A Murder on the Appian Way Page 20

  “Did he have more business in the area?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s be sentimental and assume that he wanted to spend some fatherly time with his son, strolling through the wooded grounds around his villa. But then a messenger arrived.”

  “A messenger?”

  “The one that Fulvia dispatched that morning, to give her husband the sad news about Cyrus the architect. She asked Clodius to return to Rome at once.”

  “Was it really necessary for Clodius to hurry home?”

  “Fulvia seemed to think so. Cyrus was close enough to have named Clodius among his heirs, and Fulvia was depending on the man to finish their Palatine house. She felt overwhelmed by his death. She wanted her husband to come home.”

  “And Clodius dropped everything to come running at her call?”

  “You don’t find that credible, Eco?”

  “I don’t know, Papa. You’ve had more contact with the woman than I have.”

  “Yes, well, I’ll venture to say that when Fulvia tells a man to do something, the chances are good that the man will do what Fulvia says.”

  “Even Clodius?”

  “Even Clodius. Which is to say that I find what Fulvia told me credible if not necessarily convincing: that Clodius intended to spend another night at his country villa, but instead found himself unexpectedly back on the Appian Way headed toward Rome, because of that message from Fulvia. If that was the case, then there was no premeditated ambush, was there? When Milo and his entourage passed by, Clodius should have been off strolling in the woods with his son; instead, Clodius was on the Appian Way, but only by chance.”

  “But where was his son, if the boy wasn’t with him when the skirmish occurred?”

  “Fulvia says that Clodius had promised the boy a stay in the country, and left him at the villa with his tutor.”

  “Does it strike you as credible that he would leave the boy behind, Papa?”

  “Perhaps. You might think Fulvia would have wanted her son brought back to her, but the rich see these things differently. I suppose, if I owned a huge villa in the country with a full staff of slaves to run the place, I might feel comfortable leaving my eight-year-old son in their keeping. Or perhaps the boy is an insufferable brat and a terrible traveler. Perhaps he’d been a complete pest all the previous day and Clodius couldn’t abide another long trip with the monster and wanted to be rid of him.”

  Eco laughed. “That’s better! Forget the sentimentality.”

  “Of course, to some it might look suspicious that Clodius just happened to set out from his villa with an armed company just as Milo was approaching on the Appian Way, and just happened to leave his young son behind, out of harm’s way. Another detail to be noted.”

  “So we finally come to Milo. What was he doing on the Appian Way?”

  “You heard his speech in the Forum the other day. He was expected for a religious ceremony in Lanuvium, which is the next town you come to after Aricia, a couple of miles farther south. From what I’ve been able to tell, the bare facts of the account Milo gave at Caelius’s contio are true: He attended a meeting of the Senate in Rome that morning and later he set out at the head of a large retinue, riding with his wife in a carriage. Milo claims they got a late start and didn’t pass Bovillae until about the eleventh hour, the last hour of daylight. If that’s true, it would seem to contradict Fulvia’s story about Clodius heading home, because the eleventh hour of a winter day is too late for anyone with a scrap of sense to set out on a journey of several hours with a troop of men on foot. It would have been long after dark before Clodius got to Rome, and traveling by night is a dangerous business, if only because of the chance that a man or beast will trip in the dark and break a leg. So did the incident really occur that late? Fulvia says that Clodius’s body, carried in a litter, arrived at her house on the Palatine at the first hour of the night—only an hour or two after Milo claims the skirmish began, which is impossible.”

  “So there’s a discrepancy about when the incident occurred. Fulvia says it happened earlier in the afternoon; Milo says it happened not long before sunset. Is that important, Papa?”

  “It means that one of them has to be mistaken—or deliberately lying.”

  “I shall try to contain my surprise!”

  “Yes, but why lie about the time, Eco? And if Fulvia or Milo has lied about that, then what else might one or the other be lying about?”

  “Do you think we’re likely to find out, simply by going to these places and asking some questions?”

  “We can try,” I said.

  Mount Alba loomed straight ahead of us, steadily growing larger. Clouds had gathered at its summit, casting a shadow over the higher slopes, so that the mountain seemed to erupt from the surrounding sunlit plains like a brooding mass of doubt. Davus frowned, viewing the prospect with misgivings. He was not the only one.

  15

  Though we arrived at Bovillae before the fourth hour, the midday meal was already being prepared. Smoke rose from the cookhouse behind the inn, carrying smells of baking bread and roasting meat.

  “I’m starving!” said Eco. Davus’s stomach growled in sympathy.

  “Good,” I said. “We won’t have to invent any pretenses for why we’re stopping at the tavern.”

  It was a two-story building made of much-weathered stone. The land all around was cleared and trammeled by the passage of many feet over many years. It was to this place, according to Fulvia, that Clodius had fled when Milo’s men overwhelmed him. He had taken refuge in the tavern. Milo’s men had stormed the place. Fulvia knew no details of the battle, only that eventually a passing senator on his way to Rome had come upon Clodius’s body lying in the road outside the tavern, and had sent it on to Rome in his litter.

  Davus walked the horses to a hitching post beneath a nearby stand of trees. There was a trough with water for the horses and a bench for Davus to sit on while he watched them.

  Before we went inside, Eco and I took a quick look at all four sides of the building, to see how defensible it looked. There were large, shuttered windows in the upper story, inaccessible as there was no way to climb up to them. The shuttered windows in the rear and side walls of the lower story were small and set high up. A man might have been able to wriggle through one, but only if given a boost and if there was no one inside to stop him. The back door, made of solid wood, opened onto a covered walkway to the cookhouse. The front door, which at the moment stood open, was also made of solid wood. The doorway was so narrow that Eco and I had to turn sideways and step inside one at a time. The windows on either side of the front door were slightly larger and situated a little lower than the other windows on the ground floor, but a man would still have had a difficult time scrambling in or out of them.

  All in all, the inn appeared to be a reasonably defensible building. Still, I saw the signs of a recent, losing battle.

  So did Eco. “Did you notice the difference in the shutters, Papa?”

  “Yes.”

  “The ones on the upstairs windows are all made of old, gray wood—”

  “—while the shutters on every one of the downstairs windows are conspicuously new, as are both the front and back doors. There’s a lot of new plaster around the doorway, as well. You and I know all too well how doors can be broken and need replacing.”

  “Where do you suppose everyone is, Papa?”

  “Who would you expect to be here? There were no other travelers on the road this morning. We’re probably early for the regular midday clientele.” As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I saw a plain, rustic room with a few tables and benches. A steeply angled stairway to the upper floor began at the far left corner. Underneath the stairway a counter blocked off the back portion of the room. In the wall behind the counter there was a little archway with a cloth curtain tied back to show a shadowy storage room that led through to the rear door. After a moment the door rattled and opened to show the silhouette of a large woman outlined by bright sunlight. She closed the door
behind her and waddled up to the bar, wiping her hands on the front of her coarse gown. She smelled of baking bread and roasting meat.

  “I thought I saw someone come in.” She peered at us with a squint that I took to be almost hostile until I realized she was waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. She was a strong-looking woman with meaty arms and a round, open face surrounded by a tangle of graying red hair. “That’s your fellow with the horses over by the trough?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Three altogether, are you?”

  “Yes, travelers.”

  “Hungry travelers,” added Eco, leaning against the bar.

  She showed the hint of a smile. “We can take care of that, as long as you have something that jingles.”

  Eco produced his coin purse.

  She nodded. “I’ve got a couple of rabbits roasting. It’ll be a little while before they’re done, but I can bring you some bread and cheese in the meantime.” She reached under the bar and produced two cups, then went back to the storage room and returned with a pitcher of wine and a pitcher of water.

  “Could you take some food out to the fellow under the trees, too?” I said. “I can hear his stomach growling from here.”

  “Certainly. I’ll send one of my boys to take care of him. They’re out back in the cookhouse watching the fire. With my husband,” she added, as if making of point of letting us know that she was not a woman alone. “Travelers, you say. Headed north or south?”

  “South.”

  “You’ve come from Rome, then?” She poured out generous portions of wine, then added splashes of water.

  “We left early this morning.”

  “What’s it like up in the city?”

  “An awful mess. We’re glad to be away from it.”

  “Well, it’s been an awful mess around here, too, let me tell you. Ever since that accursed day …” She sighed and shook her head.

  “Ah, yes, we must be close to where it happened—the skirmish up the road.”

  She snorted. “Call it a skirmish if you like, but I’d call it an all-out battle, to judge from the damage that was done and the dead bodies lying all about. And it may have started up the road, but right here’s where it ended.” She slapped the top of the counter.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Aren’t we talking about the same thing? Milo and Clodius and all the blood that was spilled?”

  I nodded. “No one in Rome talks about anything else these days. But everything is so confused and jumbled. Every new version contradicts the last one. Something happened on the Appian Way and Clodius ended up dead—that’s about the only thing all the stories agree on. Where, when and how, nobody knows for sure.”

  She rolled her eyes. “So much suffering and destruction, you’d think people would at least bother to find out what really happened, if only to be glad it didn’t happen to them. But you said you were hungry. I’ll get you some bread, hot from the oven.”

  Eco opened his mouth to call her back, but I squeezed his arm and shook my head. “The woman is eager enough to tell us what she knows,” I said in a low voice. “Let her do it at her own pace.”

  She returned with a steaming loaf of bread in a basket and a piece of cheese the size of a brick, then went back to the storeroom and returned with a heaping bowl of black and green olives. She put her elbows on the bar, leaned toward us and resumed her tale without any prompting. “It was my brother-in-law who owned this tavern, my little sister’s husband. A hard-working fellow, from a long line of hard workers. Inherited the place from his father; the family’s owned this inn for generations. He wept with joy the day my sister gave him a son to leave it to.” She sighed. “Who could have known how soon he’d be passing the place along? The boy’s still a baby, and now that his papa is dead there’s not another grown man on either side of the family to run the place. So we’ve taken it over, my husband and I, with our boys helping us, while my poor widowed sister stays with her baby. Ah, poor Marcus! That was her husband’s name. There’s always some danger when you run a place like this on the road, always the risk of being raided by bandits or runaway slaves who’d slash your throat without a thought. But Marcus was a big, stout fellow, not afraid of anything, and this inn was his whole life. Always had been, since he was a child. I think he didn’t realize the danger that day when Clodius’s men came running in, all bloody and out of breath. He didn’t turn them away, he just asked them what he could do to help. Clodius staggered inside, wounded and bleeding, and told him to bolt the doors. Then they laid Clodius right here, flat on his back.” She slapped the counter, hard enough to cause ripples in our cups. By the dim light I studied the mottled, stained surface of the old wood. A lot of wine must have been spilled on that counter over the years, I told myself, but there were stains which might have been something else.

  “Marcus should have sent them all right back out into the road, that’s what my husband says. But what does he know? He wasn’t here. But my poor sister was. She told me all about it. She’d left her baby with me that day. Oh, how she loved working in this tavern, as much as Marcus did; nothing could keep her away. When Clodius and his men showed up, she was upstairs, shaking out blankets and sweeping the floors. If only her little boy had been sick; if only something, anything, had kept her home that day. The shock of what happened to Marcus was bad enough, but for her to have been here, to have seen and heard—it’s broken something inside her. Ah, well, that’s why we have to do everything we can to keep the place going until little Marcus is big enough to take his father’s place.”

  I nodded. “So the skirmish—the battle—began up the road, but Clodius ended up here. Had he ever been in the tavern before? Did he know your brother-in-law, Marcus?”

  “Oh, certainly. Publius Clodius stopped in here plenty of times, on his way to that villa of his up on the mountain. I met him myself a few times over the years. So charming—you could tell right away that he was highborn, there was no hiding that. Just a certain way he had of carrying himself, and always such fine clothes and fine horses, and how his hair and fingernails were always so nicely groomed. You don’t often see a man who keeps his fingernails so well cared for. But he was never aloof. He always remembered Marcus’s name, always asked him how little Marcus was coming along. He had a young son himself.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Of course, not everybody liked Publius Clodius. He stirred up some hard feelings around here, back when he started building his villa.”

  “Hard feelings?”

  “Well, there were some who said that the way he got hold of the surrounding land wasn’t completely honest, and others who complained that some of the trees he cut down were part of the sacred grove of Jupiter. And the Vestals had to move out of their old house. But Clodius gave them money to build their new house, which is only a little farther from the Temple of Vesta than their old one, so I could never see what all their complaining was about.” She shook her head. “But I’ll speak no ill of the dead, especially when the poor man’s lemur left his body within the sound of my voice.”

  “So your brother-in-law was friendly with Clodius, despite any hard feelings that some of your neighbors might have had?”

  “Oh, yes. I suppose that’s why Clodius ran to this place when he found himself in trouble. If only he hadn’t brought the trouble with him! But I don’t blame the dead. I blame the other.”

  “The other?”

  She picked up a rag from behind the bar and began twisting it, clenching her fists until the knuckles turned white. “The one whose men were after Clodius that day. He’s the bastard to blame for what happened here.”

  “Titus Annius Milo, you mean.”

  She made a noise in her throat as if she might spit. “If you want to call him that. Milo! He chose that name for himself, didn’t he? What a vain fellow, thinking he takes after some great Olympic hero. Well, no one is overawed by your so-called Milo in these parts. He’s just another fellow from the far sid
e of the mountain who went off to Rome to make his fortune. He comes from Lanuvium, did you know that?”

  “Yes, I think I’d heard that.”

  “Titus Annius Milo, you call him. He wasn’t born with that name either. He wasn’t even born with the name Titus! The fellow was born plain Gaius Papius, like his father before him, and let me assure you that the Papii of Lanuvium never did a single thing of importance that anyone can remember. By birth he’s as common as dirt. But when his father died, his grandfather adopted him. That was his mother’s father, Titus Annius, the one with the noble ancestors. So Milo took the old man’s names and added a name of his own, and Gaius Papius turned into Titus Annius Milo. Now everyone’s heard of him. He inherited his grandfather’s money, too, when the old man died, but they say he’s squandered it all on those fancy funeral games he put on to impress the voters in Rome. The things a man will do to get himself elected to high office! Well, no man among my relatives would ever vote for the fellow. Always pretending and putting on airs, as fake as all three of his names. No, we never had any use for Milo.”