Gordianus The Finder Omnibus (Books 1-4) (94 page)

Lucius was taken aback. ‘Really, there’s nothing funny about it!’

‘No, Lucius, you misunderstand. Are you saying, Eco, that it was Stephanos whom you heard laughing?’

Eco nodded, in such a way as to indicate that he had been debating his judgment of the matter and had finally made up his mind about it.

‘Stephanos, laughing?’ said Lucius, in the same tone he might have used if Eco had indicated that he had seen Stephanos breathing fire or juggling his eyeballs.

‘He did seem a rather dour fellow,’ I agreed, giving Eco a sceptical look. ‘And if it was Stephanos who laughed, then why didn’t Thropsus say so?’

‘Probably because he had never heard Stephanos laugh before,’ said Lucius. ‘I don’t think I ever heard such a thing myself.’ He looked down at the corpse with a puzzled expression. ‘Are you sure it was Stephanos you heard laughing, Eco?’

Eco crossed his arms and nodded gravely. He had made up his mind.

‘Ah well, perhaps we’ll never know for sure,’ I said, walking towards the door.

‘You’re not staying to help me, Gordianus?’

‘Alas, Lucius Claudius, I must take my leave for now. There’s a dinner to be prepared, and a concubine to be served.’

Eco and I managed to get home relatively unscathed. A group of giggling prostitutes impeded our progress for a while by dancing in a ring around us, another King Numa carried aloft in a litter poured a cup of wine over my head, and a drunken gladiator vomited on one of Eco’s shoes, but the trip from the Palatine to the Subura was otherwise uneventful.

The fare we prepared for dinner was very simple, as suited my talents. Even so, Bethesda seemed barely able to keep out of the kitchen. Every so often she peered through the doorway wearing a sceptical frown and shaking her head, as if the very way I held a knife betrayed my utter incompetence in culinary matters.

At last, as the winter sun was beginning to sink into the west, Eco and I emerged from the kitchen to find Bethesda and Belbo comfortably ensconced on the dining couches normally reserved for ourselves. Eco pulled up the little dining tables while I fetched the various courses – a lentil soup, a millet porridge with ground lamb, an egg pudding with honey and pine nuts.

Belbo seemed content with his meal, but then Belbo enjoys every meal, so long as there’s enough of it; he smacked his lips, ate with his fingers, and laughed out loud at the novelty of sending his young master Eco to fetch more wine, accepting the tradition of reversing roles as a lark. Bethesda, on the other hand, approached each dish with an air of cool detachment. As always, her typically aloof demeanour masked the true depth of what was going on inside her, which I suspected was as complex and subtle as the most exquisite ragout. Partly she was sceptical of my cooking, partly she enjoyed the novelty of being served and the pretence of being a Roman matron, and partly she wished to hide any outward sign of her enjoyment because, ah well, because Bethesda is Bethesda.

She did, however, deign to compliment me on the egg pudding, for which I took a bow.

‘And how was your day, Master?’ she asked casually, settling back on the couch. I stood close by, my arms clasped deferentially behind my back. In her imagination, was I reduced to a slave – or worse, to a husband?

I recounted to her the day’s events, as slaves are often called upon to do by their masters at the end of the day. Bethesda listened abstractedly, running her hands through her luxurious black hair and tapping at her fall red lips. When I described my encounter with Cicero, her dark eyes flashed, for she has always been suspicious of any man who has a greater appetite for books than for women or food; when I told her I had called on Lucius Claudius she smiled, for she knows how susceptible he is to her beauty; when I told her of Stephanos’ demise and the disappearance of the silver, she became deeply pensive. She leaned forward to rest her chin on her hand, and it suddenly occurred to me that she was very dangerously close to performing a parody of me.

After I had explained the unfortunate events, she asked me to explain them again, then called on Eco, who had been performing some childish hand-slapping game with Belbo, to come over and clarify some aspects of the story. Again, as he had at Lucius’ house, he insisted that it was Stephanos whom he had heard laughing.

‘Master,’ said Bethesda thoughtfully, ‘will this slave Thropsus be tortured?’

‘Possibly.’ I sighed. ‘If Lucius is unable to recover the silver, he may lose his head – Lucius, I mean, though Thropsus could eventually lose his head as well, literally.’

‘And if Zoticus is found, without the silver, protesting his innocence?’

‘He will almost certainly be tortured,’ I said. ‘Lucius would lose face with his family and his colleagues if he were to allow himself to be duped by a slave.’

‘Duped by a slave,’ murmured Bethesda thoughtfully, nodding. Then she shook her head and put on her most imperious expression. ‘Master, you were there! How could you not have seen the truth?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You were drinking the wine of Lucius Claudius straight, weren’t you? It must have addled your judgment.’

Many liberties are allowed to slaves during Saturnalia, but this was too much! ‘Bethesda! I demand – ’

‘We must go to the house of Lucius Claudius at once!’ Bethesda sprang to her feet and ran to fetch herself a cloak. Eco looked at me for direction. I shrugged. ‘Fetch your cloak, Eco, and mine as well; the night may be chilly. You might as well come along, too, Belbo, if you can manage to lift yourself off that couch. The streets will be wild tonight.’

I will not recount the madness of crossing Rome on Saturnalia night. Suffice to say that on certain stretches of the journey I was very glad to have Belbo with us; his hulking presence alone was usually enough to clear a way through the raucous throng. When we at last rapped upon Lucius’ door, it was once again answered by the master of the house.

‘Gordianus! Oh, I’m glad to see you. This day only becomes worse and worse. Oh, and Eco, and Belbo – and Bethesda!’ His voice broke a little as he said her name and his eyes widened. He blushed, if it was possible for his florid face to turn a brighter red.

He led us through the garden. The statue of Minerva gazed down upon us, her wise countenance a study in moonlight and shadow. Lucius led us into a sumptuously appointed room just off the garden, heated by a flaming brazier. ‘I took your advice,’ he said. ‘I hired men to search for Zoticus. They found him quickly enough, as drunk as a satyr and gambling in the street outside a brothel in the Subura – trying to win enough to go inside, he says.’

‘And the silver?’

‘No sign of it. Zoticus swears that he never saw the silver or even knew that it existed. He says he slipped out the back of the house, through a window in the slaves’ quarters. He says that Thropsus was boring him and he wanted to go out alone.’

‘Do you believe him?’

Lucius clutched his head. ‘Oh, I don’t know what to believe. All I know is that Zoticus and Thropsus came in, Zoticus slipped out, and at some point in between Stephanos was killed and the silver was taken. I just want the silver back! My cousins came calling today, and I had nothing to give them. Of course I didn’t want to explain the situation; I told them my presents were late and I’d come to see them tomorrow. Gordianus, I don’t want to torture the young men, but what else can I do?’

‘You can take me to the room where you kept the silver,’ said Bethesda, stepping forward and slipping off her cloak, which she tossed onto a nearby chair. Her cascade of black hair glittered with flashes of deep blue and purple in the light of the flaming brazier. Her face was impassive and her eyes were steadily fixed on Lucius Claudius, who blinked under her gaze. I quailed a bit myself, looking at her in the firelight, for while she wore her hair down, like a slave, and was dressed in a simple slave woman’s gown, her face had the same compelling majesty as the brazen face of the goddess in the garden.

Bethesda kept her gaze on Lucius, who reached up to dab a bead of sweat from his forehead. The brazier was hot, but not that hot. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘though there’s nothing to see now. I had the body of Stephanos removed to another room . . .’ His voice trailed off as he turned and led the way to the back of the house, taking a lamp from a sconce on the wall to light the way.

Under the lamp’s flickering light, the room seemed very empty and slightly eerie. The shutters were closed and the bloodstained cloth had been removed from atop the chest.

‘Which shutters were open when you found Stephanos dead?’ said Bethesda.

‘Th-these,’ said Lucius with a slight stutter. At his touch they parted. ‘The latch seems to be broken,’ he explained, trying to push them shut again.

‘Broken, because the shutters were not opened by the latch, but forced,’ said Bethesda.

‘Yes, we figured that out this morning,’ he said. ‘They must have been pushed open from outside. Some outsider forced his way in – ’

‘I think not,’ said Bethesda. ‘What if one were to seize the top of the shutters and pull them open, like so.’ At another window she wrenched the shutters open, breaking the little latch at the middle.

‘But why would anyone do that?’ asked Lucius.

I parted my lips and drew in a breath, beginning to see what Bethesda had in mind. I almost spoke, but caught myself. The idea was hers, after all. I would let her reveal it.

‘The slave Thropsus said he heard first laughter, then a rattling noise, then a banging. The laughter, according to Eco, came from Stephanos.’

Lucius shook his head. ‘That’s hard to imagine.’

‘Because you never heard Stephanos laugh? I can tell you why: because he laughed only behind your back. Ask some of the slaves who have been here longer than Thropsus, and see what they tell you.’

‘How can you know this?’ protested Lucius.

‘The man ran your household, did he not? He was your chief slave here in Rome. Believe me, from time to time he laughed at you behind your back.’ Lucius seemed taken aback at such an idea, but Bethesda was not to be argued with. ‘As for the rattling Thropsus heard, you heard the same noise just now, when I wrenched open those shutters. Then Thropsus heard a banging, a thud – that was the sound of Stephanos’s head striking the hard edge of the chest.’ She winced. ‘Then he fell to the ground, here I should think, clutching his chest and bleeding from his head.’ She pointed to the very spot where we had found Stephanos. ‘But the most significant sound was the one that no one heard – the clanging of silver, which would surely have made a considerable noise if anyone had hurriedly stuffed all the vessels into a bag and then run off with it.’

‘But what does all this mean?’ said Lucius.

‘It means that your wooden-faced slave, whom you believed to have no sense of humour, had his own way of celebrating Saturnalia this year. Stephanos pulled a little joke on you in secret – then laughed out loud at his own impertinence. But he laughed too hard. Stephanos was very old, wasn’t he? Old slaves have weak hearts. When their hearts fail, they are likely to fall and reach for anything to support them.’ She seized the top of the shutters and jerked them open. ‘These were a poor support. He fell and struck his head, and then kept falling to the floor. Was it the blow to his head that killed him, or his heart? Who can say?’

‘But the silver!’ demanded Lucius. ‘Where is it?’

‘Where Stephanos carefully and silently hid it away, thinking to give his master a fright.’

I held my breath as Bethesda opened the lid of the chest; what if she were wrong? But there inside, nestled atop some embroidered coverlets, glittering beneath the lamplight, were all the vessels and necklaces and bangles which Lucius had shown us that morning.

Lucius gasped and looked as if he might faint from relief. ‘But I still can’t believe it,’ he finally said. ‘Stephanos never pulled such a prank before!’

‘Oh, did he not?’ said Bethesda. ‘Slaves pull such jokes all the time, Lucius Claudius. The point of such pranks is not that their masters should find out and feel foolish, for then the impertinent slave would be punished. No, the point is that the master should never even realize that he’s been made the butt of a joke. Stephanos was probably planning to be out in the street enjoying himself when you found the silver missing. He would have let you rush about in a panic for a while, then he would have come home, and when you frantically told him the silver was missing, he would have shown it to you in the trunk.’

‘But I would have been furious.’

‘All the better to amuse Stephanos. For when you asked him why he had put the silver there, he would have said that you told him to and that he was only following your orders.’

‘But I never gave him such instructions!’

‘ “Ah, but you did, Master,” he would have said, shaking his head at your absent-mindedness, and with his stern, humourless expression, you would have had no choice but to believe him. Think back, Lucius Claudius, and I suspect that you may remember other occasions when you found yourself in a fix and Stephanos was constrained to point out that it was due to your own forgetfulness.’

‘Well, now that you mention it . . .’ said Lucius, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

‘And all the while Stephanos was having a laugh at you behind your back,’ said Bethesda.

I shook my head. ‘I should have seen the truth when I was here earlier,’ I said ruefully.