Hiram explained: “It belonged to the man your father tortured to death with the help of my three mates, a job for which he agreed to pay ’em one thousand sesterces, their usual fee. I happened to make their acquaintance in a tavern last night and agreed to speak for ’em, since they’re shy of you.” Hiram’s gold tooth gleamed when he smiled. “If they don’t get their money they’ll make trouble.”
“Will they, indeed!” Lucius snatched the box—he expected it to be heavy, but it wasn’t—and lifted the lid. “It’s empty. Where are all the instruments, the drugs?”
“They sold the instruments on the street, the little bottles they threw away,” answered the gold tooth. “They had nothing in ’em but colored water and sand.”
“You don’t say? Well, the box alone is damned near worthless and I haven’t got a thousand in cash, so there!”
“The name on the bottom might mean something to you?”
Lucius turned the box over and read the inscription: Iatrides son of Philemon, carved in Greek letters. That gave him a start. The invalid woman’s physician had some such name as this. “What did this man look like? Heavy set? Bearded?” Lucius had scarcely noticed the doctor during the brief time that he and the lady had stayed with them, but, yes, it did seem like him. But why torture him? Turning the box over again, his ear caught a little rattle within it. He peered inside more closely. A pin embedded in a bit of cork lay on the bottom. Help me Hercules! It was the twin of the one that Pliny had shown them yesterday. Trying to conceal his excitement, he scowled and said, “I’ll have to know more details.”
The thugs jabbered away all at once, and Hiram translated. “They were told to waylay the man at a certain street corner where he always passed. They took him by cart, rolled up in a rug, to your little farm across the Tiber, where your father met them. They all went into the woods beyond the house and worked him over. He screamed a lot, but no one lives out that way. When they got to singeing his balls, he died on ’em. Weak heart, I’d say.”
“What did my father want from him? Did he say anything?”
Hiram consulted his companions. “They’re not paid to listen. They don’t understand much anyway. Your father wanted to know who this man was and why he was in his house. The man was harder to understand. He spoke Latin with an accent and he was, you know, screaming. He begged your father to be merciful. They understood the word ‘clemens.’ And something too about clothing—they think they heard ‘vestis.’ But maybe they heard wrong, these fellows ain’t very smart.” The three torturers, not understanding Hiram’s speech, smiled hopefully at Lucius.
“After the man died,” Hiram continued, “your father told ’em to bury him and the box—they can show you the spot if you like. He went back to the farmhouse for something to eat. While he was gone they hid the box under some straw in their cart, thinking it might be worth something.”
Lucius wasted no time in paying the Syrians off with some silver spoons, which were worth considerably more than a thousand sesterces. He wanted no trouble from them. No, indeed. He wanted time to think. Clemens? Of course! Not “merciful,” but Flavius Clemens, the God-fearer whom his father had denounced. Vestis he could make no sense of. Still, something connected this Amatia and her physician to the Clemens affair. Whoever they were, they weren’t what they seemed, and Verpa had found them out.
Lucius took the kit back to his room and sent a slave to fetch one of Scortilla’s cats. There were half a dozen in the house, all of them “sacred,” more of her Egyptian nonsense. He picked the animal up by its neck and pressed the pin into its blue-gray flank. It twisted and made strangling sounds, and in a moment it was dead. Satisfied with his experiment, he went looking for Valens. Pliny had warned him to cooperate and cooperate he would. His life might depend on it.
He found the centurion in the garden, not alone. A bosomy, unkempt woman was seated next to him on the bench beside the pool where three sun-burned, naked little boys were engaged in pushing one another’s heads under the water and shrieking at the top of their lungs.
“The family, sir,” Valens explained, looking a trifle apologetic. “Been after me for days to let ’em come over for a look round. Thought it wouldn’t do any harm.”
Lucius suppressed an urge to swear at the man. “I want you to go to the vice-prefect’s house and ask him to come here without delay. I have urgent news for him.”
“Now, sir?”