The Sacrilege(28)

“An hour? That long? It must have been a weak poison.”

“Not necessarily. Those instantaneous poisons one always hears about are fictitious. I have never encountered one that took less than an hour to kill a grown man, and most of them take much longer, accompanied by agonizing pains and convulsions. Somebody wanted you dead, my friend.”

“Any idea what sort of poison?” I asked.

“I spoke before of the difficulty of this. I dissected the animal afterward and found no signs of hemorrhage. It did not go into violent convulsions. The poison might have been an extract of certain mushrooms, but it might as easily have been a decoction of Egyptian cobra venom which had been reduced and concentrated, then mixed with a stabilizing agent to form a powder.”

“Cobra venom? That’s a bit exotic. The boy had just visited a peasant herb-woman in the Forum. Do they traffic in such things?”

“They most certainly know mushrooms. Do not be fooled by appearances, Decius. She may never have attended lectures by learned physicians, but a peasant herbalist will have an intimate knowledge of the local plants and their properties. For all I know, there may be an herb or a root native to some local valley that produces a poison deadlier than any known to the school of Hippocrates.”

“Or he might have obtained it elsewhere,” I said.

“I marvel as always at your discernment in these matters. Most men are inclined to accept the quickest or most convenient answer to everything.”

“It’s what makes me so good at my work,” I admitted. “There is a faculty in me that refuses to accept face value. If an explanation is easy or obvious, I get suspicious. If someone wants me to believe something, I suspect an ulterior motive.”

“It must be a useful faculty indeed. In kings it becomes overdeveloped and they see assassins everywhere and overindulge themselves in executions.”

“It’s a good one for a man on the service of the Senate and People of Rome,” I maintained. “And sometimes the lethal designs of enemies are real, as witness the unfortunate pig. How much for the animal, by the way?”

“Twelve sesterces.”

“Twelve? That seems a bit steep for a small pig. Couldn’t you have gone ahead and fed it to the gladiators? Surely the poison affected only the vital organs and could not have permeated the flesh.”

“It is always inadvisable to take liberties with the diet of professional killers. Twelve sesterces, Decius.”

I took out my purse and counted out the coins. “Now, as I see it, the boy may have been consulting the woman in her fortune-telling capacity, as she claimed. When I took his hand, I noticed that he was wearing a suicide ring. My slave Hermes followed him home and he vomited twice on the way. These seem to me to be signs of a very young and inexperienced conspirator, unused to murder. Well, he will be sorry he picked me for his maiden effort.”

“And the fortune-teller?” Asklepiodes inquired.

“He probably wanted to confer about favorable signs or some such. I rather doubt he confided to her the nature of his mission, but a boy nervous enough to wear a poison ring would want to be sure that the gods favored that day for a momentous enterprise, or perhaps he wanted confirmation that he has a long life ahead of him.”

“Yet he was a stranger to you. Who do you suspect set him upon you?”

“I have a short list this time, but more names may be added as I investigate further. Clodius, of course, but I think he would rather do me in with his own hand.”

“Even Publius Clodius may have attained a certain discretion and maturity with the advance of years,” Asklepiodes said. “I hear him spoken of as a promising figure in city politics.”

“Oh, that. It just means he’s the most successful criminal now operating.”

“I also hear your good friend Titus Milo spoken of in the same fashion,” he added.

“That’s just because they’re rivals. But Milo is my friend!” Sometimes I just could not understand Greeks.

“Now, you asked me to view the corpse of Aemilius Capito,” the physician reminded me.

“Oh, right. I almost forgot. Being the would-be victim of a murderer makes you forget other people’s problems in that area. What did you make of it?”

“Most odd,” Asklepiodes said.

“How so?” My attention sharpened. “I thought it seemed rather ordinary, apart from the two-blow style of dispatching.”

“That was the oddity. I persuaded the undertaker’s men to allow me to examine the wounds closely. The persuasion will cost you another ten sesterces, by the way.”

“Ten sesterces just to handle a corpse?” I said. “The necrophiles who lurk around the amphitheaters only pay five.”