The King's Gambit(63)

"It isn’t Lucullus,” I said. “He seems to be a superior general. For all I know, his soldiers are bandits as bad as any in Pompey’s army, and most of them are probably foreigners to boot. But these people have committed three murders in my district. And I rather liked Paulus.”

“And is that all?” she asked.

I thought. Was it just my wounded sense of justice and a random liking for a man I had scarcely known? “No. I don’t want to see more than two hundred of Paulus’s slaves hanging on crosses outside the city walls.”

That seemed to satisfy something in her. “Wait here.” She rose from her chair and left the room. After a few minutes, a slave girl came in and lighted the lamps. Then Caecilia returned with a small wooden box, which she placed on a table before me. “I will be back in an hour.” She left the room again.

My fingers trembled slightly as I opened the box, breaking the wax seal of the Senate with its embossed letters: SPQR. Inside were three small scrolls of superior papyrus. Each bore the names of the Consuls of the year, the Senator who had been in charge of the investigation, and the scribe. The scribe in each case had been different, and none of them was employed by the Senate. Probably they were the personal scribes of the Senators. Two of the Senators were well-known adherents of Pompey and had served in his legions. They were nonentities who had earned their purple stripes by serving as quaestors and would never be praetors without Pompey’s patronage. The investigations went back four years, only the most recent having taken place during the Consulate of Pompey and Crassus. I took the earliest scroll and untied its string.

It was bald and brief. The investigator was Senator Marcus Marius. I knew him slightly. He was a distant relative of the great Gaius Marius, and like him had only two names because the gens Marii did not use cognomens. It stated that the Senator had been told by a quaestor that Paramedes of Antioch, an alien resident in the city, had been visited by several foreign persons who were under surveillance as suspicious characters. Paramedes was known to be an agent for the pirates, but these foreigners were in the entourage of the visiting ambassador from Pontus. The Senator’s investigation (a wretchedly perfunctory proceeding) had determined that Paramedes was most probably an agent and spy for King Mithridates of Pontus. As a piece of investigation, it ranked with what an ordinary citizen says about the weather when he steps out of the baths and looks at the clouds.

The second scroll was of considerably greater interest. The investigator was difficult to make out because of a slip of the scribe’s pen, botching the nomen in a great smear of ink. Luckily, the praenomen was readable—Mamercus. This meant that it had to be the Senator Mamercus Aemilius Capita, because only the gens Aemilii used the praenomen Mamercus. This report related that the Senator had been directed by none other than the Urban Praetor of that year, Marcus Licinius Crassus, to make contact with Paramedes of Antioch. This was, in fact, not an investigation at all. Crassus wanted to question the man personally, at his quarters near Messina. Capito was acting merely as an errand boy to bring Paramedes to Crassus.

In those long-ago days of the Republic, the highest magistrates, Consuls and praetors, were all holders of the im-perium, the ancient military power of kings, and any of them could take an army into the field. Spartacus had defeated the consular army under Gellius and Clodianus. Crassus, who had served under Sulla, had been chosen as the next commander to keep Spartacus occupied while word was sent to Spain to bring back Pompey and his veteran legions.

Capito reported that he had located Paramedes and had delivered him, as directed, to Crassus’s camp. This much was of interest, but the next part was even better. The day after delivering Paramedes to Crassus, Capito had ridden a short distance up the coast, escorting Paramedes to a small fishing village. There, the Asiatic-Greek had taken a boat, returning the next day with a very young envoy from the pirate fleet, at that time in the straits of Messina dickering with Spartacus for passage to freedom. No name was mentioned, but the description fitted Tigranes the Younger.

Capito returned both men to Crassus’s praetorium, but did not attend the meeting which followed. Several hours later he escorted the young pirate envoy back to the fishing village and saw him off on his boat. There the report ended.

I was severely disappointed. Thus far, I had nothing that I did not already know or surmise. The conspirators must have panicked and sequestered anything in the Senate records with the name Paramedes on it. Was it for this that I had made my great-aunt commit sacrilege? I took up the third scroll.