“She could have reached that tree easily.” Tacitus picked up a piece of white cloth and waved it at me. “In the gloom, with the lightning flashing, and your head so addled—I can see how you thought you saw her, even thought you talked to her. And I’d be surprised if she was the only bat in this place. Let’s get you back to bed.”
“No, you don’t understand. She’s going to kill Strabo. We’ve got to stop her.”
“Why? If she is this monster you think she is, and if Strabo did kill Aristeas, why not let Daphne take care of it? It’s really between her and Strabo. You have no reason to be involved and not enough evidence to convict Strabo. This way punishment will be quick and decisive.”
“But if we let her take her vengeance outside the law, we’re no better than barbarians.”
“This from a man who—”
“I was defending myself. The law allows a man to defend himself when his life is in danger. It doesn’t allow monsters—or people who think they’re monsters—to go around dealing out ‘justice’ on their own terms.”
“Scaevola hates you already. How do you think he’s going to react when you accuse his son—his only son—of two murders?”
We found the boarded-up door on the ground floor which looked like it had been opened and then nailed shut again. As Daphne said, there were hooks in a beam in the ceiling and splotches of what could be blood on the floor.
“We had to pry open the door,” I said. “How did Daphne get in?”
“Bats can squeeze through very small openings,” Tacitus said without a smile.
“Let’s go.” I grimaced from the pain as I took a deep breath.
We walked up to Scaevola’s house as quickly as I was able. His janitor admitted us to the atrium and pointed us to benches around the impluvium. Since the benches were wet and the rain was still coming in, we chose to sit in chairs against the wall. Scaevola made us wait. We could hear him, just out of sight, talking to someone. When he entered the atrium we stood. He bowed his head slightly to acknowledge us.
“Are you all right, Gaius Pliny?” he asked. “You look like you’ve been tossed around a bit.”
“I’m fine.” I started to tell him how I’d gotten the bumps and bruises, but then I remembered that the stairs I fell down were in a building he owned, a building I had broken into.
“Have you come to talk about selling Saturninus’ building?”
“It’s Myrrha’s and Chloris’ now,” I said, “and you might as well get used to calling it that. They’re not going to sell it.”
“Then we have nothing to talk about.” He started to turn away.
“What if I told you your son’s life is in danger?”
Scaevola turned halfway around, smiled, and shook his head. “It’s always in danger. I’m tempted to kill him almost every day.”
“This is serious,” I said, taking a step toward him. “Daphne wants revenge for the murder of … the man Aristeas.”
“She must know her life will be forfeit if she lays a hand on Strabo.”
“I’m not sure she cares. A wound of hers has gotten infected. She may die soon herself.”
“Then I doubt my son has anything to fear from her. No one has any proof that Strabo had anything to do with that man’s death.”
“But I do have proof he killed your nephew, Macer.”
Scaevola staggered back as though I had struck him and collapsed into a chair. “Strabo … killed Macer? How … What proof could you have after this long?”
“Saturninus’ wife, Livilla, saw him carry Macer’s body into the rooms where Myrrha and Chloris lived. She wrote Strabo’s name on the bottom of her work table and, in a letter, identified him as the man who raped Chloris when she was ten. Strabo heard the letter when it was read at my house and, I believe, set fire to Saturninus’ building when he couldn’t find the clue Livilla spoke of.”
Scaevola jumped up from his chair. “This is preposterous! You have no evidence, no witnesses. Just rumors and some letter supposedly written by a dead woman. You can’t come in here accusing my sons—”
“Sons? Did you say ‘sons’?”
“Macer was like a son to me. His mother died when he was born. My wife and I helped my brother raise the boy. My brother died when Macer was ten. After that he became my other son. I was going to adopt him.”
More than most, I could appreciate the feelings of a man raising his nephew.
“We need to find Strabo,” I said. “His life is in danger. Do you know where he is?”
Scaevola waved his hand in disgust. “He spends most of his time at one of our taverns. I’m just glad to have him out of my sight. He keeps several women here. His favorite is one called Nephele. Apparently she’s quite … limber.”
Tacitus’ eyebrows arched. “So that was her name.”
“Is that the tavern where the woman Daphne stayed when she came to town?” I asked.
“The only guest Strabo has mentioned in the last few days was a woman with some sort of ghastly make-up.”
“That’s her.” And that was how Strabo knew Aristeas’ body was in her room. It would have been quite easy for him to move it to another room and after dark, carry him to the deserted building. “On my oath, Licinius Scaevola, that woman is going to kill your son if we don’t stop her.”
The reality of the threat seemed to finally sink in. “Let’s go,” Scaevola said.
The three of us walked down to the tavern. Scaevola wore a leather cloak. Tacitus and I had to endure a further soaking.
The door of the tavern was closed against the weather, but Scaevola shoved it open like an officer of the Urban Cohort bursting in on a criminal. Four customers tensed, ready to bolt. Strabo sat at a table in the main room with Nephele on his knee. He wore a dinner gown, red with a gold border, even though it was much too early in the day for such a costume. She had on a gown that was practically transparent. Strabo jumped up, dumping the woman on the floor.
“Father? What are you doing here? I thought—”
Scaevola grabbed Strabo by the elbow, as though he were a child about to be scolded, and led him toward the stairs at the back of the room. “He keeps a room upstairs. We can talk there.”
Tacitus and I followed the two men up the stairs and into a room that had been decorated much more lavishly than rooms in inns usually are, especially one as low-class as this one. The walls were painted with erotic scenes—better done and more graphic than the ones in Myrrha’s and Chloris’ rooms—and the furniture had been purchased from a more expensive shop than Laurentum had to offer. It came from Ostia at least, if not from Rome itself. Strabo had made this room his home away from home.
Scaevola shoved Strabo down onto the bed.
“Father, what’s going on?” the younger man asked.
“A small matter. I’m sure we can sort it out. You see, these men”—he gestured at us lavishly, like Regulus at his best in court—“are accusing you of murder.”
“Murder? That’s ridiculous. Who do they—?”
Scaeavola’s face was so close to his son’s that either man could have bitten the other’s nose off. “That man Aristeas, to begin with. And then … Macer.”
“You can’t believe them. I didn’t even know Aristeas. And Macer? Kill my own cousin? What sort of man do you think I am?”
“You’re a fool.” Scaevola spat the words into his son’s face. “A cross-eyed fool. You always have been, not like Macer.”
Strabo’s face twisted up as though he might burst, like an overheated pot on a stove. “Macer, Macer, Macer! By the gods! That’s all I ever heard. You’d think the man was a god.”
“What did you do?” Scaevola grabbed Strabo’s dinner gown and shook him.
I thought for a moment Strabo might stand up to his father, but his resolve had been broken years ago. He would have fallen if his father hadn’t had a firm grip on his dinner gown.
“Nothing. I didn’t do anything. I got sick of hearing you treat him like your favorite son,
but I didn’t do anything to him.” He turned to me. “How dare you make these charges? What evidence could you possibly have?”
“Livilla, the wife of Saturninus, saw you carrying Macer’s body into the rooms where Myrrha and Chloris lived,” I said. “You heard her letter. You were at my house when we opened Saturninus’ strongbox.”
“She didn’t name anybody.”
“But she said she had left a clue in the room where she and Saturninus lived.”
“So what?”
“After you heard that letter, you asked for permission to leave my house and return home. You went to Saturninus’ shop and searched it. Since you couldn’t find the clue, you set fire to the place in an effort to keep anyone else from finding it.”
Scaevola cuffed Strabo across the face with the back of his hand. “You set that fire?”
“Why does it matter to you?” Strabo rubbed his cheek, which was already close to the color of his gown. “You’ve said for years you wanted to buy it so you could tear it down.”
“You fool! You couldn’t even do that right. The building is still standing.” Scaevola yanked Strabo to his feet.
“And the clue is still there,” I said.
Both men turned to stare at me, fear on the face of one, consternation on the face of the other.
“What clue? Where?” Strabo choked out.
“On the bottom of Livilla’s work table, written in Hebrew letters.”
Strabo gave a harsh laugh. “So that’s what that scribbling said. You’ll never prove anything in court with that kind of evidence.”
“He won’t have to,” Scaevola said in the most frightening voice I had ever heard. It seemed to start somewhere down low in his chest and scramble and claw its way through his throat until it erupted from between his clenched teeth. “He won’t have to.”
Scaevola cuffed Strabo again, bloodying his nose this time. “Did you kill Macer?”
Strabo’s calm surprised me. Some men, when they sense they’re about to die, fight to the last breath. They make good soldiers. Others give in and accept the inevitable. I suppose they make good philosophers.
“You gave me every reason to, Father.” He licked at the blood running over his lip. “You always favored Macer over me. We were raised together, but I felt like I was the one who didn’t belong in the family.”
“Did you kill Macer?” Scaevola threw his son against the wall. Strabo’s head bounced off a fresco of Aphrodite on her knees before Adonis and he slid to the floor.
“Yes, I killed him. I had reason.”
Scaevola turned to me. “May I kill him now, Gaius Pliny? As paterfamilias I have the right. Or do you want to hear his so-called reasons?”
“There are a lot of things I want to know,” I said, “and I think you should let the law decide what happens to him.” I hadn’t come to save Strabo from Daphne’s vengeance so I could turn him over to his father’s, no matter how much he might deserve it.
“You talk to him, then. I can’t stand the sight of him.” Scaevola clenched his fists and held them in front of his face.
I stepped in front of Strabo as he stood up and rubbed the back of his head.
Blinking my eyes to clear my groggy head, I said, “You do admit, then, that you killed your cousin, Licinius Macer?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I knew my father had put Macer in his will, as though he was my own brother. I heard him tell our steward. I was afraid he might even adopt Macer and leave me nothing.”
“I would never have done such a thing,” Scaevola said.
“How could I know that? You favored him over me the whole time we were growing up. You never gave me that kind of love. When he died, you grieved over him like he was your son.”
Scaevola opened his mouth, then obviously said something different from what he originally intended. “He was … such a fine young man.”
“And I’m not. I know. But Macer wasn’t anything like what you thought he was,”
“What do you mean?” Scaevola asked.
“He raped Chloris when she was ten years old, not even nubile yet. He just held her down and forced himself on her.”
“You can’t prove that!” Scaevola yelled.
“He told me, and he told me how much he enjoyed doing it. He said I should have a go at her before she got any older. He showed me where he had rigged up a hook in the ceiling beam of that deserted building behind the cheese shop. He liked to tie Myrrha up there and whip her, like a slave, and then couple with her while she was still hanging. He said he’d like to string Chloris up and do the same to her.”
Scaevola gasped and put his hand to his chest.
“Yes, Father, that’s what your paragon of virtue was really like—a brute.”
“But that didn’t give you the right to kill him,” Scaevola said. “You could have come to me and told me all this.”
“And what would you have done? Admonished him? You never lifted a hand against him the whole time we were growing up. I was sick of him and afraid you were going to make him your heir, so I killed him. I thought I could make it look like Myrrha had done it. If anybody knew how he treated her, they’d find it easy to believe she might kill him.”
“You must have been surprised when the body was found in the well and not in Myrrha’s room, where you left it.”
Strabo shook his head. “I couldn’t say anything. Do you know what it’s like to live with a secret like that for fifteen years? You’re always afraid you’ll slip and say something that will give you away.”
I had lived, if only for less than a year, with a secret that could have landed me in exile, but I already knew what a burden it was. I couldn’t imagine how heavy it was going to become as time went on.
“You had a motive—jealousy—to kill Macer. But why did you kill Aristeas?”
“It was Nephele’s idea.”
I pointed Tacitus toward the door. “Find her and bring her here.”
Scaevola was back on his feet. “You let some whore talk you into killing a man? Is there no end to your stupidity?”
I stepped in front of Scaevola. “You said I could ask questions. We know what happened to Macer. Now I need to know what happened to Aristeas.”
Strabo leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. “We found the body in that woman’s room, next door.”
“Daphne’s room? What were you doing in there?”
“She looked so strange. Nephele wanted to know what kind of make-up she was using. We went in the room while Daphne was gone and there was this man lying on the bed. He wasn’t breathing. We couldn’t find any trace of life in him. I was sure he was dead, and I got the idea that I could use the body to make people think Myrrha had killed someone else.”
“Why would that matter?”
“I knew my father still wanted to find out who had killed Macer. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he had an answer. If I could leave another dead body in her room—somebody who was killed the same way Strabo was—Myrrha would be convicted of the murder and everybody would think she also killed Macer. But I would have to cut the man’s throat in the same way Macer’s throat had been cut.”
From his corner of the room Scaevola groaned. “You said Macer was a monster—”
“I thought this man was already dead.”
“But why did you drain the blood from his body?” I asked.
Before he could answer we heard a woman squealing outside the door. “Let me go!”
“Because of her,” Strabo said.
Tacitus brought the woman in. From the scratches on his face it was obvious she had not come along with him willingly. He pushed her into the corner opposite Scaevola. “Sit down and shut up!”
“Was it your idea, Nephele, to kill the man you found in Daphne’s room?”
“What? No! He was already dead.” She glared at Strabo. “You’re not going to blame that on me.”
“You were the one who said we should drain his blood,” Strabo
said.
“Is that true?” I asked her.
She crossed her arms over her breasts. “All right. Yes. But he was already dead. We didn’t kill him.”
“How did you know he was dead?” Tacitus asked.
“We couldn’t wake him up. He wasn’t breathing. He was just lying there—dead.”
“Why did you decide to drain his blood?” I asked.
Nephele tried in vain to cover some of the rest of herself. “A few days ago this man named Apollodoros came in here. He was looking for a fellow, a friend of his, he said. I was the only one here when he came in. There was … something about him.”
“She coupled with him,” Strabo said. “I hope you didn’t eat on the table they used.”
“All right, yes, I coupled with him. I didn’t like it, though.”
“Was he rough with you?”
“He was kind, but he took me … the way one man takes another.”
“Did he pay you?” I still didn’t understand what Apollodoros was doing with all the money he was supposedly making off of this scheme.
“He didn’t have any money, he said, but he gave me this little vial of blood. He said it usually cost a hundred aurei.”
“What would make it worth that much?”
“He said if I drank it, it would make me young for a long time, maybe forever, if I was careful. It came from the man he was looking for, a man with a raven’s head mark on his chest. He was over seven hundred years old, he said.”
“Did you drink it?”
“Of course. Wouldn’t you?”
“So when you saw Aristeas on the bed in Daphne’s room, you recognized the mark.”
Nephele nodded. “We checked him over.”
Strabo snorted. “She wanted to see how long his mentula was. That’s why she lifted his tunic.”
“You men are always bragging about that. When I saw the mark I thought we could take his blood and sell it.”
“You fools!” Scaevola growled. “If the man was dead, how could his blood make you young forever?”
“The fella that gave me the blood told me I would have to be careful. It wasn’t like I could jump off a cliff and not be killed. But, if I was careful, I would never grow old. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
The Corpus Conundrum Page 29
