by Ben Pastor
"What is the occasion?"
"Master's birthday, and an early start to Saturnalia."
The calling out of the alphabet, shouted from inside, loudly betrayed the repeated birthday toasts to each letter of the host's full name. "M ... A . .. N . . . I... U ..." The girls let out high-pitched little cries, no doubt because glasses were flying around, to be smashed for good luck.
Aelius unclasped his army cape. "Bring my thanks, good wishes, and regrets to your master; I am tired and not well."
Three hours later, the party was still raging beyond the wall that separated the wing from the main house. Litters and slave teams had all left, so Aelius assumed that guests and entertainers would spend the night, or stay up until morning. He'd bathed at leisure, read, started a reply to Thermuthis, and now sat in a cozy little library, thinking that Anubina had been "dancing at men's parties" (Thermuthis's words) for six months when he'd met her. The fact would not ordinarily keep him from dinners where girls sang and danced naked and slept with the guests; tonight the idea was unsavory, even though he was not as tired or unwell as he'd said. Head and wrist hurt a little, that was all. Celebrations jarred him, at the close of a day and evening that threatened to change things in more than one way.
The autobiography of Severus, which he'd been marking in anticipation of using it as a source, had long since become a jumble of words escaping attention, and Aelius set it aside. Closing his eyes, with an ear to the cheers of "Long life!" he saw the smoke of the funeral pyre rising from the ustrinum, the overgrown path behind it, Nemesis's temple. Broken images from the day just past and from other days rose before him like flashes in the dark.
Tedium turned to irritation when music and the rattle of tambourines grew to a pulsing rhythm, popular in Egypt and a must at officers' parties. Four beats always repeated, with emphasis on the third, increased in speed to create breathless expectation. Anubina, dancer that she was, disliked the tune. For the same reason, during the Egyptian campaign Aelius cringed whenever he heard it, unwilling as he was to accept that she had been auctioned off at the sound of such music. Men, she'd told him, had lined up to touch her between her legs to make sure, probing her carefully advertised virginity as far as the madam allowed, until a wine merchant from Alexandria bid an extravagant amount of money to uncork her, as he put it, in front of the company. "But afterward I was drunk, Aelius, so I don't remember much. I don't even know if it hurt."
In the Rebellion, the merchant had sided with the usurpers and raised a militia, and those facts—not counting in Aelius's eyes as much as his private grudge, those days—supplied the unhoped-for, honorable justification to cut his throat in battle. He'd never told Anubina, but Thermuthis knew, and it was the only time he'd seen the brothel-keeper afraid of him.
Thus the festive noise vexed him because of his Egyptian memories. But Aelius would lie to himself if he didn't admit that he was thinking, too, of the other woman, standing in the dark of the lonely house between the temple of Nemesis and the arena where her companions would be executed soon.
10 December, Sunday
In the morning, no sign of life came from the main house. Aelius had finally fallen asleep, he who never let go during a poolside rub, under the kneading of a big-handed masseur on Decimus's staff. He awoke at the usual time, after strange dreams of forcing doors only to meet with other doors, each of them promising a wild party beyond, and then opening on darkness and silence. During breakfast, he learned that Decimus's birthday was actually not until January, but he had decided to celebrate it early, "along with early Saturnalia."
"Does he anticipate his birthday often?" Aelius asked the compunctious freedman.
"No, sir. This is the first time."
Along Venus's Street, the snow cover lay nearly untracked. Water ran murky and slow in the canal, between crisp rims of white. Above the roofs of the old brothels, the morning sky shone cloudless, and sun would melt the snow by midday at the latest. Faint sounds of harness from around the corner indicated to Aelius that the first party guests readied to leave. It would be a race between the sun and the feet of litter-bearing slaves, wheels, and hoofs for the mashing of snow, he thought.
Within the hour, the Guardsman he dispatched in civilian clothes to the Circus came back to report that the butcher's stall under the arches had not opened for the day. Shop owners nearby gave different versions, two of which were privileged: He'd been seized for the role his idiot employee had in the night attack at Faunus's Fortune, or he'd run off to avoid arrest.
"Any clue to an upcoming return?"
"None, sir. The fishmonger two shops down says ten hog carcasses were hauled away yesterday evening at closing time, and that was the last they saw of the butcher as well. None of the merchants will say more. Going toward Faunus's Fortune as by your orders, instead, I ran into an unanticipated commotion just before reaching the inn. Children tossing snowballs had chased one another in the narrow spaces between houses, it seems, and stumbled upon a dead body."
Aelius had been dressing to go out and now stopped with his fingers on the bootstraps, frowning. "Not the butcher's!"
"No, sir. One of the idlers said the dead man was a known face, a branded thief. Run through the chest as far as I could tell, and not yet or no longer stiff, apart from the effect of the cold. I overheard that a group of Jews was the first to come by after the children, but hurried back to their district, to avoid trouble. By the time I arrived, the gendarmes were removing the body and let no one stand near."
"It seems an even worse neighborhood than I thought." When Aelius buckled the belt on his tunic, his bandaged wrist sent a sparkle of pain to the elbow. "What about the Minucii ustrinum: Did you check the paths around it for tracks?"
The Guardsman confirmed. "Aside from the main road, where the snow had already been driven and stepped upon, there was no disturbance anywhere around. No human tracks around the arena or the temple of Nemesis either, only the trail of a fox."
With two of his questions answered—regarding the fate of the butcher and Castas safety—Aelius planned his day around a visit to the Jewish quarter, officially to browse through used-book shops. In fact, he meant to look for Baruch ben Matthias. His Guardsman reported that the Jew had checked into the Faunus's Fortune the night before, alone. Local relatives, however, had come to greet him in the morning, and he'd gone off with them and his luggage.
Curius Decimus had bags under his eyes, looked not one but ten years older, and said his head felt "as large as the feather-filled balls girls kick on the beach." He met Aelius already mounted, as he wearily climbed into the saddle to reach his post at the Palace, late as it was. "Why didn't you come?" he asked with a yawn. "It was a smashing party— they'll be talking about it long after we're gone."
Aelius wondered at the meaning of the comment, whether it signified the memorable quality of the feast or something else. "Was it a spur-of-the-moment idea, celebrating the holidays before their time?"
"Yes. Didn't you hear the scuttlebutt? Rumors of war precipitated it. We were notified that several of us will be leaving for the frontier soon—most of the friends you've met already." Decimus adjusted the issue fur cap on his head, smoothing the hair on his temples. "You must have known it was in the air, coming as you did from His Divinity's summer seat. Was it why Our Lord Maximian would not receive you? In any case, the barbarians are rambunctious again, and it sounds like a threat that we had best not ignore. So—call me superstitious—I decided to celebrate early and share the unbeatable triplet of dance-cunt-wine with the friends I love. Riding my way?"
"Only to the end of the street. Is there a scheduled time for moving out?"
"No, and we aren't yet mathematically certain that officers of the Palace Guards will go. It stands to reason that Our Lord Maximian may want to contribute with the flower of his troops."
The ironic tone was out of place in a man in Decimus's position. Aelius took note. If it was Maximian who set up this jaundiced officer to do his fact-finding, n
o wonder his guests rushed to proclaim their loyalty to the State; the trap was too visible to be stumbled into. But Aelius did not have to pretend to speak as he did. "We're in the business of war, whatever uniform we wear."
"True, true. Nothing like an honest-to-goodness barbarian raid to make Marcellus's death and your investigative itch seem puny and out of place."
What would he do if he knew I met his cousin last night? Aelius discreetly avoided staring at his colleague's blighted after-the-feast looks. Would he insist on hearing where she hides? Would he turn her in? Keeping the information to himself gave him a pleasant edge this morning.
"The perfectissimus head of criminal police, Sido, has already pointed out the inappropriate nature of my curiosity." He allowed himself to grin. "He seems to think it will suffice to make me quit, even without the barbarians' help."
Decimus gave him a spiteful look. "Don't smile just because you have nice teeth." At the head of the street, where they parted ways, he replied to Aelius's farewell with a careless wave, leading his horse down the opposite direction.
"You're asking me? Little old me? I'm just a poor Jew." "You're a Jew, but not a poor one, not by a long shot." Finding ben Matthias had been easier than expected. His name was well known in the Jewish quarter, and after satisfying questions from a number of menacing young men, word of mouth brought Aelius to the right doorstep in a dead-end street barely wide enough for a man to stretch his arms out. Presently they sat facing each other in a smoky little kitchen, going through the routine of claiming to have happened here by chance on one side, and to be surprised that anyone would ask him for information on the other.
Ben Matthias framed Aelius's inquiries about Lupus's case in his own perspective. "Well, I am not happy about it, if that's what you mean. My son-in-law spent some uncomfortable moments explaining in detail to the local speculatores where he was, and with whom, between the time he left work in the evening and the early morning when he went to awaken Marcus Lupus. Only because he has friends in high places who are willing to vouch for those in low places who vouched for him was he able to prove that he was not involved. My daughter, who's expecting, gave us all a scare by having fainting fits. As for Lupus's brother, Commander, I wish you hadn't asked. He was one of the worst, pouring insults on Isaac only to remove suspicion from himself. They're Germans, I told Isaac when he went to work at the brickyard, J don't trust them. Can't you be a supervisor for somebody else? But, no, he had to work for Lupus, damn him to Gentile hell."
"And now?"
"And now, I don't know and I don't care. The family will grease the right palms to quell rumors and inherit Lupus's wealth, which I'm sure they feel they deserve. After all, they showed the world how disinterested they were, after they hired the fire waker to resurrect their relative the first time around. The most visible result of the entire business is that even a moderate like Constantius has lost patience with the Christians. Miracles create unrest, and besides, he's listening to those who accuse the fire waker of black magic. He and his girlfriend Casta fled barely in time, being charged now with conjuring evil spirits against Lupus to make him ill, faking a resurrection, and then killing him out of their 'hatred against humankind,' the time-honored charge made against Christians. The price is being paid by the Treveri church fathers, who have been arrested en masse."
Aelius studiously removed his cloak. "Black magic is nonsense. Philosophers say it does not exist."
"Right. And I believe in one God rather than in a bunch of divinities. Most people beg to differ, Commander. I am telling you, I left Bel-gica Prima a week after you did, and made sure I shook the dust off my sandals. Ugh, I wish it were dust. It was snow, and plenty of it. We have it good here in Mediolanum by comparison."
Studying his guest, ben Matthias did not indicate how he'd learned that Aelius had preceded him in the Italian city. Aelius did not ask, knowing that the Jew had his sources. "But what about yourself?" Ben Matthias spoke up with a smirk. "It ought to flatter me that you seek me out. However, much as we collaborated, shall we say, while in Egypt, you're not so enamored of my presence that you would stumble here without a specific reason. Or was it all you wanted, hearing about the investigation in Treveri?"
"Yes and no." Not to show the stitched cut on his head, even though the room was warm, Aelius kept his cap on, and the right cuff pulled over his bandaged wrist. "You've been here only—what? A matter of hours? But you're one to keep your ear to the ground, so I will ask you whether you heard of Minucius Marcellus's death."
"Ha! Who hasn't. He ruled in favor of the Jewish community in a case over water rights, so they told me all about his murder at breakfast. I'm shocked to hear it. Still, it's a good thing he was prosecuting Christians and not Jews, else I'd be packing from here as well." Ben Matthias stood to kindle the fire in the open hearth. "I can tell you right away that more than one man was involved, but probably no more than two. One would be watching out for other visitors and bath serfs, while the other did the judge in. Was the murder weapon found?"
"No. They might have rinsed it in the hot pool, and smuggled it out as they brought it in."
"Did they search for it around the Old Baths?"
"They said they would, but I wonder if they did. When I went inside, I saw a bloody imprint on the wall, rather smudged. At first I assumed it belonged to one of those who lifted Marcellus out of the water. The serfs I spoke to—before they were so speedily beheaded— denied that any of the baths staff leaned against the wall, but who knows. His freedman Protasius did not touch the body at all. It could have been the killer who propped himself up after stabbing his victim. If it's true, why would he do that? The murder of a slumbering old man cannot have been too strenuous."
"Maybe the murderer is overweight, or suffers from vertigo." Ben Matthias was joking, because Aelius's confidence in his sleuthing skills flattered him and amused him at the same time. He waved the burning tip of a wooden stick as if it were a brush. "Maybe he stumbled because he had a limp, and had never heard that the fire waker could make him whole. Hands differ from one man to the next, but a smudged imprint isn't much use. Did all five fingers leave a mark, at least?"
"Yes."
"Right hand or left hand?"
"Left hand, I'd say."
"You could be seeking a left-handed man. Or not. Are the Old Baths of the type that allows men and women to use them at different times?"
"No, too small. Only men may use them."
"Well, there goes my idea that the weapon could have been hidden somewhere inside and carried out by a woman accomplice at a later time. Are you sure you want to keep your cap on? You're sweating."
"I'm fine, thanks. No, no one could have taken out the weapon after the body was discovered. The baths have been closed to the public since the murder. And nothing the gendarmes found on the premises could be linked to the culprit."
"What do they think about the hand imprint?"
"They're so dense as to say that it was Marcellus himself who left it. It's unclear how he could do so, given that he was stabbed in the water and did not have time to do anything but give up the ghost."
"Policemen—you've got to love them."
Aelius shook his head. "I said gendarmes, Baruch. The criminal police isn't saying a word about its investigation, and even warned me to mind my business."
"Is that why they sent a couple of hoodlums to knock you over the head at Faunus's Fortune?" Smiling in his beard, ben Matthias pointed to Aelius's cap. "I had the cubicle where you slept at a discount, because guests are scared of spending the night in it. It seems that ruffians fall from the sky around that inn. Early this morning, while I was coming here with some relatives, I saw that someone had been thrown from the roof down the interspace between two houses."
"So, you were one of those who first saw the body: I should have known. Why do you say he was thrown down? He could have been stabbed on the ground."
"No. A freshly broken roof tile had landed on him, and others lay smashe
d under him. I say that he was left dead or dying on the roof the other night, and the snowfall caused him to slide and tumble down."
"That's impossible! Two men attacked me, and I can't have stabbed both without remembering."
"Perhaps you stabbed neither one of them. In my old fighting days—don't ask for details, as my archenemies were the Romans, back then—I found myself once or twice in the unpleasant condition of having to silence my companions after an especially delicate mission. Beastly unpleasant, but has to be done. I don't think the fellow on the roof was supposed to rain down before the spring."
"You may be right." Aelius tossed his cap on the window sill. "Until then, the butcher's boy would be blamed officially, and who questions the reasons of an idiot? He was probably only hired to stand watch and provide a useful corpse after the deed. That's why I detected no blood on the trellis: The poor fool had never climbed to the roof in the first place. Counting him, there were three, and only one was supposed to return. But why go through all this trouble and not slit my throat at least?"
"You're Caesar's envoy. It would not look good. And all you did was try to meddle in the speculators' open-and-shut case of Marcellus's death. For now." Turning his back to the hearth, the Jew rubbed his hands. "At least, that's all I imagine you did. It was supposed to appear as a random aggression to the world, but give a specific message to you. I may be off course, Commander, but if the criminal police had for whatever reason killed the judge, they would not have hesitated to cut you down as well."
Notes by Aelius Spartianus, written on Monday, 11 December, Feast of Agonalia:
After listening to ben Matthias, the question of the murders appears to me even more intricate than I surmised. On one side we find the victims: Lupus, "resurrected" by Agnus the fire waker and supposedly friendly with the Christians, and Marcellus, whose sentences against the Christians were believed by some to be too mild. On the other side, someone who killed Lupus, and someone who killed Marcellus. Why do I want to see a connection between these two deaths? Apparently there is no logical link.
