The undertaker knew he was trapped. With as much dignity as he could manage, he croaked, “Diaulus is my name, sir—but a quack? Never!”
The priest of Anubis stopped in mid-chant; suddenly all eyes were on them.
“Some years ago, your poetical friend came to me for medical attention,” said the undertaker, glancing warily at Martial. “Some trouble with our libido, wasn’t it?” To Pliny he explained in a confidential tone: “You see, sir, I am an undertaker by trade, but I aspire to the sacred calling of physician, and I’ve made rather a specialty of male complaints. Well, as I say, your friend came to me and I applied stinging nettles to the, ah, part in question, a remedy of my own devising, which I’ve had great success with, I may say. All back to normal now, I hope, sir?” There was a malicious glint in his eye.
“No thanks to you, you assassin!”
“Extraordinary,” breathed Pliny.
“I fear he was dissatisfied with my treatment, and published some rather cutting verses about me.”
“Diaulus buries corpses now (Martial recited).
A doctor once was he.
The patients that he used to kill,
He counts among his clients still,
And earns a double fee.”
“Very witty, I am sure,” Diaulus sneered. “The fact is, embalming allows me to pursue my study of anatomy. Bodies are hard to come by otherwise. I venture to say I do more dissections in a year than most physicians do in a lifetime. Your friend calls me a quack—me! But I’m a good enough doctor to have noticed something very peculiar about this particular body. Oh, I could show you something that would surprise you.” Pride had gotten the better of Diaulus’ discretion.
A voice screamed in Pliny’s brain to ignore this little man and allow the funeral to proceed. Instead, he said, “Oh?”
Oh, yes. There was no stopping him now. When he had removed the body to his embalming shop and uncovered it, Diaulus said, the face was awful to behold: the tongue protruding, the eyes bulging, the mouth hideously twisted. “Rigor had already set in. Cadaveric spasm, we physicians call it.” Here Martial made a derisive snort.
“You see, sir, it comes on quick like that sometimes; almost instantaneously when the victim is exerting himself or in a state of high emotion at the moment of death—in the act of love, for example. The gentleman’s left hand was clutching his throat, the fingers really digging in. But it was his right hand, sir. His right hand was gripping his, ah, membrum virile—I eschew the language of the streets, sir—still in a state of tumescence. I had hard work getting him to let go of it, I can tell you. After some hours the rigor passed and things, ah, settled down, so to speak.”
Pliny and Martial exchanged glances; the same thought occurred to both of them. Had Ganymede made love to his intended victim and slaughtered him at the moment of climax? Did that pathetic boy have so much nerve?
“Now, as to the stab wounds, sir,” the undertaker continued, warming to his subject. “Understanding him to be a murdered gentleman, I was glad of the chance to observe the effects of the blade on the internal organs. But, to my great disappointment, there were none to be seen! Whoever wielded that knife was a weakling indeed. I would almost have said a woman. He inflicted a great many superficial cuts, but he didn’t succeed in piercing a single vital organ, neither lungs, nor liver, nor kidneys, and there was no internal hemorrhaging at all, sir, I’ll take my oath on that. The organs, by the way, are in those jackal-headed jars right there by the coffin, if you’d care to have a look.”
“I would,” replied Pliny grimly, “and more. Valens, and you men, carry the casket into that side room. We’ll have it open right now. Oh, and fetch Lucius out here.”
“Sacrilege!” screamed the priest of Anubis, who had been listening to this. “I forbid it!”
Martial looked at Pliny as if he’d taken leave of his senses. Their carefully constructed case was about to collapse unless he stopped now. In fact, Pliny was amazed at himself. He had never suspected he was capable of such brutal decisiveness. But there was something of his uncle, the natural historian, in him that would let nothing deter him from ascertaining a fact.
“Do as I say, centurion. And clear all these people out of here. The funeral is postponed.”
The mourners, with their palm fronds, their rattles, their pitchers of Nile water, and all the rest of their paraphernalia made a hasty exit. The last to leave was the priest, who was calling down a host of barbarous demons to feast on the vice prefect’s guts. He had ripped off his mask and suddenly Pliny recognized him as the man with the star-shaped mark on his shaven skull who had been present at the reading of the will. The man who was now in charge of spending an incredible two million sesterces. It wasn’t hard to imagine how much of that would stick to his immaculate fingertips. Unless, of course, the will turned out to be a forgery.