the table when he killed Lucius and were spattered with blood. Fabius had simply rolled them up to get them out of the way and put them on the floor. He intended to finish scrawling the name, rearrange the corpse in a more convincing manner, and then go back to the library to gather up the incriminating documents, so that he could toss them into the sea along with the cloak, or perhaps burn them.
'Then he heard a voice from the hallway. Someone in the house had apparently heard him working or had been awakened by the clatter of the slaves departing and had got up to investigate. The voice called again, closer to the atrium; Fabius knew he would have to flee immediately or else commit a second murder. I don't know why he lost his nerve; of course he had no way of telling if the newcomer was armed or not, alone or with others. At any rate, he grabbed the cloak and fled.'
'But no one in the house admitted to hearing anything that night.'
'Oh?' Crassus said sardonically. 'Then someone lied to you. Imagine! Who might that have been?' 'Dionysius.'
Crassus nodded. 'The old scoundrel walked into the atrium to find his patron lying dead on the floor. Instead of raising an alarm, he took his time to evaluate the situation and consider how he might profit from it. He headed for the library to do some quick snooping. He found the incriminating documents; why they were incriminating he had no way of knowing, but the blood on the parchment spoke for itself. He took them up to his room and hid them away, then presumably pored over them at his leisure, trying to connect them with the murder.
'Imagine Fabius's panic when, he arrived at the villa with me the next day and, sneaking off to the library at his first opportunity, found that the documents had vanished! And yet he gave no outward sign of his agitation. What a cool, calculating countenance! What an officer Rome has lost!
4It wasn't until the night you arrived that he was able to slip down to the boathouse to throw the weapons into the water; he had attempted to do so on previous nights, but there was always some interruption, or else he was seen and couldn't risk going through with it. Actually, I think he was being overhesitant; your arrival spurred him to take the risk — and then you came upon him in the middle of the act! Stabbing you would have looked too much like a second murder, so he tried to drown you instead.'
'He failed.'
'Yes. From that moment, Fabius told me, he knew you were the arm of Nemesis.'
'Nemesis has many arms,' I said, thinking of all those who had played a part in exposing Faustus Fabius — Mummius and Gelina, Iaia and Olympians, Alexandros and Apollonius, Eco and Meto, loose-tongued Sergjus Orata and the dead Dionysius, and even Crassus himself.
'So it was Fabius who later slipped into the library and cleaned the blood from the statue's head?'
Crassus nodded.
'But why did he wait so long? Was it a detail he had simply overlooked until then?'
'No, he had wanted to do a more thorough cleaning of the library before, but I was always here working, or he was busy attending to duties, or else there was someone who might see him in the hallway. But your arrival set him in furious motion to cover all his tracks.'
'My arrival,' I said, 'and Dionysius's vanity.'
'Exactly. When the old windbag bragged at dinner about beating you to the solution, he sealed his own fate. Whether he actually suspected Fabius is doubtful, but Fabius had no way of knowing what the philosopher had deduced. The next morning, amid the confusion of the funeral arrangements, he slipped into Dionysius's room and added poison to his herbal concoction. You were correct, by the way; he used aconitum. While he was in the room he also attempted to pry open Dionysius's trunk, suspecting the missing scrolls might be hidden there; the lock proved too strong and he finally fled the room, fearing that Dionysius or a slave would walk in on him.'
'Where did he obtain the poison?'
'In Rome. He purchased the aconitum from some vendor in the Subura the night before we set out. Even then he realized he might have to kill Lucius, and he hoped to be able to do it in a more subtle, more secretive fashion than bashing in his skull. The poison was brought for Lucius, but it was used to silence Dionysius. I found more of the stuff in Fabius's room, and confiscated it to keep him from using it on himself. I don't intend to let him off that easily.'
'And last night, on my way to Cumae, Fabius attempted to murder me.'
'Not Fabius, but his agents. During your altercation in front of the stables he glimpsed the bloodstained cloak hidden under your own. He thought he had tossed it into the sea on the night of the murder; that was the first time he knew that the cloak had been found.'
'Yes,' I said, 'I remember the odd look on his face.'
'Had you bothered to show the cloak to me — had you trusted me from the outset with all the evidence, Gordianus — I would have recognized it immediately, and all manner of wheels would have begun to turn. But alas! Fabius could only hope that you had withheld it from me, either on purpose or through neglect, and that I hadn't yet seen it, as was the case. He had no choice but to kill you and recover the cloak and destroy it as quickly as possible.
'It was Fabius whom I had charged to obtain gladiators and organize the funeral games; usually I would have assigned Mummius, but given his weakness for the Greek slave and his distaste for the spectacle I was planning, he was unreliable. Fabius had already determined to eliminate you, one way or another. He had brought two gladiators up from the camp at Lake Lucrinus, just in case he needed them, and so had them ready to send after you immediately when you departed for Cumae. Fabius asked you where you were headed, do you remember? You made the grave error of telling him. Fabius sent the gladiators to follow you and the boy, assassinate you both, and bring him the cloak.'
I nodded. 'And when our bodies were found, the murders would have been blamed again on Alexandros, hiding in the woods!'
'Exactly. But you would have been no safer here at the villa. His other plan, had you spent the night here, was to steal into your room and pour a draft of hyoscyamus oil into your ear. Do you know its effects?'
A chill crept up my spine. 'Pig-bean oil; I've heard of it.'
'It was another poison he had purchased and brought from Rome, another option for eliminating Lucius, short of murdering him; given its effects, it would have taken care of you quite nicely. They say that if one pours an adequate dose into the ear of a sleeping man, he will wake up the next morning raving and incoherent, completely deranged. You see, Gordianus, had you spent last night here in your room, you might be a babbling idiot now.'
'And had Eco not shouted a warning outside the arena today, a spear would have pierced me from neck to navel.'
'Another gift from Fabius. When only one of his assassins returned to him last night with news that you had escaped with the cloak, he ordered the gladiator to act as his private watchman, to hide above the entrance to my box and watch for your arrival. Without my knowledge, Fabius discharged the guards who should have been standing before the entrance, so there would be no witnesses. It was his last desperate gambit; had the assassin succeeded in spearing you, he would have informed Fabius and you would have been carted off to rot with the dead gladiators, an anonymous and unlamented corpse.'
'And tonight Faustus Fabius would be free of all suspicion.'
'Yes,' Crassus sighed, 'and the people of the Cup would be spreading tales of the unique and glorious spectacle staged by Marcus Licinius Crassus, stories that would reverberate all the way up to Rome and down to Spartacus's camp at Thurii.'
'And ninety-nine innocent slaves would be dead.'
Crassus looked at me in silence, then smiled thinly. 'But instead, the opposite of each of these things has happened. I think, Gordianus, that you are indeed an arm of Nemesis. Your work here has merely fulfilled the will of the gods. How else could it be, except as a jest of the gods, that tonight I should be sitting here drinking the last of my cousin's excellent Falernian wine with the only man in the world who thinks the lives of ninety-nine slaves are more important than the ambitions of the richest man in Rome?'
'What will you do with them?'
'With whom?'
'The one hundred.'
He swirled the last of the wine in his cup and stared into the red vortex. 'They're useless to me now. Certainly they can't be returned to this house, or to any of my properties; I could never trust any of them again, after what's happened. I considered selling them here at Puteoli, but I don't care to have them spreading their story
