Roman Games (15 page)

Chapter Nineteen

The day before the Ides of Germanicus. Day eight of the Games.
The third hour of the day.

The air in Verpa’s atrium was heavy with incense and mystery. Pliny mopped his face. None of the sycophants and legacy hunters who had attended the reading of the will were present now, and Lucius was nowhere to be seen, but the place was filled with officiants from the temple in their tightly wound, ankle-length linen gowns. A tall, broad-shouldered priest, his head covered with the black and gold jackal mask of Anubis, recited the Names and Powers of Queen Isis, Lady of the House of Life, Daughter of Kronos, Star of the Sea, and chanted her sacred story. How the evil Typhon had slain and dismembered her brother-husband Osiris and scattered his limbs and how the grieving goddess had gathered them and breathed life into them, so guaranteeing blessed immortality to all who believed in her.

Meanwhile priestesses on either side of him stamped their feet and jingled their bronze rattles. In an alcove, a dozen hired female mourners, bare-breasted and disheveled, ululated around the painted coffin. And all this to send Sextus Ingentius Verpa into the blessed hereafter that Isis promised her initiates.

Later, a team of mules would draw the casket, followed by this howling, chanting horde, out to the family crypt on the Via Appia beyond the city .

Pliny found the whole thing appalling. Quite un-Roman. In the days of the old Republic the government had repressed this alien cult, tearing down Iseums as fast as they sprang up. One Roman consul took an ax in his own hands to splinter the temple’s door when the workers hung back. Later, the Deified Augustus banned the cult repeatedly from Rome. It was, after all, the religion of his archenemy, Cleopatra; and Tiberius had thrown Isis’ statue into the Tiber and crucified her scandalous priests. But the mad Caligula added her worship to the state cults, and subsequent emperors, even the sensible Vespasian, all paid her honor.

Domitian was especially devoted to the Queen of Heaven and had built the splendid new temple for her in the Campus Martius. So now these worshippers of the filthy animal-headed gods of subjugated Egypt paraded themselves openly and without fear.

Pliny wondered idly whether the same good fortune might befall even those world-hating Christians some day—ridiculous, of course.

Nectanebo bustled about self-importantly. Scarab bracelets decorated his thin arms, his eyes were outlined with kohl, and a gilded cobra head sat on his brow.

Martial stopped in midstride and stared hard at the embalmer. “Wait a minute,” he whispered to Pliny, “I know that man from somewhere.” He stepped up and laid a hairy paw on the undertaker’s bare shoulder, yanking him around. “Diaulus, you bastard, is that you under all that fancy dress? By the balls of Priapus, it
is
you!” Scortilla, standing nearby, gaped in astonishment. “Woman,” growled the poet, “if this man’s an Egyptian then I’m a tattooed Agathyrsian!”

“What’s this?” inquired Pliny, coming up.

“This is one Diaulus, a quack and a charlatan who deserves a public flogging, if nothing worse!” Martial scowled savagely at the little man. “Diaulus, this is the vice prefect of the city, who happens to be a particular friend of mine.”

The undertaker knew he was trapped. With as much dignity as he could manage, he croaked, “Diaulus is my name, sir—but a quack? Never!”

The priest of Anubis stopped in mid-chant; suddenly all eyes were on them.

“Some years ago, your poetical friend came to me for medical attention,” said the undertaker, glancing warily at Martial. “Some trouble with our libido, wasn’t it?” To Pliny he explained in a confidential tone: “You see, sir, I am an undertaker by trade, but I aspire to the sacred calling of physician, and I’ve made rather a specialty of male complaints. Well, as I say, your friend came to me and I applied stinging nettles to the, ah, part in question, a remedy of my own devising, which I’ve had great success with, I may say. All back to normal now, I hope, sir?” There was a malicious glint in his eye.

“No thanks to you, you assassin!”

“Extraordinary,” breathed Pliny.

“I fear he was dissatisfied with my treatment, and published some rather cutting verses about me.”

“Diaulus buries corpses now (Martial recited).
A doctor once was he.
The patients that he used to kill,
He counts among his clients still,
And earns a double fee.”

“Very witty, I am sure,” Diaulus sneered. “The fact is, embalming allows me to pursue my study of anatomy. Bodies are hard to come by otherwise. I venture to say I do more dissections in a year than most physicians do in a lifetime. Your friend calls me a quack—me! But I’m a good enough doctor to have noticed something very peculiar about this particular body. Oh, I could show you something that would surprise you.” Pride had gotten the better of Diaulus’ discretion.

A voice screamed in Pliny’s brain to ignore this little man and allow the funeral to proceed. Instead, he said, “Oh?”

Oh, yes. There was no stopping him now. When he had removed the body to his embalming shop and uncovered it, Diaulus said, the face was awful to behold: the tongue protruding, the eyes bulging, the mouth hideously twisted. “Rigor had already set in. Cadaveric spasm, we physicians call it.” Here Martial made a derisive snort.

“You see, sir, it comes on quick like that sometimes; almost instantaneously when the victim is exerting himself or in a state of high emotion at the moment of death—in the act of love, for example. The gentleman’s left hand was clutching his throat, the fingers really digging in. But it was his right hand, sir. His right hand was gripping his, ah,
membrum virile
—I eschew the language of the streets, sir—still in a state of tumescence. I had hard work getting him to let go of it, I can tell you. After some hours the rigor passed and things, ah, settled down, so to speak.”

Pliny and Martial exchanged glances; the same thought occurred to both of them. Had Ganymede made love to his intended victim and slaughtered him at the moment of climax? Did that pathetic boy have so much nerve?

“Now, as to the stab wounds, sir,” the undertaker continued, warming to his subject. “Understanding him to be a murdered gentleman, I was glad of the chance to observe the effects of the blade on the internal organs. But, to my great disappointment, there were none to be seen! Whoever wielded that knife was a weakling indeed. I would almost have said a woman. He inflicted a great many superficial cuts, but he didn’t succeed in piercing a single vital organ, neither lungs, nor liver, nor kidneys, and there was no internal hemorrhaging at all, sir, I’ll take my oath on that. The organs, by the way, are in those jackal-headed jars right there by the coffin, if you’d care to have a look.”

“I would,” replied Pliny grimly, “and more. Valens, and you men, carry the casket into that side room. We’ll have it open right now. Oh, and fetch Lucius out here.”

“Sacrilege!” screamed the priest of Anubis, who had been listening to this. “I forbid it!”

Martial looked at Pliny as if he’d taken leave of his senses. Their carefully constructed case was about to collapse unless he stopped now. In fact, Pliny was amazed at himself. He had never suspected he was capable of such brutal decisiveness. But there was something of his uncle, the natural historian, in him that would let nothing deter him from ascertaining a fact.

“Do as I say, centurion. And clear all these people out of here. The funeral is postponed.”

The mourners, with their palm fronds, their rattles, their pitchers of Nile water, and all the rest of their paraphernalia made a hasty exit. The last to leave was the priest, who was calling down a host of barbarous demons to feast on the vice prefect’s guts. He had ripped off his mask and suddenly Pliny recognized him as the man with the star-shaped mark on his shaven skull who had been present at the reading of the will. The man who was now in charge of spending an incredible two million sesterces. It wasn’t hard to imagine how much of that would stick to his immaculate fingertips. Unless, of course, the will turned out to be a forgery.

Diaulus was nearly in tears. “Oh, why did I open my mouth?”

“Well, you did,” said Martial, “and it’s too late now.”

The casket was sealed with wax. When they finally got the lid off a sweet, sickening effluvium mingled of resin and decay assailed their nostrils. Pliny felt nausea start in his throat. The wrappings were stiff and discolored with a yellowish stain. The body had leaked. “Too little time, too hot—” Diaulus mumbled.

“Cut the wrappings, undertaker,” Pliny ordered with all the authority he could muster. But the little man shrank back. “I’ll lose my position!” Finally, Valens drew his sword, inserted the tip at the crotch and ripped upward, laying open the cocoon of bandages. Here, at last, was the man himself. Turpia Scortilla, who had followed them in, took one look and fainted dead away. Swallowing hard, Pliny peered at Verpa’s naked torso.

“That gash in his side looks fatal enough.”

“That was my incision for removing the organs,” Diaulus explained. “Turn him over and pull the bandages away from his back.”

The back was covered with a dozen or more puckered, livid wounds. “These were the only wounds on him when I got him,” said Diaulus, “and not one deeper than the tip of my little finger.” Ganymede, in an evident frenzy of hate, had rained useless, ill-aimed blows on his victim. “The veins were still full of blood when I opened him up. When a man’s killed by sword or knife the blood runs copiously from him. But cut into a body which has died some hours before, as my profession requires me to do, and you notice that the blood flows sluggishly. No one knows why, sir, but it’s true.”

Pliny shook his head. “If I had seen the body immediately, I could have discarded the idea of a professional killer at once.”

“Now, if you’ll roll him back again,” Diaulus continued, “and expose the throat.” It was purple with bruises.

“What would make a man strangle himself?”

“Nothing in my experience, sir. But that’s not what killed him either, the windpipe wasn’t crushed.”

Meanwhile, Martial’s gaze had wandered lower. “Decent sized
mentula
on him.”

“Trust you to notice that,” observed Pliny with asperity.

“If you’re referring to the gentleman’s member, I found something rather odd there, too. Not much to look at now,” wrapping his fingers in a napkin, he retracted the foreskin carefully, “but there, you see? When the body was fresh it was tumescent, quite erect. I couldn’t help but notice that swollen lump on the glans.” It still looked for all the world like a nasty bee sting. “I’ve no idea what could have made it, sir. All I do know is that this man was dead before he was murdered, so to speak.”

“Dead of what?” Pliny cried in exasperation.

Diaulus pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. “We don’t know what most people die from, not really, sir. We blame it on the humors, but that’s just a name we give to our ignorance.”

“The quack’s a philosopher, too!” sneered Martial.

Meanwhile, Lucius had been brought into the room. It had taken him only a moment to digest this new development. His lips curved in a cunning smile. “Then I’m guilty of nothing, vice prefect. I can’t have procured the murder of a dead man.”

“Not so fast,” Pliny shot back, “that’s for a magistrate to decide. And when you’re tried you will need a very good lawyer. It so happens that I am a very good lawyer. I suggest you start cooperating with me if you want to avoid that leather sack. Why didn’t you mention the hand on the throat and the, ah, the other detail when I first questioned you?”

Lucius gave his characteristic shrug. “I didn’t mention it because I didn’t know what to make of it. It was no part of my plan. I assumed that idiot Ganymede had given him a bit of fun before killing him. I threw a coverlet over him before anyone else got too close, and sent for Nectanebo, or whatever he calls himself, to get him out of the house as fast as possible. I never had a chance to question Ganymede before the soldiers arrived and locked him up.”

Late in the day, Verpa’s funeral was, at last, allowed to proceed. Diaulus, “Nectanebo” once again, had succeeded in rounding up his crew of hired screamers, and the cortege departed in full cry. Pliny watched them go glumly. What a day it had been; by turns, a farce, an anatomy lesson, and a new mystery. “We have a killer still to find, Martial, and damned little time left.” And the slaves, always guilty until proven innocent, were once again in danger of summary execution. What was he going to do?

Martial read his friend’s thoughts in his weary face. “Odious little pissant!” he said with feeling.

“Diaulus? But he knows what he’s talking about. I had no choice but to hear him. Verpa died in a state of sexual arousal—can you believe it?”

They emerged from the house into the blinding light of the noonday sun.

“You look done in,” Martial said. “Go home and rest, inspiration may yet strike.”

“I fear I’m out of that commodity.”

“Shall I come for dinner?”

Pliny pinched the bridge of his nose. He had a splitting headache. That afternoon he was invited to the coming of age ceremony of a friend’s son. No getting out of it. There’d be a banquet. “Not tonight. What are you going to do with yourself?”

“Me? Just my usual haunts. You know.” The poet’s eyes slid away. “Shall I call on you in the morning?”

“Tomorrow morning I’m required to attend the Banquet of Jupiter at the Capitoline temple. If you’ve a Roman heart under that shaggy Spanish hide of yours, you’ll be there too. Farewell.”

* * *

That night Pliny’s sleep was troubled by terrifying visions of oozing mummies and faceless figures slithering through windows. He was in Verpa’s bedroom and the rutting Satyrs and their victims all around him moved and breathed and leered at him. But he was awakened at midnight to a still greater, and much more real, terror. A pounding on his front door. A stifled scream from Calpurnia. The clack of hobnail boots on the floor. In the Rome of Domitian that could mean only one thing. One winter’s night they had dragged away a neighbor of his—a harmless old senator with large estates and some inconvenient friends; his corpse was “found” some days later; his widow had been afraid to put on mourning. Pliny lay rigid, his heart thumping in his chest.