The Gods Help Those

by Albert A. Bell

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies, institutions, organizations, or incidents is entirely coincidental.

  The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes. All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.

  Copyright © 2018 by Albert A. Bell, Jr.

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-56474-821-8

  A Perseverance Press Book

  Published by John Daniel & Company

  A division of Daniel & Daniel, Publishers, Inc.

  Post Office Box 2790

  McKinleyville, California 95519

  www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance

  Distributed by SCB Distributors (800) 729-6423

  Book design: Eric Larson, Studio E Books, Santa Barbara

  www.studio-e-books.com

  Cover painting:“The Gods Help Those” © by Chi Meredith

  Egg tempera on panel

  www.sites.google.com/site/meredithchiartist

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Bell, Albert A., Jr., (date) author.

  Title: The gods help those : a seventh case from the notebooks of Pliny the Younger / by Albert A. Bell, Jr.

  Description: McKinleyville, California : John Daniel and Company, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018003085 | ISBN [first print edition] 9781564746085 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Pliny, the Younger—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.E485 G63 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003085

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  Cast of Characters

  Glossary of Terms

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  I

  This makes three days of rain without any let-up,” Tacitus groused. “And no sign that it’s going to stop any time soon. It must be about the sixth hour—although who can tell—and it just won’t stop.”

  The rain had not been especially heavy, but Tacitus was right. It simply would not stop. Autumn can be a wet season in Rome, but this September was well beyond anything I could remember. We were sitting under the colonnade that runs around the garden of my house on the Esquiline Hill, watching the fish pond fill up and overflow. I was reading some poetry written by my friend Caninius Rufus, who had asked for my comments on some passages about the eruption of Vesuvius. The topic still sends shivers down my spine, even six years after I witnessed the disaster and my uncle died there, but I had promised to give Caninius my reaction.

  In a corner of the colonnade to our right sat my wife, Livia, and her mother, Pompeia Celerina, along with several of their servant women. They were here at my mother’s invitation—certainly not mine—to celebrate my upcoming birthday. Pompeia has been in my house on several occasions recently, but this was the first time I’d seen Livia in nearly four months. She and I have reached what I can only describe as an uneasy truce in the fiasco that we call our marriage. She lives on her estate in Umbria, a legacy of her first husband, and I keep my relationship with my servant Aurora in the background.

  My mother and her most trusted servant and confidante, Naomi, sat in the corner of the colonnade to our left. Naomi was reading something to my mother and a few other servant women.

  Tacitus stood up, stretched, and held out his hand to feel the rain, as though he hoped it might prove to be an illusion. “Three…days.” The volume of his voice made us aware of his impatience, but, out of deference to my mother, he left out the sort of colorful adjective with which he would normally have modified “days.”

  “Three days?” my mother called to us. “That’s nothing. Imagine it raining for forty days and forty nights.”

  I got up from my seat and Tacitus and I walked over to the women. Except for Naomi and my mother, they stood.

  “Forty days and forty nights?” I said. “That amount of water would submerge most of Rome. Another day and the Tiber will be flooding the lower part of the city. We’re lucky to be on this hill. Where did you get such an absurd number?”

  Naomi rolled up the scroll from which she had been reading, but Mother put her hand on it. “It’s all right, dear,” she said. When she looked up at me I noticed the sadness in her eyes that has become a permanent fixture. “It comes from the story Naomi was reading us, about a man who survived a flood.”

  “Oh, yes,” Tacitus said. “Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha. But I don’t remember any mention of forty days and forty nights, or any particular period of time.” He scratched his chin.

  “No, this is a different story,” Mother said. “It comes from a book”—she looked at Naomi—“What’s it called again, dear?”

  “In Greek it’s ‘Genesis,’ my lady,” Naomi said quietly, “a book about beginnings. It’s one of the sacred books of my people.”

  Naomi and her son Phineas, my most able scribe, were taken captive when Jerusalem fell to Titus and his army fifteen years ago. She and my mother have become more like sisters since they discovered that they both lost a daughter at birth at about the same time and have both lost a brother in recent years. I worry that Naomi is influencing my mother with her bizarre beliefs. Mother has gone with her to their synagogue and given money to decorate the place. It’s her money, so I can’t do anything to stop her. To keep peace in the house I don’t voice my objections, though I certainly have some.

  “May I see that?” I held out my hand and Naomi grudgingly gave me the book, like a child whose favorite toy was being taken away.

  The script, which I recognized immediately as Phineas’ work, was larger than usual. I would have to talk to him about his use of my materials. Or I could confiscate the scroll and keep it in my library. I wondered how many others he had copied. Naomi did say “one of” her sacred books.

  “Rather large script, isn’t it?” Tacitus said.

  “Phineas does that to make it easier for me to read,” Mother said.

  “Where is the story about a flood?” I asked.

  “It’s about five pages in,” my mother said.

  I unrolled the scroll far enough and Tacitus looked on as I read about a god getting angry at the human race and deciding to annihilate us by means of a flood. One man was told to build a boat and take his family and numerous animals aboard.

  “Wait a minute,” Tacitus said, pointing to two passages. “This passage says one pair of each animal, but back here it says one pair of every unclean animal and seven pairs of every clean animal. Which animals are clean and which unclean?”

  “It’s a question of our law, my lord,” Naomi said, still seated. Her close friendship with my mother has given her privileges that no other slave in my house, except for Aurora, enjoys. “Some animals are acceptable for sacrifice. They’re the clean ones, but others are unclean.”

  “So how many animals were on the boat?”

  Naomi raised her hands in a gesture of ignorance. “I don’t know, my lord. A huge number, I’m sure.”

  “Must have been a damn big boat!” Tacitus laughed. “Where did this Noah live?”

  �
�I believe he lived in southern Mesopotamia, my lord.”

  “Have you ever been there?” Tacitus asked.

  “No, my lord.”

  “Well, I have. There are no trees in southern Mesopotamia, or anywhere in Mesopotamia. That’s why they build things out of mud bricks.”

  “This happened a long time ago, my lord. There must have been trees there then.”

  “I believe it’s always been a desert.”

  “This says,” I put in, “that Noah took only his wife, three sons, and their wives on board.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “And everyone else drowned?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “But then, after the flood they would have been the only humans, meaning that the entire human race today is descended from that one family. That’s positively incestuous.” I wrinkled my nose.

  “Well, it could account for some of the crazy behavior we see every day,” Tacitus said, with a jerk of his head toward Domitian’s house on the Palatine.

  “I’ll grant you that.” Everyone knew that Domitian, in addition to the other bizarre behavior he demonstrated, was having an affair with Julia, the daughter of his deceased brother Titus. I thought it best not to dwell on that. “But how do you account for Ethiopians and Indians and other races? Greek and Roman women don’t give birth to any kind of children except Greeks and Romans, unless the father is from somewhere else.”

  Tacitus nodded. “The story of Deucalion and Pyrrha makes more sense. Or less nonsense. It happened in a place where there are trees, so they had material to build a boat. And afterwards, they repopulated the earth by throwing stones—the ‘bones of their mother,’ Gaia—over their shoulders. The stones became people—males from Deucalion’s stones and women from Pyrrha’s.”

  “Nothing incestuous about that,” I said. “Nothing logical, but certainly nothing incestuous.”

  Before we could carry the discussion to any further degree of absurdity, my steward, Demetrius, came out of the house. “My lord, forgive me, but someone is here to see you.”

  “Do you know what’s it about?” I was afraid it was bad news, if someone had come out in this weather.

  “No, my lord. He says he needs to talk to you.”

  Tacitus and I, with Mother and her servant women trailing us and Livia and Pompeia joining the crowd, went into the atrium and found three rain-soaked men standing just inside the door, one slightly in front of the other two. They wore the uniform of the vigiles urbani, the watchmen who patrol the city. Their primary responsibility is to look for fires, but that couldn’t be why they were in my house now. Rain dripped from their crested helmets and glistened on their polished metal breastplates.

  “Good afternoon,” I said.

  “Good day to you, sir,” the man in front said, with a quick nod of his head. He had a somewhat spectral appearance, with a thin, hooked nose and deep-set eyes. “Are you Gaius Pliny?”

  “Yes, I am. What can I do for you?”

  “Sir, I’m Lucius Macronius of the second century of the fourth cohort. I’m afraid I bring bad news. The storehouse you own on the banks of the Tiber has collapsed.”

  “By the gods!” I said. “What caused that?”

  “The rains have swollen the river, sir. It washed away the ground under the building.”

  Pompeia gasped. “Is that the building you and I bought together, Gaius?”

  “I own three warehouses along the Tiber,” I reminded her. My worst fear, though, was that ours was the one that had collapsed. In an effort to improve my relationship with my mother-in-law, I had offered to find some property for her to invest in. She isn’t a poor woman, but she will never be able to buy business property in Rome out of her own resources, so I had offered to match whatever sum she wanted to put up.

  I turned back to Macronius. “Where was this warehouse?”

  “At the south end of the island in the Tiber, sir.”

  Pompeia groaned loudly. I did too, but inwardly. That had to be our building.

  “I’m ruined!” Pompeia cried.

  “No, you’re not.” I tried to sound hopeful. “I told you I would reimburse anything you might lose if this investment didn’t work out.”

  For me, though, this would mean a sizeable loss. We had bought the place two months ago and made a few repairs. We were expecting to start receiving shipments as soon as the rain let up. There’s always a rush of business in the autumn, just before the sailing season ends, and ships are looking for places to unload their cargos. That’s when storehouse fees go up. But I couldn’t make anything from a pile of rubble and, to compound the problem, I would have to give Pompeia sixty thousand sesterces as well as losing ninety thousand from my accounts. I hadn’t told her the actual cost of the building.

  “Gaius,” my mother said, “what are you going to do?” She leaned on Naomi’s arm, as she seemed to be doing more and more these days.

  “Well, there’s nothing to be done about it right now, Mother. When the rain lets up, I’ll go down and look the situation over.”

  “Ah…sir,” Macronius said reluctantly, “our centurion wants you to come now.”

  “In this weather? Why? What’s so urgent about a building collapsing?”

  “It’s not just the building, sir. There were six people in it. They’re all dead.”

  “By the gods, Gaius!” Livia wailed behind me. “I see you for the first time in four months and now somebody is dead, just like the last time we were together. What sort of curse have the gods put on you?”

  I wanted to say, Having you as my wife, but I bit my lip just in time.

  “Livia, this is an unfortunate accident, unlike that incident last summer. These poor wretches were probably just seeking shelter from the rain. There’s nothing sinister about it.”

  “I don’t care.” Livia stamped her foot and folded her arms over her chest. “Mother, I’m going home tomorrow. I urge you to do the same.”

  “But what about Gaius’ birthday?” Pompeia reached out to Livia, who drew back from her. “It’s not for two more days. We can’t just leave without—”

  “You’ll be amazed at how fast I can leave in the morning.” She turned to one of her servant women. “Go, start packing. Tell the others we’ll be leaving at dawn.”

  “In the rain, my lady?”

  “Rain, snow…volcanic eruption.” She sneered at me. “Nothing is going to keep me here another day.” Gathering her cloak around her short, stocky body as if she needed protection from more than just the rain, Livia walked quickly toward her rooms, with her mother pleading in her wake.

  Letting out a huge sigh, I told Demetrius to gather a few servants to accompany me. “You know the ones I like to have with me.” I touched the lobe of my right ear. An assailant had once nicked Aurora in that spot. Demetrius and I used the gesture as a signal when it seemed unwise to speak her name. I didn’t care which other servants he recruited, as long as she was among them.

  “Certainly, my lord. Give me just a few moments.”

  In the several days that Livia had been in the house, Aurora had become virtually invisible, eating in the kitchen and bathing with the other servants, which was not her usual habit. But then she would appear at my door during the night. Knowing how much Livia hated her, she had suggested I send her to my estate at Laurentum while Livia was here, but I refused. Livia had promised that she would not make any objection to my relationship with Aurora as long as I did not flaunt it in front of her, as some men do to their wives—as her first husband did to her with his favorite boy. I could not bear the thought of a lengthy period away from Aurora, so I was determined to make Livia live up to our bargain.

  “The loss of your warehouse may not be such a disaster after all,” Tacitus said, “if it rids you of Livia as well.”

  I glared him into silence as we waited for half a dozen of my servants and a few more of his to assemble in the atrium. Normally I would travel with a larger entourage. With the weather keeping most peop
le indoors, though, I thought ten or twelve men would enable us to move through the streets easily enough, and we would have the vigiles with us. Aurora was wearing a drab cloak with a hood pulled over her hair. Our eyes met and my breathing quickened, but we did not exchange any other sign. As we went out the front door, she fell in between Tacitus and me. Our arms touched, the only form of affection we could share. The others formed a cordon around us. Macronius and the men accompanying him walked in front of us. Their cloaks were leather; ours were wool coated with animal fat to repel the rain.

  “Demetrius didn’t tell me what has happened,” Aurora said as soon as the door closed behind us. “Just that you wanted me to accompany you somewhere.”

  Because she was trying so diligently to stay out of Livia’s sight, I hadn’t seen her since the previous evening. I took a moment to refresh my sensation of her—the olive skin, the dark eyes and hair—before I could find my voice. “One of my warehouses on the river has collapsed, the one I bought with Pompeia.”

  “Oh, my, that’s terrible. I’m sure she’s hysterical. But why do you have to go down there now in this awful weather?”

  I jerked my head toward Macronius. “He says his centurion wants me down there. They found six people dead in the wreckage.”

  “Oh, dear gods! But you’re not responsible.”

  “No, but I do want to see the scene before they move everything around.”

  “They’ll probably just throw the bodies into the Tiber,” Tacitus said from the other side of Aurora.

  “I hope not before I’ve at least had a chance to look at them.”

  Aurora shook her head. “Surely you don’t think—”

  “Foul play? No. Not with six people. The poor wretches just wanted to get out of the rain, I’m sure. But I would like to verify that.”

  “You and your damnable curiosity,” Tacitus said.

  “Make way!” a voice behind us commanded. “Make way for Marcus Aquilius Regulus. Make way.”

  Regulus lives farther up the Esquiline than I do. He hated my uncle and now hates me, a sentiment that has always been returned with relish from our side. I was surprised that he was out in this weather, but I knew he would have a large contingent of servants, so I motioned my men to one side.