The River God's Vengeance(64)

“You came ready for a fight,” she said. “The ludus is three streets away. This is a place for joy, for abandoning everyday cares. Yet you come here with weapons in your belt and armor under your tunic and a toga cast off by your poorest freedman.”

I fingered the worn wool. “Oh, come now, it’s not that bad. I’ll not prevaricate. The times are dangerous, and, like every public personage these days, I have enemies. I may have to fight, and I may have to run.”

She nodded. “That is understandable. But I’ll have no disorder in my establishment.” She inclined her head toward an alcove in the painted wall. There were several such and in each stood a huge man with a heavy cudgel thonged to his wide, nail-studded belt. They were gladiators from the nearby ludus, earning extra money as bouncers. “I insist on good behavior; and at the first sign of trouble, I throw the troublemaker out, whether sailor or senator. My girls are clean, my wine is unadulterated, and I keep plenty of water and sand handy in case of fire, more than the law requires. I pay all my fees on time, and if your fellow officeholders think I should give them a little more, I don’t argue.” Her look was defiant, but she had the wrong idea about why I was there.

“From what I hear, things aren’t always peaceful here.”

This took her aback. “But I just said—oh, there was a murder here awhile back, but it was just one murder in the six years I’ve been in business. Other than that, no more than an occasional bloody nose or black eye, maybe a cracked pate if one of my boys has to get rough, nothing worse.”

“Many a senatorial mansion cannot boast of so clean a record,” I told her, “but it is that very murder I have come to discuss. An aedile named—”

She held up a hand for silence. “No! A private citizen named Aulus Lucilius was found dead here. If he had previously been an aedile, that means nothing once he was out of office, you know that perfectly well.”

“I grant your point. Anyway, I want to hear about the circumstances surrounding that gentleman’s death. Be so good as to enlighten me.”

“But the urban praetor’s man questioned me about that long ago,” Andromeda protested. “Why don’t you just read his report?”

“I don’t trust other people’s reports,” I told her. “They don’t ask the right questions in the first place, and then they make mistakes when they record the results. After that, often as not, the report gets misfiled or lost or destroyed altogether, so why don’t you just tell me what happened?”

She smiled and blinked her gilded eyelids. “Your business is far more disorderly than mine, Aedile. Well then, on the night this happened, Lucilius arrived awhile after sunset. It was dark and the lamps were lit, just like now. He had his toga pulled over his head, but I recognized him from the year before, when he’d inspected twice.”

“Had he ever been here as a customer?”

“Not to my knowledge, but look around you. We have a hundred customers on a slow night, a thousand or more during the big festivals. I try to give them all personal attention, but that’s futile. The ones I know by sight are the regulars.”

“I see. Go on, please.”

“Well, a girl named Galatea met him at the door. She led him to a table over in that corner,” she pointed to one opposite from where we sat. “There was already a man seated there, wearing a cloak with the hood pulled over his head.”

“Do your customers usually hide their identities like that with togas and cloaks? I would think that would arouse your suspicions.”

“Hardly. Remember, this was between the nones and the ides of December. Everyone was pretty well wrapped up, that being one of the colder winters of recent memory. I remember Galatea was wearing a wool gown. The girls don’t go around naked until spring, normally. They’ve only left their clothes off these last few nights because of this African wind that’s made it so warm.”

“All right. So the girl Galatea conducted Lucilius to the table of the cloaked man. What then?”

On a stage in the center of the courtyard, beneath an enormous candelabra in the shape of the Hydra with multiple candles atop each of its heads, a troupe of Iberian dancers appeared like a vision and began to perform the famous dances of Gades to the frantic music of fiutes and the rhythm of the little, wooden clappers they held in their palms. These women, like most of the inhabitants of Gades, were of mixed Greek-Phoenician ancestry and had all the most salacious qualities of those nations.

The girls of the dancing families were raised from birth to perform in public, and their dances were the most lubricious imaginable. Actually, they also performed sacred dances with perfect decorum, but not in the Labyrinth, needless to say. Each woman was not only a dancer, but an acrobat and contortionist, a combination I have always liked.