The Tribune's curse s-7 Page 14

  “Pompey!” I saw the man Folius push through the crowd and stop short only at the line of lictors. He pointed at the consul. “The people of this City will have justice for the sacrosanct blood of Ateius! Will you satisfy us, or will we hang every aristocrat in Rome by his own white toga?” At this a great shout went up from the mob.

  Pompey pressed a hand against his breast and looked mortally hurt. “My friend! Has Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus, victor on land and sea in all parts of the world, triumphator, and twice consul, ever failed his masters, the Roman people?” Approval and applause from the crowd this time. This was great theater.

  “It is not enough to rest on past victories, Pompey!” shouted Folius. “This time the enemy is neither barbarian nor pirate! It must be one of your own little well-born crowd, the Senate!” Roars of agreement. Foreigners are always astonished at the way Roman commoners speak right up to the highest officials. They used to, anyway. Much as I detested him, a man like Folius was worth more than all the lickspittles who fawn on the First Citizen these days.

  “Was Quintus Sertorius not a noble Roman and a senator?” Pompey demanded. “And when he offended Rome, did I not hunt him down and slay him?” Leaving aside for the moment the fact that Sertorius bested him in every fight until he was assassinated by his own second-in-command, Perperna. It was Perperna whom Pompey defeated. He got Sertorius’s head secondhand. No matter. The crowd was accustomed to attributing all glory to Pompey, and they cheered mightily.

  “Who is to prosecute, Pompey?” Folius shouted. “Who is to investigate?”

  “This case,” Pompey cried, “will be handled by the highest judicial authority in Rome, the praetor urbanus, Titus Annius Milo!” He clapped Milo on the shoulder. There was a great roar from the crowd. “I hereby clear from his docket all other business. This murder shall take precedence over all other legal matters before the Roman bar!”

  Milo stepped forward. “With the approval of the Senate and People, I will appoint Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger as iudex to investigate this murder. He is to have full praetorian authority, equal to my own, save that I will retain my praetorian imperium.”

  “Does this satisfy you, Romans?” Pompey cried.

  Now another man pushed forward. I knew him as a supporter of Clodius: a man named Vetilius. He shoved Folius aside, and there was a moment of lively, but fake, scuffling; then Vetilius stretched a pointing hand toward me.

  “Everyone knows Milo and Metellus are close as teeth in a comb! Name someone else!”

  Yes, please do! I thought.

  “And yet,” Pompey said, “is Decius Metellus, one of the Twenty, not known to you all as a great man-hunter, who has brought many a malefactor to justice and revealed more than one plot against the State? He is the son of a Censor, a veteran of many wars, scion of an ancient and distinguished house, and nephew by marriage of our great, conquering general, Caius Julius Caesar!” I could almost hear Pompey’s teeth gritting through his praise of another man’s military glory.

  “That is not good enough!” Vetilius shouted. “The People must have a representative here!”

  “Then,” Pompey said, “overseeing this investigation on behalf of the People, I name the former tribunes Publius Clodius and Marcus Porcius Cato. Clodius voluntarily gave up his patrician rank to serve as your tribune, and Cato is famed for his honesty and integrity above all other Romans of his generation. Will that satisfy you, Citizens?” Everyone knew how Clodius and Cato detested one another.

  Now Cicero stepped forward. There was a little muttering from old Catilinarians in the crowd, but mostly they were respectful.

  “Romans! Citizens and Conscript Fathers assembled here on this dire night, listen to me! It is time to put aside politics and faction! In some terrible way we have offended the immortal gods, and we must not fight with one another while our sacred City lies beneath this cloud. I call upon the Pontifical College to review all this year’s ceremonies and festivals, to see if anything was ill done or omitted through oversight or malice.

  “In the meantime, I call upon you all to reconcile yourselves while we determine where lies the guilt in this foul murder. I call upon those who stand here upon these steps to demonstrate their reconciliation, putting aside their disputes to serve the gods and the State as Romans used to, in the days of Scaevola and Fabius Maximus.”Good show, Cicero, I thought. Appeals to religion, history, and patriotism all at once.

  Well-distributed voices in the crowd began to cry out, “Yes!” and “Show us!”

  First, Milo put out his hand. Slowly, reluctantly, Clodius took it. Then both of them grinned, their eyes shooting flames all the while. Pompey put an arm around the shoulders of both. Then Cato and Cicero and I joined the loving little menage, and there was a veritable orgy of hand-shaking, back-patting, and embracing. The crowd loved it. They had never seen so many deadly enemies standing so close together without their swords drawn.

  We drew apart and resumed our dignitas. I heard Cicero say, out of the corner of his mouth: “And I thought Plautus wrote implausible comedies!”

  “Citizens!” Pompey shouted. “Disperse now to your homes, committing no unlawful acts to further anger the gods toward us. I bid the body of Ateius Capito be taken to the Temple of Venus Victrix, above my own theater. There, on the third morning after this, we shall celebrate for him as splendid a funeral as Rome has ever seen, at my own expense!” At this, a cheer went up.

  Slowly, from its corners and fringes, the great mob began to break up. Like streams of light, torches meandered up the side streets, clumps of people broke away and dispersed, until finally only the hard core of the mobs of Milo and Clodius remained, along with the strong-arm supporters of some of the senators.

  Pompey let out a gusty sigh. “Well-done, everyone.”

  “How much of this was constitutional?” I asked.

  “We’ll sort out the legal niceties later,” he said. “The important thing is, we’ve saved the City from destruction.”

  “For tonight, anyway,” said Cicero. “By the way, that was an excellent idea, using your theater for the funeral. A funeral mob can turn ugly as any. This way, if they riot, we can close the gates and confine the destruction to the Campus Martius.”

  “Of course,” I pointed out, “your theater and temple will almost certainly be destroyed.”

  Pompey shrugged. “It needs repair, anyway. Those damned elephants.” He looked at me. “And, Decius, do try to find the guilty man or men before the funeral. It will do wonders to quiet the mob.”

  “I hardly know where to start,” I said. “It’s not as if there were a shortage of suspects.”

  “Just find us somebody, ” Pompey insisted. “Rome is full of people who aren’t really necessary.” He had a true military man’s disregard for the innocent victims of war, be it military or civil. “Well, let’s have a look at the wretched bugger.”

  We walked down the steps. At the bottom, a few thugs lounged around the catafalque. Some of them, already bored, were rolling dice and knucklebones.

  A senator let out a low whistle. “Someone did a thorough job. Looks like the lions have been at him.”

  The body was indeed an alarming sight. The bizarre robe was in rags, and the remainder of his clothing was little more than bloody ribbons. A huge variety of wounds covered it-everything from round punctures to long, parallel gashes like those made by an animal’s claws. Clodius pointed to one such set of marks.

  “I’ve seen gouges like that made by spiked caesti.” He looked up at me and smiled. “That’s your favored weapon, isn’t it, Metellus?”

  “You should know,” I said. “You’ve kissed it often enough.” Amid laughs at his expense I took out my own caestus with its bronze knuckle-bar set with stubby spikes and held it against the indicated wounds. “If it was a caestus, it had longer spikes than mine, and they were wider set. Besides, even I could never hit that hard.”

  “Milo could,” Clodius said. “Or even Senator Balbus here. We all kno
w how strong they are.”

  “Let’s have none of that,” Pompey warned. “We told the people that we’d set aside our differences and cooperate, and we will. Any of you who violates that agreement I’ll hound into exile and then to his death. There isn’t a man here who didn’t want to see this rogue dead, so there’s no sense pointing fingers just yet. I want full reports of this investigation every evening starting tomorrow.”

  I could not tell whether Ateius met his fate with fear or anger or resignation, since his face was too lacerated to read any expression. Even the eyes were gone, and you could see every tooth in his mouth. Most of his scalp hung away from the skull in hairy, bloody flaps. It was ghastly, but I’d seen bodies mauled worse after gang fights, and all the damage done by bricks and nail-studded planks.

  “Don’t get blood on your best toga!” Hermes hissed in my ear. “Julia will skin both of us!”

  “Gentlemen,” Pompey said, “good evening to you. Once again, well-done. This was a good night’s work. We might not have been able to pull it off except that four of the men I named to the commission were seen by everyone carrying the sacrifices for the full three circuits a few days ago. The people still feel good about that. But this is not over yet-far from it.”

  Clodius pointed to several of his men in turn. “You men haul this carrion over to the temple. Mind you be respectful.”

  I addressed the remaining idlers. “Do any of you know where he was found?”

  Vetilius came up to me. “I heard that some night-fishermen found him on the riverbank this evening, just before nightfall. Bodies aren’t all that rare in the river, but after the curse, everybody in Rome knew about that robe. They alerted the gate watch, and pretty soon the word was all over the City.”

  “Do you know which bank they found him on?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t hear that, but it was those boatmen you see fishing with nets and torches at night between the Sublician and Aemilian Bridges.”

  “Then I know who to ask. Thanks.” I turned to Hermes. “Come along.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’m going home, to bed. You go to Aurelia’s summerhouse and tell Julia that I’m all right.”

  “I can’t pass through the gate by myself,” he pointed out. “Don’t worry. She’ll have Cypria sitting on the roof, watching for fires in the City. As long as there are no buildings burning, she’ll know there’s no riot.” The boy had a positive genius for avoiding exertion.

  “Oh, I suppose you’re right. Tomorrow morning, when you go to the ludus, tell Asklepiodes to meet me at the Temple of Venus Victrix at his earliest convenience.”

  “Right.” He yawned as we trudged toward home. “This is more exciting than Gaul.”

  “No rest for a servant of the Senate and People,” I said. Now I had two thorny investigations to conduct. But I knew that, when I found the answer to one, I’d have solved the other.

  9

  The stretch of the Tiber between the Aemilian and Sublician Bridges was rich with history, for these were our oldest bridges and the scene of legendary battles. It was also rich with smell, for the great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, discharged its effluent into the river at this spot, along with some of the lesser sewers. The adjacent Forum Boarium, together with the Circus Maximus and all its attendant stables, had to be cleaned daily, and the resulting product, if not sold to farmers for fertilizer, was dumped by the wagonload into the murky water between the bridges.

  All this enrichment of the otherwise nutrition-poor water resulted in abundant schools of fish, making this intrapontal stretch of river the most desirable fishing ground anywhere near the City. The fishing was dominated by a few families who had for generations defended their territory against all interlopers. They had their own customs, sacrificed to their own gods and to Tiberinus, the personified river. They even spoke in a dialect of their own.

  There were, roughly speaking, three groupings of these families: those who fished from the banks and bridges with poles, those who fished with nets from boats during the day, and those who fished at night, with nets and torches.

  At dawn on the morning after the near-riot, I waited on the riverbank, grateful that the coolness of winter kept the stench within tolerable boundaries. We Romans are inordinately proud of our sewers, but they came about more or less by accident. The Forum was on swampy ground, so the early settlers dug a ditch to the river to drain it. From the Etruscans they learned how to encase the trench in vaulted stone and cover it. It turned out to be a convenient place to throw all the city’s waste, and now we have a whole system of sewers, although the City always seems to grow a little faster than the capacity of the sewers to keep it clean.

  The day-fishermen were readying their boats to go out as the night-fishermen came in, and as the latter began to unload their fish, I accosted an older man who seemed to be in charge of several of the fishing craft.

  “I am Decius Metellus, iudex appointed to investigate the murder of the tribune Ateius. I need to speak with whoever found the body.”

  The gray-haired fisherman spoke slowly, and I will not try to reproduce here his river-fisherman’s dialect. “Was young Sextus, the one we call Cricket, that spotted the corpse; then we all rowed over for a look. Would’ve left it till morning and reported it then, but the other Sextus, the one we call Mender because he’s so handy mending the nets, he leaned close with a torch and sang out. The dead man was wearing a strange robe and looked like lions had been at him. We’d all heard talk about the crazy tribune who’d cursed Crassus, so I went over to the gate and reported it right away.”

  “Admirable. Which bank was he on?”

  The man turned and pointed to the far bank, opposite the City. “The Tuscan.”

  “Did you carry him in?”

  He shook his head vehemently. “No, we don’t touch no corpses. You do that, you’ll never catch no fish till you’re purified by a priest. The gate captain rounded up some night-cleaning slaves from the Forum Boarium, and they carried him through the gate. By that time, word was spreading fast. There was already a crowd waiting at the gate.”

  “An excellent report,” I told him. “I am obliged to you.” I turned to go, but he spoke up.

  “Senator?”

  I turned back. “Yes?”

  “You’re up for aedile next year, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “You get elected, the big sewer’s clogged real bad, been needing cleaning for years.”

  “I’ll remember,” I said, sighing with resignation. I would be paying for my predecessors’ neglect. Scouring the sewers was one of the very worst jobs on the aedile’s docket. We usually employed condemned criminals to do it.

  “Do it as soon as you’re in office,” he admonished me. “Or it’ll be too late.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Flood coming next year, a big one. We’ve seen all the signs,” he nodded dolefully.

  “I’ll see to it. Thanks for the warning.”

  I made my way toward the Campus Martius, brooding over the prospect of the year ahead. I didn’t doubt the man for an instant. This wasn’t an old woman seeing warnings from the gods in every bird that flew past her window. These were people who lived their lives on the river and knew all its moods. If they said a flood was coming, then, barring freakish circumstances, it would come.

  I skirted the edge of the Forum Boarium and went out through the Carmentalis Gate and took the long street that led to Pompey’s Theater. The street was lined with some of our smaller but nonetheless most beautiful temples. Pompey had had the street widened and improved to facilitate access to his theater, which was the first permanent theater built in Rome. For centuries, the Censors tried to keep degenerate Greek influences out of the City, regarding them as a danger to public morals.

  The great complex of interconnected buildings bulked up from the flat plain of the Campus Martius like a beached whale. At one end was the vast theater with the temple atop it, and from it str
etched the extravagant portico and the Senate meetinghouse, all surrounded by splendid gardens. Pompey could do some things right, if he hired someone competent to think it up for him.

  I passed into the theater and stood within the great half circle of seats, said to have a seating capacity of forty thousand. On the stage, an acting troupe was rehearsing what appeared to be a tragedy, the actors looking strange without their masks. At the top of the seats, before the temple, I could see a small crowd gathered. I began to climb, feeling like a slave at the Games, relegated to the highest seats with the most distant view of the action.

  A pack of thugs stood as a sort of honor guard around the mangled remains of the late, unlamented Ateius Capito. I didn’t bother to look him over, since I had come here to get a professional opinion. Instead, I admired the temple, which I had not seen since it had been completed.

  The Temple of Venus Victrix was, of necessity, rather small. You do not build a truly huge temple atop a theater, even if you are inclined by nature to such odd architectural juxtapositions. Its proportions, however, were exquisite. The slender, delicately fluted Corinthian columns, topped with their sprays of acanthus leaves, were especially pleasing.

  “No signs of action from the City?” I asked the man in charge of the thugs, one I vaguely remembered seeing with Clodius’s escort.

  “No. My guess is, everyone will hold off till the funeral. The other tribunes will give a rousing funeral oration and carry on just like they didn’t hate his guts. Then, if you haven’t found the killer or killers, they’ll start taking the place apart.”

  “There’ll be no end of fun if that happens,” agreed another. These men were connoisseurs of mobs and riots.

  I wandered over to the edge of the top terrace next to the temple and looked over the waist-high railing. The building with its tiered rows of arches below me looked like a huge marble drum. Statues stood inside every arch, all of them specially commissioned for the theater. We had looted all the Greek cities so thoroughly that there was little original artwork left worth taking, so now we brought in expert sculptors to make copies for us of famous sculptures.