The Corpus Conundrum

by Albert A. Bell

  “You’re going to send her to Rome?” Chloris cried. “Please, sir, why are you—?”

  I raised a hand to silence her. There was no need to heighten Scaevola’s animosity toward the two women. He clearly held a grudge against them, and against my family, and it went back to the murder of his nephew.

  “Chloris, you asked me as your friend to look into this matter. Please, let me do that.” I turned to Scaevola. “I would like to talk to Myrrha and I’ll need to hire a cart to take Aristeas’ body out to my house.”

  Scaevola nodded. “You certainly don’t want to be hauling him in that fancy rig of yours. It will take a bit to arrange that. That’s how long you’ll have to talk to Myrrha. I’ll take you to her. Strabo, find a cart and a driver to take the body.”

  I left one of my servants to stand watch over the raeda. The rest of us followed Scaevola and his pack of hounds along the main street of the village, two blocks east to his house. It was the last house in town and had a wall around it like some country estates. He led us through the gate and around to the back. The grounds were meticulously kept. Walkways paved with travertine wound among fruit trees that were beginning to put out leaves and flowers. Several four-legged dogs greeted him and inspected us. Behind the house was an exhedra decorated with a fresco of the gods banqueting on Olympus. Zeus looked suspiciously like the master of this house. Beyond the exhedra was a well and storage areas for tools and animals’ tack. Farther on I could see stables.

  Scaevola stopped and pointed to an ergastulum, the small shed used to confine unruly slaves. This one had no windows. “She’s in there.”He turned and walked away, scratching the head of one of the four-legged dogs.

  The door of the shed had a bar across it. Chloris ran ahead of me, lifted the bar and opened the door. Even though the weather was mild, the inside of the shed was oppressively warm and airless. Myrrha sat slumped against the back wall, her chin down on her chest, her gown and her hair soaked in sweat. She looked ten years older than the last time I saw her.

  “Myrrha! It’s me.” Chloris took her sister in her arms.

  Myrrha slowly opened her eyes. “Help me,” she whispered.

  “She needs water,” I said, kneeling beside Chloris.

  Tacitus went to the well and drew a bucketful. “Give it to her slowly,” he told Chloris. “Too much too fast will make her sick.”

  “Can we get these things off of her?” Chloris grabbed the manacles on Myrrha’s wrists.

  “I don’t have a key,” I said, “and I think we’ve asked all the favors Scaevola’s likely to grant us. Let’s move her out here.” With Tacitus taking one arm and I the other, we helped Myrrha stand up. That’s when we noticed the brownish-red stains.

  “That must be the blood he was talking about,” Tacitus said.

  I peered closely and sniffed the large dark splotch on the lower part of the woman’s gown. “Yes, it is.”

  We moved Myrrha to the shade of a tree and helped her sit on a bench. Chloris pushed in close and put her arm around her sister, who began to revive with the water and the fresh air. I sent a servant to get the basket of food my mother had sent with us. It appeared it would be useful after all.

  Before I could ask a question, Myrrha said, “I didn’t kill nobody, sir. I’ll swear it by any god you like. I didn’t kill nobody.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “If we’re going to find out what happened, you need to tell me everything you can about where you were and what you did yesterday. And you’ll have to tell us how that blood got on your gown.”

  “Somebody threw it on me, sir.”

  “Who? When?”

  “I don’t know who, sir, but it happened yesterday.” Her words still came with effort.

  “How could you not know who threw blood on you?”Tacitus asked.

  “I was blindfolded, sir.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Start at the beginning and tell us what happened to you yesterday.”

  “Yes, sir. ’Twas a most unusual day, even in my line of work. Just when a whore gets to a point where she thinks she’s seen or done anything a man is willing to pay her to do, somethin’ stranger always comes along. Day before yesterday a man came in the tavern and gave me fifty aurei. He told me to be sitting alone at the table in my rooms yesterday mornin’ at dawn, with my back to the door, and not to be surprised at anything. There would be another fifty aurei when we was done, he said.”

  “How long does it usually take you to earn that much?” Tacitus asked.

  “Three months, sir. Four months if things is slow.”

  “Did you know the man?” I asked.

  Myrrha shook her head. “He were a servant, though, I’m sure.”

  “Do you often get ... invitations to men’s homes around here?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Especially when they come down from Rome without their wives. They’ll sometimes take us on for several days. It’s a bit of a vacation for us.”

  “So what happened this time?”

  “I did just like he said.”

  “Chloris wasn’t there?”

  “No, sir,” Chloris said. “Like I told you, I had been ... engaged for the day. When I left Myrrha was sitting at the table.”

  “Go ahead, Myrrha. What happened?”

  “A man jumped me from behind and threw a sack over my head. I started to fight back until he said, ‘Fifty aurei.’ Then I let him do what he wanted.”

  “And what was that?”

  “He tied and gagged me.”

  “With the sack still over your head?”

  “Yes, sir. I could hardly breathe. He carried me just a short piece and threw me into a carriage and we rode for a while. When we stopped he tossed me over his shoulder like sack of wheat and took me inside a house.”

  “Can you describe the man or the house?”

  “No, sir. I was blindfolded and tied up the whole time. He coupled with me a few times during the day. Or it might have been different men, I suppose. No one ever said anything.”

  The servant who had gone after the food basket returned and Chloris helped Myrrha eat. When she was finished I asked, “Can you tell us anything more about where you were? Did you hear any sounds you could identify? Waves on the shore? Servants talking? Animals?”

  “No, sir. I’m sorry. I want to help. I just know I was in a room with my hands tied behind my back and a tight blindfold on. And I was tied to a bed.”

  “And someone threw blood on you?”

  Myrrha nodded. “A couple of times somebody brought in a chamberpot for me to piss in. After I did that the second time, I felt them throw something wet on me. I thought it was my own piss. You know, to humiliate me.”

  “When did you realize it was blood?”

  “My gown started to feel clammy and sticky, and blood has a smell all its own.”

  “Do you know how long you were there?”

  “No, sir. There wasn’t no window in the room, so I couldn’t get a sense of where the sun was. After what felt like a long time somebody come and untied me from the bed but left my hands tied and the blindfold on. They put me in a wagon and drove me back here. They dropped me just inside my door.”

  I had to wait while Chloris helped her eat a little more and drink some water. “How were you able to get loose?”

  “They loosened the ropes before they put me out of the wagon. I managed to get ’em off me soon enough.”

  “But not soon enough to see who did all of this to you.”

  “No, sir. They was long gone by then.”

  “So they didn’t pay you the other fifty aurei?”

  “Oh, but they did, sir. It was in a bag around my neck, with a note in it.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “I wish I knew, sir. I could recognize my name on it. That was all. Chloris is the one that can read. But it must have been somethin’ bad.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I wondered why they had thrown blood on me and ruined one of my gowns. I tho
ught maybe the note was an apology for that. As soon as I got my bearings I went into my room to get a clean gown. That’s when I found him—that man, on my bed, with his throat ripped open.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I screamed. I screamed so loud Saturninus heard me and come running.”

  “And there you stood,” Tacitus said, “with a dead man in your bed and blood all over your gown.”

  Myrrha started to cry and Chloris embraced her. “I tried to tell him I didn’t do it,” the older woman said, “but he wouldn’t listen. He hates me anyway. He grabbed me and sent a servant to get the duovirs.”

  “You said the note said something bad. How do you know?”

  “Well, the duovirs read the note and looked at one another like they knew something. Then they put these on me.” She raised her shackled hands. “And took the bag of coins.”

  “But they didn’t read the note to you?

  “No, sir. They just nodded and Licinius Strabo tucked it into the sinus of his toga. They said the money was all the proof they needed.”

  Tacitus applauded. “Amazing. I’ve never heard such a preposterous concoction. It’s worthy of a Milesian tale.”

  “But, sir, it’s true. I didn’t kill that man. That was the money for what I’d been through that day. And it warn’t nearly enough.”

  “What makes you think she’s not telling the truth?” I asked Tacitus. “It looks like someone wanted her away from her rooms for the day and didn’t want her to be able to identify anyone or any place she saw.”

  “But what if she did kill him and wanted to come up with a story that puts her away from here but doesn’t make her actually account for where she was?”

  “Then where was she today?”

  Tacitus picked a few leaves off the tree he was standing under and crushed them between his fingers. “Possibly right here killing Aristeas. She’s got blood all over her, and her knife was certainly handy. That’s the argument Scaevola’s going to make.”

  I turned back to Myrrha. “Are you sure you can’t tell anything about where you were or who you were with?”

  “No, sir. Not a thing.”

  Pulling Tacitus away from the women, I lowered my voice and said, “Do you think a simple woman like her could make up such an improbable story?”

  “It would fit right in with a seven-hundred-year-old man and an empusa, wouldn’t it?”

  “Do you really think she could have killed Aristeas?”

  “No, but I wanted you to see how easily Scaevola could make his case.”

  “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

  “None, and it scares me.”

  I was glad to hear I wasn’t the only one who was unnerved by all that had happened over the last couple of days. “Someone clearly wanted these women away from their home for the entire day, but in a way that left them unable to establish where they were.”

  We sat down with the women and I questioned Chloris. “You weren’t treated like your sister, were you?”

  “No, sir. I was blindfolded in the wagon going to and from the place, but not once I arrived at whatever house I was taken to.”

  “But she’s not the one who’s being made to look guilty,” Tacitus said.

  I nodded. “For some reason they want to shift all the blame onto Myrrha. And there have to be several people involved to carry out such an elaborate scheme.”

  “Two houses,” Tacitus said.

  “Not necessarily. Both women could have been at the same house, each unaware of the other.”

  “Agreed. But why would someone go to such lengths to make it look like some stranger was killed by a couple of whores?”

  I flinched when Tacitus used the term. After all, Chloris was one of my friends. “And why would someone take so much trouble to kill an iterant shyster like Aristeas? Why not just ambush him in an alley or on the road out in the country?”

  Licinius Scaevola walked around the corner of the house, with Strabo by his side and followed by his dogs—both two-legged and four-legged. “The body is ready for you to take back to your house,” he announced, “so your interview with the prisoner is over.”

  As the younger man I should have stood to show my respect to Scaevola, but my equestrian stripe outranked his plain toga. “I still have a number of other questions to ask her.”

  “What other questions could there be? We have a murdered man, found in this whore’s room. We have the whore herself standing over him in a blood-soaked garment. We have a money bag she must have taken from the dead man—”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Where else would she have gotten it?”

  “You know her profession.”

  Scaevola shook his head. “No whore makes the kind of money that was in that bag.”

  Tacitus gave a quick laugh. “I’ve known a couple—”

  “What if someone paid her to kill the man?” Strabo asked over his father’s shoulder.

  Chloris gasped and Myrrha wailed, “Oh, sir! I didn’t kill him!”

  In his effort to indict Myrrha, Strabo had given me another argument in my case. “Isn’t the person who pays someone to commit a crime just as guilty as the person who does the deed?”

  Scaevola folded his arms over his chest. “You’re wasting my time, young man.” I wasn’t sure if he meant me or his son. “This woman is going to be sent to Rome and, I’m sure, will be in the arena within a few days.”

  “But she hasn’t been found guilty in a court. There’s been no testimony against her.”

  “She provided all the testimony anyone needs. She was found standing over a man who had been savagely murdered.” He signaled two of his brutes. “Lock her back up.”

  With Chloris clinging to her, Myrrha was dragged back to the ergastulum. One man pulled Chloris away while the other one, with scratches on his face from his earlier encounter with Myrrha, crammed her, still protesting her innocence, into the shed and closed and barred the door. I moved to Chloris’ side and guided her away from the shed before Scaevola’s man could hurt her.

  “You must leave,” Scaevola said. “Now. You can’t do anything here but upset the prisoner.”

  “I am going to look into this matter further,” I said. “I want you to keep Myrrha here, under kinder conditions, for at least ... two days.” My words were drowned out by Myrrha’s cries and her pounding on the door.

  “Gaius Pliny, you have no authority here. And no interest in this case. Even if that creature is” —He sneered at Chloris.— “for some unfathomable reason, a ‘friend’ of yours, this other one isn’t. I must demand that you stay out of the way and let me do my duty. All you have to take care of is a rotting corpse.”

  This time there was no mistaking that Aristeas was dead. Although the cart Scaevola had provided to transport the body stayed behind my raeda on the way home, the breeze was from that direction, and the day was growing quite warm. If it had not been for the aroma of new cedar wood in the raeda, I think we all would have gotten sick from Aristeas’ stench. As it was, the bouncing of the carriage combined with the odor brought me dangerously close to nausea.

  “Is my sister going to die in the arena, sir?” Chloris asked, wiping her nose and sniffling. She was sitting next to me, with Tacitus across from us. The warmth of her leg, pressed against mine, gave me something more pleasant to concentrate on.

  “I will do everything within my power to prevent it. I have to warn you, though, that Scaevola has what looks like enough ‘evidence’ to convince most people of her guilt. He’ll have to bring a charge against her and call for a hearing. I’ll speak in her defense, but I don’t know who the jury will be.”

  “The cream of Scaevola’s clientela, no doubt,” Tacitus said.

  “The dregs, more likely. And no matter how many of them have coupled with Myrrha, they’ll vote the way he wants them to.” I put my hand on Chloris’ knee, causing Tacitus’ eyebrows to rise. “I’ll present her case as I see it, but I don’t know what
I can do beyond that.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’m sure you can save her.”

  “I’ll have a better chance if you don’t conceal information from me in the future.”

  Chloris looked down and shook her head. “I didn’t mean to hide anything, sir. I just didn’t see how something that happened fifteen years ago had any connection to this.”

  “When a close relative of the duovirs was murdered and your sister and my uncle were suspected of having something to do with it, there is a strong connection. Scaevola has been waiting all this time to get back at Myrrha. Now that I’ve walked onto the stage, he sees a chance to settle another old score at the same time.”

  Chloris took my hand and placed it over hers so that the dolphin on my ring fit into the place it had made on hers. I knew she was staking her claim on my friendship and I could not back away from this fight.

  “I’m sure you can beat him, sir.”

  I wasn’t at all sure. I looked out the window at the budding trees and wondered if I had really been sitting under one only two days ago congratulating myself on how tranquil my life was. Scaevola was determined to exact his vengeance on Myrrha, for his own reasons and to curry favor with Rome. Holding no official position here, it would be difficult for me to stop him. The cases in which I had appeared in court thus far had been civil, not criminal. It’s one thing to win a jury to your side when only money is at stake. With a life hanging in the balance, I might have to ask Tacitus to teach me a few of his oratorical tricks.

  “What do you make of that mark disappearing?” Tacitus asked, “and that business of Aristeas’ soul leaving his body like a raven flying off?”

  “I’m sure when we can examine the body in full daylight we’ll see where the mark was erased, just as you can always see the erasure on a piece of papyrus if you look closely enough.”