The Sacrilege(71)

“Quite right, Senator,” said the sign painter a little hesitantly. He left and went back to his task.

“Uh, master, maybe you’d better be more careful how you talk, right out in public.” Hermes looked around, distinctly ill at ease.

“Why?” I demanded. “Have we reached such a pass that a Roman citizen—a Senator, no less—can’t publicly express his opinion of the likes of jumped-up would-be monarchs like Pompey and Crassus and even Julius Caesar?”

“I take no more than a slave’s interest in political matters,” the boy said, “but as I understand it, we’ve reached exactly such a pass.”

“It’s intolerable!” I said, out-Catoing Cato. “I tried to behead Clodius right in front of the senior praetor and I’ll probably have to pay a fine for it. But say the wrong thing in public about a lowbred military adventurer, and I’m supposed to worry that he will try to kill me.”

“Maybe he already has,” Hermes said. “Tried to, I mean.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“Well, somebody tried to poison you. Haven’t you had run-ins with Pompey before?”

“Yes, I have.” Somehow, I had neglected to suspect Pompey of that particular crime, perhaps because of the relative abundance of other suspects. “To be brutally honest, I never believed I was important enough to attract his hostility. Some rather important men have told me exactly that, in fact.”

“Master, I may be only a slave, while Pompey’s the greatest conqueror since Alexander, but even I know that there’s no such thing as an enemy who’s too small to kill.”

“This will bear some thinking,” I said. “You may turn out to be not such a burden after all, Hermes. Keep thinking like this. After he tried to poison me, you saw Nero go to the house of Celer. I’d thought only of Clodia, since she’s the sister of Clodius and has tried to do away with me before, but she’s acted as cat’s-paw for Pompey in the past. But he has those lethal Etruscans with him. Why not send one of them?”

We thought about that for a while, passing the jug back and forth.

“How about this?” Hermes said. “Maybe he didn’t want people to think you’d been murdered at all. You can’t always tell with poison. People die all the time from bad food or simply unknown causes.”

“Right. I was just back in Rome. I might have picked up some horrid disease in Gaul. And since he was already having poor old Capito murdered that night, perhaps he didn’t want to overdo it.”

“So you think he had Capito done away with?” Hermes was enjoying this talk of murder far too much.

“He certainly had reason to.” I told him about Capito’s interference with Pompey’s land settlements. The boy gave a low whistle.

“And I thought Clodius and Milo were dangerous men to deal with! These leaders of the Republic are even worse!”

I nodded. “Very true. Clodius and Milo are small-scale gangsters, with purely urban ambitions. These men are criminals of world stature. Do try to moderate your admiration.”

“Well, what do you propose to do about it? Clodius you can always fight. Milo is your friend and his gang is as big and as powerful as Clodius’s. You can’t fight Pompey, if the whole aristocratic party in the Senate can’t do anything about him.”

For a slave, the boy was learning political nuance quickly. Suddenly, the family farm at Beneventum seemed like a good place to be.

“I think you’d better make your peace with him, master,” Hermes advised.

“The problem is, I don’t even know what I’ve done to offend him, if he truly is the one who tried to have me poisoned. I could never prove anything against him in the past. Why should he care about me now?”

“You have a reputation for finding things out about people, don’t you? Things they’d rather keep hidden? Well, maybe he’s done something, or plans to do something, that he’d just as soon nobody found out about.”

“Hermes, you amaze me,” I said. “That is very astute.”

“I told you I thought better on a full stomach.”

There are stages in the investigation of a crime, conspiracy or other mystery that involves many people acting from many motives. At first, all is confusion. Then, as you gather evidence, things get even more complicated and confusing. But eventually there comes a point when each new fact unearthed fits into place with a satisfying click and things become simpler instead of more complex. Things begin to make sense. I now felt that things had reached that stage. It seemed to me that my guardian genius, my ferret-muse, hovered near and was aiding me to untie this knot of murder and intrigue.