The Venus Throw (26 page)

“Somewhere, yes, and soft of. A year in Bithynia under Gaius Memmius was quite enough. I thought he was going to make me rich, but Memmius just took me along to read my poems to him. Couldn’t blame him for craving a touch of culture; Bithynia’s a hellhole. Couldn’t wait to get out of the place; came back early, as soon as the weather allowed. It’s so good to be back in a truly civilized place like Rome, where a fellow’s likely to get robbed while lusting after a pair of hairy buttocks.”

“What are you talking about?” Vibennius giggled nervously and looked about, shifty-eyed.

“Vibennius, you disgust me. For Cybele’s sake, leave the poor sap’s things alone. What did you expect to find that would be worth taking? His smelly loincloth?”

“Catullus, you jest. I was just looking to make sure that my son put his shoes away. Oh, but that explains it—I must
have gotten mixed up. I’ve been looking in the wrong niche. I wondered why everything looked so unfamiliar!”

Catullus laughed scornfully and shook his head. “Vibennius, I should report you to the management. But they’d probably cut off your busy little fingers and throw them in the furnace, and then we’d all have to suffer the stench. Why don’t you go see what your boy is up to? Then the two of you can pull your other bathhouse trick.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, the one where Junior finds a dark corner and grabs his ankles to lure the unsuspecting sap, and as soon as he’s got him in a death grip with that bearded mouth, you sneak up behind and start goosing the fellow with your busy fingers, loosening him up for what’s to come.”

“Catullus, you slander me!”

“On the contrary, Vibennius, your ‘massages’ are quite famous.”

Vibennius crossed his arms and looked smug. “From your foul mood, I’d say you could use a good ‘massage,’ Catullus.”

“Get any closer to me with that ugly thing, Vibennius, and I’ll tie it in a knot.”

“And what if the rope isn’t slack enough for tying?” Vibennius smirked.

Catullus stepped toward him. I retreated toward Belbo, expecting blows. Instead Catullus grinned. “Oh, Vibennius, it
is
good to be back.”

Vibennius opened his arms. “You wicked goat, how we’ve all missed your sharp tongue,” he said, embracing Catullus and slapping his. back.

I blinked, not sure what to make of this display, then gave a start when a hand touched my shoulder. “Gordianus?” said a voice behind me.

I turned and saw the vaguely familiar face of a burly young man with a neatly trimmed beard and soulful brown eyes. It was the way his eyebrows grew together into a single
line that jarred my memory—he was the slave who had answered Clodia’s door. He stood before me fully dressed and slightly out of breath. “Bamabas,” I said. “Hebrew for ‘consolation.’ ”

“That’s right.” He nodded and lowered his voice. “Chrysis said you were already here. Publius Licinius is on his way now, with the box.”

I frowned. “You’re the one I’m supposed to meet?”

“Yes.”

“Then who—?” I turned toward Catullus and caught just a glimpse of his enigmatic grin before Barnabas pulled me back and hissed in my ear. “Licinius just walked in! Come with me.” He took me by the arm and led me across the room with Belbo lumbering behind. “In the green tunic,” Barnabas whispered.

The young man did look familiar, though I had never met him—I had seen him in the Forum, and walking through the streets of the Palatine in the company of Marcus Caelius. He was nervously glancing from side to side and fiddling with something in his hand.

“We part now,” whispered Bamabas. “Just stand aside and watch. Make sure you keep your eyes on the pyxis!” By this he meant the tiny box Licinius carried in his hand, one of those elaborately decorated containers with a hinged lid and a latch, so favored by ladies for keeping their powders and unguents—and by poisoners for keeping their poisons. The pyxis Licinius carried appeared to be made of bronze with raised knobs and inlays of ivory. He turned it over and over in his palm.

Licinius spotted Barnabas and sighed with relief. He stepped forward to meet the slave, but Barnabas signaled with a nod that they should withdraw to a corner of the room. As Barnabas turned, his eyes very briefly met mine, making sure I would follow. I glanced over my shoulder, wondering where Catullus and Vibennius had got to, but I couldn’t find them in the throng of clothed and naked flesh.
The dressing room suddenly seemed to have gotten considerably more crowded.

Barnabas arrived at the corner and turned. Licinius reached him and began to extend his hand, obviously eager to pass along the pyxis. Then the mad scramble and the shouting began.

Since I had arrived in the changing room I had been studying the crowd, trying to spot Clodia’s arm-twisters. I had marked down several likely candidates, judging by their brawniness, and sure enough, these were among the men who suddenly rushed Licinius. But there were more of them than I would have expected, at least ten. Among them, to my surprise, was the busy-fingered Vibennius.

They moved to apprehend Licinius the moment the pyxis changed hands, but their timing was premature. Someone shouted an instant too early, or someone bolted toward the box before he should have, or perhaps Licinius was simply so nervous that he froze in midtransaction and panicked before the box reached Barnabas’s hand. Whatever the exact sequence of events, the pyxis was never handed over. It remained in Licinius’s possession as he wheeled about in alarm and began to dodge and dart around the room, slipping through the grasp of his would-be captors. I caught a glimpse of his face and thought I had never seen a man who looked so much like a rabbit, and a frightened rabbit at that. But the pyxis remained tightly grasped in his white-knuckled grip.

The brawny arm-twisters would have made persuasive captors, but what they had in muscle they lacked in agility. Arms closed on empty air as the rabbit scurried by. Heads banged together as Licinius slipped through their pincers. It was like a comic scene performed by mimes, but more elaborately choreographed than anything I’d ever seen on a stage.

The rabbit made for the main exit, but the way was blocked.

“Hand over the pyxis!” someone shouted.

“Yes, the pyxis!”

“Hand it over!”

“Poison! Poison!”

The bystanders witnessing this spectacle wore various expressions of confusion, outrage and mirth. Some seemed to drink it was merely a game, while a few scrambled for safety under the wooden benches. In the throng I spotted the sharp-tongued Catullus, who watched with wide-eyed surprise.

Licinius, unable to get out through the blocked entrance, wheeled about and headed for the unguarded door into the bathing rooms. Just as he reached it, the door was opened by an old man draped in a towel. Licinius knocked him to the floor. With a great whoop, Clodia’s arm-twisters followed, leaping over the old man like hounds over a log.

“Damnation!” muttered Barnabas as he rushed by me, grabbing my arm.

We followed in the rabbit’s wake, past a giant tub full of shouting and laughing bathers. One of the arm-twisters had fallen on the wet floor and kept slipping as he tried to get up. We angled past him and ran through another door into the innermost room, where the air was thick with steam from the hot pool. Confusion reigned as a tumult of splashing and a chorus of shouts echoed through the dimly lit room.

“Block the door! He’ll try to slip back out!”

“Poison!”

“Don’t let him throw the pyxis into the pool!”

“Did someone say ‘poison in the pool’?”

“Poison? Let me out!”

There was a great deal of running and slipping and colliding as the arm-twisters tried to find Licinius. Some of them stepped into the piping-hot pool with hisses of discomfort and poked about.

“He must be here!” said Barnabas. “The door’s blocked and there’s no other way out.”

“Of course there is,” I said, pointing to a dark corner. “The door to the furnace room.”

Barnabas groaned and ran to pull the door open. Sweltering air poured out from the dark passage beyond. Barnabas took a few hesitant steps, tripped against something and let out a gasp. “Hades! A corpse!”

There was something in the darkness at his feet, but not a corpse, unless corpses have two heads and writhe about.

“Get lost!” moaned one of the heads.

“Go find your own!” wheezed the other.

Barnabas gave a start. “What—?”

“It’s woolly-bottom and the bald sap!” I said.

This meant nothing to Barnabas, but he caught on quickly enough. “Did someone else pass this way?”

“Yes,” gasped one of the voices. “The idiot stepped on my hand! He’ll have passed through the furnace room and be out in the alley by now. So—if you don’t—mind—”

Barnabas groaned.

The writhing figures on the floor thrashed, gasped and bleated in ecstasy.

I pulled Barnabas back into the bathing room and shut the door behind us. Now the farce had everything, including a climax.

C
hrysis fretted all the way back to Clodia’s house. She insisted that I come along to explain what had happened. I think she was afraid to break the bad news to her mistress alone.

The litter bearers turned down the little cul-de-sac, with the bodyguards and Belbo following behind, and deposited us in front of the house. Belbo and I waited on the red and black tiled doorstep, looking up at the towering cypress trees on either side while Chrysis rapped on the door and then clutched my hand to draw me inside. Belbo followed.

“What do you mean, she’s not here?” I heard her say to the slave who opened the door.

“She’s gone off,” said the old man. “I don’t know where.”

“For what? For how long?”

He shrugged. “Nobody tells me anything. But—”

“Surely she didn’t decide to go down to the Senian baths herself,” mumbled Chrysis, nipping at a fingernail. “No, she would have seen me. Unless we passed each other on the way. Oh, Attis!” Chrysis made a little yelp of frustration. “Wait here,” she called to me as she disappeared down a hallway. “Or in the garden,” she added, waving vaguely toward the center of the house.

While Belbo stayed in the foyer, I walked through the atrium beyond, down a wide hallway, through a colonnaded archway and finally down a short flight of steps into the open air and sunlight. The garden was square, surrounded by a covered portico. There was a low platform at the opposite end, which appeared to be a stage, for behind it was a wall painted with a jumbled cityscape, like a theatrical backdrop. In front of the platform there was a small lawn with room for several rows of chairs. At each of the four corners of the garden were cypress trees, teller than the roof. In the center of the garden was a small fountain with a statue of a naked Adonis. Bronze fish beneath his feet emptied water into the pool from their gaping mouths. I walked closer to have a look at the mosaics that lined the bottom. Beneath the splashing water the images of dolphins and octopi quivered against a shimmering field of blue.

The Adonis was captured in the act of kneeling—knees bent, upraised palms extended, his face turned upward with a radiant expression. It was obvious to whom he was showing obeisance, for on the stairway which I had just descended, atop a high pedestal looking out over the whole garden, was an enormous bronze statue of Venus, even more magnificent and more opulently detailed than the one which decorated Clodia’s horti on the Tiber. The goddess was naked above the waist; the folds of cloth gathered about her hips seemed frozen in the act of fluttering to the ground. The curves of her body were sumptuous, and the painted bronze gave the illusion of pliant flesh, but the size of the statue was out of scale, disconcertingly large, more intimidating than beautiful. Her hands were captured in gestures of eloquent tenderness, more motherly than erotic, but this was at odds with her face, which was strangely impassive, severe in its beauty. Her unblinking lapis lazuli eyes stared down at me.