Roman Games(19)

Pliny, whose own house was not nearly so grand, was impressed in spite of himself. The stairway led up to a second story gallery that ran the length of the house, its tessellated floor glittering like glass.

“That’s my room ahead, if you care to know.” Lucius halted at the top of the steps. “Go left, my father’s room is at the end there.”

“Five, six doors down. Who occupies those rooms?”



“No one, at the moment. They’re for guests. Sometimes my friends sleep over if they’re too drunk to find their way home.”



“Did any of your friends happen to sleep over the night before last?”



“Maybe—I mean, no, no one.”



Pliny lifted a quizzical eyebrow. “And the room below his?”



“His room overlooks the back corner of the garden. Below it is a shed for garden tools and whatnot. No one sleeps there.”



They stood in the doorway and Pliny took in the scene at a glance: a small desk and chair, a lamp-stand and a gilded chamber pot with handles in the shape of urinating Cupids; and Verpa’s bed, its costly Babylonian coverlet tangled and spattered with blood. All at once an unexpected thrill of excitement shot through him. The thing began suddenly to seem real to him. Here a man had died, butchered by a resentful slave, a castoff lover or perhaps some other enemy.

“Of course, without our slaves there’s no one to clean,” Lucius said in a petulant tone.

“Uncommonly large for a bedroom, isn’t it.”

“The family that built the house bedded a dozen slaves here. My father felt that was far too generous. One only needs to squeeze slaves closer together to get them in smaller quarters.

Pliny seemed to recall that this mansion in the Vicus Pallacinae had formerly belonged to a senator whom Verpa had denounced years ago for dabbling in philosophy. It was a beautiful house, far the grandest in a neighborhood of grand houses, and the emperor gave it to him as his reward. Informing on one’s colleagues paid well.

“My father took this room as his private, ah, lair, if that’s the right word,” Lucius continued. “He wanted someplace that was more secluded than the downstairs bedrooms. He was a secretive man who craved privacy—not easy to achieve in the houses we Romans live in. The rest of us have seldom had occasion to enter it. As you see, he decorated it to suit his taste.”

Until now, no one had called attention to the room’s most striking feature—the murals. On every wall, horse-tailed Satyrs with bulging eyes and huge curving penises performed sexual acts in every imaginable position with naked women, their hair loose, their mouths open in shrieks of ecstasy. The figures were life-sized, painted by an undoubted master of anatomy, color, and modeling.

Pliny, like any Roman, was not easily shocked. Sex was celebrated everywhere in the city; you could see similar things in the public baths. Still, his Northern conservatism was pricked. His parents’ house had allowed no such stuff as this. “Great gods, it looks more like a brothel than a gentleman’s bedroom.” All this to stir the man’s flagging libido or, more likely, to instruct the younger slave girls in what was expected of them. What shameful sights these walls must have seen.

Valens grinned. No doubt he and “the lads” found frequent occasion to come up here. Lucius stared straight ahead and said nothing.

Pliny hastened on, “Lucius Ingentius, tell me in your own words what happened that night.”

The young man shrugged—shrugging seemed to signal the way he dealt with the world—and explained how he and a few slaves had burst in at dawn when Verpa failed to answer their knock and found him naked, on his stomach, one leg curled under him, the other extended straight, his back and buttocks shredded with bloody slash marks. The body was cool to the touch and already stiffening.

“And there was no one else in the room when you entered?”



“No one.



“And no one heard a struggle, a cry for help?”



Lucius hunched his shoulders again, “I was out most of the night. Scortilla’s room is downstairs.”



“What about the slaves?”



“I’ve already questioned them, sir,” Valens struck in. “None of them admits to hearing anything.”



“And none of them ran away?”



“No, they’re all here,” Lucius said.



“Interesting. How did your father get along with them.”



Lucius looked doubtful. “He was a strict master, but hardly the monster people made him out. Not loved. But this? I don’t know.”

“And where do the slaves sleep?”



“There are two other big rooms at the other end of the house. Most of them sleep there.”