politics than poison. It was easy enough to find men willing to talk, but impossible to find hard facts. It was as Clodius had said: plenty of people professed to 'know' the 'truth' (Caelius tried to poison Dio and failed, then Caelius and Asicius together stabbed Dio), but no one seemed to have any real evidence.

  I found men who had attended the trial of Asicius and talked with them at length. The common knowledge was that Asicius was guilty and everyone knew it, but among the judges the weak-minded had been dazzled by Cicero's defense and the weak-willed bribed by King Ptolemy's gold—together, a safe majority. Yet, when I questioned these men about the trial itself, about the speeches and the witnesses who had given evidence, it seemed to me that the prosecution had been able to come up with little more than I had—hearsay and innuendo. Perhaps the judges had simply acquitted Asicius for lack of proof. It was a frustrating day.

  The sun was beginning to set as Belbo and I trudged up the Ramp. I suddenly realized that I had seen nothing of Catullus all day. Perhaps I had finally convinced him that I was not his rival in love. The absurdity of the notion made me smile.