The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits Read online

  "Then, finally, money arrived — a considerable sum, enough to buy my freedom and more. And with it came a letter — not in Zanziba's hand, because neither of us had ever learned to read or write, but written for him by the banker who transmitted the money."

  "What did the letter say?"

  "Can you read?"

  "Yes."

  "Then read it for yourself."

  Zuleika handed me a worn and tattered scrap of parchment:

  Beloved Sister, I am in Italy, among the Romans. I have become a gladiator, a man who fights to the death to honour the Roman dead. It is a strange thing to be. The Romans profess to despise our kind, yet all the men want to buy us drinks in the taverns and all the women want to sleep with us. I despise this life, but it is the only way a freedman can earn the sort of money we need. It is a hard, cruel life, not fit for an animal, and it comes to a terrible end. Do not follow or try to find me. Forget me. Find your way back to our homeland, if you can. Live free, sister. I, too, shall live free, and though I may die young, I shall die a free man. Your loving brother, Zanziba.

  I handed the scrap, of parchment back to her. "Your brother told you not to come to Italy."

  "How could I not come? Zanziba hadn't forgotten me, after all. I was not going to forget him. As soon as I was able, I booked passage on a ship to Rome."

  "Travel is expensive."

  "I paid for the fare from the money Zanziba sent me." "Surely he meant for you to live off that money." "Here in Rome I make my own living." She raised her chin high. The haughty angle flattered her. She was beautiful; she was exotic; she was obviously clever. I could well imagine that Zuleika was able to demand a high fee for the pleasure of her company.

  "You came to Rome. And then?"

  "I looked for Zanziba, of course. I started with the banker who'd sent the money. He sent me to a gladiator camp near Neapolis. I talked to the man who owned the camp — the trainer, what you Romans call a lanista. He told me Zanziba had fought with his troupe of gladiators for a while, but had long since moved on. The lanista didn't know where. Most gladiators are captives or slaves, but Zanziba was a free agent; he went where the money was best. I followed his trail by rumour and hearsay. I came to one dead-end after another, and each time I had to start all over again. If you're as good as people say, Gordianus the Finder, I could have used the skills of a man like you to track him down." She raised an eyebrow. "Do you have any idea how many gladiator camps there are in Italy?"

  "Scores, I should imagine."

  "Hundreds, scattered all over the countryside! Over the last few months I've travelled the length and breadth of Italy, looking for Zanziba without luck, until . . . until a man who knew Zanziba told me that he was fighting for a lanista named Ahala who runs a camp in Ravenna. But the man said I needn't bother going all the way to Ravenna, because Ahala's gladiators would be fighting at funeral games the very next day up in Saturnia."

  "At the funeral of Sextus Thorius," I said.

  "Yes. I wasn't able to leave Rome until the next morning. I travelled all day. I arrived just when Zanziba's match was beginning — excited, fearful, out of breath. Just in time to see —"

  "Are you sure it was him?"

  "Of course."

  "But he wore a helmet."

  She shook her head. "With or without the helmet, I'd have known him. By his limbs and legs. By the way he moved. `Zanziba must have wings hidden between those massive shoulders,' the master in Alexandria used to say . . ." Her voice trembled and her eyes glittered with tears. "After all my travels, all my searching, I arrived just in time to see my brother die!"

  I lowered my eyes, remembering the scene: the Nubian flat on his chest, the Gaul with his sword poised to strike, the uncertain magistrate, the raucous crowd, the death-blow, the fountain of blood . . .

  "I'm sorry you had to see such a thing, Zuleika. Did you attend to his body afterwards?"

  "I wasn't even allowed to see him! I went to the quarters where the gladiators were kept, but the lanista wouldn't let me in."

  "Did you tell him who you were?"

  "If anything, that made him even more hostile. He told me it didn't matter whose sister I was, that I had no business being there. 'Clear off!' he shouted, and one of the gladiators shook a sword at me, and I ran away, crying. I should have stood up to him, I suppose, but I was so upset . . ."

  Stood up to him?, I thought. That would have been impossible. A freedwoman Zuleika might be, but that hardly gave her the privileges of a Roman citizen, or the prerogatives of being male. No one in Saturnia that day would have taken her side against the lanista.

  I sighed, wondering, now that her story was told, why she had come to see me. "Your brother did an honourable thing when he sent you money to buy your freedom. But perhaps he was right. You shouldn't have followed him here. You shouldn't have tried to find him. A gladiator's life is brutish and short. He chose that life, and he saw it through to the only possible end."

  "No!" she whispered, shaking her head, fixing me with a fiery gaze. "It wasn't the end."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It wasn't the end of Zanziba!"

  "I don't understand."

  "Zanziba didn't die that day. I know, because . . . because I've seen him!"

  "Where? When?"

  "Yesterday, here in Rome, in the market place down by the river. I saw Zanziba!"

  Was the glint in her eyes excitement, or madness? "Did you speak to him?"

  "No. He was on the far side of the market. A cart blocked my way, and before I could reach him, he was gone."

  "Perhaps you were mistaken," I said quietly. "It happens to me all the time. I see a face across a crowd, or from the corner of my eye, and I'm sure it's someone I know. But when I take a second look, I realize the familiarity was merely an illusion, a trick of the mind."

  She shook her head. "How many men who look like Zanziba have you ever seen in the Roman market?"

  "All the more reason why you might mistake such a fellow for your brother. Any tall, muscular man with ebony skin, glimpsed at a distance —"

  "But it wasn't a glimpse! I saw him clearly —"

  "You said a cart blocked the way."

  "That was after I saw him, when I tried to move towards him. Before that, I saw him as clearly as I'm seeing you now. I saw his face! It was Zanziba I saw!"

  I considered this for a long moment. "Perhaps, Zuleika, you saw his lemur. You wouldn't be the first person to see the restless spirit of a loved one wandering the streets of Rome in broad daylight."

  She shook her head. "I saw a man, not a lemur."

  "But how do you know?"

  "He was buying a plum from a vendor. Tell me, Gordianus: do lemures eat plums?"

  I tried to dissuade her from hiring me by naming the same fee I would have asked from Cicero, but she agreed to the figure at once, and paid me a first instalment on the spot. Zuleika seemed quite proud of her financial resources.

  It was her idea that we should begin our search in Rome, and I agreed, duly making the rounds of the usual eyes and ears. I quickly discovered that a large Nubian of Zanziba's description had indeed been seen around the marketplace, but no one could identify the man and no one knew where he'd come from, or where he'd gone. Zuleika wanted to visit every hostel and tavern in the city, but I counselled patience; put out a reward for information, I told her, and the information would come to us. Sure enough, a few days later, a street-sweeper in the Subura arrived at my door with word that the Nubian I was seeking had spent a single night at a seedy little hostel off the Street of the Coppersmiths, but had given no name and had moved on the next day.

  Again I counselled patience. But days passed with no new information, and Zuleika grew impatient to commence with the next obvious step: to pay a call on Ahala, Zanziba's lanista, the man who had turned her away when she tried to see her brother's corpse. I remained dubious, but made preparations for the journey. Ravenna is a long way from Rome, especially when the traveller suspects in h
is heart of hearts that at journey's end lies bitter disappointment.

  Zuleika travelled with me and paid all expenses — sometimes with coins, but more often, I suspected, by exchanging favours with tavern keepers along the way, or by plying her trade with other guests. How she made her living was her business. I minded my own.

  During the day, we rode on horseback. Zuleika was no stranger to horses. One of her brother's acrobatic tricks had been to stand upright on the back of a cantering horse, and she had learned to do so as well. She offered to show me, but I dissuaded her; if she fell and broke her neck, who would pay my way home?

  She was a good conversationalist, a skill that no doubt contributed to her ability to make a decent living; men pay for pleasure, but come back for good company. To pass the hours, we talked a great deal about Alexandria, where I had lived for a while when I was young. I was amused to hear her impressions of the teeming city and its risible inhabitants. In return, I told her the tale of the Alexandrian cat, whose killer I had discovered, and the terrible revenge exacted by the cat-worshipping mob of the city.

  I was also intrigued by her newcomer's impressions of Rome and Italy. Her search for Zanziba had taken her to many places and her livelihood had acquainted her with men from all levels of society. She knew both the city and the countryside, and due to the nature of her search she had inadvertently become something of an expert on the state of gladiators.

  "Do you know the strongest impression I have of this land of yours?" she said one day, as we passed a gang of slaves working in a field along the Flaminian Way. "Too many slaves!"

  I shrugged. "There are slaves in Alexandria, too. There are slaves in every city and every country."

  "Perhaps, but it's different here. Maybe it's because the Romans have conquered so many other people, and become so wealthy, and brought in so many slaves from so many places. In Egypt, there are small farmers all along the Nile; they may own slaves, but they also till the earth themselves. Everyone pulls together; in years of a good inundation, everyone eats well, and in years when the Nile runs low, everyone eats less. Here, it seems to me the farmers are all rich men who live in the city, and slaves do every bit of the work, and the free men who should be farmers are all in Rome, crowded into tenements and living off the dole. It doesn't seem right."

  "The farms are run well enough,. I suppose."

  "Are they? Then why does Rome import so much grain from Egypt? Look at how these field slaves are treated — how shabbily they're dressed, how skinny they are, how hard they're made to work, even under this blistering sun. An Egyptian farmer would be out in the fields alongside his slaves, pushing them to work harder, yes, but also seeing just how hard they do work, and making sure they're healthy and well-fed so they're fit to work the next day, too. To an Egyptian, slaves are a valuable investment, and you don't squander them. Here, there's a different attitude: work a slave as hard as you can, invest as little as possible in his upkeep, and when you've used him up, dispose of him and get another, because slaves are cheap and Rome's provinces provide an endless supply."

  As if to illustrate her point, we passed a huddled figure in the gutter alongside the road, a creature so shrivelled and filthy that I could tell neither its age nor its sex — an abandoned slave, kicked out by its master, no doubt. As we passed by, the creature croaked a few unintelligible words and extended a claw-like hand. Zuleika reached into her travelling bag and threw the unfortunate a crust of bread left over from her breakfast.

  "Too many slaves," she repeated. "And far too many gladiators! I can scarcely believe how many camps full of gladiators I had occasion to visit since I arrived here. So many captured warriors, from so many conquered lands, all flowing into Italy. What to do with them all? Put on gladiator games and make them fight each other to the death! Put on a show with six gladiators, and three will likely be dead by the end of the day. But ten more will arrive the next day, bought cheap at auction! Not all of them are good fighters, of course; the ones who turn out to be clumsy or cowardly or nearsighted can be sent off to a farm or a ship's galley or the mines. The ones who remain have to be outfitted and trained, and fed reasonably well to keep them strong.

  "That's how the best camps are run. But those lanistas charge a lot of money to hire out their gladiators. Not everyone can afford the best, but every Roman wants to host games at his father's funeral, even if it's only a single pair of fighters spilling each other's blood in a sheep pen while the family sit on the fence and cheer. So there's a market for gladiators who can be hired cheaply. You can imagine how those gladiators are kept — fed slop and housed in pens, like animals. But their lives are more miserable than any animal's, because animals don't fall asleep at night wondering if the next day they'll die a horrible death for a stranger's amusement. Such gladiators are poorly trained and armed with the cheapest weapons. Can you imagine a fight to the death where both men are armed with nothing better than wooden swords? There's no way to make a clean, quick kill; the result is a cruel, bloody farce. I've seen such a death-match with my own eyes. I didn't know which man to pity more, the one who died, or the one who had to take the other's life using such a crude weapon."

  She shook her head. "So many gladiators, scattered all over Italy, all trained to kill without mercy. So many weapons within easy reach. So much misery. I think, some day, there may be a reckoning."

  When we reached the outskirts of Ravenna, I asked a man on the road for directions to the gladiator camp of the lanista Ahala.

  The man eyed the two of us curiously for a moment, then saw the iron citizen's ring on my finger. "On the far side of town you'll come to a big oak tree where the road forks. Take the left branch for another mile. But unless you've come to hire some of his gladiators, I'd stay clear of the place. Unfriendly. Guard dogs. High fences."

  "To keep the gladiators in?"

  "To keep everybody else out! A while back, a neighbour's slave wandered onto the property. One of those dogs tore his leg off. Fellow bled to death. Ahala refused to make restitution. He doesn't like folks coming 'round."

  Leaving Zuleika at a hostel near the town forum, I made my way alone to the oak tree on the far side of town and took the branch to the left. After a mile or so, just as the man had said, a rutted dirt road branched off the stone-paved highway. I followed the road around a bend and came to a gateway that appeared to mark the boundary of Ahala's property. The structure itself was probably enough to keep out most unwanted visitors. Nailed to the two upright posts were various bones bleached white by the sun, and adorning the beam above my head was a collection of human skulls.

  I passed through the gate and rode on for another mile or so, through a landscape of thickets and wild brush. At last I arrived at a compound surrounded by a high palisade of sharpened stakes. From within I heard a man's voice shouting commands, and the clatter of wood striking wood gladiators drilling with practice swords, I presumed. I heard other, more incongruous noises — the bleating of sheep and goats, a smith's hammer, and the sound of men laughing, not in a harsh or mean-spirited way, but quite boisterously. I approached a door in the palisade, but had no chance to knock; on the other side, so close and with such ferocity that I jerked back and my heart skipped a beat, dogs began to bark and jump against the gate, scraping their claws against the wood.

  A shouting voice chastised the dogs, who stopped barking. A peep-hole opened in the gate, so high up that I assumed the man beyond was standing on a stool. Two blood-shot eyes peered down at me.

  "Who are you and what do you want?"

  "Is this the gladiator camp of Ahala?"

  "Who wants to know?"

  "Are you Ahala?"

  "Who's asking?"

  "My name is Gordianus. I've come all the way from Rome."

  "Have you, indeed?"

  "I saw some of your gladiators perform at Saturnia a while back."

  "Did you, now?"

  "I was most impressed."

  "Were you?"

  "More to the point
," I said, improvising, "my good friend Marcus Tullius Cicero was impressed."

  "Cicero, you say?"

  "You've heard of him, I presume? Cicero's a man to be reckoned with, a rising politician and a very famous advocate who handles the legal affairs of some of the most powerful families in Rome."

  The man lifted an eyebrow. "Don't think much of politicians and lawyers."

  "No? Well, as a rule, Cicero doesn't think much of funeral games. But he thought your men put on quite a show." So far, everything I had said was true; when lying, I have found it best to begin with the truth and embellish only as necessary. "In his line of work, Cicero is frequently called upon to advise the bereaved. On legal matters such as wills, you understand. But they often ask his advice about all sorts of other things — such as who to call upon to produce a truly memorable afternoon of funeral games."

  "I see. So this Cicero thought my boys put on a memorable show?"

  "He did indeed. And as I happened to be coming to Ravenna on business of my own, and as you happen to have your camp here, I promised my good friend Cicero that I would call on you if I had a chance, to see what sort of operation you run — how many gladiators you've got, how long you've been in business, how much you charge, that sort of thing."

  The man nodded. The peep-hole banged shut. The barking resumed, but receded into the distance, as if someone were dragging the dogs elsewhere. A bolt was thrown back. The gate swung open.

  "Ahala — lanista — at your service." I had assumed the speaker was standing on something to reach the peephole, but I was wrong. Towering over me was a grizzled, hulking giant of a man. He looked like a gladiator himself, though few gladiators live long enough to attain such a magnificent mane of grey hair. Was Ahala the exception? It was not entirely unheard of for a fighter to survive long enough to buy his freedom and become a professional trainer; it was far less common for such a survivor to become the owner of a cadre of gladiators, as Ahala apparently was. Whatever his origins and history, he was obviously smarter than his lumbering physique and terse manner might suggest.