I’d lifted my cup for another gulp but set it down abruptly. “Why would someone get Ajax drunk, or slip him herbs to make him sleep, and then kill him? And then …” I waved my hand so I wouldn’t have to describe it again.
“Yes, it is very odd.” Cassia began marking her tablet, the stylus making little noise on the soft wax.
“What are you writing?” I asked in mild irritation.
“A list of possibilities. None are more probable than the others at this point.” Cassia raised her head, the end of her stylus at her lower lip. “Did you find any hint of where the other two gladiators are? Herakles and Rufus?”
“And now Regulus. Aemil thinks he has gone missing too, though I doubt it. Regulus will keep himself away to be annoying. I haven’t had time to look for the others. Herakles has a highborn lover on the west bank of the Tiber, and Rufus has a wife and apparently mistresses. They should be safe enough with them.” So I hoped. “Ajax had been visiting various lupinari for days. He might have met someone there who lured him out to kill him.”
“Or he might have been killedinone of the lupinari.”
I thought back on my encounter with the ladies inside the two I’d visited and shook my head. “The women would have been far more nervous about my questions. They were annoyed at my interruption but not worried over where Ajax had gone.”
Cassia returned to her notations. “Then we will assume he met someone either in one of the houses or as he departed the last one. Someone who took him elsewhere.”
“Invited him elsewhere,” I suggested. “And he went willingly. If he’d resisted, there would have been a fight, and people would have remembered.”
“A good observation.” Cassia wrote this down, approval in her tone.
“Aemil has instructed me to find his killer. He doesn’t want the cohorts involved.”
“No? What will he do with the culprit when we find him?”
I noticed she saidwhen, notif. I also noted thewe. “I don’t know. Give him to the magistrates himself, maybe.”
“That would rather depend on who this murderer turns out to be.”
True. If the killer was a bandit or brigand, Aemil would simply execute the man himself and toss the body in the river. Magistrates would frown on Aemil taking matters into his own hands but not care too much. No one had much sympathy for bandits, who preyed on any they could.
But if this murderous madman was a highborn person, or even of the Equestrian class, the situation would be very different. A patrician or Equestrian would have family, money, and advocates on their side.
But why would a patrician or Equestrian murder a gladiator and leave him in pieces in a back lane in the Subura? Carefully redressed in his gladiator gear?
“It makes no sense,” I said, coming out of my thoughts.
“I agree with you.” Cassia’s nod was decided.
“Gladiators always fight as warriors,” I mused, half to myself. “Legendary ones. Thracian, myrmillo, provacatur. The retiarius is a fisherman, or sometimes Poseidon, who hunts the secutor. During the Republic, gladiators were dressed as people the Roman army had conquered—the Thracians are from that time. So Marcianus has told me.” I ran my fingers across the scarred tabletop. “We are real fighters, but everything about the battles is staged. The costumes, our names, our combat style. We fight in an arena, before an audience, not on a battlefield.” I paused again, trying to decide what I wanted to say. “Ajax’s body was like that. Staged. Unreal.”
“But all too real at the same time,” Cassia said softly.
She understood, to my relief.
The speech had made me thirsty, and I drank my wine. Swallowing two cups in quick succession added to my drowsiness—my refuge from too much shock was sleep.
I was also hungry. As shaken as I was about the death, my body, used to taking strain after strain and then getting on with things, nudged me to eat.
I scraped my bowl to me and downed the stew. I barely tasted it, but I’d emptied my stomach in the alley, and needed to fill it up again.
“We had better find the other gladiators to make certain they are well.” Cassia observed my slumped shoulders and softened her tone. “Tomorrow, I mean. Do you know where this highborn woman Herakles meets lives?”
I thought back to what Praxus had said. “North of the Pons Agrippae on the west bank. Near a large winery.”
“Oh.” Cassia’s eyes widened. “The Villa Flores.”
I set down my spoon. “You know it?”
“I do.” Her gaze turned nostalgic. “My mistress and her husband visited it often when she traveled to Rome. My father and I accompanied them from time to time. I know the villa well and the people in it.” A remote smile tugged at her mouth. “I believe I will have no trouble gaining entrance and discovering what has become of Herakles.”
