SPQR I: The Kings Gambit

by John Maddox Roberts

  I looked at him, and for the first time saw a rather frightened old man, but still a man who cared about his son. “Free citizens have been murdered in the Subura, Father,” I said. “The Subura is my district. I will see justice.”

  There was nothing he could say to that. A Roman magistrate could no more deny duty than he could deny the gods. It was unfair of me, of course. I had no stake in the Roman order in those days, without wife or children or high office. I belonged to the most expendable group of citizens—the wellborn young men who traditionally made up the junior officer corps. But in that moment I felt quite virtuous, and so miserable that I cared not whether I lived or died. I do not know whether this was because of my heedless youth, or was just the spirit of the times. Most of the rising men of my generation behaved as if they held their own lives as cheap as they held the lives of others. Even the richest and best-born would resort unhesitatingly to desperate action, knowing that their lives would be the forfeit of failure. In that moment, I was as reckless as any.

  A few minutes later Asklepiodes arrived. The place was growing as crowded as the Senate chamber during a war debate. Two quaestors had arrived with their secretaries and were making an inventory of the house with the aid of the majordomo. Two lictors had arrived to take the unfortunate eunuch to the prison beneath the Capitol, there to await his fate.

  “Another murder?” Asklepiodes asked.

  “And an odd one,” I told him. “Please come with me.”

  We went to the bedroom, the only part of the house that was not swarming. Asklepiodes knelt by the bed and examined the victim’s neck.

  “I would like to see the back of his neck, but I will need aid in turning him.”

  I turned to my clients, who stood just outside the doorway. “Help him lift the body.” They shook their heads and backed away. Romans will do awful things to a live man’s body, but they are afraid to touch a dead one, for fear of some unspecified contamination. “Fetch some slaves, then,” I ordered. A few minutes later they had the body on its side and Asklepiodes exclaimed triumphantly and pointed at a round indentation in the ring of darkened skin encircling the neck.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The knot. It is typical of the bowstring garrote, as used by the Syrians.”

  A new shadow blocked the doorway and I turned to tell whoever it was to be off, but I wisely refrained from doing so. It was the Consul, Pompey the Great. With all of his lictors and attendants, I thought, the house must be about to erupt like a volcano, its walls bursting outward onto the streets outside.

  “Greeting, Metellus the Younger,” he said. Pompey was a handsome, square-faced man of excellent bearing, but he always looked uncomfortable in a toga, as if armor suited him better.

  “Your Honor,” I said, straightening from where I crouched by Paulus. “I didn’t expect to see you here at a murder investigation.”

  He barely glanced at the corpse. “When one as rich as this one dies, the whole Roman economy is in danger. There’s a great crowd out in the street. Now they’ve seen me here, things will calm down. The citizenry are like troubled children. When they see one who is known as a successful general, they think everything will be all right.”

  It made sense. “Will his death cause such an uproar?” I asked.

  “When I passed through the Forum, the slave speculators were already asking each other what it would do to the price of slaves. The man must have owned thousands. If they all go on the market at once, the prices will plunge. No one yet knows how much land and livestock he owned, how many ships and cargoes. I know he had an interest in some mines in Spain, although he owned none outright.”

  Pompey, who owned many such mines, would be in a position to know. He glanced at Asklepiodes. “A trifle late to summon a physician, isn’t it?”

  “He is not here to treat the victim, but to examine him,” I explained. “Master Asklepiodes is an expert in all manner of violent wounds. I’ve found his expertise to be most useful in my investigations.”

  Pompey raised his eyebrows. “That’s a new idea. Well, carry on.” He turned to leave, then turned back. “But I shouldn’t waste a great deal of time on this. The real problem will be for the quaestors and praetors to sort out. The man himself amounted to nothing. The eunuch killed him. My advice is, just leave it at that.”

  “I will leave it,” I told him, “when I am satisfied that the murderer has been caught.”

  “As you will.” His look was not hostile, his words were not loud, but his tone was bone-chilling. He left a great silence behind him when he walked out of the bedroom.

  7

  I STILL CANNOT UNDERSTAND IT,” I said to Asklepiodes. We sat in his spacious quarters at the Ludus of Statilius Taurus. I had never been in a physician’s quarters before, and I suspected that his decor was odd by the standards of that profession. Every manner of weapon hung on his walls or stood in racks around the rooms. Many of them had scrolls affixed describing the various wounds they could inflict.

  “That a man was strangled?” Asklepiodes said.

  “No. I have three murders here, and one break-in and robbery, all of them somehow connected. And an arson, let’s not forget that. Sinistrus undoubtedly killed Paramedes, but who strangled Sinistrus? And I can’t believe that it was the same person who killed Sergius Paulus. Do we have three murderers here? And who broke into my house, cracked me on the head and stole that amulet? Macro said that must have been done by a boy, and he seems to be a foreigner.” I paced the floor and walked to a window. From below came the clattering, the shouts and the labored breathing of the fighters practicing in the palaestra.

  “It is a difficult problem.” Asklepiodes toyed with a decorated silver stylus. “But why do you think it was not the same person who killed Paulus and Sinistrus?”

  I sat on a fine couch and rested my chin on a fist. “You were in Paulus’s bedroom. You saw the window. I don’t believe that the eunuch killed him. And I doubt that he would have let anyone else past, knowing that it meant his own crucifixion. So the murderer came in through the window. The boy who broke into my house might have done it. Very well, there is nothing logically wrong with that. It would be no great task to strangle a drunken, snoring fat man.”

  “I follow you so far,” Asklepiodes said. He was wearing the plaited silver hair-fillet I had given him on the last occasion. I reminded myself to choose another present for him.

  “But the boy could not have strangled Sinistrus, who was a large, powerful man and a trained fighter. So there must be two murderers, both expert with the bowstring.”

  Asklepiodes set down the stylus and gave me a superior, knowing smile. “Why do you think that a man of exceptional strength must have strangled Sinistrus?”

  This drew me up short. “Why, it seems … how could it not be so?”

  The physician shook his head. “The garrote is not the same thing as simply wrapping your hands around a man’s neck and squeezing. Allow me to demonstrate.” He got up and crossed to one of the walls and took a short bow from a peg. It was unstrung, the stout cord wrapped around the lower limb. Stripping the string from the bow, he stood before me with the string draped between his hands. “This is the most conventional way to use the garrote,” he said, wrapping a turn of the cord around each hand. “You are far larger and stronger than I am. Even so …” He stepped around behind me. A hand flashed in front of my face and I felt the cord biting into my neck. Even though I had been expecting it, I panicked immediately. There is no more shocking sensation than having a breath cut in half and knowing that you cannot breathe. I reached behind me and I could feel the physician pressed tightly against my back. I could grasp his clothes, but I could not secure a strong grip on his body to pull him loose. I began to charge at a wall, ready to twist so that I could crush him between my body and the wall, but instantly both the man and the cord were gone.

  “You see?” he said as I sat and drew in great, ragged breaths. “One need not be terribly strong to thrott
le even a powerful man. Unconsciousness comes in less than a minute. Death in five or six.”

  “But why,” I said when I had breath, “did Sinistrus not crush the boy against a wall?”

  “He may have been too shocked, or too stupid, but I think it may have been another reason.” His fingers worked nimbly on the string, fashioning a knot. “You remember the spot on the back of Paulus’s neck I showed you?”

  I nodded. Asklepiodes stepped up to me and his hands moved swiftly. Then I was strangling again, only this time the Greek was standing before me, hands behind his back and smiling. My hands went to my neck, clawing at the cord, but it was buried in the flesh and I couldn’t get them under it. Black spots appeared before my eyes and the inside of my head thundered like the Nile cataracts. I could feel the strength draining from my knees and I fell to all fours, no longer able even to feel my hands. I felt hands at the back of my neck and, suddenly, breath filled my lungs, sweet as water to a man dying of thirst.

  Asklepiodes helped me to the couch and handed me a cup of watered wine. “You see,” he said, holding the bowstring before my clearing eyes, “it is a noose rather than a true garrote. The Syrian slipknot tightens and will remain tight after it is released. Yet one who has the skill may loosen it in an instant.”

  “You must be the terror of your students,” I croaked. “I hope you don’t demonstrate the sword that way.”

  “I have found that a strong object lesson need not be repeated.”

  I had indeed learned not one but two valuable lessons, one of which was that it was unwise to rely upon my own limited assessment of any situation in which the circumstances were bizarre or unprecedented. At such times there is always a tendency to give one’s own ignorance and prejudice the weight of knowledge. I vowed always to seek out informed and expert opinion, as one customarily does in legal, medical and religious matters.

  I thanked Asklepiodes for half-killing me and departed. My puzzle had now been simplified to a small degree. The murderer of Sinistrus had also slain Sergius Paulus, and it was the same foreign boy who had broken into my house and attacked me. At this point, even a minor simplification was desirable.

  My anger, on the other hand, was growing. Great men were conspiring to thwart my investigation. Claudia had, in some way I could not yet fathom, made use of me. Most illogical of all, I was angry at Paulus’s murder. I had met him only once, and I suspected him of involvement in conspiracy, but I had liked the man. In a city of self-seeking politicians and military brigands who styled themselves patriots, I had found him a refreshingly honest vulgarian, a man devoted to the acquisition of property and the pleasures of the flesh as only one raised in slavery can be.

  I had questioned many of Paulus’s slaves before I left his house. They had been, of course, terrified at the prospect of crucifixion should the murderer not be found. They seemed to wish the eunuch no ill, but I could tell that they hoped he would be found guilty, because then they might be spared. Through all this, there was a pathetic hope in them, for Paulus had promised many that they would be freed in his will, should he die untimely.

  I had not the heart to tell them that their hope was almost certainly futile, that many powerful men coveted their master’s property, and they were part of that property. The will would almost certainly be broken. They had seemed honestly grief-stricken that Sergius was dead, and it takes a man as hard-hearted as Cato (the Senator) to remain untouched by such devotion. He had never remarried after losing his slave-wife, and while he had disported himself freely with his many pretty slave girls, he had never deceived any of them with promises of marriage, as so many heartless men do. He had never produced children by any woman, a curse which he attributed to a fever he suffered about the time he shaved his first beard.

  To my taste, one Sergius Paulus was worth ten of Publius Claudius, a vicious lout born with every advantage but consumed with the belief that he had somehow been denied something. At least Rome gave a man like Paulus a chance to rise from servile status and make something of himself, as Paulus had. The Greeks have always looked down their Attic noses at us and called us uncouth barbarians, but I never heard of an Athenian slave in the greatest days of Pericles gaining his freedom, becoming a citizen and having a good prospect of seeing his sons sitting with purple-bordered togas in the Curia, debating the high matters of state with the other Senators.

  You have to grant us that. We Romans have practiced cruelty and conquest on a scale never attempted by any other people, yet we are lavish with opportunity. We have enslaved whole nations, yet we do not hold a previous condition of servitude as a bar to advancement and high status. The patricians make much of their superiority, yet what are they but a pitiful remnant of a decrepit, priestly aristocracy long discredited?

  The sad fact is that in those days we were mad. We fought class against class, family against family. We had even fought a war of masters against slaves. Many nations have been destroyed by civil war and internecine struggle. Rome always emerged stronger from each of these conflicts, another proof of our unique character. At this time, the infighting was between two parties: the Optimates, who thought themselves made up of the best men, an aristocratic oligarchy; and the Populares, who claimed to be the party of the common man. Actually the politicians of both parties had no ideals beyond their own betterment. Pompey, a former colleague of Sulla, was a leader of the Optimates, while Caius Julius Caesar, although a patrician, was a rising leader of the Populares. Caesar’s uncle by marriage had been the great Marius, and the name of Marius was still revered by the Populares. With leaders like these, the fact that Rome was not easily destroyed by foreign enemies must prove that we enjoy the unique favor of the gods.

  All these thoughts came to me at that time, but they did nothing to help solve my problem. And now I had another thing to consider. My father’s wistful hope that the whole affair would be passed on to the next year’s magistrates had reminded me that time was getting short. I had only about a month before the new magistrates took office. The committee positions are by appointment, not by the annual elections, but I had a strong suspicion that the next set of praetors would have their own favorites to appoint, and I would be out. This was when we were still using the old calendar, which would get out of order every few years, so that the Pontifex Maximus would have to declare an extra month. That year, the new year would begin on about the first of January, as it does now. The new calendar was one of Caesar’s better ideas. (At least, he called it his calendar. It was Cleopatra’s court astronomer, Sosigenes, who actually created it, and in truth it was Caesar’s own neglect of his duties when he was Pontifex Maximus that got the old calendar into such dreadful shape in the first place. That’s something you won’t find in the histories written later by his lackeys.)

  The oddest thing was that Pompey, or Crassus, or any of the praetors could have ordered me to cease my investigations, or to turn in a false report. Undoubtedly they wanted to do just that. After the chaos of the past years, however, our rulers were determined to follow constitutional forms, and to avoid any stigma of tyranny at all costs.

  That did not mean, of course, that they would not stoop to any underhanded way to sabotage my work. Assassination was not out of the question. I was convinced that the only thing preserving me from these more extreme measures was my family’s prestige. Both parties were courting the Metel-lans. We had an ancient reputation for moderation and levelheadedness in government. Metellans had always opposed the fanatical extremes of the various parties. As a result we had an enviable reputation with aristocrats and commoners alike, and only someone bent on political suicide would attack one of us too blatantly.

  Still, I did not take great comfort in this knowledge. I have already mentioned the extreme recklessness of our politicians, and I did not yet know how desperate this vat of corruption might make them. So far, each man who might have led me to the solution of this puzzle had been murdered.

  Then I remembered that there might be another. The mercha
nt Zabbai had said that the pirates maintained an agent at Ostia. The port town was not more than fifteen miles from Rome, using either the river or the Via Ostiensis. There was a chance that he might be able to supply me with some much-needed information. It was worth a try, anyway. I determined to go immediately.

  I returned to my house and filled a small purse from my chronically underweight money-chest and found my traveling cloak, the same close-woven woolen garment I had worn when campaigning in Spain. I left word with Cato not to expect me back until late the next day and left my house.

  I had only the slightest knowledge of Ostia, so I decided to take a guide with me, and I knew just the man for the job. I went to pay a visit to Macro.

  He was surprised to see rne. “Decius Caecilius, I was not expecting you. I still haven’t received word of that estate manager in Baiae. I should know in two or three days.”

  “Excellent. As it occurs, I’m here about something else. I have to go to Ostia immediately and I need a guide, since I’ll be calling on some less-than-official people. Lend me your boy Milo. I’ll have him back to you by tomorrow evening.”

  “Certainly,” Macro said. He sent a slave running to fetch Milo.

  “Possibly you could help me further. I need to contact the agent who negotiates for the pirates in Ostia. Do you know his name and where he’s to be found?”

  Macro shook his head. “My territory stops at the city walls. Milo should be able to tell you.” He looked at me with a puzzled expression. “What happened to your neck?”

  “My neck?”

  “Yes. It looks like you tried to hang yourself. Are things that bad?”

  My hand went to my throat. I could feel nothing, but I knew that it bore a mark like that around Sergius Paulus’s neck. “Oh, that. I just had some lessons on the garrote. It’s getting to be quite the fashion in Rome lately.”