within it. He peered inside more closely. A pin embedded in a bit of cork lay on the bottom. Help me Hercules! It was the twin of the one that Pliny had shown them yesterday. Trying to conceal his excitement, he scowled and said, “I’ll have to know more details.”
The thugs jabbered away all at once, and Hiram translated. “They were told to waylay the man at a certain street corner where he always passed. They took him by cart, rolled up in a rug, to your little farm across the Tiber, where your father met them. They all went into the woods beyond the house and worked him over. He screamed a lot, but no one lives out that way. When they got to singeing his balls, he died on ’em. Weak heart, I’d say.”
“What did my father want from him? Did he say anything?”
Hiram consulted his companions. “They’re not paid to listen. They don’t understand much anyway. Your father wanted to know who this man was and why he was in his house. The man was harder to understand. He spoke Latin with an accent and he was, you know, screaming. He begged your father to be merciful. They understood the word ‘ clemens.’ And something too about clothing-they think they heard ‘vestis.’ But maybe they heard wrong, these fellows ain’t very smart.” The three torturers, not understanding Hiram’s speech, smiled hopefully at Lucius.
“After the man died,” Hiram continued, “your father told ’em to bury him and the box-they can show you the spot if you like. He went back to the farmhouse for something to eat. While he was gone they hid the box under some straw in their cart, thinking it might be worth something.”
Lucius wasted no time in paying the Syrians off with some silver spoons, which were worth considerably more than a thousand sesterces. He wanted no trouble from them. No, indeed. He wanted time to think. Clemens? Of course! Not “merciful,” but Flavius Clemens, the God-fearer whom his father had denounced. Vestis he could make no sense of. Still, something connected this Amatia and her physician to the Clemens affair. Whoever they were, they weren’t what they seemed, and Verpa had found them out.
Lucius took the kit back to his room and sent a slave to fetch one of Scortilla’s cats. There were half a dozen in the house, all of them “sacred,” more of her Egyptian nonsense. He picked the animal up by its neck and pressed the pin into its blue-gray flank. It twisted and made strangling sounds, and in a moment it was dead. Satisfied with his experiment, he went looking for Valens. Pliny had warned him to cooperate and cooperate he would. His life might depend on it.
He found the centurion in the garden, not alone. A bosomy, unkempt woman was seated next to him on the bench beside the pool where three sun-burned, naked little boys were engaged in pushing one another’s heads under the water and shrieking at the top of their lungs.
“The family, sir,” Valens explained, looking a trifle apologetic. “Been after me for days to let ’em come over for a look round. Thought it wouldn’t do any harm.”
Lucius suppressed an urge to swear at the man. “I want you to go to the vice-prefect’s house and ask him to come here without delay. I have urgent news for him.”
“Now, sir?”
“Yes, now. And I want this rabble out of my garden.”
The centurion’s face darkened, and for an awful moment Lucius feared the man might hurt him. But his woman was up at once, dragging the children out, and Valens, tight-lipped, turned smartly and marched off.
He was back in half an hour. “Vice-prefect’s not at home, as it happens,” he said in his surliest tone of voice. “His wife says he’s left town and she doesn’t know where. Didn’t seem too happy about it either. Anything else you want done, you ask your own people.” He returned to the garden, now emptied of his family, drew his sword and set to sharpening it with vicious strokes against the edge of a stone bench.
Chapter Twenty-four
The seventeenth day before the Kalends of Domitianus.
Day eleven of the Games.
The white napkin, released from the praetor’s fingertips, fluttered down, simultaneously a horn sounded, the restraining rope dropped, and a dozen four-horse chariots shot out of the starting boxes. A roar rose from a quarter of a million throats. The drivers, distinguished by their team colors – green, blue, red, white, purple, and gold- stretched out almost horizontally over their horses’ backs, cracking their whips, twisting their bodies, turning their heads for brief seconds to see who was beside or behind them, searching for an opening to the left, closer to the barrier.
As they dashed around the first turn, a Green driver tried to foul one of the Reds by crowding him but wasn’t skillful enough and lost control of his own chariot, careening into the barrier. The chariot flipped up and over, throwing the driver out. His horses plunged on, dragging him, still tied to the reins, into the path of another team. The roar of the crowd redoubled. This was what they had come to see.
Martial and his four friends rose to their feet, screaming with the rest, although from high up in the cheap stands of the vast Circus Maximus it was hard to see what had happened. The surviving chariots disappeared around the turn and up the back stretch in a cloud of dust. They sat again on the benches, prodded by elbows in their ribs, knees in their backs.
“Purple’s going to carry off the honors today,” Priscus shouted in his ear over the rumble of voices. “The emperor’s team. That’s where I put my money.” They could just make out the distant figure of the emperor in the imperial box, swathed in the folds of his purple toga, surrounded by his courtiers, Parthenius, no doubt, among them. “Who’s your money on, then?”
But Martial wasn’t listening. The momentary excitement past, he had sunk back into his own thoughts, which, like those chariots, went round and round in an endless circle. Where was Pliny? Why had he left the city yesterday morning without warning, telling no one where he was going? He would have to meet Stephanus tonight at the popina, but what could he tell him? Stephanus. That man gave him the shudders with his cold eyes and sallow cheeks and that perpetually bandaged arm. And what if Parthenius refused to believe that Pliny hadn’t confided his plans to him? What if Parthenius dropped him after all this? He doubted that anything he had reported so far had really been of much interest to the grand chamberlain. It was that woman Amatia he seemed most interested in.
And there, Martial had simply drawn a blank. An ordinary and harmless provincial matron was all he saw. Rather reserved, rather sad, a bit foolish on the subject of religion. None of the gossip-mongers knew anything about her, naturally, since she hadn’t been in Rome more than a couple of weeks. But in that case, why did Parthenius care? And yet he did care. Which must mean that there was more to Amatia than he had guessed. The thought pounced on him like a cat leaping from cover upon an astonished mouse. Amidst the din of a mindless crowd, Martial’s mind suddenly gained clarity. The woman was lying to them. As simple as that. But what was he to do with this new idea? Martial, who had always thought himself so clever, so knowing, suddenly felt out of his depth, baited and hooked like a fish into betraying his friend and patron for reasons he couldn’t fathom.
He must tell Pliny, as he should have done in the first place. But how could he do so without confessing to his deal with Parthenius and all of his small betrayals over the past days? No, he couldn’t afford that. He would lose both Pliny and Parthenius as patrons.
Thirty years in Rome, grasping for a fame always just out of reach, had changed him into a man that he didn’t like any more. But “the die was cast,” as the Deified Julius had once famously said. There was no alternative now. He would go back to Pliny’s house tonight, play the dutiful client, make himself agreeable to the little wife, and see whether he could pry any information loose from the mysterious Amatia.
The chariots thundered past and Diadumenus, sitting beside him, clutched his arm and screamed, “On, the Greens!” in a transport of excitement, Martial tried hard to look attentive. ???
A second day’s journey by coach brought Pliny and Zosimus to the lovely hill town of Ameria, where they were met by the bailiff of the farm, who had brought saddle horses for them. The farm lay about four miles west of the town.
At a walking pace, they took their way through the rolling country, thick with oak and poplar. Away on their right, Mt. Soracte, a towering wedge of granite, soared above the hills; behind them on the distant horizon stretched the folded masses of the Apennines. In the deep shade of leafy trees the air was autumn crisp, while Rome, sixty miles below, still sweltered through the last days of summer. Rome. Pliny shook himself to drive the
