Saturnalia(36)

The archive of the aediles was nowhere near as voluminous as the great tabularia but it was extensive enough. Luckily, I now knew exactly what date I wanted, and the old man shuffled off to fetch what I demanded. A few minutes later, he shuffled back.

“Sorry, Senator. There’s nothing about this dead woman.”

“What?” I said, astounded. “There must be! This happened in the market area on the Campus Martius, and it involved a stall keeper who must have paid her … fees, I suppose, to the aediles. How could there not be a report?”

“I couldn’t say. The aediles are only in charge of markets and streets and so forth; they don’t handle criminal investigations.”

I left very dissatisfied. Granted that it is always difficult to find anything in the state archives, something this recent should be available. We were almost to the plaza surrounding the circus when the slave boy from the temple ran up to us.

“What do you want, you little mouse?” Hermes said, with the usual contempt of a personal slave for one owned by the state.

“I have something that may be of use to the senator,” the boy said.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Well, they don’t give me much back there,” he said insinuatingly.

“You’re a slave,” I informed him. “They don’t have to give you anything.”

“I’m owned by the state, so they have to feed me and give me a place to live. On the other hand, I don’t have to tell you anything if I don’t feel like it.”

Hermes was about to punch the boy, but I grabbed his shoulder.

“What makes you think you have something worth paying for?”

“You want to know about that report, don’t you? The one about the woman Harmodia?”

I took out a copper and tossed it to him. He tossed it back. “You’ll have to do better than that.” This time Hermes did punch him. He merely got up off the pavement and held his hand out. I dropped a silver denarius in it.

“The woman Harmodia was found by the Circus Flaminius, murdered,” he said.

“I already know that, you little twit,” I said. “What else?”

“The aedile Caius Licinius Murena was in the offices that morning and he went out to the Field of Mars to look into it. He came back a couple of hours later and dictated a report to his secretary and gave it to me to file. A couple of days later, a slave from the court of the praetor urbanus came and said the aedile needed the report for his presentation to the praetor. I was the only one in the offices that hour and I fetched it. It never came back.”

“Who came to report the killing?” I asked him.

“A watchman. I think he was one employed at the Circus Flaminius.” The primitive organization of vigiles we had in those days did not extend beyond the old City walls. They weren’t very efficient within the walls, for that matter.

“Do you know the name of the man who came to get the report?”

The boy shrugged. “He was just a court slave.” Court slaves, obviously, were inferior to temple slaves.

“Anything else?”

“I told you what happened to the report, didn’t I?”

“Away with you, then,” Hermes said, jealous of the boy’s financial success. “That wasn’t worth a denarius,” he said when the temple slave was gone.

“You never know,” I told him. “Let’s go pay a visit to the Circus Flaminius.”

As we walked I thought about the aedile, Caius Licinius Murena. The name was vaguely familiar to me. Gradually, I straightened it out. During the Catilinarian fiasco he had been a legate in Transalpine Gaul and had arrested some of Catiline’s envoys who had been stirring up the tribes. His brother, Lucius, had been proconsul there but had returned to Rome early for the elections, leaving Caius in charge. Lucius had been elected consul for the next year along with Junius Silanus, Afterward he had been prosecuted for using bribery to get elected, but Cicero had gotten him acquitted. And that was as much as I knew about the aedile Murena.

We retraced my steps of the day before, across the cattle market, which was more crowded than ever, what with people buying supplies for the feasting to come and animals for sacrifice. The whole city, in fact, was filling up as people poured in from the countryside to celebrate the holiday.

The Campus Martius, in sharp contrast, was nearly deserted. I saw immediately that the previous day’s horde of tents, booths, stalls, and so forth had temporarily moved into the City proper, taking advantage of the relaxed market laws. I felt obscurely relieved, not having to pass by Furia’s booth.

A bit of asking and poking around turned up the watchman, one of several employed by the circus to keep thieves away from the expensive decorations and prevent indigents from kindling fires beneath the arches on cold nights and perhaps burning the place down. He lived in a tenement near the circus. In common with most of Rome’s insulae, his was a five-story building, its ground floor mostly let out for shops and its lower living quarters rented to the better-off classes. The upper floors, divided into small, waterless, and nearly airless rooms, were rented to the poor. The object of my search lived on the top floor, beneath the eaves.