Chapter 21
Cassia sucked in a breath. “Mena? You’re certain?”
“Of course I am,” Lucius answered, wiping his eyes. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Marcus Flavinus Mena was the man who’d taken me for wine at the popina outside his home after I’d saved him from falling on the steps of the Horrea Agrippina.
“Mena,” I repeated. “Did he never meet Xerxes face to face?”
“I have no idea,” Lucius said in puzzlement. “Manius never mentioned it, but he could have, I suppose. Manius picked him out as our go-between in Rome, while I chose the Parthian shipper.”
Mena had been affronted when the guard in the Horrea Agrippina accused him of smuggling, but maybe Mena had only been upset that he’d been caught.
If he’d been assisting Xerxes and Lucius, then he might have had similar arrangements with others. There had to be a reason Xerxes had thought of Mena as their go-between in Rome.
Mena had spontaneously invited me to take wine with him. Had he done the same with Xerxes on his last day alive?
I imagined Xerxes receiving Lucius’s message telling him he wanted to begin the silk shipments again and seeking out Mena to find out if he was still interested in his end of the scheme.
If Mena had willingly been dealing with the false Xerxes—or had become the false Xerxes himself—he might have panicked.
He would either fear Xerxes’s wrath or become convinced Xerxes would report him to the magistrates. I doubted Xerxes would have run for the nearest urban cohort, but Mena could not be sure of that.
Or, the false Xerxes had intercepted the message and alerted Mena, who made certain Xerxes ate or drank something dosed with poison before he went into the arena.
There was one way to find out.
It was the middle of the night, and I couldn’t bang on the door of a domus on the Palatine without being arrested. I’d have to wait until morning, and Arsakes had taken my bed.
“You must all sleep here,” I said to the gathering. “To be safe until dawn. Then I will visit Mena. Lucius, you will come with me.”
“I’m not certain I—” Lucius began.
“He might have killed Xerxes,” I told him. “I want your face there, to scare him into confessing.”
Cassia and Marcia found blankets for us all, the two women sharing Cassia’s pallet, while Arsakes stayed on my bed and the rest of us bunked down on the hard floor.
Marcia slept soundly and had a bleary-eyed Marcianus out the door first thing in the morning, before I could open the apartment’s shutters.
Cassia, always alert in the early hours, fetched water and breakfast and served it to me and Lucius, with an equal portion for herself and thin stew for Arsakes, as instructed by Marcianus. Arsakes would remain in our apartment, as Marcianus had said he could not yet be moved.
I did not like to leave Cassia behind with him while I questioned Mena, but nor did I want her coming with me to the house of a potential killer.
Arsakes at present wasn’t much of a threat. Gray-faced, he was barely able to lift his head and eat the food Cassia spooned into his mouth.
“I’ll look after him,” she promised us. “Go.”
Lucius nodded, crammed the last of his bread into his mouth, and followed me to the street.
As we strode down the hill, Lucius smiled viciously. “If Mena had anything to do with my brother’s death, I will have much to say to him.”
I’d shove Lucius aside to throttle Mena first. My rage, fueled by lack of sleep, was climbing as we left the Quirinal. Whoever had caused Xerxes’s death had robbed me of my closest friend, the likes of which I’d never find again.
Rome was filled with its usual morning bustle, its inhabitants getting on with buying, selling, eating, banking, litigating, or collecting debts before it grew too hot.
The festival days of Lemuria were finished, so the courts were open again.
The Forum Romanum was crowded with advocates waiting to gain compensation for their clients for stolen goats, eloping wives, or runaway slaves.
Patricians would be at home receiving visitors who’d promise to do the patrician’s bidding in return for a hand-up in their careers.
Mena’s home was no different. At least a dozen men lingered on the benches inside the long foyer that ran from the shops outside the house to its front door. The lictors of the more prominent gentlemen idly leaned against the walls, flicking belligerent glances at us.
I suggested Lucius and I wait in the popina Mena had taken me to. I knew Mena’s majordomo was unlikely to admit a gladiator and a freedman ahead of the young patrician and equestrian men arranged on Mena’s benches.
The proprietor recognized me as a previous guest of Mena’s and brought us wine right away, a decent vintage. Lucius fidgeted with his cup, shuffled his feet, and glanced out the door a dozen times, drawing far too much attention to himself.
I was willing to wait all day, if necessary. I even contemplated waylaying Mena whenever he came out of his house, but after only an hour, a man in a long tunic walked purposefully into the popina. He paused at our table, fixing a gaze only on me.
“I have come from Flavius Mena,” he announced. “You are to see him now.”
I rose without a word, leaving a coin on the table for what we’d drunk.
Mena’s man led us from the popina to the domus’s front door.
I studied him, noting that he was of sturdy build and walked as though he knew how to tramp many miles a day without injuring his feet.
Another former legionnaire. I wondered if his tunic hid a cut where Lucius’s knife had grazed the attacker in Herminius’s office.
Half of the clients still waited on the benches, glancing up in curiosity or annoyance as we passed. Ignoring them, our guide took us into a large and pleasant atrium with a full pool in its center and across this to the tablinum. Mena rose from behind his desk in the tablinum when we entered it.
“Leonidas, I heard you were lingering in my popina,” Mena said in welcome. “You should have sent your name in with the doorman. Sit down, sit down. Who is your colleague?”
He turned an interested stare on Lucius. Mena didn’t blink, didn’t blench, didn’t gasp in astonishment that I’d brought a man with me who might be Xerxes’s twin.
No man could feign such ingenuousness—it was clear that Mena had never seen Xerxes before.
I sat down on one of the folding stools Mena indicated, and Lucius plopped himself on the other next to me. The attendant bowed and withdrew.
“What can I do for you, gladiator?” Mena asked congenially. “Have you come to tell me your builder friend has agreed to redesign my house?”
“I mentioned it to him,” I said. “What I want to know about is the man you sell silk for. One who calls himself Xerxes.”
Mena stilled. His broad hands quieted on his desk and his welcoming smile died.
“I told you,” he said without a tremor. “Silk trading is for the foolhardy. Recall how easily Seneca the Philosopher relieved me of an entire shipment?”
“Did that shipment come from the Parthian shipper, via Xerxes?” I asked in a hard voice. “Or was it from a different venture?”
Mena twined his pudgy fingers together and assumed a patient tone.
“These are things I do not need to explain to you, Leonidas. You were kind to help me the other day, but unless you wish to speak of your builder amending my house or you working for me as a bodyguard, I really have no time for idle chatter.”
“It isn’t idle chatter,” Lucius said heatedly. “Xerxes died, and we want to know if you killed him.”
Mena sat up straight in astonishment, his mouth popping open. “Xerxes is dead? When? What happened?”
“He died in the Saturnalian games, three Decembers ago,” I stated.
“Oh.” Mena waved a relieved hand in front of his face. “You are talking about Xerxes, the gladiator. Yes, I knew he was killed, unfortunately. I recall losing a wager on that match. I thought you meant—” He broke off, as though realizing he’d revealed too much.
“Xerxes, the silk smuggler,” I finished. “Xerxes, the gladiator, was your original contact. When he died, another man took his name and his place.”
“He did?” Mena gaped. “I continue to be amazed. You see, this is why I keep telling myself to stay away from the silk trade. You mean a gladiator was steering all that silk to me? I had no idea.”
He lifted a feathered fan from the desk and began flapping it as sweat trickled from his temples.
“He was,” I said. “Then Xerxes died. Another took his place. I need to know who this other man is.”
“Well, the gods help me, I don’t know.” Mena’s eyes went wide.
“I never see or speak to him. We communicate only in letters. I thought he was using the moniker of Xerxes so I wouldn’t know his real name.
Very Persian, isn’t it?” Mena slowed the fan.
“Oh dear, I did not mean to distress you, Leonidas. You must have known the gladiator Xerxes well.”
“He was my friend, yes,” I said stiffly.
“And yours?” Mena asked Lucius.
“No. He was my brother.”
“Ah.”
Mena dropped his fan, regarding us with a little more worry.
“I will tell you plainly, Leonidas and friend. I did not know it was the famed gladiator who was providing me with the silks. A Parthian trader brought in the cloth, and laborers in the Porticus Aemilia moved it to the area I rented. I always paid Xerxes through a go-between. I never met the man.”
“Who was the go-between?” I asked.
Mena shrugged. “I use different messengers, none of whom work for me directly. They are paid to pick up the shipment and hand a receipt to Xerxes, who then collects his money from my banker.”
This explained why Vitus thought the pouch Xerxes received couldn’t have contained much money. It hadn’t held any money at all, only the papyrus or piece of clay that Xerxes would then exchange for his payment, similar to what Fabius the banker had given to me to mark Cassia’s investment.