The River God's Vengeance(38)

“I shall be delicate,” he assured me. “Now, an inexperienced person seeking to break a neck in this fashion will grasp the head thus.” He placed his left hand on the back of my head and with his right grasped my lower jaw, my chin in his palm and his thumb and fingers curling around the mandible. “In this way, when pressure is applied—” he began to twist and my jaw slid sideways until it creaked.

“Ow!” I cried, never having mastered that Stoic attitude so admired by my contemporaries.

“You see? Done this way, the lower jaw can dislocate before pressure has been applied sufficient to disjoint the vertebrae. It is much better to grasp the head thus.” He left his left hand where it was, and repositioned his right higher, so that the heel of the palm lay athwart the upper jaw, his thumb curling around my cheekbone. This time, when he twisted, my lower jaw moved little and I quickly felt the strain on my neck. I slapped the table in a wrestler’s surrender, and he released me.

“You see?”

“Clearly,” I admitted. “You think this is how it was done?”

“I could say with certainty if I had been able to examine the bodies myself, but the description I had from the Libitinarii leads me to believe so. Keeping in mind that I have only secondhand descriptions to go on, but acknowledging that these descriptions came from knowledgeable sources, my conclusions are as follows: Lucius Folius and his wife were murdered in their bed, while asleep, by a person accomplished in the technique of snapping a neck swiftly and silently. They lay in that position, dead, for not less than four hours before the house collapsed and they were precipitated into the basement.”

“Wonderful!” I commended him. “That is just the sort of information I wanted. Will you swear to this in court?”

“With the disclaimers and hedges I have already specified, of course. But you must realize that there is no evidence now. The bodies, even the house, are all gone.”

“Evidence doesn’t mean that much in court,” I assured him. “A really loud voice helps a lot. A forceful assertion carries more weight than quiet evidence.” I told him about the switch pulled on me with the house timbers and the murder of the big slave.

“It sounds as if someone is cleaning up after himself,” he said cheerily. “That slave, though, sounds like a fine candidate for the murder of the master and mistress.”

I nodded, but there was much doubt in my mind. “That was my own thought, but there is much about that household that gives me pause. Let me tell you something that young Antonius related to me.” So I told him about the unfortunate cook and of the neck rings and punishment marks I had seen on the dead slaves at the disaster site.

Asklepiodes shook his head and clucked. “How distasteful. Of course, as a Greek, I am quite prepared to believe Romans capable of any sort of enormity, but this seems the very epitome of bad taste.”

“I have a feeling that until I have some idea of who was doing what in that house, and for what reasons, I will never get to the bottom of this. And it is plain that someone is making it his business to ensure that I learn nothing. In any case, your aid has been inestimable, as always.”

“Then,” he said, rising, patting his belly, and belching all at the same time, “I will take my leave of you now. Please convey my compliments to your lady, together with my apologies that I could be of no greater aid in her difficulty.” With that enigmatic utterance, he left my study. I walked him to the gate, where his slaves waited patiently beside his litter.

I longed to go over the documents sent from the Tabularium, but dim lamplight would be too much for my aching eyes, and I was weighed down by a dreadful fatigue. In our bedroom I found Julia waiting up for me. I undressed and lay down beside her.

“What’s going on?” she demanded.

So I told her all the events of my long, long day. She laughed when I told her of my boat ride in the sewers, turned her face away in revulsion when I described the Puticuli, and sharpened attentively when I related my conference with the family elders and Messala.

“Then it’s true?” she said. “Your family is going over to Pompey?”

“They’ve struck a reasonable compromise,” I said. “No reason to put too extreme an interpretation on it.”

“That isn’t how it sounds to me. It sounds to me as if there has been a decisive and irreversible shift in policy.”

“There is no such thing as an irreversible policy,” I insisted. “Not in Roman politics, anyway. And they are right. We need a period of powerful central authority to straighten out the City, and there is no man for the job except Pompey. Even I can see that, and you know better than anyone how much I loathe the man.”