questioned him. You must have thrown quite a scare into him. Do you think he killed Balbus?”
“Only if he really feared that you would marry him. He says he didn’t believe it.”
“Oh, he believed it all right. He threatened to strangle me. I laughed at him.”
“And when was this marriage supposed to take place?”
“Balbus told me that he had written a new will naming me as his principal heir and providing for Aulus, his son, but leaving Fabia with nothing. He hadn’t told her yet. He said he was waiting for the Spring so he could divorce her and put her on a ship the same day. He didn’t want her hanging about. He loathed the woman.”
Suetonius stroked her hair. “Did you love him?”
“A little.”
“What will you do now?”
“What I’ve always done. Look out for myself. Argyrus doesn’t frighten me. You said there were two questions.”
“Does the name Barzanes mean anything to you?
“I don’t think so, why?”
“Another angle we’re pursuing. I’m not to talk about it until we know more. But I think we’re going to need the help of your Persians.”
“Count on me, my dear.”
She kissed him.
***
“We were told you wanted to see us.” Arsames avoided mentioning Sophronia’s name.
Pliny explained while Arsames translated for his companions. A minute passed in whispering and gesticulation.
Arsames threw his hands wide. “Barzanes is a common name among us. You say he purchased a piece of land out in the woods somewhere? We are merchants, shopkeepers, not peasants. Why would he do such a thing?”
“What do you know about Mithras?” Suetonius asked.
The black eyebrows shot up. “What do I know about him? He is the god of light. He wages an eternal struggle with the forces of evil. He is your Apollo, your Helios. What is that to you?”
“Do you worship him in caves?”
“Caves! Certainly not.”
“Think again,” Pliny urged, “about this Barzanes. He would be a very old man by now.”
Arsames shrugged, turned again to his companions. The whispering grew animated, finally punctuated with a loud “Ah!”
“My father—” he indicated a frail, stooped old man “—once knew a man from the land of Commagene by that name who lived here and mixed with us Persians for a time. A foolish fellow who used to boast that he came of royal stock although his clothes were shabby. People laughed at him, my father says, and, after a time, he turned his back on us. No one has seen him in years. He’s probably dead.”
Commagene, Pliny knew, was a region in the province of Syria, formerly an independent kingdom, whose ruling caste was culturally Persian. “Does your father know where he lived?” The old man touched his son’s shoulder and spoke in his ear.
“My father remembers,” said Arsames, “that this man’s clothes sometimes had a whiff of urine about them as if he’d spent too much time in a public toilet or a fullery. That’s why people laughed. A prince who smelled of piss!”
Chapter Twenty-eight
The day before the Ides of November
The second hour of the night
Pliny and Suetonius trod carefully on the slick cobblestones of the crooked alley. A rivulet of liquid filth ran down the middle of it; rats squeaked and scuttled in its dark corners. The tottering buildings on either side nearly met above their heads. Their way was lit only by the flaring torch of the Night Watch slave who guided them. Behind them, Galeo and three other lictors dressed in dark-colored clothing loitered along the way, just close enough to come running if summoned. The damp stones, the sagging tenement walls of rotting timber and crumbling plaster, seemed to exhale a breath redolent of the toilet. Here, on the eastern outskirts of the city, was Nicomedia’s largest fullery, where vats of urine and burning sulfur were used in the process of cleaning and whitening cloth. Understandable how, living here, the smell might cling to your clothes, your hair. Doubtless, the inhabitants of the quarter had long since stopped noticing it.
Two days had passed since the meeting with the Persians. Pliny had summoned the city’s Night Watch—a score of public slaves, most of them elderly—who knew intimately the city’s every corner and cul-de-sac, every wine shop and cook shop and run-down bath house. He had promised a reward to whoever could track down a certain old foreigner, poorly dressed but haughty, living in the vicinity of a fuller’s establishment. He hadn’t hoped for much.
But then one of the slaves had come back that morning to report that the proprietor of a cook shop