“That may be. But Leonidas answers to another authority.”
The vigiles who’d helped bring me in began to back from me. If it turned out I was protected by an important man, they did not want to draw his wrath.
“I have to explain why the landlord of the popina has been killed, and by who,” Scaevola growled.
“Blasius,” I said.
Scaevola swung to me. “What?”
I recalled Blasius eyeing me belligerently the second time I’d met Nero there, and whenever I’d passed the popina since. I’d lost him his best cheating dice—maybe he blamed the landlord and also me for cutting into his livelihood. Killing the landlord and having me be executed for it would achieve his vengeance.
Scaevola scoffed. “You mean the old man who sits in the popina day after day, drunk most of the time? He can barely lift his wine cup to his lips, let alone wield a knife.”
“Question him,” Hesiodos commanded. “Leonidas comes with me.”
“I need more than your orders, freedman. Who do you answer to?”
Hesiodos clamped his lips shut, but I had to concede that Scaevola had a point. Hesiodos had no apparent authority here.
A tramping of feet outside the door made Scaevola swing around in mounting fury. The street had become filled with the curious who’d paused to stare in the doorway at the vigile captain and the gladiator. Through them pushed the fighting men who guarded Sextus Livius, followed by Livius himself.
The crowd regrouped after the bodyguards scattered them, intrigued by the flash of gold on Livius’s wrists and cloak finer than many a patrician’s toga. Hesiodos, as displeased as Scaevola for this interruption, scowled at him.
“Leonidas could not have committed this crime,” Livius announced as he entered. “He has been working for me all day. I will take responsibility for him.”
I tried to school my face to remain expressionless. True, I more or less worked for Livius, as I was an assistant on a site he owned, but I’d been nowhere near him today. Even when we’d escorted Gallus to meet him at the Porticus Aemilia, I hadn’t actually seen Livius there. I forced myself to not contradict his half-truth.
Scaevola seethed in frustration. Hesiodos, ready to let someone else handle the trouble of me, offered nothing. Scaevola, with a snarl, waved me off.
“Get out,” he said. “If I can find no one else who did this crime, I will have to speak to you again.” He sent Livius a glare then turned his back on him, finished with all of us.
Livius walked out, not waiting to see if I’d follow. Hesiodos curled his lip and gestured me to exit before him.
“Next time, I’ll leave you to rot,” Hesiodos told me clearly as we stepped into the spring warmth. He strode away, back ramrod stiff.
I did not see Cassia lurking near the vigiles’s house, and I hoped she’d gone home and shut herself inside. I wanted to hurry that way, but Livius’s men now surrounded me, propelling me along in Livius’s wake.
“How did you know to come?” I asked Livius’s back.
He glanced over his shoulder, his cloak rippling. “I was escorting Gallus home. When we reached the Forum Romanum, Gallus spied your colleague, Vibius, rushing about in great consternation. We stopped him, and he told us what happened. I sent Gallus on home with a few men to guard him, and sought the vigiles’ house. My guards knew where it was.”
“I did not kill the man,” I felt the need to say.
“I know you did not. That is why I came.”
Livius turned away again, he and his guards leading the way up the hill.
A crowd had gathered at the popina, ogling the place where the dead man had worked. A few helped themselves to the stew that continued burbling on the counter.
Blasius, I saw in disbelief, still occupied the seat in the corner where I’d seen him earlier. Maybe I was wrong about his guilt—if he’d committed the murder, he’d have fled the hill and the city itself. I doubted Blasius could pretend innocence well enough to remain.
I stepped to him, and Livius’s men closed behind me.
“Did you see?” I demanded of Blasius. “When the landlord left here to seek me, did you see if any followed him?”
“The landlord?” Blasius blinked at me, his red-rimmed eyes attesting to all the wine he’d drunk today. “You mean Secundus?”
The breath left me, and I gulped for air. Never in the six months I’d lived on the Quirinal had I bothered to ask the landlord’s name. I pictured him—stocky with graying hair—much like the description Cassia had of the person who’d bought the ring in the Forum Romanum, and Duilius’s depiction of him as well.
