I nodded. “What about the amount? The ides is only two days away. A hundred thousand sesterces amounts to ten thousand gold pieces. Can you raise that sum?”
Quintus Fabius snorted. “The money is no problem. The amount is almost an insult. Though I have to wonder if the boy is worth even that price,” he added under his breath.
Valeria glared at him. “I shall pretend that I never heard you say such a thing, Quintus. And in front of an outsider!” She glanced at me and quickly lowered her eyes.
Quintus Fabius ignored her. “Well, Gordianus, will you take the job?”
I stared at the letter, feeling uneasy. Quintus Fabius bridled at my hesitation. “If it’s a matter of payment, I assure you I can be generous.”
“Payment is always an issue,” I acknowledged, though considering the yawning gulf in my household coffers and the mood of my creditors, I was in no position to decline. “Will I be acting alone?”
“Of course. Naturally, I intend to send along a company of armed men—”
I raised my hand. “Just as I feared. No, Quintus Fabius, absolutely, not. If you entertain a fantasy of taking your son alive by using force, I urge you to forget it. For the boy’s safety as well as my own, I cannot allow it.”
“Gordianus, I will send armed men to Ostia.”
“Very well, but they’ll go without me.”
He took a deep breath and stared at me balefully. “What would you have me do, then? After the ransom is paid and my son released, is there to be no force at hand with which to capture these pirates?”
“Is capturing them your intent?”
“It’s one use for armed men.”
I bit my lip and slowly shook my head.
“I was warned that you were a bargainer,” he growled. “Very well, consider this: If you successfully arrange the release of my son, and afterwards my men are able to retrieve the ransom, I shall reward you with one-twentieth of what they recover, over and above your fee.”
The jangling coins rang like sweet music in my imagination. I cleared my throat and calculated in my head. One-twentieth of 100,000 sesterces was 5,000 sesterces, or 500 gold pieces. I said the figure aloud to be sure there was no misunderstanding. Quintus Fabius slowly nodded.
Five hundred pieces of gold would pay my debts, repair the roof on my house, buy a new slave to be my bodyguard (a necessity I had been without for some time), and give me something left over.
On the other hand, there was a bad smell about the whole affair.
In the end, for a generous fee plus the prospect of five hundred pieces of gold, I decided I could hold my nose.
Before I left the house I asked if there was a picture of the kidnapped boy that I could see. Quintus Fabius withdrew, leaving me in his wife’s charge. Valeria wiped her eyes and managed a weak smile as she showed me into another room.
“A woman artist named Iaia painted the family last year, when we were down at Baiae on holiday.” She smiled, obviously proud of the likenesses. The group portrait was done in encaustic wax on wood. Quintus Fabius stood on the left, looking stern. Valeria smiled sweetly on the right. Between them was a strikingly handsome hazel-haired young man with lively blue eyes who was unmistakably her son. The portrait stopped at his shoulders but showed that he was wearing a manly toga.
“The portrait was done to celebrate your son’s coming of age?”
“Yes.”
“Almost as beautiful as his mother,” I said, stating the matter as fact, not flattery.
“People often remark at the resemblance.”
“I suppose he might have a bit of his father about the mouth.”
She shook her head. “Spurius and my husband are not related by blood.”
“No?”
“My first husband died in the civil war. When Quintus married me, he adopted Spurius and made him his heir.”
“Are there any children in the household?”
“Only Spurius. Quintus wanted more children, but it never happened.” She shrugged uneasily. “But he loves Spurius as he would his own flesh, I’m sure of it, though he doesn’t always show it. It’s true they’ve had their differences; but what father and son don’t? Always fighting about money! Spurius can be extravagant, I’ll admit, and the Fabii are famous for stinginess. But the harsh words you heard him utter earlier — pay them no attention. This terrible ordeal has put us both on edge.”
Valeria turned back to the portrait of her son and smiled sadly, her lips trembling. “My little Caesar!” she whispered.
“Caesar?”
“Oh, you know who I mean — Marius’s nephew, the one who was captured by pirates last winter and got away. Oh, Spurius loved hearing that story! Young Caesar became his idol. Whenever he saw him in the Forum he would come home all breathless and say, ‘Mater, do you know who I saw today?’ I would laugh, knowing it could only be Caesar, to make him so excited.” Her lips trembled. “And now, by some jest of the gods, Spurius himself has been captured by pirates... well, that’s why I call him my little Caesar, knowing how brave he must be, and pray for the best.”
I left the next day for Ostia, accompanied by the armed force that Quintus Fabius had hired and outfitted for the occasion. The band was made up of army veterans and freed gladiators, men with no prospects who were willing to kill or risk being killed for a modest wage. There were fifty of us in all, jammed together in a narrow boat sailing down the Tiber. The men took turns rowing, sang old army songs, and bragged about their exploits on the battlefield or in the arena. If one were to believe all their boasting, taken together they had slaughtered the equivalent of several cities the size of Rome.
Their leader was an old Sullan centurion named Marcus, who had an ugly scar that ran from his right cheekbone down to his chin, cutting through both lips. Perhaps the old wound made it painful for him to speak; he could hardly have been more tight-lipped. When I tried to discover what sort of orders Quintus Fabius had given him, Marcus made it clear at once that I would learn no more and no less than he cared to tell me, which for the moment was nothing.
I was an outsider among these men. They looked away when I passed. Whenever I did manage to engage one of them in conversation, the man quickly found something more important to do and in short order I found myself talking to empty air.
But there was one among their number who took a liking to me. His name was Belbo. To some degree he was ostracized by the others as well, for he was not a free man but a slave owned by Quintus Fabius; he had been sent along to fill out the ranks on account of his great size and strength. A previous owner had trained him as a gladiator, but Quintus Fabius used him in his stables. The hair on Belbo’s head was like straw, while the hair on his chin and chest was a mixture of red and yellow. He was by far the largest man in the company. The others joked that if he moved too quickly from one side of the boat to the other he was likely to capsize it.
I expected that nothing would come of questioning him, but soon discovered that Belbo knew more than I thought. He confirmed that young Spurius was not on the best of terms with his father. “There’s always been a grudge between them. The mistress loves the boy, and the boy loves his mother, but the master has a hard spot for Spurius. Which is odd, because the boy is actually more like his father in most ways, even if he is adopted.”
“Really? He looks just like his mother.”
“Yes, and sounds and moves like her, too, but that’s all a kind of mask, if you ask me, like warm sunlight sparkling on cold water. Underneath, he’s as stem as the master, and just as willful. Ask any of the slaves who’ve made the mistake of displeasing him.”