The Bull Slayer

CHAPTER Fifteen

That afternoon, Pliny convened his staff again. They ate a light lunch while they discussed the case.

Suetonius, carefully peeling a hardboiled egg, asked, “Are we keeping the murder a secret from Diocles?”

“Especially from him,” Pliny answered firmly. “But I don’t delude myself that our story will hold up long. Someone, a trooper or one of the dog handlers, will talk. And when it becomes known that the second highest Roman official in the province has been murdered we must be seen to take decisive action. This is a disaster, gentlemen, and we must deal with it swiftly. And we can’t do it by just sitting here. The tip about the saddle was a gift from the gods, but we can’t expect more like that. The answer to this puzzle is not going to walk in through the front door. We must go out and find it, and we haven’t much time.”

“And just how do we do that, Sir?” Aquila growled.

“We’re in a better place than we were before, Centurion. When Balbus had simply vanished we had nothing to go on. Now we do. We know that someone hated him enough or feared him enough to kill him. Either Silvanus out of fear or someone else for reasons we can’t even guess. And, mind you, the motive must have been irresistible to take such a risk. Every crime has a logic to it, if we can discover it. It is always the final act in a long train of events.”

“Like following the clew.”

“What’s that, my boy?”

Zosimus, aware of his humble station, seldom spoke at these meetings. When he did, it was to the point. “Theseus and the Minotaur, Patrone. You know the story. How Theseus had to follow a clew of thread that led him back from the Minotaur’s lair through the Labyrinth? It’s like that. We have hold of one end of the thread and we must walk it back to the other end. Following the clew.”

“Or clews,” Pliny laughed for the first time, it seemed, in a long time. “I thank you for that image, my boy, it’s very apt.” Zosimus blushed to the roots of his hair. “But I suspect what we have here is a tangle of many threads, and each one must be followed to its end.”

“One of them being embezzlement—unless we’ve abandoned that theory?” asked Caelianus. He had come over from the treasury building to confer with them. “All we know for certain is that Silvanus was stealing. Whether Balbus was also, who can say? The counting is going slowly; the clerks are mutinous, they stop working every time I take my eye off them.”

“No theory has been abandoned,” Pliny answered.

“Silvanus is our murderer,” Suetonius said firmly. “I can’t forget the way Balbus humiliated him at dinner. Even apart from being caught with his hands in the money chest, he had reason to hate Balbus.”

Pliny shook his head. “You were imagining a knife in the ribs, as I recall. But breaking Balbus’ thick neck? I doubt the chief clerk’s physically capable of it. Not single-handedly anyway.”

“And then there’s Fabia,” Marinus suggested. “In my experience, there’s always a woman at the bottom of these things.”

Suetonius cocked an eyebrow. “Your experience of women being precisely what?”

“Is that bald spot of yours getting bigger, my literary friend?” Marinus leered at him. “I’ve read somewhere that pigeon droppings rubbed briskly into the scalp does wonders.”

These two had been having at each other lately. All of them were on edge.

“Yes, there’s Fabia.” Pliny swallowed a sip of watered wine and dabbed at his lips with his napkin. “And there is a slave in that household, too, who I’ll wager could break a neck. Worth thinking about. If there’s a mistress in the picture, for instance, I would not like to be the man who crossed Fabia.”

“Tattooed Thracian, they say,” Suetonius pulled a comical fierce face.

“Such is the rumor. When I spoke with her this morning and mentioned Silvanus she was more than happy to blacken his character. I got the distinct feeling that she’d like us to think he murdered her husband.”

“But you didn’t actually say he’d been murdered?”

“Oh, no, I told her it was an accident. If she does have something to do with his death, I don’t want her to know how much we know. Not until we have a motive.”

“Right, then,” Suetonius said, “now we’re getting into my line of country. Did Balbus have a woman on the side? Did he visit the brothels? Did he have gambling debts? I assign myself the task of discovering these things.”

“Thank you, my friend, your expertise in these matters is well known.”

Suetonius bowed his head modestly. Marinus snorted in his beard.

“And,” added Pliny, “I have a job for Zosimus here, too. I want you to go out into the streets, my boy. Oh, not to the brothels and gambling dens, I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble with Ione! But hang about in the agora, in the palaestra, the baths, the cook shops, and talk to people. I want to know what’s being said out there, not just about Balbus but all of us. You’re the only Greek I absolutely trust. Will you do this?”

The young man’s eyes lit up. “I will start this morning, Patrone!”

***

“Good riddance to ’im, say I. They should set up a statue to the ’orse that broke ’is f*cking neck for ’im. One less Roman leech sucking our blood, ain’t I right, sir? You’re not from here are you? So maybe you ’aven’t ’eard.”

The fact of the procurator’s death and the alleged cause of it had, with almost magical rapidity, made its way to the farthest corners of the city.

The blowzy proprietress rested a fat elbow on the bar and refilled Zosimus’ cup with a thin and vinegary red. The secretary had no head for wine and was beginning to feel the worse for it. Soon, he promised himself, he would return to the palace and have Ione put a cold cloth on his forehead. It had been a long, and not very fruitful, day. The things he had heard, he could hardly bring himself to repeat to his patrone. He had set out that morning full of enthusiasm to carry out his commission to “catch tongues,” proud to be called the one Greek that a Roman could trust. And the young man had no difficulty striking up conversations with strangers. It was his face, he supposed. A broad, open face with a nose like a dumpling and innocent brown eyes; the face of one who was, perhaps, just a little simple. No one suspected that such a face concealed the well-stocked mind of one who had been trained from boyhood to recite all the comedies of Menander and Terrence from memory. His parents had been slaves of the old master, Pliny’s learned uncle, who had noticed the child’s quickness and cultivated it. When the uncle died in the smoke of Vesuvius, Zosimus had passed to the nephew. And the younger Pliny had treated him with the greatest affection and intimacy, even sending him for a rest cure once when he was sick, then manumitting him without requiring him to buy his freedom, and finally marrying him to his darling Ione. Zosimus would gladly give his life for Gaius Plinius.

He had begun the day at the palaestra among idlers watching the wrestlers and runners at their sweaty practice. As the sun rose higher, he had drifted with the crowd to the agora, to the welcome coolness of the portico that ran along one side, stopping along the way to buy a piece of grilled squid from a street vendor. The courts had been in session all morning and now the jurors spilled out of the courthouse, buzzing like Aristophanes’ wasps. Everywhere, knots of men stood nose to nose, gesticulating and shouting, the way Greeks always did. Zosimus pretended to read the public inscriptions on their marble slabs, and listened. Not all the conversation was about the Roman procurator’s unexpected demise, but much of it was, and none of it was complimentary. His fine estate, his handsome horse, his entourage of lackeys worthy of some Persian king—and all of it paid for by their taxes. And he would be replaced by another barbarian from that race of plunderers, equally brutal and grasping. Would there ever come an end to their slavery?

With his ears ringing, Zosimus sought solace in the baths. But Nicomedia’s bathhouse was shockingly dilapidated and dirty, the water coated with a greasy scum. He didn’t stay long.

He browsed for a while along the street of the potters, the street of the carpenters, and the street of the bronzesmiths, lined with cramped workshops where men bent over bowls and lamps, tapping with little hammers. He strolled along narrow, zigzagging lanes where old women sat in their doorways, shelling peas and cackling to each other, and sturdy, straight-backed young women trudged from the public well, balancing water jugs on their shoulders; where school children chanted their lessons in a sidewalk classroom and dogs ran along, sniffing hopefully at piles of refuse.

He turned a corner and found himself in the midst of a noisy procession of Isis worshippers—shaven-headed men carrying tall palm fronds and priestesses jangling their rattles. They passed by, leaving a trail of flower petals.

He came down at last to the harbor. The fishermen had come in with their catch and were spreading their nets out on the quays to dry. The water in the bay was grey and choppy. The fishing boats stayed close to shore now and soon would not go out at all. The big merchantmen were already berthed. The city was preparing itself for winter. The walls of the big warehouses bore a load of scrawlings: prostitutes advertisements (I’m yours for two obols), election slogans (Elpenor for archon), the faded announcement for a gladiatorial show in which men had died and were, by now, forgotten. And among them the occasional So-and-so kisses Roman ass. And worse. Zosimus was not beyond blushing.

And finally he had stopped into this sailor’s grog shop that smelled of seaweed, and sedition. He’d heard enough for one day. He threw some coins on the counter and left. The sun was sloping down to late afternoon as he mounted the street of the leather workers up toward the treasury and the great temple of Rome and Augustus that overlooked a wide plaza: the soaring Corinthian columns and painted architrave, the vast gilded bronze doors, and within, the gold and ivory statue of the Deified Augustus. It dwarfed the buildings around it. It breathed Roman power, Roman pride.

There was a crowd gathered in front—fifty, or maybe a hundred, men surrounding a speaker who stood on the lowest step of the temple podium. Over the hubbub of voices, Zosimus could not make out the man’s words, but there was no mistaking the shrill and angry tone. Sighing resignedly—for this was certainly what Pliny had sent him out to look for—Zosimus worked his way to the front. It was one of those ragged street corner ranters of the Cynic sect, troublemakers of the worst sort, who spewed out their hatred of all lawful authority. The crowd was cheering him on.

Suddenly, Zosimus had a premonition and turned to look for a way out. And, at that instant, with a clatter of hooves on the cobblestones, a score of Roman cavalrymen galloped into the square and charged the crowd, swinging their long-bladed swords. Some fled in panic, but others stood their ground. Stones flew through the air, a trooper was dragged from his horse. The blades flashed up and down. A trumpet blast rang out and then more soldiers appeared, infantrymen with their shields locked together and spears thrusting. Zosimus was lifted off his feet in the press of bodies, forced up against the flank of a horse. He never saw the blow that caught the side of his head and sent him sinking down unconscious amid a tangle of legs.