Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (33 page)

I pretended to be disinterested. She pretended to be cold. She insisted on stopping by the market on our way home so that we would have something to eat that night. While she shopped I wandered about the street, absorbing the squalid smells and sights of the Subura, happy to be home. Even the pile of fresh dung that we had to bypass on the climb up did not dampen my mood.

The stablemaster’s slave Scaldus sat on the ground before the door, leaning against it with his legs outstretched. At first I thought he slept, but at our approach the colossus stirred and rose to its feet with alarming speed. Recognizing my face, he relaxed and grinned stupidly. He told me that he had taken turns with his brother so that the house had never gone unguarded, and that no one else had been there in my absence. I gave him a coin and told him to be off, and he obediently began loping down the hill.

Bethesda looked at me in alarm, but I assured her we would be safe. Cicero had promised to pay for protecting my house. I would find a professional in the Subura before we slept.

She began to speak, and from the way she curled her lips I knew she was about to say something sarcastic. Instead I covered them with a kiss. I walked her backwards into the house and closed the door with my foot. She dropped her armful of greens and bread and clutched at my shoulders and neck. She sank to the floor and pulled me with her.

She was overjoyed to see me again, and she showed me. She was angry at having been left in a strange household, and she showed that as well, clutching her nails against my shoulders and beating her fists against my back, nipping at my neck and earlobes. I devoured her like a man starved for days. It seemed impossible that I had been gone for only two nights.

She had bathed that morning. Her flesh had the taste of a different soap, and behind her ears and on her throat and in the secret places of her body she had anointed herself with an unfamiliar perfume – filched, she told me later, from the private cache of the stablemaster’s wife while no one was looking. In the last rays of sunlight we lay exhausted and naked in the vestibule, our sweat leaving obscene imprints on the worn rug. That was when I chanced to look beyond the sleek planes of her body and noticed the message still scrawled in blood on the wall above us: ‘Be silent or die. . . .’

A sudden breeze from the atrium chilled the sweat on my spine. Bethesda’s shoulder turned to gooseflesh beneath my tongue. There was a strange moment in which it seemed that my heart ceased to beat, suspended between the fading light and heat of her body and the message above us. The world seemed suddenly a strange and unfamiliar place, and I imagined I heard those words whispered aloud in my ear. I might have read this as an omen. I might then have fled from the house, from Rome, from Roman justice. Instead I bit her shoulder, and Bethesda gasped, and the night continued to its desperate conclusion.

Together we lit the lamps – and though she showed a fearless face, again Bethesda insisted that every room be lit. I told her she should come with me down to the Subura to shop for a guard, but she insisted on staying behind to cook the meal. I felt a pang of dread at the idea of leaving her alone in the house even for a short while, but she was adamant and only asked me to be quick. I could see that she was choosing to be brave and that in her own way she wanted to reassert her power over the house; in my absence she would burn a stick of incense and perform some rite learned long ago from her mother. After the door closed behind me, I listened to make sure she bolted it securely from within.

The moon was rising and nearly full, casting a blue light over the quiet houses on the hillside, making the tile roofs look as if they had been scalloped from copper. The Subura was a vast pool of light and muted sound below me, that swallowed me up as I quickly descended the hill until I stepped onto the busiest nighttime street in Rome.

I could have found a gang member on any corner, but I didn’t want a common thug. I wanted a professional fighter and bodyguard from a rich man’s retinue, a slave of proven worth who could be trusted. I went to a little tavern tucked behind one of the more expensive brothels on the Subura and found Varus the Go-Between. He understood what I wanted immediately, and he knew my credit was good. After I had bought him a cup of wine he disappeared. Not too long after he returned with a giant in tow.

They made quite a contrast walking into the dim little room side by side. Varus was so short he came only to the giant’s elbow; his bald pate and ringed fingers shone in the light while his doughy features seemed to soften and run together in the glow of the lamps. The beast beside him looked hardly tamed; there was a brooding red light in his eyes that didn’t come from the lamps. He gave an impression of almost unnatural strength and solidity, as if he had been built out of granite blocks or tree trunks; even his face had the look of having been chiselled from stone, a rough model discarded by a sculptor who decided it was too brutal to finish. His hair and beard were long and shaggy but not unkempt, and his tunic was made of good cloth. Such grooming bespoke a responsible owner. He looked as well cared for as a fine horse. He also looked capable of killing a man with his bare hands.

He was exactly the man I wanted. His name was Zoticus.

‘His master’s favourite,’ Varus assured me. ‘The man never steps outside his house without Zoticus at his side. A proven killer – broke the neck of a burglar only last month. And strong as an ox, to be sure. Smell the garlic on his breath? His master feeds it to him like oats to a horse. A trick the gladiators use, gives a man strength. His master is wealthy, respectable, owner of three brothels, two taverns, and a gaming hall all located in the Subura; a pious man without an enemy in the world, I’m sure, but he likes to protect himself from the unforeseen. Who wouldn’t? Never takes a step without his faithful Zoticus. But especially for me, because he owes a favour to Varus, the man will let me have this creature on loan – for the four days you requested, no more. To repay a long-standing debt he owes me. How very lucky you are, Gordianus, to be a friend of Varus the Go-Between.’

We haggled over the terms, and I let him have too sweet a deal, being anxious to return to Bethesda. But the slave was worth the price; stepping through the crowds of the Subura I watched strangers draw back and give way before us, and I saw the cowed looks in their eyes as they stared above my head at the monster behind me. Zoticus spoke little, which pleased me. As we ascended the deserted pathway to my house, leaving the noise of the Subura behind, he loomed behind me like a protective spirit, ceaselessly peering into the shadows around us.

As we stepped within sight of the house I heard his breath quicken and felt his hand like a brick on my shoulder. Another man stood before the door with crossed arms. He shouted at us to stop where we were, then pulled a long dagger from his sleeve. In the blink of an eye I found myself behind Zoticus instead of before him, and as the world whirled past I glimpsed a long steel blade in his fist.

The door rattled open and I heard Bethesda laughing, then explaining. It seemed that I had misunderstood Cicero. Not only had he offered to pay for a bodyguard, he had even gone to the trouble of sending the man over himself. Only minutes after I left Bethesda, there had been a banging on the door. She had ignored it at first, then finally peered through the grate. The man had asked for me; Bethesda pretended that I was in the house but indisposed. Then he gave her Cicero’s name and his compliments and told her he had been sent by Cicero to guard the house, as her master would recall. He took up his place beside the door without another word.

‘Two will be better than one, anyway,’ Bethesda insisted, and I felt a pang of jealousy as she looked from one to the other; perhaps it was that tiny twinge of jealousy that blinded me to the obvious. I would have been hard-pressed to have said which of the two was uglier, or bigger, or more intimidating, or which Bethesda seemed to find more fascinating. Except for his red beard and ruddy face the other might have been Zoticus’s brother; his breath even carried the same odour of garlic. They regarded each other as gladiators do, with locked jaws and basilisk eyes, as if the least twitch of a lip might mar the purity of their mutual contempt.

‘Very well,’ I told her, ‘for tonight we’ll use them both, and sort it out tomorrow. One to circle the house and patrol the pathway, another to stay in the vestibule, inside the door.’

Cicero had told me to make my own arrangements for a guard; I remembered that quite clearly. But perhaps, I thought, in the heat of his excitement over the news I had brought him, Cicero had forgotten his own instructions. All I could think of were the smells that came from Bethesda’s kitchen and the long, careless night of sleep to come.

As I left the vestibule I glanced at the redbeard sent by Cicero. He sat in a chair against the wall, facing the closed door with his arms crossed. The naked dagger was still in his fist. Above his head was the message written in blood, and I could not help reading it again: ‘Be silent or die.’ I was sick of those words; in the morning I would tell Bethesda to scrub the wall clean. I glanced into Redbeard’s unblinking eyes and gave him a smile. He did not smile back.

Often in comedies there are characters who do foolish things that are painfully, obviously foolish to everyone in the audience, to everyone in the universe except themselves. The audience squirm in their seats, laugh, even shout aloud: ‘No, no! Can’t you see, you fool?’ The doomed man on the stage cannot hear, and the gods with great merriment go about engineering the destruction of yet another blind mortal.

But sometimes the gods lead us to the brink of destruction only to snatch us back from the abyss at the last moment, as richly amused by our inexplicable salvation as by our unforeseen death.

I woke all at once with no interval between sleep and waking, into that strange realm of consciousness that reigns between midnight and dawn. I was alone in my own bedchamber. Bethesda had led me there after a long meal offish and wine, stripping off my tunic and covering me with a thin wool blanket despite the heat, kissing me on the forehead as if I were a child. I stood and let the blanket fall behind me; the night air was heavy with heat. The room was dark, lit only by a single beam of moonlight cast through a tiny window high in the wall. I walked by memory to the corner of the room, but in the darkness I couldn’t find the chamber pot, or else Bethesda had emptied it and never put it back.

It did not matter. In the weirdness of that night a chamber pot might turn into a mushroom or disappear into thin air and it would have seemed a little thing. It was the same strangeness I had felt earlier, lying with Bethesda in the vestibule. I saw and sensed everything around me with absolute clarity, and yet it seemed mysterious and unfamiliar territory, as if the moon had changed her colour, as if the gods themselves drifted from the earth in heavy slumber and left existence to its own devices. Anything at all might happen.

I pushed aside the curtain and stepped into the atrium. Perhaps I wasn’t awake after all and dreamed on my feet, for the house possessed that unreality of familiar places turned askew by the geography of the night. Blue moonlight flooded the garden and turned it into a jungle of bones casting shadows as sharp as knives. Here and there about the peristyle lamps burned low, like withered suns on the verge of extinction. The brightest of the lamps shone from behind the wall that hid the vestibule, casting a thin yellow light around the corner like the glow of campfires beyond a ridge.

I stepped to the edge of the garden and pulled up my tunic. I was as quiet as a schoolboy, aiming for the soft grass and making hardly a sound. I finished and let my tunic drop and stood gazing across the field of bones, transformed by the shadow of a passing cloud into the ashen ruins of Carthage on a moonless night.

Amid the smells of earth and urine and hyacinth, I caught the faint odour of garlic on the warm, dry air. The lamplight from the vestibule flickered and moved, and cast the wavering shadow of a man onto the wall that enclosed Bethesda’s room.

Like a man in a dream I walked towards the vestibule; as in a dream, I seemed to be invisible. A bright lamp was set on the floor, casting weird shadows upward. Redbeard stood before the defaced wall with its threatening message, peering into it as if it were a pool and moving one hand over the surface. The hand that moved was wrapped in a red-stained cloth that dripped something dark and thick onto the floor. His other hand clutched his dagger. The glittering blade was smeared with blood.

The door to the house was wide open. Sprawled against it, as if to prop it open, was the massive body of Zoticus, his throat so severely slashed that his head was almost detached from his body. A great pool of blood had poured from his neck onto the stone floor. The rug was soaked with it. While I watched, Redbeard stepped back and stooped down to dip the cloth into the pool of blood, never taking his eyes from the wall, as if he were an artist and the wall a painting in progress. He stepped forwards and began to write again.

Then, very slowly, he turned his face and saw me.

He returned the smile I had given him earlier with a horrible, gaping grin.

He must have been upon me very quickly, but it seemed to me that he moved with a ponderous and impossible slowness. I had all the time in the world to watch him wield the dagger aloft, to note the sudden blast of garlic in my nostrils, to ponder the taut and quivering rictus of his face, and to wonder stupidly what possible reason he could have to dislike me so very much.

My body was wiser than my brain. Somehow I managed to grip his wrist and deflect the dagger. It barely grazed my cheek, slicing a thin red track that I felt only much later. Suddenly I was flat against the wall with the breath knocked out of me, so confused that I thought for an instant I was flat on the floor with the full weight of Redbeard’s body on my chest.