The woman’s eyes narrowed when they caught sight of my senator’s stripe. “I’m doing nothing wrong here, Senator,” she protested before I said a word. “You’re not an aedile, anyway.”
“No, but I will be next year, so you may as well cooperate, or I’ll make your life miserable.”
“Well, what do you want, then?”
“Were you here when Crassus left the City a few days ago?”
“I was, and it was quite a show, too. We missed the best of it out here. Couldn’t see that crazy man laying his curse on the whole City.”
“I was on the other side and saw it. But then he disappeared in this direction. Did you see him?”
“Couldn’t miss him. He was wearing that robe, looked like a Babylonian whore’s tent at a country fair.”
At last, an eyewitness. “How did he get down from the gate?”
“Had a ladder, over there.” She pointed to the wall just to the west of the gate. “It’s not there, now.”
“Did you see him go up?”
She thought. “Maybe. The ladder was there when I got here before dawn that morning. Sometime after dawn there was two or three men using the ladder. I didn’t pay much attention. I thought it was people getting a good spot to watch the show. Everybody knew Crassus was going out that morning. His horsemen were all gathered over there on the road. Made a good show.”
As I had suspected, Ateius had had help. It had struck me from the first that he’d had little time to lug all his gear to the top of the gate and get a fire going. His trappings had been awaiting him when he ran there from the Forum.
“What did he do when he reached the ground?”
“Well, first thing, he skinned out of that robe, stuffed it in a sack. A man came up, looked like he was wrapping a bandage around his arm. I heard the tribune cut his arm as part of his curse.”
“Where did he go after that?”
She pointed to the west, where the wall made a great curve to the south to go around the base of the Aventine before turning north again to meet the river. “They took off that way. I didn’t see them after they passed those horse stables.” Much of the land just outside the wall in that area was still pasture, but there were numerous houses and stables as well.
“Thank you. You’ve been the first real help I’ve had in days.”
“You won’t give me a hard time when you get to be aedile, will you?”
“I’ll be far too busy.” I asked a few more people, but most hadn’t noticed anything in all the uproar, and the few who had confirmed the bird-seller’s story.
So they had fled westward, two and possibly three of them. There were three more gates before the wall reached the river. They might have reentered the City at any of them, unnoticed. Or they may have gone on to the river and taken a boat across, or trudged up the embankment to cross one of the bridges. Sometime shortly after that, Ateius had been murdered and his body dumped on the western bank of the river.
As always, questions arose. Who were the other men? Were they some of his supporters, such as I had met at his house, or were they other men entirely? Why had his body been deposited on the bank, instead of in the river? Above all, who had killed him?
It did seem that he had not been immediately attacked by indignant Friendly Ones. And it occurred to me to think, what would have happened if his body had been thrown into the river? To begin with, it might have floated all the way to Ostia and gone out to sea, there to feed the fish. And the woman had seen him stuff the robe into a sack, whereas the body had been wearing it. Brilliant philosophical deduction: the killers wanted the body to be found, and by wrapping it in the incriminating robe, they wanted to make sure that it was properly identified, despite its untidy state.
Feeling rather pleased with myself, I began to walk toward home. I was making progress. The problem was, would I progress all the way to the end of this riddle before the funeral obsequies of Ateius and the subsequent dismantling of the City by a rioting mob?
It was a long walk to my home. I came to the rounded southern end of the Circus Maximus and turned up the Triumphal Way, one of the broader of Rome’s narrow streets. The day was fading; Rome was shutting down for the night. Doors were closed, shutters latched, awnings lowered. The hammering of carpenters and smiths was stilled; people were sitting down to their evening meal. Somehow, it didn’t seem like a city poised on the edge of riot and destruction, but Rome is deceptive.
Where the Triumphal Way intersected the Via Sacra, I encountered Hermes.
“I thought I might catch you here. Julia’s been asking about you. I’ve been hanging around the Forum most of the afternoon. She’s worried about you.”