Roman Games

by Bruce Macbain

  Introductions were made. Amatia appraised the newcomer with observant eyes. “I am only a provincial countrywoman,” she said. “Forgive me if your fame has not reached us. What sort of poems do you write?”

  “Yes, well,” Pliny broke in hastily “Perhaps this is not the time.”

  “But it is, my friend,” Martial said, reaching into the fold of his cloak and bringing out a small scroll.” If I may, this is a gift for your charming wife. Our conversation last night put me in mind of it. Years ago in Spain, during one particularly bitter winter, a little slave girl of ours, Erotion was her name—I told you about her—well, she took sick and died just six days short of her sixth birthday. I was fond of her—well, we all were. I wrote an elegy for her. Would you favor me by setting it to music, Calpurnia?”

  She took the scroll from his hand, unrolled it, and read it aloud. When she came to the end there was silence around the table and Pliny looked at his guest as though seeing him for the first time.

  “It’s beautiful, sir.” She regarded him gravely and repeated the last line. “Gently cover her tender bones, ye rugged earth, for she trod so light on thee.” She rewound the scroll and tucked it in her bosom. “I will do my best with it, and thank you.”

  Suddenly the poet was embarrassed—an unaccustomed emotion for him. To cover it, he lifted his cup and drank deeply. “Yes, well,” he blustered, “didn’t mean to interrupt things.” He turned instead to the older woman. “Amatia, this Verpa business, then. I confess I’m curious. How did you come to be in that dubious household?”

  Amatia repeated her story, adding that Scortilla seemed especially glad to receive her, actually flattered that her home was recommended by the temple authorities. “She seemed lonely, troubled.”

  “Most unpleasant woman,” Pliny broke in. “The whole damned family. Imagine those priests sending this unsuspecting lady to that house. What an unworldly lot they must be.”

  “Which brings us,” said Martial, suddenly sober, “to the mystery.”

  But Amatia had little to tell. She had taken a sleeping draught that night and heard nothing, although her room was not far from Verpa’s. She was awakened by the uproar the next morning when his body was discovered. She came out into the hall to see what the matter was and peeked into Verpa’s room where everyone was milling around and shouting. She had just a glimpse of the horrible, bloody scene and felt an attack of hysteria coming on. She retreated to her room, feeling breathless and faint, and had stayed there until the soldiers discovered her.

  “And your physician took himself off somewhere and never came back?” said Pliny. “On the same day that Verpa died? Curious. More than curious, in fact. Did he say where he was going?” She shook her head. “Well, the city is full of dangers for the unwary. Give me his description and I’ll convey it to the prefect’s office. If he’s come to harm, we’ll learn of it sooner or later. In the meantime, I’ll ask Soranus to have a look at you the next time he comes to examine my wife.”

  “Oh, no, please,” she protested. “I mean, I’m used to Iatrides. He must come back soon.”

  “Well, as you wish.”

  Martial asked what impression she had formed of the family during the days she was there.

  His question seemed to make her uncomfortable. “I mustn’t speak ill of my benefactors, fellow-worshipers of the goddess,” she answered, “but, well, I suppose it wasn’t a very happy family. I began to regret that I had agreed to stay there. So much shouting. I tried not to listen, but you couldn’t avoid it.”

  “Shouting between…?”

  “Verpa and his son, mostly. They had several rows. Lucius complained about not being given enough spending money. He called his father ungrateful. There was some talk about atheistic Jews which I didn’t understand. Then another time they argued about one of the slave girls, Phyllis, I think, and on that occasion the father actually threatened to kill his son if he caught him with her again.”

  “Hmm. And Scortilla?” Pliny asked.

  “She just seemed, I don’t know how to describe it, preoccupied, jumping at the slightest noise. She hardly spoke to either of them as far as I could tell.”

  There was a thoughtful silence all around until finally, Amatia asked, “What will you do now, Pliny? Is the case closed? I suppose there’s no doubt the slaves did it.”

  “Husband,” Calpurnia asked, “what will they do to the slaves?”

  Pliny had no desire to tell her, but she persisted. “Some will be dressed in shirts covered with pitch and burned alive. Others will be thrown to the lions in the arena.” The girl gave a shudder.

  Zosimus, Pliny’s secretary, who had said little all evening, looked straight ahead, not a muscle in his face betraying his feelings. Zosimus had been born a slave in this house and, although he had been educated, cherished, cared for when he was sick, and finally rewarded with freedom, he vibrated with a sympathy for the enslaved that none of these others would ever understand.

  “It is the mos maiorum, child,” Amatia explained, touching Calpurnia’s arm.

  “You are a traditionalist, dear lady,” Pliny said. “I admire that in you, so rare these days. And yet one’s human feelings rebel…”

  “Oh, yes of course,” she murmured.

  “But, to answer your question, the case is not closed. Not until I know for a certainty who killed Ingentius Verpa.”

  That night Pliny lay in bed, waiting for sleep to come, and thinking how pleasant it was that Calpurnia, his darling Calpurnia, had a new friend.

  Chapter Twelve

  The seventh day before the Ides of Germanicus.

  Day three of the Games.

  The first hour of the day.

  The usual crop of drowsy-eyed clients filled Pliny’s atrium. With one significant addition—Martial. Pliny had half expected this, but didn’t relish it. He had hoped to have the poet as a genial acquaintance, even a helpful assistant in the Verpa affair, but not as a client. But by attending the salutatio, Martial was proposing himself for that status, and Pliny didn’t see how he could refuse. In a moment of careless generosity, he’d brought it on himself. Now, as the poet’s patron, he had obligations toward him. If the mos maiorum still meant anything at all, he would have to use what small political capital he possessed to get his poems read by the emperor. This meant fawning on the chamberlain, Parthenius—a thought which filled him with disgust. Well, all that was for another day. He had too much else on his plate at the moment.

  When the others shuffled out, clutching their daily handouts of food and coin, Martial made no move to leave. It was an awkward moment for both men. But before either could speak, a strange voice sounded from the back of the room. Pliny, looking up, saw that two men whom he did not recognize lingered near the door. One, the shorter of the two, decently dressed in a Greek cloak; the other tall, shabby, long-bearded, and very old. They approached, the short man taking the lead, bowing as he came.

  “I am Evaristus, bishop of Rome,” the man said. “My companion is Ioannes of Patmos. He is a visitor to our city. We are Christians.” He said it as easily as one might say, We are rug merchants. He was a man of middle age, olive-skinned, with gray starting in his beard. He searched Pliny’s face with intense black eyes.

  Pliny returned a blank look. “Christians,” he said, trying to remember in what connection he had heard the word before. “You are their high priest?”

  “One of them,” Evaristus gave a deprecating smile.

  “And your business with me?”

  “Today our brothers Pollux and the young man Arminius, and our sisters Modestina, Artemisia, and Graciliana are sitting at the feet of God. They will live forever, hallelujah. But I have come to beg for their bodies, to bury them according to our rite.”

  “This is a police matter, I can’t allow it.”

  But Martial interrupted with an unpleasant laugh. “Immortal are they? What, merely by dying? Seems a cheap and easy way to achieve immortality. Any gladiator can do it. The Isis priests,
so I hear, make you pay through the nose and spend months in initiations.”

  The bishop seemed to notice him for the first time. His black eyes flashed. “You are that poet, I believe.”

  “I am delighted to hear my fame has spread so far.”

  “Oh yes, I know your works: the language of the gutter employed with the skill of an artist for the solitary purpose of drawing blood. The women, whores when they aren’t bald, toothless and eyeless; the men, gluttons, hypocrites and perverts.” Martial opened his mouth but the bishop silenced him with a dismissive flick of the hand. “I know what you’re going to say: you attack the vice, not the person; your verse is lascivious while you yourself are chaste. But I tell you, God sees through that false rhetoric.”

  “Rhetoric! What does a drag-tail fellow like you know about rhetoric?” Martial sputtered.

  “I was a professor of it for twenty years before my eyes were opened.” It was said with more than a trace of pride.

  And, for once in his life, the poet found himself without a riposte.

  While the two men stared each other down, Pliny was recalling a public reading he had attended some years earlier, given by the historian Cornelius Tacitus: How these Christians were every bit as atheistical as the Jews, from whom their sect had sprung, though now they claimed to hate the Jews. Like everything filthy and degrading, Tacitus had said, they eventually found their way to Rome. Nero accused them of starting the great fire that had nearly destroyed the city some thirty years ago, and executed some of them with particular savagery—so much so that they excited a degree of public sympathy. It was the common belief, nevertheless, that they engaged in orgies and sacrificed children to their god and even ate them. Probably an exaggeration, but who could say, since they practiced their rites in secret.

  Then another thought struck him.

  “Fellow, bishop, whatever you call yourself, answer me one question. Is the seven-branched candelabrum a symbol of your cult?”

  “Certainly not! That is for the ones who reject Our Lord, who misunderstand their own prophecies. Our symbol of recognition is a fish.”

  “Then Pollux and the others you named are not Jews?”

  “Not since they chose the true path to salvation. I converted Pollux myself some years ago, and from that day onward he never struck a man.”

  “You mentioned four others besides Pollux. We found a sixth body, a boy of twelve or thirteen, Hylas he was called. Is he not one of yours?”

  Evaristus shook his head. “He is not known to me.”

  Pliny motioned Martial to come closer and they exchanged a few whispered words. If Pollux was, in fact, one of these Christians, then perhaps the sketch of the candelabrum and the Jewish dagger had been planted as clues to implicate him by someone who thought he was still a Jew. And who would that someone be? Lucius leapt to mind; he certainly had the motive. But the question remained, how was it done? Who had come through that open window, if not a Jewish assassin? And how could Pollux not have heard sounds of the struggle? And then why was the boy Hylas killed by the other slaves if he was neither a Jew nor a Christian? Whatever theory he had had about the case before was now shipwrecked. He would have to begin all over again. There were too many puzzles, and Pliny, whose whole professional life dealt with certainties, with documents and numbers, hated puzzles. He discharged his annoyance at Evaristus.

  “They say you are atheists and haters of mankind. You gather secretly like rats in the sewers. You do not sacrifice to our emperor. If even half what they say about you is true, you deserve to be punished. What gives you the nerve to come here and ask me for a favor?”

  The bishop returned his angry gaze with eyes as bright as steel; there was no fear in them. “We are men of peace, we obey the laws and those who are set over us. We pray for the emperor, though not to him. We mean no harm to anyone. I say to you, Senator, save yourself, be born again in Christ Jesus—”

  “Macro!” Pliny shouted to his door keeper. “Escort these men out.”

  Until then, the bishop’s companion, the cadaverous, bearded ancient in his threadbare cloak, had stood silently by, giving no sign that he understood what was being said. Macro’s firm hand on his shoulder set him off. Without warning, he flung his scrawny arms wide and burst into shrill Greek. “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great. Babylon, the harlot of the seven hills. Alas, alas for the great city that was clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet. Alas that in a single hour she should be laid waste…” He stared with all his eyes, seeing something that was invisible to the rest of them. While his breath came short and sharp between his teeth, he poured out a torrent of words.

  Bishop Evaristus, for the first time showing fear, looked this way and that. “The vision comes upon him sometimes, unfortunate timing, please excuse us…” He tried, with Macro, to push Ioannes toward the door but the holy man was not to be silenced. The Greek was so rapid, the man gasping in the throes of his vision, Pliny could only understand bits of it—a woman riding on a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns—the seven heads were the seven hills of Rome and the woman was drunk on the blood of God’s people—foul and malignant sores on those who wore the mark of the beast and worshipped its image, plainly the emperor himself—the seas, the rivers, and springs were turning to blood and every living thing dying—now the kingdom of the beast, plunged in darkness and men gnawing their tongues in agony—tormented in sulfurous flames…

  “Enough!” Pliny sprang from his chair. “Monsters! Out of my house!”

  When they were gone, the old man’s voice echoing down the street, Martial groped for a stool and sank on to it. There was a moment of shocked silence while the two men looked at each other.

  “What on earth was that about?” breathed Pliny.

  Martial shook his head. “Sounds treasonous to me.”

  “Well, that’s not our concern right now.”

  “Yes, but d’you think one of them could be Verpa’s killer? Blame it on the Jews?”

  “I doubt it. Why bother if we’re all going to go up in flames soon anyway?”

  The sound of a girl weeping came from behind the half-open door of one of the side chambers.

  “Calpurnia!” Pliny ran to her at once and clasped her in his arms. No telling how much she had understood but the girl seemed scared out of her wits. A moment later, Amatia appeared from her bedroom, her face still puffy with sleep. Between them they got Calpurnia to a couch.

  Martial watched discreetly from the sidelines. When some calm had been restored he asked Pliny if he was going back to Verpa’s house today.

  “I’m staying with my wife. Tomorrow the will is going to be read. I will attend that. Wills, at least, are something I understand. Come with me if you like.”

  The poet bowed himself out.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The sixth day before the Ides of Germanicus. Day four of the Games.

  The fourth hour of the day.

  For the third time in four days Pliny reluctantly mounted his litter and was carried above the jostling crowds, the choking dust and stinks of the city. The foot traffic eddied around his conveyance, a small boat riding a turbulent stream. The heat already felt like the exhalation from a potter’s oven.

  His way took him down the slope of the Esquiline, past the Colosseum and the Temple of Venus and Rome, along the Via Sacra and on into the Forum Romanum. On his left he passed, with a throb of longing, the noble Basilica Julia, the two-storied colonnaded building which occupied nearly the whole north side of the Forum. His view of it sadly was obscured by an immense bronze equestrian statue of Domitian, which towered over the surrounding buildings. But this was his arena, the scene of his triumphs since the day he had argued his first inheritance case there at the age of eighteen. In its vast interior the law courts met in open view of passers-by, and when he pleaded a case, audiences would desert the other orators to gather round him! Over the years, he had made a name for himself and done quite well off his fees. How he wished that this in
terminable month, not yet a third over, would end, allowing him to get back to his proper vocation.

  Leaving the Forum behind, he was carried along the Clivus Argentarius, skirting the north flank of the Citadel, and coming out in the Vicus Pallacinae, near the east end of the Circus Flaminius.

  As he swayed comfortably on the broad shoulders of his bearers, Pliny let his mind drift. He realized with a twinge of guilt that all during the morning salutatio he had scarcely heard a word anyone had said, including himself, so preoccupied was he with this wretched case. (Martial had sent a note, saying he’d had a late night and begged to be excused.)

  Should he consider now that the Jewish business was a blind, intended to throw him off the track? And, if so, by whom? By Lucius? Or even Scortilla? Or, both of them? He knew so little. A man like Verpa would have had hundreds of enemies who wished him dead, any one of whom might have found a way to accomplish it. But how? A room with one high, narrow window and one door guarded by a man who, in spite of being a slave and a former Judean rebel, struck Pliny as truthful. And who was now revealed to have been a different sort of atheist altogether.

  At any rate, today’s task was to interrogate those few slaves who had had the run of the house that night, something he should have done in the first place. That and listen to the reading of the will. Perhaps there would be a clue there.

  His bearers, by this time, could have found their way blindfolded to the imposing porphyry-columned entrance to Verpa’s house. They set him down before the bronze-studded double doors which, today, were decorated with dark acanthus wreathes and bows of cypress, proclaiming that the deceased’s lying-in-state had begun.

  The great man lay encoffined in a vast gilded mummy case resting on a black-draped catafalque which occupied the center of the atrium. The head of the case was painted with a likeness of Verpa’s face which, despite the artist’s best intentions, did not completely disguise the hard jaw line, the pugnacious nose, the heavy-lidded eyes. The actual burial was scheduled for four days hence. Were those alien gods, Pliny wondered, who stood ready to receive his spirit on the banks of the Styx, or wherever it was Egyptians went—were they quite prepared for what they were getting in this pretty package?