The King's Gambit(6)

“Where have you been?” asked Rutilius. He was Commissioner for the Trans-Tiber district, a cautious and conventional man. “We’ve been waiting since the second hour.”

“I was sacrificing at the Temple of Jupiter and then conducting an investigation into a murder in my district. How was I to know an extraordinary meeting was called? What has happened that requires such prompt attention?”

“What murder?” asked Opimius. He was my other colleague, in charge of the Aventine, Palatine and Caelian districts. He was a supercilious little climber who came to a bad end several years later.

“Just some freed gladiator who was found strangled this morning. Why?”

“Forget the scum for the moment,” Rutilius said. “There is a matter demanding your immediate attention. You’ve heard about the fire down near the Circus last night?”

“Who talks of anything else this morning?” I said, annoyed. “We’re Police, not Fire Control. What has the fire to do with us?”

“The fire started in a warehouse on the river. There is every appearance of arson present.” Opimius spoke with the indignation which Romans reserve for fire-raisers. Treason is treated much more leniently. This was serious, indeed.

“Please go on,” I said.

“The fire, of course, was in my district,” Opimius continued, “but it seems that the owner of the warehouse lived in the Subura.”

"Lived?” I said.

“Yes. A messenger sent to notify the man of the fire found him in his lodgings, dead. Stabbed.”

“Peculiar, isn’t it?” said Rutilius. “Junius, what was the fellow’s name?”

Junius glanced at one of his tablets. “Paramedes. An Asian Greek from Antioch.”

“Just a moment,” I said, sensing a chance to shift the whole business to someone else. “If the man was a foreigner, this case properly belongs to the Praetor Peregriniis.”

“There seem to be complications,” Opimius stated, “that hint of a certain”—he made wavy gestures with his hands—"delicacy to the affair.”

“It has been determined,” Rutilius said, “that the investigation should be carried out at a lower level, with as little public disturbance as possible.” It was plain that ours was not the first meeting to be held that day. Some very frantic conferences had been convened uncommonly early in the morning.

“And why all this intrigue?” I asked.

“There are international implications here,” Rutilius explained. “This Paramedes, or whatever his name was, was not just the importer of wine and oil that he pretended to be. It seems that he also had contacts with the King of Pontus.” That was indeed something to ponder. Old Mithridates was a thorn in the Roman side and had been for many years.

“I take it that the fellow’s been under investigation for some time. Who’s been in charge of the investigation? If I must handle this, I’ll want to see all the records and documents that have been compiled on this man to date.”

“Ah, well,” Opimius said, and I feared the worst. “It seems, ah, that, since these matters touch on state security, those documents have been declared secret. They are to be put under Senate seal and deposited for safekeeping in the Temple of Vesta.”

“Are you serious?” I barked. “Am I really expected to conduct an investigation while important evidence is withheld from me?”

My colleagues found something of absorbing interest on the Curia ceiling and studied it intently. Obviously, there was only to be the form of an investigation, not its substance. State security! The meaning was clear: Senatorial reputations were at stake, and the most junior member of the elected government was being sent out to sweep the whole untidy mess into a dark room and close the door after it.

“We serve the Senate and People of Rome,” Rutilius said, when I had calmed a bit.

“Exactly,” I said. “All right, Junius, tell me whatever scraps of information I am permitted to know.”

“The late Paramedes of Antioch,” Junius droned, “was an importer of wine and olive oil and owned a large warehouse, now incinerated, on the Tiber, near the Circus.”

“Wait,” I interjected as he paused for breath. “If he was a foreigner, he couldn’t have owned property in the city outright. Who was his citizen partner?”

“I was just coming to that,” Junius sniffed. “As title holder for his city property, Paramedes had as partner one Sergius Paulus, freedman.”

That was more like it. That man Junius so blithely dismissed as S. Paulus, freedman, was one of the four or five richest men in Rome at that time. Paulus, once a slave of an illustrious family, had risen to the position of steward while in servitude. Upon his master’s death, he was willed his freedom and a generous sum of money. With this stake, he had put his freedman’s expertise to work and made many shrewd investments, quickly multiplying his wealth. At this time, he owned so many farms, ships, shops and slaves that there was really no way to calculate his wealth, except that it was fairly certain that he was not quite as rich as General Marcus Licinius Crassus, who was as rich as a Pharaoh.