A Murder on the Appian Way Page 22

  “And turnips with our hostess’s special sauce!” said one of his companions, sniffing the air. They settled themselves on some benches in a corner.

  “What do we owe you?” I asked the woman. As I counted coins from Eco’s purse I leaned toward her over the bar. “Your sister—how is she now?”

  She shook her head. “A broken woman, as I told you. I don’t know if she’ll ever get over it.”

  “Is there any chance that she could receive a visitor?”

  “A visitor?” The woman frowned.

  I lowered my voice even further. “Forgive me: I haven’t been entirely forthcoming with you, I’m afraid. But now that I’ve heard you speak, I know I can trust you. I didn’t just happen to pass by today.”

  “No?” The woman looked at me suspiciously, but with growing interest.

  “No. I’m here on behalf of Fulvia.”

  “Clodius’s widow?” She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Yes—please, keep your voice down. I wasn’t sure I could trust you before, but now that I’ve heard your feelings about Clodius, and about Milo and his wife …”

  “Roasted rabbit! Roasted rabbit!” The newcomers began to chant and beat their fists against the tables, laughing good-naturedly.

  “Just wait your turn!” shouted our hostess, with a glare that they took for a joke. They laughed and began another chant that quickly disintegrated into laughter: “Turnips! Turnips! Tur—”

  She leaned closer and spoke just above a whisper. “I see! So you’re here to help wreck Milo’s schemes.”

  I pursed my lips. “I can’t say that’s my purpose for being here, exactly, but I can say that Fulvia has asked me to find out what I can about her husband’s death.”

  “Ah!” She nodded knowingly.

  “So you can see why I would like to speak to your sister, if I could.”

  “Of course.” She nodded sagely, then frowned. “But it’s not possible.”

  “I realize her fragile condition—”

  “But it’s not only that. She’s not here.”

  “No?”

  “She’s gone off with her son to stay with our aunt down in Rhegium. Everyone thought it would be best, for her to get as far from this place as possible for a while.”

  I nodded. One couldn’t get much farther away than Rhegium, at the very tip of the Italian peninsula.

  “Roasted rabbit and turnips and sauce! Roasted rabbit and turnips and sauce!”

  The woman shrugged. “I really must see to the others now. But good luck! Anything that helps to bring Milo down a peg or two …”

  “Oh, but one more question—”

  “Roasted rabbit and turnips and sauce—”

  “Yes?”

  “Marc Antony—does that name mean anything to you?”

  She thought for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Never heard of him. He must not be from around here.”

  “Roasted rabbit and turnips and sauce—”

  Our hostess groaned. “I’d better feed this lot quickly, before we have another riot in this place!” She rolled her eyes and cast a final grin at Davus, then hurried away.

  16

  “Where to now?” said Eco as we stepped out of the inn. “I could use a nap after that meal.”

  Davus yawned and stretched in agreement.

  “Nonsense! The day is early and we have a lot more to do. Davus, fetch the horses.”

  We set out on the Appian Way and soon passed the stable and the outbuilding where the toilets had failed to meet with Fausta Cornelia’s approval.

  Eco laughed. “Do you think that Milo’s wife can be half as disagreeable as our hostess seemed to think?”

  “I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting the lady myself, but she’s certainly been the subject of more than her share of gossip. Not that I ever seek out such tales; Bethesda tells them to Diana, you know, and I can hardly help overhearing.”

  “Of course, Papa, I understand. It’s the same with Menenia, always subjecting me to distasteful gossip. But it would be rude to plug my ears, wouldn’t it? So—tell me what you’ve heard, and I’ll tell you what I’ve heard!”

  I laughed. Davus, immune to the irony, looked at us as if we were crazy. “Mostly to do with her sexual habits,” I said. “When her previous husband, Gaius Memmius, was off governing some province, she chose to stay in Rome, and carried on so scandalously that when Memmius got home he divorced her. Then she married Milo.”

  “Children?”

  “Not yet. They’ve been married only a couple of years. But from what one hears, she’s been too busy with her lovers to do much procreating with her husband.”

  “Poor Milo!”

  “Save your sympathy. I suspect it’s as our hostess said—the two of them married each other for politics and profit. Whatever else she may be, Fausta is the dictator Sulla’s daughter, and that means a great deal, especially to the so-called Best People with whom Milo has been trying to ingratiate himself most of his life.”

  “What could it have been like, to have been Sulla’s child?”

  “I doubt whether you or I can even begin to imagine, Eco. She and her twin brother Faustus were born late in the dictator’s life, and he was apparently quite pleased with himself—imagine cursing a child with a name meaning Lucky Omen. If Fausta’s a spoiled brat, blame her doting monster of a father.”

  “Marrying her was a step up for Milo, I can see that. But what was in the marriage for Fausta?”

  “She may not have had many choices. Memmius had divorced her and left her with a tarnished reputation. Milo looked to be a rising star, didn’t he? He’d just inherited a lot of money from his grandfather; never mind that he proceeded to squander it all on the old man’s funeral games. Apparently she didn’t marry Milo for his lovemaking, since she seems to look elsewhere for that.”

  Eco nodded. “I suppose you’ve heard the story about Milo catching the radical tribune Sallust in bed with her—the day after their wedding! He had his slaves beat Sallust black and blue and confiscated his moneybag for a fine.”

  “Yes. Which makes me wonder how much of Sallust’s alliance with the Clodians these days is from political sincerity and how much is from a desire to get revenge on Milo. Then of course there’s the tale of how Milo caught his old friend Sextus Villius in bed with Fausta. Milo flew into a rage and dragged Villius screaming from the room. But in fact Fausta had been entertaining two lovers, and the other one had managed to hide in a wardrobe. While Milo was thrashing Villius out in the hall, the second lover sneaked back into bed with Fausta and gave her the ride of her life!”

  “The lady seems to have a penchant for getting caught,” observed Eco.

  “Or maybe she has a taste for cruelty and likes to see her lovers thrashed.”

  Davus looked at us and made a face. I suspect he had never heard two men speculate about other people’s behavior in such a prurient fashion.

  Eco shook his head. “I’ll say it again: poor Milo. He married Fausta for prestige, and all he’s gotten is embarrassment. Even her twin brother makes jokes about her.”

  “Yes, I know the story. While her first husband was gone from Rome she was stringing along two lovers at once, one a fuller who owned a wool-washing operation, and the other a fellow called Macula, on account of a birthmark on his cheek that looked like a stain. So Faustus observed, ‘I don’t see why my sister doesn’t get rid of that Stain—after all, she has the personal services of a fuller!’”

  Even Davus laughed.

  I pointed at a circle of oak trees a little off the road. “Your memory was perfect, Eco. There’s the altar of Jupiter that you mentioned.”

  “Perhaps we should stop and do something pious, to make up for all this gossipmongering.” Eco, the complete skeptic, likes to taunt me for what little religious sensibility I possess.

  “It wouldn’t hurt to leave a few coins and say a prayer, my son. We’ve had a safe journey and good fortune so
far.” As we dismounted under the shade of the oaks, a man in a scrappy white robe appeared from behind the stone altar. His jaw was covered with stubble and he smelled of wine. He introduced himself as Felix, and explained that he was the priest of the place and offered to recite an invocation to Jupiter on our behalf, for a small fee. Eco rolled his eyes, but I gestured for him to open his purse. The prayer was a simple formula, mumbled so quickly that I scarcely heard it. Instead I looked into the shadowy recesses of the trees around us and listened to the nearby babbling of the stream and the rustling of the branches. So close to the normally busy, altogether civilized expanse of the Appian Way, this ancient spot possessed a powerful sense of the ineffable and unseen. There is good reason why the altars and temples of the gods are erected in some places and not in others. The places chose the altars, so to speak, and not the other way around. This was such a place, and no matter what sort of priest maintained it, its specialness was as palpable yet elusive as the mist of a breath in cold air.

  When the prayer was done we turned to leave, but the priest reached for my arm. “You’re passing through?” Felix said. He had the narrow face of a ferret, and his teeth were yellow.

  “On our way from here to there.”

  “You know what happened just up on the road, don’t you?”

  “Quite a few things over the years, I should imagine.”

  “No, I mean the business with Milo and Clodius.”

  “Oh, that. Are we close?”

  “Close? Can’t you hear the lemures of the dead, shaking the leaves around us? The battle ended just down the road, at the old inn.”

  “Yes, we just ate there. The proprietress told us something about it.”

  Felix looked disappointed, then brightened. “Ah, but she couldn’t have shown you where the battle started.”

  “No. Is it interesting to see?”

  “Interesting? When you go back to Rome, you can tell all your drinking friends that you saw the very spot where the bloodshed began.”

  “What makes you think we’re from Rome?”

  He raised an eyebrow as if to say that our origins were all too obvious to a country dweller like himself. “So, do you want to see the place or not?”

  “Are you offering to be our guide?”

  “Why not? I’ve been the priest at this altar for twenty years, and I know everything there is to know about these parts. Of course, I would require a small gratuity, for the upkeep of the altar …”

  I narrowed my eyes and looked at Eco. “What do you think?”

  Eco stroked his chin. “I suppose it might be interesting. We’re not in too much of a hurry.”

  “Oh, it will only take a moment,” said Felix. “I can’t leave the altar for long.”

  I pretended to consider, then finally nodded. “Very well. Come along with us.”

  Davus, Eco and I kept our horses to a slow walk, so that the priest, on foot, could keep up. Past Bovillae the road began a steady ascent. The wooded hillside rose on our left and sloped downward on our right. Despite the increasingly jumbled landscape, the road that Appius Claudius had built continued steady on its course, as smooth and broad as ever.

  “So you saw the inn already,” said our guide. “Did you notice the new doors and shutters? You should’ve seen the place right after the battle—like a crone with her eyes and teeth plucked out. And all those bodies lying about!”

  “Did you see the battle yourself?”

  “I heard the fighting when it started up the hill, and knew that something was up. Then I saw them come running past—you can see a bit of the road from the altar—that fellow Clodius stumbling and tripping, practically carried along by his men, five or six of them, and then a little later those two monsters lumbering after them—Eudamus and Birria.”

  “You recognized them?”

  “Who wouldn’t? I never miss a gladiator show when I get the chance to see one. For religious purposes, you understand. The games started as funeral rites, you know. They’re still a sacred institution.”

  I didn’t care to argue the point with a priest. “Were Eudamus and Birria the only ones who came after Clodius and his men?”

  Felix snorted. “Now wouldn’t that make a legend—the two gladiators who laid siege to the inn at Bovillae and conquered it all by themselves! No, they weren’t the only ones. A whole army came down behind them.”

  “An army?”

  “Perhaps I exaggerate.”

  “How many men, then? Ten, twenty?”

  “Maybe more than that.”

  “Then Clodius was greatly outnumbered?”

  “You could say that.”

  “And the siege at the inn—did you see that as well?”

  “Well, not exactly. Not while it was happening. I stayed at the altar, of course, to protect it.”

  “Of course.”

  “But everyone knows how it turned out. Marcus the innkeeper slaughtered, and that scoundrel Clodius and his men lying dead in the road.”

  “Scoundrel?”

  The priest looked up at me sidelong and clicked his teeth. “I mean no offense, citizen. You were a partisan of the fellow?”

  “No. Our hostess at the inn had a different opinion of Clodius, that’s all. Say what you please about him.”

  “Then I’ll go ahead and call him a scoundrel, if you don’t object.”

  “You preferred Milo?”

  Felix raised an eyebrow. “I’m a priest of great Jupiter. I keep my thoughts on higher things than the squabbling of petty politicians up in Rome. But when a man commits sacrilege as blatantly as Clodius did, the gods are bound to strike him down sooner or later.”

  “Sacrilege? You mean the time he disguised himself as a woman to sneak into the rites of the Good Goddess in Rome, with the objective of making love to Caesar’s wife even as the rites were being performed?” This had been one of Clodius’s most infamous escapades.

  “That was indeed a terrible sacrilege,” said the priest. “Clodius should have been stoned for that, but he managed to bribe the jury.”

  “A failure of earthly justice,” said Eco, nodding in agreement but with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “And a lapse of heavenly justice, too. When I was a boy, everyone told me that any man who dared to violate the rites of the Good Goddess would be struck deaf, dumb and blind. But Clodius was the same after he sneaked into the rites as he was before. I wonder why the Good Goddess spared him. Did his gown and makeup fool her? Or was she as charmed by Clodius as Caesar’s wife was?”

  The priest refused to be nettled. “Of course she spared him—so that he could meet a more horrible fate these ten years later, here at Bovillae! Do you think it’s only a coincidence that the battle began right in front of the Good Goddess’s shrine on the Appian Way? Fauna had a hand in his fate, you can be sure.” The priest nodded gravely, daring Eco to refute his logic. “But that wasn’t the man’s only sacrilege, or even the worst. Up in Rome I don’t suppose you’ve heard much about what Clodius did to the grove of Jupiter here on Mount Alba, or the way he treated the local Vestal Virgins.”

  “Our hostess at the inn mentioned something about it,” I said, “but the story’s new to me.”

  Felix shook his head. “You’d think such crimes would be brought to light when a man runs for public office, but I suppose people were ready to elect Clodius praetor without giving a thought to his religious offenses in these parts. I’ll tell you, then. It all had to do with that gigantic villa of his up on the hill. It was a simple enough place to start with, but that wouldn’t do. He had to keep expanding it, turning it into his private fortress. His property came right up against some of the most sacred parts of the mountain—the grove of Jupiter, the Temple of Vesta, the House of the Vestal Virgins. When he needed more land, Clodius somehow got the property lines redrawn. He claimed a large part of the sacred grove—which he then proceeded to chop down for lumber! And he had the Vestals evicted from their house, which he then dismantled stone by stone to add a wing to his o
wn villa—using the old mosaics and statuary for decorations! Look, there’s the new house of the Vestals over there, on the left; you can just glimpse it through the trees. At least he left the Temple of Vesta alone, but that’s small recompense for what he did to the grove. To my mind there’s no more impious act than doing harm to a sacred tree, and Clodius ordered them cut down by tens and twenties!”

  “But how did he manage to lay claim to these sacred properties?”

  “How should I know? I’m only a simple priest, assigned to a single altar. Who knows what sort of threats and bribes he made? Men like that will stop at nothing to get what they want.” He looked at Eco. “Do you doubt me now, young man, when I say that the gods were at work when Clodius was struck down?”

  “The gods are at work in all things,” I said, to mollify him, “even in our chance meeting, and this conversation. So, you saw the flight to the inn, but not the battle itself.”

  “But I could hear it from the altar. Cracking and crashing and screaming!”

  “How long did this go on?”

  “Hard to say. Not too long. Then a lot of yelling, and things fell quiet for a while. Then the old senator and his daughter came down the hill in their litter.”

  “You mean, after Eudamus and Birria and Milo’s men had gone back up the hill,” I said.

  “No. The senator went by, and it wasn’t until quite a bit later that Milo’s men started back up the hill with the prisoners.”

  “Prisoners?” I frowned.

  “Five or six of them, I’d say.”

  “How could you tell they were prisoners?”

  “Because their hands were bound! They were all huddled together, looking scared out of their wits, with Milo’s men surrounding them and Eudamus and Birria prodding them on with an occasional jab to their behinds.”

  “But who were these prisoners? Clodius’s men?”

  Felix shrugged. “Who else?”

  “But I thought that the five or six men defending Clodius at the inn were all killed.”

  “Yes, I suppose they were. Maybe these were some of his men rounded up from the woods.”