The Venus Throw (13 page)

“It’s only a short walk,” said the gallus. “Straight ahead for a block or two, then off to the right.”

We walked up the street and passed the apartment building where Marcus Caelius lived. The shutters of all the upper-story windows were closed, despite the heat. Could he be sleeping, at this time of day? What a life!

The building was owned by the rabble-rouser Publius Clodius; now I was on the way to see his sister. What a small town Rome is, I thought, and growing smaller with each passing year. I had never met either of the notorious Clodii. They were distant cousins of my old patron Lucius Claudius, but our paths had never crossed. That had suited me. In recent years I’ve grown increasingly selective both of those I choose to help and of those I choose to offend. From what one heard about them, Clodia and Clodius were the sort it was best simply to avoid.

An obscure citizen lamenting the theft of his family’s silver; an old acquaintance threatened by anonymous letters; a young wife unfairly accused of adultery by her vindictive mother-in-law—in my semiretirement, these struck me as the sort of people to whom I should lend my expertise. Men who deal in raw power, who control vast networks of secret operatives, who dispatch strong-armers to crush their opponents—the
Pompeys and King Ptolemies of this world—these struck me as men I should take extreme care to avoid offending, even if it meant passing up the chance to help an old friend; even though it had meant turning my back on Dio of Alexandria.

Now I found myself on the way to the house of Clodia, supposedly to discuss some matter relating to the murder of Dio, following a priest of Cybele carrying a bright yellow parasol through the sunny streets of the Palatine. The gods delight in surprising men with the unexpected—and are notorious for the cruelty of their mirth.

Clodia’s house was situated at the end of a little cul-de-sac off a quiet lane. Like the houses belonging to most patrician families, it looked old and showed an unassuming face to the street. The windowless front was stained with a muted yellow wash. The doorstep was paved with glazed red and black tiles. Twin cypress trees framed the rustic oak door. The trees soared to a great height; I had often noticed them from the balcony at the back of my house, but had never known exactly where they were located. Like the house, the cypresses had obviously been there for many years.

The slave who answered the door was a burly young man with a neatly trimmed black beard and bushy eyebrows that grew together above soulful brown eyes. He opened the door only halfway and smirked when he saw Trygonion. He hardly looked at me or Belbo. “She’s gone out,” he said, crossing his arms and slouching against the door frame.

“Gone out?” said the gallus. “But I only just left her, to go fetch this fellow.”

The doorkeeper shrugged. “What can I tell you? You know how she is.”

“But she knew I was coming straight back,” said Trygonion in a petulant voice. “Where has she gone?”

“Down to the river.”

“What, to the markets?”

The slave narrowed his eyes. “Of course not. You know she never goes to the public markets anymore. Afraid Milo’s men will be there to start up the chants about her. Pretends she doesn’t care, but you know how she hates that.” The slave arched his right eyebrow, which created a striking effect, since his eyebrows were joined. “She’s gone down to her place on the Tiber. Said it was the only spot to be on a beautiful day like this. ‘Everyone will be at the river,’ she said. Looking to catch an eyeful, I imagine—the swimmers.” A sudden twitch at the corner of his mouth turned into a smile, as a hand belonging to someone hidden behind the door slipped across the gap and made its way onto the slave’s backside. The visible patch of wrist moved in a sinuous fashion, like a wriggling snake. The young doorkeeper gave a ticklish start and flexed his muscular forearms. “She should have taken me with her,” he sighed, “but I’m managing to stay busy.”

“Did she leave any word for me?” asked Trygonion, exasperated. “She must have!”

From just beyond the door I heard a woman’s laugh, then a smiling face appeared, pressed cheek to cheek with the burly doorkeeper. “Don’t worry, she didn’t forget you,” the woman trilled. Her voice had a cultured accent and her chestnut hair was extravagantly put up, though a few stray tendrils had escaped the pins and combs. The lines around her eyes and mouth had been skillfully softened with makeup, but I could see she was no longer young. “Barnabas is teasing you! Aren’t you, Barnabas? Wicked!” She playfully bit the slave’s ear.

Barnabas laughed brusquely and jerked away, freeing his ear from the woman’s gleaming white teeth and his buttocks from her grip. “Off with you, then!” she said, laughing and snapping her fingers. “Go on! I’ll tend to you later.” She growled deep in her throat and clicked her teeth. The door slave departed.

“It’s a Hebrew name, you know,” she said, turning back
to us. “Barnabas, I mean. Clodia says it means ‘consolation.’ She should know!” The woman laughed, and I caught the smell of wine on her breath.

“What did Clodia say about me?” demanded the gallus.

“About you, Trygonion? Hmm, well, we all know where your name comes from, don’t we?” She looked at him knowingly.

“Never mind!” snapped the gallus. “What did she say before she left?”

The woman’s expression soured, undoing the illusion of her makeup. “Oh, all right, then. She said she simply couldn’t stay indoors for another instant, and she’s been dying to get down to her place on the river for days, so she told Chrysis to call for her litter bearers and pack up a few things and off they went in a cloud of dust. She asked me to come along, but I told her I was too, too despondent and in great need of
consolation
. Ha!” She barked out a laugh, showing perfect white teeth. “So, since I was staying, Clodia asked me to please give you a message if you should happen to come around, to tell you that you and your”—she looked at Belbo and me blearily, as if noticing us for the first time—“your friends, or whatever, should trot down to the river and meet her there. Is that clear enough?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Trygonion curtly. He turned around and hurriedly strode away, taking the longest steps his short legs would allow.

“Cut off their halls and see what pests they turn into,” the woman muttered between clenched teeth. She shrugged and slammed the door.

“Horrible woman!” Trygonion said as Belbo and I caught up with him.

“Slow down,” I complained. “Who is she?”

“Just a neighbor. Nobody. A cousin or something. I don’t have money for a litter, do you? I suppose we can walk.”

Which we did. As we made our way down the western slope of the Palatine, through the cattle markets, across the bridge and up the west bank of the Tiber, at several points I considered telling Trygonion that I had changed my mind and was turning back. What was I doing, after all, coming at the summons of a woman I had happily avoided until now, to discuss a matter from which I had deliberately distanced myself? Blame it on Cybele, I thought, as I followed her priest, his parasol held resolutely aloft.

It is a sign of wealth and good taste to own a green patch on the banks of the Tiber. Such estates are something of a cross between a park and a garden; the owners call such grounds
horti
. There is usually a structure of some sort—sometimes no more than a rustic retreat with quarters for the groundskeeper and a few guests, sometimes a whole complex of buildings. The grounds themselves are often a mix of wilderness and cultivation, depending on the size of the property, the owner’s proclivities and the gardener’s skill; patches of tall grass and woodland may be interspersed with rose gardens, fishponds, fountains, and stone-paved walkways adorned with statuary.

Clodia’s horti were unusually close in. A hundred years ago, the property must have been well out in the countryside, but the city had greatly expanded since then. It was an enviable location for a piece of riverfront property and must have been in her family for generations.

The impression of great age was reinforced by the grounds themselves, which on such a warm, windless day had the feeling of a place where time stopped long ago. The immediate approach was a long, narrow lane bordered by sprawling berry bushes which met overhead, shading the way. This tunnellike path opened onto a broad field of grass kept closely mown by a pair of goats which bleated at our approach. Facing the meadow and perpendicular to the river,
which was almost entirely obscured by an intervening stand of dense trees, was a long narrow house with a red-tiled roof and a portico running along the whole front. The open meadow was as private as any walled garden in the city, for the view on all sides was shielded by tall cypress trees and majestic yews.

“She won’t be in the house, but I suppose we can take a look all the same,” said Trygonion.

We crossed the meadow and stepped under the shade of the portico. Trygonion rapped on the nearest door, then pushed it open and stepped over the threshold, beckoning to Belbo and me. Each room of the long house opened onto the next, and every room had its own door onto the long portico, so that one could walk from end to end of the house either along the shaded outdoor walkway or through each room in succession.

I could tell at once that the house was empty. It had the feeling of a place left unoccupied all winter, which had not yet been brought back to life. The air was still and cool inside, the walls and the sparse furnishings exhaled a slightly musty odor, and every surface had a thin coating of dust.

We followed Trygonion slowly from room to room as he called Clodia’s name. In some of the rooms, dropcloths covered every object. In other rooms the cloths had been pulled away, apparently quite recently, for they still lay carelessly crumpled on the floor. Having acquired a furnished house on the Palatine, I know a few things about furniture. The pieces I saw in Clodia’s house on the Tiber were of the sort which fetch astonishing prices at auction nowadays, especially among our burgeoning empire’s new rich who have no such treasures in their obscure families—sleeping couches saved from the flames of Carthage, their plush cushions so faded that the exotic patterns can barely be made out; gilded cabinets and trunks with massive iron hinges of a sort no longer made; ancient folding chairs that the Scipios or the Gracchi brothers might have sat on.

There were paintings as well, in every room, and not theatrical wall paintings such as are fashionable among the wealthy nowadays, but portraits and historical scenes painted in encaustic on wood and mounted in elaborate frames. These were darkened by age, their smooth surfaces covered by a skein of very fine cracks. Collectors set great store by these qualities, which time alone creates and which cannot be mimicked by human artists. There were also tiny sculptures mounted here and there on pedestals, none of them taller than a man’s forearm, in keeping with the small scale of the rooms, and all of rustic subjects to match the rustic mood of the place—little statues of Pan and Silenus, of a slave boy pulling a thorn from his foot, of a wood nymph kneeling on a rock.

We came to the end of the house and stepped back onto the covered portico. Trygonion peered toward the woods on the opposite side of the meadow, where I could see nothing. “No, she wouldn’t be over at the kitchens or the slave quarters or the stable,” he said. “She’s down by the water, of course.” We set out across the meadow again, toward the grove of trees along the river. In their shade, we came upon a statue of Venus—not a small, decorative object like those in the house, but a magnificent, towering bronze upon a marble pedestal. The goddess looked out on the water with an expression of almost smug contentment on her face, as if the river flowed merely to give music to her ears, and the city on its further bank had been erected for no other purpose than to amuse her.

“Extraordinary,” I whispered. Beside me Belbo stared up at the statue dumbly, a look of religious awe on his face.

“Do you think so?” said Trygonion. “You should see the one at her house in the city.” He turned and walked on, humming a hymn to Cybele. His mood seemed to lighten with each step that brought him closer to the river, and to the red and white striped tent pitched on the bank.

We stepped out of the trees and into the sunlight. A mild
breeze stirred the lush grass. The tent stood out in dazzling relief against the bright green grass, the darker green of the river beyond, and the glaring azure sky above. Its fine silk panels shivered in the delicate breeze. The red stripes wavered like slithering snakes against a field of white, then, by a trick of the eye, the illusion was reversed and the stripes became white snakes against a field of red.

From somewhere I heard the sound of splashing, but the tent and the high trees on either side blocked my view of the river.

“Wait here,” said Trygonion. He stepped inside. A little later he stuck his head out the flap. “Come in, Gordianus. But leave your bodyguard outside.”

As I moved toward the flap it was pulled aside by an unseen slave within. I stepped into the tent.

The first thing I noticed was the scent, a perfume I had never smelled before—elusive, subtle and intriguing. The instant I first smelled it, I knew I would never forget it.