The King's Gambit(13)

Very well, if there was little virtue to be found in public life, there was still duty. I was a Caecilius Metellus, and no member of that family had ever betrayed Rome. As long as there was even the appearance of a danger to the city, I would pursue this case to its very depths and bring the guilty parties to justice.

I sat back feeling greatly relieved, now that the decision had been made. Even the wine tasted better. So what did I have?

Paramedes had been murdered. Paramedes had been the owner of a warehouse which had burned down on the night of his murder. The fire had been a result of arson. He had been in partnership with one of Rome’s wealthiest men. He was rumored (ah, those evasive rumors!) to have connections with the King of Pontus. At the highest levels of the Senate there was concern, a virtual panic, about this case. Important information concerning the doings of Paramedes had been seized and sequestered in the Temple of Vesta.

Marcus Ager, formerly known as Sinistrus, had been murdered on the same night. Paramedes had been killed with a sica. There was nothing unusual in that. The sica is the favored weapon of the common street-killers. Its curved blade makes it easy to wear concealed in a sheath beneath the armpit. It is so common among cutthroats that it is considered infamous, and soldiers will only use the straight-bladed pugio, an honorable weapon.

The sica is also the weapon of the Thracian gladiators. Marcus Ager had been a Thracian daggerman. Paramedes had been killed by a left-handed man. Marcus Ager had fought under the name Sinistrus. And Sinistrus, of course, means left-handed.





3


THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER MY routine duties were taken care of, I went to examine the site of the fire. The ruins of the warehouse formerly owned by Paramedes stood on a piece of riverside property with docking facilities on the bank. These were always desirable properties, since barges coming up from Ostia could make their deliveries directly instead of having the goods off-loaded and hauled by wagon or porter to their destination. So valuable, in fact, that now, two days after the fire, the ruins were being cleared away and new construction was beginning.

Heat from the burning oil had been such that the warehouse had burned right down to its foundations and the wharf had been destroyed. Luckily, the wind that night had blown most of the sparks out onto the river, and the blaze had been confined to the warehouse. Gangs of slaves were employed in clearing away the wreckage while surveyors took sightings with their instruments to lay out the foundations of a new building. I made a mental note to look into the question of ownership.

A brief inquiry among the idlers lounging about to watch the work in progress elicited a few facts: Some men had been seen to rush into the warehouse in the early morning hours (there are always sleepless persons who observe such things), there had been crashing sounds from inside and shortly thereafter the structure had burst into flames. For all its fearsome aspect, arson was only slightly less common than a head cold in Rome. Vigiles could do little more than douse the odd kitchen-fire or lamp flare-up. The fabled General Crassus had built a good part of his fortune with his private fire-fighting squad. They would rush to the site of a fire, fight off other fire fighters, and Crassus would make the owner an offer for the still-burning property. The unfortunate owner would naturally accept any offer and then Crassus would send in his men to put out the fire while his new property was still salvageable. It was rumored (ah, those rumors!) that other employees set the fires for him. He was always first at the site, at any rate. Scandalous, and highly profitable.

Perhaps it was a sign of the times that such behavior did not prevent Crassus from being elected Consul for that year. As a balance, his colleague as Consul was Pompey, his rival general. Ruling on alternate days, the two neatly canceled each other’s effect, which suited everybody, and it meant that they would both be out of Rome for an extended period when their year in office was over. That was better yet.

However, just then my business was not with such high personages. Now I had to go see someone nearly as influential, but not quite so respectable. This was a matter calling for extreme circumspection. I went to question Macro.

Macro controlled the most powerful gang in Rome at that time. He was the terror of the whole city, and relatively immune from prosecution because of his political connections. He was a supporter of the Optimates and a particular client of Quintus Hortensius Hortalus. He was not, as one might infer, the sort of client who called upon the great man every morning. Macro’s clientage made Hortalus’s elections a foregone conclusion.

Macro’s house was a minor fortress in the Subura surrounded by tenements owned by Macro and his cronies. It fronted on a narrow street lined with wineshops and fishmongers’ stalls. A nearby liquamen factory added the pungency of its product to the general reek of the neighborhood. The street entrance of the house was flanked by a pair of louts with the telltale bulges of sica handles showing beneath their arms.