A Murder on the Appian Way Read online

  He took a sip of Falernian and gazed down at the city. “I shall be leaving Rome myself in a day or two. When I come back, I shall put an end to all this nonsense.”

  “Nonsense, Great One?”

  By a wave of his hand he indicated the pillars of smoke. “This infernal disorder.”

  “But how, Great One?”

  Pompey looked at me shrewdly. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you. Tomorrow, the Senate will convene in the portico at my theater, out on the Field of Mars.”

  “Outside the city walls?”

  “Yes. That way I can attend—legally attend—the proceedings. Let no man say that Pompey thinks himself above the law! A lot of business has piled up, as you can imagine. A number of proposals shall be put forth. One of them is to rebuild the Senate House. No controversy there. I shall suggest that Milo’s brother-in-law Faustus Sulla be given the contract. Let no man say that Pompey is unfair to the relatives of Milo! Besides, such a commission seems only proper, since it was Sulla, Faustus’s father, who remodeled the old Senate House. Thus the Senate shall pay homage to the memory of the dictator Sulla and his achievements. Many Romans flinch at that word, dictator. They forget how important it is to have some mechanism whereby supreme power can be placed in the hands of a single man, when circumstances demand it.”

  He took another sip of wine and stared at the pillars of smoke as if he could disperse them by sheer will power. “And there will be another, more important proposal—that the Senate declare a state of emergency and issue the Ultimate Decree. Do you know what that means, Finder?”

  “Yes,” I said, remembering the last time such a decree had been issued, when Cicero was consul and had demanded extraordinary powers to deal with Catilina and his circle. “The Ultimate Decree instructs the consuls to do ‘whatever may be necessary to save the state.’”

  “Martial law,” said Pompey, bluntly.

  “But there are no consuls.”

  “Yes, that’s a problem. How can troops be levied from the countryside if there are no consuls to levy them? Well, it’s only a technicality, really. Someone other than a consul will have to do the job, of course. Fortunately, as a man who has twice been elected consul and as the current commander of the Roman troops in Spain, I have both the necessary expertise to raise a militia here in Italy, and the skill to deploy it in the most efficient manner to bring order to the city.”

  “The Senate will agree to this?”

  “I’m certain they will. It’s all a matter of counting the votes ahead of time. Oh, some of Caesar’s supporters will make a fuss, as may some of the more hidebound conservatives, like Cato. A terrible precedent, they shall say, but what other solution have they to offer? They won’t protest too vehemently. I shall find ways to mollify them. The important thing is that order be restored. If we must resort to certain innovations to achieve that end, if the law must be slightly bent, then so be it.”

  He at last turned his gaze from the pillars of smoke, which, for the moment at least, had refused to disperse. “Well then, shall we discuss your fee, Finder?”

  13

  A man commences a journey on the Appian Way with the smell of fish in his nostrils and the sound of dripping water in his ears.

  The smell comes from the fish markets just outside the Capena Gate, at the southern end of the city. Fishermen from the Tiber and as far away as Ostia string up their catches on lines, presenting row upon row of fish hung up by their gaping jaws, with here and there a basket full of mollusks, octopi or squid. On a normal day, at a normal hour, the place resounds with the jabber of kitchen slaves, housewives and marketers. We set out in the gray hour before dawn, before the markets would normally be open, but even so the place was unnaturally quiet and deserted. According to Bethesda, there had been no market outside the Capena Gate for days. Like startled minnows, the fishermen had all been scared away. Still, there was a strong odor of fish about the place, as if the sea had penetrated the very stones beneath our feet.

  The sound of dripping water comes from a leak in the Appian aqueduct. It was built by the same Appius Claudius Caecus who built the Appian Way, two hundred and sixty years ago. When the aqueduct reaches the city it merges with the wall and for a considerable distance flows inside it, a river within a wall, a marvel of design and engineering spoiled by only one defect: at the Capena Gate, the aqueduct leaks. In warm months the great arching blocks of stone overhead are covered with dripping moss, like the ceiling of a grotto. In the dead of winter the moss dies back and sometimes the water freezes into a dully gleaming sheet of ice. On this morning it was not that cold. The water seeped, slowly but freely. As we stepped through the gate, one drop in particular, an especially large, especially frigid drop, struck the back of my neck and wriggled down my spine. I gave a jerk and must have made a curious noise, for Eco gripped my arm and Davus looked at me with alarm.

  I knew what Davus must be thinking: it’s an ill omen to begin the first step of a journey with a shudder and a curse from the master. Eco, less superstitious, probably feared that I was having a seizure. Then a drop glanced off the tip of Eco’s nose, making him blink in confusion. When Davus tilted his head back and opened his mouth to laugh, another drop struck him square between the eyes.

  “There, now we’ve all been anointed by the Capena Gate. A very good omen,” I declared for the benefit of Davus.

  Eco raised a dubious eyebrow. “Where is this stable that Pompey mentioned? I’ve never noticed it before.”

  I looked around. Toward the left, just beyond the market, stood the dense grove of trees that surrounded the shrine of Egeria with its limestone springs. It could hardly be in that direction. I looked toward the right. “That must be the place, over there. It looks like a stable, doesn’t it? Usually all the hanging fish would hide it from view. I see an open door and a light inside. Someone must be up already.”

  A narrow path flanked by cypress trees led to the long, low building in the shadow of the city wall. I took a step inside the open door and was met by an odor of horse dung and hay that was a welcome relief to the stink of fish, then by a pitchfork aimed at my throat.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” The man held a lamp in his other hand. The glow lit up his gaunt, wary face.

  “We come from your master,” I said. “I thought you’d be expecting us.”

  “Maybe. What are you called?”

  “Finder.”

  “All right, then.” The man lowered his pitchfork. “I have to be careful. There’s been a lot of trouble lately. Desperate men, damned good horses, and me in between—me the one who’ll pay if there’s any stolen. Understand? And I’ll tell you, the master keeps some fine ones here. Fine horses! Takes a military man to really appreciate what a horse is worth. Keeps them here for convenience, for when he wants to take a ride to his villa down south. Come along and see. Careful, follow the lamp. He said you could have your pick. How many are you? Three? Here, I happen to have three blacks, not a spot of white on them. Those are the ones I’d take if I were you.”

  I saw the three he meant and reached toward the nearest. The beast had a long, powerful neck and bright eyes. “Why? Are these the fastest?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. But they’d for sure be the hardest to see if you do any riding after dark. Something to think about, these days, making yourself hard to see if you’re out in the open at night.”

  The three horses looked fit and strong enough, and were very black indeed; even in the glow of the man’s lamp they tended to vanish into the shadowy stalls. I took his advice.

  Davus had some trouble mounting his horse. It turned out he had never ridden a horse before.

  Eco looked thoroughly disgusted—not angry at Davus but at himself for not thinking of such an elementary detail before we set out. What use was a bodyguard on horseback if he couldn’t control his mount? Davus was now my personal bodyguard; I should have been the one to ask if he could ride, but I was so used to Belbo that I took it for granted.
“You’ve never even been on a horse?” I asked.

  “No, Master.”

  “You know nothing about riding?”

  “Nothing, Master.” Davus peered uncertainly at the ground on either side, like a man atop a rickety table.

  “Then today you shall learn how to ride,” I said. And tomorrow you will hardly be able to stand upright, I thought. What good would a bodyguard be, with saddle sores and wooden limbs?

  The horse snorted. Davus gave a start and gripped the reins tightly. The stableman was greatly amused. “Don’t worry! I tell you, these horses are the best. Trained to do all the thinking. Battle horses—keep their wits no matter what. Smarter than your average slave, that’s for sure. The Great One even lets women ride them!”

  Davus took this as a challenge. He wrinkled his brow, forced the queasy look from his face and sat upright.

  We ambled away from the stables, letting the mounts get a feel for us. Eco was fretful, but not about Davus. “Do you think it was a good idea, bringing strangers into the house?”

  “They’re Pompey’s men. Don’t you think we can trust them?”

  “I suppose so …”

  “It was the only way. Well, perhaps not the only way …” In fact, for the time that Eco and I would be away, Pompey had offered to allow Bethesda, Menenia and Diana and whatever attendants they needed to take up residence in his old family house inside the city wall, in the Carinae district, on the western slope of the Esquiline. It made sense; they would certainly have been safe there, and the place was situated midway between Eco’s house and mine. But I didn’t want to slip quite so far, quite so quickly into Pompey’s camp. Putting my family completely in his care would mean putting them completely in his power, and in a way that outsiders would surely notice. On the other hand, it was out of the question for me to leave Rome even for a few days without doing something to safeguard the family households, especially if Eco went with me, which he insisted on doing. The solution was to borrow a troop of bodyguards from Pompey as part of my fee, sufficient to protect both the house on the Esquiline and the house on the Palatine in our absence. Pompey was agreeable. His men had arrived at my house early that morning before Eco and I departed.

  “I didn’t like the looks of some of those fellows,” brooded Eco.

  “I think that’s the point. They’re frightening.”

  “But can we trust them?”

  “Pompey says so. I doubt that there’s a man on earth better at keeping discipline in his own ranks than Pompey.”

  “Bethesda wasn’t pleased.”

  “Bethesda wasn’t pleased about any of this. Her household is in chaos, her husband is traipsing off into danger again, and another man’s gladiators are tracking mud into her house. But I suspect she was secretly glad to have the protection. Those men who ransacked the house and killed Belbo—that shook her more than she’ll admit. And mark my words, by the time we get back, she’ll have every one of Pompey’s brutes trained to take off his shoes before he steps on the carpets and to ask permission before he goes to the privy.”

  Eco laughed. “Perhaps Pompey will take her on as a drill sergeant!” We rode on a bit. “Menenia was reasonable enough about the whole thing,” he noted. The wistfulness in his voice made me suspect they had come to more than a mental understanding during the night.

  “Menenia is the soul of reason,” I said.

  “And Diana—”

  “Don’t say it. I saw the way she was looking at some of those fellows. I’d rather not think about it.”

  Davus shifted uneasily and cleared his throat, but Eco pressed on. “She’s seventeen, Papa. She should get married soon.”

  “Perhaps, but how? A decent marriage means negotiations between the families, planning, announcements to friends—all the things we went through when you married Menenia. Can you imagine managing all that, with things as they are now?”

  “The riots will pass, Papa. Things will get back to normal soon enough.”

  “Will they?”

  “Life goes on, Papa. Things are bound to get better.”

  “Are they? This time I’m not so sure …”

  There was not a person to be seen along the road, at least not any living person. Lining the way, as always along the major thoroughfares outside any city, were a succession of tombs and sepulchers, large and small. Burial within city walls is illegal, so the neighborhoods of the dead begin just outside the walls. Crooked cenotaphs with inscriptions worn smooth by time stood alongside newly sculpted family portraits in marble and limestone. Among the grandest tombs were those of the Scipios, the family whose glory had dominated Rome in the age before my father’s birth. They conquered Carthage and began the work of empire; now they were dust.

  Equally grand were the tombs of the Claudii. The Appian Way was their road, or so they considered it, since it had been built by their ancestor. The dead Claudii in their ornate stone tombs were clustered thickly along the way, like jostling spectators at a parade. The Claudii continued to make their mark on Rome; Publius Clodius, affecting the plebeian variant of the name, had been the latest to hold sway. As Pompey had noted, his murder on the road of his ancestors had been a twist of fate of the sort so beloved by melodramatic playwrights and sentimental rhetoricians. The irony might someday provide a theme for schoolboy compositions: Appius Claudius Caecus built the Appian Way. Two hundred and sixty years later his descendant Publius Clodius was murdered there. Compare and contrast the achievements of these two men.

  Beyond the tombs were great drifts and piles of rubbish and debris, bits of broken pottery and worn-out shoes, shards of glass and bits of metal and plaster. A city as vast as Rome produces a great deal of trash, and it all has to go somewhere. Better to cart it outside the walls and dump it in the city of the dead than to let it pile up among the living.

  At the farthest edge of the city, where the tombs and trash heaps grew fewer and farther between and the countryside began in earnest, we passed the Monument of Basilius. I’ve never known who Basilius was or why his tomb, built like a miniature Greek temple atop a little hill, should be as grand as those of the Claudii or Scipios. The inscriptions are so old they can no longer be read. But the monument’s prominence and location make it a landmark of sorts. The Monument of Basilius marks the farthest reach of the city’s vices, or the farthest incursion of the countryside’s menace, depending on your point of view. Bad types of all sorts congregate there. The vicinity is notorious for robberies and rapes. Thus the commonplace warning to a friend setting out on the Appian Way: “Be careful passing the Monument of Basilius!” That morning, those had been Bethesda’s next to last words to me. At the moment, the only vagrants to be seen were a few wretched figures huddled under coarse blankets against the monument’s base, surrounded by empty wine vessels. They were probably as harmless and miserable as they looked; on the other hand, bandits are notorious for feigning such disguises.

  I spurred my mount to a trot, eager to put the place behind us. But as we hurried on, all my inner senses told me I was getting closer to danger, not farther away. When I had insisted that Pompey supply guards for my family in my absence, he had offered to send more guards along with Eco and me. I had refused. His men were likely to be recognized. What was the point of sending me to find out what Pompey’s men could not, if people could tell at a glance that I came from Pompey? Besides, I had reasoned, three healthy, armed men on horseback, offering offense to no one, should have little to worry about.

  Bethesda’s very last words to me that morning—with what glimmered suspiciously like a tear in her eye—had been “You are a fool.” I hoped she was wrong.

  Past the Monument of Basilius, the Appian Way stretches like a long, straight ribbon toward Mount Alba on the horizon. The land on either side is as flat as a table, dotted here and there with distant trees and houses. A man can see for miles. There was no one but us traveling on the road that morning, no slaves at work in the fallow fields. Except for a few plumes of smoke from hear
th fires in scattered houses, there were no signs of life at all. This is one of the safest stretches on the whole Appian Way, since the topography affords no places for ambush. The fresh air, the smell of earth, the vast emptiness, the sun rising over the long ridge of hills to the west, all these things made me feel exhilarated, glad to be leaving the city and its madness behind me for a while. But one of us did not look happy at all.

  “Is something wrong, Davus? You seem to be getting the hang of riding.”

  “Master? No, the horse is fine.” Even as he spoke he tightened his grip on the reins, as if the beast might overhear and rear up just to spite him.

  “Is it something else, then?”

  “Nothing, Master. Only …” He scanned the empty fields on either side with such a disconcerted look that I followed his gaze, thinking there must be some menace lurking in the clumps of frigid earth and brown grass.

  “For Jupiter’s sake, what do you see, Davus?”

  “Nothing, Master.”

  “Don’t keep saying that! You must see something.”

  “No, Master, that’s exactly it. I’m seeing nothing. Nothing at all. And it seems to go on forever.”

  “Are you going blind?”

  “No! I can see everything. Except that there’s nothing to see!”

  I suddenly understood. I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it. Eco frowned and drew his mount closer. “What’s going on, Papa?”

  “Davus has never been outside the city in his life,” I said. “Isn’t that right, Davus?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “How old are you, Davus?”

  “Nineteen, Master.”

  “Davus is nineteen years old, Eco, and he has never been on a horse, and he has never stepped foot outside Rome.”

  Eco cursed and rolled his eyes and rode on ahead.