The Year of Confusion s-13

by John Maddox Roberts

  These men belonged to a generation that never hesitated to speak out about their leaders. Even a common Forum idler would berate a consul to his face. All that is gone now.

  “Decius Caecilius!” came Caesar’s voice from within. I left the others and found Caesar seated by Pompey’s statue, a couple of folding desks nearby, piled with papers, scrolls, and wax tablets. Two of his secretaries stood by with writing kits. He could wear out whole relays of secretaries with his dictation of speeches, endless letters, and dispatches. Still, he found time to write poems and plays. The latter were not distinguished, though. Caesar’s gift was for the prose narrative, at which he was peerless.

  “Caesar wishes?” I said.

  “Caesar wishes you would find this killer so Caesar can execute him. Caesar would also like very much to know what all this is about.” No, he was not in a good mood.

  “I fear my investigation is not complete, but I have isolated some factors that keep turning up too often for coincidence.”

  “Factors such as?”

  “Such as astronomers as opposed to astrologers and their manifold differences, native Romans and foreigners and even pseudo-foreigners, certain great ladies and their social circles-”

  “Great ladies?” he said in a leaden tone that told me to tread carefully.

  “Exactly. Including one whose name I rather expect you will prefer not to hear.”

  “Just tell me Calpurnia is not involved.” I supposed that he was still going by that absurd Caesar’s-wife-must-be-above-suspicion nonsense.

  “Her name has not come up in any capacity. Actually, I have no real proof that any of these people were involved in the murders, only that they keep appearing in my investigation so I suspect that I may have reason to look into them more closely.”

  “Do whatever is necessary,” he said.

  “It might be best if you send the astronomers back to Alexandria while some of them are still alive. Their work on the calendar is done. You don’t need them here anymore.”

  “That might have been a good idea a few days ago, before the killings started. But one of them may be the killer, though I can’t imagine why.”

  “I can’t either, but that signifies nothing. People kill one another for a great number of reasons, it isn’t always for world-shaking stakes or simple, understandable jealousy or points of honor. I’ve known people to kill for reasons that seem perfectly adequate to themselves but defy all understanding by anyone else.”

  “Quite true,” Caesar said, already sounding bored. “Very well, get on with it, but bring me some results soon. I am hard-pressed for time these days and I want all business, major and minor, concluded before I depart for Parthia.” He did not indicate whether my investigation was a major or a minor affair.

  So I departed. Ordinarily, this was the hour for going to the baths, but that was going to have to wait. I gathered up Hermes and we walked a few streets to Rome’s great grain market. Here was a huge square almost the size of the Forum itself, surrounded by granaries and the offices of grain merchants and speculators. The granaries were giant warehouses where every day of the harvest season wagons came in from the countryside to discharge loads of wheat and barley. It would buzz with activity again when the barges came up the river to unload the Egyptian harvest.

  In its center was a spectacular statue and shrine of Apollo. There was also a more modest shrine to Demeter, goddess of the harvest, but Apollo had pride of place. He might seem an eccentric choice as patron of grain merchants and protector of granaries, but in very ancient times, farmers sacrificed to Apollo to protect their granaries from mice, and some learned persons claim that Apollo was originally a mouse-demon from Thrace before the Greeks promoted him to his current glorious status as a solar deity, patron of music, culture, and enlightenment.

  Grain is the most volatile commodity on any market. People absolutely must have it to live, and you never know how much of it there will be in any given year. This meant that there were vast fortunes to be made from the stuff and much collusion went into artificially inflating prices.

  A few years previously Pompey, as proconsul, had been given an extraordinary five-year oversight of Italy’s grain supply. Part of his task had been to eradicate this sort of business. He had had some success, but it seems to be especially difficult to root out such harmful practices when they are so long established. It didn’t help that so many senators got rich out of it. Senators were not supposed to engage in business, but the fact that it was grain meant that it was actually a part of agriculture, which was honorable. Besides, they always had stewards and freedmen and foreign partners to act as fronts.

  We were looking for the offices of one Publius Balesus, grain merchant. I have long thought that life would be greatly simplified by having some sort of system of identifying where persons live and businesses are located. Unfortunately, so far the only way to keep things under control is to concentrate certain trades in a particular district. Then you go to that district and keep asking questions until you’ve found what you are looking for. This we did, and soon found our man. His office was located on the second floor of one of the huge granaries, opening off a balcony overlooking the plaza. The rich, pleasant smell of grain permeated everything.

  I did not think much of my chances here, but this case was so devoid of solid leads that I thought it was worth a try. The man, who looked up from his desk as we came in, was a big, bald-headed specimen who looked as if he had done his time in the legions. His face and right arm were scarred and he had blunt, peasant features that had the cast of southern Latium.

  “Yes?” he said, looking slightly annoyed, a busy man interrupted at his work.

  “Publius Balesus?” I said.

  “That’s me.” The accent matched the face. He was from somewhere south of Rome.

  “I am Senator Decius Caecilius Metellus, and I need to ask you a few questions.”

  He looked a little more accommodating, but still suspicious. “I remember when you were aedile. Those were fine games. How can I help you, Senator?”

  “You may have heard that the foreign astronomer who called himself Polasser of Kish was murdered a few days ago.”

  He nodded. “I heard the rogue was dead. Good riddance, I say. The man was a fraud and a cheat.”

  “The praetor peregrinus of last year, Aulus Sabinus, says that you tried to bring suit against Polasser, but he wouldn’t hear it.”

  “Probably got a whopping bribe from Polasser, if you ask me.”

  “Let’s not get into that,” I said, knowing that it was all too likely. “In what way did Polasser cheat you?”

  “First off, he’s supposed to be able to see your future, right?” He began to fume. “All these eastern star-men are supposed to be good at it. Well, he told me to buy heavy, that the coming year should be a good one for speculating in grain. It made sense, didn’t it? Civil war, everyone nervous, everyone hoarding. So I followed his advice. Well, you know what happened to the grain market last year, don’t you? You’re a senator, you have estates.”

  “The market was flooded first with a good harvest here and then with cheap grain from Egypt.”

  “Exactly,” he said disgustedly. “I know what your kind think of mine. You think we’re schemers who batten on the misfortune of others, Well, it’s business, isn’t it? It’s a hard world. And when things turn out good for others, nobody sheds tears because it’s a disaster for us.”

  “I’m not passing judgment on you,” I assured him. “I know plenty of senators who are in your business, at one remove or another.”

  “Buggering right,” he said. A man came into the office.

  “Master, some wagons just came in from Apuleia.”

  “Good,” Balesus said. Then, to us, “I bought this lot before it was planted. See what a risky business it is? Let’s go look at it. I’ll show you some things.”

  “Lead the way,” I said. Hermes raised his eyebrows at me but I ignored him. We went out onto the balcony an
d down some stairs to a yard behind the building. Eight or ten wagons stood there, loaded with big leather bags.

  “Late harvest in Apuleia this year, and these wagons were a long time on the road. Now the first thing you do is this.” He went to the third wagon and selected a bag apparently at random, opening its top. He reached in and took out a handful of grain. He held it up close to his eyes. They were fine, fat grains as far as I could see.

  “Looks good so far,” he said. “No mold, properly dried, no mouse dung in it. Now this is the next thing you do.” He thrust his hand down into the grain until his arm was buried past the elbow. He withdrew another fistful of grain from deep within and examined it. “The same stuff. We’ll go through some other bags before I’ll take it, but it looks like I’m not being cheated. Now I’ll show you something else. Come along.”

  So we followed him across the plaza to a rather splendid building decorated with reliefs of wheat sheaves, harvest implements, and various gods of field and storehouse. It was the guildhall of the grain merchants. He led us to a room where a bored clerk sat with a pair of scales and a number of weights.

  “I want to show the senator those bags the thief from Neapolis brought here last month,” Balesus said.

  “Help yourself,” the clerk said, indicating a number of the big leather sacks that leaned against a wall nearby. “It’s not needed as evidence anymore, the man’s been sentenced. I was going to throw it out and sell the sacks.”

  “Then we’re just in time.” Balesus hauled out a sack and set it before me and opened it. “Here, Senator. Give it a try.”

  I took a handful of grain from the top and looked at it in the light that streamed in through a window. These looked like healthy grains to my eye. “Looks fine.”

  “Now dig deep, like I just did,” he said, grinning.

  I stuck my hand down in as far as it would go and closed my fingers around a fistful and drew it out. This I examined as well. The grains were shriveled, showed signs of mold, and were laced with unpleasant black flakes. They even smelled foul.

  “You see? You have to be careful in this business. The man should have known better than to try this trick in Rome, but he did. Tried to sell it out there in the great market at the peak of the harvest, thinking buyers wouldn’t look close when they had so many tons to move. Well, he was wrong. We hauled him before the curule aedile but he can only levy fines and judged this too serious and passed it to the praetor’s court. The man’s property was confiscated and he was sold as a slave. I hope he works shoveling other people’s grain for the rest of his miserable life.”

  We went back outside and walked back toward his office. “You seem to know your business.” I said.

  “That I do. Well, these star-men have their own schemes, and I wish I knew as much about them as I do about the grain business.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “I didn’t try to take Polasser to court just because he’d gulled me with a false horoscope. I’d just look like a fool then, wouldn’t I? I learned he’d advised half a dozen other merchants, and probably others who wouldn’t admit it. Some he told to buy, like he told me. Others he told to sell. Any way it came out, he’d have a string of merchants who thought he’d given them a proper fortune. What do you want to bet he’d charge more for his services the next year?”

  “Very clever,” I said. “Why didn’t the other men you mentioned join you in pressing for this suit?”

  He snorted. “Not buggering likely, not after I told them who his patron was. Nobody’d touch it then.”

  Hermes was bursting to say something, and he’d held his silence long enough, so I nodded to him

  “Who recommended Polasser to you?”

  “A patrician lady who was selling off the produce from her dead husband’s estate last year. Name was Fulvia.”

  I had been very afraid that he was about to speak another name. This was bad enough, but it still came as a relief. “Did she advise the others as well?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose so. They must’ve found out about the fraud from somewhere.”

  “Well, I thank you, you’ve been very helpful. And now I know what to do when somebody tries to sell me grain in bulk.”

  “Anything for the Senate and people. And, Senator?”

  I was turning to go but turned back. “Yes?”

  “There was nothing wrong with our old calendar. Why did you have to saddle us with this new one? It’s caused me no end of trouble. Contracts have dates on them, you know.”

  We made our way back toward the Forum. “Fulvia, eh?” Hermes said.

  “Well, I knew she was part of Servilia’s little group. So what has this told us? It could be nothing. She must have wanted to sell off the produce from Curio’s estates before his other relatives could lay hands on them. I don’t know what the disposition of those estates has been, now that she’s married to Antonius.” Curio had been a remarkable man, at first a conservative, then an adherent of Caesar and a tribune of the people, and very successful in every role. He’d had a brilliant future ahead of him and had married Fulvia, who always furthered her husbands’ careers to the best of her ability, which was saying something. Then he had gone to Africa in Caesar’s cause and had been killed in some obscure skirmish, a sad end for such a man.

  “It could be nothing,” I said. “She may have been besotted with these astrologers and babbled about them to anyone who would listen. I’ve known others like that.”

  “And Polasser may have looked at how the grain business works and decided that there was a killing to be made. Still, Balesus seems like a hard-headed man, not likely to be taken in by such a fraud.”

  “You never can tell. I’ve known many men to be sensible and no-nonsense in their own line of work, but gullible fools when out of their depth. A fraud artist I once knew said that a self-made man was often the easiest victim.”

  “Why should that be?” Hermes wanted to know.

  “He said it’s because they think they know everything. Starting with nothing they build great fortunes and they think they have perfect judgment. They won’t consult with more knowledgeable people because they think they’ve made it where they are by always knowing exactly what they are doing. In fact, they often succeeded because they were lucky, or just hard-working or shrewd in a very narrow field. So they will trust a transparent fraud when a five-minute conversation with someone like Cicero or Sosigenes or Callista would show them the error of their ways. They have too much confidence in themselves.”

  “Like the ones who come out from Rome and think they’re great natural military leaders because they’re born into famous families?” He was remembering some bad experiences we’d had in Gaul.

  I shuddered. “Exactly. The world is full of people who have perfect confidence in themselves for all the wrong reasons. They cause no end of trouble.”

  Still, this was another name that had come up more than once in all this business: Fulvia. I had known her slightly for a long time and avoided closer acquaintance. She was one of those bad women to whom Hermes had hinted I was too attracted. The first time I had seen her she was in the house of Clodia. In Clodia’s bed, in fact. She’d been no more than fifteen and even then had struck me as some sort of anthropophagous creature. We had had a few encounters in the years since, none hostile but always tricky. Fulvia plus Antonius made a combination I was particularly anxious to avoid, especially now that I no longer had the protection of a family of enormous political importance. I had not realized what an advantage I had had being a Caecilius Metellus until the family fortunes had collapsed in the civil war.

  We went among the throng of afternoon frequenters in the Forum, taking hands and trading political gossip in the immemorial Roman fashion. All the time I was pondering what I had learned and how it all fitted together. Surely Polasser had not just hit upon his grain scheme in a fit of inspiration. I ran through my mind a list of Roman rogues, villains, and lowlifes I numbered among my acquaintance, and I
found depressingly many.

  “Hermes,” I said at last, “I think we need to call on Felix the Wise.”

  “Him?” Hermes said, unbelieving. “I’m all for it. I hear he holds court at the Labyrinth these days.”

  “Then let’s go there. Julia will be attending the evening sacrifice at the Temple of Vesta, then going on her mysterious errand with Servilia. So we have the evening all to ourselves. Let’s go to the Labyrinth.”

  The establishment thus named was at that time Rome’s largest, most fabulous, and most successful brothel. It was located in the trans-Tiber, which gave it both more space and less oversight from the aediles. People visiting Rome for the first time always made it a point to visit the Labyrinth. It attracted more of them than the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter.

  We made the long, leisurely walk across town and across the river into the trans-Tiber and got to the Labyrinth just as the sun was going down. The building towered five stories high and was as large as any of the apartment blocks in Rome. Before it stood its infamous sign, a larger than life-sized sculpture of Pasiphae and the bull rendered in excruciating anatomical detail. The queen was depicted as splayed quadrupedally, the cow disguise devised by Daedalus merely hinted at with hoofed boots and gloves. The bull was well endowed even for a bull.

  We went through the long corridor that led from the entrance to the vast courtyard within. There were about a hundred long tables inside beneath a canopy worthy of the Circus where people feasted and watched the entertainment. I was recognized instantly, being a well-known public figure, of course. The madam, an immensely tall woman who emphasized her height by wearing an actor’s buskins and a towering wig, greeted me with a resounding kiss on the cheek.

  “Senator Metellus!” she said in a voice that echoed off the walls, “you haven’t honored us with your presence in far too long!” Heads turned from all directions to gape at me. There was a good deal of laughter.