Oracle of the Dead(58)
“It’s not exactly rare in the rest of Italy, either,” I said. “My fellow senator Cato is a Porcius, and I think his family came from Etruria. No help there, then. But this inventory is standard burglar’s loot: small items of high resale value, precious metals and gemstones and so forth. One sale could be legitimate, but I’ll bet my men find more like this.”
“Pretty foolish to put it in writing, don’t you think?”
“Some people are fanatic record keepers. They can’t help it. They always think someone is going to cheat them and have to keep track of every denarius. It’s a sort of sickness.”
As I had foretold, within the hour we had at least thirty more such records, all detailing the same sort of items. There were also records of the legitimate cargoes the man had bought on speculation and sold at a profit or, more often, at a loss, but the former outnumbered the latter by a great margin.
“No question about it,” Belasus said with a sigh. “We have here the district’s biggest fence. Well, good riddance to him. I, for one, don’t plan to waste much time finding out who the killer might be. The man did a public service exterminating this wretch.”
“I doubt you’ll find the killer here, anyway,” I muttered.
“Eh? What was that, Praetor?”
“Nothing. Just talking to myself, for which I have no excuse in such good company.” I laid aside the scroll I had been reading. “It’s getting too dark to read.”
“So it is,” Belasus said. “Come to my house for some dinner, you and your men. I’m a widower, my daughters are married, my sons are with the eagles in Macedonia, and I’ve nothing but room. We’ll make a boy’s night of it.”
“That is the finest offer I’ve had in months,” I told him, truthfully.
I called my men out of the office and the duumvir put an official seal on the door. We went to a market and stopped by a caterer’s shop where Belasus ordered up a small banquet to be delivered to his house. The caterer was a man who knew the duumvir’s likes and dislikes and needed to be told very little. Belasus explained that, as an elected duumvir he did a good deal of entertaining, but didn’t like to be troubled with a great staff of servants, so he had all his larger meals catered. This made eminently good sense to me. In the street we encountered some friends of his whom he invited to dinner in the usual fashion of politicians. “All bachelors and widowers,” he confided to me, “and all good conversationalists. They won’t bring along any women.”
His house proved to be modest but very adequate for any reasonable need. It was in the old-fashioned design, just a square surrounding a courtyard with an atrium, a large triclinium for entertaining, and a dozen or so bedrooms, most of them now vacant. He ordered the servants to set up chairs and tables in the courtyard by the pool, and there we sat, drinking his excellent wine and snacking on nuts and dried octopus while the servants set up the triclinium and the caterer’s people brought in dinner.
Our host, not quite formally, bade us all drink a health to the Republic, which really needed some drinking to that year. That done, we relaxed. The courtyard was of the usual design: a square with a pool in the middle. And in the middle of the pool was a pedestal supporting one of the most delightful sculptures I have ever seen. It was a dancing faun, no more than three feet high, its pose so lively and lifelike that its pedestal seemed inadequate to hold it.
“So, Praetor,” Belasus began, “what’s going on up there at the temple? I’ve been hearing the most lurid stories about the murders and the countryside’s rife with rumors that there’s a veritable battle of gods going on.”
“Nothing as grand as that, I’m afraid.” I gave him a bald outline of what had happened and what we knew and some of the things we had speculated about. This may seem unwise in the middle of an investigation, but I had often found that it paid to have the counsel of a person uninvolved in a case, who might look at the evidence with eyes unclouded by the prejudices and assumptions that clutter the thinking of those too close to the events under examination.
He whistled. “What a story! So you think there may be some sort of robbery ring operating up there?”
“I think that’s a part of it, but I can’t make a lot of things fit. The Hecate cult poses few problems. Foreign cults are always suspect, greed and larceny are everywhere. A number of things have me stymied. For one thing, how have they gotten away with it for so long? For another, what is the connection with the priests of Apollo? Granted Apollo is a foreign god, but the god himself, his worship, and his priests for centuries have practically defined respectability.”