The Sacrilege(75)

“You make no sense whatever,” she said with considerable restraint.

“Made no sense to me at first, either. That’s the way it is with divine revelations. You see, my friend Milo wants to marry Fausta. He was very displeased when he heard that you saw her there that night when she had no right to attend the Mysteries but didn’t join you unmarried women. He hinted that he might be quite unhappy with me should I implicate her in any wrongdoing, and Milo is not a man I would want to fall afoul of. So imagine my relief when I understood that she was not there that night!”

“But I saw her,” Julia said coolly. “Do you think I am a liar, or merely a fool?”

“No, no, nothing of the sort,” I said, laughing and shaking my head. I must have looked and sounded truly demented. “You see, that wasn’t Fausta you recognized. It was her twin brother, Faustus, dressed as a woman!”

Her jaw dropped gratifyingly. “Dressed as a woman? Like Clodius?”

“Yes, like Clodius. And Pompey, and your uncle, Caius Julius. I suspect that Crassus was there as well. Pompey was wearing the dress of the peasant herb-woman, a purple dress. He does so love to wear purple.”

“But Uncle Caius? Can you be sure?”

“He was supposed to spend that night at the house of Metellus Celer, but he went out, ostensibly to look for omens on the Quirinal. I checked at the Temple of Quirinus and found out that he did not go out through the Colline Gate that night. I think he, too, must have donned women’s clothing and went into his own house thus disguised. And if Caesar, Pompey, Clodius and Faustus were there, then Crassus was most likely involved as well.”

“Oh, dear,” she said weakly. “But why? Why meet together in such a bizarre fashion?”

“That is what I am about to find out,” I said. “Come along. Let’s have a few words with my slave boy, Hermes.”

“Your slave?” she said as she followed me to the rear of my house, Cato close behind us.

“Exactly.” I threw open the door to his cubicle, and the boy backed against a wall, white-faced. “Where is it, you thieving little swine?” I shouted.

“What do you mean, master? I don’t know what you’re talking about!” At least he had the grace to look as guilty as Mars in Vulcan’s net.

“I mean the things you stole from the body of Appius Claudius Nero, you disgusting creature!” I slapped his face twice, forehand and backhand.

“Under my bed!” he cried, all but bawling.

I threw back his pallet, revealing a cache of rings, bracelets and coins in a hollow scooped into the dirt floor. Among the glittering loot was a plain bronze cylinder as long as my palm and as big around as my thumb.

“You couldn’t resist, could you?” I said. “You went back out there that night and stripped the body. That’s pretty low, Hermes, robbing a corpse!”

“Of course it’s low!” he yelled. “I’m a slave! What do you expect! You noblemen can murder each other in the streets, and the praetor sends you out of town for a year or two. We get sent to the cross! I couldn’t just leave him lying there with all that gold on him. Anyway, I sacrificed to Mercury, and he’s the god of thieves.”

“Admirable piety. Well, you may have cleared things with the gods, but not with me. You made a mistake, Hermes. You came back here with your ill-gained loot and you had to gloat, didn’t you? It was still dark, but you couldn’t resist trying the quality of the gold.” I held the poison ring before his nose. There were teeth marks on its capsule.

“You didn’t know this was a poison ring and you bit into it. You didn’t suck out all the poison, but you got enough to give you a bellyache all the next day.”

“So poor old Nero had his revenge after all,” he said, wincing at the memory.

“He deserves more!” I shouted. “Cato, bring the whip!”

“You don’t own a whip, master,” Cato said. I turned to face him.

“Yes, I do. A great, nasty-looking flagrum with bronze studs along all the thongs. My father gave it to me when I set up in my own house. Where is it?”

“You lost it in a dice game years ago,” Cato said.

His wife, Cassandra, appeared in the doorway. “Will you all stop yelling? The neighbors will think we’re disorderly. I’m trying to get dinner together. Nobody’s going to whip any slaves in this house, master. Cato’s too old and you’re too softhearted.”

“Oh, let’s go back out to the atrium,” I said, disgusted. “It’s too crowded in here.” I could swear that I saw Julia masking a smile. I examined the bronze tube. The wax seal over its cap was broken. Back in the atrium, Julia and I took chairs while Hermes, temporarily reprieved, stood nervously shifting from one foot to the other.