A Point of Law (18 page)

“Not much chance of keeping my stripe with a quick bribe, then,” Sallustius said. “Well, what one set of censors decree, another can set aside. Maybe I won’t even have to wait that long.”

“How will you accomplish that?” I asked him. Expulsion by the censors usually meant a five-year wait until a more sympathetic pair took office. Then you had to start at the bottom again, getting elected to another quaestorship and serving in that office for a year to qualify for the Senate.

“Appius won’t stay in office any longer than it takes him to do as Aemilius Paullus says. He’ll have no excuse, and he’ll have other things to do. I’ll ask Caesar to get me a quaestorship without going through the elections again. He can get the comitia to grant me one by acclamation. He did it for Marcus Antonius. A year of that and I can resume my seat in the Senate.” In a few seconds Sallustius had figured out a way to extricate himself from a political predicament that might have discouraged a less flexible man. He was not without talent.

“There, you see?” said Aemilius Lepidus Paullus. “Being a friend of Caesar has its advantages.” He lost his smile. “Bribery! As if I would not support Caesar without being bought! The Aemilii and the Julia Caesares have been allies for generations.”

I could not vouch for that, but it was clear that the charge of bribery rankled him. Caesar’s munificence could be confusing. Sometimes he simply bought a man’s allegiance, as had clearly been the case with Curio. But just as often he was generous to a man whose support was already unquestioned.

“How will you handle next year’s business?” Sallustius asked him. “It’s clear you are going to have a hostile colleague in office.”

“Much will depend upon how great my support is. I can count upon little from the Senate.”

“You can count upon mine,” Sallustius said, “but it sounds as if I’ll be devoting myself to literary pursuits at my country house.”

“Then I shall have to look to the Popular Assemblies, it seems. That’s where the real power is these days.”

And there it was again: class against class. War was coming.

O
CTAVIA SAID SOMETHING IMPORTANT
,” I told Julia.

“What was it?”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s a great help.” We sat eating dinner while sounds of revelry made their way in through the door and over the walls. Everyone was entertaining Caesar’s soldiers, and the party had spilled out into the streets and squares where tables had been set up and the wine flowed. I wished I could be out there with them.

“I mean, I remember everything she said. I just can’t put my finger on what did not ring true.”

“Sleep on it,” Julia advised. “Perhaps, like Callista, you’ll be visited by a god who will sort this out for you.”

“It could happen,” I admitted. “Speaking of that learned lady, did she come up with a solution for the code?”

Julia shook her head. “No, I left her house shortly after you did. I wanted to give her privacy to work on it.”

I wondered what the two had really been talking about. Me and my shortcomings, no doubt.

There was a pounding on the door outside and a few moments later my father came in, accompanied by Scipio and Nepos. Julia served wine and retired, none too happy about it. These men were too old-fashioned to talk politics with a woman in the room.

“What have you learned?” Father demanded. I gave a succinct report of my doings, and he made a disgusted sound. “You’ve wasted your time while we’ve been lining up support for you.”

“No, I find this interesting,” said Metellus Scipio. “You’ve gathered a lot of evidence here and there, Decius. Have you drawn any conclusions?”

“Just a few minor conclusions that may lead to the main one.”

“Such as?” said Nepos.

“Fulvius was killed by three or more highly placed men.”

“How is that?” Father asked. “The number of weapons says multiple assailants and the bugger was held from behind, I’ll grant your Greek friend knows what he’s talking about there. What makes you think they were well-born or important and not just street scum?”

“The clumsiness of the execution,” I told them. “What grown Roman man doesn’t know how to kill a man with a knife? It’s part of every soldier’s training, and even those who never served in the legions see it done in the arenas, both with straight blades and curved
sicas
. This man was killed by a multitude of shallow cuts, like some wretch executed by an Oriental monarch. And the cuts were administered by straight blades, not well suited to the task.”

Scipio nodded. “And a gentleman would never use a
sica
, even to commit murder.”

“Precisely. And there was this: Everybody wanted to participate, but nobody wanted to be the one to administer the deathblow.”

“You’ve lost me,” Father said.

“We’ve seen it before,” I told them. “The essence of conspiracy is to take part, but also to make sure that the others take an equal part. Look at the absurd lengths to which Catilina’s men went to make sure that every one of them was liable to the death penalty. That way nobody could back out, and nobody could squeal on the others.”

“So each administers a little bit of the death, eh?” Nepos said.

“Picture yourself as part of such a conspiracy,” I began.

“Never!” said Father.

“Bear with me. This is the way I think. If you had conspired with some colleagues to murder a prominent man, would you rush right up and cut his throat, the easiest way to do it? No, because you’d know exactly what the others would do: They’d back away with looks of horror, pointing at you and saying, ‘Ohhh, look at what he did!’ Imagine how embarrassed you’d be. No, you give the poor bastard a cut, then you back away and make sure that the rest do at least as much. Only then does someone administer the deathblow.”

They considered this for a while. They weren’t accustomed to my sort of reasoning. Finally, Nepos spoke up.

“I can see men conspiring this way against a really great man, a Pompey or a Caesar. But why a nobody like Marcus Fulvius? He was nothing.”

“Yes,” I said, “but what might he have
become?”

“Decius,” Scipio said impatiently, “you are not Socrates, and we are certainly not your adoring students. Stop asking questions and give us some answers!”

“Hear, hear!” chimed in the other two. I loved nettling them like this.

“Just this morning, while conferring with the Greek lady who is working on the code for me, we talked about what family names and bloodlines mean to us Romans, to the common plebs no less than to the patricians and the aristocrats. Marcus Fulvius was the brother-in-law
of Clodius, whom the commons still mourn. He and his sister, Fulvia, are also the grandchildren of Caius Gracchus. The commons revere nobody the way they revere the name of Caius and Tiberius Gracchus.”

“Gracchus!” Father said. “I’d forgotten that. Scipio, what’s the connection?” Scipio, with his patrician antecedents, was the acknowledged expert. He could reel off Roman lineages the way most of us could recite the bloodlines of chariot horses.

“The wife of Caius Gracchus was a Licinia, of the Licinius Crassus line. Their daughter was Sempronia and she married—let me see—Fulvius Flaccus. The slut Fulvia and the dead fool must be their children. I think there’s another.”

“Manius Fulvius,” I said. “He’s duumvir of Baiae. Now tell me who was the mother of the Gracchi?”

“Cornelia,” they all said at once. This took no great feat of memory. Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, was the most famous Roman mother since Rhea Silvia, mother of Romulus and Remus. Predictably, it was Metellus Scipio who first grasped the implications.

“Jupiter! Cornelia was the daughter of Scipio Africanus, my own ancestor!”

“Exactly,” I affirmed. “Marcus Fulvius’s brother-in-law was the most popular tribune of his generation. His grandfather was the glorious hero of the plebs. His great grandmother was the most revered woman in Roman history. His great-great grandfather was the man who defeated Hannibal, then was cheated of all his honors by Cato the Censor, the most reactionary aristocrat who ever lived.”

I sat back and took a long drink. I needed one. “Picture it: There I am, standing for trial in the court of Juventius. The jury are all members of the equestrian order. Very few members of that body who are not our clients are very friendly toward us in the first place. Marcus Fulvius gets up to introduce himself and reels off that list of recent ancestors and family connections. What happens next?” I looked at them, from one to the other in turn. Father spoke first.

“He steps right into the spot vacated by Clodius.”

“And,” said Nepos, “he demands to be elected tribune, even though he hasn’t served a quaestorship. It’s been done before.”

Father’s scarred face flamed. “This has been going on and we didn’t know about it?”

“Why should we?” I asked him. “There’s a revolution in the making, and it’s directed against people like us.”

“Against the Roman Constitution, you mean,” Scipio said.

“No, against a few entrenched families that have wielded power for far too long. Who has held power in Rome these thirty years past? Men like Pompey and Crassus, Hortensius Hortalus, Lucullus, families like the Claudia Marcella, and, yes, the Caecilia Metella. All of them supporters of Sulla. The old dictator killed all his enemies and theirs, and left them the Republic to run as they saw fit under his new constitution.

“People are growing tired of them—tired of
us
, I should say. Caesar gained power with the
populares
by identifying himself with his uncle-by-marriage, Marius, the sworn enemy of Sulla. Should it be any surprise that another man would try to do the same by stressing his descent from the Gracchi and Africanus?”

Father surprised me by, for once, not berating me for having such disloyal thoughts. He brooded for a while, then said, “I believe my son is right in this. By whatever pseudo-Greek process of logic, he has found the basis of this threat. But we still don’t know who killed this Marcus Fulvius or why. We had the most reason to, and we know we didn’t do it.” He glared at the others. “We
didn’t
do it, did we?”

Nepos and Scipio vigorously denied any involvement. “Face it,” Nepos said, “none of us was clever enough even to have seen the threat. We had no reason to kill him until Decius here just explained it, and now he is already dead. But where does Caius Claudius Marcellus fit into this? As you just said, Decius, the Claudia Marcella are old Sullans and they’re rabidly against Caesar. Why give patronage to this putative Man of the People?”

“Perhaps,” Scipio said, “the Marcelli wanted to raise up a
rival
to Caesar. Fulvius might have drained off some of the popular support Caesar needs to further his ambitions. Clodius was Caesar’s tame dog. Fulvius would not have been.”

“Very astute,” I admitted. “That may very well have been a part of it. It still doesn’t explain who killed him.”

We pondered that for a while, until we decided that we weren’t going to come to any conclusions that night.

At the door Father turned to me and said, “Only you could use an investigation as an excuse for a wine-tasting expedition, and then make it work.” I could almost have sworn that I saw him smile.

Julia came to join me as soon as they were gone.

“I suppose you were listening,” I said.

“Naturally. Things are beginning to make a sort of sense. Maybe we can get the rest before it’s trial time.”

“We’re running short of sources to investigate,” I complained.

“They’re all around us.”

“What do you mean?”

“How tired are you? Are you up to another expedition tonight?”

“Where are we going?” Ordinarily, Julia was vehemently opposed to all nocturnal wanderings. Rome was a dangerous city, and my reputation was well-earned.

“Not far. The neighbors will be up all night, the wine is flowing freely, and this is the Subura. What better time and place to pick up City gossip?”

Tired though I was, this prospect lent me new energy. “Splendid idea! You get your girl, I’ll find Hermes, and we’ll go test the waters.”

I dashed to my study, bellowing for Hermes. He joined me and I opened the box on my desk, took out my
caestus
and dagger, and tucked them within my tunic. No sense taking any chances. Hermes helped me don the dingy old toga I wore for nocturnal excursions, and I was ready to go.

Julia waited at the door, her head now decently covered by her
palla
and accompanied by Cypria, her maid. We went out into the bustling streets of the Subura.

The festive air was not as extreme as at one of the great celebrations like Saturnalia or Floralia. On those occasions, nobody would be sober and upright at this late hour. The atmosphere was more that of a country village fair, with a great deal of jollity but without the total license of the state-sanctioned orgies.

We received the usual greetings from our neighbors, and we welcomed and praised the soldiers from the district who were visiting their homes, some of them for the first time in years. There were depressingly few of these though. Young City men rarely served in the legions anymore. The legions depended more and more on the Italian
municipia
, the rural citizen communities where life was dull enough to make a soldier’s life seem attractive. There was just too much to do in Rome. Life was easy and exciting in the great City. I couldn’t blame them. I, too, hated to leave Rome.

The district’s innumerable men’s clubs and funeral societies stood open, illuminated with candles and lamps. On every corner fragrant smoke rose from charcoal braziers, where vendors served warmed wine and grilled sausages. There were no major temples in the Subura, but many small ones. Fires had been kindled before the altars of these so that the gods of the district could share in the festivities.

Our first stop of the evening was an inn called the Gorgon. It was run by a man named Strabo and his freedwoman wife, Lucia. It had stables where I occasionally boarded horses, and on this night the courtyard framed by the stables and the main building had been filled with tables to accommodate the crowd.