The Water Thief

by Ben Pastor

  The few days Paratus had spent in his neat little quarters had sufficed him to “set up shop,” as he said, with the help of his reading servant and the information he received from outside. True to his law enforcement past, he advised prudence about conspiracy hearsay, but the news had on him the effect it had worked on Aelius himself. “I could take excitement much better when I was young,” he confessed. “It seems nearly too much to handle, now that we’re so close to deciphering the obelisk, too. I do not dare ask what else you might have learned.”

  “It comes down to another version of Antinous’s death, much less idealistic than the others. Jealousy and spite among favorites and his fear of being replaced. Since Marcius Turbo was the jaundiced father of one of the ‘golden boys,’ I must take his narrative for what it’s worth. At the imperial villas of Praeneste and Sublaqueum I found nothing useful, although Praeneste’s Nile mosaic in Fortuna’s shrine is similar to those I saw at Antinoopolis, but the priesthood in the Boy’s name no longer exists. There’s also a family tradition that half-confirms a City location for Antinous’s grave, no exact spot given. Presumably outside the walls, along one of the consular roads. Least believable of all is a piece of gossip from Suetonius to Marcius Turbo, alleging that—as he puts it—‘Antinous was a natural son of that quasi defender of the Christians, Pliny the Younger’, conceived while he was proconsul in Bithynia.”

  “That’s preposterous!”

  “It’s more or less what I told my hostess. She, is less skeptical, as in Trajan’s days Suetonius was such a close friend of Pliny’s, and there were rumors that the proconsul, being about fifty and having fathered no children from his wives, finally took up with a local girl, free-born. It seems unlikely that the Boy would then end up in a male brothel at Baiae. As for the conspiracy, in the lady’s library I scoured the deified Hadrian’s biographers for any word that might confirm it, but that hint privately reported by Suetonius is all I found. Still, I am thrilled.”

  “Suetonius was not above bending the truth,” Paratus reminded him. “I thank you for sending me the account of your stay at Tibur—having never visited the great villa, I listened to the reading of it with great interest. Frankly, however, it was not prudent for you to spend the night there alone. Anyone could have followed you and waited for a chance to do you in.”

  Aelius felt too optimistic to care. “I dare most assassins to thread their way across that labyrinth, especially in the dark. Besides, I set my bodyguards at the entrances. Wait until I share a theory I developed during my visit there, and perfected in the lady’s library. What about you, rather? News from your property?”

  “Some. One of my sons is coming up from Minturnae to manage the tavern in my absence, and we’re starting work in the vineyard again. The other son stays with my wife, just in case. I’ve given her enough worry through the years, and don’t wish anything to happen to her.” Turning his head to the barking of noncommissioned officers outside the window, Paratus seemed briefly lost after the sounds of drilling. “Don’t you miss camp life?”

  “No.”

  “I do. Being here does me good. By the way, in your absence I have also taken it upon myself to hire a crew, and pending your approval, the workers are ready to start on the obelisk even tomorrow. The II Cohort will have a couple of men watching, but it can only be to our advantage to have police cover. The only obstacle is that worm, Onofrius, who claims to have a group of Alexandria merchants coming. to Rome for a guided tour, and made himself scarce. I had him swear that he’ll show up regularly at your doorstep first thing in the morning.”

  “Excellent, thank you.”

  Paratus felt his way across the small room toward the window, and the echo of military calls reverberating from it. “Less than excellent. The II Cohort wouldn’t agree to let your bodyguard join in. if I were you, I’d ask that your men stay in the neighborhood anyway.”

  “I’ll think about it.” But Aelius had no intention to display concern when physical threats against him seemed a thing of the past.

  So, it was all coming together: he had a translator, a collaborator, everything was at his fingertips in the Great City. He left the Special Agent Barracks in great spirits, went home down the street to read his mail, and then allowed himself the luxury of relaxing in the public baths before closing time. Given the funerary flavor of the holiday, many stayed away from public places, so he chose Trajan’s establishment, with a mind to browse afterward the nearby bookstores of Shoemakers Alley.

  Aelius would not be able to explain it afterward. One moment he was reaching across the packed bookstore for a volume on the counter, the next there was a thud, no, not quite a thud, rather a slicing plunk, like the sound of frogs jumping in Tibur’s pools, the shush of one body fluidly penetrating another, and it would have remained a half-remembered impression had he not seen the glossy arc of blood scatter drops on the backs and faces of those around him. With that, pain like a blow in the collarbone, although his attention stayed on the motion of the blood arc, and how fishlike steel had threaded it in the air. A tumult around him, bodies jostling one another, by instinct his need to reach for the hand holding the weapon and stop it. A surprised face stood out in the bustle, over someone’s shoulder, lips mouthing something like “Has-a-knife,” and that slicing thud again, the brilliant scatter of drops, sick wetness under his arm, reaching for it before a new stretch toward the fishlike metal. His own hand spread blood around this time and missed the grip, folks coalesced and then floated apart. All the while he was perfectly conscious of the store, the wounds, blood spurting, his bodyguard like a bull charging him. Darkness lasted a moment, but in it, small animals sounds and flips in low water, the slow motion of Anubina’s hand placing the plate before him, and the brightness of the copper jar in her room all had a place. The bodyguard was shouting, pushing a fistful of cloth against his collarbone and neck. From then on Aelius maintained full lucidity, although he remembered nothing of the time between the knifing and the moment a navy surgeon made a face and said, “Shit.”

  26 August, Saturday (Third intercalary day)

  A slender line, thinner than a ribbon, separated deep sleep from a weird suspended state, during which—for the length of the night—Aelius perceived people coming and going, a murmur of voices, and pain, dull and wearisome. Mostly, anguish for being unable to intervene, as if cloth walls kept him separate from others, flat on his back, inert. It seemed impossible that such gauzy rags should suffice to hold him down. They floated above him at times, like a trembling, shimmery tangle of water plants, bending in the current, while he lay at the bottom half-aware, without strength. In and out of that feverish, submerged state Aelius sank and rose for hours well into the second morning. Then thirst and restlessness, irritation at the voices multiplying questions and explanations around him, brought him back in a weak spurt of energy.

  “I know what happened, I was there.” He dismissed all from the room except Paratus, who’d remained standing by the bed for the last three hours at least, and to whom Aelius said, “For God’s sake, you, too, sit down.”

  “The bodyguard at the store’s entrance had his throat cut,” Paratus told him. “That, I don’t think you know. The same would have happened to you had the crowding not impeded an attack from behind; even so, it’s a miracle you didn’t get your gullet slashed from the side.” A look of angered frustration on the veteran’s face revealed for once how much his impairment weighed on him. “Your head guardsman described the scene to me. How I wished I had my eyes—I’d never have permitted that the assassin be killed, because now we will never know who he was, or who sent him. As it was, the commotion drew the baths security to the place; and they cut him down.

  Gloomily Aelius fingered his bandages, crisp with drying blood and whatever medication had been applied to the wounds. ‘Anything identifiable on him?”

  “Not on him: about him. He was missing a finger of his left hand. We can assume he’s the one from the band that struck at my place, but n
o more than that.” Paratus’s long gauntness seemed hunched with his present failure, to the point that Aelius—already grieving his guardsman’s death—felt guilty for his imprudence. “Count your blessings that the Misenum Fleet headquarters were so close Paratus continued, his elbows on the bedside table. “The navy surgeon seems to think the killer was a sailor, by the callouses on his palms. He also says the bleeding from your neck was so serious, he didn’t think you’d pull through. This much, I know from my own experience: It’ll be a few days before you can do anything about the obelisk or anything else.”

  “No.” Trying to lift his head hurt too much, and Aelius had to desist. “No. There’s no time. I want Onofrius in the Varian Gardens with the II Cohort, the bodyguard, whatever. I want the text read and translated within the day.”

  “That, too, is going to be impossible. Onofrius hasn’t shown up. Contrary to what he said, there was no meeting with businessmen from Alexandria. Two of your men went to fetch him yesterday morning, and discovered he skipped town with his rags and latest pay. The police are looking for him in connection with the attack against you.”

  “He would not dare.”

  “No, but he probably indicated you to his accomplices, and then conveniently took to his heels.”

  Had he been sand, Aelius would have not felt his strength eroding more quickly than it did, as if water washed over him and made him shapeless when he desperately wanted to stay whole. “I should have had my men watch him well beyond the first two weeks,” he said, but perhaps only to himself. “This would have never happened.”

  It was just as well that a rising fever kept him out of commission for the next twenty-four hours, giving him time to come to terms with his anger. Whispered voices returned in the bedroom, the surgeon’s cool hands touched and tapped and caused pain. “Where is the letter?” he thought he heard someone ask. “Where is it?” But the room was empty, blue like Anubina’s house, only dilated into a borderless space for him to sink into.

  Late in the morning of the third day, he was lucid enough to curse his forced immobility, and hear Paratus mildly steer the conversation toward what information they had.

  “It’s a fact, Aelius Spartianus. Consider it preparatory work to the reading of the obelisk; given Onofrius’s betrayal, perhaps even a substitute to it. If your days in Hadrian’s villa brought you to formulate a helpful hypothesis, let’s hear it and judge where it leads us.”

  Propped up by pillows, Aelius stared at the ceiling. “Damn it, it’s all I can do.” The servant waiting by the door he ordered to fetch the villa’s plan, and unfold it on the-bedside table in front of Paratus. “My theory has less to do with the cause of Antinous’s death than with its timing—maybe. I first had an inkling at the villa, but after studying it at length in Lady Repentina’s library, I became convinced that the apparent jumble of buildings at Tibur had a purpose after all.”

  “A purpose?”

  “I’m not sure—a meaning, at any rate.”

  “Well, it’s general opinion that the emperor was mad toward the end.” Paratus reached for the plan, feeling the edges of it with his fingertips. “There are those who say the villa was not completed by that time, and others that it merely represents his mutable humor.”

  Aelius lay back, impatiently shielding his eyes from what brightness of day came through the window. “And his passion for traveling, I know.”

  “It bordered on obsession, they say.”

  “But it was born out of necessity. I don’t recall any historian ever remarking that the deified Hadrian traveled merely for sport.”

  “Even ruling is a sport, for some.” Paratus smiled his undefinable smile devoid of anger, that expression just short of admitting, even to oneself, that one’s been used in a huge game, but it’s all right with him. Head averted from the bright window, Aelius observed that smile. He thought how only the stolid ones, like his father, never developed as far as that irony, doing their time and getting out still fully convinced that soldiering was the best opportunity for a man to get places. If he doesn’t get himself killed in the process.

  “I cannot prove that the villa is much more than a museum of sites visited around the world, Paratus. Scholars better trained than I seem to think that’s all it is. What astonished me is how taking an abstract look at the plan itself shows that part of the grounds at least were laid out to represent the heavens.”

  Paratus’s smile changed imperceptibly. “You’re not serious.”

  “But I am. Place your hands on the sheet in front of you, and you’ll notice I punctured the outlines of the buildings with a pin, from behind; so that you may follow them with your fingertips.”

  Amusement disappeared from the veteran’s face as his index and middle finger lightly felt the plan.

  “Keep talking.”

  “At the beginning, since different segments of the complex were built at different times, I was tricked into trying to make sense of those single elements. The residence and its service areas, the Canopus and Egyptian Quarter, the so-called Elysian Fields, and so on.” Aelius found that if he closed his eyes and shut off the brightness of day, fever bothered him less, and he could think more clearly. It’d been the same thing in Egypt, when the wound had been much more serious, and he’d sworn to himself that if he lived, he’d find a girl and settle down. What he’d found was Anubina, no house other than her blue room, and wars elsewhere. Dry-mouthed with loss of blood, he reached for the canteen at his side. “Then I began to perceive that the final, or nearly final layout created a unitary pattern.” The water and vinegar mix was just cool enough to freshen his tongue; savoring it, Aelius watched Paratus’s hand move on the plan, tentative like his wandering the villa at night, swallowed by this or that corridor or portico that blacked out the stars. “It’s a known fact that the deified Hadrian was an amateur astronomer. On the imperial barge at Antinoopolis, I had seen a mosaic representing Orion’s corner of the sky, without understanding its significance until I realized that in the villa, too, thanks to connecting walls, pools, earthworks, the buildings combine to form a set of eight constellations.”

  “Go on, go on.”

  Aelius glanced over. “Where your fingers are touching now, that is the area of the residence. Reception halls, libraries, official and semiofficial quarters, which ought to be ‘read’ along their common perimeter, and recognized as Orion, with its main stars marked by the triclinium, external court, officers’ quarters, and the island residence. Move slightly above the complex, and you will meet the audience hall, which I read as the Hare. To the right of Orion, the constellation astronomers call the Unicorn is represented by the great promenade porch, and close by, the two hounds accompanying Orion: the Greater Dog with Sirius, where the entrance vestibule leads into the villa, and the lesser one, with Procyon matching the spot of the observatory tower.”

  “What about this straight line?”

  Aelius swallowed a thirsty gulp before answering. “That is the garden path leading from the vestibule to the Nile’s pavilion. It matches the direct line between Sirius and the star called—not coincidentally—Canopus, after the hero by that name. The Keel of the Ship Argus is represented by the wall of the academy terrace. There, if you pay attention, a fourfold portico occupies the space that In the sky is taken up by the cross-shaped mast above the Keel.”

  “And Argus is the constellation Manilus connected with drowning.” Paratus’s delicate fingering ran the perforated sheet. “If it’s true, it’s absolutely stunning.”

  “It is absolutely stunning, and if it isn’t true, or meant, it’s a miracle of coincidences.”

  “Didn’t the legendary mariner Canopus drown?”

  “Some say that not only did he drown off the Egyptian shore, but gave his name to the Delta resort near Alexandria, and—we all know—to the southern navigational star for everyone traveling by land or sea. Any sailor can confirm it, or any of us who have soldiered far enough south to see Canopus.” Talking was beginning to wear
y him. Aelius’s impatience struggled against a torpid need to sleep, or lie still. “That scum, Onofrius, told me that for the Egyptians it is also the star of the dead, representing Horus-on-the-Horizon.”

  “And Horus is Osiris’s son.”

  “Yes. Of course, Orion is identified with Osiris in Egypt.”

  Paratus’s fingers continued to seek and follow, making sense of the design laid out before him. “And Sirius the Egyptians call Sothis, Isis’s star of the Nile, identified with Anubis who watches over the dead. So this pinprick here—”

  “The round memorial?” Aelius drained the canteen. “It marks the Dove, flying ahead of the Ship.”

  “But there’s an important star missing from your map: Antinous’s namesake.”

  “The emperor’s memoirs deny that it appeared at the Boy’s death—in fact, he had already observed the star years earlier. The Canopus represents Antinous at the villa.”

  “Still, everything feels upside down to me.” Without prompting, Paratus turned the map around.

  “Of course, I understand—this map is oriented not to the North Star but to the South, the direction from which for the Egyptians all life and all death come.”

  “That’s not all. At the edges of the sheet, you’ll also find the constellations Eridanus and Sea Serpent. Those are the two brooks bordering the spur on which the villa was built.”

  The surgeon’s arrival interrupted the conversation for the time being. Paratus offered to leave the room but Aelius—still unwilling to give away his fatigue—said it was all right, it wouldn’t take long because he felt better anyway, and so on. Circumscribed by light from the window like an apparition, the surgeon seemed singularly unimpressed by the patient’s opinion: He replied curtly it didn’t matter how he felt, and he’d have to stay in bed until allowed to do otherwise.