door was pierced by two narrow windows that faced the courtyard in front of the house, shuttered against the cold and covered by dark red draperies.
Between the windows, above the table where Crassus laboured, was a painting of Gelina. It was a portrait of rare distinction, touched with life, as the Greeks say. In the background loomed Vesuvius, with blue sky above and green sea below; in the foreground the image of Gelina seemed to radiate a sense of profound equanimity and grace. The portraitist was evidendy quite proud of her work, for in the lower right-hand corner was printed IAIA CYZICENA. She made the letter 'A' with an eccentric flourish, tilting the crossbar sharply downward towards the right.
On either side of the table stood squat pedestals supporting small bronze statues, each about the height of a man's forearm. The statue on the left I could not see, for it was covered by Crassus's carelessly discarded chlamys. The one on the right was of Hercules bearing a club across his shoulders, naked except for a lionskin cloak, with the lion's head for hood and its paws clasped at his throat. It was an odd choice for a library, but the workmanship could not be faulted. The tufts of the lion's fur had been scrupulously modelled; the texture of fur contrasted with the smooth muscularity of the demigod's flesh. Lucius Licinius had been as careless of his art as of his ledgers, I thought, for it appeared that the scalloped fur of the lion's head had somehow begun to rust.
'Marcus Crassus…' I began again.
He sighed and waved me aside without looking up. 'Yes, go now. I suppose I've made it clear that I have no enthusiasm for your project, but I will support you in whatever you need. Go to Fabius or Mummius first. If you cannot find satisfaction on some point, come to me directly, although I can't guarantee you'll be able to find me. I have a great deal of business to transact before I return to Rome, and not much time. The important thing is that when this matter is done, no man will be able to say that the truth was not sought or that justice did not prevail.' He at last turned his head, only to give me a weary and insincere smile of dismissal.
I stepped into the hall and closed the door behind me. The guard offered to show me the way to my room, but I told him that I was quite awake. I paused for a moment in the central atrium to look again at the corpse of Lucius Licinius. More incense had been put out, but the smell of decay, like the odour of roses, seemed to grow stronger at night. I was halfway to my room before I turned abruptly back.
The guard was surprised and a little suspicious. He insisted on entering the library first and consulted with Crassus before allowing me to enter. He stepped into the hall and shut the door, leaving us alone once more.
Crassus was still poring over the ledgers. He now sat in his undertunic, having stripped off his riding tunic and thrown it over the Hercules. In the few moments I had been gone, one of the slaves had delivered a tray with a steaming cup from which he sipped. The infusion of hot water and mint filled the room with its smell.
'Yes?' He cocked one eyebrow impatiently. 'Was there some point I neglected to discuss?'
'It's a small thing, Marcus Crassus. Perhaps I'm entirely mistaken,' I said, as I lifted his tunic from the Hercules. The cloth was still warm from his body. Crassus looked at me darkly. Clearly he was not used to having his personal things touched by people he did not own.
'A very interesting statue,' I remarked, looking down on the Hercules from above.
'I suppose. It's a copy of an original I have in my villa at Falerii. Lucius admired it once on a visit, so I had one made for him.'
'How ironic, then, that it should have been used to murder him.'
'What?'
'I think we're both sufficiently acquainted with the sight of blood to know it when we see it, Marcus Crassus. What do you make of this rusty substance trapped in the crevices of the lion's fur?'
He rose from his chair and peered down, then picked up the statue with both hands and held it beneath a hanging lamp. At length he set it down on the table and looked at me soberly. 'You have very sharp eyes, Gordianus. But it seems quite unlikely that such a cumbersome bludgeon should have been carried all the way down the hall to the atrium for the purpose of murdering my cousin Lucius, and then carried back again.'
'It was not the statue that was moved,' I said, 'but the body.'
Crassus looked doubtful.
'Consider the posture of the corpse as it was found, like that of a man who had been dragged. Certainly from this room to the atrium is not too far for a strong man to drag a body.'
'Easier for two men,' he said, and I saw he meant the missing slaves. 'But where is the rest of the blood? Surely there must have been more on the statue, and a dragged body would have left a trail.'
'Not if a cloth was placed beneath the head, and the same cloth was used to clean whatever blood was left behind.' 'Was such a cloth found?'
I hesitated. 'Marcus Crassus, forgive my presumption when I ask that you share this knowledge with no one else. Gelina, Mummius, and two of the slaves already know. Yes, such a cloth was found, soaked with blood, down the road where someone attempted to fling it into the sea.'
He looked at me shrewdly. 'This bloodstained cloth was one of the discoveries you mentioned earlier, the secrets you prefer to withhold from me while the evidence ferments in your head?'
'Yes.' I squatted down and looked for traces of blood on the floor. A cloak would hardly have been adequate to clean blood from the dark carpet, but in the dim light it was impossible to see any stains.
'But why should the assassins have moved his body?' He picked up the statue with his left hand and fingered the encrusted blood with his right, then set it on the table with a grimace.
'You say assassins, not assassin, Marcus Crassus.'
'The slaves-'
'Perhaps the body was moved and the name of Spartacus carved precisely to implicate the slaves and distract us from the truth.'
'Or perhaps the slaves moved his body to the most public part of the house precisely to make their point, where all would be sure to see it and the name they carved.'
To that I had no answer. One doubt led to another. 'It does seem unlikely that the killing could have occurred in this room without anyone hearing, especially if it followed an argument, or if Lucius was able to make any noise at all. Gelina sleeps just across the hall; surely the noise would have awakened her.'
Crassus smiled at me sardonically. 'Gelina need not figure in your calculations.'
'No?'
'Gelina sleeps like the dead. Perhaps you've noticed her liberal consumption of wine? It's not a new habit. Dancing girls with cymbals could parade down the hallway and Gelina wouldn't stir.'
'Then the question must be: why was Lucius murdered here in his library?'
'No, Gordianus, the question is the same as it always was: where are the two escaped slaves? That Zeno, his secretary, should have murdered Lucius here in the room where they often worked together is hardly surprising. The young stableman Alexandros may have been here with them; I understand he could read and do figures, and Zeno used him sometimes as a helper. Perhaps it was this Alexandros who committed the crime; a stableman would have had the strength to drag Lucius down the hall, and a Thracian would have had the gall to scrawl his countryman's name on the floor. Something interrupted him in the act and he fled before he could write the whole name.'
'But no one interrupted them. The body wasn't discovered until morning.'
Crassus shrugged. 'An owl hooted, or a cat stirred a pebble. Or perhaps this Thracian slave simply hadn't yet learned the letter C and was stumped,' he said facetiously, rubbing his eyes with his forefinger and thumb. 'Forgive me, Gordianus, but I think I've had enough for tonight. Even Marcus Mummius has gone to bed, and we should do the same.' He picked up the Hercules from the table and replaced it on its pedestal. 'I suppose this is another of your secrets that needs fermenting? I shall mention it only to Morpheus in my dreams.'
The lamp that illuminated the hallway had grown dim. I stepped past Gelina's door, treading lightly despite Crassus's assertion that nothing could wake her. In the darkness an eerie sensation crept over me; this was the very route by which Lucius's lifeless or dying body had been dragged. I glanced over my shoulder, almost wishing that I had accepted the bodyguard's offer to escort me back to my room.
In the moonlit atrium I paused for a long moment. The place was still, but not entirely quiet. The fountain continued to splash; the sound echoed in the well-like atrium, and was certainly loud enough to cover the incidental noises made by a man moving with intentional stealth. But would it have concealed the high-pitched screeching of a knife carving letters on a hard flagstone? The very idea of the noise set my teeth on edge.
From the corner of my eye I saw a strange shape like a white veil floating beside the funeral bier. I started
