Aurelius Chrysippus lay face up in this mess. I recognised the grey hair and spade-shaped beard. I tried not to look at his face. Someone had closed his eyes. One sandalled foot was bent under the other leg, probably a result of the vigiles flipping the body. The other foot was bare. Its sandal lay two strides away, dragged off, with a strap broken. That would have happened earlier.
`I'll find something to cover him.' The scene shocked even Fusculus. I had seen him before in the presence of grisly corpses, accepting them as matter-of-factly as any of the vigiles, yet here he had become uncomfortable.
I held up a hand to stop him. Before he went searching for material to drape on the remains, I tried to work out the course of events. `Wait a moment. What do you think, Fusculus? I assume he was on the marble when found? But all this must have taken some time to achieve. He didn't give up easily.'
`I doubt if he was taken by surprise – a room this size, he must have seen whoever was coming.'
`No one heard him call for help?'
`No, Falco. Maybe he and the killer talked first. Maybe a quarrel developed. At some point they grappled. Looks as if one party at least used a chair to fence with; probably both. That was just one phase of the fight. I reckon the opponent had him on the ground by the end, and he was face down, scrabbling to escape what was being done to him. That was how it finished.'
`But before that he and the assailant – or assailants? – had been eyeballing. He knew who it was.'
`The clincher!' agreed Fusculus. `The assailant knew there would be consequences unless this one was finished off.' `Chrysippus. That's his name.'
`Right. Chrysippus.'
We afforded him politeness. But it was hard to think of what remained as having been a man who lived like us not long before.
I moved nearer. To do so I had to wade through a carpet of bloodspotted papyrus – scrolls that were still rolled, and others that had shot open as they fell, unravelling and then tearing as the fight progressed. These scrolls must have been out that morning, in position to be worked on in some way. There was no sign that they had been wrenched from the pigeonholes, which all looked well ordered, and anyway the wreckage lay too far from the walls of this immensely spacious room for that to have happened. They must have come from the tables that stood at intervals, one still containing a stacked pile of unboxed documents.
`You can see it was a face-to-face issue at some point,' Fusculus said. `Some of the punches were landed from in front.' Quietly he added, `And the other business.'
The `other business' was both inventive and horrible.
Avoiding various viscous pools, I stepped carefully right up to the corpse. Kneeling beside it, I agreed with Fusculus. One cheek had been jellied. Fusculus waited for me to comment on the rest. `Ouch! Very creative…'
Jammed up one of the dead man's nostrils was a wooden rod, the kind that scrolls are wound on. When it was shoved up his nose, the pain must have been appalling, though I did not think it would have killed him. Not unless it broke the skull bones and punctured the brain cavity. Somebody who loathed him would have felt better for doing this – but afterwards he would have been left with an opponent who was in agony and furious, yet still alive and able to identify whoever had struck him in this vicious way.
I took hold of the blood-drenched rod, with distaste, and tugged it free. Blood came with it, but no brain. No; this had not been fatal.
`This peculiar pile driving would have been most easily accomplished from the rear, Fusculus. Grab him with one arm, then ram him. Your free fist has the rod and jerks. The blow is towards you, and upwards.'
`Hard.'
`Hard!'
The end of the scroll rod now had no finial; I knew there had been one at some stage, because beneath the bright gore at the rod's tip was a short white area, its wood cleaner than the rest. The dowel had snapped, and the shorter part was tangled in the dead man's tunic folds, held by splinters on the ripped fibres of the tunic neck from which a long tear ran almost to the waist. When I laid the two broken parts side by side on the tesserae, the short end had a gilded knob in the shape of a dolphin on a tiny plinth. There was no sign anywhere of the missing finial from the longer end.
`A man,' I decided, to the unspoken but inevitable question.
`Almost certainly,' said Fusculus. Working on the Aventine, he must have met some tough women. He never discounted any possibility.
`Oh, a man,' I assured him gently, looking at the bruising from the fistfight that had battered Chrysippus into oblivion. Fist, and probably boot. And elbow. And knee. Headbutts. Hands clawing at clothing, which was ripped to shreds.
