I felt my face and ears turn as red as Tiro's. I glanced at Bethesda and saw that she was smiling very slightly, looking relieved. Tiro took a deep breath and backed away from me, as if he had drawn a line with his crutch and stepped behind it.
'You must understand, Gordianus. This matter belongs to Cicero now. It always did. You put yourself in danger in his service, and for that he's taken you under his protection. He asked you to find the truth, and you did. Now the truth must be judged by the law. That's Cicero's domain. The defence of Sextus Roscius is the most important event in his life. This could mean everything to him. He honestly believes you're more a danger than a help now. You mustn't confront him about this. You mustn't test him. Do as he asks. Obey his judgment.'
Tiro turned to go, giving me no time to answer and using his clumsiness with the crutch as an excuse not to look back or make any gesture of farewell. In the empty courtyard his presence lingered: eloquent, loyal, insistent, and self-assured — in every regard the slave of his master.
I picked up the history by Polybius I had been reading, but the words seemed to run together and slide off the parchment. I raised my eyes and looked beyond the scroll, into the shadows of the portico. Nearby, Bethesda sat with her eyes closed, catlike and content in the warm sunlight. A ragged cloud crossed the sun, casting the courtyard into dappled shadow. The cloud departed; the sun returned. After a few minutes another cloud took its place. Bethesda seemed almost to be purring. I called her name.
'Take this scroll away,' I said. 'It bores me. Go back to the study. Beg our host's forgiveness for the interruption, and ask Tiro if he can find something by Plautus for me, or perhaps a decadent Greek comedy.'
Bethesda walked away, mouthing the unfamiliar name so that she wouldn't forget it. She clutched the scroll in that strange way that the illiterate handle all documents — carefully, knowing it to be precious, but not too carefully, since it would be hard to break, and without any affection at all, even with some distaste. When she had disappeared into the house, I turned around and scanned the peristyle. No one was about. The heat of the day had reached its peak. All were inside napping or otherwise taking refuge in the cool depths of the house.
Climbing onto the roof of the portico was easier than I had anticipated. I pulled myself up one of the slender columns, grabbed hold of the roof and scrambled up. The height seemed nothing to a man who had practically flown the night before. Evading the guard posted at the far corner of the roof loomed as a greater challenge, or so I thought until my foot loosened a cracked tile and sent a spray of tiny stones hissing on the paved court below. The guard stayed just as he was, his back to me, standing straight up and dozing against his spear. Perhaps he heard me when I leaped to the alley below and upset a clay pot, but by then it was too late. I made a clean escape. This time no one pursued.
28
There is a fine sense of freedom that comes from wandering about a familiar city with no particular destination in mind, with no one to meet, no duties, no obligations. My only concern was with certain men I wanted very much not to meet, Magnus chief among them. But I had a good notion of where a man like Magnus might or might not be found on such a fine afternoon, and as long as I stayed away from the familiar haunts to which those who knew my habits might direct a searching stranger, I felt relatively safe — almost a shadow, in fact. Or better, a man made of precious glass, as if the warm sunshine that beamed down on my shoulders and head passed straight through me, casting no shadow at all, and every citizen and slave I passed looked right through me. I was invisible. I was free. I had nothing to do and a thousand nameless, sun-drenched streets to do it in.
Cicero was right; my part in the investigation of the murder of Sextus Roscius was over. But until the trial was done, there was no way I could move on to other business, no way I could return with safety to my own home. Unused to having enemies himself (how soon that would change, with his ambitions!), Cicero expected me to hide myself away until all was clear, as if that were a simple thing. But in Rome one's path is never entirely clear of enemies. When even a perfect stranger could prove to be Nemesis, no man can protect himself completely. What point is there in cowering away in another man's house, behind the spear of another man's guard? Fortune is the only true protection against death; perhaps it was true that Sulla was followed everywhere by her protecting
hand — how else to explain his longevity when so many others around him, far less culpable and certainly more virtuous, were long dead?
It would have been amusing to surprise Rufus in the Forum; I imagined stealing up behind him in some dusty corner of some dusty clerk's library, humming a snatch of Metrobius's ditty from the night before — 'and the lady agreed, yes, the lady declared' — but the Forum was probably the most dangerous place for me to loiter, except for the Subura. Without a plan, I wandered northward towards the Quirinal Hill, into a region where the houses were shabby and the streets littered. I came to the edge ofthe Quirinal, above the Servian Wall; the street dropped off in a steep descent and the houses on either side drew back from the road, leaving a wide plaza with a patch of unkempt grass and a single straggly tree.
Even in the city of one's birth there may be undiscovered streets that open onto unexpected vistas, and the goddess who guides aimless wanderers had guided me to such a spot. I paused for a long moment, looking out at the quadrant of Rome beyond the city walls, from the sweep of the Tiber on the left, sparkling beneath the sun as if it were on fire, to the straight, broad Flaminian Way on the right; from the jumble of buildings massed around the Circus Flaminius to the Field of Mars beyond, hazy with dust. The sound and the odour of the city rose on the warm air like a breath exhaled from the valley below. For all its danger and corruption, for all its meanness and squalor, Rome still pleases my eyes more than any other city on earth.
I made my way south again, following a narrow footpath that skirted the backyards of tenements, crossed alleys and wound through patches of green. Women called out to one another across the way; a child cried and his mother began to sing a lullaby; a man roared in a drunken, sleepy voice for everyone to be quiet. The city, languorous and good-natured from the warmth, seemed to swallow me up.
I passed through the Fontinal Gate and wandered aimlessly until I rounded a corner and saw looming ahead of me the charred mass of a burned-out tenement. Blackened windows opened onto blue sky above, and while I watched, a long section of one wall fell crashing to the ground, toppled by slaves pulling long ropes. The ground all about was blackened with ash and tumbled with heaps of ruined clothing and what remained of household goods — a cheap pot melted by the heat, the black skeleton of a loom, a long jagged bone that might have been human or canine. Beggars picked through the sorry remains.
Because of the unfamiliar angle by which I had approached, a long, puzzled moment passed before I realized this was the same tenement that Tiro and I had watched go up in flames only a few days before. Another blackened wall came crashing down, and through the vacant space, standing in the street with his arms crossed and issuing orders to his foremen, I saw Crassus himself
The wealthiest man in Rome looked quite cheerful, smiling and chatting with those among his large retinue privileged to stand within his earshot. I stepped carefully around the periphery of the ruins and placed myself at the edge of the group. A rat-faced sycophant, unable to insinuate himself farther into the throng, was willing to settle for a conversation with a passing stranger.
'Clever?' he said, following my lead and turning up his rat's nose. 'Hardly the word for Marcus Crassus. A brilliant individual. No other man in Rome is so economically astute. Say what you like about Pompey being a brilliant general, or even Sulla. There are other kinds of generals in this world. Silver denarii are the troops of Marcus Crassus.'
'And his battlefields?'
'Look in front of you. What more carnage could you desire?' 'And who won this battle?'
'You have only to look at Marcus Crassus's face to know that.'
'And who lost?'
'The poor beggars in the street, picking through what's left of their belongings and wishing they still had a roof over their heads!' The man laughed. 'And the wretched owner of this wreck. Previous owner, I should say. Off on holiday when it happened. Not a very good strategist. So saddled with debts that they say he killed himself when he got word of the fire. Crassus had to deal with the grieving son, and certainly got the better of him. They say he gave up the property for less than the cost of a trip to Baiae. And you think that's merely clever! The man narrowed his rat's eyes and pursed his thin lips in an access of admiration.
'But he'll have to pay to have the tenement rebuilt,' I suggested.
The man arched one eyebrow. 'Not necessarily. Given the density of this neighbourhood, Crassus may leave the property undeveloped, at least for a while. That's so he can raise the rents on the tenement next door, and keep them up. He bought that property at the same time, off a panic-stricken fool who gave it up for a song.'
'You mean the building that barely escaped the flames? That one there, where people keep streaming out the door, assisted by those large men who look like brawlers from a street gang?'
'Those are employees of Marcus Crassus, evicting tenants unwilling or unable to pay the new rents.'
We watched together as a thin old man in a tattered tunic stepped cautiously out of the building next door with a large sack balanced on his back. One of the evictors intentionally stuck out his foot and tripped the man, causing the sack to slip from his shoulders and break open when it hit the street. A woman came running from an already loaded wagon, screaming at the enforcers while she helped the old man to his feet. The innocent guard turned red-faced and looked away in chagrin, but the culprit only began to laugh, so raucously that heads all around us turned to watch, including that of Crassus.
My new acquaintance seized the occasion of being in the great man's line of sight. 'It's nothing to bother you, Marcus Crassus,' he shouted, 'just an unruly ex-tenant blowing farts at one of your servants!' He let out a ratty little laugh. Crassus's eternal smile wavered a bit, and he stared at the man briefly with a perplexed expression, as if trying to remember who he might be. Then he turned away and resumed his business. The rat-faced man turned up his long nose in smug triumph. 'There,' he said, 'did you notice the way he laughed at my little joke? Marcus Crassus always laughs at my jokes.'
I turned my back on him in disgust, walking away so quickly I hardly noticed where I was going. I bumped into a half-naked slave covered with soot who had a rope slung over his shoulder. The rope went slack and he pushed me aside, shouting at me to look out. A section of wall fell crashing at my feet, shattering like bits of hardened clay. Had I missed bumping into the slave I might have walked right under it and probably died in an instant. Instead a cloud of soot billowed harmlessly about my knees, darkening the hem of my tunic. Feeling eyes on my back, I glanced over my shoulder and saw Crassus, alone of all those around him, staring straight at me. He did not smile, but very soberly gave a superstitious nod of his head in acknowledgment of a stranger's unaccountable good fortune. Then he turned away.
I walked on in the way that one walks when furious, or heart-broken, or lost in the inexplicability of existence — aimlessly, carelessly, with no more attention to my feet than a man pays to his heartbeat or breath. Yet it could hardly have been an accident that I found myself retracing exactly the route that Tiro and I had taken on the first day of my investigation. I found myself in the same square, watching as the same women drew water from the neighbourhood cistern and shooed away the same indolent children and dogs. I paused by the sundial and gave a start when the same citizen passed by me, the very man I had queried before about the way to the House of Swans, the quoter of plays and despiser of sundials. I raised my hand and opened my mouth, trying to think of some greeting. He looked up and stared at me strangely, then glowered as he leaned to one side, making it quite obvious that I was blocking his view of the sundial He noted the time with a snort, glowered at me again and hurried on. It was not the same man at all, nor did he bear anything more than a passing resemblance.
I walked on, down the narrow winding street that led to the House of Swans, past blind walls mounted with sconces and the remnants of torches and scrawled with graffiti, political or obscene or sometimes both together. (P. CORNELIUS SCIPIO FOR QUAESTOR, A MAN YOU CAN TRUST, read one in an elegant hand, and next to it, hastily scrawled, P. CORNELIUS SCIPIO WOULD CHEAT A BLIND WHORE AND GIVE HER AN UGLY BABY.)
I passed the dead-end alley where Magnus and his two henchmen had lain in wait. I stepped around the dim bloodstain that marked the place where old Sextus Roscius had died. It was even duller than it had been on the day of my first visit, but not hard to locate, as the space all around it was markedly clean in contrast to the grimy cobblestones that filled the street. Someone had been out washing the very spot, scrubbing and scrubbing, trying to eliminate it once and for all. The job must have taken hours, and all for nothing — if anything, the spot was more conspicuous than before, and all the passing feet and soot-laden winds that had soiled it once would have to soil it again to make it disappear once more into the street. Who had worked here for hours on hands and knees (in the middle of the day? in the middle of the night?) with a scouring rag and a pail, desperately trying to wipe out the past? The shopkeeper's wife? The widowed mother of the mute boy? I imagined Magnus himself doing it, and almost laughed at the idea of the glowering assassin down on his hands and knees like a scrub maid.
I stooped down, brought my face near to the ground and stared into the flat stones and the tiny flecks of blackened red trapped in every fissure and pit. This was the very stuff that had given life to Sextus Roscius, the same blood that flowed in the veins of his sons, the same blood that heated the body of young Roscia, standing warm and naked against a dark wall in my memory; the same blood that must have run down her thighs when her father broke her maidenhead; the same blood that would burst from his own flesh when and if a Roman court saw fit to have him publicly scourged and then sewn up alive in a sack full of wild beasts. I stared into the stain until it grew so vast and deep that I could see nothing else, but even then it gave no answers, revealed nothing about either the living or the dead.
I unbent myself, groaning as my legs and back reminded me of last night's leap. I stepped forward just enough to peer into the gloomy shop. The old man sat behind the counter at the back, propping his head on his elbow, his eyes shut. The woman fussed about the sparsely stocked shelves and tables. The shop exhaled a dank, cool breath into the sunlit street, tinged with sweet rot and musk. I went into the tenement across the street. The downstairs watchman was nowhere in sight. His little partner at the top of the stairs was asleep with his drooling mouth wide open and a half-full cup of wine in his hand, tilted just enough so that he spilled a few drops with each snore.
Inside my tunic I fingered the hilt of the knife the boy had given me. I paused for a long moment, wondering what I could say to either of them. To the widow Polia that I knew the name of the men who had raped her? That one of them, Redbeard, was dead? To little Eco that he could take back his knife, because I had no intention of killing Magnus or Mallius Glaucia for him?
I walked down the long, dark hallway. Every board I stepped on creaked and groaned above the muffled voices from the cubicles. Who would huddle inside in the dark in the middle of such a day? The sick, the old, the infirm and crippled, the weak and starving, the lame. Ancients beyond any use, infants unable yet to walk. There was no reason that Polia and her son should be home at all, and yet my heart caught in my throat as I rapped on the door.
A young girl pulled the door wide open, giving me a view of the whole room. An ancient crone huddled amid blankets in one corner. A little boy knelt in the open window. He glanced over his shoulder at me, then went back to watching the street below. Except for its size and shape, everything about the room was different.
Two watery eyes looked out from the blankets. 'Who is it, child?'
'I don't know, Grandmother.' The little girl stared at me suspiciously.
'What do they want?'
The little girl made an exasperated face. 'My grandmother says, what do you want?' 'Polia,'I said.
'Not here,' said the boy in the window. 'I must have the wrong room.'
'No,' said the little girl crossly. 'Right room. But she's gone.'
'I mean the young widow and her son, the little mute boy.'
'I know that,' she said, looking at me as if I were an imbecile. 'But Polia and Eco aren't here any more. First she left, and then he left,'
'Gone,' added the old woman from the corner. 'That's how we finally got this room. Lived across the hall before, but this room is bigger.- Big enough for all five of us — my son and his wife and the two little ones.'
'I like it better like this, when Mommy and Daddy are out and it's just us three,' said the boy.
'Shut up, Appius,' snapped the girL 'One day Mommy and Daddy will go out and never come back, just like happened to Eco. They'll disappear, like Polia. You'll run them off because you're always crying. We'll see how you like that.'