I followed Eco into the garden. "What does it mean?"

"It means that Dio was poisoned, Papa."

"But the stabbing -"

"He was stabbed after he was already dead. You remarked yourself how little blood there seems to have been for so many wounds, how the wounds were all close together in his chest and there was no sign that he put up a struggle. Because he was already dead."

"But someone broke into the room that night and scattered everything about. Someone stabbed him. Why?"

"Perhaps it was Titus Coponius himself, because he didn't want it to get out that Dio was poisoned under his roof, and he wanted to make the death look like the work of assassins. But that's not really the point,

is it?"

"What do you mean, Eco?"

"The important thing is that Dio was poisoned."

"But how? Where? By whom? We know that he would touch no food in Coponius's house. And only a short time before, he left my house with a full stomach! As cautious as he was, he wouldn't have eaten anything else that night."

"Exactly, Papa."

"Eco, say what you mean!"

"You needn't shout, Papa. You must be thinking the same thing."

I stopped pacing. We stared at each other.

"Perhaps."

"The symptoms the girl described: if it was poison, what do you

think-"

"Gorgon's hair," I said.

"Yes, I thought the same thing. Some time ago I gave you some gorgon's hair for safekeeping. I didn't want the stuff in my house with the twins. Do you remember?"

"Oh yes," I said. My mouth was dry.

"Do you still have it? Is it still where you put it?"

My silence gave him the answer. Eco nodded slowly. "The last meal Dio ate was at your house, Papa."

"Yes."

"That's where he must have been poisoned." "No!"

"Did someone use the gorgon's hair I gave you? Do you still have it or not?"

"Clodia!" I whispered. "She wasn't pretending to be poisoned, then. The gorgon's hair she showed me could have come from Caelius, after all. Certainly not from Bethesda-not if the gorgon's hair in my house had already been used… "

"What are you whispering, Papa?"

"But Caelius couldn't have killed Dio, not if he was poisoned first. You're right, he's innocent, of that crime at least… "

"I can't hear you, Papa." Eco shook his head, tired and exasperated. "The only thing I can't figure out is why anyone in your household would have wanted to poison Dio in the first place. Who knew the man, much less had any reason to want him dead?"

I thought of my old Egyptian mentor, who secretly liked to tie up young slave girls and abuse them, and particularly liked to bind their wrists and hang them on hooks. I remembered the women in my garden, exchanging secrets about men who had raped them when they were young. I thought of Bethesda when she had been a slave in Alexandria, and the powerful, respected master who had used her mother so cruelly that he killed her, and would have done the same to Bethesda if she hadn't fought back and found herself carted off to the slave market instead, where a poor young Roman smitten by her beauty emptied his purse to pay for her, never dreaming he would take her back to Rome and make her his wife, obliging her to serve dinner to his guests and to give the first heaping portion to an esteemed visitor such as Dio of Alexandria…

I had said to her,

You have deliberately deceived me!

Do you deny it?

And she had answered,

No, husband, I do not deny it. 'And I thought I understood!" "Papa, speak up-"

"Cybele help us!" I shook my head.

"I think I know the answer,

Chapter Twenty Five

Eco pressed me for an explanation, but I only shook my head. We made our way back to the Forum in silence through the hot, crowded streets of the Subura. The sky was cloudless and the sun directly overhead, casting a harsh, glaring light onto a world without shadows. Lit so brightly, objects became perversely indistinct. Edges ran together and views of the distance had no depth. The throngs of people going about their holiday

business seemed faceless. I stared at them, not quite able to make them out. Old or young, male or female, smiling or frowning, standing quietly or shoving their way through the street, all seemed blurred together and equally strange. The city itself was unreal, dreamlike and slightly absurd. This feeling only intensified as we entered the Forum and rejoined the immense crowd attending the trial of Marcus Caelius.

Catullus was where I had left him. "You missed Caelius's climax!" he said. "He did it into that little pyxis, to show everyone how. No, I'm only joking! But it was a good climax for all concerned. One thing about Caelius, he always strives to satisfy whoever he's with, not just himself. No judges or spectators left hankering and unfulfilled at Nola's walls, so to speak."

I stared at him blankly, unable to make sense of what he was saying. He went on, nonetheless. "Then you missed Crassus's whole speech. Just as well, actually. Nobody had a climax there! Seems Crassus was trying to get Caelius off the hook for all those killings on the way up from Neapolis, but if you ask me, Crassus never did learn how to give a decent speech. Plodding, plodding! Words, words, words, and not a memorable pun among them. He should stick to what he knows, making piles of money, and simply bribe the judges instead of boring them to death with bad rhetoric. He made Caelius look as guilty as Caelius managed to make, himself look innocent! It's all up to Cicero now. Who's this?" "My son," I said absently, and introduced Eco.

"Well, good, you're both here for the real speech. Cicero's about to begin. Come, let's see if we can't move up a bit…"

We managed to move considerably closer, so that I was able to see quite clearly the figure now stepping before the judges. Slender and frail when I first met him long ago, Cicero had become plump and thick-jowled in the years of his prosperity. The political triumph of his con-sulship had been followed by near-ruin, when his enemies managed to banish him; counterlegislation passed by Cicero's allies eventually welcomed him back, but not before the great man passed eighteen months in exile, during which time much of his property was destroyed by the mob. In his months away from Rome, Cicero had grown lean with worry, or so it was said. From the way his toga clung to his frame as he swaggered before the court, it looked to me that he had made short work of regaining both his girth and his stature.

Clodius had once been Cicero's political ally, then his nemesis. Even now Clodius was attempting to keep Cicero from rebuilding his ruined house on the Palatine, claiming that the property had been legally seized by the state and sanctified for religious use, and so could not be recovered by Cicero. The two enemies waged war against one another in every arena they could find-on the floor of the Senate, in courts of law, in the reading of omens by priests and augurs. Between them burned the kind of hatred that can be extinguished only by death.

That was reason enough for Cicero to hate Clodia, perhaps, since she was her brother's staunchest supporter and a party to his schemes. But what of the vague rumor which Catullus had repeated, about a stunted love affair between Clodia and Cicero, back when her brother and Cicero were allies? Perhaps he hated Clodia for reasons that had nothing to do with politics, or with Clodius. That would help to account for what he did to her that day. Or perhaps, like a good advocate, he simply did whatever was necessary to make sure Marcus Caelius was acquitted of the charges against him.

As I watched Cicero deliver the final oration of the trial-one of the finest of his career, some would later say-I felt as if I were watching a play. Like a play, the action seemed distant from me, the dialogue out of my control; I was a spectator, powerless to stop or alter the course of unfolding events. But a playwright strives to elucidate some truth, whether mundane and comic or grand and tragic. Where was the truth in this strange play? Who was the villain, and who the tragic figure? It seemed to me that I was witnessing the sort of play where the action becomes increasingly tangled and absurd, until there is no way out of the mess except to bring on a god or a messenger to deliver a speech that makes sense of everything. But the messenger from offstage had already arrived: Eco, bringing the slave girl up from the south. Now I knew the truth about Dio's death, but no one on the stage seemed to know-not Cicero, nor Caelius, nor Clodia. For me to reveal what I knew, to play the part of the god from the machine, was impossible. How could I incriminate my own wife?