'I suppose. Why do you ask?'

'Marcus Crassus, you mentioned the blood on this statue to no one?'

'Not even to Morpheus,' he said wearily, 'with whom I have a meeting long overdue.'

'And yet someone else in the house knew of it. Because since last we spoke someone has done a thorough job of removing the dried blood from the lion's mane.'

'What?'

'See here, where last night there was plentiful evidence of blood trapped in the sculpted furrows, someone has since then deliberately and carefully scraped them clean. You can even see where the metal has been newly scratched.'

He pursed his lips. 'What of it?'

'The rest of the room isn't freshly cleaned; I see dust on the shelves, and a circle from a wine cup on the table. It seems unlikely that a slave would have given such a thorough cleaning to this particular object in this particular room, with so much other work to do in preparation for the funeral. Besides, any domestic slave fit for this house would have known how to clean a statue without scarring the metal. No, I think this was done hurriedly by someone who didn't know that the blood had already been noticed, and hoped to prevent us from seeing it. That someone was not Alexandros, and it surely was not Zeno. "Whereby it follows that the murderer of Lucius Licinius, or someone who knows something about die murder, is here among us, actively concealing evidence.'

'Possibly,' Crassus admitted, sounding weary and cross. 'It's getting chilly,' he complained, plucking his chlamys from the centaur statue and wrapping it across his shoulders.

'Marcus Crassus, I think it might be a good idea to place a guard inside this room at all times, to make sure that nothing else is taken or altered without our knowledge.'

'If you wish. Now, is there anything else?'

'Nothing, Marcus Crassus,' I said quietly as I left the room, walking backwards and nodding my head in deference.

XVI

Why you? asked Eco, signing sceptically the next morning when I told him of my midnight conversation with Crassus. I took the question to mean: Why should such a great man confide so much to a man like you?

'Why not?' I said, splashing my face with cold water. 'Whom else can he talk to in this house?'

Eco squared his shoulders and mimed a beard on his face.

'Yes, Marcus Mummius is his old friend and confidant, but at the moment they're feuding about the fate of the slave, Apollonius.'

Eco stuck his nose in the air and painted tendrils of hair swept back from his forehead.

'Yes, there's Faustus Fabius, but I can't imagine Crassus showing weakness to a patrician, especially a patrician who happens to be his subordinate.'

Eco circled his arms in a hoop before him and puffed his cheeks. I shook my head. 'Sergius Orata? No, Crassus would be even less likely to show weakness to a business associate. A philosopher would be a natural choice, but if Crassus has one, he's left him behind in Rome, and he despises Dionysius. Yet Crassus desperately needs someone, anyone, to listen to him – here and now, because the gods are too far away. He faces a great crisis; he is full of doubt. Doubt hounds him from hour to hour, moment to moment, and not just about his decision to take on Spartacus. I think he secretly doubts even his decision to massacre Gelina's slaves. He's a man used to absolute control and clear-cut decisions, counting up tangible profits and losses. The past haunts him – bloody chaos and the death of those he loved most. Now he's about to step into a dark and uncertain future -a terrible gamble, but one worth taking, because if he succeeds he may at last become so powerful that no power on earth can ever harm him again.'

I shrugged. 'So why not tell everything to Gordianus the Finder, from whom no one can keep a secret anyway? As for confidentiality, I'm famous for it – almost as well known for keeping my mouth shut as you are.'

Eco splashed me with a handful of water.

'Stop that! Besides, there's something about me that compels others to empty their hearts.' I said it jokingly, but it was true; there are those to whom others quite naturally confide their deepest secrets, and I have always been one of them. I looked at myself in the mirror. If the power to pull the truth from others resided somewhere in my face, I couldn't see it. It was a common face, I thought, with a nose that looked as if it had been broken, though it had not, common brown eyes and common black curls streaked with more and more strands of silver every year. With the passing of time it had come to remind me of my father's face, as best as I could recall it. My mother I barely remembered, but if my father told the truth when he insisted she had been beautiful, then I had not inherited her looks.

It was also a face that badly needed a shave, if I was to put in a decent appearance at the funeral of Lucius Licinius.

'Come, Eco. Surely out of ninety-nine slaves Gelina has one who's a decent barber. You shall have a shave as well.' I said it just to please him, but when I glanced at his smiling face in the morning sunlight, I saw that there actually was a faint shadow across his jaw.

'Yesterday you were a boy,' I whispered, under my breath.

Ironic as it sounds, there is nothing quite so alive as a Roman household on the day of a funeral. The villa was full of guests, who thronged the atrium and the hallways and spilled over into the baths. While Eco and I reclined on couches, submitting our jaws to be shaved, naked strangers loitered about the pools, refreshing themselves after hard morning rides from points as distant as Capua and the tar side of Vesuvius. Others had arrived by boat, ferried across the bay from Surrentum, Stabiae, and Pompeii. After my ablutions I stood on die terrace of the baths and looked down on the boathouse, where the short pier was too small for all the arrivals; skiffs and barges were lashed to one another, so that the later arrivals had to walk to the pier over a small floating city of boats.

Metrobius, draped in a voluminous towel, joined me on the balcony. 'Lucius Licinius must have been a popular man,' I said.

He snorted. 'Don't imagine they've all come just to see poor Lucius go up in smoke. No, all these wealthy merchants and landowners and vacationing nobility are here for quite a different reason. They want to impress you-know-who.' He glanced over his shoulder toward the heated pool, where the slave Apollonius was helping an old man emerge from the water. 'I had to push and shove all through the house to get here. The atrium is already so crowded I could hardly cross it. I haven't seen so much black in one place since Sulla died over in Puteoli. Though I noticed,' he said, wrinkling his nose, 'that most of the visitors were giving the corpse a wide berth.' He laughed softly. 'And they're already whispering jokes; usually that doesn't start until after the ceremony, when the eating begins.'

'Jokes?'

'You know – stepping up to the bier, peering into the corpse's mouth, then sighing, "The coin is still there! Imagine that, with Crassus in the house!" And don't you dare repeat that to Crassus,' he quickly added. 'Or at least don't tell him that you heard it from me.' He stepped away with a dry smile. Apparently he had forgotten that he had told me the same joke the day before.

I peered over the balcony again, wondering how I would ever manage to discover what had been dumped off the pier with so many vessels moored there. Many of the rowers were still in their boats, or loitered about the boathouse, waiting for their masters to return.

Eventually I found Eco, who had disappeared into one of the cubicles for a cool bath to follow his hot one. We dressed in the sombre black garments that had been laid out for us that morning. The slave Apollonius assisted us with the various tucks and folds. His bearing was grave, as suited the occasion, but his eyes were a clear and dazzling blue, unclouded by the fear that haunted the eyes of the other slaves. Was it possible that Mummius had somehow kept him from knowing what the next day might bring? More likely, I thought, Mummius had secredy assured him that he himself would be spared. Did he know that Mummius had failed to sway Crassus?