Steven Saylor - Arms of Nemesis

'A very interesting statue,' I remarked, looking down on the Hercules from above.

'I suppose. It's a copy of an original I have in my villa at Falerii. Lucius admired it once on a visit, so I had one made for him.'

'How ironic, then, that it should have been used to murder him.'

'What?'

'I think we're both sufficiently acquainted with the sight of blood to know it when we see it, Marcus Crassus. What do you make of this rusty substance trapped in the crevices of the lion's fur?'

He rose from his chair and peered down, then picked up the statue with both hands and held it beneath a hanging lamp. At length he set it down on the table and looked at me soberly. 'You have very sharp eyes, Gordianus. But it seems quite unlikely that such a cumbersome bludgeon should have been carried all the way down the hall to the atrium for the purpose of murdering my cousin Lucius, and then carried back again.'

'It was not the statue that was moved,' I said, 'but the body.'

Crassus looked doubtful.

'Consider the posture of the corpse as it was found, like that of a man who had been dragged. Certainly from this room to the atrium is not too far for a strong man to drag a body.'

'Easier for two men,' he said, and I saw he meant the missing slaves. 'But where is the rest of the blood? Surely there must have been more on the statue, and a dragged body would have left a trail.'

'Not if a cloth was placed beneath the head, and the same cloth was used to clean whatever blood was left behind.' 'Was such a cloth found?'

I hesitated. 'Marcus Crassus, forgive my presumption when I ask that you share this knowledge with no one else. Gelina, Mummius, and two of the slaves already know. Yes, such a cloth was found, soaked with blood, down the road where someone attempted to fling it into the sea.'

He looked at me shrewdly. 'This bloodstained cloth was one of the discoveries you mentioned earlier, the secrets you prefer to withhold from me while the evidence ferments in your head?'

'Yes.' I squatted down and looked for traces of blood on the floor. A cloak would hardly have been adequate to clean blood from the dark carpet, but in the dim light it was impossible to see any stains.

'But why should the assassins have moved his body?' He picked up the statue with his left hand and fingered the encrusted blood with his right, then set it on the table with a grimace.

'You say assassins, not assassin, Marcus Crassus.'

'The slaves-'

'Perhaps the body was moved and the name of Spartacus carved precisely to implicate the slaves and distract us from the truth.'

'Or perhaps the slaves moved his body to the most public part of the house precisely to make their point, where all would be sure to see it and the name they carved.'

To that I had no answer. One doubt led to another. 'It does seem unlikely that the killing could have occurred in this room without anyone hearing, especially if it followed an argument, or if Lucius was able to make any noise at all. Gelina sleeps just across the hall; surely the noise would have awakened her.'

Crassus smiled at me sardonically. 'Gelina need not figure in your calculations.'

'No?'

'Gelina sleeps like the dead. Perhaps you've noticed her liberal consumption of wine? It's not a new habit. Dancing girls with cymbals could parade down the hallway and Gelina wouldn't stir.'

'Then the question must be: why was Lucius murdered here in his library?'

'No, Gordianus, the question is the same as it always was: where are the two escaped slaves? That Zeno, his secretary, should have murdered Lucius here in the room where they often worked together is hardly surprising. The young stableman Alexandros may have been here with them; I understand he could read and do figures, and Zeno used him sometimes as a helper. Perhaps it was this Alexandros who committed the crime; a stableman would have had the strength to drag Lucius down the hall, and a Thracian would have had the gall to scrawl his countryman's name on the floor. Something interrupted him in the act and he fled before he could write the whole name.'

'But no one interrupted them. The body wasn't discovered until morning.'

Crassus shrugged. 'An owl hooted, or a cat stirred a pebble. Or perhaps this Thracian slave simply hadn't yet learned the letter C and was stumped,' he said facetiously, rubbing his eyes with his forefinger and thumb. 'Forgive me, Gordianus, but I think I've had enough for tonight. Even Marcus Mummius has gone to bed, and we should do the same.' He picked up the Hercules from the table and replaced it on its pedestal. 'I suppose this is another of your secrets that needs fermenting? I shall mention it only to Morpheus in my dreams.'

The lamp that illuminated the hallway had grown dim. I stepped past Gelina's door, treading lightly despite Crassus's assertion that nothing could wake her. In the darkness an eerie sensation crept over me; this was the very route by which Lucius's lifeless or dying body had been dragged. I glanced over my shoulder, almost wishing that I had accepted the bodyguard's offer to escort me back to my room.

In the moonlit atrium I paused for a long moment. The place was still, but not entirely quiet. The fountain continued to splash; the sound echoed in the well-like atrium, and was certainly loud enough to cover the incidental noises made by a man moving with intentional stealth. But would it have concealed the high-pitched screeching of a knife carving letters on a hard flagstone? The very idea of the noise set my teeth on edge.

From the corner of my eye I saw a strange shape like a white veil floating beside the funeral bier. I started back, my heart pounding, and then realized it was only a plume of smoke from the incense, captured for a moment in a beam of blue moonlight. I shivered, and blamed it on the clammy night air.

I ascended the stairway to the upper storey. I must have turned down the wrong hallway and somehow lost my way. Tiny lamps lit the passages at intervals, and windows let in shafts of moonlight, but still I found myself confused. I tried to determine the direction of the bay by listening, and instead found myself hearing the faint gurgling of hot water through Orata's much-esteemed pipes where they were invisibly laid beneath the floor and along the walls. I passed a closed door and thought I heard faint laughter within — the deep voice of Marcus Mummius, I was almost certain, and another, softer voice replying. I walked on and came to an open doorway from which came a steady, raucous snoring. I took a step inside, squinting in the darkness, and saw what appeared to be the bulbous profile of Sergius Orata reclining on a wide couch with a gauzy canopy. I returned to the hall and pressed on until I came to the semicircular room where Gelina had greeted us earlier.

'Gordianus the Finder' you call yourself, I thought with disgust, thanking the gods that no one was there to laugh at me. I had come to the northern end of the house, having turned in exactly the wrong direction after I ascended the stairway in the atrium. I was about to turn back, when I decided to step onto the terrace for a breath of air to clear my head.

Beneath a waxing moon, the bay was a vast expanse of silver scalloped with tiny black waves and circled by black mountains pierced here and there with a point of yellow light to indicate a distant lamp within a distant house. The sky above was rent by a few ragged clouds aglow from the moon, but otherwise was full of stars. Entranced by the view, I almost failed to catch the tiny glimmer of a lamp on the shore below, where the land steeply descended to meet the water.

Gelina had mentioned a boathouse. An outcropping of rock and the tops of tall trees obscured the view, but almost directly below me I could see a bit of roof and what must have been a pier projecting into the water, very small in the distance. I could also see at intervals a tiny flash of flame, coming and going. I listened more closely, and it seemed that each appearance of the lamp coincided with a soft splashing noise, as if something were being quietly dropped into the water.