“And your physician took himself off somewhere and never came back?” said Pliny. “On the same day that Verpa died? Curious. More than curious, in fact. Did he say where he was going?” She shook her head. “Well, the city is full of dangers for the unwary. Give me his description and I’ll convey it to the prefect’s office. If he’s come to harm, we’ll learn of it sooner or later. In the meantime, I’ll ask Soranus to have a look at you the next time he comes to examine my wife.” “Oh, no, please,” she protested. “I mean, I’m used to Iatrides. He must come back soon.” “Well, as you wish.” Martial asked what impression she had formed of the family during the days she was there.
His question seemed to make her uncomfortable. “I mustn’t speak ill of my benefactors, fellow-worshipers of the goddess,” she answered, “but, well, I suppose it wasn’t a very happy family. I began to regret that I had agreed to stay there. So much shouting. I tried not to listen, but you couldn’t avoid it.”
“Shouting between…?”
“Verpa and his son, mostly. They had several rows. Lucius complained about not being given enough spending money. He called his father ungrateful. There was some talk about atheistic Jews which I didn’t understand. Then another time they argued about one of the slave girls, Phyllis, I think, and on that occasion the father actually threatened to kill his son if he caught him with her again.”
“Hmm. And Scortilla?” Pliny asked.
“She just seemed, I don’t know how to describe it, preoccupied, jumping at the slightest noise. She hardly spoke to either of them as far as I could tell.”
There was a thoughtful silence all around until finally, Amatia asked, “What will you do now, Pliny? Is the case closed? I suppose there’s no doubt the slaves did it.”
“Husband,” Calpurnia asked, “what will they do to the slaves?”
Pliny had no desire to tell her, but she persisted. “Some will be dressed in shirts covered with pitch and burned alive. Others will be thrown to the lions in the arena.” The girl gave a shudder.
Zosimus, Pliny’s secretary, who had said little all evening, looked straight ahead, not a muscle in his face betraying his feelings. Zosimus had been born a slave in this house and, although he had been educated, cherished, cared for when he was sick, and finally rewarded with freedom, he vibrated with a sympathy for the enslaved that none of these others would ever understand.
“It is the mos maiorum, child,” Amatia explained, touching Calpurnia’s arm.
“You are a traditionalist, dear lady,” Pliny said. “I admire that in you, so rare these days. And yet one’s human feelings rebel…”
“Oh, yes of course,” she murmured.
“But, to answer your question, the case is not closed. Not until I know for a certainty who killed Ingentius Verpa.”
That night Pliny lay in bed, waiting for sleep to come, and thinking how pleasant it was that Calpurnia, his darling Calpurnia, had a new friend.
Chapter Twelve
The seventh day before the Ides of Germanicus.
Day three of the Games.
The first hour of the day.
The usual crop of drowsy-eyed clients filled Pliny’s atrium. With one significant addition-Martial. Pliny had half expected this, but didn’t relish it. He had hoped to have the poet as a genial acquaintance, even a helpful assistant in the Verpa affair, but not as a client. But by attending the salutatio, Martial was proposing himself for that status, and Pliny didn’t see how he could refuse. In a moment of careless generosity, he’d brought it on himself. Now, as the poet’s patron, he had obligations toward him. If the mos maiorum still meant anything at all, he would have to use what small political capital he possessed to get his poems read by the emperor. This meant fawning on the chamberlain, Parthenius-a thought which filled him with disgust. Well, all that was for another day. He had too much else on his plate at the moment.
When the others shuffled out, clutching their daily handouts of food and coin, Martial made no move to leave. It was an awkward moment for both men. But before either could speak, a strange voice sounded from the back of the room. Pliny, looking up, saw that two men whom he did not recognize lingered near the door. One, the shorter of the two, decently dressed in a Greek cloak; the other tall, shabby, long-bearded, and very old. They approached, the short man taking the lead, bowing as he came.
“I am Evaristus, bishop of Rome,” the man said. “My companion is Ioannes of Patmos. He is a visitor to our city. We are Christians.” He said it as easily as one might say, We are rug merchants. He was a man of middle age, olive-skinned, with gray starting in his beard. He searched Pliny’s face with intense black eyes.
Pliny returned a blank look. “Christians,” he said, trying to remember in what connection he had heard the word before. “You are their high priest?”
“One of them,” Evaristus gave a deprecating smile.
“And your business with me?”
“Today our brothers Pollux and the young man Arminius, and our sisters Modestina, Artemisia, and Graciliana are sitting at the feet of God. They will live forever, hallelujah. But I have come to beg for their bodies, to bury them according to our rite.”
“This is a police matter, I can’t allow it.”
But Martial interrupted with an unpleasant laugh. “Immortal are they? What, merely by dying? Seems a cheap and easy way to achieve immortality. Any gladiator can do it. The Isis priests, so I hear, make you pay through the nose and spend months in initiations.”
The bishop seemed to notice him for the first time. His black eyes flashed. “You are that poet, I believe.”
“I am delighted to hear my fame has spread so far.”
“Oh yes, I know your works: the language of the gutter employed with the skill of an artist for the solitary purpose of drawing blood. The women, whores when they aren’t bald, toothless and eyeless; the men, gluttons, hypocrites and perverts.” Martial opened his mouth but the bishop silenced him with a dismissive flick of the hand. “I know what you’re going to say: you attack the vice, not the person; your verse is lascivious while you yourself are chaste. But I tell you, God sees through that false rhetoric.” “Rhetoric! What does a drag-tail fellow like you know about rhetoric?” Martial sputtered. “I was a professor of it for twenty years before my eyes were opened.” It was said with more than a trace of pride. And, for once in his life, the poet found himself without a riposte.
While the two men stared each other down, Pliny was recalling a public reading he had attended some years earlier, given by the historian Cornelius Tacitus: How these Christians were every bit as atheistical as the Jews, from whom their sect had sprung, though now they claimed to hate the Jews. Like everything filthy and degrading, Tacitus had said, they eventually found their way to Rome. Nero accused them of starting the great fire that had nearly destroyed the city some thirty years ago, and executed some of them with particular savagery-so much so that they excited a degree of public sympathy. It was the common belief, nevertheless, that they engaged in orgies and sacrificed children to their god and even ate them. Probably an exaggeration, but who could say, since they practiced their rites in secret.
Then another thought struck him.
“Fellow, bishop, whatever you call yourself, answer me one question. Is the seven-branched candelabrum a symbol of your cult?”
“Certainly not! That is for the ones who reject Our Lord, who misunderstand their own prophecies. Our symbol of recognition is a fish.”
“Then Pollux and the others you named are not Jews?”
“Not since they chose the true path to salvation. I converted Pollux myself some years ago, and from that day onward he never struck a man.”
“You mentioned four others besides Pollux. We found a sixth body, a boy of twelve or thirteen, Hylas he was called. Is he not one of yours?”