guests. Sometimes my friends sleep over if they’re too drunk to find their way home.” “Did any of your friends happen to sleep over the night before last?” “Maybe-I mean, no, no one.” Pliny lifted a quizzical eyebrow. “And the room below his?” “His room overlooks the back corner of the garden. Below it is a shed for garden tools and whatnot. No one sleeps there.”
They stood in the doorway and Pliny took in the scene at a glance: a small desk and chair, a lamp-stand and a gilded chamber pot with handles in the shape of urinating Cupids; and Verpa’s bed, its costly Babylonian coverlet tangled and spattered with blood. All at once an unexpected thrill of excitement shot through him. The thing began suddenly to seem real to him. Here a man had died, butchered by a resentful slave, a castoff lover or perhaps some other enemy.
“Of course, without our slaves there’s no one to clean,” Lucius said in a petulant tone.
“Uncommonly large for a bedroom, isn’t it.”
“The family that built the house bedded a dozen slaves here. My father felt that was far too generous. One only needs to squeeze slaves closer together to get them in smaller quarters.
Pliny seemed to recall that this mansion in the Vicus Pallacinae had formerly belonged to a senator whom Verpa had denounced years ago for dabbling in philosophy. It was a beautiful house, far the grandest in a neighborhood of grand houses, and the emperor gave it to him as his reward. Informing on one’s colleagues paid well.
“My father took this room as his private, ah, lair, if that’s the right word,” Lucius continued. “He wanted someplace that was more secluded than the downstairs bedrooms. He was a secretive man who craved privacy-not easy to achieve in the houses we Romans live in. The rest of us have seldom had occasion to enter it. As you see, he decorated it to suit his taste.”
Until now, no one had called attention to the room’s most striking feature-the murals. On every wall, horse- tailed Satyrs with bulging eyes and huge curving penises performed sexual acts in every imaginable position with naked women, their hair loose, their mouths open in shrieks of ecstasy. The figures were life-sized, painted by an undoubted master of anatomy, color, and modeling.
Pliny, like any Roman, was not easily shocked. Sex was celebrated everywhere in the city; you could see similar things in the public baths. Still, his Northern conservatism was pricked. His parents’ house had allowed no such stuff as this. “Great gods, it looks more like a brothel than a gentleman’s bedroom.” All this to stir the man’s flagging libido or, more likely, to instruct the younger slave girls in what was expected of them. What shameful sights these walls must have seen.
Valens grinned. No doubt he and “the lads” found frequent occasion to come up here. Lucius stared straight ahead and said nothing.
Pliny hastened on, “Lucius Ingentius, tell me in your own words what happened that night.”
The young man shrugged-shrugging seemed to signal the way he dealt with the world-and explained how he and a few slaves had burst in at dawn when Verpa failed to answer their knock and found him naked, on his stomach, one leg curled under him, the other extended straight, his back and buttocks shredded with bloody slash marks. The body was cool to the touch and already stiffening. “And there was no one else in the room when you entered?” “No one. “And no one heard a struggle, a cry for help?” Lucius hunched his shoulders again, “I was out most of the night. Scortilla’s room is downstairs.” “What about the slaves?” “I’ve already questioned them, sir,” Valens struck in. “None of them admits to hearing anything.” “And none of them ran away?” “No, they’re all here,” Lucius said. “Interesting. How did your father get along with them.”
Lucius looked doubtful. “He was a strict master, but hardly the monster people made him out. Not loved. But this? I don’t know.” “And where do the slaves sleep?” “There are two other big rooms at the other end of the house. Most of them sleep there.” “Under guard?” “They’re counted every night, but not locked in.” “You said most of them sleep there.” “A few privileged ones sleep elsewhere.” “And they are?”
“The night staff, the door slaves, the clock slave. Oh, and Iarbas the dwarf. He’s Scortilla’s pet and plays the clown in her pantomime troupe. He sleeps with her.”
“Her own troupe?”
Lucius had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. “I know, frowned on in these virtuous days, but her tastes are old-fashioned. Harmless, really-bit of slapstick, rude songs, boy ballet dancers.” “Quite,” Pliny interrupted. “And so she and your father never slept…” “Together? No, not for years.” “Did any other slaves have the freedom of the house at night?”
“Phyllis, one of the slave girls, generally slept with my father, she was his current favorite. And there’s Ganymede, the cinaedus in our troupe.”
“And where does he sleep?”
There was a half-smile on the young man’s lips. “Ganymede sleeps wherever he likes.”
“Hmm. Well, I will question them all in due course. None of them sounds like a likely suspect. But your father didn’t have Phyllis to bed that night, or anyone else?”
“No, he didn’t. It was his custom when he had important business to transact the next day not to squander his vital force in lovemaking.”
“And what business would that have been?”
“I’ve no idea. But he seemed agitated at dinner and drank more than usual. Something was in the wind.”
“Sir.” Valens had been circling the room, doubtless with the object of appreciating the muralist’s extraordinary technique. “Look at this here. We never noticed this before.” He was pointing at what appeared to be a charcoal sketch of some kind high up on the wall beside the bed: three semicircles one above the other, the largest one at the bottom bracketing the other two. A vertical slash drawn through their centers connected them and protruded a little way above and below them.
“By the gods,” whispered Lucius, squinting up at it. “Jews! My father prosecuted them, you know, and their friends, the ones who call themselves God-fearers.”
Pliny cast him a questioning look.
“What, you don’t know about the God-fearers? Romans, people of our own class, mind you, who attend the lectures of the rabbis where they listen to a lot of nonsense about how their books contain wisdom the equal of Plato or Pythagoras. They worship a god with no image, if you can imagine it, and not only that but he’s worse- tempered than Zeus with a hang-over, spouting rules about this, that and the other. But they eat it up. I had to sit through hours of it, pretending to be one of them, and it all went over my head, I assure you. The only thing that was clear to me is that they’re traitors. But that’s how we caught Clemens and Domitilla. It was my father’s idea.”
What a long speech suddenly from this reticent young man, Pliny thought. “But what does that have to do with this scrawl on the wall?”
“I know what this is a drawing of,” Lucius replied. “And so do you, vice prefect, think about it.”
“ Mehercule, he’s right!” Valens exclaimed. “On the Arch of Titus, sir. That bloody huge seven-branched candlestick from the temple in Jerusalem.”
Of course! He’d seen it a hundred times. Every Roman knew those bas-reliefs that depicted the triumph of the emperor Titus, Domitian’s lamented elder brother, over the Jews. All the treasures of the temple had been paraded through the streets of Rome more than a quarter century ago and commemorated in carved and painted stone on the triumphal arch that Titus built near the Forum. “Sir?” Valens scratched his jaw. “If I might make a suggestion, sir.” “Yes, what?” “Ask about the murder weapon.” “Right, of course, centurion. I was just going to.” In fact, it hadn’t occurred to him. He was no policeman, damn it! “I have it,” said Lucius. “We found it on the floor by the bed. I took it to my room, I’ll get it.”
Lucius returned moments later with the dagger and held the hilt toward Pliny, who took it in his hand. It was a heavy piece with a wicked-looking curved blade incised with symbols in a foreign script. Black flakes of Verpa’s blood clung in them.
“A Jewish sica,” said Valens. “An uncle of mine worked for tax farmers in Judea before the revolt. The Zealot terrorists used to slash Roman throats with these.”
“You’re a font of information, centurion.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Here, you’d best take charge of it. It’s our only evidence so far.” He handed it to the centurion. Turning back to Lucius, he asked, “Are there any Jews in this house?” The young man looked at his feet. “Well, yes, one among
