Past Crimes: A Compendium of Historical Mysteries Read online

  Cassia could not cook—she knew the theory of cooking, baking, beer brewing, wine making, and many other crafts of food, but she could not execute any of these herself. We bought all our meals from the tavern down the street.

  “That means the boy didn’t do it either,” I said in a low voice. Sergius had wandered to the corner where my bed was, and now pulled back the shutter to look down into the street. “He followed me to the baker’s.”

  “Unless he did it before you saw him the first time,” Cassia pointed out. “Though that’s unlikely. I see no blood on him either. Dirt, yes. Whoever cares for him doesn’t bathe him.” She shook her head in disapproval.

  Cassia was always clean, from the toes that peeped from her sandals to the curls on top of her head. She bathed every afternoon and came home smelling of scented oil. I believe one reason she didn’t complain about being a slave to a gladiator is that I did not hinder her leaving for the baths at the eighth hour of every day precisely.

  “I’m not taking him back to the brothel.”

  “I agree. Poor lad.” Cassia set her stylus on the table. “Where will you take him?”

  We both knew he could not stay here. We barely had the coin to feed ourselves, in spite of our “benefactor.” Cassia tirelessly worked to uncover his identity, but she’d so far not been successful.

  I thought in silence then said, “Marcella.”

  Cassia’s brows rose. “Widow of your friend, who has five children of her own?”

  “She is kind and always needs help on the farm.”

  Marcella had been the wife of a gladiator who’d called himself Xerxes. I never learned his real name—I don’t think he remembered it. He’d been secundus palus at our gladiator school, the second-best fighter. The primus palus, the top fighter, had been me. Many commented on the irony of our names—Xerxes the Persian and beaten down Leonidas the Spartan at the Battle of Thermopylae—but we only stared at those who mentioned it until they quietly slunk away.

  Xerxes, probably the closest friend I’d had in life, had married and produced five children, even though he’d returned to the ludus every day for training and to the arenas for the games. He’d never been paired with me, and that fact had eventually gotten him killed. If I’d been his opponent that fatal day, I’d have let him win. I’d had nothing to lose—he’d had everything.

  Marcella had been grateful to me for returning his body, along with his meager belongings. I’d contributed some of my winnings to help her set up a monument to him with a long inscription she’d told me said what a good husband and father he’d been. Xerxes, dead at age twenty-six.

  Cassia watched me a moment and then simply went back to studying the false voucher, which told me she approved of what I wanted to do.

  “Can you mend this?” I asked, stirring the shards of the cup with my finger.

  Cassia switched her gaze to it, considering. “I believe so. I’ll go to the potters’ yard and find some paste.”

  She’d likely have it fixed better than new, or talk the potters into doing it for her. I held out my hand to Sergius. “Come with me.”

  Sergius looked around from where he held the shutter open, letting in a chunk of hot sunlight. His eyes filled with fear. “To Alba?”

  “No. To my friend. She has a farm.”

  Sergius’s face screwed up as though he had to think hard about this. I began to wonder if there was something wrong with him. He’d been streetwise enough to find his way through Rome but had not enough wit to tell me all of his name or who this woman called Alba was until I’d pried it from him.

  If Alba owned the boy and I stole him away, I’d be taken to court. If I returned him, he’d go back to being a body to fulfill some senator’s lustful fantasy. One of those fantasies could get Sergius killed.

  I prayed Mars was looking out for me today, and made my decision. I’d take the boy to Marcella, and if this Alba fussed about it, I’d ask Cassia to come up with the money somehow to pay her off.

  “Never seen a farm,” Sergius said doubtfully.

  Cassia stood and went to him, leaning down to speak in a bright tone I’d never heard her use. “Well, today you will, my lad. I’ll mend your cup, and Leonidas will bring it to you later.” She straightened up, reached to him as though to pat his head, then withdrew her hand before it touched his greasy hair.

  Marcella would bathe him. She had a spring on her farm, which she diverted to her own makeshift baths, and her children spent every summer day in them. She laughed and said they were half fish.

  I held out my hand. Sergius, at last making up his mind, came and took it.

  Cassia sent me a look I could not interpret. I ignored her and led Sergius out.

  I saw Cassia dart back to her table to make a mark on her tablet as we left, likely the time I departed and where I was going. I felt relief more than annoyance. Her record-keeping had saved my life more than once.

  I took Sergius through streets that had emptied for the heat of the afternoon. The sixth hour had passed—work was finished, time to sleep out of the sunshine or head for the baths to while away the bright hours of the day.

  We walked toward the Forum Augusti. From there we’d make our way to the Porta Capena as Marcella lived a few miles west of the city along the Via Latina.

  If Selenius’s body had been discovered, there was no sign of it in the people who wandered around the end of the Forum Augusti’s walls and down to the district called the Carinae. No one pointed at me and cried murderer! At least not today.

  Even so, they noticed me. As they had this morning, people pointed, whispered, noted my passing. They’d wonder about the boy now too.

  I halted at the corner of a lane that led to a small piazza. A narrow fountain spouted from the side of a tall tower that connected to the aqueducts, the overflow from the fountain’s stone basin sliding down the street until it found the nearest drain in the concrete curb. Most fountains did this, rendering Rome’s streets damp streambeds. Water flowed constantly into and out of Rome without a break.

  I crouched down next to Sergius. “Do you know a faster way to the Porta Capena?”

  The lad nodded readily, as though he’d been waiting for me to ask.

  I rose and took his hand, letting him pull me along through the packed houses and apartments between the Oppian and Palatine hills. If we continued on this road, we’d skirt the Palatine and turn near the Circus Maximus to reach the gate, a route that would take us through some of the most populated streets in Rome.

  As I’d hoped, Sergius knew a way around. He moved unerringly down a side passage to a scarred door much like the one he’d brought me through earlier.

  This door was locked, but Sergius lifted an iron sliver that had been tucked under a rock, picked it open, and returned the iron sliver to its place. No one paid any attention to him, I noted. They looked at me, but they took no heed of what the small boy a few feet from me was doing.

  Sergius opened the door a few inches and slid through. If I hadn’t been watching him, he’d have disappeared before I’d been aware. I waited until the street cleared a bit then caught the door before it closed and slipped inside after him.

  I found myself in a dark, narrow passageway that smelled of urine and decay. For a moment, I imagined myself in the outbuildings of an amphitheater, waiting with both beasts and men to go to what might be our last fight. Darkness crept over my mind, wanting to suck me into it, but I shook it off and hurried after the boy, the sound of his footsteps guiding me.

  The passageway led downward, and the floor grew wet as I descended. Soon my large sandaled feet sloshed in water and who knew what else, the walls now damp to my touch. I came to a branch in the passageway, emptiness to the right and to the left. I could no longer hear Sergius.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  My words echoed back to me, but no reply from Sergius.

  The darkness was complete, the light that had streamed through the cracks of the outer door far behind. I felt a rush of ai
r to my left, and the soft grunt of a man striking out.

  My instincts, honed from years of training for the deadliest games in the world, had me grabbing the wrist of the hand that came at me, turning it back and breaking the bone, even as a knife slashed through my tunic, biting into my flesh.

  Chapter 4

  The man wailed. I heard a thump as he fell back against the wall, and another cry of pain. A knife clattered to the damp floor, and I picked it up. It had cut me, but only a glancing blow.

  “Don’t kill me,” the man wheezed. “Please …”

  I groped until I found him then hauled him up by the back of his neck. He continued to plead and beg, and he smelled like filth.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “No one.” His whisper was hoarse. “No one.”

  “Tell me, No One, do you know the way from here to the Porta Campena?”

  His groan cut off. “What?”

  I squeezed his neck a bit harder. “Do you know where this tunnel leads?”

  “Yes, yes. Don’t hurt me anymore. Sir.”

  I wasn’t a patrician or an equestrian and never would be, but I didn’t correct his use of the honorific. Down here in the dark, I could be anyone.

  “Show me,” I said.

  The man trembled all over. I loosened my grip but not enough to let him run away. He shuffled forward, me half supporting him with one hand on his neck, the other under his unhurt arm.

  We moved a long way through the barrel vault of the tunnel, the stench of the damp floor nauseating.

  I didn’t usually mind closed-in spaces, feeling safest in my life when I’d been holed up in my tiny bedchamber in the ludus. The cell at the ludus had been my sanctuary, a place where no one expected me to do anything but lie on my back and wait for the next day. Perhaps that’s why I slept so much now—bed was the only place in which I felt protected.

  But this noisome corridor was not the same as my dry little room at the ludus where Xerxes had scratched erotic pictures onto the walls for me. It was wet and stank, and we kept going down, down into blacker darkness. I expected to find raw sewage at any moment, and the rush of water from under every latrine and domus in the city, carrying away leavings of its citizens. Romans considered gladiators excrement, but I had no wish to become it in truth.

  The tunnel began to slope upward again, and at long last, I no longer waded through liquid. After the tunnel dried out, a slit of light cut through the wall and made me blink.

  I’d learned how to keep flashes of light from blinding me—an opponent could move his shield to catch the sunlight and beam it into the small eyeholes of my helmet. If I let such a thing distract me, it would be for the last time.

  The man I propelled along obviously hadn’t had arena training. He screwed up his eyes and tripped, and would have fallen had not my firm grip kept him on his feet.

  The chink of light belonged to a wooden door whose vertical slats had warped as they dried in the sun. The door was locked, but the latch that held it was easily broken with one shove. We emerged into a narrow street that looked like all other narrow streets in Rome. The smoke from a tavern mixed with the stench of slops and a waft of spice from a nearby warehouse.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  The man peered about, barely able to open his eyes in the bright sunshine—he must have been in the tunnel a long time. “Bottom of the Caelian Hill,” he said breathlessly. “Near the old wall.”

  The Caelian was a smaller hill across from the Palatine, the base of it filled with tiny lanes and too many houses. Finer houses spread out as the hill rose, and an aqueduct marched across the top, its arches raised against the sky.

  I studied the man I held. He was grimy, his smell unfortunate, his face black with muck, his skin dark from both the sun and whatever were his origins. I’d thought he would be older, but a fairly young face turned up to me, his dark eyes above unshaven cheeks filled with pain. I’d cut his skin when I’d broken his wrist, and the blood had stained his tunic and the pathetic remains of his sandals. He might have been twenty at most, which was a man by Roman standards, but his look was that of a youth.

  He was also a slave, I realized by the tattered remains of his garments. A runaway one probably. Not that I would immediately haul him back to his master—if the master had been good to him, he wouldn’t have run.

  He gaped as he took me in, finally seeing what sort of man had hold of him. “I didn’t mean … I didn’t mean …”

  “To try to rob me in the dark?” I finished for him. “An easy mistake.”

  “I thought—” He broke off, his gaze going to the scar that ran down my neck. “Who are you?”

  “You’ll have to get that wrist seen to,” I said, ignoring the question. “The best medicus for setting bones is Nonus Marcianus. He lives at the bottom of the Aventine, near the fountain of the three fish. Tell him Leonidas sent you and that he should go to Cassia for his payment. Can you remember that?”

  The man stared at me in shock. “Leonidas?”

  “Yes, that Leonidas,” I said impatiently.

  He shook his head in confusion. “Never heard of you. I meant that the name is unusual. Greek—Spartan. But you don’t look Greek.”

  The fact that he didn’t know of Leonidas the Gladiator surprised me. I had been the most famous fighting man in all of Rome until the last year, and everyone in Rome went to the games. I’d traveled with my lanista for exhibitions outside Rome many a time, so people the length of the empire had seen me. Either this man was from a very remote outpost, or he’d been living in the sewers a long, long time.

  “Go to Marcianus,” I said firmly. “Remember, fountain of the three fishes. Ask there for him.”

  The man nodded, his greasy hair falling into his eyes. Nonus Marcianus would not thank me for sending him this squalid specimen, but I knew he’d see to him without hesitation.

  As the man finally shuffled away, I heard light footsteps. Sergius came running down the street to me, having popped through another door.

  “I lost you!” he said breathlessly, panic in his voice.

  I held out my hand, hiding my relief. “Now I am found again.”

  The relief startled me. I had fully prepared to walk through the tunnels in search of the boy if I had to, and the thought of not finding him had made me cold.

  I put my speculations about these feelings aside as I led Sergius onward. Both of us were dirty and smelly from the tunnels, but the people we passed as we walked under the aqueduct and out through the gate were just as stained from travel, tired and ready for journey’s end.

  I wondered if any of the travelers had the slips of papyrus they’d take to a shipping agent or money-changer to redeem the equivalent of the funds they’d paid into an account in their own cities. They’d be unlucky if they’d been told to go to Selenius to collect. If it was discovered the slips were forged, they would be worth nothing.

  It set me to thinking. Had a traveler approached Selenius with a forged chit, and Selenius indignantly refused to honor it? Had the man with the forged paper grown enraged and murdered him?

  Or was Selenius the forger? He could give the false slips to confederates who’d take them to the far corners of Rome, where agents might not realize the forgery and give out the coins. A nice scheme, if true. Selenius and his friends could divide the money without it costing them a single as.

  Perhaps someone in the provinces had caught on to the fact that he was being robbed. That man might have come to Rome to confront Selenius, even to kill him.

  I had little doubt that Cassia had already considered these speculations. While I traveled to the country, she’d be finding out who Selenius’s confederates or angry customers might be. How Cassia would discover these things, I didn’t entirely understand, but she knew every slave and every scribe in every house from the Palatine to the top of the Esquiline and every villa beyond that.

  We weren’t going far, but I tagged along behind a merchants’ caravan, holding
tight to Sergius’s hand, carrying him when grew he tired. Even this close to Rome, even in these peaceful times, even in the middle of the afternoon, robbers could hide and strike a lone, exhausted traveler. I didn’t worry for myself, but having to look after a child would hamper me if I had to fight.

  The merchant didn’t mind me joining them—he welcomed the muscle against robbers. Carrying Sergius must have made me look trustworthy, because the merchant didn’t seem to worry about me trying to rob him.

  I strode in silence, and Sergius offered no conversation. I realized as we went that I didn’t know how to talk to children. I didn’t much know how to talk to grown men either, so that wasn’t such a surprise. But I hadn’t given up the vague idea I’d have children of my own one day. It would be a quiet upbringing if I couldn’t think of anything to say to them.

  Sergius eventually settled into the crook of my arm and fell asleep against my shoulder. It puzzled me he was so trusting of me, if men at his brothel had used him as I suspected they had. But then I was Leonidas, the hero on his cup come to life. Perhaps he saw me as his champion, or maybe he was too simple to understand I could be as dangerous to him as any drunkard in a brothel.