The Venus Throw (49 page)

I
woke late the next morning. My head felt as if a whole toga had been stuffed inside it; I could taste scratchy wool on my tongue. Dunking my head in cold water helped. So did eating a bit of food. I stepped shakily into the garden at the heart of Eco’s house and found a place to sit in the sun. After a while Menenia walked by, beneath the portico. She acknowledged my presence with a nod but did not smile. A little while later Eco sauntered out to join me.

“You came in awfully late last night, Papa.”

“Who’s the son here, and who’s the father?”

“Can we talk now?”

“I suppose so.”

“About Dio, and how he died. You never told me yesterday what you think.”

I sighed. “You were right, about the poison in my house being used to kill him.”

“But who did it?”

I took a deep breath, then another. It was hard to say it aloud. “Bethesda.”

Eco looked at me steadily, less surprised than I expected him to be. “Why?”

I told him about the conversation I had overheard in my house, between Clodia and Bethesda. “It must have been
Dio she was talking about. Dio was the powerful, respected man who owned her mother. She never said anything about it to me. Never! Not a single word! But she must have recognized Dio the moment she saw him.”

“Did he recognize her?”

“He looked at her strangely, I remember. But she was hardly more than a child when he last saw her, and he had a great many things on his mind. No, I don’t think he knew who she was. But she surely recognized him. I think back now and realize how oddly she behaved that night. I thought it was because I was going away! What I find so appalling is how quickly she must have made the decision to kill him—no deliberation, no hesitation. She got the poison, fixed the dinner, made a special portion for the guest and then watched him eat it, right in front of me!”

“You have to talk to her, Papa.”

“I’m not ready. I don’t know what to say.”

“Tell her you know what she did. Go on from there.”

“Go on, as if it makes no difference that my wife is a murderer? That she compromised the honor of my house by killing a guest? She should have come to me.”

“Before or after she poisoned Dio?”

“If not before, then certainly after! There, you see how angry it makes me to talk about it? No, I’m not ready to go home to her yet. I wonder if I ever will be.”

“Don’t talk that way, Papa. You must understand why she did it. Look, I wasn’t taken entirely by surprise by what you’ve just told me. I had a lot of time to think on the ride up from Puteoli, wondering how Dio could have been poisoned in your house and by whom. Bethesda does the cooking, Alexandria was a common thread—I figured she might somehow be responsible. So I’ve had more time to think about this than you have, and to make up my mind that it makes no difference. I was with Zotica all that time, seeing what the brute did to her. I can’t be sorry that someone
killed him. If it was Bethesda, and if she had as much reason to hate the man as Zotica did, then what is there to forgive?”

“But it was murder, Eco! Cold-blooded, calculated, committed in secret. Does my name and my household stand for nothing? We are not murderers!” I stood and began to pace around the garden. “Talking does no good. I need to be alone again. I need to think.”

“Not another walk?”

“Why not?”

“You’ll wear out the streets, Papa. Where will you go?”

A completely unrelated thought entered my head. “I’ll take care of my last bit of business with Clodia. The money I gave you for your trip south—you must have a lot left over.”

“Quite a bit.”

“It’s Clodia’s money. It was meant to bribe me so that I’d testify for her, or else it was meant to pay for the slaves of Lucceius. Who knows what she really had in mind? Either way, she didn’t get what she paid for, did she? Never say I’m like Caelius, that I took money from Clodia and didn’t return it. Go fetch it, will you? I’ll take it back to her right now. At least I can wash my hands of that affair and put it behind me for good.”

Eco went into the house and returned with a purse full of coins.

“By the way, how is Zotica doing?” I said. “Now that she’s rested, is she any calmer?”

Eco lowered his eyes.

“Is something wrong?”

“After we talked to her yesterday, Menenia showed her to a place where she could sleep, and left her alone. It was a mistake to let her out of the locked pantry. When I came home from the Forum . . .”

“Oh, no!”

“She ran away, Papa. I can’t say I’m surprised. I told
you, she’s turned wild, like an animal. I doubt that we’ll ever see her again.”

Heading to Clodia’s house by the shortest way would have taken me by my own front door, so I took a roundabout route. The day was hot and the way was steep. I arrived sweaty and winded.

I rapped on the door. After a long pause I rapped again. Finally the peephole opened. A dispassionate eye observed me. “My name’s Gordianus,” I said. “I have business with your mistress.”

The peephole was shut. After a long wait it opened again. The eye that now perused me was penciled with makeup. From the other side of the door I heard a familiar but unexpected voice. “It’s all right, I know him. We can let him in.”

The door swung open to reveal the gallus Trygonion. After I stepped inside he motioned to the slave to shut the door behind us. “What business could you possibly have with Clodia?” he said tersely. He walked at a hurried clip toward the garden and I followed. “Did she forget to pay you?”

“As a matter of fact, she overpaid me; gave me money for expenses I didn’t incur.” I jiggled the bag of coins. “I’m here to return it.”

Trygonion looked at me as if I were mad, then nodded and sighed. “I understand. You wanted an excuse to see her again.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“No, really, I do understand. But I’m afraid you can’t see her.”

“Why not?”

“She’s gone.”

“Where?”

He hesitated. “Down to her villa at Solonium. She left early this morning, before dawn. She wanted to slip out of the city without being seen.” We arrived at the steps leading
down to the garden and stopped beneath the giant Venus. I found my eyes wandering to the pedestal, where Catullus had said she kept her trophies in a secret compartment. Trygonion noticed.

“She emptied it before she left. She burned everything that could be burned. You can see the ashes in that brazier over there. The things that wouldn’t burn—jewels and necklaces and such—she took with her. To throw into the sea, she said.”

“But why?”

He shrugged. “How can a eunuch understand these things?” He walked to the fountain. Suddenly the sound of chanting echoed through the garden, coming from the House of the Galli.

“Why aren’t you with them?” I said.

“I’ll join them soon enough. She sent a messenger for me in the middle of the night, saying she needed my help. ‘I have to leave,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand it here.’ She always goes south for a month right after the Great Mother festival, like a lot of rich people do. Down to Baiae, usually. But she wasn’t waiting for the festival to be over, and she wasn’t going to Baiae. ‘Solonium,’ she said. ‘It’s closer, and nobody ever goes there. I never want to see anybody again.’ ” He smiled ruefully. “I thought she intended for me to go with her.”

The chanting grew louder and faster. Trygonion closed his eyes and moved his lips with the words, then blinked and gazed at the sunlight reflected in the fountain. “But she didn’t want me to go with her. ‘I need someone to close up the house for me,’ she said. ‘I’d ask Clodius, but he mustn’t come near this place, not for a while. You’ll do it for me, won’t you, Trygonion? Make sure the windows are all shuttered and locked, put the good wine away so the slaves can’t get to it, dispatch some last-minute letters for me, that sort of thing.’ I said, ‘Yes, of course. Have a good trip.’ ”

Together we studied the broken sunlight on the water.
“Right before she left, as she was going out the door, she turned back. She called my name. I ran to her. She said, ‘Oh, and don’t tell anyone where I’ve gone.’ I said, ‘Of course I won’t.’ But I suppose it’s all right to tell you, Gordianus. You can keep a secret. You
are
the most honest man in Rome, aren’t you?” His lips curled into a sardonic smile.

“Did a visitor come, late last night?”

Trygonion gave me a blank look, then smiled wanly. “Oh, you mean the poet, the one who recited that awful thing about Attis at the party. Yes, one of the slaves told me he came beating on the door in the middle of the night, drunk and demanding. Bad timing; Clodia was in no mood to be harassed. She sent Barnabas and some of the burlier freedmen to run him off. I think he got away with nothing worse than a broken nose.”

I thought of poor Catullus, lying alone in his dreary little room with his books, hung over with a bloody nose. “And a broken heart. She’s a cold woman.”

Trygonion looked at me sharply. “You’re like all the rest. You think she feels nothing. Of course she feels everything. How could she not, being who she is? She feels
everything
. It amazes me that she can bear it.”

The chanting became dreamlike, magical. The bits of sunlight on the water were dazzling. “And you, Trygonion? Are you the same? Everyone thinks you feel nothing, but in reality—”

He looked at me steadily, his eyes swimming with tears, daring me to go on, but I left the rest of the thought unspoken.

I took the same circuitous route back to Eco’s house.

“Perhaps you should write a letter to Meto,” Eco suggested. “Doesn’t that often help to clear your head?”

“I don’t think it would be wise to put incriminating information about my wife in a letter.”

“You can always burn it afterward. Don’t you often do that, anyway?”

I sometimes think my sons know me too well. I asked Eco to show me where he kept his writing tools.

I sat in his little study and stared at the blank parchment for a long time, then finally wrote:

To my beloved son Meto, serving under the command of Gaius Julius Caesar in Gaul, from his loving father in Rome, may Fortune be with you.

I write this letter on the Nones of Aprilis, the second day of the Great Mother festival . . .

I put down the stylus and stared again at the parchment. There was a sound from the doorway. I looked up and saw Meto looking back at me.

The gods delight in catching us off our guard. The threads of our lives weave back and forth across one another, intersecting in a pattern no mortal can discern: my thoughts had turned to Meto and now he stood before me in the flesh, as if my desire had conjured him up.

“By Hercules!” I whispered. “What are you doing here?”

His older brother suddenly appeared behind him. They both burst out laughing.

“You knew, Eco!” I said. “He was already here when you suggested I write the letter!”

“Of course! I couldn’t resist the joke. Meto arrived right after you left for Clodia’s house. When we heard you coming back, I made him go and hide. You should see the look on your face!”

“Playing tricks on your father is despicable.”

“Yes, but at least you’re smiling,” said Eco.

I pushed the parchment away from me. “A good thing you’re here, Meto. Writing it all down would have been impossible!”

He smiled and sat down beside me. “I’m lucky to be here in one piece.”

I put my hand over his and drew in a breath. I was always worried for him, knowing the dangers he faced in Gaul. But that wasn’t what he meant.

“The riot, over near the Forum,” he explained. “Surely it’s still going on. Didn’t you see it on your way back from the Palatine?”

“I took a roundabout route . . .”

“There’s a play being put on for the festival,” Eco interjected. “Apparently some of Clodius’s hooligans commandeered the stage and set off a riot. Instant revenge for the nasty things that were said about him at the trial yesterday.”

“Put a man like Clodius in charge of a festival and he’ll use it for his own petty ends,” said Meto in disgust. “Politicians are all the same. But what’s this business about a trial?”

I tried to explain as succinctly as I could, but after a moment Meto held up his hand. “It’s all too complicated. Give me military strategy any day!”

I laughed. “But what are you doing in Rome? Is Caesar here?”

“He’s up in Ravenna, actually, but you never heard me say that. Having a secret meeting with Crassus. Then he’s going to Luca to meet with Pompey. Caesar wants to appoint more generals and raise four legion; he’ll need the help of those two to get the Senate to approve the expenditures and to quash complaints that he’s becoming too powerful. If you ask me, the three of them are going to resurrect the Triumvirate, and make it work this time. It’s inevitable. Sooner or later, the Senate will become entirely defunct. The Senate can’t rule itself, much less an empire! It’s nothing more than a hindrance now, another obstacle in Caesar’s way. A rotten limb that needs to be pruned. All this judicial haggling, politicians constantly dragging each other into court—this nonsense has to stop sooner or later. From what
you’ve said, this trial of Caelius is just one more example of how far the standard has fallen.”

“But what’s the alternative?” said Eco.

Meto looked at his brother blandly. “Caesar, of course.”

“You’re talking about a dictator, like Sulla,” I said, shaking my head.

“Or worse,” said Eco, “an outright king, like Ptolemy.”

“I’m talking about a man who can lead. I’ve seen with my own eyes what Caesar can do. All this petty squabbling in Rome seems quite absurd when you’re up in Gaul, watching Romans conquer the world.”

“Pompey and Crassus are hardly petty,” I said.

“That’s why a triumvirate is the answer,” said Meto. “Temporarily, anyway. But you never heard me say that.”

“What about men like Clodius and Milo?” said Eco. “Or Cicero, for that matter? Or Caelius?”

Meto made an expression to show that such men were beneath contempt. What had his service to Caesar done to my son?