The Venus Throw (14 page)

The red and white silk softened the bright sunlight, filling the tent with a warm glow. The panels facing the river had been rolled up, letting in the view and framing it like a picture. Sunlight danced on the green water and cast lozenges of light into the tent, where they flitted and danced across my hands and face. I heard the sound of splashing again and now I saw its source, a group of young men and boys, fifteen or more, who frolicked in the water just beyond the tent. Some of them wore bright-colored swaps of cloth about their loins, but most were naked. Beads of water clung to their sleek flesh; in the sunlight they glimmered as if chased with jewels. When they moved into the shade beneath trees they became dappled, like spotted fauns. Their splashing caused the lozenges of light to dance wildly inside the tent.

I walked toward the center of the tent, where Trygonion awaited me with a beaming smile on his face. He stood beside a high couch strewn with red and white striped pillows,
holding the hand of the woman who reclined upon it. The woman was turned so that I could not see her face.

Before I reached the couch a figure suddenly appeared before me. She looked hardly older than a child but wore her auburn hair coiled atop her head and was dressed in a long green gown. “Mistress!” she called, keeping her eyes on mine. “Mistress, your guest is here to see you.”

“Show him to me, Chrysis.” The voice was sultry and unhurried, deeper than Trygonion’s but unmistakably feminine.

“Yes, Mistress.” The slave girl took my hand and led me before the couch. The smell of perfume grew stronger.

“No, no, Chrysis,” her mistress said, laughing gently. “Don’t put him directly in front of me. He’s blocking the view.”

Chrysis tugged playfully at my hand and pulled me to one side.

“That’s better, Chrysis. Now run along. You, too, Trygonion—let go of my hand, little gallus. Go find something for Chrysis to do up at the house. Or go look for pretty stones along the riverbank. But don’t let one of those river satyrs catch either one of you or who knows what might happen!”

Chrysis and Trygonion departed, leaving me alone with the woman on the high couch.

T
he young men you see in the river wearing loincloths are mine. My slaves, that is—my litter bearers and bodyguards. I let them wear loincloths here at the horti. After all, I can see them naked anytime I wish. Also, it makes it easier for me to pick out the others. Any young Roman worth being seen naked knows that he’s allowed to come swimming along my stretch of the Tiber anytime he wishes—so long as he does it in the nude. They come down from the road along a link pathway hidden beyond those trees and leave their tunics hanging on branches. At the height of summer on a hot afternoon there are sometimes more than a hundred of them out there, diving, splashing each other, sunning themselves on the rocks—naked by my decree. Look at the shoulders on that one . . .”

I found myself staring at a woman of no few years—knowing that she was about five years older than her brother Publius Clodius, I calculated that she was probably forty, give or take a year. It was hard to say whether she looked her age or not. However old she looked, it suited her. Clodia’s skin was certainly finer than that of most women of forty, the color of white roses, very creamy and smooth; perhaps, I thought, the filtered light of the tent flattered her. Her hair was black and lustrous, arranged by some hidden magic of
pins and combs into an intricate maze of curls atop her head. The way that her hair was pulled back from her forehead gave emphasis to the striking angles of her cheekbones and the proud line of her nose, which was almost, but not quite, too large. Her lips were a sumptuous red which surely could not have been natural. Her eyes seemed to glitter with flashes of blue and yellow but mostly of green, the color of emeralds, sparkling as the sunlight sparkled on the green Tiber. I had heard of her eyes; Clodia’s eyes were famous.

“Look at the gooseflesh on them!” She laughed. “It’s a wonder they can stand to go in the water at all. The river must still be frigid so early in the year, no matter how warm the sunshine. Look how it shrivels their manhoods; a pity, for that can be half the fun of watching. But notice, not one of them is shivering. They don’t want me to see them shiver, the dear, brave, foolish boys.” She laughed again, a low, throaty chuckle.

Clodia reclined on her divan with her back against a pile of cushions and her legs folded to one side beneath her. A long stola of shimmering yellow silk, belted below her breasts and again at her waist, covered her from her neck down. Only her arms were naked. Even so, no one could have called the costume modest. The fabric was so sheer as to be transparent, so that it was hard to tell, in the glittering light from the sun-spangled river, how much of the sheen of her contours came from the shiny silk and how much from the sleek flesh beneath. I had never seen a dress like it. This must have shown on my face, for Clodia laughed again, and not at the young men in the river.

“Do you like it?” She looked steadily into my eyes as she smoothed her palm over her hip and down her thigh to the bend of her knee. The silk seemed to ripple like water before the advancing edge of her hand. “It comes all the way from Cos. Something new from a famous silkmaker there. I don’t think any other woman in Rome has a dress like it. Or perhaps they’re like me, not quite brave enough
to wear such a garment in public.” She smiled demurely and reached up to the silver necklace at her throat. She spread her fingers, and I could clearly see, thanks to the transparency of the silk, that while she rolled one of the lapis baubles between her forefinger and thumb, with her little finger she delicately stroked one of her large, pale nipples until it began to grow excited.

I cleared my throat and glanced over my shoulder. The young men in the water were now throwing a leader ball back and forth among themselves, making a game of it, but every now and then they shot glances toward the tent. No wonder they had come to the river on the first warm day of the year, I thought. They came to look at her no less than she came to look at them. I cleared my throat again.

“Is your throat dry? Did you
walk
all the way from the Palatine?” She sounded genuinely curious, as if walking for any distance outdoors was a feat she had watched her fitter bearers perform but which she had never attempted on her own.

“Yes, I walked.”

“Poor dear, then you
must
be thirsty. Here, look, before she left, Chrysis put out cups for us. The clay pitcher holds fresh water. The wine in the silver decanter is Falernian. I never drink anything else.”

The vessels were set on a little table beside her. There was no chair, however. It appeared that visitors were meant to stand.

My mondt was in fact quite dry, and not entirely from the heat of the day. Clodia’s cup was already full of wine, so I reached for the pitcher of water and poured myself a cup, drinking it slowly before I poured myself another.

“No wine?” She sounded disappointed.

“I think not. It’s bad for a man my age to drink wine after exerting himself in the heat of the day.” If not bad for my bowels, I thought, then bad for my judgment in such
company. What would the transparent silk dress begin to look like after a cup or two of strong Falernian?

“As you wish.” She shrugged. The silk pooled above her shoulders, then rippled like a sheet of water over her breasts.

I finished the second cup of water and put it down. “There was a reason you sent the gallus for me?”

“Yes, there was.” She turned her gaze from me and fixed it on the young men in the river. I watched her eyes flit back and forth, following the leather ball. Her face remained impassive.

“Trygonion said it had something to do with Dio.”

She nodded.

“Perhaps I should close the tent flaps,” I said.

“Then what would the young men in the river think?” The idea of scandal seemed to amuse her, as did my growing consternation.

“If we need a chaperon, call back your handmaiden.”

“Do
we need a chaperon?” The look in her eyes was unnerving. “You obviously don’t know Chrysis; she would hardly qualify for the role.”

“Trygonion, then.”

At that she laughed aloud and opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it. “Forgive me,” she said. “When I have business to conduct with a good-looking man, I like to indulge in a little teasing first. It’s a fault of mine. My friends have learned to overlook it. I hope that you’ll overlook the fault as well, Gordianus, now that I’ve confessed it.”

I nodded.

“Very well. Yes, I wanted to consult you regarding the untimely death of our mutual friend, Dio of Alexandria.”

“Our
mutual
friend?”

“Yes, mine as well as yours. Don’t look so surprised, Gordianus. There are probably a great many things about Dio that you didn’t know. For that matter, there are probably a great many things about me that you don’t know, despite
all you may have heard. I’ll try to be brief and to the point. It was I who suggested to Dio that he should go to your house to seek your help on the night he was murdered.”

“You?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t know me.”

“Even so, I know of you, just as you undoubtedly know of me. Your reputation goes back a long way, Finder. I was a girl of seventeen, still living at home, when Cicero made such a splash defending that man accused of parricide. I remember my father talking about the case for long afterward. I didn’t know of the role you played until many years later, of course, when I learned the details from Cicero himself—how Cicero loved to rehash that old case, again and again, until his triumph over Catilina finally gave him something even bigger to crow about! Cicero used to speak of you often to my late husband; on a few occasions he even recommended that Quintus seek out your services, but Quintus was always stubborn about using his own men for snooping and such. I shall be honest with you: Cicero didn’t always speak highly of you. That is to say, from time to time when your name was brought up, he sometimes used words that should not be repeated aloud by a respectable Roman matron such as myself. But we’ve all had our fallings-out with Cicero, have we not? The important thing is that even when he was infuriated with you, Cicero always made a point of praising your honesty and integrity. Indeed, when Quintus was governor up in Cisalpine Gaul, Cicero and his wife Terentia came for a visit, and one night after dinner we all played a game of questions and answers; when Quintus asked Cicero what man he would trust to tell the truth, no matter what, do you know whom he named? Yes, Gordianus, it was you. So you see, when Dio asked us to whom he might turn for help, the name of Gordianus the Finder came to my mind at once. I didn’t know at the time
that you and Dio already knew each other, Trygonion told me about that after their visit to you.”

“I suppose I’m flattered,” I said. “You know, then, that I met Dio in Alexandria, years ago?”

“Trygonion explained it to me.”

“But how is it that
you
knew Dio?”

“Because of his dealings with my brother Publius, of course.”

“What dealings?”

“They met shortly after Dio arrived in Rome. The two of them had much to talk about.”

“I should think that Dio and Publius Clodius would have had a hard time finding common ground, considering that it was your brother who engineered the Roman takeover of Egyptian Cyprus.”

“Water under the bridge, as the Etruscans say. Far more important to Dio was my brother’s opposition to Pompey. Publius offered Dio a much-needed ally in the Senate. Dio offered Publius a means to cheat Pompey of his ambitions in Egypt.”

“And your place in all this?”

“There’s something about sharp-witted older men that I find simply irresistible.” She gave me another of her unnerving looks.

“And what did Dio see in you?” I asked bluntly.

“Perhaps it was my well-known love of poetry.” Clodia shrugged elegantly, causing the sheer silk to catch and drag across her nipples.

“If you and your brother were such great friends and supporters of Dio, why didn’t he stay at your house where he’d be safe, instead of moving from one dubious host to another, staying barely ahead of his killer?”

“Dio couldn’t stay at my house for the same reason that you may not lower the flaps of this tent, Gordianus. A man and a woman together, you understand. Dio’s position with the Senate was precarious enough without having it further
eroded by sexual innuendos. Nor could he have stayed with Publius; imagine the rumors that would have set off, about the Egyptian troublemaker hatching plots with the famous rabble-rouser. Notoriety exacts a price. Sometimes our friends must stay at arm’s length, for their own good.”

“Very well, Dio was your friend, or ally, or whatever, and you sent him to me for help. I had to refuse him. A few hours later he was dead. You and your brother didn’t do a very good job of protecting him, did you?”

Her lips tightened and her eyes flashed. “Nor did you,” she said icily, “who had known him far longer than I had, and whose obligations must have run far deeper.”