The Sign of the Eagle Page 25

  “That leaves only the women’s baths,” Bassus said. “I’m sorry, Macha, but they must be searched.”

  “They’re in for a rude shock,” Macha said, not surprised by Bassus’ decision. More than likely Pugnax and his thugs had escaped, but Bassus had to be certain by including the woman’s area in the search. “I hope your men have the decency to inspect their rooms as quickly as possible and leave,” she added.

  “They will,” Bassus said. “I’m no more fond of treating them to the indignity than you are in witnessing it. But there are clothing and storage rooms where Pugnax and his vermin could hide, and there is the women’s separate entryway, another escape route, but guarded outside.”

  Instead of finding women relaxing naked on the warm tiles by the pool’s edge, Macha and the guards were surprised to see them clothed in towels or tunics. Those still in the pool were submerged to their necks, their backs quickly turned to the men.

  “One of the slaves must have warned them about the raid,” Macha said. “It’s the only explanation, but it won’t keep them from complaining.”

  “They might as well protest to the statues of Diana, Minerva, and the other goddesses lining the walls for all the good it’ll do them,” Bassus said. “We won’t leave until the search is complete.”

  A number of women protested to Bassus and Macha about the intrusion of armed soldiers. They had appeared as ghosts through the fine steam drifting from the tiny sitting pools at each corner of the cold plunge.

  Macha attempted to reassure the indignant matrons the Vigiles were only doing their duty and would finish as quickly as possible.

  “Duty indeed,” a plump old dowager grumbled. “Just an excuse to feast their lusting eyes on our bodies.” Two slaves attempted to keep her lumpy body covered with woolen towels as she sat on a stool beneath the marble statue of Juno. “This is the only place we can get away from obnoxious men. Is nothing sacred anymore? What’s worse, it’s the second intrusion by men today.”

  Macha, only half listening while she squeezed water out of the soaked portion of her tunic, suddenly shot a look to Bassus. He raised his bushy eyebrows. Macha turned back to the woman.

  “What did they look like?” she asked.

  “A disgusting bunch, especially the big one—must be a gladiator by the looks of his scarred face and ugly nose.”

  That sounds like Pugnax the Thracian, Macha thought. “When were they here?” she snapped.

  “Couldn’t be more than five minutes ago.” The woman nodded toward a service exit used by the slaves.

  “That leads to the furnace room,” Pomponius Appius said. Through the rising steam, he approached from one end of the pool. Rivulets dripped from his hawk face, and his armor was coated with beads of water. He motioned to a centurion. “Regroup the men.”

  Departing the women’s quarters, Macha stayed with Viriatus and Bassus as they followed behind Appius and the bucketmen. At the military quick step, they headed to the middle of the complex.

  Situated on the lower level between the men’s and women’s hot baths, the large grated wood fire room heated both baths at one time. As they filed through the stoking area’s narrow entrance, a blast of hot humid air struck Macha’s face like a volcanic eruption. For a moment she thought she would bake in the same manner as if a loaf of bread. Her clothing grew hotter with each passing second. A thin cloud of smoke swirled along the cement ceiling of the poorly ventilated room, lighted only by the huge banked fire burning in the open brick furnace.

  “There they are!” a trooper shouted.

  In the shadowy light at the far end, Macha spotted Pugnax and his followers sneaking around a gigantic iron water tank.

  “That’s him!” Macha exclaimed to Bassus. She pointed to the big thick-jawed Gaul, clad in a brown and white striped tunic and breeches. “He’s the one who tried to kill Shafer and me.”

  Viriatus grimly nodded, muttering an oath under his breath.

  Grabbing burning sticks from the furnace, Pugnax and his men hurled them at the invading troops who deflected them with swords and shields. Macha stayed near the entryway guarded by the Spaniard as the bucketmen, led by Bassus and Appius, charged the assassins, shouting battle cries.

  Pugnax and his bandits whipped out swords hidden beneath their tunics. To Macha’s eyes, the bloody clash appeared as mass confusion. In a ringing clash of iron swords, spears and booming thuds of cloth-covered wooden shields, cornered and outnumbered, the thugs savagely fought the troops.

  In an instant, Pugnax flashed his sword above a watchman’s protective shield, slicing off his head. Blood splattered on the ex-gladiator’s face. He turned as another bucketman jabbed his short-sword toward his side. Pugnax parried away the thrust, swinging back his weapon and sliced the trooper through the abdomen, spilling his guts.

  Macha saw Appius sneaking up to Pugnax from one side as the Thracian quickly dispatched another watchman. He turned about and before he could react, Appius jammed his short sword into his gullet, giving it a hard twist. Blood gushed from Pugnax’s mouth. He dropped to the floor with a thud, dead.

  Besides several wounded, five assassins lay dead. The rest threw down their weapons and surrendered.

  “I want them alive!” Bassus shouted to the troops as they started putting the survivors to the sword.

  Grumbling about not being able to finish off the assassins as they deserved, the bucketmen roughly shackled the prisoners. Macha heard Viriatus growling in accord. “Aye, they killed my men and nearly the Mistress.”

  Her eyes stinging from the smoke, Macha, followed by her bodyguard, edged her way between the mangled corpses lying on the tiled floor, reeking of feces and urine. Bypassing the huge pile of cordwood, Macha reached Pugnax’s bloodied body where Appius stooped over the corpse. Blood oozed from a small laceration on the Tribune’s cheek. He pulled up the ex-gladiator’s tunic and partially pulled down his breeches. Branded into the left thigh were the letters, IVL XXX.

  “What do they mean, Tribune Appius?” she asked, eyes fixed on the markings.

  “He trained at the Julian School of Gladiators and killed thirty men before gaining his freedom,” the tribune answered. “It’s Pugnax all right.”

  “I didn’t know they branded gladiators when they were freed.”

  “They don’t,” Appius said. “The letters, IVL, the abbreviation for Julius, were burnt into his flesh when the school purchased him as a slave. Pugnax later added the number thirty.”

  She understood. Pugnax was one of the fortunate ones. Few gladiators survived long enough to obtain their freedom.

  “He probably showed off his victory scars in the baths,” Macha said. She crinkled her lips in disgust.

  “No doubt in the mixed area,” Bassus added.

  Macha had found the torture of Crixus repugnant and didn’t argue when Bassus advised her against witnessing the prisoners’ interrogations.

  She was escorted home by Viriatus and a squad of watchmen. Later, when Bassus returned from Latumiae Prison, he informed Macha that although the prisoners confessed to being hired by intermediaries to assassinate her, they swore ignorance of young Titus’ kidnapping.

  “Now that you have finished interrogating the prisoners, what are you going to do with them?” Macha asked.

  “I will send Viriatus and the surviving litter bearers to the prison to see if they can identify any of them as those who tried to kill you after you left Pollia’s home.”

  Macha firmed her lips and frowned. “If they do identify them as assassins, what will become of them?”

  “Those identified will be executed, and the rest will be released after a flogging.”

  * * * * *

  The following morning Pomponius Appius led a detail of watchmen to a tenement, the Claudia Victoria in the Subura, to search the assassins’ apartment. Curious to see if they would discover any incriminating evidence, Macha received permission from Bassus to accompany the squad of ten.

  As they approached the insula,
Macha noticed wide cracks running down the wooden wall, facing the noisy crowded street. Heavy timbers propped up its rickety side and dingy first-floor shops flanked the entrance. When Appius shoved the apartment porter out of the way, the bucketmen followed him through the dimly-lighted central portal. Greeted by the pungent odors of cooking fish and stale urine, they tramped across the middle of the courtyard passing a blackened slime-coated fountain. Despite the lattice screens hanging across the width of each of the apartment’s six levels, garbage and filth still leaked onto the plaza floor. Macha covered her mouth and nose with a silk handkerchief. Even Viriatus snorted in disgust.

  Heading up the flimsy wooden stairway, the bucketmen brushed aside the army of noisy grimy-faced children, playing on the steps, wearing dirt-stained ragged tunics. Peering out their doors upon hearing the commotion, tenants quickly slammed them shut when they spotted approaching troops.

  Upon reaching the uppermost story, the sixth floor where the poorest lived, the detail discovered the assassin’s room at the end of a gloomy graffiti-ridden hallway. A centurion kicked open the flimsy door and the men barged after him into the cramped flea-infested quarters. The apartment’s only illumination streamed through a tiny window and from an open door leading to a little balcony above the street. After adjusting her eyes to the poor light, Macha noticed a fissure rippling along the ceiling’s length. An army of vermin ran in and out of its gaping crevice. It was a miracle the roof tiles hadn’t caved through.

  Her eye fell upon a sleeping mat resting on the dirt-encrusted floor in one corner. It appeared too small even for a dwarf. Nearby on a marble slab sat three foul-smelling jars of pickled fish and four cracked wine jugs. At the foot of the bed sat an old leather-strapped chest. Slicing apart the bindings, a trooper opened and found a stack of gnawed water-stained books. Macha picked up one of the scaly parchments and unrolled the fragmented scroll. A section crumbled in her hands, but she spotted the remaining segments were written in Greek, a copy of Homer’s Iliad. Could anyone in this foul apartment read Greek, wondered Macha.

  “A feast for the unlettered mice,” Macha said. Viriatus looked at her quizzically as he hovered nearby.

  She dropped the book’s jumbled remnants back into the trunk and wiped the gritty pieces from her hands.

  As the men scoured other rooms, Macha encountered a pile of filthy clothing in another corner between the three-legged bed and the rusty brazier. Above the rags hung a wooden shelf holding a moldy chunk of cheese and a couple of stale onions. Unconsciously, she stepped back from the putrid smelling mess, and was about to skip it all together, then stopped and pondered the situation for a moment. This might be the ideal spot to hide a vital piece of evidence. She could be wrong, but it was worth a look.

  “Would you please pull those rags apart with your sword?” she asked the watchman as he ripped apart the bed. It was the same one who had earlier made the snide comments about her presence.

  The trooper’s lips curled into a sneer and turned to her bodyguard. “Why not him?”

  Viriatus nodded to Macha. “I’ll take care of it, Lady.”

  “No you won’t, Viriatus,” Appius growled from where he stood in the doorway of the balcony. “He will do it. You heard Lady Carataca, trooper, do as she asks!”

  The frowning bucketman stabbed his weapon into the middle of the rotting mound and dragged it apart. Laying on the floor beneath a wine-stained tunic, Macha spotted a black hardwood stick with splinters missing along one side. One end was filed and tapered as if for holding an axe or mallet head. The murder weapon used against her slave, Nicanor! She dropped to the floor and pulled a cloth from inside her stola. Holding her breath, Macha wrapped it around one end of the pole and dragged it free from the rags. Lifting it, she carried it across the room to the tiny window for a better look and a breath of fresh air. Her eyes searched the room. She saw Pomponius Appius conversing with the squad sergeant. “Tribune Appius, will you come here, please?” Macha asked.

  “Find something, Lady Carataca?”

  “This stick.”

  Appius glanced and shrugged. “What about it?”

  “You may think I’m silly, but this appears to be the weapon used to murder my slave, Nicanor.”

  “I see nothing to distinguish it from any other stick.”

  Macha pointed to the pole. “There are splinters missing.”

  “Most are splintered if they’ve been used at all.”

  “I know, Tribune,” Macha said, with an edge of impatience.

  “Why would anyone bring it to Rome?”

  “That was my thought.” Macha nodded at the stick. “At one time this weapon may have had a legitimate use. You notice one end is roughened. Maybe it once held the head of a mallet or sledge hammer?”

  “Possible.”

  “It reminds me of the kind used by officials in the gladiatorial games.”

  “You mean those who dress as Charon?”

  “The same,” she answered. Although she never attended the games, she had heard of the brutes costumed as the Etruscan God of the Underworld. They used iron mallets to club badly wounded and crippled gladiators to death in the arena.

  Macha slowly turned the rough stick in her hands, carefully checking it from top to bottom. She stopped and blinked her eyes a couple of times and peered closer.

  “Great Mother Goddess! Look, Tribune Appius, this belonged to Pugnax.” She pointed a forefinger to the carved letters on the side of the weapon, IVL XXX, the same branded on Pugnax’s thigh.

  “A memento from his days as a gladiator,” Appius said.

  “That’s why I’m taking it with me to Senator Bassus’ home,” Macha answered. “I have a set of splinters. I’m nearly certain they’ll match the missing spots on this club. This must be the weapon used to murder Nicanor.”

  Chapter 33

  Flower Shop Walls Have Ears

  Macha returned to Bassus’ house carrying Pugnax’s club under her cloak. In the study, as Senator Bassus watched, she removed the four black slivers kept in her cosmetic box. She placed them into the crevices on the club where the splinters had been torn away.

  “They match,” she said. “The fit is perfect.”

  “Now we have conclusive evidence Pugnax murdered your slave,” Bassus said, triumph in his voice. “Too bad we couldn’t capture him alive. He might have answered a lot of questions.”

  Downhearted, Macha reluctantly agreed. “For instance, if Pugnax lived in Rome, how was he recruited so quickly to murder Nicanor and kidnap young Titus clear up in Mediolanum? It’s over three-hundred miles away!”

  “Last year Pugnax received his freedom and moved to Verona.”

  She took the splinters from the club and handed them to Bassus. “Where did you learn that?”

  “From the owner of the Julian School of Gladiators,” Bassus answered. He examined the slivers held in his leathery hand. “Pugnax was hired as a trainer for the new Flavian School of Gladiators, forming up north. It’s my guess he was recruited in Verona by someone who lived in Northern Italy or who had traveled there, probably from Rome. Verona is on the way to Mediolanum. He could have secretly arrived there and murdered Nicanor before kidnapping your son."

  “You’re probably right, Senator.” Macha hissed, “What a vile creature!”

  Bassus placed the splinters within a fold inside his tunic. “I will see these are put in a safe place.”

  * * * * *

  About midmorning, Macha, escorted by Viriatus, Shafer, and a new set of eight retainers and six slaves carrying the litter, went to Clodia's shop to buy flowers for Antonia and take them to the House of Vesta. She planned them as a gift in gratitude for the Vestal's rescue of her and her entourage from the assassins. Macha felt pangs of guilt because she had not done this sooner. The raid at the Baths of Memnon, and discovery of the murder weapon used on Nicanor, had occurred so soon after the assassination attempt she had completely forgotten about the matter until now. She was certain Antonia would forgive
her.

  Macha arrived at Clodia and Lepidus' little business after her escort had battled its way through the narrow crowded streets. Viriatus set up a screen of retainers around the outside of the store front and Macha stepped from the car. Carefully, she skirted the broken crockery and rotten vegetables scattered along the edge of the cobblestoned curb. The acidic smell of urine drifted from the fuller's shop across the street, while excited voices of shopkeepers and customers haggling over goods echoed from shabby stalls up and down the lane.

  Approaching the flower stand, Macha saw no sign of Clodia. She turned to Shafer, who shrugged. They entered for a closer look at the flowers. While Clodia’s husband, Lepidus, bartered with a customer, Macha stopped and inhaled deeply the fresh odor of newly-cut yellow roses.

  “Aren’t they lovely?” she said to Shafer, who agreed.

  Clodia tapped Macha’s shoulder and said quietly, “Lady Carataca.”

  Startled, Macha spun around.

  “Please come with me. Hurry!” Clodia motioned with her head over her bony shoulder to the back wall, hidden in the darkness. Macha nodded to Shafer to come along. Pulling up the hem of her stola, Macha followed, stepping carefully along the wet planks strewn with wilted flower cuttings and vegetable scraps. Shimmying between rows of narrow tables, filled with an array of colorful flowers and fresh vegetables, the women stepped to the side of a canvas door flap facing the dingy alley. Clodia turned toward Macha and Shafer and placed a calloused finger to her thin pursed lips.

  Staying in the shadows, Macha peered through a corner of the narrow opening in the direction of two echoing voices. Flies buzzed noisily on a pile of garbage. Its reeking odor drifted through the slivered opening cloistering the three women. She recognized Falco at once. Disguised in a homespun worker’s tunic and faded brown cape, he stood conversing with a short curly-haired Greek cloaked in a long white tunic. Instantly, Macha recognized him as the Greek from the Baths of Memnon, who claimed to be the Emperor's secretary. Was this Phidias, the one who sent Bassus to Misenum? The pale little man carried a leather sack filled with vegetables in one hand. The images of the quill and wax tablet, symbols reserved exclusively for Imperial secretaries, were embroidered in purple on his sleeve.