Dog-Headed Death: A Gaius Hesperian Mystery

by Ray Faraday Nelson

  Adrastia looked at her stepson with raised eyebrows. “Spiritual? Him?”

  Serapion flashed her a worried, distracted little smile.

  * * * *

  Odysseus Memnon lay on his bed panting as the room came back into focus and the pain in his chest subsided.

  “Another attack.” He was whispering, though there was no one else in the room to overhear him.

  A pain. A dizziness. A shortness of breath. Nothing, he decided, to worry about. It would be better not to tell his doctors about such a minor matter, and besides, they might bleed him, and he was sure he needed every drop of blood he had!

  “I’ll rest a moment,” he murmured, shifting into a position where the pain was less—where it seemed almost to vanish altogether. There was no hurry. This confrontation with his family could wait. In fact, it would do them good to stew a bit before he threw his secret, like a handful of mud, into their faces.

  He laughed softly, wheezing, but he did not laugh long. There was something frightening about that wheeze, something that smacked of death. He thought, I never was too healthy, not even as a boy. Odysseus the sickly, Odysseus the little guy, the runt. His father’s face materialized in his mind with an expression of mingled pity and contempt. Croton Memnon had been a muscular man in his time, like Serapion but without Serapion’s cultured airs. Croton Memnon had worked very hard all his life as a shipwright, but had never been able to get completely out of debt. He’d told Odysseus time and time again, “That’s what a man lives for—to work!” What pride there was in old Croton’s voice when he said those words!

  Then, when Odysseus was twelve, Croton was imprisoned for debt.

  Odysseus had a good memory.

  He remembered his father’s face, on the other side of the bars. The pity and contempt were gone. That face, that always before had been clean-shaven as the divine Alexander’s, was now hidden behind a tangled graying beard, but nothing could hide that new expression, the look of frozen surprise, the look of a man whose gods had departed. He did not talk that way. He did not talk much at all about gods or abstract things, but it was there in his face, the clear message, My gods have betrayed and abandoned me.

  Such abject despair! Such unconcealed unhappiness!

  A child can forgive his parents anything but unhappiness.

  Odysseus had looked up into that tortured face and said with controlled anger, “Whatever I do, I swear I’ll never be like you!”

  Croton wept, but Odysseus the runt was at that instant transformed. There was no pity or love in him, only the ecstasy of sudden freedom, of rebirth as a new being, of an awakening from a kind of walking sleep. In a single leap he had become what he was to be as an adult; in a single instant he had changed more than in all the years before or since, and his mother and brother were shocked to see him, as they left the prison, singing and dancing in the street.

  The next day Odysseus marched fearlessly up to his father’s employer and demanded—not asked for, but demanded—a job, and the astonished shipmaster had given it to him, in spite of the youth and small stature of this ugly boy who stood before him, fists on hips like a young Julius Caesar.

  That night Odysseus said to his mother, “I’ll take care of you now.”

  Odysseus worked like a gnome and schemed like a Herod, and two months had not passed before Demetrius, his younger brother, was also working at the shipyard, much to his own surprise.

  Two years later the boys were able to buy their father out of debt, and thus out of jail.

  Croton did not thank them.

  Odysseus had not expected that he would.

  He understood his father now, looking down on him from a great height, and it did not matter to him whether his father was grateful or not. When Demetrius said blissfully, “At last we’ve got a little security,” Croton had looked up from his bowl of meal with all the hate of a dying animal in a gladiatorial spectacle, and only Odysseus really knew why.

  His mother said, “Now, Odysseus, you can relax and have a little fan, like a normal boy.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then when, I ask you?”

  “When I’m a Roman gentleman.”

  Of course they all laughed at him then.

  They went on laughing for days, telling all the neighbors, whispering, glancing at him out of the corners of their eyes.

  Then, quite suddenly, the laughter ceased.

  Odysseus had caught his overseer embezzling and exposed him. Before Odysseus had had a few friends, but now that was over. He and, because of him, his whole family were no longer members of the community of the working poor. Everyone was stealing, some on a large scale, most on a small. Not one of them could risk the danger of a friend who was too honest.

  The embezzler—one of old Croton’s best friends—was tried, found guilty and sent to the mines where, it was said, he lasted all of a year and a half.

  Odysseus went into the office, almost as an adopted son of the boss.

  At the age of twenty-two, Odysseus became overseer, and everyone under him was older than he was except for his brother Demetrius and a handful of the rawest apprentices.

  His father had been drinking heavily for some time now. Drink had cost him his job. Drink had kept him from getting another. When he heard of his son’s promotion he waited for him in the evening, singing in a bitter, off-key voice and drinking unwatered wine right from the camel skin flask, chasing everyone else from the room.

  “Is that you, Odysseus?” he called out as his son entered.

  “Who else?”

  “They say you do the hiring now, down at the yard.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, now…” He gave Odysseus a wink. “Here’s your own father looking for a job, as hard a worker as ever swung an adz. What do you say, boy?”

  “I say no.”

  “What? I don’t believe it!” Croton dragged himself to his feet and stood there, swaying.

  “You’re not a good risk.”

  Croton screamed wordlessly and kicked over the table, then came at his son with a drawn kitchen knife, still a head taller and fifty pounds heavier than Odysseus the runt.

  Odysseus had a knife too, a beautiful thing with a jeweled pommel and floral designs embossed on its long curving blade. Just once he plunged it into his father’s stomach, all the way to the hilt, then as quickly jerked it out again. Croton did not fall immediately, but when he did Odysseus stood over him for several minutes, watching the light fade out of his father’s eyes.

  When he was dead, Odysseus finally spoke, very softly.

  “You gave me no choice, old man.”

  Odysseus was not brought to trial, thanks to the intervention of his powerful employer.

  He saw less and less of his mother.

  When she died, a few months later, neither Odysseus nor Demetrius was present, but they gave her the finest funeral the neighborhood had ever seen.

  On the night of her death Demetrius had been in a whorehouse and Odysseus had been visiting an old Jewish rabbi who was teaching him how to read and write Greek like a gentleman. (He was teaching himself bookkeeping and mathematics, and all the texts were in Greek.)

  He learned the ways of money so quickly it was as if he’d learned it all in some past life, and now was only brushing up. Clever men began to fear his cleverness, and stupid men feared him even more because they thought he was demon-possessed. Odysseus encouraged their fear. It made everyone eager to please him. It kept the workers under him from giving him any trouble.

  He heard them whispering behind his back, “A man who’d kill his own father…” and he smiled.

  When he asked rich but superstitious men to lend him vast sums of money, they hastened to oblige.

  “Yes, Memnon. Of course, Memnon. We know
your reputation…”

  Odysseus leased a cargo ship.

  The established shipping companies temporarily dropped their rates, after consulting together in secret meetings in dockside inns.

  Odysseus was forced into bankruptcy.

  One step away from debtor’s prison, he sought out a Parthian agent and made a deal.

  “Yes, Memnon. We pay your debts, give you another loan, provide you with steady financial backing.”

  “And I smuggle slaves, arms, money, information—anything that will either bring a high price or help the Parthian cause.”

  “Exactly.”

  There was an unlooked-for bonus.

  Parthian agents in high places arranged for Odysseus to be granted Roman citizenship.

  Before he was thirty Odysseus was able to buy out, one by one, most of the established companies that had conspired to ruin him in his earlier venture.

  He sailed to Rome—his one and only visit to the Imperial capital— and when he returned his brother met him at the gangplank.

  “Odysseus! What’s the meaning of that medallion hanging from your neck?”

  “I’ve earned the honorary title of ‘Caesars Friend’!”

  “But that’s impossible!”

  “Not if one foots the bill for one of the Emperor Caligula’s gladiatorial games.”

  He was so Roman now.

  Osiris-Serapis? Ignorant superstition! Jupiter was a god who stood for something, even if it was only the power of the Roman army.

  He had learned the paradoxical Roman morality, too—so permissive in some ways, yet so puritanical in others.

  He smiled and slowly shook his head, remembering.

  He remembered his first wife, Octavia.

  He still was not sure it was true, but he’d been told she was distantly related to the Ptolemaic dynasty and the dead but still famous Queen Cleopatra.

  True or not, the claim had gained him some measure of acceptance into upper class Alexandrian society, a colony of displaced bluebloods who lived in the glorious past before the Romans took over Egypt. Such social connections were useful but expensive—the bluebloods were often in need of financial aid to help maintain their facades.

  “Parasites,” muttered Odysseus Memnon, lying on his green-draped bed.

  Octavia had borne him one son, Serapion, and one daughter, Hathor, then a number of stillbirths, and he finally divorced her and sent her to Rome so he could marry the young and beautiful but shallow Adrastia. Adrastia was, perhaps, the greatest mistake he’d made.

  “Bitch,” muttered Odysseus Memnon, on his bed.

  His frown passed quickly.

  He thought, I’ve done it. I’m a Roman gentleman.

  That, at least, was good.

  But it was no good to be old.

  It was no good to have a son who made light of the hard-won Memnon financial empire, no good to have a timid brother who kept trying to maintain the status quo and protect what they had by never taking risks, no good having a daughter who no longer confided in him the way she had when she was a little girl. He’d spent a small fortune bringing her up almost as if she were a boy, giving her a boy’s education in Greek and rhetoric, even allowing her, when she asked for it, to be given training in arms, in the use of sword, horse and javelin. Now she acted as if she were a complete stranger! Sometimes he suspected her of having a secret lover somewhere, yet she’d always shown little interest in the opposite sex.

  No, these things weren’t good.

  They weren’t right!

  But the worst of it was the way his wife Adrastia treated him, like some sort of idiot. She spent his wealth without the slightest understanding of the lifetime of effort it had taken to amass it.

  “Parasites,” he growled under his breath. “They’re all parasites.”

  But this strange new religion, Christianity—it might prove to be the ideal weapon to put them in their places. What blame could attach to a man who, like a holy Pythagorean philosopher, renounced all worldly goods to become a humble mendicant? And that would certainly put the religious pretensions of Serapion in a different light!

  With this thought bolstering him, he rose, chuckling, from his bed and shuffled off to preside at the supper table.

  * * * *

  “Hathor?”

  “Yes, Father?”

  Odysseus Memnon, reclining on the couch at the head of the table, cast a calculating glance at Hathor on another couch to his right. Serapion, lying beside and slightly behind her, concentrated on nibbling the date he held delicately between his thumb and forefinger, but Hathor met the old man’s eyes with perfect composure.

  “Sabella told me.”

  “Told you what, Father?”

  “You know.”

  Adrastia, who shared Odysseus’ couch, gave him a peevish little shove. “Don’t tease, dear.”

  “Sabella told me she saw you in the Egyptian quarter. Is that where you’re hiding your lover?”

  He studied her reaction, but she gave nothing away.

  “Sabella was lying,” she said, still meeting his eyes squarely.

  “Sabella does not lie,” interrupted Adrastia with mild indignation.

  “All slaves lie,” said Demetrius gloomily. His couch was on the opposite side of the table from the one shared by Hathor and Serapion.

  “Well, if she didn’t lie, then she must have been mistaken, Father. Whatever would I be doing in a place like that?”

  “Ah, Hathor, that’s exactly what I was going to ask you!”

  An uneasy ripple of laughter passed around the table. There was no joy, Odysseus realized, in their laughter, just a momentary release from tension. They’re afraid, he thought.

  He was enjoying himself more than he had in years. “We’re finished,” he told the two eunuch slaves, Rophos and Wakar, who stood at ease nearby. The two began unobtrusively clearing away the remains of the long and delectable supper, and Odysseus noticed that his family had apparently not been very hungry; there were so many leftovers.

  “And you, my fine young man—what are you doing to protect your sister from handsome thieves and fortune hunters?”

  Serapion replied curtly, “She needs no protection. She’s as good with weapons as any man, and twice as cunning.”

  At any other time Odysseus might have been angry, but tonight he had a secret of his own that undoubtedly dwarfed any possible secrets his children might be keeping from him. He turned his attention to his brother Demetrius.

  “And you, what—or whom—have you sold lately?”

  “Whatever I’ve done,” said old Demetrius stiffly, “I’ve done for the good of the family.”

  The family, thought Odysseus. Anything for the family. That was what everyone said. That’s what he’d said himself up until quite recently, but now…

  Last the old man turned to his wife, the beautiful Adrastia. The hairdresser, it seemed, had produced a masterpiece, but none of the Memnons gave it more than a fleeting glance.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to spend somewhat less on your hair in the future, my dear.”

  She paused, then said coldly, “Indeed? How much less?”

  He let his gaze travel slowly around the circle. All were trying to pretend indifference, but even proud Serapion was hanging on his father’s words. They knew him. They knew this was the moment when he would tell them his secret, and they sensed that it would be something unexpected and… unpleasant.

  “Nothing at all,” said Odysseus Memnon.

  “What kind of nonsense…” began his wife.

  “Not nonsense.” He was gloating now, triumphant. “You see, I’m going to join the Christians.”

  They looked at him with stunned astonishment. He noticed that only Deme
trius was not completely surprised, only horrified, like a man who sees a nightmare coming true. “Odysseus, you fool…”

  “Yes, my dear brother, you heard me correctly. I’m joining the Christians, and when I do I plan to hand over every last drachma to their leader, the Apostle Mark. Then I’ll sell every ship, every bit of real estate—everything I own, and give the proceeds of those sales, too, to the Christians.”

  A voice piped up from the doorway. “Sell everything? Even me?” It was Sabella.

  “Even you,” he told her gently, “but I’ll see you get a kind master.”

  Slave and master contemplated each other for an anguished moment, then, abruptly she burst into tears and ran from the room.

  Odysseus turned again to his family. “All my life I’ve been looking for something. You know that’s true, don’t you? Rejoice, then, that I’ve found it at last! Rejoice, if you love me!”

  Still they did not speak.

  “What’s this? No cries of joy? No happy hugs and kisses for old Odysseus? But perhaps that’s because you’ll miss me so much when I’ve left you. Then listen, my little brood. You can accompany me into the brotherhood of the Church!”

  The silence that followed was broken only by the rustle of silk as Adrastia, holding herself stiffly erect as if balancing her elaborate hairdo on her head, stood up and looked down at her husband with a cold contempt warmed with only the faintest trace of pity. It was he, not she, who first looked away.

  She said, speaking not to his face but to the bald dome of his bowed head, “So this is your little surprise, darling. You don’t give us much choice, do you? Now, before you have a chance to change your will, one of us will simply have to do you in.”

  * * * *

  “The Blues!”

  “The Reds!”

  The hysterical shouts were faint in the distance.

  “The Greens! Go! Go, Greens!”

  Almost everyone was at the chariot races. Their cheering echoed through the deserted streets of Alexandria as they hysterically screamed out the colors of their favorite teams. The flies and seagulls went about their business, paying no attention.