I stepped across the landing and rapped on the other door. No one answered, so I pushed it open.
A smaller family gathered here. A woman and a man held a boy and the girl I’d seen at their sides, watching me as though they expected me to seize the lot of them and drag them away.
I noticed they had no furniture, nothing at all in the single room. The apartment below had held a few sticks of it, and the pallets in that bedroom had been enough for a family of four.
“When did you move up here?” I asked into the silence. The fact that they’d left their belongings below told me they meant to return, or else the move had been so recent—perhaps today—that they hadn’t had time to carry the furniture upstairs.
The man cleared his throat. “A few days ago. The rent is cheaper.”
He lied but I did not argue with him. “I saw your daughter downstairs earlier this morning.”
The woman tugged the girl closer to her. The girl herself regarded me without alarm, as did the boy, but their parents were clearly terrified.
“She does not understand we no longer live there,” the father said rapidly. “It is strange for her.”
I pretended I accepted the answer. I could smell the parents’ fear, which was more than that of people worried I’d come to rob them. They’d abandoned the apartment downstairs swiftly for some reason, and I could guess why. That reason put them in great danger.
“The building next door is even cheaper.” I indicated the shuttered window, which blocked the view of the insula down the hill. “You should move to it, perhaps tonight. I have a friend there—name of Avitus. Tell him Leonidas sent you, and that he should find an empty room to put you in.”
I held the gaze of the man until I was certain he understood me. I was not good at being subtle, but I sensed that if I baldly told the man the killer who had paid or coerced them to leave their rooms below would return for him and his family, he and his wife would panic. Better for all that they calmly did what I suggested.
The man nodded ever so slightly. I left them and went back downstairs.
Cassia had led Martolia into the stairwell. Martolia had recovered somewhat but still held on to Cassia.
I searched Chryseis’s apartment until I found keys then I joined Cassia on the landing, shut the door, and locked it, securing Rufus inside. The killer must have already picked the door’s lock before we’d arrived, preparing to haul Rufus’s body over, which was why we’d easily gained entrance.
I started the long journey down the stairs, Cassia and Martolia behind me. At the bottom of the steps, I stopped and pounded on the shuttered window of the basketmaker’s shop. He and his wife and daughter would have seen more than anyone who’d come and gone that day. Even the coppersmith, whose back had been to the street as he’d beaten on his wares, would not have witnessed as much.
After much hammering and banging, the exasperated wife at last pulled open the side door.
“We’ve seen no one,” she answered testily to my question. “We’ve been asleep since we shut up shop. This is the first we’ve heard of any trouble at all. Murdered, you say? The gladiator?” She shook her head. “What that woman gets up to is beyond me.”
She adamantly refused to say whether she’d seen anyone carrying anything inside the building. Once they closed the doors for the night, she proclaimed, they took to their beds in the back and were oblivious to whatever went on beyond their walls. They’d been awake when Cassia and I had arrived the first time, which meant they also would have been when the killer entered before us, but I recognized it would be futile to argue with her.
The basketmaker peered from the shadows in the back at Cassia, a flicker of uneasiness in his eyes, before we departed and walked away into the now-dark street.
* * *
We crossedto the Transtiberim to take Martolia home. Once inside the tiny apartment, I watched Merope and Gaius, who’d returned from the ludus, transform from excited welcome to shock to grief in the space of a moment.
The three gathered into themselves to weep, holding on to one another for comfort.
Cassia asked to remain with them while I went to the ludus to break the news to Aemil. “I can do more good here,” she explained. “I will walk back home with you when you are finished.”
I left her puttering about the room, pouring wine and straightening things, while the three clung to each other in bewildered sorrow.
I found Marcianus at the ludus. His face fell when I told him about Rufus, and Aemil flushed dark red with rage.
“Who in the name of all the gods is doing this?” Aemil roared. “Are they seeking vengeance on me? News of this will be all over Rome in the morning. I’ll be shut down. Look what happened in Pompeii.”
Not really the same thing, I wanted to point out, but a glance at Aemil told me to keep my silence. In Pompeii, a riot between rival towns had begun in the stands during gladiatorial games, which had resulted in the deaths of innocents. The official who’d planned the games had been exiled and gladiatorial combat banned in Pompeii for ten years.
“If the consuls shut me down, I’ll be ruined,” Aemil moaned. “The spring games are in a matter of weeks.”
He blustered, but I could see that the loss of his gladiators upset him, and not only because he could no longer sell their services. Aemil considered himself a paterfamilias, feeling a responsibility to all of us. I’d learned that over the years, but of course Aemil would never openly admit it.
We again pulled his hand cart across the river, this time to the Aventine and the now quiet insula. A few of the curious inside peered around door frames but left us to the unnerving business of hauling Rufus’s body, covered in whatever of Chryseis’s blankets and linens we could find, down the stairs.
