When they were gone, the old man’s voice echoing down the street, Martial groped for a stool and sank on to it. There was a moment of shocked silence while the two men looked at each other.
“What on earth was that about?” breathed Pliny.
Martial shook his head. “Sounds treasonous to me.”
“Well, that’s not our concern right now.”
“Yes, but d’you think one of them could be Verpa’s killer? Blame it on the Jews?”
“I doubt it. Why bother if we’re all going to go up in flames soon anyway?”
The sound of a girl weeping came from behind the half-open door of one of the side chambers.
“Calpurnia!” Pliny ran to her at once and clasped her in his arms. No telling how much she had understood but the girl seemed scared out of her wits. A moment later, Amatia appeared from her bedroom, her face still puffy with sleep. Between them they got Calpurnia to a couch.
Martial watched discreetly from the sidelines. When some calm had been restored he asked Pliny if he was going back to Verpa’s house today.
“I’m staying with my wife. Tomorrow the will is going to be read. I will attend that. Wills, at least, are something I understand. Come with me if you like.”
The poet bowed himself out.
Chapter Thirteen
The sixth day before the Ides of Germanicus. Day four of the Games.
The fourth hour of the day.
For the third time in four days Pliny reluctantly mounted his litter and was carried above the jostling crowds, the choking dust and stinks of the city. The foot traffic eddied around his conveyance, a small boat riding a turbulent stream. The heat already felt like the exhalation from a potter’s oven.
His way took him down the slope of the Esquiline, past the Colosseum and the Temple of Venus and Rome, along the Via Sacra and on into the Forum Romanum. On his left he passed, with a throb of longing, the noble Basilica Julia, the two-storied colonnaded building which occupied nearly the whole north side of the Forum. His view of it sadly was obscured by an immense bronze equestrian statue of Domitian, which towered over the surrounding buildings. But this was his arena, the scene of his triumphs since the day he had argued his first inheritance case there at the age of eighteen. In its vast interior the law courts met in open view of passers-by, and when he pleaded a case, audiences would desert the other orators to gather round him! Over the years, he had made a name for himself and done quite well off his fees. How he wished that this interminable month, not yet a third over, would end, allowing him to get back to his proper vocation.
Leaving the Forum behind, he was carried along the Clivus Argentarius, skirting the north flank of the Citadel, and coming out in the Vicus Pallacinae, near the east end of the Circus Flaminius.
As he swayed comfortably on the broad shoulders of his bearers, Pliny let his mind drift. He realized with a twinge of guilt that all during the morning salutatio he had scarcely heard a word anyone had said, including himself, so preoccupied was he with this wretched case. (Martial had sent a note, saying he’d had a late night and begged to be excused.)
Should he consider now that the Jewish business was a blind, intended to throw him off the track? And, if so, by whom? By Lucius? Or even Scortilla? Or, both of them? He knew so little. A man like Verpa would have had hundreds of enemies who wished him dead, any one of whom might have found a way to accomplish it. But how? A room with one high, narrow window and one door guarded by a man who, in spite of being a slave and a former Judean rebel, struck Pliny as truthful. And who was now revealed to have been a different sort of atheist altogether.
At any rate, today’s task was to interrogate those few slaves who had had the run of the house that night, something he should have done in the first place. That and listen to the reading of the will. Perhaps there would be a clue there.
His bearers, by this time, could have found their way blindfolded to the imposing porphyry-columned entrance to Verpa’s house. They set him down before the bronze-studded double doors which, today, were decorated with dark acanthus wreathes and bows of cypress, proclaiming that the deceased’s lying-in-state had begun.
The great man lay encoffined in a vast gilded mummy case resting on a black-draped catafalque which occupied the center of the atrium. The head of the case was painted with a likeness of Verpa’s face which, despite the artist’s best intentions, did not completely disguise the hard jaw line, the pugnacious nose, the heavy-lidded eyes. The actual burial was scheduled for four days hence. Were those alien gods, Pliny wondered, who stood ready to receive his spirit on the banks of the Styx, or wherever it was Egyptians went—were they quite prepared for what they were getting in this pretty package?