The River God's Vengeance(57)

“I must send word to Aurelia,” Julia said. “She can probably explain this.”

Fausta looked me over with a thousand years of patrician cynicism in her eyes. “Oh, I don’t know. An aedile is in a position to acquire any number of trinkets like this.”

I let this insult pass because it set off a tingle in the back of my mind, and I didn’t want my dislike of the woman to distract me. She and Julia were close friends despite Fausta’s contempt for me. But then, Julia detested Milo, my friend of many years. It all worked out.

“But where can we put this?” Julia said, straightening and brushing a few leaves from her hands.

“Don’t move it an inch until you’ve studied it in several lights,” Fausta advised. “Then place it where the most favorable light will strike it, but make sure it’s under a roof so the finish won’t be ruined. Something this exquisite was never intended for outdoor display.” This made excellent sense.

“I don’t think it should be in this house at all,” Julia said. “We should take it to the country estate near Fidenae and build a little shrine for it, a round one in the Italian style with slender Ionic columns and a circle of poplars all around it.” She turned to me. “If we do that this summer, the poplars will be well-grown by the time you inherit the estate.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “I’ll talk to the old man about it; I’m sure he’ll have no objection.” But I already had reservations about this lovely work of art with its murky past. I was not at all sure that it had been sent to me as a friendly gesture.

I returned to my study, new suspicions boiling in my already overburdened mind. I have known men who allowed their minds to become so distracted by suspicion, seeing plots and conspiracies at every hand, that they became incapable of action. For the first time in my life, I felt myself approaching that paralytic stage. To calm my mind, I picked up the scroll I had abandoned and studied it carefully.

It was written in a clumsy hand by an official who clearly had performed this task himself rather than delegating it to a secretary. Young Roman men destined for public life are trained for public speaking, not how to write gracefully. We usually leave that to professionals. Still, I was able to forge my way through the report’s ill-formed letters and awkward phrasing.

It was addressed to the censors Vatia Isauricus and Messala Niger, from the plebeian aedile Aulus Lucilius, a man completely unknown to me. The subject was the condition of the theater of Aemilius Scaurus. In bald, unsparing prose, it described the findings of his investigation: The all but new theater, beneath its unprecedented ornamentation, was built entirely of wood that was green, rotten, termite-chewed, or otherwise unfit for any sort of construction, much less for a structure in which a very large proportion of the citizenry would be seated, at peril of their lives, on festival days.

In considerable detail for so small a document, it went on to detail the bricks used as footing on the landward side of the theater, which were made of wretched clay, ill-?red, and easily crumbled in the hands of a strong man. He had sunk shafts in several locations and found nothing beneath except river mud, the whole weight of the theater resting upon either more of the inferior brick or, worse, on water-soaked timbers that were deteriorating by the day.

It was a thing of wonder, Lucilius concluded, that the structure had survived the Games celebrated by Scaurus in the year of its construction; and he went on to list the names of those he knew to be malefactors in this affair, with the recommendation that the results of his investigation be passed on to the urban praetor for prosecution. The names were: Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, builder; Lucius Folius, dealer in building materials; and—here my stomach sank while the hair on the back of my neck rose, a most disorientating phenomenon—Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica, owner of the lumberyard and brickworks whence had come almost all of the structural components of the theater.

Appended to the bottom of the scroll was a note written by another hand: “From M. Valerius Messala Niger. Censor to the urban praetor. This man is a notorious political enemy of Scaurus and Pompey. We can safely ignore this scurrilous rant.”

I slid the scroll aside and buried my face in my palms. My world was crumbling around me. My long-planned Games were to be held in a structure that was a death trap for the audience. If I were to expose this matter, which was my clear duty, I would bring a terrible disgrace upon my own family, just when they were arranging a political compromise that might save the City from chaos and the Empire from civil war.

This explained much, especially Scipio’s sudden change of heart about prosecuting the fraudulent builders and my family’s vehement objection. Scipio was a Caecilius Metellus by adoption, but among the great families, adoption was as firm as blood descent. He bore the name, and the name was everything. He had been adopted by the great Metellus Pius, Pontifex Maximus before Caesar and a man revered for that most primal of Roman virtues, pietas.