A Murder on the Appian Way Read online

  She paused for breath and began to wipe the counter with her rag, as if she could rub away the bloodstains. “Oh, Milo would stop in here from time to time on his way home to Lanuvium, buy a round of wine for everybody, say a few pretty words, make sure everyone noticed him. The local boy who’d become such a powerful fellow in Rome, friend of Cicero, ally of Pompey, sure to become consul one of these days! But if you ask me, Milo hasn’t got a speck of Clodius’s charm. Clodius would come into this room and it would be as if someone had lit candles all around—everything suddenly had a glow to it. Milo would come in, blustering and grinning, and it was like someone blowing bad breath in your face. His charm was all for show. You could practically see him gritting his teeth at having to mix with the common folk he’d left behind. As for that wife of his, what’s her name—”

  “Fausta, I believe,” said Eco.

  “Ah, yes, Fausta Cornelia—well, there’s a case of a man marrying upward if ever there was one! Now how did the old dictator Sulla’s daughter ever end up hitched to Gaius Papius from Lanuvium? All a game of money and politics, I suppose. Marriage between people like that always comes down to a cold calculation, doesn’t it? They say it hasn’t stopped her from having all the lovers she wants. They say Fausta’s more of a slut now than she was with her first husband. For all that, let me tell you, she never pretended to have the common touch. When she and Milo would come parading up the Appian Way and he’d stop in here to buy drinks for everyone, the great Fausta Cornelia would stay most firmly ensconced in that fancy carriage of hers, rigid as a statue, staring straight ahead, as if it might give her a gas pain just to look at a person like myself. Well, I could understand her staying out of the tavern, a lady like that—Clodius’s wife, Fulvia, was the same, she and her women would always keep to themselves when Clodius stopped in, but you’d see her on the grass under the trees, playing with her little boy or nursing the little girl, behaving like a normal person. Not like Fausta Cornelia, too good to even exchange a glance with the likes of myself. But there was one time, one time—”

  The woman suddenly shook and choked with laughter. “Nature gets the better of everybody in the end, eh?” she managed to say, regaining herself. “I remember the time—oh, she must have needed to relieve herself very badly, because she actually sent a slave to ask me where the toilets were. So I sent a girl to show her the way to the little building over by the stream, past the stables. And the girl came back, saying that Fausta Cornelia hadn’t found the toilets to her liking and that she’d refused to use them. You can bet that Milo left the tavern and set out pretty soon after that. I suppose she held it in all the way to Lanuvium! But how? Even the Appian Way has a few bumps in it. We all talked about it afterward, wondering whether she’d had an accident in the carriage, and how Milo would react. Oh, can you imagine the look on the man’s face—”

  She burst out laughing again, until tears flowed down her cheeks. Finally she recovered and stood wiping away the tears with the backs of her hands. “Ah! The rabbit! It’ll be done by now, surely.”

  And with that she disappeared again through the back door.

  Eco raised an eyebrow. “It seems that Clodius and Milo were both rather well known in these parts.”

  “Yes, the ambitious local boy, and the aristocratic outsider with money and charm. Two types bound to excite strong reactions in people. Admiration, respect—”

  “Envy, hatred …”

  “Yes,” I said, “and both of them politicians, not shy about putting themselves forward. We know how skillful Clodius was at laying on the common touch; he made an art of it. Milo, who really did have common roots, seems to have been rather clumsy at it.”

  “So our hostess says, Papa, but she’s obviously biased. And what’s this about Clodius cutting down sacred trees, displacing the local Vestal Virgins—”

  Kicking open the back door, out hostess returned bearing a steaming platter. A tall, hulking figure came in after her, carrying a steaming bowl. The fellow was so large that I felt a little apprehensive until I realized who it was.

  “Davus! What are you doing? You’re supposed to be watching the horses. A fine thing if we were to finish our meal and find them gone. I don’t care to walk the twelve miles back to Rome.”

  “Don’t worry,” said the woman. “I sent one of my boys to take his place. Your horses will be safe, you have my word for it. Isn’t it all right for your slave to come inside? The clouds are starting to creep down from the mountaintop, and a fellow can catch a chill, sitting out in the open air. Let him warm up a bit.” She cast a look at Davus such as women, alas, have all too rarely cast at me. Just because a fellow happens to be nineteen, has wavy black hair, oxlike shoulders and a profile like a Greek statue …

  “She’s brought him inside so that she can look at him!” said Eco from the corner of his mouth.

  “Obviously,” I agreed. “This is the woman who preferred Clodius to Milo, remember.”

  The woman put plates and utensils before the three of us and filled our cups. The steaming platter turned out to be the roasted rabbit. Rabbit is not my favorite flesh—too greasy and bony—but it was well cooked and I was too hungry to quibble. The steaming bowl was full of glazed turnips. I complimented our hostess on the sauce.

  “Oh, it’s simple enough. A bit of cumin, a little garlic, some honey and vinegar and olive oil, a pinch of rue. A root vegetable calls for a spicy sauce, my mother always said.”

  “It’s really quite excellent,” I said, and meant it. But it was time to bring her back to the death of Clodius. “Did you do much of the cooking here at the tavern before that unfortunate day?”

  “Oh, every now and again, especially after my sister had her boy.”

  “But you weren’t here that day?”

  “No, as I said, there was only my sister, working upstairs, and Marcus.”

  “Had Clodius come through Bovillae the previous day?”

  “So my sister told me, but he didn’t stop in. She saw his entourage come marching through, but they passed so quickly that she only caught a glimpse of Clodius, riding at the head with his little boy beside him and a couple of friends.”

  “And on the day of the incident, Milo must have passed through here not long before the battle.”

  “Oh, yes, my sister remembers that vividly—remembers everything that happened that day, like a bad dream you can’t forget. Milo did stop for a while, to water his horses, but none of his men came into the tavern. Still, she says you couldn’t miss his entourage. It went on and on, like one of those triumphal processions in the city. That’s how he usually traveled, at least when she was with him.”

  “Fausta Cornelia, you mean.”

  “Yes. You’d think she couldn’t leave the house without ten slaves to make up her face in the morning and ten slaves to tuck her into bed at night. And I suppose Gaius Papius—Milo, if you must—simply liked showing off all those slaves and bodyguards to his friends and family back in Lanuvium. ‘Look at me! I just can’t seem to leave the house without having a hundred minions trailing behind me!’”

  “A hundred? Were there that many people in his entourage that day?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know the number. As I say, I didn’t see it myself, my sister did. But she says that while Milo was watering his horses at the stable, with his people milling about, they filled up the road, like a crowd in the Forum in Rome, and when they finally got going again, the procession just seemed to go on and on. Marcus made a joke of it, she said. If only Milo had watered his slaves as well as his horses, they could have sold every drop of wine in stock and paid for a new roof!”

  “So Milo’s party was bigger than the group that Clodius passed through with on the previous day?”

  “Are you a simpleton, or are you just not listening? Yes, definitely. Much, much bigger.”

  “But Clodius’s party was made up entirely of armed men—so I’ve heard—whereas you make it sound as though Milo traveled with hairdressers and cosm
eticians.”

  “Fausta’s slaves were in the party, yes, but Milo always traveled with plenty of gladiators, some of them pretty famous. Ever heard of Eudamus and Birria?”

  “Of course. They were in Milo’s party?”

  “He owned the two of them. Isn’t that just like him—to buy a pair of famous gladiators just so he could show them off? Even I’ve heard of Eudamus and Birria, and I have about as much interest in seeing men kill each other in an arena as I do in watching a beetle roll a piece of dung across the road. Though some of those gladiators aren’t hard to look at …” She cast a glance at Davus, who busied himself with tearing a bit of rabbit flesh off the bone. “Eudamus and Birria, on the other hand—now those two are about as pretty as a donkey’s hind end, and about as hard to miss. They always brought up the rear of Milo’s entourage. Huge, like walking trees. You never see one without the other. My husband says they used to fight as a team in the arena.”

  “Yes, two against two, sometimes two against four,” said Davus, pulling a rabbit bone from his mouth. Eco and I both looked at him in surprise.

  “Go on, Davus,” I said.

  He cleared his throat. “It’s just that when I was a boy my old master used to take us all to watch the fights,” he explained. “He owned a few gladiators himself. Thought about training me for the arena, but finally decided I was too small and he could make a better deal selling me as a bodyguard. He always said that no man ever lost money betting on Eudamus and Birria. It didn’t matter what sort of weapon they used, or in what combination—trident and net, short sword, ax, with shields or without. They could paralyze a man with fear, just by staring at him. The two scariest men who ever lived, that’s what my old master used to call them.”

  I speared a turnip with my fork and dabbed it in the sauce. “And these gladiators were with Milo when he passed through that day?”

  The woman nodded. “Of that I’m certain, because they were the first of the men who came running after Clodius. My sister saw them from an upstairs window.”

  “Is that where she stayed during the attack, upstairs?”

  “This is how she tells it: she heard the noise when Clodius and his men rushed in, and she started to come down. She just caught a glimpse of them, then Marcus yelled at her to go back upstairs.”

  “How many men did she see?”

  “Not very many. Five or six, she said, and Clodius lying on this counter, gripping his shoulder and gnashing his teeth, giving orders to the rest.”

  “Giving orders?”

  “Yes, telling them to close the shutters and so forth.”

  “Then he was wounded but still conscious.”

  “Very much so. Determined, my sister said. All his men were looking to him for directions. But the looks on those men’s faces …”

  “What sort of look?”

  “Like men with death on their heels, bracing themselves to turn and look it in the face. That’s just how she put it. Panic-stricken, gasping for breath. When they heard her on the stairs, they all gave a start and looked up at her like startled rabbits. All except Clodius, she said. He smiled at her. Smiled! Then Marcus yelled for her to go back, and she ran up the stairs.”

  “Then what?”

  “She ran to a window to see what they were running from. Just a little up the road a man had fallen. Two men stood over him, hacking at him with swords—blood flying all over the place. The fallen man must have been with Clodius. The other two were Eudamus and Birria. She recognized them right away—like demons from Hades, she said, like monsters from an old story. Farther up the road she could see more fallen men, and what looked like a whole army of gladiators heading for the tavern. Imagine how she felt! Eudamus and Birria finished hacking at the fallen man and came lumbering toward the tavern. The others came rushing up behind them. Oh, it makes me sick to think of it. My baby sister …” She shook her head and patted her hand against her breast.

  Eco pushed his plate away, looking slightly queasy. Davus stared intently at the woman and used his teeth to tear a shred of rabbit flesh off a bone.

  “And then what?” I said.

  “Marcus had barred the doors and the shutters downstairs. The attackers got closer and closer, and then they were at the door. Bang, bang, bang! Beating at the door, at the shutters, with their fists, with the pommels of their swords. The racket was terrifying. She covered her ears and still she could hear it. It went on and on—men crying out, the crack of splintered wood and broken hinges, screams and yells, clanging steel.” The woman rolled her eyes up. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night, imagining what she must have gone through, trapped up there, alone and helpless. She finally gathered up all the blankets, crouched in a corner and piled the blankets on top of her. She says she can’t even remember doing it, but she must have, because finally she realized that all the noise was over and there she was, sweating under all those blankets but shivering as if she were naked.”

  “How much time had passed?”

  “Who knows? A few moments, an hour? She couldn’t say. Finally she got up the courage to peek through the blankets. She was still all alone upstairs, and there was only silence from down below. She went to a window and looked out. She saw bodies scattered here and there along the road, and the strangest thing—right in front of the tavern, a litter with a group of people standing around it.”

  “A litter?”

  “Yes, not a carriage or a wagon, but a litter, the kind that’s carried by a team of slaves, with curtains for privacy. The litter had been put down, the bearers were standing by. An old man in a senator’s toga and a woman were standing over one of the fallen men in the road with their heads together, talking.”

  “Did your sister recognize the senator?”

  “No, but she knew the litter. We’ve seen it for years, heading up to Rome and coming back again. It belongs to an old senator who owns one of the villas on the mountain, Sextus Tedius. I’ve never seen his face. He’s not the sort to come into a place like this.”

  “And the man they were leaning over?”

  “Clodius.”

  “Your sister was able to recognize him, even at a distance?”

  “I suppose so. That’s what she said, that it was Clodius.”

  “How did he get from the tavern into the road?”

  “Who knows? Probably Eudamus and Birria dragged him out there, like dogs with a rabbit.” I thought of the marks around Clodius’s throat. Perhaps he had been literally dragged by the neck.

  The woman looked at our plates. “Why, you two haven’t finished your meat! On a chilly day like this, a man needs plenty of hot food in his belly, to keep up his strength. This one knows how to eat!” She cast a toothy grin at Davus, who finished sucking the last bit of marrow from a bone and cast a lingering glance at the uneaten meat on our plates. “Wasn’t it good?”

  “Excellent,” I assured her. “Roasted to perfection. I’m afraid we stuffed ourselves with too much of your fine bread and cheese beforehand.” I slid my plate and Eco’s toward Davus. “You say your sister saw bodies scattered along the road and Senator Tedius and his wife—”

  “Not his wife. Senator Tedius is a widower. The woman would have been his daughter, I imagine. His only child; she’s never married and is very devoted to him.”

  “I see. Then she saw Senator Tedius and his daughter with their litter out front, discussing what to do with Clodius. Where were Milo’s men?”

  “Vanished. They’d won the battle, hadn’t they? What reason did they have to stay? My poor sister finally found the courage to creep down the stairs. I know what she saw, because I saw it myself later—everything overturned and broken, the door off its hinges, all the shutters smashed. It was as if the Furies themselves had been unleashed in this room. And worst of all, right at the foot of the stairs, poor Marcus, pierced all over with wounds and not a breath left in his body. At the foot of the stairs, don’t you see—defending her. She must have lost her senses for a while, because the next thing she re
members is arriving at my house up the hill. She could barely talk for weeping. Oh, how she wept!”

  “And the people outside the tavern,” I said quietly. “Senator Tedius and his retinue?”

  She shrugged. “They were all gone by the time my husband and I got here. So was Clodius, or whatever was left of him. Later we heard that Tedius had sent the body on to Rome in his litter, and hundreds of people gathered at Clodius’s house in Rome that night and lit bonfires. His poor widow! But Fulvia’s grief couldn’t have been any greater than my sister’s. There were no gatherings here, no bonfires, just a great mess to be cleaned up. The next day my husband saw that all the bodies were gathered up and laid out in rows over by the stable. A man from Clodius’s villa came with a wagon and claimed them. But they didn’t clean the blood from the Appian Way—you can still see great patches of it between here and the shrine of the Good Goddess. And nobody’s offered to pay a single sesterce toward the repairs we had to make to this place. I told my husband that he should take Milo to court for damages, but he says we should wait and see how things go up in Rome before we get ourselves into more trouble. How do you like that? Honest men suffer in silence while a man like Milo can still put himself forward for consul. It’s an outrage!”

  I nodded sympathetically. “So you and your husband arrived after everyone else had scattered?”

  “Yes. All we saw were dead bodies.”

  “At what time of day did all this happen?”

  “The battle? Well, considering when we arrived, and from all my sister said, I think it must have been about the middle of the afternoon. I’d say Milo arrived in Bovillae at the ninth hour, watered his horses, rounded up his entourage and moved on, and then his gladiators chased Clodius here at the tenth hour.”

  “Not later? Not closer to sunset?”

  She shook her head. “Why do you ask?”

  I shrugged. “One hears so many different versions of the story up in Rome …”

  There was a noise from the open doorway behind us. I stiffened, but the woman smiled at the men who entered. “Roasted rabbit today, if I can trust my nose,” said one of them.