Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (122 page)

‘Love flowed to Cleon from all directions, like rivers to the sea – but he turned back the rivers and lived in his own rocky desert. Eros chose Cleon to be his favourite, but Cleon refused him. He laughed in the god’s face once too often.’

‘How? What had Cleon done to finally push the god too far?’

Again I saw the internal debate behind his eyes. Clearly, he wanted to tell me everything. I had only to be patient. At last, he sighed and spoke. ‘Lately, some of us thought that Cleon might finally be softening. He had a new tutor, a young philosopher named Mulciber, who came from Alexandria about six months ago. Cleon and his sister Cleio went to Mulciber’s little house off the forum every morning to talk about Plato and read poetry.’

‘Cleio as well?’

‘Sosistrides believed in educating both his children, no matter that Cleio’s a girl. Anyway, pretty soon word got around that Mulciber was courting Cleon. Why not? He was smitten, like everybody else. The surprise was that Cleon seemed to respond to his advances. Mulciber would send him chaste little love poems, and Cleon would send poems back to him. Cleon actually showed me some of Mulciber’s poems, and asked me to read the ones he was sending back. They were beautiful! He was good at that, too, of course.’ Hippolytus shook his head ruefully.

‘But it was all a cruel hoax. Cleon was just leading Mulciber on, making a fool of him. Only the day before yesterday, right in front of some of Mulciber’s other students, Cleon made a public show of returning all the poems Mulciber had sent him, and asking for his own poems back. He said he’d written them merely as exercises, to teach his own tutor the proper way to write a love poem. Mulciber was dumbstruck! Everyone in the gymnasium heard about it. People said Cleon had finally gone too far. To have spurned his tutor’s advances was one thing, but to do so in such a cruel, deliberately humiliating manner – that was hubris, people said, and the gods would take vengeance. And now they have.’

I nodded. ‘But quite often the gods use human vessels to achieve their ends. Do you really think the statue tumbled into the pool of its own accord, without a hand to push it?’

Hippolytus frowned, and seemed to debate revealing yet another secret. ‘Yesterday, not long before Cleon drowned, some of us saw a stranger in the gymnasium.’

At last, I thought, a concrete bit of evidence, something solid to grapple with! I took a deep breath. ‘No one else mentioned seeing a stranger.’

‘I told you, they’re all too superstitious. If the boy we saw was some emissary of the god, they don’t want to speak of it.’

‘A boy?’

‘Perhaps it was Eros himself, in human form – though you’d think a god would be better groomed and wear clothes that fit!’

‘You saw this stranger clearly?’

‘Not that clearly; neither did anybody else, as far as I can tell. I only caught a glimpse of him loitering in the outer vestibule, but I could tell he wasn’t one of the regular boys.’

‘How so?’

‘By the fact that he was dressed at all. This was just after the games, and everyone was still naked. And most of the gymnasium crowd are pretty well off; this fellow had a wretched haircut and his tunic looked like a patched hand-me-down from a big brother. I figured he was some stranger who wandered in off the street, or maybe a messenger slave too shy to come into the changing room.’

‘And his face?’

Hippolytus shook his head. ‘I didn’t see his face. He had dark hair, though.’

‘Did you speak to him, or hear him speak?’

‘No. I headed for the hot plunge and forgot all about him. Then Caputorus found Cleon’s body, and everything was crazy after that. I didn’t make any connection to the stranger until this morning, when I found out that some of the others had seen him, too.’

‘Did anybody see this young stranger pass through the baths and the changing room?’

‘I don’t think so. But there’s another way to get from the outer vestibule to the inner courtyard, through a little passageway at the far end of the building.’

‘So Caputorus told me. It seems possible, then, that this stranger could have entered the outer vestibule, sneaked through the empty passage, come upon Cleon alone in the pool, pushed the statue on to him, then fled the way he had come, all without being clearly seen by anyone.’

Hippolytus took a deep breath. ‘That’s how I figure it. So you see, it must have been the god, or some agent of the god. Who else could have had such perfect timing, to carry out such an awful deed?’

I shook my head. ‘I can see you know a bit about poetry and more than a bit about wrestling holds, young man, but has no one tutored you in logic? We may have answered the question of
how
, but that hasn’t answered the question of who. I respect your religious conviction that the god Eros may have had the motive and the will to kill Cleon in such a cold-blooded fashion – but it seems there were plenty of mortals with abundant motive as well. In my line of work I prefer to suspect the most likely mortal first, and presume divine causation only as a last resort. Chief among such suspects must be this tutor, Mulciber. Could he have been the stranger you saw lurking in the vestibule? Philosophers are notorious for having bad haircuts and shabby clothes.’

‘No. The stranger was shorter and had darker hair.’

‘Still, I should like to have a talk with this lovesick tutor.’

‘You can’t,’ said Hippolytus. ‘Mulciber hanged himself yesterday.’

‘No wonder such a superstitious dread surrounds Cleon’s death,’ I remarked to Eco, as we made our way to the house of Mulciber. ‘The golden boy of the Cup, killed by a statue of Eros; his spurned tutor hanging himself the same day. This is the dark side of Eros. It casts a shadow that frightens everyone into silence.’

Except me
, Eco gestured, and let out the stifled, inchoate grunt he sometimes emits simply to declare his existence. I smiled at his self-deprecating humour, but it seemed to me that the things we had learned that morning had disturbed and unsettled Eco. He was at an age to be acutely aware of his place in the scheme of things, and to begin wondering who might ever love him, especially in spite of his handicap. It seemed unfair that a boy like Cleon, who had only scorn for his suitors, should have inspired so much unrequited infatuation and desire, when others faced lives of loneliness. Did the gods engineer the paradox of love’s unfairness to amuse themselves, or was it one of the evils that escaped from Pandora’s box to plague mankind?

The door of the philosopher’s house, like that of Sosistrides, was adorned with a black wreath. Following my knock, an elderly slave opened it to admit us to a little foyer, where a body was laid out upon a bier much less elaborate than that of Cleon. I saw at once why Hippolytus had been certain that the short, dark-haired stranger at the gymnasium had not been the Alexandrian tutor, for Mulciber was quite tall and had fair hair. He had been a reasonably handsome man of thirty-five or so, about my own age. Eco gestured to the scarf that had been clumsily gathered about the dead man’s throat, and then clutched his own neck with a strangler’s grip:
To hide the rope marks
, he seemed to say.

‘Did you know my master?’ asked the slave who had shown us in.

‘Only by reputation,’ I said. ‘We’re visitors to Neapolis, but I’ve heard of your master’s devotion to poetry and philosophy. I was shocked to learn of his sudden death.’ I spoke only the truth, after all.

The slave nodded. ‘He was a man of learning and talent. Still, few have come to pay their respects. He had no family here. And of course there are many who won’t set foot inside the house of a suicide, for fear of bad luck.’

‘It’s certain that he killed himself, then?’

‘It was I who found him, hanging from a rope. He tied it to that beam, just above the boy’s head.’ Eco rolled his eyes up. ‘Then he stood on a chair, put the noose around his neck, and kicked the chair out of the way. His neck snapped. I like to think he died quickly.’ The slave regarded his master’s face affectionately. ‘Such a waste! And all for the love of that worthless boy!’

‘You’re certain that’s why he killed himself?’

‘Why else? He was making a good living here in Neapolis, enough to send a bit back to his brother in Alexandria every now and again, and even to think of purchasing a second slave. I’m not sure how I’d have taken to that; I’ve been with him since he was a boy. I used to carry his wax tablets and scrolls for him when he was little and had his own tutor. No, his life was going well in every way, except for that horrible boy!’

‘You know that Cleon died yesterday.’

‘Oh, yes. That’s why the master killed himself.’

‘He hung himself
after
hearing of Cleon’s death?’

‘Of course! Only . . .’ The old man looked puzzled, as if he had not previously considered any other possibility. ‘Now let me think. Yesterday was strange all around, you see. The master sent me out early in the morning, before daybreak, with specific instructions not to return until evening. That was very odd, because usually I spend all day here, admitting his pupils and seeing to his meals. But yesterday he sent me out and I stayed away until dusk. I heard about Cleon’s death on my way home. When I came in, there was the master, hanging from that rope.’

‘Then you don’t know for certain when he died – only that it must have been between daybreak and nightfall.’

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘Who might have seen him during the day?’

‘Usually pupils come and go all day, but not so yesterday, on account of the games at the gymnasium. All his regular students took part, you see, or else went to watch. The master had planned to be a spectator himself. So he had cancelled all his regular classes, you see, except for his very first of the day – and that he’d never cancel, of course, because it was with that wretched boy!’

‘Cleon, you mean.’

‘Yes, Cleon and his sister, Cleio. They always came for the first hour of the day. This month they were reading Plato on the death of Socrates.’

‘Suicide was on Mulciber’s mind, then. And yesterday, did Cleon and his sister arrive for their class?’

‘I can’t say. I suppose they did. I was out of the house by then.’

‘I shall have to ask Cleio, but for now we’ll assume they did. Perhaps Mulciber was hoping to patch things up with Cleon.’ The slave gave me a curious look. ‘I know about the humiliating episode of the returned poems the day before,’ I explained.

The slave regarded me warily. ‘You seem to know a great deal for a man who’s not from Neapolis. What are you doing here?’

‘Only trying to discover the truth. Now, then: we’ll assume that Cleon and Cleio came for their class, early in the morning. Perhaps Mulciber was braced for another humiliation, and even then planning suicide – or was he wildly hoping, with a lover’s blind faith, for some impossible reconciliation? Perhaps that’s why he dismissed you for the day, because he didn’t care to have his old slave witness either outcome. But it must have gone badly, or at least not as Mulciber hoped, for he never showed up to watch the games at the gymnasium that day. Everyone seems to assume that it was news of Cleon’s death that drove him to suicide, but it seems to me just as likely that Mulciber hung himself right after Cleon and Cleio left, unable to bear yet another rejection.’

Eco, greatly agitated, mimed an athlete throwing a discus, then a man fitting a noose around his neck, then an archer notching an arrow in a bow.

I nodded. ‘Yes, bitter irony: even as Cleon was enjoying his greatest triumph at the gymnasium, poor Mulciber may have been snuffing out his own existence. And then, Cleon’s death in the pool. No wonder everyone thinks that Eros himself brought Cleon down.’ I studied the face of the dead man. ‘Your master was a poet, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said the slave. ‘He wrote at least a few lines every day of his life.’

‘Did he leave a farewell poem?’

The slave shook his head. ‘You’d think he might have, if only to say goodbye to me after all these years.’

‘But there was nothing? Not even a note?’

‘Not a line. And that’s another strange thing, because the night before he was up long after midnight, writing and writing. I thought perhaps he’d put the boy behind him and thrown himself into composing some epic poem, seized by the muse! But I can’t find any trace of it. Whatever he was writing so frantically, it seems to have vanished. Perhaps, when he made up his mind to hang himself, he thought better of what he’d written, and burned it. He seems to have got rid of some other papers, as well.’