screamed at him to come back, to help me cut Mul-ciber down, and he only said, 'I'll be late for the games!'' Cleio col-lapsed to the floor, weeping, the poems scattering around her. ' 'Late for the games!'' she repeated, as if it were her brother's epitaph.
On the long ride back to Rome through the Campanian countryside, Eco's hands grew weary and I grew hoarse debating whether I had done the right thing. Eco argued that I should have kept my sus-picions of Cleio to myself. I argued that Sosistrides deserved to know what his daughter had done, and how and why his son had died- and needed to be shown, as well, how deeply and callously his beau-tiful, beloved Cleon had inflicted misery on others.
'Besides,' I said, 'when we returned to Sosistrides's house, I wasn't certain myself that Cleio had murdered Cleon. Accusing the dead tutor was a way of flushing her out. Her possession of Mulciber's missing poems were the only tangible evidence that events had un-folded as I suspected. I tried in vain to think of some way, short of housebreaking, to search her room without either Cleio or her father knowing-but as it turned out, such a search would have found nothing. I should have known that she would keep the poems on her person, next to her heart! She was as madly, hopelessly in love with Mulciber as he was in love with Cleon. Eros can be terribly careless when he scatters his arrows!'
We also debated the degree and nature of Cleon's perfidy. When he saw Mulciber's dead body, was Cleon so stunned by the enormity of what he had done-driven a lovesick man to suicide-that he went about his business in a sort of stupor, attending the games and performing his athletic feats like an automaton? Or was he so cold that he felt nothing? Or, as Eco argued in an extremely convoluted series of gestures, did Mulciber's fatal demonstration of lovesick de-votion actually stimulate Cleon in some perverse way, inflating his ego and inspiring him to excel as never before at the games?
Whatever his private thoughts, instead of grieving, Cleon blithely went off and won his laurel crown, leaving Mulciber to spin in midair and Cleio to plot her vengeance. In a fit of grief she cut off her hair. The sight of her reflection in Mulciber's atrium pool gave her the idea to pass as a boy; an ill-fitting tunic from the tutor's wardrobe completed her disguise. She carried a knife with her to the gymnasium, the same one she had used to cut her hair, and was prepared to stab her brother in front of his friends. But it turned out that she didn't need the knife. By chance-or guided by Eros-she found her way into the courtyard, where the statue presented itself as the perfect murder weapon.
As far as Cleio was concerned, the statue's role in the crime constituted proof that she acted not only with the god's approval but as an instrument of his will. This pious argument had so far, at least as of our leaving Neapolis, stayed Sosistrides from punishing her. I did not envy the poor merchant. With his wife and son dead, could he bear to snuff out the life of only remaining offspring, even for so great a crime? And yet, how could he bear to let her live, knowing she had murdered his beloved son? Such a conundrum would test the wisdom of Athena!
Eco and I debated, too, the merits of Mulciber's poetry. I had begged of Sosistrides a copy of the tutor's farewell, so that I could ponder it at my leisure:
Savage, sullen boy, whelp of a lioness,
Stone-hearted and scornful of love,
I give you a lover's ring-my noose!
No longer be sickened by the sight of me; I go to the only place that offers solace To the broken-hearted: oblivion! But will you not stop and weep for me, If only for one moment…
The poem continued for many more lines, veering between re-crimination, self-pity, and surrender to the annihilating power of love.
Hopelessly sentimental! More cloying than honey! The very worst sort of dreck, pronounced Eco, with a series of gestures so sweeping that he nearly fell from his horse. I merely nodded, and wondered if my son would feel the same in another year or so, after Eros had wounded him with a stray arrow or two and given him a clearer notion, from personal experience, of just how deeply the god of love can pierce the hearts of helpless mortals.
A GLADIATOR DIES ONLY ONCE
'A beautiful day for it,' I said begrudgingly. Cicero nodded and squinted up at the filtered red sunlight that penetrated the awning above our seats. Below, in the arena, the first pair of gladiators strode across the sand to meet each other in combat.
The month was Junius, at the beginning of what promised to be a long, hot summer. The blue sky and undulating green hills were es-pecially beautiful here in the Etrurian countryside outside the town of Saturnia, where Cicero and I, traveling separately from Rome, had arrived the day before to attend the funeral of a local magistrate. Sextus Thorius had been struck down in the prime of life, thrown from his horse while riding down the Clodian Way to check on the progress of a slave gang doing repair work on the road. The next day, word of his demise reached Rome, where quite a few important persons had felt obligated to attend the funeral.
Earlier that morning, not a few of the senators and bankers who gathered to watch the funeral procession had raised an eyebrow at the sight of Gordianus the Finder among them; feeling the beady gaze of a prune-faced matron on me, I distinctly overheard her whis-per to her husband, 'What's he doing here? Does someone suspect foul play at work in the death of Sextus Thorius?' But Cicero, when he caught sight of me, smiled grimly and moved to join me, and asked no questions. He knew why I had come. A few years ago, facing the prospect of a ruinous business scandal, Thorius had consulted Cicero for legal advice, and Cicero had sent Thorius to me to get to the bottom of the affair. In the end, both scandal and litiga-tion were averted. Thorius had rewarded me generously, and had subsequently sent quite a bit of business my way. The least I could do on the occasion of his death was to pack my best toga, spend the night at a seedy inn in Saturnia, and show up at his funeral.
We had followed the procession of musicians, hired mourners and family members to the little necropolis outside Saturnia, where, after a few speeches of remembrance, Thorius's remains had been set alight atop a funeral pyre. At the soonest opportunity to do so without seem-ing impolite, I had turned to leave, eager to start back to Rome, when Cicero caught my arm.
'Surely you're not leaving yet, Gordianus. We must stay for the funeral games.'
'Games?' I meant to load the word with irony, but Cicero took the question in my voice literally.
'There's to be a gladiator show, of course. It's not as if Thorius was a nobody. His family wasn't rich, but they'll have spent whatever they can afford, I'm sure.'
'I hate watching gladiators,' I said bluntly.
'So do I. But they're a part of the funeral, no less than the procession and the eulogies. One has to stay.' 'I'm not in the mood to see blood spilled.'
'But if you leave now, people will notice,' he said, lowering his voice. 'You can't afford to have them think you're squeamish, Gordianus. Not in your line of work.'
I glanced at the faces around us, lit by the funeral pyre. The prune-faced matron was among them, along with her husband and numerous others from the same social set back in Rome. Much as I might hate to admit it, I was dependent on the trust and good will of such people, the sort who had occasion to call on my services and means to pay for them. I ferreted out the truth, and in return they put bread on my. table.
'But I have to get back to Rome,' I protested. 'I can't afford another night at that seedy inn.'
'Then you'll stay with me,' said Cicero. 'I have accommodations with a local banker. Good food. Comfortable beds.' He raised an eyebrow.
Why did Cicero want so badly for me to stay? It occurred to me that he was the squeamish one. To watch the gladiators, he wanted the company of someone who wouldn't needle him about his squeamishness, as so many of his social equals were likely to do.
Begrudgingly, I acquiesced, and so found myself, that fine after-noon in Junius, seated in a wooden amphitheater constructed especially for the funeral games to honor the passing of Sextus Thorius of Saturnia. Since I was with Cicero, I had been admitted into the more exclusive section of seats beneath the shade of the blood-red awning, along with the bereaved family, various local dignitaries, and important visitors from Rome. The local villagers and farmers sat in the sun-drenched seats across from ours. They wore brimmed hats for shade and waved brightly colored fans. For a brief moment, bemused by the fluttering fans, I had the illusion that the crowd had been covered by a swarm of huge butterflies flapping their wings.
