Last Seen in Massilia (12 page)

“As for why I think it must have been Rindel….” There was a catch in Arausio’s voice. He cleared his throat and pressed on. “That morning she went missing again. Out for another of her long walks, I thought. But I had other things to worry about. That was the day the Romans brought up the battering-ram. For all we knew, the walls of the city might come down at any moment. As it turned out, the walls held; our soldiers even captured the battering-ram for a trophy. But Rindel….” He cleared his throat. “Rindel never came home. Night fell, and the curfew, and still no sign of her. I was angry, then worried, then frantic. I sent slaves to search for her. One of them came back with the rumor about a girl who had been seen on the Sacrifice Rock pursued by a soldier—an officer in a blue cape.” His eyes bored into mine. “Is it true? Is that what you saw?”

“The man wore a pale blue cape,” I acknowledged. I remembered it fluttering in the wind.

“Zeno! It must have been him. I knew it! Rindel must have found him and confronted him. He’d led her on, betrayed her, broken her heart—married that monster instead. Who knows what Rindel said to him, or what he said to her? And it ended with him driving her up the rock, and then—”

“No one drove anyone,” objected Hieronymus. “The woman we saw led, and the man chased after her. He was clearly trying to stop her. The tragedy is that he failed. The woman
jumped
.”

“No, Arausio is right,” insisted Davus. “The woman was trying to get away from the man. Then he caught up with her. He
pushed
her over.”

Arausio looked at me. “What do you say, Gordianus?”

Both Hieronymus and Davus looked to me for vindication. I turned my gaze to the Sacrifice Rock. “I’m not sure. But both versions can’t be true.”

“It matters, don’t you see?” Arausio leaned forward. “If Zeno pushed Rindel, then it was murder. The heartless beast!”

“
If
the woman was Rindel;
if
the man was Zeno.”

“But it must have been them! Rindel never came home. She couldn’t simply disappear, not in a city as small as Massilia, with every exit blocked. It was her on that rock. I know it was! And the man was Zeno, wearing his blue officer’s cape; you saw that for yourself.”

“And if it
was
your daughter and Zeno, and if the only witnesses to the event were the three of us on this terrace, then there are at least two different opinions of what may have occurred—and no way to reconcile them.”

“But there is a way. There’s someone who knows the truth,” insisted Arausio. “Zeno!”

I nodded slowly. “Yes, if it was Zeno we saw in the blue cape, then he alone can tell you exactly what happened, and why.”

“But he never will! He lied to my daughter about loving her. He’ll lie about this as well.”

“Unless he could be compelled to tell the truth.”

“By whom? His father-in-law, the First Timouchos? Apollonides controls the city police and the courts. He’ll stop at nothing to protect his son-in-law and avoid a scandal.” Arausio lowered his eyes. “But there
will
be a scandal. Word is already out. Everyone knows there was a death at the Sacrifice Rock. No one knows yet who it was, but word will spread soon enough. ‘I heard it was the daughter of that Gaulish merchant Arausio,’ they’ll say. ‘Rindel was her name. She went crazy after Zeno spurned her. Her father should have seen it coming.’ And I should have. I should have locked her in her room! How could she bring such shame on her family? Unless I can show
that Zeno pushed her, everyone will assume that she killed herself. An illegal suicide, unsanctioned by the Timouchoi—an offense to the gods at the very moment they sit in judgment on the city, deciding whether Massilia lives or dies! How can I bear it? This will be the ruin of me!”

I felt a sudden chill toward the man. He had come to us grief-stricken at the disappearance of his daughter. Now he seemed more concerned about damage to his own reputation. But the scapegoat had a different reaction. Hieronymus knew what it meant to suffer the onus of public humiliation and ruin in Massilia, to be outcast for the sins of others. He looked at Arausio with tears in his eyes.

“That’s why I’ve come to you, Finder,” said Arausio. “Not just because you witnessed the thing, but also because of what they say about you. You find the truth. The gods guide you to it. I know the truth—my daughter didn’t jump; she must have been pushed—but I can’t prove it. Apollonides could squeeze the truth out of Zeno, but he’ll never do it. But maybe there’s some other way to bring out the truth, and if there is, you’re the man to find it. Name your fee. I can afford it.” As proof, he slipped one of the thick bracelets from his wrist and pressed it into my hand.

The yellow gold was worked with images of a hunt. Archers and hounds pursued an antelope, and overseeing all was Artemis, not in her guise as the strange
xoanon
of the Massilians, but in the traditional image of a robust young woman with long, graceful limbs, armed with a bow and arrow. The workmanship was exquisite.

“What did your daughter look like?” I asked quietly.

Arausio smiled weakly. “Rindel’s hair was blond. She wore it in braids, like her mother. Sometimes her braids hung free. Sometimes she wound them about her head. They shimmered like ropes of gold, like that bracelet in your hand. Her skin was white, as soft as rose petals. Her eyes were blue, like the sea at midmorning. When she smiled….” He drew a shuddering breath. “When Rindel smiled, I felt like a man lying in a field of flowers on a warm spring day.”

I nodded. “I, too, have lost a child, Arausio.”

“A daughter?” He looked at me with tears in his eyes.

“A son. Meto was born a slave and not of my flesh, but I adopted him and he became a Roman. When he was a boy, he was full of mischief and laughter, bright as a newly minted coin. He grew quieter as he grew older, more thoughtful and withdrawn, at least in my presence. I sometimes thought he was more reserved and somber than a young man his age ought to be. But every now and then he still laughed, exactly the way he’d laughed when he was a boy. What I would give to hear Meto laugh again! The sea below the walls of Massilia claimed him, as you say it claimed your daughter. I came all the way from Rome to find him, but he was gone before I arrived. Now there’s nothing more I can do to help my son….”

“Then help my daughter!” begged Arausio. “Save her good name. Help me to prove that she never jumped from the Sacrifice Rock. Prove that Zeno murdered her!”

Davus cleared his throat. “As long as we’re stuck here in Massilia, father-in-law, we could use the money….”

“And surely,” added Hieronymus, “you need something to occupy you, Gordianus. You can’t go on as you have been, sitting and brooding on this terrace from sunrise to sunset.”

Their advice had no influence on me. I had already made up my mind.

“Ever since we saw the incident on the Sacrifice Rock, there’s something I’ve been wondering about.” I spoke slowly, trying to choose my words carefully, although there was no delicate way to speak of the matter. “Others have fallen from the Sacrifice Rock before—scapegoats…suicides. Were their remains never found? I should think they might eventually have…washed up on shore.” I was thinking of the woman we had seen. I was also thinking of Meto.

Hieronymus lowered his eyes. “My parents were never found,” he whispered.

Arausio cleared his throat. “The current can be very strong, depending on the season and the time of day. Yes, sometimes bodies have washed up on shore, but they never enter the harbor; the current won’t allow that. Bodies have been found miles from Massilia—or
never found at all, because so much of the coastline consists of steep, jagged rocks. A body washed onto the shore is likely to be torn to pieces among sharp rocks, or hidden in some inaccessible grotto, or sucked into a seacave where even the eyes of the gods can’t see.”

“After the naval battle with Caesar, there must have been scores of bodies in the waters offshore,” I said.

Arausio nodded. “Yes, but not one of them was recovered. If they were cast onto the shore, and if they could be seen and reached, it was the Romans who claimed them, not us. The Romans control the shoreline.”

“So, even if the woman we saw was washed back to the shore—”

“If anyone found her, it would have been the Romans. Here in Massilia, we would never hear of it.”

“I see. Then we should give up any hope that we might yet identify the woman by her…remains.” My thoughts turned again to Meto. What had become of his body? Surely, if it had been found and identified by Caesar’s men, Trebonius would have known, and would have told me. It seemed most likely that Meto, like Rindel—if indeed the woman was Rindel—had been swept out to sea beyond recovery, swallowed forever by Neptune.

I sighed. “Then we must determine the woman’s identity by some other means. We can begin with practical considerations. For example, what was the woman on the Sacrifice Rock wearing when we saw her that morning? And was it the same as what your daughter was wearing the last time she left your house?”

It was Hieronymus’s recollection that the woman on the rock had worn a dark gray cloak. Davus thought it was more blue than gray. I remembered it as more green than blue. As far as Arausio could recall, none of his daughter’s garments fit any of those descriptions, for she preferred bright colors, but he couldn’t be certain. His wife and household slaves knew Rindel’s wardrobe better than he did; perhaps one of them could either remember or, by elimination, deduce exactly what Rindel had been wearing on the day she left home for the last time.

We talked a bit more, but Arausio was wrung out and unable to think clearly. I told him to go home and see what else he could learn from his wife and slaves.

After he left, I sat on the terrace, idly fingering the gold bracelet and studying the changing light on the Sacrifice Rock and the sea beyond. Suddenly I noticed that Davus was looking at me sidelong, a smile of relief on his lips.

Apparently it was my day for receiving visitors. No sooner had Arausio left, than a slave came running to tell Hieronymus that two more callers had arrived, again asking for Gordianus the Finder.

“Greeks or Gauls?” asked Hieronymus.

“Neither, Master. Romans. They call themselves Publicius and Minucius.”

The scapegoat raised an eyebrow. “I thought you had no friends in Massilia, Gordianus.”

“I’ve no idea who they are. Perhaps it’s another inquiry about what we saw on the Sacrifice Rock.”

“Perhaps. Will you see them?”

“Why not?”

A few moments later two men slightly younger than myself were shown onto the terrace. The taller, balding one was Publicius; the shorter, curly-headed one Minucius. Even without their names I would have known them for Romans by their dress. In Massilia, the Greeks wore the knee-length chiton or the draped chlamys, while the Gauls wore tunics and sometimes trousers; but these men were dressed in togas, as if outfitted for some formal event in the Roman Forum. But what sort of man, even a Roman, dons a toga on a warm day in a foreign city under siege?

Their togas looked freshly washed and had been impeccably draped across their shoulders and folded over their arms. I wondered if they had helped each other to arrange their garments; could one find a slave
this far from Rome who knew the proper way to drape a toga? Despite their gravity, there was something comical about them; they might have been a pair of wide-eyed farmers come to the city to petition a magistrate in the Forum. It seemed absurd, especially given the state of affairs in Massilia, that they should have dressed so formally merely to call on Gordianus the Finder.

Their manner was stiff. When Hieronymus introduced me, they stuck out their jaws and gave me a military salute in unison, striking their fists against their breasts.

They appeared to have mistaken me for someone else. I was about to say as much when Publicius spoke up. The emotion in his voice overwhelmed his dignified bearing and caused him to stammer. “Are you—I mean, are you really—are you
the
Gordianus?”

“I suppose. The name is fairly uncommon,” I allowed.

His shorter companion elbowed him. “Of course it’s him! There can be only one Gordianus the Finder.”

“Perhaps not,” I said. “Some philosophers teach that each man is unique, but others believe that we each have a double.”

Publicius laughed out loud. “And a wit! Of course, you would be. So famously clever and all that.” He shook his head, beaming at me. “I can hardly believe it. I’m actually seeing you in the flesh!” His eyes sparkled, as if he were Jason and I the fleece. I found his scrutiny disconcerting.

Minucius saw my discomfort. “You’re wary, Finder—and rightly so, in this godforsaken city.” He lowered his voice. “Spies everywhere. And pretenders.”

“Pretenders?”

“Frauds. Impostors. Liars and rogues. Misleaders of the credulous.”

“You make Massilia sound like Rome.”

I was serious, but they again took my words for wit and cackled. Whom on earth had they mistaken me for? A popular comedian from the stage? Some wandering philosopher with a cultish following?

“I think, citizens, that you may have confused me with another Gordianus.”

“Surely not,” said Publicius. “Are you not the father of Meto, Caesar’s close companion?”

I drew a sharp breath. “I am.”

“The same Gordianus who fought alongside his son Meto, then barely old enough to don a manly toga, under the banner of the great Lucius Sergius Catilina—”

“Catilina the Deliverer!” intoned Minucius in a sudden rapture, with folded hands and upturned eyes.

“—at the battle of Pistoria?”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I was at Pistoria…with Meto. And Catilina. That was years ago.”

“Thirteen years ago, last Januarius,” noted Minucius. “Thirteen is a mystical number!”

“You and your son were the only followers of Catilina to survive that battle,” continued Publicius. “All the others perished alongside the great Deliverer. Nothing in this universe occurs without a reason. We are all part of a divine plan. The gods chose you, Gordianus, and your son, to carry the memory of Catilina’s last moments.”

“Did they? All I remember is a great deal of noise and confusion, and screaming, and blood everywhere.” And fear, I thought. I had never known such fear as when the Roman troops assembled against Catilina began to converge upon us there on that battlefield in northern Italy. I was there, suited in mismatched armor with a sword in my hand, for only one reason: because my son, with the hotheaded enthusiasm of a sixteen-year-old, had decided to cast his lot with the doomed leader of a doomed revolution, and if I could not persuade him to abandon Catilina, I had determined to die fighting at his side. But in the end it was Meto who saved me, who abandoned the battlefield to drag me, unconscious, to a safe refuge where we two alone, of all those who fought alongside Catilina, survived. The next day, in the victors’ camp, I saw the head of Catilina mounted on a stake. He had been a man of immense charm and wit, radiating an infectious sensuality; nothing could have brought home more vividly the totality of his destruction than the sight of that lifeless head with its gaping mouth and empty eyes. It haunted my nightmares still. So much for the revolution Catilina had promised his followers; so much for the leader these men still, inexplicably, insisted on calling “the Deliverer.”

“Pistoria!” said Publicius, who intoned the name of the battleground as if it were a holy shrine. “You were actually there, beside the Deliverer himself! Did you hear his last words?”

“I heard the speech he delivered to his troops.” Wry and ironical it had been, fearless and without illusion. Catilina had faced destruction with his eyes wide open, perversely defiant to the end.

“And you saw his final moments?”

I sighed. “Meto and I were near Catilina when the fighting began. He planted his eagle standard in the ground. That was the spot where he made his last stand. I saw the standard fall….”

“The eagle standard!” gasped Publicius. “The eagle standard of Marius himself, which Catilina held in trust for the next deliverer to come.”

Publicius and Minucius raised their hands and chanted together: “The eagle standard! The eagle standard!”

“Yes, well….” I felt increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of these two fawning acolytes of a dead deliverer. “If you were such staunch supporters of Catilina, why were you not there at Pistoria as well?”

As they had chanted, so they blushed in unison. Publicius cleared his throat. “We and a few others came here to Massilia in advance of Catilina, to clear the way for his arrival. Up until very near the end, it was in his mind to escape to Massilia, here to plan his triumphant return to Rome. But in the end, alas, he could not abandon the country and the people he sought to deliver from the Senate’s tyranny. Catilina chose martyrdom over exile. He made his stand at Pistoria and fell there. It was left to us, the handful of his followers who had fled to Massilia, to keep his memory alive.”

“To keep his dream alive!” added Minucius.

“And now the gods have led you here, Gordianus the Finder. Have led both you and your son to Massilia! It can only be a sign that the faith we have kept alive all these years has been justified, that the gods have looked down upon us and given us their blessing.”

“My son—how did you know he was here?”

“Because he came to us, of course. He sought us out in secret. When he revealed to us who he was—”

“No one less than Meto, who fought with Catilina at Pistoria, who crossed the Rubicon with Caesar—”

“We could hardly believe it. It was a sign, of course. A sign of the gods’ favor—”

“
Favor?
” I snapped. “You fools! My son is dead.”

There was an awkward silence. My two visitors gazed sidelong at each other, keeping their mouths shut but working their eyebrows and lips, as if debating some point purely by an exchange of facial expressions. Finally Publicius stepped forward. He took my hand, which hung limply at my side.

“Come with us, Gordianus. We have something to show you. And something to tell you.”

“Tell me now, then.”

He shook his head gravely. “No, not here.” He looked askance at Hieronymus and lowered his voice. “This place is…not suitable.”
Impure,
he meant. Unclean, on account of the scapegoat. “Come, Gordianus. You must see what we have to show you. You must hear what we have to say.”

I swallowed hard. The visit from the Gaulish merchant had distracted me, had lured me with a puzzle to take me out of myself and away from my misery. The visit from these latter-day Catilinarians had plunged me back into an unhappy past and an even more miserable present. What of any consequence could they show me? What could they tell me that I didn’t already know? I looked to Davus, who saw my indecision and gave an eloquent shrug, as if to say,
Why not? What have we to lose, father-in-law, stuck here on the edge of nowhere?

“Very well,” I said. “Davus and I will go with you.”

“And where are you taking my guests?” inquired Hieronymus, who clearly thought as little of the two Romans as I did.

“That, Scapegoat, must be a secret,” said Publicius, with his nose in the air.

“But I’m this man’s host, and as such I’m obliged to look after his safety. Before he leaves my home, you’ll have to tell me where you’re taking him.”

Publicius and Minucius conferred in whispers. At last Publicius
looked up. “I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling
you,
” he said, with the unsubtle implication that the scapegoat’s days were numbered. “We’re taking Gordianus to the house of Gaius Verres.”

Verres! The name was synonymous with corruption, extortion, limitless greed, and the very worst sort of misgovernment. As my two visitors conducted Davus and me through the streets of Massilia, I wondered what possible link could connect these last pitiful sheep from Catilina’s flock to the most notorious of all Roman exiles.

It was Cicero who had prosecuted Gaius Verres a little over twenty years ago. The case had been a major scandal and established Cicero as the preeminent advocate in Rome, even as it destroyed Verres, who fled for Massilia before the court could deliver its damning verdict. The charge against Verres was extortion and criminal oppression of the people of Sicily during his three years as provincial governor of the island. Roman governors have always been notorious for exploiting their provinces and lining their own purses at the expense of the governed, while the Senate, whose members all hope for the opportunity to do the same themselves someday, turns a blind eye. It was indicative of the egregiousness of Verres’s conduct that he was actually brought to trial for his offenses.

According to Cicero, who had also served as an administrator in Sicily, Verres had not only extorted the populace and plundered their civic treasuries, but had virtually stripped the island bare of every beautiful man-made object. Verres’s appetite for fine works of art amounted to a mania. He especially loved paintings of the sort done in encaustic wax on wood, not least because they could easily be carried off, and he assiduously built himself a collection of the best pictures to be gleaned from every public space and private gallery in Sicily. But his greatest passion was for statues. Before Verres, every town square in Sicily, even the humblest, was decorated with the statue of a local hero or some particularly venerated deity; after Verres, the pedestals stood empty—except in those instances where the scoundrel, to squeeze even more money from the locals, had forced them to erect statues of himself, charging them outrageous sums for the privilege. Anyone
who dared to oppose him, whether Sicilian or Roman, was ruthlessly disposed of. His behavior while he controlled the island was more that of a pirate than a provincial governor.

As soon as Verres’s tenure was up and he returned to Rome, the Sicilians sought restitution from the Roman Senate and looked for a way to prosecute the man who had robbed them. Cicero took up their cause and, despite all Verres’s legal finagling and the Senate’s reluctance to prosecute one of its own, Cicero and the Sicilians eventually prevailed. The evidence assembled against Verres was so damning that even the Senate had to act; and as the trial progressed, Verres chose to flee Rome rather than face the verdict. The connoisseur of fine art set another fashion in his choice of destination; Verres fled to Massilia, and in the twenty years of political chaos that ensued, wave upon wave of Roman political exiles would follow him.

I knew who Gaius Verres was, of course—what Roman didn’t?—but I had I never laid eyes on him. I knew that he was here in Massilia, but I had never expected our paths to cross. But then, nothing predictable or expected had occurred since the moment we emerged from the flooded tunnel into the city. More and more it seemed to me that Massilia was an unfamiliar world with its own peculiar rules of logic to which I must bend, willingly or not.

Verres’s house was not far from the scapegoat’s, somewhere along the way to Milo’s house. Within her encircling walls, Massilia was a small city, and her fashionable district was very compact.

The house itself surprised me by its opulence. One thinks of exiles living in ruin and misery, or at least in reduced circumstances. But the house of Verres was even more ostentatious than that of the scapegoat, with a brightly colored facade in shades of pink and yellow, and elaborate columns flanking the entrance. A slave admitted us at once; the Catilinarians were obviously familiar visitors. The foyer was floored with yellow marble with swirling red veins, and, like a Roman house, had niches on either side housing the busts of Verres’s ancestors. Or so I thought upon first glance. When my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw that the busts were not of ancestors after all, unless Verres claimed descent from the likes of Pericles, Aeschylus, and Homer. He had used
the niches reserved for sacred display to show off specimens from his sculpture collection!

A slave led us deeper into the house. Statues and paintings were everywhere. Many of the paintings were installed on the walls, jammed close together, but others were stacked in narrow spaces between pedestals and walls, and some were even piled atop each other in corners. But the paintings, as vivid as many of them were—portraits, pastoral scenes, episodes from
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey,
erotic tableaux—faded into the background. It was the statues that dominated the house, and not just in the niches and the usual spots in front of columns or under archways. There were scores of statues, perhaps hundreds, so crowded together in some rooms that only a narrow pathway had been left clear. Their arrangement made no sense; Diana with her bow and arrow thrust her elbow into the nose of some obscure Sicilian statesman and appeared to take aim directly at the head of a seated Jupiter only a few feet away, whose stern gaze was directed at a pair of rearing life-size stags done in marble and flawlessly painted, even to the white spots on their flanks. The house was large and the rooms spacious, but it was not a palace, and a palace would have been required to properly contain so much art. As it was, I had the peculiar feeling of having stumbled into a very crowded but ominously silent house party, where the guests were all made of bronze and marble—gods and animals, dying Gauls and cavorting satyrs, nude athletes and long-dead playwrights.