Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (155 page)

The soldier’s ugly face opened in an ingratiating smile. ‘Marcus Crassus requests your presence in the library downstairs. If you’re not too busy, that is.’

It took only a moment to slip into my sandals. I began searching in the lamplight for a suitable tunic, but the bodyguard told me to come as I was. Eco softly snored through the whole exchange. The day had worn him out, and his sleep was uncommonly deep.

A long straight hallway took us to the central atrium; winding stairs led down to the open garden, where the light of tiny lamps on the floor cast strange shadows across the corpse of Lucius Licinius. The library was a short walk up a hallway into the north wing. The guard indicated a door to our right as we passed and put a finger to his lips. ‘The lady Gelina is asleep,’ he explained. A few steps farther on he pushed open a door on our left and ushered me inside.

‘Gordianus of Rome,’ he announced.

A cloaked figure sat at a square table across the room, his back to us. Another bodyguard stood nearby. The figure turned a bit in his backless chair, just enough to give me a glimpse of one eye, then turned back to his business and gestured for both guards to leave the room.

After a long moment he stood, tossed aside the simple cloak he wore – a Greek chlamys, such as Romans often adopt when they visit the Cup – and turned to greet me. He wore a plain tunic of durable fabric and simple cut. He looked slightly dishevelled, as if he had been riding. His smile was weary but not insincere.

‘So you are Gordianus,’ he said, leaning back against the table, which was strewn with documents. ‘I suppose you know who I am.’

‘Yes, Marcus Crassus.’ He was only slightly older than myself, but considerably greyer – not surprising, considering the hardships and tragedies of his early life, including his flight to Spain after the suicide of his father and the assassination of his brother by anti-Sullan forces. I had seen him often in the Forum delivering speeches or overseeing his interests at the markets, always attended by a large coterie of secretaries and sycophants. It was a little unnerving to see him on so intimate a scale – his hair untidy, his eyes tired, his hands unwashed and stained from handling a rein. He was quite human, after all, despite his fabulous wealth. ‘Crassus, Crassus, rich as Croesus,’ went the ditty, and the popular imagination at Rome pictured him as a man of excessive habits. But those powerful enough to move in his circle painted a different image, which was borne out by his unpretentious appearance; Crassus’s craving for wealth was not for the luxuries that gold could buy, but for the power it could harness.

‘It’s a wonder we’ve never met before,’ he said in his smooth orator’s voice. ‘I know of you, certainly. There was that affair of the Vestal Virgins last year; you played some part in saving Catalina’s hide, I understand. I’ve also heard Cicero praise your work, if in a somewhat backhanded way. Hortensius, too. I do recognize your face, from the Forum I suspect. Generally I don’t hire free agents such as yourself. I prefer to use men I own.’

‘Or to own the men you use?’

‘You understand me exactly. If I want, say, to build a new villa, it’s much more efficient to purchase an educated slave, or to educate a bright slave I already own, rather than to hire whatever architect happens to be fashionable, at some exorbitant rate. I buy an architect rather than an architect’s services; that way I can use him again and again at no extra cost.’

‘Some of the skills I offer are beyond the capacities of a slave,’ I said.

‘Yes, I suppose they are. For instance, a slave could hardly have been invited to join Gelina’s dinner guests and to question them at will. Have you learned anything of value since you arrived?’

‘As a matter of fact, I have.’

‘Yes? Speak up. After all, I’m the man who’s hired you.’

‘I thought it was Gelina who sent for me.’

‘But it was my ship that brought you, and it’s my purse that will pay your fee. That makes me your employer.’

‘Still, if you would permit, I should prefer to keep my discoveries to myself for a time. Sometimes information is like the pressed juice of the grape; it needs to ferment in a dark and quiet place away from probing eyes.’

‘I see. Well, I shall not press you. Frankly, I think your presence here is a waste of my money and your time. But Gelina insisted, and as it was her husband who was murdered, I decided to indulge her.’

‘You’re not curious yourself about the murder of Lucius Licinius? I understand he was your cousin, and a steward of your property for many years.’

Crassus shrugged. ‘Is there really any question at all about who killed him? Surely Gelina has told you about the missing slaves, and the letters scrawled at Lucius’s feet? That such a thing should happen to one of my kinsmen, in one of my own villas, is outrageous. It cannot be overlooked.’

‘And yet there may be reasons to believe that the slaves are innocent of the crime.’

‘What reasons? Ah, I forgot, your head is some sort of dark casket where the truth slowly ferments.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Metrobius could no doubt come up with more puns on the same theme, but I’m too tired to make them. Ah, these accounting ledgers are a scandal.’ He turned away from me to study the scrolls laid out on the table, apparently no longer interested in my reason for being there. ‘I had no idea Lucius had become so careless. With the slave Zeno gone there’s no making sense of these documents at all . . .’

‘Are you done with me, Marcus Crassus?’

He was absorbed in the ledgers and seemed not to hear me. I looked about the room. The floor was covered with a thick carpet with a geometric design in red and black. The walls on the left and right were covered with shelves full of scrolls, some of them stacked together and others neatly stored in pigeonholes. The wall opposite the door was pierced by two narrow windows that faced the courtyard in front of the house, shuttered against the cold and covered by dark red draperies.

Between the windows, above the table where Crassus laboured, was a painting of Gelina. It was a portrait of rare distinction, touched with life, as the Greeks say. In the background loomed Vesuvius, with blue sky above and green sea below; in the foreground the image of Gelina seemed to radiate a sense of profound equanimity and grace. The portraitist was evidently quite proud of her work, for in the lower right-hand corner was printed IAIA CYZICENA. She made the letter ‘A’ with an eccentric flourish, tilting the crossbar sharply downward towards the right.

On either side of the table stood squat pedestals supporting small bronze statues, each about the height of a man’s forearm. The statue on the left I could not see, for it was covered by Crassus’s carelessly discarded chlamys. The one on the right was of Hercules bearing a club across his shoulders, naked except for a lionskin cloak, with the lion’s head for hood and its paws clasped at his throat. It was an odd choice for a library, but the workmanship could not be faulted. The tufts of the lion’s fur had been scrupulously modelled; the texture of fur contrasted with the smooth muscularity of the demigod’s flesh. Lucius Licinius had been as careless of his art as of his ledgers, I thought, for it appeared that the scalloped fur of the lion’s head had somehow begun to rust.

‘Marcus Crassus . . .’ I began again.

He sighed and waved me aside without looking up. ‘Yes, go now. I suppose I’ve made it clear that I have no enthusiasm for your project, but I will support you in whatever you need. Go to Fabius or Mummius first. If you cannot find satisfaction on some point, come to me directly, although I can’t guarantee you’ll be able to find me. I have a great deal of business to transact before I return to Rome, and not much time. The important thing is that when this matter is done, no man will be able to say that the truth was not sought or that justice did not prevail.’ He at last turned his head, only to give me a weary and insincere smile of dismissal.

I stepped into the hall and closed the door behind me. The guard offered to show me the way to my room, but I told him that I was quite awake. I paused for a moment in the central atrium to look again at the corpse of Lucius Licinius. More incense had been put out, but the smell of decay, like the odour of roses, seemed to grow stronger at night. I was halfway to my room before I turned abruptly back.

The guard was surprised and a little suspicious. He insisted on entering the library first and consulted with Crassus before allowing me to enter. He stepped into the hall and shut the door, leaving us alone once more.

Crassus was still poring over the ledgers. He now sat in his undertunic, having stripped off his riding tunic and thrown it over the Hercules. In the few moments I had been gone, one of the slaves had delivered a tray with a steaming cup from which he sipped. The infusion of hot water and mint filled the room with its smell.

‘Yes?’ He cocked one eyebrow impatiently. ‘Was there some point I neglected to discuss?’

‘It’s a small thing, Marcus Crassus. Perhaps I’m entirely mistaken,’ I said, as I lifted his tunic from the Hercules. The cloth was still warm from his body. Crassus looked at me darkly. Clearly he was not used to having his personal things touched by people he did not own.

‘A very interesting statue,’ I remarked, looking down on the Hercules from above.

‘I suppose. It’s a copy of an original I have in my villa at Falerii. Lucius admired it once on a visit, so I had one made for him.’

‘How ironic, then, that it should have been used to murder him.’

‘What?’

‘I think we’re both sufficiently acquainted with the sight of blood to know it when we see it, Marcus Crassus. What do you make of this rusty substance trapped in the crevices of the lion’s fur?’

He rose from his chair and peered down, then picked up the statue with both hands and held it beneath a hanging lamp. At length he set it down on the table and looked at me soberly. ‘You have very sharp eyes, Gordianus. But it seems quite unlikely that such a cumbersome bludgeon should have been carried all the way down the hall to the atrium for the purpose of murdering my cousin Lucius, and then carried back again.’

‘It was not the statue that was moved,’ I said, ‘but the body.’

Crassus looked doubtful.

‘Consider the posture of the corpse as it was found, like that of a man who had been dragged. Certainly from this room to the atrium is not too far for a strong man to drag a body.’

‘Easier for two men,’ he said, and I saw he meant the missing slaves. ‘But where is the rest of the blood? Surely there must have been more on the statue, and a dragged body would have left a trail.’

‘Not if a cloth was placed beneath the head, and the same cloth was used to clean whatever blood was left behind.’

‘Was such a cloth found?’

I hesitated. ‘Marcus Crassus, forgive my presumption when I ask that you share this knowledge with no one else. Gelina, Mummius, and two of the slaves already know. Yes, such a cloth was found, soaked with blood, down the road where someone attempted to fling it into the sea.’

He looked at me shrewdly. ‘This bloodstained cloth was one of the discoveries you mentioned earlier, the secrets you prefer to withhold from me while the evidence ferments in your head?’

‘Yes.’ I squatted down and looked for traces of blood on the floor. A cloak would hardly have been adequate to clean blood from the dark carpet, but in the dim light it was impossible to see any stains.

‘But why should the assassins have moved his body?’ He picked up the statue with his left hand and fingered the encrusted blood with his right, then set it on the table with a grimace.

‘You say assassins, not assassin, Marcus Crassus.’

‘The slaves—’

‘Perhaps the body was moved and the name of Spartacus carved precisely to implicate the slaves and distract us from the truth.’

‘Or perhaps the slaves moved his body to the most public part of the house precisely to make their point, where all would be sure to see it and the name they carved.’

To that I had no answer. One doubt led to another. ‘It does seem unlikely that the killing could have occurred in this room without anyone hearing, especially if it followed an argument, or if Lucius was able to make any noise at all. Gelina sleeps just across the hall; surely the noise would have awakened her.’

Crassus smiled at me sardonically. ‘Gelina need not figure in your calculations.’

‘No?’

‘Gelina sleeps like the dead. Perhaps you’ve noticed her liberal consumption of wine? It’s not a new habit. Dancing girls with cymbals could parade down the hallway and Gelina wouldn’t stir.’

‘Then the question must be: why was Lucius murdered here in his library?’

‘No, Gordianus, the question is the same as it always was: where are the two escaped slaves? That Zeno, his secretary, should have murdered Lucius here in the room where they often worked together is hardly surprising. The young stableman Alexandros may have been here with them; I understand he could read and do figures, and Zeno used him sometimes as a helper. Perhaps it was this Alexandros who committed the crime; a stableman would have had the strength to drag Lucius down the hall, and a Thracian would have had the gall to scrawl his countryman’s name on the floor. Something interrupted him in the act and he fled before he could write the whole name.’

‘But no one interrupted them. The body wasn’t discovered until morning.’

Crassus shrugged. ‘An owl hooted, or a cat stirred a pebble. Or perhaps this Thracian slave simply hadn’t yet learned the letter C and was stumped,’ he said facetiously, rubbing his eyes with his forefinger and thumb. ‘Forgive me, Gordianus, but I think I’ve had enough for tonight. Even Marcus Mummius has gone to bed, and we should do the same.’ He picked up the Hercules from the table and replaced it on its pedestal. ‘I suppose this is another of your secrets that needs fermenting? I shall mention it only to Morpheus in my dreams.’