Under Vesuvius(53)

“No, this is just how she was found,” the undertaker explained. “Since she is to have a funeral, we will of course prepare her properly.”

“Do so.” I turned to the officials. “I want to know where she was found and the circumstances.”

Silva gestured, and a man in gaudy military garb came to the front. I recognized him as the officer of the city guard.

“Just after first light this morning,” he reported, “I was notified that a young woman’s body had been discovered at the municipal laundry. I—”

“Take me there,” I said, cutting him off. I wanted to hear the rest of his tale on the site.

In a mass, we walked from the precincts of the temple and through the city and out one of the side gates. This took no more than a few minutes, Baiae being the small town that it was.

“I must say, Praetor,” Norbanus said, “that you are making a great fuss over a dead runaway.”

“Is everyone here really as obtuse as they pretend,” I asked, “or is this some act put on for my benefit?” I glared around, but nobody said anything. “Gorgo, daughter of Diocles the priest, was murdered. Now her slave girl has likewise been murdered. The two are connected. Investigating this unfortunate slave girl’s death is as important as investigating Gorgo’s.”

I might as well have been speaking to them in Parthian. When people are accustomed to thinking in terms of rank, status, hierarchy, and so forth, it is difficult if not impossible for them to think any other way. I had learned long since that my mental fluidity was a rare thing in a highborn Roman. In any sort of Roman, for that matter.

The municipal laundry lay just outside the gate. Although it was just a place where wives and family servants could come to do the household laundry, like everything else in Baiae it was a thing of beauty. A low hillside had been terraced and a stream diverted to descend what appeared to be a great, marble stairway. Here a number of women were at work, beating the wet clothes and bedding with wooden paddles, laughing and gossiping the whole time. On a sunny slope just downhill, bronze drying racks awaited the clean cloth.

There were many places to sit and rest amid the soothing sound of flowing water. Huge, mature plane trees provided abundant shade. Protective herms lined the watercourse, and at the top of the marble stair a benevolent, reclining water god watched over all. It was the sort of scene pastoral poets like to sing about: nature with all its dangerous aspects banished, nature tamed and made orderly.

“Where was she found?” I asked.

The guard captain strode to a spot next to the watercourse, beneath a plane tree. It was a grassy little nook, the sort of place where a family might come for a picnic. “She was laid out here,” he said.

‘“Laid out’?”

“Yes, Praetor. She was found exactly as you saw her in the libitinarium, arranged just as she would have been if she were on a funeral bier.”

“But naked?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who found her?”

“Some slave women from the house of Apronius Viba. His house is just against the city wall by the gate, and they were the first to come here this morning.”

I went over the ground, but the springy turf and short-trimmed grass held no prints. I saw nothing that might have been lost or discarded by the killer. At the edge of the little clearing a stone stair led up the slope, away from the watercourse. Curious, I climbed it. Everyone else followed dutifully.

The stair traced a curving path beneath low-hanging branches and ended at a broad pavement flooring on a notch cut into the hillside. A retaining wall perhaps ten feet high covered the vertical face of the cut, and it was pierced by at least thirty low, square doorways. I had never seen such a structure before.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Why, Praetor,” said Silva, “these are ice caves.”

“Oh, yes. You told me about these a few days ago. Who owns them?”

“The ice company leases them to various men of the city,” said the guard captain.

“I want a list of all the lessees,” I said.

“Why, Praetor?” Norbanus demanded. “One of them is mine, I freely admit. But why do you want to know this?”

“Because they strike me as a good place for a runaway slave to hide,” I said, but that was only part of my reason.

He shrugged. “Very well. I can get you the list. There are several of these facilities around the city.”

“This is the one that interests me,” I said. “It will do.”

I saw no more profit to be had in this place, so we returned to the city. By this time my new house was prepared. I sent the rest on about their business but I asked Cicero to tarry. He was clearly bored with life away from Rome and was following my progress out of curiosity.