Conspiracies of Rome Read online

  We returned to the portico. The dark patch of my friend’s life blood was a vague circle with a diameter of about four feet. On the edge and leading off – I hadn’t taken this in at first – was a confusion of footprints, and the unmistakable signs of a blood-sodden corpse being pulled and then carried off for dumping. A few feet away, hidden in some lengthening grass, were scattered the three broken fragments of Maximin’s staff. It had been sliced roughly in half, and one of the halves had had about five inches lopped off.

  I breathed hard, fighting back the misery and the nausea. At first, I couldn’t make any pattern in the bloody prints. But by measuring with our hands and looking for irregularities in the imprinting leather, we finally made out five distinct sets of prints. Two were of large, heavy men. These were the most frequent going in and out of the circle. One was of a smaller man, who seemed mostly to have stood on the edge, going in perhaps only once.

  There were two other sets of prints. These were inconsistent with the others. They went in once to the circle – we could see a clear impression, as if the blood were already congealing when they passed over it. They came out again, leaving increasingly faint prints as they moved back towards the Forum.

  ‘The small man used the sword,’ said Lucius. ‘The others held your friend on either side. Before then, he fought like a hero – staff against swords. His staff was sliced first in half. Then he defended himself with the part that remained, until this was sliced off by the hand. You say fingers were missing. I fear we should look for them.’

  ‘The question is . . .’ My voice was a croak. I started again: ‘The question is, why stun him and then bring him over here to be murdered?’

  ‘Something may have gone wrong,’ Lucius replied. ‘What was meant as a robbery or abduction became a murder. Perhaps your friend recognised someone. There is reason to believe he was left here for some while after death. The two others may have been sent back to remove the body to the Forum, though for reasons I cannot yet imagine.

  ‘But this is guessing. For the moment, we need evidence. I’m afraid we must look for those fingers. They may not tell us much. Then again, they might. At least, they can be added for burial.’

  We looked, but no fingers. Perhaps the rats did get them after all. Whatever the case, I was quietly relieved.

  The slave produced a small book of waxed wooden tablets. He scraped with his stylus as Lucius gave a dictation – everything plain and matter of fact, with no surmise.

  ‘Always keep a record,’ he explained. ‘What we are seeing now won’t be here tomorrow. Already, much evidence by the Column of Phocas may have gone for good. Always keep a record. Even the least important detail may turn out important – but only if you have it recorded.’

  He had manners enough not to show it. But I could see that Lucius was enjoying himself. He was enjoying the challenge of the investigation, and he was enjoying my company as his apprentice. I was grateful for the help. At the least, I no longer felt alone in that city.

  We moved on. Most of the houses in the side street where Maximin seemed to have been grabbed were in ruins. The end house, though, was still sound. It looked inhabited. The upper storey had windows that must have overlooked the Forum.

  Lucius nodded to his slave.

  ‘Open for the lord Basilius,’ the slave shouted, banging on the flimsy door. ‘The noble lord desires information of the householder. Open for the lord Basilius.’

  Connections really are everything. The slave had no sooner fallen silent than there was a scraping of bolts and the door opened a few inches. An old woman looked suspiciously out – ruined teeth, wrinkles, a few wisps of hair. She must have been a good twenty years younger than I now am. It pleases me to think she looked much worse. Such is the effect of poverty.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Information,’ Lucius replied.

  ‘You’ll get nothing from me,’ she said. ‘I’m just a poor old woman. Go away and leave me be.’

  She tried to shut the door. But the slave had deftly pushed his right foot into the opening. The old woman made a feeble effort to eject him, then gave up. The door opened wide. We walked in.

  I can’t be bothered to describe how the place stank. You can imagine that for yourself. Filth and great age so often go naturally together. Even though I make a certain effort, I know that I am hardly a sweet flower to my students. Being half paralysed from a stroke, the old woman had made no effort. I don’t know how long she’d been alone. I suppose she was waiting for death to claim her, and in the meantime she was living on the papal charity that supported much of the Roman population.

  I don’t think the building had originally been a house. It was too small for a house in such a fine location, and had the remains of an elaborate stucco. It must once have been a row of offices. Now what was left was a hovel for the poorest of the poor.

  The old woman settled herself into a cot that was the only furniture in the single room of the ground floor, and pulled some rags around her. The light that came through the blocked window just above street level was too poor for me to see the stinking refuse with which she surrounded herself in the cot to keep warm at night. We stood leaning against a wall that seemed cleaner than the others by comparison.

  ‘With proper respect for your many years, mother, we seek information of the highest value,’ Lucius opened in a surprisingly charming voice. He allowed a slight emphasis on the words ‘highest value’.

  ‘A man of God – a priest, no less, of Holy Mother Church – was set upon last night by vagabonds. They robbed and murdered him just by your house. We are charged by His Holiness himself to bring these enemies of God and man to justice. Did you hear the commotion last night?’

  She had. She’d been woken by a sound of shouting outside. She’d crawled upstairs to the disused upper part of the house and looked out of the window. She babbled on for a while about the nothings that flit through the minds of the very senile or uneducated. Then: ‘Three men was on him,’ she jabbered. ‘They pulls him away. They was followed by two others.’

  ‘Two others?’ I asked. Lucius hushed me with a movement of his hand.

  She drooled awhile from her sagging lips. Her mind seemed to wander. Lucius snapped his fingers impatiently in her face.

  She pulled herself together with a look of perhaps habitual alarm – the old, I can tell you, need often to be wary of the young – and continued: ‘Two others. They follows close behind. Far down the way, there was sounds of more shouting. I hears fighting. I can’t say nothing more.’

  She cackled a prayer that the killers might be brought to justice. ‘We had a way with bastards like that in the old days.’ She jerked her head in the general direction of the Colosseum. ‘They was fine display with the animals. Rome was safe in them days – safe as the Emperors’ Palace, I tell you.’

  I doubted this. Lucius had told me a story the other evening about a young man in the great days of Rome. For a bet, he’d dressed as a woman one night and gone out alone. He was raped before he got forty paces. But it pleases the old to think the past was better. It compensates for the lack of any future.

  As Lucius was paying out some small change for her trouble, I spoke up again: ‘Can you give any description of the attackers? I know it was a dark night. But did you have any sight of those men?’

  She thought. ‘They had torches. I seed them once all bright. One, he looks up at me.’

  ‘Can you tell me what he looked like?’

  ‘Big man, he was – big and ugly. Patch he had on one eye.’ She cackled at the recollection.

  ‘Your One-Eye, perhaps?’ Lucius asked.

  Yes, it was One-Eye. He’d been in at the kill.

  24

  We found no more information in or around that street. No one else owned to seeing or hearing anything. But we’d found enough for today. I was no closer to jumping to a complete account of what had been happening since those two bandits crossed us on the road. Even so, I now had a good idea of h
ow and where Maximin had been killed. And One-Eye was part of the story. As if I needed an atom more of evidence, I knew that this hadn’t been a casual robbery and murder.

  And Lucius had begun my training in the art of investigation. I tried to persuade Lucius that the letters must have been taken by the killers.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ I’d said. ‘The fact is surely plain.’

  ‘A fact is not a fact until it’s been checked,’ he’d snapped smartly back. How did I know the letters had even been connected with the death? They probably were, and it was worth making what the lawyers call a rebuttable presumption. But this was open to rejection if further evidence should turn up. And if some connection with the letters was to be presumed, their current whereabouts remained an entirely open question.

  Yes, Lucius had set me on the path to finding the killers. We’d reconstructed the main details of the murder. Much remained, of course. I still had no idea why those letters had been worth killing for, or who wanted to recover them so badly. But Lucius had revealed a method of getting answers to my questions. Back home, the truth in these matters was apprehended – if at all – by a sudden assault. Here, it would need to be subdued by a possibly long siege.

  I was tired again, and feeling half dead from hunger. Marcella’s breakfast aside, I hadn’t eaten in over a day. The progress of the afternoon had brought back my appetite. I suggested eating in one of the little cookshops that dotted the centre.

  Lucius turned up his nose. ‘By all means, eat there if you want. If you’d rather avoid food poisoning, though, come back with me. I don’t think I can raise a banquet at short notice, but I can offer something that isn’t soaked in herbs to cover the taste of decay.’

  We walked back to the Forum, where Lucius had his slave buy me a black cake from a stall set up beside the locked Senate House. This had last been opened, he said, for the acclamation of Phocas, seven years earlier. This had been an embarrassingly chaotic event, he added. It was the first meeting of the Senate in ages, and none of the senators who’d bothered to attend had realised they had to bring their own chairs. They’d had to stand like the congregation of a Greek church.

  But I looked dubiously at the cake. It looked more like a block of charcoal than anything edible.

  ‘It won’t taste very nice,’ Lucius explained, ‘but it will perk you up for the time between now and dinner. I may try some for myself later. I can’t say what’s in it, but priests and lawyers eat the stuff before a long session.’

  He was right. The taste was utterly horrid. But I soon felt a comforting warmth that started in my belly and spread rapidly over my whole body. The tiredness fell away from me. Even the misery lost much of its dullness.

  As we waited for the drug to take better effect, Lucius showed me several more inscriptions in the Forum that commemorated his ancestors. There was even a marble statue, lying on its back, that he told me was of the Basilius who’d paid to have the Colosseum put in order. Lucius had already paid to have it set up again once, but it had been thrown down again in a bread riot. Since it was too big to take back to his house, he’d decided to have it left until a more permanent solution could be found.

  From here, we set off slowly up the Capitoline Hill. I’d recovered some of my drained energy, but still had to stop every so often to steady myself. I’d seen the Temple of Jupiter with Maximin from below. Now, it was coming much closer. If you know anything of history, you’ll know that this was the spiritual heart of Rome in the days of the Old Religion. It was here that the formal inspection of entrails took place, and here that the triumphal processions terminated. I think it was here that the Sybelline Books were kept.

  After Constans turned up in Rome, some decades later, he stripped the gilt bronze tiles off as many temples as he could easily get at. He didn’t touch the Temple of Jupiter, but the pope had the tiles removed to replace those from a now more important building. That was the end of the place. The last time I was in Rome, it was a ruin.

  Back then, though, it was still standing more or less as it had for centuries past. Of course, it had lost all its adornments, and the doors had been smashed open so beggars could squat there. In better circumstances, I’d have turned tourist. But we walked right past the temple and continued on our way. We walked along a wide street lined with the ruins of ceremonial buildings, then into a maze of side streets so narrow that even the lowish buildings there kept out the daylight. Some of the bigger tenements in these streets were still inhabited.

  ‘That is the remnant of the Basilius fortune,’ Lucius said, pointing. ‘I collect the rents in person, and sometimes pay my creditors with the proceeds. I suppose I’ll have to shell out something to them next month. But Constantinople and Ravenna aren’t cheap places to visit. So, for the moment, they can go fuck themselves.’ He laughed and moved on.

  We came suddenly into a large square, dominated by a cluster of temple buildings. The main courtyard had once been a colonnaded rectangle. But the columns had mostly been taken off for use elsewhere. The temple, though, remained – itself apparently in all its former glory. I could see brick here and there, but most of the marble facing was still in place. It was easily the biggest temple I’d ever seen – a cylinder about a hundred and fifty feet across, topped by a vast dome that terminated perhaps another hundred and fifty feet above the ground. It was fronted by a portico that, big as it was, seemed nothing by comparison with the main building. I leant against an empty plinth.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked, pointing at the building.

  ‘That,’ said Lucius, ‘is something you have to see, tired as you are.’

  He sent the slave off to order food for us at his house. We would follow more slowly behind. ‘We’ll be safe enough as a pair. It’s not even dark yet,’ he said.

  We’d approached from the side. I moved back from the portico, so I could take it all in from the front. The portico was made of three rows of granite columns topped with Corinthian capitals. Above this was a long entablature. On this was the inscription: ‘Marcus Agrippa Son of Lucius Consul for the Third Time Made This’.

  ‘Who was this Agrippa?’ I asked.

  ‘He was the son-in-law of the great Augustus,’ Lucius replied. ‘He built this temple around the time your Galilean carpenter was born.’ He looked at me closely. ‘Or is he your Galilean carpenter?’ he asked. ‘I’m beginning to wonder what you do actually believe . . . But never mind this.’ Lucius turned back into well-informed guide. ‘The temple was almost entirely rebuilt by Hadrian a hundred or so years later. You know Hadrian? He was my favourite emperor – a man of great learning and of piety for the Old Gods.

  ‘Do you know about Antinous?’ he asked with a change of tone.

  I knew something, but shook my head. I’d read something of Hadrian’s catamite in the Encyclopaedia that Saint Jerome put together. Since I didn’t know what of this I should believe, I waited for Lucius to enlighten me. But he shrugged and turned back to his main theme.

  ‘The main structure is all by Hadrian,’ he said. ‘He left only the portico. He left Agrippa’s name because he was always too modest to have his own put on his works.

  ‘Let’s go in.’

  We walked through the portico and Lucius rapped on the huge bronze door. It wasn’t locked, but swung noiselessly open, just enough for a priest to stick his head round.

  ‘This building is shut until the consecration,’ he said officiously. ‘Come back for the ceremony.’

  Lucius pushed his usual key in the lock: ‘I am Lucius Decius Basilius,’ he drawled. ‘I go where I please. You will open the door now.’

  Another priest looked out, then withdrew his head. There was a whispered conversation inside. Finally the door opened and we entered.

  Nothing had prepared me for the astonishing beauty of the interior. It was one great circular room, topped by the coffered, hemispherical dome. The light of a very late afternoon entered obliquely through a hole, or oculus, at the centre of the dome. This fell directly o
n the upper part of the dome, and was then diffused lower onto walls of the most glorious polychrome marble. Around the walls, taking the weight of the dome, was a circle of elegant Corinthians.

  The overall impression in that late, golden light was of immense yet restful magnificence. I could hardly reconcile the people of the Rome I knew with the race that could have conceived and built something so completely wonderful. It was like the most beautiful and technically perfect ancient poem, enlarged and made into stone.

  We stood awhile in silence, then Lucius said: ‘It was built as a temple to all the Gods. Now it is to be stolen and given over to the worship of the Jewish Sky God of the Galileans.’

  Then I noticed for the first time the frantic work all around us. I was confused for a moment as to how I could possibly have ignored it. Workmen ran up and down ladders. They were taking down any obvious symbol of the old worship. Already, a giant cross was in place before one of the main recesses. There was a high altar that hadn’t yet been set in position.

  In another of the recesses I saw a pile of broken statuary. We walked over to this. The disfigured beauty of the Old Gods pierced my heart, lifting me for a moment from my own personal grief.

  ‘The “demons” are to be cast out,’ said Lucius flatly. ‘When I was last in here, they were still in the places given them long ago. Now, they have been pulled down, and the smashed fragments are to be burnt for cement. The walls are to be scraped. I am told there are to be twenty-eight cartloads of corpse parts delivered from the catacombs to complete the desecration. They’ll need to burn half a ton of incense to cover the stench of death. But these will be old relics. I regret to say your friend looks set to join this lot. He’ll be a nice, fresh, convenient martyr to add to the pile and inflame the passions of the mob.’

  Would Maximin have wanted this? Probably, he would. ‘When is the consecration to be?’ I asked.

  ‘Around the Ides of next month, I believe,’ said Lucius. ‘If Boniface is still sweating pus in Naples – a punishment, be assured, for his impiety here – it may all be delayed. Or this new plague may force delay. Or the dispensator may take his place. That’ll please the grisly old creep, I’m in no doubt.