'She won't like that!' he said.
I was tired of his mistress trying to make demands on me when I had busy plans of my own, but to get rid of him I said I would break my previous appointment if I could (not meaning to try). Then I slung one end of my black cloak over my shoulder and studied the pyre like a mourner who was lost in melancholy thought: the transience of life, inevitable death, how to avoid the Furies, how to placate the Fates (and how soon can one politely make an escape from this funeral... ).
When the slave had gone I cast my garland and poured my oil, said a few words in private to the cook's soul, then collected my hired donkey and left the scene.
At the site where the cake stall once stood I reined in thoughtfully.
I had to be clear what I intended doing now. I had been working for Severina simply to stay close enough to study her as a suspect. It must be nearly time to choose where I really stood.
Yet it was beginning to look as if Severina's theories about who killed Hortensius Novus might be accurate. Priscillus for one had attempted it, after Novus took his stubborn business stand. And apparently either Pollia or Atilia was responsible for another try, with a poisoned cake.
I considered the one line of events which I could now trace satisfactorily: Priscillus planting the poisoned spices which killed Viridovix. A murder which did remove a key witness to what had happened that day in the kitchen-yet a murder brought about by chance. If I had not gone into the dining room for professional reasons that evening, Viridovix would never have rushed in there too. No one could have planned that. Poor Viridovix was an accident.
For obvious and very strong reasons I wanted to avenge the cook. For equally strong social reasons, there was no future in doing it.
True, I had enough evidence to ask a magistrate to indict Appius Priscillus. But face facts: Viridovix was a slave. If I showed that Priscillus had killed him-especially without intending to-what would probably happen if it ever reached a court would be not a murder trial, but a civil suit by the Hortensii for the loss of their slave. The worst charge levelled against Appius Priscillus would be a compensation claim for lost property. No court would put much value on a Gallic prisoner of war; a cook, and not even Alexandrian! Two hundred sestercii, at the outside.
That left my only hope of exacting retribution for Viridovix in the indirect approach: through proving what had happened to his dead master and bringing that culprit to book. All I knew was what had not happened. I could name suspects with motives, but possessing a motive to kill someone was not, in these enlightened days, enough to have them denounced publically. They had made attempts; yet as far as I knew the attempts had failed. Again, probably no charge.
Lastly, there was Severina Zotica. Severina, who had established a wonderful motive for herself when Novus agreed to marry her-and lost it, the moment he died before their wedding contracts were exchanged.
Perhaps she had another motive. But if so, I could not fathom what it was.
Why do funerals always arouse such a tearing appetite? I had to stop thinking about life, death, and retribution. All I could apply my mind to was the now futile memory of delectable cakes.
What ineptitude makes a landlord destroy such a boon to the community? Minnius would have been an asset to the neighbourhood whatever rent he paid. By clearing him out, Hortensius Felix must have made his name a byword for pointless destructiveness all over the Pincian. Well, landlords are used to that. Who knows what labyrinthine form of reasoning churns in a lessor's perverted mind? Though in this case the answer was unfortunately obvious: Minnius knew too much.
What could he have known? Simple: Minnius knew who bought the dinner-party cakes.
It was dangerous knowledge. For a moment I even wondered if the cakeman might be dead. Perhaps one dark night after Hortensius Novus was poisoned, sinister shapes had come flitting down the hill from the freedmen's mansion, battered the unlucky pastry king while he was sleeping, and buried the corpse in a shallow grave on the site of his flattened oven and stall... No. I was still sick and rambling. One glance round the area convinced me that no soil had been disturbed. (I was a market gardener's grandson-but more than that, I had been in the army; the army teaches you all there is to know about digging hostile ground.) After a long hot Roman August it would be obvious if anyone had attempted to scrape at this hard-baked hillside. Only the sun had forced open these giant cracks where furiously aimless ants ferried themselves to and fro with specks of chaff while the more sensible lizards basked. Only wheels and hooves had ever packed down the surface of this road.
Minnius might be dead, but if so he wasn't here. And if he wasn't here, in the absence of other evidence I might as well hope he was alive.
So where would he go? Thinking back to my previous conversations with him, it was possible he had told me the answer himself: '... in those days I mas still selling pistachio nuts off a tray in the Emporium ...'
I turned the donkey down the hill, and set off across Rome.
It took me an hour to find him, but I managed eventually. So it was an hour well spent.
The Emporium sits on the city side of the Tiber bank, under the shadow of the Aventine. It is the main exchange in Italy for produce imported by sea, quite simply the greatest, most fascinating commodity market in the Empire-the hub of world trade. You can buy anything there, from Phoenician glass to Gallic venison; Indian rubies; British leather; Arabian peppercorns; Chinese silk; papyrus, fish pickle, porphyry, olives, amber, ingots of tin and copper or bales of honey-coloured wool; and from Italy itself all the building bricks, roof tiles, ceramic dinner services, oil, fruit and wine you could ever want-provided you are prepared to buy it in wholesale quantities. No point asking the man politely if he will pick you out just one nice nutmeg; it must be twenty caskfulls, or you'd better be on your way before he reinforces his raucous sarcasm with the sole of his boot. There are stalls outside for timewasters who only want something tasty for the family lunch.
I had known the cavernous interior of the Emporium building, the wharves where the Tiber wherries jostled in queues before they landed, and the unloading bays for the creaking wagons that rumbled overland from Ostia, since I was knee-high to a Macedonian. I knew more people in the Emporium than my brother-in-law Gaius Baebius did, and he worked there (mind you, unless he landed you with the calamity of his marrying your sister, who would want to know Gaius Baebius?) I even knew that although the place appeared to be stuffed with produce, there were good days at the Emporium; but when the right ships had just landed there could be even better ones. Mind you, the normal rules of human life applied here as welclass="underline" if you dropped in for that special rose-tinted marble your architect had recommended to face your reconditioned atrium, the odds were that the very last sheets in stock would have gone out yesterday to some baker who was building himself an atrocious mausoleum, and as to when another consignment could be expected, legate-it would depend on the quarry, and the shipper, and the winds, and frankly, who could say} Odds on, you would buy yourself a Syrian perfume jar to save being altogether disappointed by the trip-then drop it on the doorstep when you reached home.
Leave that aside. My trip was a success.
The main building was the usual throng of porters and patter. Pushing my way round this noisy bazaar was not the wisest occupation for a recent invalid. But I did find him. He had gone down from a stall but was still one up from his old tray; he was now selling from a stone-faced counter, though he told me he had to take his wares to be cooked first at a public bakery.