'Are you saying that the final blow was delivered by a third party?'
'I have taken an oath not to speak of the details.' 'I see.' Pompey considered this. 'Then I suggest that you keep your mouth shut.'
'Should I, Great One?'
'Yes. By all means, don't break an oath on my account. Clodius
is dead and burned to ashes. Milo is ruined and about to leave Rome for good. So much for those two. My next task shall be seeing to the punishment of the parties responsible for burning the Senate House:
The state must deal evenly with all disturbers of the peace, you see,
or there can be no law and order. Could this revelation of yours
have any effect on that?'
'I think not, Great One.'
'Then it's irrelevant and of no interest to me. The murder of Clodius is old business. Do you understand, Finder?' There was a note almost of menace in his voice.
'Yes, Great One, I think I do.'
The inside of Milo's house seemed oddly familiar, though I had never been there before. The mosaics on the floor, the pale ochre colour of the walls, as well as various objects in the foyer and what I could glimpse of the nearby rooms reminded me at once of Cicero's house. Having no sense for such things himself) Milo had slavishly emulated his great friend's impeccable taste.
The place also reminded me, in an odd way, of Clodius's great house on the Palatine, for it was clearly in a state of chaos. But where I had seen Clodius's house in the process of being decorated and refurbished, Milo's house was the reverse, in the process of being undecorated and dismantled. Paintings had been removed from the walls and stacked upright. Precious objects were being boxed up. Curtains had been removed from doorways and neatly folded on little tables.
Like Clodius's mansion on the night of his murder, there was an air of distraction and abandonment in Milo's house. Occasionally a slave would pass by on some errand, looking unhappy and hardly glancing at me. I began to think I had been forgotten. Finally, the slave who had admitted me returned and gestured for me to follow him deeper into the house.
Was I a fool, leaving Davus outside and going to face Milo alone? I braced myself for the confrontation. I was not sure how I would feel when I saw him. He had done me a great wrong, and I had every reason to despise him, and yet, oddly, the experience of my incarceration made me feel a kind of sympathy for him. It is a terrible thing, for a man to lose all his dreams, to have everything taken away from him except the bare means of sustenance. Milo had risen from obscurity to a position of great power. The consulship itself had been within his grasp — then his world had been shattered in a moment and his destiny had gone spiralling out ofhis control. He had played a dangerous game, and in the end had lost eveiything. Whether he deserved his fate or not, the totality ofhis ruin moved me. Nevertheless, I intended to tell him what I thought ofhis treatment of me, and to demand restitution.
The slave showed me to a room with a decidedly feminine atmosphere. The walls were painted with scenes of peacocks in full fan strutting across wildly blooming gardens. A low dresser was covered with little cosmetics boxes, jewellery cases, brushes and burnished hand mirrors all made of fine woods and metals inlaid with precious stones. Across the room, a riot of colourful gowns and stolas spilled from an open wardrobe. Dominating the room was a large sleeping couch with a diaphanous red canopy. The air was scented with jasmine and musk.
Sounds of splashing and laughter came from a doorway at the far side of the room, which evidently led to a private bath. I could hear both male and female voices. Where had the doorkeeper taken me, and why had he gone off without announcing me? I cleared my throat as loudly as I could.
The laughter and splashing stopped. There was dead silence. I cleared my throat again and called out, 'Milo?' The response was silence, then a burst of laughter and splashing louder than before.
'Wait there,' called a woman's voice. I heard whispered conversation and more laughter. Finally she appeared in the doorway, wearing a loose, unbelted gown which did very little to conceal the plump, voluptuous contours of her body. Masses of ginger-coloured hair were piled and pinned atop her head. Whatever she had been doing in her bath, she had managed not to get her hair wet.
I had met her father once long ago. The dictator Sulla had been near the end of his life; Fausta Cornelia must have been no more than a child then. Thirty years later, she was still too young to show the ravages of severe dissipation, which had ruined her father's looks, but there was a decided family resemblance — the same fair complexion, the same carnivorous smile, the same wilful fire behind the eyes. She was not graceful; when she moved, some part of her body always seemed to jiggle or sway. Instead of grace, she exuded a ripe fleshiness, and even from a considerable distance I could feel the radiant heat of her body, flushed and pink from her hot bath. Her high birth had attracted two promising husbands; other attributes had attracted a steady string of lovers, and I was being given a good look at them.
'So, you're the Finder,' she said.
'Yes. I came to see your husband on a matter of business.' 'My husband isn't here.'
'No?' I looked towards the door to the bath. I could still hear an occasional splash and the sound of voices.
'If Milo were here, do you think I'd be taking a bath with two of his gladiators?'
She looked to see if her candour would shock me. I did my best to keep a blank expression.
'I realize that Milo must be very busy during his last days in Rome,' I said. 'It isn't absolutely necessary that I see him face to face, but I do want to make sure that he receives this.' I held up the little scroll with Pompey's seal.
She rolled her eyes. 'Oh, not another bill! Thank the gods I kept my own income, even if it is in my brother's name.' She took the scroll from me and walked down a short hallway. She jiggled a good deal behind as well, I noticed. We came to a cluttered room filled with documents. 'My husband's study,' she announced, with an air of distaste. 'From here, he was going to run the Republic. What a joke that turned out to be! I suppose there'll never be another man like my father, a real man who can bring this unruly town to heel.'
'I'm not so sure of that,' I said quietly, thinking of Pompey, and of Caesar.
She didn't hear. 'This is the latest pile of bills,' she said, indicating a tall box overflowing with scrolls and scraps of parchment. 'Shall we toss yours on top? There. But don't be surprised if it gets moved to the bottom, or lost altogether.'
'Who's attending to sorting out all these bills? Is your husband doing it himself?'
'Gods, no! Milo's a wreckage; he can hardly sort out which shoe to put on first in the morning. One peek inside this room and he's reduced to a blubbering baby. No, this will all be dealt with after he leaves. Cicero will take care of it. Or Tiro will, I should say; Tiro is a wonder at organizing things.'
'I see. Here, then, let's put my request aside from all the rest. If you would, tell Cicero to honour it first. Tell him that Gordianus the Finder insists. Cicero will know why. So will Tiro.'
She looked at me wryly. 'And you think I don't? I know who you are, Finder. I'm more aware of my husband's affairs than you seem to think. He was quite bent on killing you, you know. It was all he talked about for days.'
'Really?' Her candour about her lovers was not nearly as startling as her candour about her husband's plots.
'Oh, yes. Milo considered you to be quite a menace. You should be honoured, I suppose. Of course, towards the end, he was seeing an assassin in every cupboard and a spy behind every bush. You obsessed him for a while. Cicero kept telling him that he was blowing any threat you posed out of all proportion. Cicero said that your reputation was grossly inflated, that you were barely competent, really, and that Milo should stop worrying about you.'
'How kind of Cicero.'
'He was trying to protect you, you fool. But Milo was determined to see you dead, in a cold sweat about it. In the end Cicero made him agree to a compromise, and Milo simply had you abducted But you must be as clever and persevering as he thought — you escaped before the trial came up. By Hercules, what a fright you must have given Cicero when you popped up on the road right in front of him!' She emitted a short, barking laugh.
'I only wish I could have appreciated the humour at the time.'
'Can't we all say that, in retrospect? If only I'd known that marrying Milo would turn into such a joke! And that horrible day on the Appian Way, when I thought I was living through a nightmare, it was really all a grotesque
