Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (21 page)

In the street Tiro walked so fast I had to run to catch up. ‘I shouldn’t have done it,’ he said, shaking his head and staring straight ahead.

I laid my hand on his shoulder. Though he shrank away, he obeyed as a horse obeys, slowing his pace. ‘You didn’t find her desirable, Tiro?’

‘Of course I did. She’s . . .’ He searched for a word, and finding none adequate gave a despairing shrug.

‘You didn’t enjoy yourself?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘Then you might at least thank me.’

‘But I shouldn’t have done it.’ He scowled. ‘It was Cicero paying, not you. You’ll charge him the expense. What do you think he would say if he knew? Using his money to buy a woman for me . . .’

‘Then he needn’t know. Anyway, I had paid for the whore already; it was a legitimate expense, you must admit that. It only made sense that one of us should use her.’

‘Yes, when you put it that way. Even so . . .’ He looked me straight in the eye, only for an instant, but long enough for me to see inside him. The guilt he felt was not for abusing Cicero’s trust, but for betraying another.

That was when I first knew just how badly Tiro had been smitten by the daughter of Sextus Roscius.

XIII

We walked again past the widow Polia’s tenement, past the bloodstain, past the old shopkeeper and his wife. Tiro was in a mood to walk fast; I matched him and then set a faster pace. I had had enough for one day of strangers and their tragedies. I longed to be home again.

We entered the square. The shops had reopened; the street vendors had returned. The sun was still high enough to reach over the rooftops and strike the public sundial. An hour of daylight remained.

Children were playing about the cistern; housewives and slaves stood waiting to fetch water for the evening meal. The square was alive with noise and movement, but something was amiss. Only gradually I realized that half of the crowd or more had their faces turned in the same direction. A number of them were pointing.

Rome is a city of fire and smoke. The people are sustained by bread, bread is baked in ovens, ovens release plumes of smoke. But the smoke of a tenement fire has an altogether different appearance. The smoke rises thick and black; on a clear and windless day it thrusts upward in a great column. Currents of ash roil and thrash against the sky, only to be sucked inward to the core, thrown higher and higher against the sky.

The fire lay directly in our path, somewhere between us and the Capitoline. Tiro, seeing it, seemed suddenly relieved of all anxieties. His face took on a smooth, healthy lustre of excitement as he quickened his pace. Man’s instinct is to flee from fire, but city life obliterates the animal urges; indeed, we passed not a single person going in the opposite direction as we neared the fire, but instead found ourselves drawn into an ever-growing congestion of pedestrians and wagons as people from all about rushed to see the catastrophe at its peak.

The fire was near the foot of the Capitoline, just outside the Servian wall, in a block of fashionable apartments south of the Circus Flaminius. A four-storey tenement was almost completely engulfed. Flames belched from the windows and danced about the roof. If there had been a drama of the type the crowd so adores, we had missed it; there were no helpless victims screaming from the upper windows, no babies being thrown to the street. The inhabitants had already escaped or else were dead inside.

Here and there in the crowd I saw women tearing their hair, men weeping, families huddle together. The mourners and the destitute were swallowed up in the general mass of the crowd, who watched the flames with various expressions of awe and delight.

‘They say it started in mid-afternoon,’ said a man nearby, ‘and took all this time to swallow the whole building.’ His friend nodded gravely. ‘Even so, I hear there were several families trapped on the upper floors, burned alive. You could hear them screaming. They say a flaming man came hurtling out of an upper window not more than an hour ago, landing in the midst of the crowd. If we move over that way, we might be able to see the spot where he landed. . . .’

In the open corridor between the crowd and the flames a greybearded man was running hectically to and fro, hiring strangers off the street to help contain the conflagration. The wage he offered was hardly more than a volunteer’s honorarium, and not many took him up. On the northward side, looking up the hill, the fire seemed to pose little danger of spreading; there was no wind to carry the flames, and the wide space between the buildings was adequate protection. But on the southward side, towards the Circus, another, shorter tenement nearly adjoined the burning building, with only the width of a tall man’s reach between them. Already the facing wall was scorched, and as the burning building began to crumble, heaps of ash and debris tumbled into the gap between them, with some of the flaming material landing on the roof of the lower structure, where a team of slaves hastily shovelled it off.

A noble, finely dressed and attended by a large retinue of slaves, secretaries, and gladiators, stepped out of the crowd and approached the distressed greybeard. ‘Citizen,’ he called out, ‘are you the owner of these buildings?’

‘Not the burning building,’ the man snapped. ‘That would be my stupid neighbour Varius, the kind of fool who lets his tenants build fires on the hottest day of the year. You don’t see him here, fighting the fire. Probably on holiday down at Baiae. This is mine, the one that’s still standing.’

‘But not, perhaps, for long.’ The noble spoke in a fine voice that would not have been out of place in the Forum. I had not yet seen his face, but I knew who he must be.

‘Crassus,’ I whispered.

‘Yes,’ Tiro said, ‘Crassus. My master knows him.’ There was a trace of pride in his voice, the pride of those who appreciate a brush with celebrity no matter what its nature. ‘You know the song: “Crassus, Crassus, rich as Croesus.” Already they say he’s the richest man in Rome, not counting Sulla, of course, which makes him richer than most kings, and growing richer every day. So Cicero says.’

‘And what else does your master say about Crassus?’ The object of our conversation had wrapped one arm around the greybeard’s shoulder. Together they walked to a spot with a better view of the breach between the two buildings. I followed behind, and stared beyond them into the blinding cleft, impassable for the constant rain of ash and smouldering bricks.

‘Men say that Crassus has many virtues and only one overwhelming vice, and that is avarice. But Cicero says that his greed is only the symptom of a deeper vice: envy. Wealth is the only thing Crassus has. He keeps hoarding it up because he’s so jealous of other men’s qualities, as if his envy were a deep pit, and if he could fill it full enough of gold and cattle and buildings and slaves, then he could finally stand level with his rivals.’

‘Then we should feel pity for Marcus Crassus? Your master is very compassionate.’

We moved beyond the mass of the crowd and drew near enough to hear Crassus and the tenement owner shouting above the roar of the flames. The fire was like hot breath against my face, and I had to blink my eyes against flying cinders.

We stood at the heart of the crisis. It seemed a strange place to transact business, unless you considered the advantage it gave Crassus. The poor greybeard looked in no condition to strike a hard bargain. Above the roar of the flames I could hear Crassus’s trained oratorical voice like chiming bells.

‘Ten thousand denarii,’ he shouted. I couldn’t hear the landlord’s answer, but his face and his gestures indicated outrage. ‘Very well.’ Crassus shrugged. He seemed about to offer a higher price when a sheet of flame abruptly shot up about the base of the endangered building. A group of workers immediately ran to the spot, beating against the flames with rugs and passing a chain of buckets. Their efforts seemed to douse the flames; then the fire leaped up in another spot.

‘Eight thousand, five hundred,’ said Crassus. ‘My final offer. Better than the value of the raw land, which is all that may be left. Consider the expense of having the rubble carted off.’ He stared into the conflagration and shook his head. ‘Eight thousand denarii, no more. Take it now if you’re interested. Once the flames start in earnest I won’t offer you an as.’

The greybeard wore an expression of agony. A few thousand denarii was hardly adequate compensation. But if the building was gutted it would be utterly worthless.

Crassus called to his secretary. ‘Gather up my retinue. Tell them to be ready to move on. I came here to buy, not to watch a building go up in flames.’

The greybeard broke down. He clutched at Crassus’s sleeve and nodded. Crassus made a sign to his secretary, who instantly produced a fat purse and paid the man on the spot.

Crassus raised his hand and snapped his fingers. Immediately his entire retinue went into action. Gladiators and slaves scurried about the building like ants, seizing buckets from the hands of exhausted volunteers, tearing up paving stones and throwing rocks, dirt, and anything else that would not burn into the breach between the buildings.

Crassus turned on his heel and walked straight towards us. I had seen him many times in the Forum, but never so close. He was not a bad-looking man, slightly older than myself, with thinning hair, a strong nose, and prominent jaw. ‘Citizen!’ he called to me. ‘Join the battle. I’ll pay you ten times a workman’s daily wage, half now and half later, and the same for your slave.’

I was too stunned to answer. Crassus walked on, unperturbed, making the same offer to every able-bodied man in the crowd. His secretary followed behind, disbursing payments.

‘They must have seen the smoke and come straight over the hill from the Forum,’ Tiro said.

‘A chance to buy property at the foot of the Capitoline for next to nothing – why not? I hear he keeps slaves posted on the hilltops to watch for fires such as this, so that he can be first on the spot to buy up the spoils.’

‘It’s not the worst stories they tell about Crassus.’ Tiro’s face turned livid, either from my sudden scrutiny or from the heat of the flames.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, only that he made his fortune by profiting from the proscriptions. When Sulla had his enemies beheaded, their property was confiscated by the state. Whole estates went up on the auction blocks. Sulla’s friends were able to buy them for scandalous prices. Everyone else was afraid to bid.’

‘Everyone knows that, Tiro.’

‘But Crassus finally went too far. Even for Sulla.’

‘How?’

Tiro lowered his voice, though no one could possibly have heard us amid the rumble of the flames and the sudden din of Crassus’s hirelings. ‘I overhead Rufus telling my master one day. Rufus is connected to Sulla by marriage, you know, through his sister Valeria; he hears all sorts of things that otherwise would never leave Sulla’s house.’

‘Yes, go on.’

‘The story goes that Crassus had an innocent man’s name added to the proscription lists, just so he could get his hands on the man’s property. This was an old patrician who had no one to protect his interests; his sons had been killed in the wars – fighting for Sulla! The poor man was rounded up by thugs and his head was chopped off that very day. His estates were auctioned off a few days later, and Crassus saw to it that no one else was allowed to bid. The proscriptions were strictly for political enemies, and terrible enough, but Crassus used them to satisfy his own greed. Sulla was furious, or pretended to be, and hasn’t let him run for a public office since, for fear that the scandal will come out.’

I searched the busy crowd for Crassus. He stood amid the swirling mass of slaves and gladiators, heedless of the confusion, staring wide-eyed and smiling like a proud parent at his latest acquisition. I turned around and followed his gaze. As we watched, the wall of the flaming tenement gave way and fell in on itself with a great shudder and a shower of sparks. The fire was contained. The smaller building would not be lost.

I looked again at Crassus. His face was flushed with an almost religious joy – the ecstasy of a bargain well and truly struck. In the reddish glow of the bonfire his face looked smooth and younger than its age, flushed with victory, set about eyes that glittered with an unquenchable greed. I stared into the face of Marcus Licinius Crassus, and I saw the future of Rome.

XIV