Catilina's Riddle (10 page)

Bethesda had quietly seen to that—and my neighbors offered no dis-

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tractions in that vein. What sort of erotic life did Claudia lead, I idly wondered, and then killed the thought stillborn, as I did not really care to know. Ah, Bethesda . . .

I recalled a particular instant of our lovemaking, a specific sensation, and smiled, doting on the memory. What had set off the sparks between us? Ah, yes, the visit from young Marcus Caelius with his stylish beard and his elegant tongue. I found myself contemplating his face, and found the image not unpleasant. He was quite handsome, after all, if in a wily sort of way. Too wily for such a young man. Catilina liked to surround himself with good-looking young men, as everyone knew; a lascivious mind might well imagine just how young Caelius had managed to insinuate himself so firmly into Catilina's confidence. What would happen if I allowed Catilina himself to visit the farm, as Caelius desired? What sort of effect would that have on Bethesda? Catilina was well into his forties, barely younger than I, but he was famous for having the energy of a man half his age. And for all the insults that had been hurled at him, no one had ever called him ugly. In his own way he was as good-looking as Marcus Caelius, or had been once, for I had not seen him close at hand in many years. Beauty is beauty no matter what the gender.

Beauty brings universal pleasure to the eye. . . .

These thoughts unfurled and my imagination drifted into a world of pure flesh, as I find often happens just before sleep. All the words poured from my head like water through open fingers. I lay upon the grass, content to be an animal warmed by the sun, my head full of animal thoughts.

And then I heard my daughter calling me.

I sat up—with a start, because there was no playfulness in her voice, but instead an unfamiliar urgency.

She called to me again, from quite near, and then she appeared over the verge of the hill and came running down to me, her tiny sandals slipping on the lush grass. I blinked and shook my head, not quite fully awake.

"Diana, what is it?"

She slid onto her bottom beside me, gasping for breath. "Papa, you must come!"

"What is it? What's wrong?"

"A man, Papa!"

"A man? Where?"

"He's in the stable."

"Oh, not another visitor!" I groaned.

"No, not a visitor," she said, sucking in a deep breath and then frowning thoughtfully. Later I would wonder how she stayed so calm, so serious. Why did she run to me and not to her mother? How did she keep from screaming after what she had seen? It was my blood in her, I

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decided, the blood of the ever-curious, ever-deliberating, dispassionate Finder.

"Well, then, who is this man?"

"I don't know, Papa!"

"A stranger?"

She shrugged elaborately and stuck out her arms. "I'm not sure."

"What do you mean? Either you know the man or you don't."

"But, Papa. I can't tell whether I know him or not!"

"And why not?" I said, exasperated.

"Because, Papa, the poor man has no head!"

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C H A P T E R S E V E N

he body lay upon its back in an empty horse stall. How it had arrived there—dropped, dragged, or rolled—could not be told, because the straw all around it had been deliberately disturbed and then patted down; this I could tell from the T fact that bits of straw had been littered onto the body itself, indicating that the disturbance of the straw had occurred after the arrival of the corpse. Nor were there any footprints or other signs to indicate how the body had come to be in the stable.

For all I could tell, it might have grown out of the earth like a mushroom.

It had, as Diana had observed, no head, but all its limbs and digits were intact, as were its private parts. This I could tell at a glance, for the body was naked.

I looked down at Diana, who stared at the corpse with her mouth slightly open. I think she might have seen a dead body before, perhaps in a funeral procession in Rome, but she had never seen a headless one.

I put my hand on her head and gently turned her around to face me. I squatted down and held her by her shoulders. She trembled slightly.

"How did you come to find him, Diana?" I said, keeping my voice low and even.

"I was hiding from Meto. Only Meto wouldn't play with me, so I took one of his silly little soldiers and went to hide it."

"Little soldiers?"

She turned and ran to a corner of the stall. She reached down for something in the straw, darted a wary glance at the corpse, then hurried back. She held out her hand, which cradled a little bronze figure of a Carthaginian warrior with a bow and arrow. It was from the board game called Elephants and Archers. After he was elected consul, Cicero had

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handed out specially minted sets of the game to dozens of guests at one of his celebrations. I had passed the gift along to Meto, who treasured it.

"I might have taken one of the little elephants, but I knew that would make him even angrier," she said, as if the distinction were important for her defense.

I took the bronze archer from Diana and nervously fingered it. "You came to the stable alone, then?"

"Yes, Papa."

"Was no one else here?"

"No, Papa."

The stablehands, I recalled, were up at the northern end of the farm helping Aratus repair a broken section of the wall. Aratus had asked me the night before for specific permission to take them away from their usual tasks. They had fed and watered the horses at daybreak and then gone off to work before the day became too hot. If they had seen the body, they certainly would have informed me. The body had appeared after daybreak, then—but that seemed impossible. Who could have smuggled a body into the stable in daylight? Perhaps, lying low as it did amid the straw in an empty stall, it had simply been overlooked.

But I was getting ahead of myself. I didn't even know who the man was, or had been, or how he had died.

"Whom else did you tell, Diana?"

"I ran straight to you, Papa."

"Good. Here, let's step away, back toward the door."

"Shouldn't we cover him up?" said Diana, looking over her shoulder.

At that moment Meto came running through the open doorway.

"There you are!" he said. "Where did you hide it, you little harpy?"

Diana suddenly burst into tears and hid her face in her hands. I squatted down and put my arm around her. Meto looked abashed. I handed him the little bronze soldier.

"She took it," he said haltingly. "I didn't start it. Just because I have better things to do than play hide-and-seek with her all morning, that's no excuse for her to take my things."

"Diana," I said, holding her by the shoulders and speaking softly,

"I have a job for you to do. It's very simple, but it's important. I want you to go and fetch your mother. Don't say a word about why, especially if there are any of her slaves about. Just say that I want her to come here to the stable right away, alone. Can you do that for me?"

The crying stopped as abruptly as it had begun. "I think so."

"Good. Now run along. Be quick!"

Meto looked at me in consternation. "But I didn't do anything!

All right, I called her a harpy—but can I help it if she's such a crybaby?

She took my game piece, and she knows that's wrong."

"Meto, be quiet. Something terrible has occurred."

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He drew an exasperated breath, thinking I was about to lecture him; then he saw how serious I looked and wrinkled his brow.

"Meto, you've seen dead men before. You're about to see another."

I led him to the empty stall.

Be careful in choosing your own vulgar exclamations, for your children will say them back to you. "Numa's balls!" he whispered hoarsely, his voice abruptly breaking.

"Not old King Numa, I think. Better to call him Nemo—
Nobody—

though a body is not what he's missing. But Nemo it will be, until we find a better name for him."

"But what is he doing here? Where did he come from? Is he one of the slaves?"

"Not one of our slaves, of that I'm pretty certain. Look at his build and coloration, Meto. You know the slaves as well as I do. Could this body belong to any of them?"

He bit his lower lip. "I see what you mean, Papa. This man was tall and rather heavy about the middle, and hairy."

I nodded. "See the hair on the back of his hands, how thick it is?

Of our slaves, only Remus has hands like that, and Remus is a much smaller man. A younger man as well; see the gray hairs mixed in with the black, especially on Nemo's chest?"

"But then how did he get here? And who did this to him?"

"Who killed him, you mean? Or who cut off his head?"

"It's the same thing, isn't it?"

"Not necessarily. We can't be sure that he died from having his head cut off."

"Papa, I should think that
anyone
would die if you cut off his head!"

"Are you baiting your father, Meto, or merely being obtuse?" I sighed. "I see no wounds to the front of his body, do you? Here, do you think you can help me roll him over?"

"Of course," he said, but I saw him swallow hard as he stooped to take hold of one of the legs while I reached under the corpse's shoulders.

He gave a shudder as his hands touched the clammy flesh. So did I.

I grunted and stepped back, brushing straw from my hands. "No apparent wounds to the back, either. And yet it isn't easy to murder a man by cutting off his head—think about it. You have to have some way to hold him still. Perhaps they cut his throat, or strangled him first. That would be hard to tell, since it won't be easy to find any bruises on his neck amid the gore."

While I knelt to have a closer look, Meto stepped discreetly back and covered his mouth with one hand. He had turned considerably paler, though he was still several shades darker than the corpse, which was as white as a fish's belly.

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"He wasn't killed this morning, that's for sure," I said.

"How can you tell?"

"The body is cold and stiff, and all its color is gone. It takes time for that to happen. Physicians say that the lungs are like bellows, heating the blood. Even after they stop working, the body stays warm for quite some time, like a coal slowly losing its heat. Also, look at the wound itself. See how the blood is clotted and the wound gone dry. The fresher the wound, the more it would seep. This cut must be at least a day old to have dried so completely. See, there's not even any blood on the straw below. And yet he can't have been dead for too long, because even in this heat the body has not begun to smell too strongly. Here, Meto, step closer. Observe the wound with me."

He obeyed, but with considerable hesitation. "What else can we observe from the wound itself?" I said.

He shrugged and made a face.

"Observe how cleanly the cutting was done. A very sharp, very broad blade, I should think, and accomplished with what appears to have been a single blow, the way that chickens are decapitated on a chopping block. There are no signs of hacking or sawing. Indeed, I can even see traces of the blade's particular grain, the way one can see the serrations of a knife after it has sliced through a roast. The subsequent outpouring of blood should have obscured all such details, don't you think? I wonder, could the cutting have been done
after
the blood had already dried within the body? If so, the decapitation had nothing to do with the cause of death. Now why would anyone decapitate a dead body and then hide it in plain sight in my stable?"

I felt a flash of anger, a fury at being violated, but I swallowed hard and suppressed it. So long as I could simply play an old familiar role—

examining a corpse for clues, dispassionately studying a situation—I knew I could keep a level head. I felt incredibly attentive and alert, and everything around me had taken on a preternatural clarity—the smell of straw and horse dung, the heat of the day, the swirling motes of dust captured in bars of sunlight. Yet at the same time a part of me had gone numb. I stepped back. "What else can we tell about him? You say he looks rather heavy about the middle, Meto, but to me he also looks rather gaunt in the chest and limbs and buttocks, like a heavy man who has suddenly lost weight. He looks unwell."

"Papa—the man is dead!" Meto rolled his eyes.

I sighed and found myself missing my elder son, who would already have grasped all that I had observed and been far ahead of me. But then, Eco had begun his life as a child of the streets and had learned to use his wits of necessity long before I adopted him. Meto had been born a

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slave in a rich man's villa and had always been rewarded more for cleverness than cunning. I only hoped he would grow into a decent farmer, for a Finder he would never be.

Still,
I
persevered. "What can we tell of his place in the world, Meto? Slave or free?"

Meto studied the body from head to foot. "He's not wearing an iron ring," he offered.

"Indeed he is not. But that really tells us nothing. A citizen's iron ring is easily removed, and the opposite—to slip such a ring onto a slave's finger—would have been just as easy. Nemo might be a patrician for all we know, whose gold ring has been pilfered. However, sometimes an iron ring does leave a stain or a band of paler flesh on its wearer's finger. I see none, do you?"

Meto shook his head.

"Still, inconclusive. Certainly he wasn't the field slave of some cruel master—there are no shackle marks on his wrists or ankles, no scars on his back from being whipped, no brand marks on his flesh. All in all he looks well taken care of, and not used to hard labor. See, there are no heavy calluses on his hands or feet, and his fingernails and toenails are well groomed. Nor did he spend much time outside—his skin is not much darkened by the sun. If only we had his head, we could tell much more. . . . "

There was a sudden rustling behind us. I gave a start, but it was only Diana running toward us through the straw. A moment later Bethesda appeared in the doorway. Bright sunlight silhouetted the stray tendrils of her coiffed hair and the long, loose stola belted beneath her breasts and again at her waist. She paused in the doorway and then walked resolutely forward like a woman expecting the worst. When she saw the body her nostrils dilated, her eyes grew wide, and she pressed her lips together until all the color was gone from them. She clutched at her stola and stamped her foot. Bethesda's manner is often imperious or brusque, but I have seldom seen her truly angry. It was a sight to make even the staunchest Roman turn to jelly.