The Year of Confusion

12

The next morning I woke up realizing what I had missed the previous evening. That messenger with his Mercury garb. I should have thought of it much sooner, but I was finding that, as I got older, some mental processes seemed to be slowing down. The baleful influence of a hostile god, no doubt.

I sent for Hermes, and he arrived while I was about my morning ablutions.

“Hermes, we’re going to the headquarters of the messenger’s guild this morning.” I thrust my face into the bowl of cold water and blew like a beached whale for a while. I straightened and groped for a towel, which Hermes thrust into my hand. The cobwebs and smoke seemed to clear from my head as I dried my face.

“I should have thought of it myself,” Hermes said.

“My thought exactly. What more logical than that our fleet-footed fugitive should work as a messenger? He can keep in training and get paid for it in the bargain.”

“But the guild members are mostly slaves,” he pointed out. “He could be working as a messenger at one of the great houses instead of at the public service.”

“That’s likely,” I said, knowing that men like Cicero carried on huge correspondence and employed full-time messengers. Businessmen sometimes had scores. “But it’s a place to start and there has to be network of information among the community of messengers. It’s not that large a group of men, even in Rome.”

After a few bites of oil-dipped bread we were out the door just as the sun was clearing the roofs of the lowest buildings. Then we turned our steps, as on most mornings, toward the Forum. The headquarters of the messenger’s guild was located near the Curia, since they got a great deal of business from the senators.

It was a modest building, the carving above its portal proclaiming it to be, logically enough, the Brotherhood of Mercury. There was a rather fine statue of that deity out front, and a number of members lounged about on the steps. Ordinarily, a great many more occupied the tavern just across the narrow street, but it was all but empty at this early hour. We climbed the short flight of steps and passed within.

As a guild whose only stock in trade was its membership, the place needed no elaborate facilities or warehousing space. There was a single, spacious room, its walls decorated with tasteful frescoes, a fine marble desk in its center. In the rear wall was a doorway leading to what appeared to be a smaller room lined with honeycomb shelves for record-keeping. That was all. A substantial man rose from behind the desk.

“Welcome, Senator Metellus!” he said. “How may I help you? I am Scintillius, duumvir of the Honorable Guild of Mercury at Rome.” Actually, the word “substantial” is a weak one to describe the duumvir of the guild. He was grossly corpulent and wheezed as he rose. If he had ever been a messenger himself, those days were long behind him.

“Ah, my friend Scintillus!” I said as if I wanted his vote. “Well met! This morning I find myself in need of your services. That is to say, I am trying to locate a man who might be a member of your guild.”

“Eh?” He looked a bit hesitant. “I mean, I shall be most happy to help you and the noble Senate any way I may.” He sweated slightly but that might have just been all that fat. “I do hope there is no, ah, irregularity involved?”

“None at all, none at all!” I assured him heartily.

“The senator is looking for a man who may be going by the name of Caius Domitius,” Hermes rapped out. “We think he works here.” This was a routine we had worked out long before. I was all hearty geniality, and he came across as threatening. Sometimes if you keep people off-balance you learn things you might not otherwise.

“I see. Caius Domitius, you say? I can’t say that I know all of the messengers by name, but with two names he must be a citizen so that narrows it, and we have records, of course. Why did you say you wanted him?”

“We didn’t say,” Hermes told him forcefully. “Records, you say?”

“Yes, yes,” he gestured toward the door behind him. “Right back here. Records of our purchases and discharges, payrolls, important commissions and so forth.”

“Show us!” Hermes barked.

The man whirled and now it was time to do my bit. I took him by the arm. “This fellow should be distinctive. He’s a great cross-country runner, surely an asset to your magnificent, ancient, and very honorable establishment. Such a man as you might use to run messages to country estates, or even hire out to the legions for wartime service. Why, when I was in Gaul with Caesar a few years ago we had a company of men hired from this very guild for routine communications between far-spread cohorts, all those daily missives that don’t call for a detached cavalryman, you know.” While I babbled on thus we entered the smaller room which was jammed full of cabinets, the nests of cubbies stacked to the ceiling.

“As you see, Senator, we keep very careful records.”

I could see nothing of the sort, but I hoped they were in better order than those at the public archive. “So I see. A splendid facility indeed. And among these heaps of scrolls do you have the employment record of our Caius Domitius?”

“I truly hope so, Senator. As you can see these records go back many, many years, but I presume that the man you seek will have been employed here, if indeed he was, in rather more recent times?”

“Certainly within the last few years.”

“Then the payroll records are the place to look,” he said, taking down a large scroll. “Since most of our staff are slaves, those receiving a free laborer’s pay are a decided minority.”

“Why do you employ free men at all?” Hermes demanded.

“It’s a matter of law,” he said, “laid down by the censors in the times of the wars with Carthage. In businesses that employ more than a hundred persons, no more than eighty percent may be slave. It is the same for the construction industry, the stevedores, brickmaking, and so forth. In fact, only agriculture is exempt, and certain occupations that free men won’t do for any pay, like mining.”

This was a law dating from the earliest days when cheap slaves began to pour into Italy. There was fear that free labor might be totally displaced and the censors acted to stem the tide. Their success has been partial, at best. Caesar had recently passed a law requiring those who grazed their herds in Italy to employ not less than one-third freemen as herders. It was the least he could do, considering how many Gallic slaves he had dumped on the market.

He went to a table beneath an east-facing window and began to unroll the big scroll. “The first part,” he explained, “records the contributions we make to each man’s peculium. These vary in size and frequency according to the man’s length of service and diligence at his work. One who works hard and stays sober can expect to buy his own freedom from the savings in his peculium in five to seven years.” This is the traditional means of assuring obedience and good work from a slave. “They can, of course, keep any tips they receive.” He unrolled the scroll further, revealing figures in a different color of ink.

“Now here,” he went on, “are the records of the free employees’ pay. Men are paid on the day before the calends of each month. Of course,” he grumbled in a lower voice, “with this new calendar, we must refigure everything.”

“Just see if he’s in there,” Hermes growled. He was beginning to overdo it. The man was cooperating after all. I made a signal to back off and Hermes complied, reluctantly. This was one of his favorite games.

“Certainly, certainly. Ah, here he is!” He stabbed a pudgy, beringed finger at a line on which in large letters was written “C DOMIT CIT.”

“You see? Caius Domitius, citizen. This accounts for his slightly higher grade of pay than that of a foreigner, of which we employ a number.”

“Dates?” I asked.

“Last worked for us in Quinctilis of that year.” For those too young to remember, that is the name of the month that Caesar had that very year obtained consent from the Senate to name after himself, July. The Senate would grant him almost anything in those days.

It was looking like another blind alley. “Did he quit or was he dismissed?” I asked him, all but discouraged.

“Hmm, let me see, there’s a notation here. Ah, he went on detached service. That is something we do frequently. A great house or business will lease a man from us fulltime, sometimes a whole company of our messengers, as you mention your legion in Gaul did.”

I felt a tingle. “Who hired him from you?”

“Let’s see-ah, yes, now I remember it. A foreign steward hired him for the household of Queen Cleopatra for the duration of her stay in Rome.”

I thanked him effusively and we went back outside. “I knew it!” I said.

“Knew what?” Hermes asked.

“I knew that scheming Egyptian was up to something.” Have a pygmy shoot me in the nose, would she? We’d see about that.

“But what is she up to? Do you think she ordered the murders?”

“Well, we don’t really know that, but she’s involved somehow.”

“We’ve suspected that for some time. In fact, we still really don’t know much at all, do we?”

“We know that Cleopatra hired Domitius. What we need to find out now is how he got from her household to the stables of Archelaus, and why.” I looked across the street to the tavern catering to the messengers. The painting to one side of the door featured, unsurprisingly, Mercury. On the other side was painted a gladiator. For reasons I have never been able to understand these luckless men have become a popular symbol of good luck and you see them painted everywhere, usually at entrances. “Hermes, I want you to come back here this afternoon when the tavern is crowded. Hang about and see if you can learn anything about our friend Domitius.”

He beamed. “Certainly.”

“You are to stay sober.”

“How can I do that without losing all credibility?”

“You’ll find a way. You are clever. That’s one reason that I gave you your freedom.”

“It wasn’t because of affection? Because of my years of hard work and faithful service? Not to mention the numerous occasions upon which I’ve saved your life or the awful perils we’ve gone through together?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. What now?”

By this time we had turned a corner and entered the Forum. It was even more noisy and chaotic than usual due to Caesar’s building projects. Great cartloads of marble rumbled along the pavement. Others carried wood or brick or the powdery cement which, mixed with gravel and water, made Rome’s uniquely ugly, pinkish concrete. People crowded one another and loudmouths sounded off from the bases of monuments. Unsupervised children darted between the legs of adults, bound upon missions of mischief. Farmers led asses piled with produce toward the vegetable markets beyond, peddlers hawked their wares in blissful violation of the laws banning such activities in the Forum. Mountebanks performed with equal contempt for the law, and fortune-tellers had their booths set up along the porticoes, tempting the anxious with prophecies of good luck and the favor of the gods.

It was a familiar, comforting scene, one I had enjoyed most days of my life. Had the heat and smells of summer contributed to the ambience, it might not have been so pleasant but, just then, it was the Forum the way I liked to see it. However, somewhere out there, perhaps in the Forum, certainly within the city or its suburbs, an assassin moved freely, concealed as a shark is concealed beneath the surface of the sea.

“What next?” I echoed. Over the roof of the Temple of Saturn I eyed the towering facade of the Archive, its rows of arches on three levels seeming from this angle to support the temples of Juno the Warner and of Jupiter Best and Greatest, which watched benignly over all. A pair of eagles circled high above the temple rooftops. Doubtless many idlers were reading an omen into the flight of these birds, despite the fact that eagles flew over the capitol all the time. “What, indeed?”

I had just espied a little knot of men gathered beneath a statue of Caesar and recognized them as some of the year’s tribunes of the Plebs. They were arguing loudly and drawing a minor crowd of their own. These men were understandably peeved that year. Their office was one of the most powerful, with the authority to introduce legislation to the Plebeian Assembly and to veto acts of the Senate, but not with a dictator in power. Now if they wanted to introduce a law it hadn’t a hope of passing unless it was proposed first by Caesar and their power of veto was suspended. They were barely even time servers.

“This looks like amusement in the making,” I said. “Let’s see.” So we made our way toward the disputatious legislators. They were growing red-faced, and one of them, a beak-nosed individual who looked vaguely familiar, was waving a gilded object that appeared to be made from thin metal. I barged in as if I had some business there. “What’s going on, gentlemen?” I asked jovially.

The beak-nosed one glared at me for a moment. “Oh, it’s you. You’re just another of Caesar’s lackeys. Stay out of this.”

I stuck my right hand into a fold of my tunic and slipped the bronze cestus over my knuckles, just in case. “No need to call names, ah, Flavus, is it?” At last I recognized him as Caius Caesetius Flavus, a tribune decidedly in the anti-Caesarian camp, meaning he was a man with few allies. One of these, another tribune named Marullus, now spoke up.

“You should have died with the rest of your family, Metellus. They were better men.”

I decided the bridge of his nose would do nicely for a target. One smack for him, then a half-turn and lay another one on Flavus’s jaw. I bet myself that I could put them both on the pavement in the same moment, but this time Hermes played peacekeeper.

“What’s that thing you’re waving around?” he asked.

Flavus held it up. “Last night someone put a crown on the head of Caesar’s statue!”

“What of it?” I asked. “The Senate has granted Caesar the right to adorn his statues with the Civic Crown and the Siege Crown.” I gestured around the Forum, where a minor crowd of Caesar’s statues stood in prominent places. He really was overdoing it in those days.

“This is not one of the crowns of honor,” Marullus hissed. “It is a diadem, a royal crown!”

“Put it back,” yelled yet another tribune. I did not recognize this one. You hardly saw them in the Senate since they lost their veto.

“Shut your mouth, Cinna!” Flavus bellowed. Cinna charged and for a while a good-sized brawl erupted at the base of the statue, with numerous bystanders taking part. Hermes and I kept out of it. A tattered golden object came flying from the pile of struggling men and Hermes caught it adroitly. I examined it and found it to be made of gilded parchment, not metal.

Eventually the disputants were separated. Flavus and Marullus were taken off to their houses, much the worse for wear. Cinna sat on the steps blotting at the blood running freely from his nose. I handed him a kerchief and he pressed it to his nose, tilting his head back for a while. When the bleeding stopped he stood.

“Many thanks, Senator Metellus.”

“Think nothing of it. You’re not Cornelius Cinna, I know him. Are you Cinna the poet?”

“Helvius Cinna, and yes, I flatter myself that I write verses of some merit. Come, I need a drink, and I’ll stand you to some wine as well.”

“Bacchus lays his curse on a man who turns down a free drink,” I said. “Lead on.”

We went down an alleyway that led to a small square with a fountain in its center. The tavern had outdoor tables covered by arbors that provided shade in summer. Just then the sun overhead and the buildings on all four sides kept the temperature tolerable for dining or drinking in the open.

He ordered a pitcher with some snacks to go with it, and we filled our cups, poured a libation on the ground, and pledged one another’s health. It was the raw red stuff of the country, a welcome change from the rather effete vintages I had been imbibing of late. At least so I told myself. The fact was, I would drink just about anything. Still do, for that matter. The girl came back with a large bowl of crisp-fried nuts and dried peas, liberally salted.

“I know you of course, Senator Metellus,” Cinna said, his voice slightly distorted by his swollen nasal passages. His nose, doubtless handsome in its usual state, was rapidly assuming the shape and color of a ripe plum. “I know that you are married to Caesar’s niece, and that you’ve been his friend since you were both boys.”

I took a long drink, pondering how to play this. It was a distinct exaggeration to style us boyhood friends. I barely knew him until I was in my twenties. He was about ten years older. We had worked closely together many times in the years since, though. To a recently arrived man like this obscure Cinna, it might well seem that Caesar and I were old cronies.

“Caesar trusts no other man the way he trusts my patron,” Hermes said with smarmy sincerity. He had already decided the best approach and I thought it best to play along.

“That’s good to know,” he said. “Caesar has a great many toadies, but only a few true supporters.”

“Hence your lack of objection to the crown on the statue,” I observed.

He chuckled. “I put it there.”

This was interesting. “And you would have no objection to a real crown on the dictator’s head?”

“Why not? The Republic of the old days is dead, anyone can see that. Since Marius it’s been one strongman after another taking dictatorial power, whether or not he held the title. When there’s none in power, the rest are all fighting to gain that power. It’s messy and it’s stupid and destructive. Caesar is the first man of true talent and genius to pick up the iron rod and wield it over lesser men. Why not let him have the throne and crown to go with it? We had kings in the past, and they were good ones. It wasn’t until we had Etruscans for kings that we rejected monarchy.”

“Feeling runs deep against unlimited one-man power, especially if it can be inherited.” I munched on some nuts.

“But that’s foolish,” he objected. “A republic worked well enough when Rome was a little city-state like dozens of others in Italy. A panel of wealthy farmers could rule well enough in those days, when all their retainers lived within a day’s march of the City. But now Rome rules a world-spanning empire and our provinces are so far away that a man sent out to govern travels so long to get to his province he practically has to turn around on arrival to be back in Rome for election time. It’s foolish!”

“Very true,” Hermes said, nodding. “He should have all the trappings of a king, so he can deal with foreign kings on an equal footing.”

“Right,” Cinna said. He smiled slyly. “In fact, this is supposed to be secret, but the whole city will know about it soon enough. I have the bill all drawn up in legal fashion, I’m just waiting for Caesar to give me the word to introduce it-”

“Tell us!” I pleaded. He looked satisfied as only a man who holds a secret can. I slugged down some wine and tossed a handful of the snacks into my mouth.

“Well, this is for your ears only, right?” We nodded with wide eyes like a pair of idiots. “All right. This bill, which I will bring before the Plebeian Assembly, empowers Caesar to marry any woman he wishes, and as many of them as it pleases him to marry, simultaneously, not sequentially.”

There is a great art to not choking on a mouthful of dried peas and nuts when news like this gets dropped on one. Fortunately, I am a master of this art. It has saved my dignity at many a political banquet. I continued chewing and turned that into a nod.

“Makes sense,” Hermes said.

I swallowed. “Absolutely. Kings do that sort of thing all the time.”

“It’s traditional for sealing alliances in the east,” Cinna pointed out, “and Caesar plans further conquests in that direction. Alexander had no problem with marrying some kinglet’s daughter when he needed an alliance.”

“And we all know Caesar has taken Alexander as his model,” Hermes said with an air of great wisdom. He was laying it on a bit thick, but Helvius Cinna seemed like the sort of man who wouldn’t notice such a thing. Typical poet.

“Has he given you any idea when he wants you to bring this before the consilium? I asked him.

“No, but I think it can’t be much longer. He will be leaving for his Asian campaign soon.”

We finished our wine and traded a few more pleasantries and parted with hearty handclasps and tokens of good friendship. Without exchanging a word Hermes and I walked down to the embankment by the side of the Tiber, a handsome park above the retaining wall that had been built by the aediles after the last big flood. There we found a fine marble bench between shade-trees and sat, watching the river flow by.

“All right,” Hermes said at length, “what’s this mean? I can guess part of it but there must be more.”

“What have you guessed?” I asked him.

“That he’s going to marry Cleopatra. She’ll be a legal wife, not just a concubine. I don’t know the Egyptian custom, but with the legions to back him, that will make him pharaoh as far as we’re concerned.”

“Yes, and how did the pharaohs keep it in the family, so to speak?”

“They married their sisters so as not to sully the royal bloodline, but Caesar has no living sisters and his only daughter is dead.”

“So who does that leave?” I prodded.

He thought. “Atia?”

“Yes, his niece. Then her brat, Octavius, becomes young Caesar, heir not only to his fortune but to his power. He will have our empire in his hands on Caesar’s death.”

“Then Servilia and all the others are out.”

“Under this law he can marry her if he feels like it, but Servilia will not be a cowife. Not to Cleopatra or anybody else.”

“Will people put up with this?” Hermes wondered. “The purple robe, the red boots, even the crown are just baubles, but overturning the custom of centuries and the power structure founded by the first Brutus, that’s different.”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “The commons love him, and part of that is seeing how he’s humbled the aristocracy. I’m not sure many of them see much difference between being ruled by a king and being ruled by a Senate composed of the likes of Lucius Cinna and Brutus and Cassius, aristocrats who have always treated them with contempt. It’s not as if their votes really count for much. Caesar has given them splendor and foreign conquest and public banquets and the grain dole. They might just back him in this.”

Hermes was quiet for a while. Then said, “Do you think Caesar has gone insane?”

“If so, he wouldn’t be the first to rise to absolute power and lose his grip on reality as a result.” I got up. “Then again maybe this Helvius Cinna, poet, is lying. We can always hope so.”

I dismissed Hermes to go snoop in the messengers’ tavern, little hoping that he would return sober. For a while I sat and watched the river. It was a familiar, soothing sight, as the Forum had been. Citizens crossed the busy bridges or leaned on their balustrades, brooding on the water just like me. Ducks paddled about while men with poles and lines fished for dinner. More serious fishermen were out in boats with nets and barges plied the water. Pleasure craft sailed about, carefully staying upstream of the sewer outlets.

While I watched the river I thought about Egypt. The land of the Nile, Cleopatra’s kingdom, was incredibly rich yet the Ptolemies, the Macedonian usurpers to the ancient land, were often penniless. This was partly due to their own fecklessness but also because Egypt’s vast wealth, product of its incredibly fertile land, went into the coffers of its priests and temples. Even the greatest pharaohs and their Macedonian successors had been unable to break the stranglehold of the priesthoods of the many beast-headed gods of that superstitious, benighted land. I have always been grateful that Romans would never submit to the rule of priests.

In truth, Cleopatra, last descendant of that degenerate line, was ruler only of Alexandria and much of the Delta. Those alone made her richer than all other monarchs save a Great King of Persia, but she would have been ten times richer had the produce of the interior been hers.

Did Caesar truly aspire to be the first pharaoh in more than five hundred years? If so, he would have all that wealth because unlike any Egyptian or Greek he would not hesitate to make those priests pay up. We Romans respect other peoples’ gods, but that has never stopped us from looting their temples, even those of gods to whom we pay the highest honors. Sulla and Pompey had plundered temples all over Greece and the East, their excuse being that they were collecting from rebellious or resisting cities, not from the gods themselves. They left the images and insignia of the gods alone but took everything else of value. No Roman had even that much respect for the ridiculous deities of Egypt.

How much ambition was it possible for one man to have? To surpass Alexander in conquest, even to surpass Romulus in prestige and honor, these were ambitious enough. Romulus had been deified. Did Caesar aim that high? Did he think to place himself among the immortal gods? The thought sent a shudder through me. This is what the Greeks call “hubris” and its consequences are famously terrible, not just for the offender but for the whole community. This is why a triumphing general has a slave standing behind him in his chariot to whisper from time to time, “Remember that you are mortal.” I am not superstitious, but there is such a thing as tempting the gods too far.

From the river I made my way back to the Forum. It was as good a place as any to be, since I had run out of leads to investigate. The political gossip being bandied about from end to end of the Forum was no less lively for the overbearing presence of a dictator. There were plenty of lesser offices that were still desirable because they were too small for such a man’s attention, others that were coveted for their prestige.

Consul was one of these. Though the dictatorship usurped the consular powers, Caesar kept the office alive. Each year, he was always one of the consuls, with some chosen politician acting as his colleague. At that date his colleague as co-consul was Antonius. There was much talk of who would take Caesar’s place as suffect consul when he left for Syria.

It seemed, if I was collecting the right gossip, that Caesar had chosen Publius Cornelius Dolabella, and according to report (unattributable, naturally) Antonius was furious about it. I remembered the man slightly. Three years previously he had been a tribune of the people and had proposed legislation canceling debts and remitting house rents, always a winner with the commons. His proposals had gone nowhere of course, but he had gained much popularity thereby.

It was entirely possible that his choice of causes was not lacking in self-interest. Dolabella was a notorious wastrel and many of the debts cancelled would be his own. Like many another such reprobate, Caesar, upon his return from Alexandria, had taken him under his wing, covered the worst of his debts, and hauled him off to Spain for some personal training and education. He was now firmly in the pro-Caesar camp. In just such a fashion had Caesar attached Scribonius Curio to his cause. Curio made him another useful tribune.

I couldn’t see that the choice could make much difference. Antonius’s prefecture of the City was where the real power lay and Caesar would undoubtedly leave Dolabella a minutely detailed list of every action he expected the second consul to take and a very long list of things he forbade him to do. Antonius would get his own list, which he would ignore, but Dolabella would never dare.

I crossed the broad pavement and pushed past some oxen hauling a wagonload of marble to the new basilica. There was a great crowd of people standing about before the huge building, and many of them were foreigners. Some were truly exotic specimens and I knew these were not the usual travelers come to see the sights of the famous city. The lictors on guard pushed them back if they got too close. I walked up to one of the fasces-bearing men I recognized.

“Hello, Otacilius. I’ve come to see the dictator. I take it from your presence that he’s here?”

“Certainly, Senator. Your name is on the list of those allowed in.” He stepped aside for me.

I suppose I should have felt uniquely privileged to have my name on that list. Perhaps I should have preened. It was certain that many other senators preened to be thus singled out. At that time I could only reflect that there had been a time when any citizen could walk into a basilica any time it struck his fancy to, even if the thing was under construction.

I found Caesar inside, and Cleopatra was with him, which came as no surprise to me, having seen the crowd of exotics loitering about outside. Caesar, uncharacteristically, was seated and looked rather drawn.

“Well, Decius Caecilius,” Caesar said when he saw me, “I hope you have brought me some good news. I could use some.”

At that moment some things began to fit together in my mind. They did not give me anything complete, but it was as if some bricks had been added to what was still a very incomplete wall. I must have looked strange because Cleopatra said, “Well? Can you not speak?”

Caesar raised a hand. “Patience. The gods are speaking to him. It happens sometimes. I’ve seen this before.”

“Caius Julius,” I said at length, “I think that in, oh, two days, I shall have the answer to these murders.”

“That is oddly imprecise, but if you have the killer for me, I shall be content.”

Cleopatra looked at me sharply. “You are certain of this?”

“I am,” I assured her. Actually, I had no such confidence, but I was not about to admit it in front of her. I smiled as if I knew something that she didn’t. I always hate it when people do that to me and was gratified to see her look of discomfiture. It might mean something. Or perhaps not. Everyone has something to hide and a person like Cleopatra has more than most.

“I’m sending the astronomers back to Alexandria,” Caesar said. “They’ve been here long enough.”

“I rejoice to hear it,” I assured him. “I’d hate to lose Sosigenes. The rest I don’t care much about.” As we spoke I noticed a man hovering in the background, beneath one of the interior arches. He was a tall, thin man, coiffed and bearded in Greek fashion. Beside him was a boy who carried a large, leather-covered chest slung from his shoulder. I knew the man well, as he had worked on me upon occasion in Gaul. He was Caesar’s personal physician.

The two showed no further interest in me so I took my leave of them and walked back out to the Forum with much to ponder about. Having made my boast, I now had to deliver. Caesar would be very displeased should I fail to hand him the killer on the day following the next. Not only the killer, but some sort of comprehensible explanation for what had been going on.

Hermes found me in the tavern near the old Curia where we ate frequently. It enjoyed a fine view of the ancient building, the meeting-place of the Senate since the days of the kings. At that time it was still gutted, its upper facade black-smudged, the marks of the rioting that followed the funeral of Clodius.

How like Caesar, I thought, to erect his immense basilica to his own glory practically next door while the most sacred of our ancient assembly-places stood derelict for want of someone to pony up the cash for restorations, forcing the Senate to meet in the Theater of Pompey. Maybe it was another way for him to display his contempt for the Senate. Or maybe he planned some unthinkably vast and elaborate new Curia, one that would outshine anything built by Pompey.

Hermes plunked himself down and began helping himself to my lunch. “Domitius drops by the messengers’ tavern from time to time.”

“I thought so. Men who share a profession or specialized skill usually like to get together with their fellows to talk shop. What do the others know about him?”

“He regales them with stories of Cleopatra’s house. They love to hear about the extravagances that go on in that place.”

“Everybody does. Anything else?”

“Lately he’s been working for someone else as well. Someone he calls ‘the easterner’ or ‘the star man.’”

“Polasser!” I said, thumping the table with my fist. “Worked for him, all right, but he set him up to be murdered.”

“Maybe he’s the killer,” Hermes suggested.

“I thought about that, but somehow I doubt it. I didn’t get a good long look at him, but I don’t think he had the hands and arms of a wrestler. Pure runner, that’s all. Did you get anything else?”

“Just that he hasn’t been by for more than ten days, which they think odd. I didn’t press it. They already thought I was being suspiciously snoopy, even though I was buying the drinks.”

“A conscientious lot,” I said. “Most men will sell you their mothers as long as you keep the free wine flowing.” I told him of my little meeting with Caesar and the queen of Egypt.

“So maybe he really is sick,” Hermes mused.

“Or maybe Cleopatra is just being oversolicitous of his health and insists on having a physician present, and Caesar would trust nobody but that Greek. It’s like her. Still, he didn’t look all that well. Not really sick, but lacking in his usual vigor, like that day in the Senate when he was so undiplomatic with Archelaus.”

“Do you think Caesar will live long enough to take his expedition to Syria?”

“If King Phraates has any brains at all,” I said, “he’s sacrificing to Ahura-Mazda right now that he will not.”