She let out a sob, then twisted her lips into a crooked smile. "But something amazing had happened. They didn't blame me at all. They thought the old man had been stabbed to death. Killers had broken into his room after I left him, they said, and cut him up with knives. I didn't know what to think. But the master never blamed me, so I never told anybody what had happened. With the old man dead, I thought every-thing would be like it was before." The smile vanished. "But instead everything changed. The master sold me. Everything just got more and more awful… "
"You're safe now," said Eco gently.
The girl sagged against the wall and closed her eyes. "Please don't make me talk anymore. If only I could sleep… "
"No more talk," Eco agreed. "Stay here for now. One of the slaves will come to show you where you can sleep."
We left her weeping softly and muttering to herself, her face pressed against the wall as if she could somehow melt into it.
I followed Eco into the garden. "What does it mean?"
"It means that Dio was poisoned, Papa."
"But the stabbing -"
"He was stabbed after he was already dead. You remarked yourself how little blood there seems to have been for so many wounds, how the wounds were all close together in his chest and there was no sign that he put up a struggle. Because he was already dead."
"But someone broke into the room that night and scattered everything about. Someone stabbed him. Why?"
"Perhaps it was Titus Coponius himself, because he didn't want it to get out that Dio was poisoned under his roof, and he wanted to make the death look like the work of assassins. But that's not really the point,
is it?"
"What do you mean, Eco?"
"The important thing is that Dio was poisoned."
"But how? Where? By whom? We know that he would touch no food in Coponius's house. And only a short time before, he left my house with a full stomach! As cautious as he was, he wouldn't have eaten anything else that night."
"Exactly, Papa."
"Eco, say what you mean!"
"You needn't shout, Papa. You must be thinking the same thing."
I stopped pacing. We stared at each other.
"Perhaps."
"The symptoms the girl described: if it was poison, what do you
think-"
"Gorgon's hair," I said.
"Yes, I thought the same thing. Some time ago I gave you some gorgon's hair for safekeeping. I didn't want the stuff in my house with the twins. Do you remember?"
"Oh yes," I said. My mouth was dry.
"Do you still have it? Is it still where you put it?"
My silence gave him the answer. Eco nodded slowly. "The last meal Dio ate was at your house, Papa."
"Yes."
"That's where he must have been poisoned." "No!"
"Did someone use the gorgon's hair I gave you? Do you still have it or not?"
"Clodia!" I whispered. "She wasn't pretending to be poisoned, then. The gorgon's hair she showed me could have come from Caelius, after all. Certainly not from Bethesda-not if the gorgon's hair in my house had already been used… "
"What are you whispering, Papa?"
"But Caelius couldn't have killed Dio, not if he was poisoned first. You're right, he's innocent, of that crime at least… "
"I can't hear you, Papa." Eco shook his head, tired and exasperated. "The only thing I can't figure out is why anyone in your household would have wanted to poison Dio in the first place. Who knew the man, much less had any reason to want him dead?"
I thought of my old Egyptian mentor, who secretly liked to tie up young slave girls and abuse them, and particularly liked to bind their wrists and hang them on hooks. I remembered the women in my garden, exchanging secrets about men who had raped them when they were young. I thought of Bethesda when she had been a slave in Alexandria, and the powerful, respected master who had used her mother so cruelly that he killed her, and would have done the same to Bethesda if she hadn't fought back and found herself carted off to the slave market instead, where a poor young Roman smitten by her beauty emptied his purse to pay for her, never dreaming he would take her back to Rome and make her his wife, obliging her to serve dinner to his guests and to give the first heaping portion to an esteemed visitor such as Dio of Alexandria…
I had said to her,
You have deliberately deceived me!
Do you deny it?
And she had answered,
No, husband, I do not deny it. 'And I thought I understood!" "Papa, speak up-"
"Cybele help us!" I shook my head.
"I think I know the answer,
Chapter Twenty Five
Eco pressed me for an explanation, but I only shook my head. We made our way back to the Forum in silence through the hot, crowded streets of the Subura. The sky was cloudless and the sun directly overhead, casting a harsh, glaring light onto a world without shadows. Lit so brightly, objects became perversely indistinct. Edges ran together and views of the distance had no depth. The throngs of people going about their holiday
business seemed faceless. I stared at them, not quite able to make them out. Old or young, male or female, smiling or frowning, standing quietly or shoving their way through the street, all seemed blurred together and equally strange. The city itself was unreal, dreamlike and slightly absurd. This feeling only intensified as we entered the Forum and rejoined the immense crowd attending the trial of Marcus Caelius.
Catullus was where I had left him. "You missed Caelius's climax!" he said. "He did it into that little pyxis, to show everyone how. No, I'm only joking! But it was a good climax for all concerned. One thing about Caelius, he always strives to satisfy whoever he's with, not just himself. No judges or spectators left hankering and unfulfilled at Nola's walls, so to speak."
I stared at him blankly, unable to make sense of what he was saying. He went on, nonetheless. "Then you missed Crassus's whole speech. Just as well, actually. Nobody had a climax there! Seems Crassus was trying to get Caelius off the hook for all those killings on the way up from Neapolis, but if you ask me, Crassus never did learn how to give a decent speech. Plodding, plodding! Words, words, words, and not a memorable pun among them. He should stick to what he knows, making piles of money, and simply bribe the judges instead of boring them to death with bad rhetoric. He made Caelius look as guilty as Caelius managed to make, himself look innocent! It's all up to Cicero now. Who's this?" "My son," I said absently, and introduced Eco.
"Well, good, you're both here for the real speech. Cicero's about to begin. Come, let's see if we can't move up a bit…"
We managed to move considerably closer, so that I was able to see quite clearly the figure now stepping before the judges. Slender and frail when I first met him long ago, Cicero had become plump and thick-jowled in the years of his prosperity. The political triumph of his con-sulship had been followed by near-ruin, when his enemies managed to banish him; counterlegislation passed by Cicero's allies eventually welcomed him back, but not before the great man passed eighteen months in exile, during which time much of his property was destroyed by the mob. In his months away from Rome, Cicero had grown lean with worry, or so it was said. From the way his toga clung to his frame as he swaggered before the court, it looked to me that he had made short work of regaining both his girth and his stature.
Clodius had once been Cicero's political ally, then his nemesis. Even now Clodius was attempting to keep Cicero from rebuilding his ruined house on the Palatine, claiming that the property had been legally seized by the state and sanctified for religious use, and so could not be recovered by Cicero. The two enemies waged war against one another in every arena they could find-on the floor of the Senate, in courts of law, in the reading of omens by priests and augurs. Between them burned the kind of hatred that can be extinguished only by death.