Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (183 page)

We sat in silence for a moment, sipping the wine.

‘Where is Faustus Fabius tonight?’ I asked.

‘Here in the villa, as before. Except that tonight I’ve placed guards outside his room and had him stripped of any weapons, poisons, or potions, lest he do some harm to himself before I decide what I shall do with him.’

‘Will you bring charges against him? Will there be a trial in Rome?’

Crassus again put on the face of a disappointed tutor. ‘What? Go to so much trouble on account of the murder of a nobody like Lucius? Alienate the Fabii, expose an unspeakable scandal in which my own cousin was involved, embarrass myself in the process – they were using
my
ship and
my
resources to carry out their schemes, after all – do all this on the eve of the great crisis, when I stand ready to take the command against Spartacus and begin my campaign for the consulship next year? No, Gordianus, there will be no public accusation; there will be no trial.’

‘Then Faustus Fabius will go unpunished?’

‘I never said that. There are many ways for a man to die during wartime, Gordianus. Even a high-ranking officer can be struck down by a spear accidentally cast from behind him, or receive a fatal blow which cannot afterwards be accounted for. And I never said
that,
either.’

‘Did he confess everything to you?’

‘Everything. It was just as you thought; he and Lucius had hatched their smuggling scheme together during my visit to Baiae last spring. Faustus comes from a very old, very distinguished patrician family. His branch of the Fabii retain a vestige of their old prestige, but they lost their fortune long ago. Such a man can become very bitter, especially when he serves under another man of a lower social rank whose wealth and power far exceed his own and always will. Still, to have betrayed Rome for the sake of his own aggrandizement, to have sacrificed the honour of the Fabii, to have given succour to an army of murderous slaves – these crimes are unforgivable and beneath contempt.’

Crassus sighed. ‘The crimes of my cousin Lucius are even more painful to me. He was a weak man, too weak to make his own way in the world, neither wise enough nor patient enough to trust my generosity. I consider it a personal affront that he should have used my own organization and embezzled my own funds to engage in such a disgusting criminal enterprise. I always gave him more than he deserved, and this was how he repaid me! I’m only sorry that he died as quickly and painlessly as he did; he deserved an even crueller death.’

‘Why did Fabius kill him?’

‘My visit was unscheduled and unexpected. Lucius had only a few days’ notice before my arrival. He panicked – there are dozens of improprieties in his records; there were swords and spears hidden down in the boathouse, awaiting shipment. The night before we arrived, Fabius stole away from the camp at Lake Lucrinus after dark and came to confer with Lucius. To confuse anyone who might see him, and without my knowledge, he took my own cloak before he rode off. It was suitably dark; all the better to hide himself. He didn’t foresee the use to which he would put it, and the fact that he would have to dispose of it altogether. Once it was ruined with blood he could neither leave it at the scene of the crime nor return it to me. He tore the seal from the cloak and threw both into the bay. The seal, being heavier, must have reached the water; the cloak caught on the branches.

‘I missed my cloak the next day and wondered where it had gone; I mentioned it to Fabius himself and he never batted an eyelash! Why do you think I’ve been wearing this old chlamys of Lucius’s every night? Not to conform to the Baian taste for Greek fashion, but because the cloak I brought from Rome was missing.’

I stared at him, suddenly suspicious. ‘But on the same night that I suggested Lucius had been killed here in the library, you asked me where the blood had gone; do you remember, Marcus Crassus?’

‘Perfectly well.’

‘And I told you then that a bloodstained cloak had been found, discarded by the road. You must have suspected that it was your cloak!’

He shook his head. ‘No, Gordianus. You told me that you had discovered a
cloth,
not a
cloak.
You never called it a cloak; I remember your words exactly.’ He breathed through his nostrils, sipped his wine, and looked at me shrewdly. ‘Very well, I admit that at that moment I experienced an odd quiver of apprehension; perhaps a part of me glimpsed a path that might lead to the truth. Perhaps a passing god whispered in my ear that this
cloth
might be my missing
cloak,
in which case there was far more to Lucius’s murder than I had previously suspected. But one hears such vague whisperings all the time, no? And even the wisest man never knows if the gods whisper true wisdom in his ear or cruel folly.’

‘Still, why did Fabius murder Lucius?’

‘Fabius left Rome prepared to kill Lucius, but the actual murder was spontaneous. Lucius became hysterical. What if I found him out, as I surely would if I made more than a cursory inspection of his records or located the captain of the
Fury
? He saw his own destruction loom before him. Fabius urged him to keep a cool head; together, he argued, they could keep me busy with other matters and deflect me from ever suspecting their enterprise. Who knows? They might have succeeded. But Lucius lost his wits, began to weep and insisted that a full confession was their only recourse. He intended to tell me everything and throw himself on my mercy, exposing Fabius along with himself. Fabius reached for the statue and silenced his babbling for ever.

‘It was a stroke of genius to incriminate the slaves, don’t you think? That kind of quick-witted, cold-blooded reaction is exactly the quality I need in my officers. What a waste! When Zeno and Alexandros walked in on him, all the better – Fabius scared them off and sent them fleeing into the night to become his scapegoats. He was lucky that Zeno died, because Zeno almost certainly had recognized him. But Alexandros had never seen him before, and so couldn’t tell Iaia and Olympias whom he had seen.’

‘That was why Fabius left the name Spartacus unfinished – because the slaves disturbed him?’

‘No. He had already cleaned the visible blood in the library and wiped it from the floor of the hallway, but he had not yet gathered up the incriminating scrolls that Lucius had been poring over. Some of them had been open on the table when he killed Lucius and were spattered with blood. Fabius had simply rolled them up to get them out of the way and put them on the floor. He intended to finish scrawling the name, rearrange the corpse in a more convincing manner, and then go back to the library to gather up the incriminating documents, so that he could toss them into the sea along with the cloak, or perhaps burn them.

‘Then he heard a voice from the hallway. Someone in the house had apparently heard him working or had been awakened by the clatter of the slaves departing and had got up to investigate. The voice called again, closer to the atrium; Fabius knew he would have to flee immediately or else commit a second murder. I don’t know why he lost his nerve; of course he had no way of telling if the newcomer was armed or not, alone or with others. At any rate, he grabbed the cloak and fled.’

‘But no one in the house admitted to hearing anything that night.’

‘Oh?’ Crassus said sardonically. ‘Then someone lied to you. Imagine! Who might that have been?’

‘Dionysius.’

Crassus nodded. ‘The old scoundrel walked into the atrium to find his patron lying dead on the floor. Instead of raising an alarm, he took his time to evaluate the situation and consider how he might profit from it. He headed for the library to do some quick snooping. He found the incriminating documents; why they were incriminating he had no way of knowing, but the blood on the parchment spoke for itself. He took them up to his room and hid them away, then presumably pored over them at his leisure, trying to connect them with the murder.

‘Imagine Fabius’s panic when he arrived at the villa with me the next day and, sneaking off to the library at his first opportunity, found that the documents had vanished! And yet he gave no outward sign of his agitation. What a cool, calculating countenance! What an officer Rome has lost!

‘It wasn’t until the night you arrived that he was able to slip down to the boathouse to throw the weapons into the water; he had attempted to do so on previous nights, but there was always some interruption, or else he was seen and couldn’t risk going through with it. Actually, I think he was being overhesitant; your arrival spurred him to take the risk – and then you came upon him in the middle of the act! Stabbing you would have looked too much like a second murder, so he tried to drown you instead.’

‘He failed.’

‘Yes. From that moment, Fabius told me, he knew you were the arm of Nemesis.’

‘Nemesis has many arms,’ I said, thinking of all those who had played a part in exposing Faustus Fabius – Mummius and Gelina, Iaia and Olympians, Alexandros and Apollonius, Eco and Meto, loose-tongued Sergius Orata and the dead Dionysius, and even Crassus himself.

‘So it was Fabius who later slipped into the library and cleaned the blood from the statue’s head?’

Crassus nodded.

‘But why did he wait so long? Was it a detail he had simply overlooked until then?’

‘No, he had wanted to do a more thorough cleaning of the library before, but I was always here working, or he was busy attending to duties, or else there was someone who might see him in the hallway. But your arrival set him in furious motion to cover all his tracks.’

‘My arrival,’ I said, ‘and Dionysius’s vanity.’

‘Exactly. When the old windbag bragged at dinner about beating you to the solution, he sealed his own fate. Whether he actually suspected Fabius is doubtful, but Fabius had no way of knowing what the philosopher had deduced. The next morning, amid the confusion of the funeral arrangements, he slipped into Dionysius’s room and added poison to his herbal concoction. You were correct, by the way; he used aconitum. While he was in the room he also attempted to pry open Dionysius’s trunk, suspecting the missing scrolls might be hidden there; the lock proved too strong and he finally fled the room, fearing that Dionysius or a slave would walk in on him.’

‘Where did he obtain the poison?’

‘In Rome. He purchased the aconitum from some vendor in the Subura the night before we set out. Even then he realized he might have to kill Lucius, and he hoped to be able to do it in a more subtle, more secretive fashion than bashing in his skull. The poison was brought for Lucius, but it was used to silence Dionysius. I found more of the stuff in Fabius’s room, and confiscated it to keep him from using it on himself. I don’t intend to let him off that easily.’

‘And last night, on my way to Cumae, Fabius attempted to murder me.’

‘Not Fabius, but his agents. During your altercation in front of the stables he glimpsed the bloodstained cloak hidden under your own. He thought he had tossed it into the sea on the night of the murder; that was the first time he knew that the cloak had been found.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I remember the odd look on his face.’

‘Had you bothered to show the cloak to me – had you trusted me from the outset with
all
the evidence, Gordianus – I would have recognized it immediately, and all manner of wheels would have begun to turn. But alas! Fabius could only hope that you had withheld it from me, either on purpose or through neglect, and that I hadn’t yet seen it, as was the case. He had no choice but to kill you and recover the cloak and destroy it as quickly as possible.

‘It was Fabius whom I had charged to obtain gladiators and organize the funeral games; usually I would have assigned Mummius, but given his weakness for the Greek slave and his distaste for the spectacle I was planning, he was unreliable. Fabius had already determined to eliminate you, one way or another. He had brought two gladiators up from the camp at Lake Lucrinus, just in case he needed them, and so had them ready to send after you immediately when you departed for Cumae. Fabius asked you where you were headed, do you remember? You made the grave error of telling him. Fabius sent the gladiators to follow you and the boy, assassinate you both, and bring him the cloak.’

I nodded. ‘And when our bodies were found, the murders would have been blamed again on Alexandros, hiding in the woods!’

‘Exactly. But you would have been no safer here at the villa. His other plan, had you spent the night here, was to steal into your room and pour a draft of hyoscyamus oil into your ear. Do you know its effects?’

A chill crept up my spine. ‘Pig-bean oil; I’ve heard of it.’

‘It was another poison he had purchased and brought from Rome, another option for eliminating Lucius, short of murdering him; given its effects, it would have taken care of you quite nicely. They say that if one pours an adequate dose into the ear of a sleeping man, he will wake up the next morning raving and incoherent, completely deranged. You see, Gordianus, had you spent last night here in your room, you might be a babbling idiot now.’

‘And had Eco not shouted a warning outside the arena today, a spear would have pierced me from neck to navel.’

‘Another gift from Fabius. When only one of his assassins returned to him last night with news that you had escaped with the cloak, he ordered the gladiator to act as his private watchman, to hide above the entrance to my box and watch for your arrival. Without my knowledge, Fabius discharged the guards who should have been standing before the entrance, so there would be no witnesses. It was his last desperate gambit; had the assassin succeeded in spearing you, he would have informed Fabius and you would have been carted off to rot with the dead gladiators, an anonymous and unlamented corpse.’