“Not at present. But I may wish to speak with you again.”
“Anything for one on the service of the Senate and People of Rome,” he said, none too warmly.
With the crowd gone, I went back to my inspection duties, giving them less than half of my attention. Much as I disliked the man’s attitude, Quintus Cosconius had spoken nothing but the truth when he said that Rome needed a police force. Our ancient laws forbade the presence of armed soldiers within the sacred walls, and that extended to any citizen bearing arms in the city. From time to time someone would suggest forming a force of slave-police, on the old Athenian model, but that meant setting slaves in power over citizens and that was unthinkable.
The trouble was that any force of armed men in the city would quickly become a private army for one of the political criminals who plagued the body politic in those days. In earlier times we had done well enough without police because Romans were a mostly law abiding people with a high respect for authority and civic order. Ever since the Gracchi, though, mob action had become the rule in Rome, and every aspiring politician curried favor with a criminal gang, to do his dirty work in return for protection in the courts.
The Republic was very sick, and despite my fondest hopes, there was to be no cure.
“You’ve been drinking,” Julia said when I got home.
“It’s been that sort of day.” I told her about the dead senator while we had dinner in the courtyard.
“You have no business investigating while you’re in another office,” she said. “Varus should appoint a iudex.”
“It may be years before a Court for Assassins is appointed to look into this year’s murders. They’re happening by the job lot. But this one occurred in my territory.”
“You just like to snoop. And you’re hoping to get something on Clodius.”
“What will one more murder laid at his doorstep mean? No, for once I doubt that Clodius had anything to do with it.” Luckily for me, my Julia was a favorite niece of the great Caius Julius Caesar, darling of the Popular Assemblies. Clodius was Caesar’s man and dared not move against me openly, and by this time he considered himself the veritable uncrowned king of Rome, dispensing largesse and commanding his troops in royal fashion. As such, sneaky, covert assassination was supposedly beneath his dignity. Supposedly.
At that time, there were two sorts of men contending for power. The Big Three were all that were left of the lot that had been trying to gain control of the whole empire for decades. Then there were men like Clodius and Milo who just wanted to rule the city itself. Since the great conquerors had to be away from the city for years at a time, all of them had men to look after their interests in Rome. Clodius represented Caesar. Milo had acted for Crassus, although he was also closely tied in with Cicero and the star of Crassus was rapidly fading, to wink out that summer, did we but know it at the time. Plautius Hypsaeus was with the Pompeian faction, and so it went.
“Tell me about it,” Julia said, separating an orange into sections. She always believed her woman’s intuition could greatly improve upon the performance of my plodding reasoning. Sometimes she was right, although I carefully refrained from telling her so.
“So you think a prostitute killed him?” she said when she had heard me out.
“I only said that was in keeping with the weapon. I have never known a man to use such a tool to rid himself of an enemy.”
“Oh yes. Men like sharp edges and lots of blood.”
“Exactly. This little skewer bespeaks a finesse I am reluctant to credit to our forthright cutthroats.”
“But if the man owned property all over the city, why take his hired companion to the cellar of an unfurnished house?”
“Good question,” I allowed. “Of course, in such matters some men have truly recondite taste. Why, your own Uncle Caius Julius has been known to enjoy...”
“Spare me,” she said, very clearly considering that her teeth were clamped tightly together.
With my fellow aediles I shared the warren of office space beneath the ancient Temple of Ceres. A man was waiting for me the next morning when I climbed the steps. “Aedile Metellus?” He was a short, bald man, and he wore a worried look that furrowed his brow all the way back to the middle of his scalp. “I am Manius Varro, the builder.”
“Ah yes. You recently completed a townhouse property for Aulus Cosconius?”
“I did,” he said, still worried. “And I used only the best...”
“You will be happy to learn that I found no violations of the code concerning materials or construction.”
Relief washed over his face like a wave on a beach. “Oh. It’s just about the body, then?” He shook his head ruefully, trying to look concerned. “Poor Aulus Cosconius. I’d done a fair amount of business for him over the years.”
“Was there any dispute over your payment?”
He looked surprised that I should ask. “No. He paid in full for that job months ago. He’d been planning to put up a big tenement in the Subura, but he canceled that a few days ago.”
“Did he say why?”
“No, just that he didn’t want to start anything big with uncertain times ahead. I thought he meant we might have a dictator next year. You never can tell what that might mean.”
“Very true,” I said, my gaze wandering out over one of Rome’s most spectacular views, the eye-stunning expanse of the Circus Maximus stretching out below us. To a native son of Rome, that view is immensely satisfying because it combines three of our passions: races, gambling, and enormous, vulgar buildings. His gaze followed mine.
“Ah, aedile, I take it you’ll be organizing the races next month?”
“To the great distress of my purse, yes.”
“Do you know who’s driving in the first race?”
“Victor for the Reds, Androcles for the Greens, Philip for the Blues, and Paris for the Whites.” I could have reeled off the names of all sixteen horses they would be driving as well. I was good at that sort of thing.
“You Caecilians are Reds, aren’t you?”
“Since Romulus,” I told him, knowing what was coming.
“I support the Blues. Fifty sesterces on Philip in the first race, even money?” He undoubtedly knew the names of all the horses as well.
“The Sparrow has a sore forefoot,” I said, naming the Reds’ near-side trace horse. “Give me three to two.”
“Done!” he grinned. We took out the little tablets half the men in Rome carry around to record bets. With our styli we scratched our names and bets in each other’s tablets. He walked away whistling, and I felt better, too. Victor had assured me personally that the Sparrow’s foot would be fine in plenty of time for the race. I flicked the accumulation of wax from the tip of my stylus, my mind going back to the condition of Cosconius’s body.
I had dismissed Varro as a suspect in the murder. Building contractors as a class are swindlers rather than murderers, and his manner was all wrong. But our little bet had set me on a promising mental trail. My borrowed lictor was sitting on the base of the statue of Proserpina that stood in front of the temple before the restorations commissioned by Macaenas. He looked bored senseless. I summoned him.
“Let’s go to the Forum.” At that he brightened. Everything really interesting was happening in the Forum. In the Forum, lictors were respected as symbols of imperium. With him preceding me, we went down the hill and across the old Cattle Market and along the Tuscan Street to the Forum.
The place was thronged, as usual. It held an aura of barely-contained menace in that unruly year, but people still respected the symbol of the fasces and made way for the lictor. I made a slow circuit of the area, finding out who was there and, more important, who was not. To my great relief, neither Clodius nor Milo was around with their crowds of thugs. Among the candidates for the next year’s offices I saw the young Quintus Cosconius. Unlike the others standing for the tribuneship in their specially whitened togas, he wore a dingy brown toga, and he had not shaved his face nor combed his hair, all in token of mourning.