IX
I winced at a sharp pain in my head, as if someone were poking me with a nettle, and opened my eyes to see Eco peering down at me, pursing his Lips thoughtfully. He was reaching out to tap at a spot on my forehead just below the scalp. I grunted and pushed his hand away. He winced sympathetically and drew back, shaking his head.
‘Is it that bad?’ I said, swinging my feet onto the floor and leaning forward to look into the mirror. Even by the grey light of dawn the bump was quite evident, a raised red knob that looked more painful than it felt. Eco held up my still-damp tunic with one hand and the oar with the other. He looked at me disapprovingly, demanding an explanation.
I began with my interview with Crassus ��� the bloodstains on the statue of Hercules, the evidence that Lucius Licinius was killed in his library, our employer’s determined disinterest. I told him about the moving lamp at the boathouse, the periodic splashing as of something being dropped into the water, the steep descent, the deserted pier and boathouse, the oar swung against my head, the struggle in the water.
Eco shook his head at me angrily and stamped his foot.
‘Yes, Eco, I was a fool, and a lucky one at that. I should have fetched you out of bed to come with me instead of rushing down to investigate. Or better yet, I should have brought Belbo along to play bodyguard and left you in Rome to look after Bethesda.’ That suggestion riled him even more.
‘I have no idea who struck me. As for the boathouse and the pier, there was nothing to be seen, at least not by night. How I hate the water!’ I remembered the burning draught of saltwater in my throat, the struggling and thrashing; my hands were suddenly shaky and I had to struggle for breath. Eco’s anger vanished and his arm was around me, holding me right. I caught my breath and patted his hand.
‘And if my adventure at the boathouse was not enough, I came back to find this in my bed.’ I stepped to the window and picked up the figurine. The black, porous stone seemed clammy to the touch. I had kept waking up during the night to see it staring down at me from the windowsill, its ugly face weirdly illuminated by the lamplight, its red eyes shining. At one point I actually thought I saw it moving, undulating in a kind of dance - but that was only a dream, of course.
‘What does it remind you of?’
Eco shrugged.
‘I’ve seen something like it before; it reminds me of an Egyptian household god of pleasure, Bes they call him, an ugly little fellow who brings bliss and frivolity into the house. So hideous, if you didn’t know he was friendly you might be frightened of him ��� a huge, gaping mouth, staring eyes, a pointed nose. But this isn’t Bes; it’s an hermaphrodite, for one thing - see the tiny round breasts, and the little penis? Moreover, the workmanship is not Egyptian. It seems to have been made from local stone, that soft, porous black stuff one finds on the slopes of Vesuvius. Not an easy medium to work in, I imagine, too crumbly, so it’s hard to say whether the workmanship is crude or simply rushed. Who could have fashioned such a thing, and why was it put in my bed?
‘The practice of sorcery is very popular here on the Cup, much more so than in Rome. There’s a great deal of indigenous magic among those whose families have always lived here, whose race predates the Romans in these parts. Then the Greeks settled here, bringing their oracles with them. Even so, this strikes me as a thing someone from the East might carve, and more likely a woman than a man. What do you think, Eco ��� is one of the household slaves trying to cast a spell on me? Or could it be���’
Eco clapped and gestured toward the door behind me, where the little slave boy Meto stood waiting expectantly, bearing a tray of bread and fruit. I saw his eyes dart nervously about the room. I hid the figurine from sight while I turned, so that when I faced him I held it behind my back. I smiled at him. He smiled back. Then I produced the figurine and thrust it onto the tray.
He let out a little gasp.
‘You’ve seen this thing before?’ I said accusingly.
‘No!’ he whispered. That might be literally true, given the frantic way he averted his eyes.
‘But you know what it is, and where it comes from?’
He was silent, biting his hp. The tray trembled. An apple pitched onto its side and rolled into a bunch of figs. I took the tray from him and set it on the bed, picked up the statuette and thrust it against his nose. He peered at it, cross-eyed, and then shut his eyes tightly. ‘Well?’ I pressed.
‘Please, if I tell you, it may not work …’
‘What? Speak clearly.’
‘If I explain it to you, the test may come to nothing.’ ‘Do you hear that, Eco? Someone is testing me. I wonder who, and why.’ Meto quailed under my glare. ‘Please, I don’t really understand it all myself, it’s just something I happened to overhear.’ ‘Overhear? When?’ ‘Last night.’ ‘Here in the house?’ ‘Yes.’
‘I suppose you must overhear many things, coming and going as you do.’
‘Sometimes, but never on purpose.’ ‘And whom did you overhear last night?’ ‘Please!’
I looked at him for a long moment, then stepped back and let the sternness fall from my face. ‘You understand why I’m here, don’t you, Meto?’
He nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘I’m here because you and many others are in very grave danger. I want to help you if I can.’
He looked at me sceptically. ‘If I could be sure of that .. .’ he whispered in a very small voice.
‘Be sure of it, Meto. I think you know how great the danger is.’ He was only a little boy, far too young to be facing the prospect Crassus had planned for him. Had he ever seen a man put to death? Was he old enough to really understand? ‘Trust me, Meto. Tell me where this statue came from.’
He stared at me for a long moment, then looked uiinlnchingly at the grotesque in my hands. ‘I can’t tell you that,’ he finally said. Eco moved toward him in exasperation; I blocked him with my arm. ‘But I can tell you …’
‘Yes, Meto?’
‘That you must show the figurine to no one else. And you must tell no one about it. And …’ ‘Yes?’
He bit his lower Hp. ‘When you leave this room, don’t take it with you. Leave it here. But not on the table or the windowsill …’
‘Where, then? Where I found it?’
He looked relieved, as if his honour were less compromised if I spoke the words instead of him. ‘Yes, only …’ ‘Meto, speak up!’
‘Only leave it opposite of how you found it!’ ‘Face-down, you mean?’ ‘Yes, and …’
‘With its feet toward the wall?’
He nodded, then quickly looked at the statue. He clapped his hand over his mouth and cringed. ‘Look how it stares at me! Oh, what have I done?’
‘You’ve done the right thing,’ I assured him, placing the statue out of his sight. ‘Here, I have an errand for you: return this oar to the boathouse. Now go, and tell no one that we talked. No one! Stop trembling, people will notice. You’ve done the right thing,’ I said again, closing the door behind him, and then added, ‘I hope!’
*
After a hurried breakfast we made our way to the library. The slaves were up and about, sweeping and carrying and spreading baking smells from the kitchens, but no one else seemed to be stirring. A few lamps still burned in the hallways, and shadows lurked in the more remote corners, but most of the house was suffused with a soft blue light. We passed by a long window that faced eastwards; the sun, not yet risen behind Vesuvius, cast a halo of pale gold about the mountain’s shoulders. It was the first hour of the day, when most Romans would be up and about. The denizens of the Cup keep a more leisurely schedule.
The library was unguarded and empty. I opened the shutters to let in as much light as possible. Eco stepped to the right of the table and studied the dried residue of blood on the Hercules statue to confirm what I had told him, then shivered at the early-morning chill that crept in through the windows from the gravelled courtyard outside. He picked up the chlamys that Crassus had draped ove
r the other statue, which turned out to be a centaur, and wrapped it around his shoulders.
‘I wouldn’t borrow that particular cloak if I were you, Eco. I’m not sure how a man like Crassus would react to people of our ilk handling his personal things.’
Eco only shrugged and walked slowly around the room, gazing at the multitude of scrolls. Most of them were neatly rolled and inserted into long jackets of cloth or leather and identified by little tags. It appeared that the more literary works intended for pleasure or instruction ��� philosophical treatises, quaint Greek novels, plays, histories - had been given red or green tags, and were rather haphazardly catalogued, heaped atop one another in tall, narrow shelves. Documents relating to business transactions were more fastidiously arranged in individual pigeonholes and given blue or yellow tags. All in all, there were hundreds of scrolls, filling two walls from floor to ceiling.
Eco let out a low whistle. ‘Yes, quite impressive,’ I agreed. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many scrolls in one place, not even in Cicero’s house. But for now I’d rather you directed your eyes downward, to the floor. If ever a carpet was designed to hide a bloodstain it must be this one, all dark red and black. Still, if Lucius bled on the floor and the assassin used only a cloak to wipe it up, there should be some sign of the stain.’
Eco joined me in peering down at the geometric pattern. The morning light grew stronger moment by moment, but the longer we studied it the more baffling the dark pattern seemed to become. Together we crossed the carpet step by step. Eco eventually dropped to his hands and knees like a hound, but to no avail. If there had ever been a drop of blood on the carpet, some god must have turned it to dust and blown it away.
The tile floor, where it showed beyond the carpet’s edge, was no more revealing. I lifted the edge of the carpet and folded it back, thinking it might have been moved to cover a bit of bloodstain, but I found nothing.
‘Perhaps Lucius wasn’t killed in this room, after all.’ I sighed. ‘He must have bled somewhere, and there’s nowhere to bleed except on the floor. Unless …’ I stepped towards the table. ‘Unless he was standing here, where he naturally would be standing in his library, in front of the table. The blow was to the front of his head, not the back, so he must have been facing his assailant. And the blow was on the right, not the left, so he must have been facing north, with his left side toward the table and his right side exposed. To strike the right temple head-on, the assailant must have used his left hand; that could be very important, Eco - anyone who picked up a heavy statue to use as a bludgeon would use the arm he favoured. We assume the killer was left-handed, then. Lucius would have been knocked sidelong onto the table …’
Eco obligingly pitched himself onto the table amid the clutter of documents Crassus had been studying the night before. He fell face-down with one arm beneath him and the other outstretched.
‘In which case the blood might well have been spattered above the table, onto the wall - where it might as easily have been wiped away. I see no blood there now. Unless it spattered even higher…’ I climbed onto my knees on the table. Eco pushed himself up to join me in studying the painting of Gelina. ‘Encaustic on canvas, set in a frame of black wood with mother-of-pearl inlay ��� easy to wipe clean ��� and encased in the wall. Had any blood landed on the painting itself, I doubt the murderer would have dared to scrub the wax too vigorously for fear of damaging it, if indeed he saw the blood among all these pigments. Amazing, isn’t it, how many colours there are in a painting when you see it this close? At this distance Iaia’s signature is certainly large enough, done in red, but more likely cinnabar than blood. The folds of Gelina’s stola are a mottled red and black; no doubt she chose these carpets to match her gown in the painting. Red here, black there, and -Eco, do you see it?’
Eco anxiously nodded. Dribbled across a patch of green background, where no painter would have been so careless as to spill it, was a spray of red-black drops the colour of dried blood. Eco peered closer and then began pointing out more drops ��� on the background, on the stola, everywhere across the bottom of the painting, even a smear across the first letter of Iaia’s signature. The more we looked, the more we saw. In the growing morning light the drops seemed to blossom before our eyes, as if the painting itself wept blood. Eco made a face, and I grimaced in agreement: What a grisly blow must have been struck across the head of Lucius Licinius to have scattered so much gore. I drew back from the painting, repulsed.
‘Ironic,’ I whispered, ‘that Lucius should have polluted with his own blood the painting of the wife he married for love, and ended here, a corpse, prostrate before her image. A jealous lover, Eco? Did someone intentionally murder him here, in front of the painting? It must have made quite a tableau, the dead husband crumpled lifeless before the serene image of his wife. But if someone intended it that way, then why was the body moved, and the spectre of Spartacus invoked?’
I stepped off the table, followed by Eco. ‘There must have been blood on the table, easily wiped clean. Which means there must have been no documents lying here, as there are now, or else they would have been bloodied as well, and impossible to clean; blood will wipe off lacquered wood, but not parchment or papyrus. I wonder, though … here, help me pull the table from the wall.’
It was easier said than done. The table was heavy, too heavy perhaps for one man alone to lift it. Even with one of us at either end the job was awkward; we knocked over the chair, bunched the carpet and caused a loud screech as one table leg scraped across the tiled floor. Our reward was blood: on both the wall and the back edge of the table, trapped where no cloth could have reached it, there were patches of a gummy, red-brown residue. Lucius’s blood had run across the table and pooled in the narrow space between table and wall, leaving its trace on both.
Eco wrinkled his nose. ‘More proof that Lucius was murdered here, if we needed it,’ I said. ‘But what does that tell us? It makes no sense that the missing slaves would have wiped up the blood, especially if they were proud of the crime; still, it will take stronger proof than that to shake Crassus from his intention. Here, Eco, help me replace the table as it was. I hear footsteps in the hall.’
Just as I was picking up the chair and Eco was straightening the carpet, an inquiring face peered around the corner.
‘Meto! Just the one I wanted to see. Step inside, and shut the door behind you.’
He did as I ordered, but not without hesitating. ‘Are you sure we should be in this room?’ he whispered.
‘Meto, your mistress made it clear that I should have access to any part of the house, did she not?’
‘I suppose. But no one was ever allowed in this room without the master’s permission.’
‘No one? Not even the scrub maids?’
‘Only when the master would let them in, and even then he usually wanted himself or Zeno to be in the room.’
‘But there’s nothing here for a slave to pilfer - no small coins, no jewellery or trinkets.’
‘Even so - once I snuck in, just because I wanted to have a closer look at the horse���’
‘Horse? Ah, the centaur statue.’
‘Yes, and the master himself walked in on me. He was angry in an instant, and the master wasn’t normally an angry man. But his face turned all red and he shouted at me till I thought I would die from the pounding in my chest.’ Meto’s eyes opened wide at the memory. He puffed out his cheeks and shook his head, like a man trying to recover from a terrible dream. ‘He called in Alexandros and ordered him to give me a beating, right here. Normally it would have been Clito, who also works in the stables and likes to give beatings, but I was lucky because Clito was working in Puteoli that day. I had to bend over and touch the floor while Alex gave me ten blows with a cane. He only did it because the master made him. He could have hit me a lot harder, I’m sure, but it still made me cry.’
‘I see. You like this Alexandros?’
The boy’s eyes sparkled. ‘Of course. Everyone l
ikes Alex.’
‘And what about Zeno, did you like him, too?’
He shrugged. ‘Nobody liked Zeno. But not because he’s cruel or a bully, like Clito. He’s haughty and speaks languages and thinks he’s so much better than any of the other slaves. And he farts a lot.’
‘He sounds thoroughly disagreeable. Tell me, on the night your master was killed, was anyone up and about? You, perhaps, or some other slave?’
He shook his head.
‘You’re sure? No one heard anything, saw anything?’
‘Everyone’s been talking about it, of course. But no one knows what happened. The mistress told us the next day that if anyone knew anything, he must go directly to Master Crassus, or to Mummius or Fabius. If anyone had seen or heard what happened, they would tell, I’m sure.’
‘And among the slaves themselves, there are no rumours, no whispers?’
‘Nothing. And if anyone had said anything at all, even in secret, I’m the one who’s most likely to have overheard. Not that I eavesdrop���’
‘I understand. Your duties take you all over the house, from room to room, dawn to dusk, while the cooks and stablemen and cleaners stay in one place all day and gossip to each other. Hearing things and seeing things is nothing to be ashamed of, Meto. I do it for a living. When I first saw you, I could tell right away that you are the very eyes and ears of this house.’
He looked at me in wonderment, and then cautiously smiled, as if no one had ever perceived his true worth before.
‘Tell me, Meto, on that night, might Zeno have been in this room with your master?’
‘It’s possible. They often came here and worked together after dark, sometimes very late, especially if a ship had just arrived or was about to leave from Puteoli, or if Master Crassus was on his way.’
‘And might Alexandros have been here as well?’ ‘Possibly.’
Arms of Nemesis - Roman Sub Rosa 02 Page 12
