The Corpus Conundrum

by Albert A. Bell

  “It looks like someone has drowned,” I said as he walked up to us.

  “Yes, I saw that. Are you going to fish him out?” Volconius asked.

  “My boat sank while I was out this morning.”

  He pointed to my bandage. “Is that what happened to your head?”

  “I hit my head on the boat when it overturned.”

  Volconius chuckled. “You never have been much good on the water, have you, Gaius Pliny? I remember watching you and that slave girl floundering around in a boat. Thought I was going to have to go get you then. Let me get a couple of my men.”

  Volconius owns several large fishing boats that supply markets in Ostia. He and his men also fish and dive in our bay. Their presence was the primary reason I wanted to dump Aristeas’ urn in the deepest water I could find. When he gave an ear-piercing whistle and waved his arms, two of his servants came down to the beach and, from a cave, pulled out a boat quite a bit larger than mine.

  “Do you and your friend want to come with us?” he asked.

  After introductions, Tacitus declined the offer. I decided to accompany them so I would know what, or whom, I was dealing with before the body was brought ashore. I quickly regretted my decision. The waves were higher than they had been that morning, and my head was bobbing even more than the boat. I leaned over the side and vomited. Neither Volconius nor his servants said anything as I wiped my mouth and curled up in the bottom of the boat.

  The two servants rowed swiftly and powerfully, bringing us alongside the dead man in no time. A quick glance at the shore made me nervous. We were too close to the spot where my boat had gone down and the urn had—I presumed—gone to the bottom. The water was clear. I had not gotten as far out as I had hoped to.

  “Let’s see what we have here,” Volconius said, grabbing the man’s hair and raising his head. “By the gods! That’s a bit of a mess.”

  We all recoiled, but I was the only one who vomited. The man’s face had been clawed so badly I didn’t think his own mother would recognize him. There were deep slashes on his chest as well.

  “Do you know him?” Volconius asked as I finished emptying my stomach.

  I shook my head before I could think better of it. All I could tell was that this wasn’t Apollodoros. His skin was too white. “How long do you think he’s been in the water?”

  “Since early morning, wouldn’t you say, fellas?” He turned to his servants, who nodded.

  “Could some sort of sea creature have done that to his face?” I asked.

  “Nothing that I know of. There are some that’ll nibble on a man, but whatever did this had claws, more like a bird.”

  Or an empusa, I thought.

  We hauled the poor man into the boat and started back to shore. When we were close enough that I was sure I could be heard, I yelled to Tacitus, “Get the women back into the house!”

  Once the women were out of the way, Volconius’ men beached the boat gracefully. The dead man was lying face down in the bottom of the craft. Tacitus and Tranio approached us, but I held up a hand.

  “If you want to see him, prepare yourselves for a shock. His face isn’t really a face any more.”

  “My association with you, Gaius Pliny, has prepared me for just about anything,” Tacitus said, resting his hands on the edge of the boat.

  Volconius grabbed the dead man’s hair and raised his head. Some sort of small sea creatures were crawling out of the bloody mass that had been his face.

  Tranio turned, took a few steps, and began to retch. Tacitus gagged, grabbed at his stomach and stepped back. “Just about anything, but not that.”

  “What’ll we do with him?” Volconius asked me, letting the man’s head drop with a thump. “Turn him over to the duovirs? It’s pretty clear he didn’t do this to himself.”

  I didn’t want another body to dispose of, and yet I knew this corpse was one more latrunculus piece that was being maneuvered into position to trap me. But by whom? And why?

  “I’ll have some of my men take him up to my place,” I said. “I need to see Licinius Scaevola about something else, so I’ll take care of this as well.”

  “Good,” Volconius said. “No disrespect to the dead, but I don’t need to be taking care of a mangled body. There’s enough strange things going on around here lately.”

  “ ‘Strange things’? What do you mean?”

  “Haven’t you seen that huge bat?”

  I stopped myself from nodding. “Yes, we noticed it.”

  “Thing showed up a couple of days ago. One of my men caught it trying to kill one of our lambs. He threw a knife at it and wounded it, but it got away.”

  “When was this?”

  “Let’s see. Two nights ago, it was.”

  The night Daphne appeared at my door, with a gash in her shoulder.

  Tacitus looked at me, and I knew what he was thinking—the werewolf story from Petronius, the part after where my mother had made Hylas stop reading. After seeing the werewolf, the narrator runs to his lover’s house. She tells him that a wolf attacked their sheep. He killed several, but one of the servants wounded him in the neck with a spear. When the narrator returns to the inn where the story began, he finds the soldier who had turned into a wolf lying in bed with a wound in his neck.

  Volconius and his men bid us good day. “I think we’ll take another run out there. We’ll see if we can retrieve your boat.”

  “I would appreciate that very much.”

  “Glad to do a favor for a neighbor.” He turned to his men. “Did you boys see what I saw on the bottom?”

  Both men nodded and looked eager to get back out on the water.

  “What if they saw Aristeas’ urn?” I asked Tacitus as we watched them row out to the spot.

  “Well, the worst that can happen is that they’ll open it and dump his ashes back into the bay. They’ll probably keep the urn for their trouble.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I guess so.” I wanted that body to stay disposed of.

  “Meanwhile, we’ve got another corpse to take care of.”

  We wrapped a cloth around the dead man’s face and I told two of my servants to carry him up to the stable.

  “More like an inn for the dead,” Tacitus said. “Are you going to have enough room for your horses?”

  “Please don’t make jokes right now.”

  “I have to make jokes so I won’t think about what we’re both thinking about.”

  “The wounded bat?”

  Tacitus nodded. “And the wounded Daphne.”

  “It’s not possible, is it? People don’t turn into wolves and bats and then back into people. Bodies remain what they are. Something that’s born a cow doesn’t turn into a fox or a horse.”

  “I’ve never seen it happen. But your uncle wrote about even stranger things in his Natural History.”

  “Things he never saw. He just repeated stories that people have been telling since Herodotus’ day. And probably longer. Herodotus was just the first to write some of them down.”

  “And writing them down doesn’t make them true, does it?”

  I looked around at the cliff from where a rock had come crashing into my boat and sent Aristeas’ ashes to the bottom of the bay, at Volconius’ estate where a large bat had attacked a lamb. “No, of course not. Papyrus doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie. As Socrates said, the written word doesn’t know to whom to speak and to whom not to speak. Right now I don’t think I do either.”

  “Do you think some wine would help us sort it out?”

  “Could it make things any worse?”

  Tacitus shook his head. “I’ve never known wine to make things worse.”

  When we came to the top of the stairs and onto the terrace we found Licinius Strabo pacing like a man anticipating the verdict in his trial.

  “Good morning. Are you waiting for me?” I asked.

  “Yes. You said I could return home today. I’d like to ask your permission to do so.”

  �
�By all means. You’ve been an admirable hostage. You’re free to go.”

  “Thank you.”He turned to leave.

  “Would you like to have a drink with us?” Tacitus asked.

  “No, thank you. I just want to go home.”

  “Odd,” Tacitus said as we watched Strabo hurry through the door. “Yesterday he acted like he didn’t care if he ever saw home again.”

  A shout from the water brought us back to the edge of the terrace. Volconius and one of his men were in the boat. The other was in the water, holding onto the edge of the boat and guiding a rope which the first servant was pulling. Just as I had feared, Aristeas’ urn bobbed to the surface. Volconius must have thought the urn, because of its weight, contained some treasure. He pulled it into the boat and he and his men made for shore.

  “He’s back,” Tacitus said.

  I didn’t have much time to worry about the recovery of the urn. Saturninus’ funeral proved to be more complicated than I had anticipated. Even though he had not lived as a Jew, Naomi insisted it would be appropriate to bury him as one. I consented because, pragmatically, it would save us building another funeral pyre, which we would have to do for the man we fished out of the bay. Myrrha and Chloris gave their approval, and Naomi provided the instructions.

  Because the steps down the cliff were precipitous we used ropes to lower Saturninus’ body to the cave. Naomi led a group of women—Myrrha, Chloris, my mother, and several servants—with ointments and a linen cloth to wrap the body in.

  Tacitus and I watched the proceedings from the terrace. “It really is like watching some descent into the underworld,” he said. “I can’t understand how this is better than a cremation.”

  “Be thankful he wasn’t an Egyptian. Then we’d have to make a mummy out of him, and that takes a couple of months.”

  “But now somebody will have to remember, a year from now, to go in there and pick up his bones. Who’s going to do that?”

  I shook my head very slowly. Would I ever feel normal again? “It won’t be me. That’s all I know.”

  We turned away from the cliff and went back inside the arcade as a cool breeze picked up.

  “I hope you have better luck keeping Saturninus buried than you did with Aristeas,” Tacitus said. “What if he gets up and walks out of that cave?”

  “Then I will have to reconsider what I believe about life and death. But not until then.”

  “In the meantime, what do you propose to do about the faceless man?”

  “I’d like to know who he is, but, without a face, I don’t see how anybody can identify him.” The man without a face reminded me of the image of the face on the blanket that had been wrapped around Aristeas. I called Tranio and told him to retrieve it.

  “You do have an odd assortment of bodies and faces lying around, Gaius Pliny,” Tacitus said. “Are you going to try to match them up, so you don’t have any left over?”

  Some of Tacitus’ questions don’t deserve a serious answer, and I don’t have a quick enough wit to give him any other kind, even when my head isn’t spinning. All I can do is shrug or roll my eyes.

  Tranio returned to the arcade with a puzzled look on his face.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “My lord, I don’t know what to say. The cloth you gave me is gone.”

  “Gone? Didn’t you hide it?”

  “Yes, my lord. In the safest place I could think of—behind the chest in my bedroom. But it’s not there now.”

  That sounded like the most obvious place to me. “Who could have found it?”

  “My wife and I are the only ones who should be in there, my lord.”

  “Bring her in here at once.”

  Tranio ran out of the arcade. He and his wife have the largest room in the section of the house where my servants live. Tacitus and I barely had time to take our seats before he returned with his wife, Lutatia, in tow. She’s a tall, blonde woman who may bear some ancient Sabine blood, older than Rome itself, if one wanted to talk about blood bestowing immortality.

  “You wanted to see me, my lord?” she asked.

  “Yes. Tranio tells me he stored a blanket behind a chest in your bedroom, but now it’s gone. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Yes, my lord. I noticed a corner of it sticking out from behind the chest, so I pulled it out to see what my husband was hiding from me this time.”

  I wondered what Tranio was in the habit of hiding from his wife—and if he was hiding things from her, he could be hiding them from me—but the blanket was my only concern at the moment. “What did you do with the blanket?”

  “Nothing, my lord. It was just a blanket. I couldn’t understand why he was hiding it, so I folded it and put it in the chest.”

  “You didn’t notice anything unusual about it?”

  “No, my lord. Should I have?”

  “I need to see it. Bring it here.”

  “Certainly, my lord.” Lutatia turned, gave Tranio a curious look, and hurried out of the arcade. When she returned she was carrying a folded blanket.

  I took the blanket from her and dismissed the two servants. When I shook the blanket out, Tacitus and I looked at one another in surprise. There was not even the faintest image anywhere on the piece of cloth.

  “I told you it wasn’t a face,” I said.

  “Oh, you did not! You ran straight into the library and compared it to the face that Hylas had drawn. You saw it as clearly as I did ... Are you sure that’s the right blanket?”

  I nodded. “I recognize a couple of places where it’s been repaired.”

  “I guess, whatever kind of image we saw, it wasn’t permanent. It faded away.”

  “I just wish we knew when it disappeared.”

  “What difference would that make?”

  “What if it disappeared at the moment Aristeas died?”

  “By the gods, Gaius Pliny. Are you suggesting it might have something to do with Aristeas’ soul leaving his body?”

  I ran my hand over the blanket. “I can’t use those words. All I know is that the image was there two days ago and now it’s gone.”

  “And that frightens you.”

  “No. What frightens is that I have no explanation, and I don’t even know where to begin to look for one.”

  After placing Saturninus’ body in the cave and sealing it, Naomi wanted Myrrha and Chloris to observe a period of mourning. But Myrrha would have none of it.

  “You said I’m not Jewish, since we don’t know if my mother was. My father never told me he was Jewish. Why should I sit for days mournin’ a man who disowned me? I’ve given him a decent burial. I want to go back to Laurentum. I have business there.”

  I agreed with her and told Naomi she could not expect these women to observe rituals they knew nothing about. “We’ll go back to Laurentum in the morning.”

  After lunch Tacitus and I went out to the stable to exam the faceless man. It was a hopeless task. There were no marks on his clothing that would tell me anything about him.

  As I lifted one of his arms, Tacitus said, “I wonder why we can’t get to examine a young woman’s body once in a while. It would liven up this whole gruesome business.”

  “I thought you had examined quite a few young women’s bodies. There was that serving woman in the tavern the other day.”

  “Yes, but there’s always a ‘Don’t do that,’ or a ‘Not there.’ ” He slapped one of his hands with the other.

  “Perhaps you just aren’t paying them enough.”

  Tacitus arched his eyebrows. “I’ll remember that next time. Now, can you learn anything about this fellow?”

  “His hands are calloused, so I think he was a workman.”

  “Slave? Freedman?”

  “There’s no way to tell. It might be best just to turn him over to Licinius Scaevola.”

  “That’ll be easier to do than you might expect.” Tacitus was facing the house, looking over my head. “Here comes Scaevola now.”

  Placing
a cloth over the dead man’s face, I turned to see the senior duovir striding across my paddock. His son was not among the men accompanying him. One of them was driving the wagon I had seen several times in recent days.

  “Gaius Pliny, greetings.” His tone told me this was an official visit, not a social one. “I’ve heard that you and Volconius fished a man out of the bay this morning. Don’t you think you should have notified me?”

  “News travels fast.”

  “It does when it’s reported by a responsible citizen like Volconius. Now, may I see the man?”

  I wondered why Volconius had not left it to me to decide what to do with the body. Then I remembered: he was married to Scaevola’s cousin. “If you insist.”

  I stood aside and let Scaevola lift the cloth from what should have been the man’s face. He must have been told what to expect, but he still stepped back in shock and quickly covered the head again.

  “It’s my duty as duovir to take this man back to Laurentum. Are we going to fight over this body?”

  “This one’s dead,” I said. “Myrrha was very much alive.” I did not want Scaevola to remove the body until I had time to consider what might have happened to the man, but I had no valid reason to interfere this time.

  “And is she still in your custody?”

  “She is here in my house.”

  “Does she intend to take over her father’s business?”

  “You would have to ask Myrrha about that. If she does, I’m ready to assist her as one of my friends.”

  Scaevola waved for his men to come take up the body.

  I removed the cloth from the man’s head and took one last look at what remained of his face, trying to imprint the image in my mind so I could try to understand what had happened to him, even after I was no longer able to see him.

  As Macrinus finished shaving Tacitus and packed up his razors, we seemed to have a few moments of calm ahead of us.

  “I’m ready to bathe,” I said. “Let’s use the swimming bath.” I led the way to the warm pool next to the bath. While swimming there, one has a superb view of the bay.