A report had been received, he said, in which King Hiero tried to make out that Naso had been, in effect, responsible for his own death; that he’d crept furtively away from a party held in his honour, somehow evading the guards provided at his own request for his own protection, scrambling over a high wall – which Caecilius Naso could never have done, he pointed out, having been severely wounded in battle in the service of his country, as a result of which he walked with a pronounced limp, something which anybody who had ever met him couldn’t possibly have helped noticing. The report, he went on, his eyes blazing with righteous indignation, was nothing less than an insult to the memory of a loyal and valiant officer, propagated by the very people who had brought about his death, in a callous attempt to disrupt the peace process which the Roman people had worked so hard to bring about.
I was there, at Hiero’s insistence. I got as far as opening my mouth, but then Scaurus started up again.
Fortuitously, he continued, a thorough investigation had been conducted by a team of dedicated Roman public servants, including Naso’s private secretary, the guard commander and a commission of officers of propraetorian rank – one of whom he had the honour to be. He was therefore in a position to prove that Naso was murdered, in cold blood, by a trained assassin acting on the orders of the criminal Agathocles, who in turn was carrying out the direct command of King Hiero himself, with the intention of subverting the peace process. The assassin, one Maurisca, a young woman of exceptional strength and agility, presently in custody in Rome, had been disguised as a flute-girl, in which guise she was introduced to Naso at the party. Naso, plied by his host with wine far stronger than that to which he was accustomed, was enveigled into following the assassin to the upstairs room of the house. There she murdered him. Then, with a view to covering up the crime and allowing Syracuse to evade the proper wrath of the Roman people, she proceeded to dispose of the body.
No doubt (this appalling man went on) the Syracusan delegates had read King Hiero’s so-called report; in which case, they must recall that the upper room of the house was some ten feet from a substantial fig tree, whose branches overhung the outer wall. What the report neglected to mention was the presence in the loft of a number of highly significant artefacts, amongst which: a cheese press of considerable weight – the long, stout handles used to turn the screw of the said press during the whey reduction process; a coil of strong, fine rope. These apparently mundane objects, he thundered, were all that were needed to construct a rudimentary but effective crane, by the use of which the assassin shifted Naso’s lifeless corpse through the open door of the upper room and into the branches of the tree. Thereafter, it was an easy matter for the assassin – previously trained as an acrobatic dancer – to leave the house, enter the courtyard, and, using the rope or a section thereof, lower Naso’s body over the wall, at a distance there from enabling her to escape detection. Continuing, she dropped from the tree to the ground and dragged the body over a paved pathway on which she knew no trace would be left, to some point nearby, where accomplices awaited her with a cart or some similar vehicle. Said accomplices proceeded to dispose of the body by breaking into the nearest warehouse and placing it in a large storage jar, possibly with the intention of returning later and recovering it for more permanent disposal. If that was their intention, presumably they were frustrated in it by the search of the neighbourhood insisted on by the Roman delegation.
And then the obnoxious Scaurus turned round and pointed straight at me, and went on: “You may feel, fellow delegates, that such an operation, such a feat of engineering, would be difficult to achieve. The Syracusans would, no doubt, like you to believe that it would be impossible. No doubt. I believe that the very complexity – I might say the implausibility of the scheme – was a fundamental part of its design. The Syracusans want you to believe that there was no way the body, once dead, could have been removed from that place; therefore, they argue, Naso must have left the house alive, in the manner they describe in the report. But, as we have seen, their explanation is not only highly unlikely, in the light of what we know of Caecilius Naso’s exemplary character, but actually impossible, because of his war wound. We have, of course, the evidence of the assassin herself, obtained and confirmed under torture before a magistrate. But even without her evidence, the matter speaks for itself. Having disproved the purportedly straightforward version offered by the Syracusans, we have no alternative but to conclude that Naso was dead when he left the house; in which case, it is an unavoidable conclusion that some form of mechanical artifice was used to remove him, and that artifice was constructed from the materials later found in the upper room. And if anybody wishes to argue that those materials were inadequate for the purpose, I say this: to any ordinary man – perhaps. To a trained engineer, even – quite possibly. But King Hiero of Syracuse has in his service the greatest living expert, fellow delegates, the world’s foremost authority on the use and application of levers and mechanical advantage; I refer, of course, to the universally acclaimed inventor Archimedes, son of Phidias, who is sitting before me as I speak; the man who once boasted, as I’m sure I need not remind you, ‘Give me a firm place to stand, and I can move the Earth’. Fellow delegates—”
I’m afraid I missed the rest of the speech. Two of Hiero’s men took me politely by the elbows and walked me out of the room, before I could say anything.
*
On my way home, Orestes and I stopped off at Stratocles’ warehouse. It was a huge place, and the nearest uninhabited building to Agathocles’ house. Inside, there were more jars than I’ve ever seen in my life. There were sealed jars, rows and rows of them, ready to be loaded and shipped. There were empty jars, sent back to be washed out and refilled. There were damaged jars waiting to be hauled off and dumped in the bay, and two long lines of half-filled jars, containing the preservative oil but as yet no sprats, standing by to be stoppered and sealed with pitch.
I stood next to one of these – it was about two fingers’ width taller than me – and tried to imagine lifting a dead body high enough to drop inside it. It’d take several men.
“Come on,” Orestes said sadly. “This part of the evidence isn’t in dispute.”
“I guess not,” I said. “I’d still like to know why sprats, though.”
“Excuse me?”
“The body was bound to turn up sooner or later,” I said. “When the jar was opened. I grant you, it was sheer chance that it ended up in Rome. Even so—”
I didn’t finish the sentence because at that point I slipped and nearly ended up on my face. The floor was slick with oil. Someone had tried to blot it up with sawdust, but hadn’t been thorough enough.
Orestes grinned at me. “Archimedes’ principle of the displacement of fluids,” he said. “I read about it at school.”
I gave him a look. “I’m guessing,” I said, “that this is where the body was tipped in, and the displaced oil came gushing out. He was a big man, so there was a lot of spilt oil.”
“Quite,” Orestes said. “So where does that get us?”
I wiped oil off the sole of my sandal with the hem of my gown. “Nowhere,” I said.
*
The next day, Orestes came to see me. I sent word that I didn’t want to talk to anybody. He insisted. I pointed out that I was having a relaxing, well-earned bath, in which I hoped to dissolve every trace of the air I’d been forced to share with Publius Laurentius Scaurus. Orestes came in anyway, and sat down on the floor looking sadly at me and not speaking.
“I told Hiero,” I said. “I didn’t want to get involved.”
“You’re involved all right,” Orestes said. “They’re demanding your extradition.”
I’m not a brave man. I squealed like a pig. “Hiero’ll never agree.”
“No,” Orestes said, “he won’t. And that means there’s going to be a war. Which,” he added, with a faint shrug of his shoulders, “we’ll almost certainly lose, unless you can think of a way of blasting the Roman fleet o
ut of the bay. Pity about that,” he added.
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not my fault.”
“Nobody said it was,” Orestes replied gloomily. “Still, that’s one thing I never thought I’d see.”
“What?”
“Archimedes,” he said, standing up. “Outsmarted by a Roman.”
He was just about to leave. I called him back. “I don’t suppose,” I said, “you’ve still got your file on Naso.”
He grinned at me. “As a matter of fact,” he said, and pulled out the papers from under his tunic.
I sighed. “Read them to me,” I said. “My eyesight—”
So he read his notes on the life and times of Quintus Caecilius Naso, up to a point where I told him to stop and go back a bit. He read that bit again, and I asked him some questions, which he was luckily able to answer.
“You wouldn’t happen to have,” I said quietly, “anything similar on our friend Scaurus?”
“Wait there,” he said.
*
The bath was getting cold when he came back, but I hadn’t bothered to get out. I’d been too busy thinking; or, rather, bashing helplessly at the locked door of my intuition, behind which I felt sure the answer lay …
“Publius Laurentius Scaurus,” Orestes said, peering owlishly at the paper in his hand. “A member of the influential Laurentii family, once prominent in the Optimate movement, though their influence has been on the wane for the last twenty years or so. Married to the second cousin of the celebrated Aemilius—”
There was a lot more of that sort of thing. I was partly listening, the way an old married man partly listens to his wife. At the same time, my mind was hopping, flapping, until suddenly and quite unexpectedly, it soared.
“Got it!*” I remember shouting. “Here, help me out, I’ve got to see Hiero.”
Which I did, refusing to wait, or see anybody else. I barged my way into the royal presence and told him all about it. Then I said, “Well?”
A pause; then Hiero said, “You’re right.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
Hiero nodded slowly. Then he lifted his head and looked at me. “Archimedes,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Why haven’t you got any clothes on?”
*
In contrast to our previous encounters, my third meeting with Scaurus was distinctly low-key. There were just the three of us, in a small garden at the back of the palace. We sat like civilized men under a fine old beech tree, and a boy served wine and honey cakes.
Hiero – he was the third member of the party – wiped his lips delicately on a linen napkin and gave Scaurus a friendly smile. “I asked you here,” he said, “to see if we can’t work something out. Something sensible,” he added. “Just the three of us.”
Scaurus nodded gracefully. “I can’t see why we shouldn’t be able to,” he said. “If you’re prepared to be realistic.”
Hiero nodded. “And since you’re such an admirer of my cousin’s work,” he went on, “I’ve asked him along. I know you’ve had your differences, let’s say, but I feel sure that deep down, both of you men of science, you can really talk to each other. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Of course,” Scaurus said. “And you’re right. The very greatest admiration.”
I acknowledged the compliment as best I could. “Maybe,” I said, “we could have a chat about scientific method.”
A slight frown crossed Scaurus’ face. “I’d have thought we had rather more urgent—”
I raised my hand. “Method first,” I said, “then the specifics.”
He shrugged. “If you like.”
“What I admired about that paper of yours,” I went on, “wasn’t the actual conclusions, which are fanciful, or the empirical data, which is deeply flawed. No, what I liked was the approach. Confronted, you said, with various different explanations for an observed phenomenon – all of which fit the facts equally well – logic requires that we choose the explanation that calls for the least number of new assumptions. Is that right?” I asked nicely. “My Latin’s nothing special, but I think that’s what you said.”
He looked at me as if he didn’t like me nearly as much as he used to. “More or less,” he said.
“In other words,” I went on, “the simplest explanation is likely to be the right one.”
“That’s not actually what I—”
“Near enough,” I said firmly, “is good enough. In which case,” I went on, “try this. The simplest explanation for what happened to Naso isn’t that he climbed the wall on his own, or that this mysterious and wonderful flute-girl of yours winched him over the wall on an improvised crane. The simplest explanation,” I said, beaming at him like the rising sun, “is that when he came outside to shag the flute-girl, he found the sergeant of his honour guard waiting for him. The sergeant killed him, and a couple of squaddies lugged him out through the open gate and put him on a cart, to be disposed of later in a nearby warehouse. Well?” I asked him. “Simple enough for you?”
Bless him. He didn’t say a word.
“And why would the sergeant do such a thing?” I continued. “Because he was ordered to, or paid, or both. Who by? Well, that’s a subject for speculation, I grant you. It could have been a member of a rival political faction – let’s see, Naso was well up in the Popular party, just as you’re quite well thought of among the Optimates, aren’t you? Or maybe it was someone who reckoned the best way to make sure there’d be a war would be by manufacturing a serious diplomatic incident. Mind you,” I added, “they’d have to be a Optimate, since the Populars don’t want a war right now. Or it could simply have been the uncle of Naso’s first wife; you know, the one who died in mysterious circumstances, falling down the stairs or something like that, thereby making it possible for Naso to marry that rich and well-connected heiress. Or maybe it was just that someone whose career’s been nothing special lately simply wanted his job. We just don’t know. I’m sure,” I added sweetly, “that once we’ve shared our theories with Naso’s friends in the Populars, they’d have no trouble thinking of someone who answers one of those descriptions. Or maybe all of them, even.”
He gave me a look that would’ve curdled milk. “Have you finished?” he said.
“Yes. Almost,” I added. “I’d just like to give you a new dictum for your collection.”
“Well?”
“Give me a firm place to stand,” I said, “and I can kick your arse from here to Agrigentum.”
*
Later, Orestes asked me, “So why sprats?”
“Ah,” I said, smiling like a happy Socrates. “My guess is, the Romans had chosen poor old Stratocles’ warehouse well in advance as a good place to lose the body. They wouldn’t want it found, not ever, because a disappearance was just as good for breaking up the peace talks as a visible murder, and a body might just’ve given the game away; no rope-marks or anything like that to support the crane theory. There might have been some trifling clue they’d overlooked, but which might’ve been picked up by one of our sharp-as-needles Syracusan investigators. Attention to detail, you see, a typically Roman trait.”
“But?”
I grinned. “But when they got to the warehouse – it was dark, remember, and they wouldn’t have risked a light – they made a slight mistake. They’d been intending to put the corpse in one of the damaged jars we saw there, earmarked for dumping in the bay. Instead, they dumped it in a half-filled jar, which is how come it ended up in Rome.” I shook my head sadly. “Too clever by half,” I said, “and basically just careless.”
*
There was no war. Scaurus went home, and was replaced by a polite old Optimate who explained that the girl Maurisca had confessed that she’d been bribed by the Carthaginians (nice touch, everybody hates the Carthaginians) to tell a parcel of lies in order to get Hiero into trouble. The charges were, therefore, withdrawn, and the negotiations proceeded to a long, drawn out, meaningless conclusion.
And that, I sin
cerely hope, was the last time I’ll ever have anything to do with the Romans. They may have their stirling qualities, but I don’t like them. They have absolutely no respect, in my opinion, for the scientific method.
* In Greek, Eureka
Something to do with Diana
Steven Saylor
Over the last twenty years Steven Saylor has been carving a sizable niche for himself in the world of ancient Rome. He has recently embarked on a colossal history of Rome told in fictional form, starting with Roma (2007) which charts the growth of Rome from its earliest days to the time of Julius Caesar, and Empire (2010) which takes us through to the Emperor Hadrian. But Saylor is probably best known for his stories featuring Gordianus the Finder, who lives by his wits and, because of his acquaintanceship with Cicero in Roman Blood (1991), the first book in the series, frequently finds himself involved in the higher level of politics and intrigue in Republican Rome. Other books in the series include Arms of Nemesis (1992), Catilina’s Riddle (1993), Rubicon (1999), The Judgement of Caesar (2004), The Triumph of Caesar (2008) and two collections, The House of the Vestals (1997) and A Gladiator Dies Only Once (2005).
Saylor is working on another volume featuring Gordianus but this time set during his early years, against the backcloth of the original Seven Wonders of the World. The following story, set in 92 BC, takes place at the Temple of Diana (know as Artemis to the Greeks) in Ephesus. Gordianus, aged just eighteen, is on an extended journey accompanied by his former tutor, the poet Antipater of Sidon, who was one of the first to list the Seven Wonders.
Marina
If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep,
Untied I still my virgin knot will keep.
Diana, aid my purpose!
Bawd
What have we to do with Diana?
—Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre
The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction Page 3
