Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 13, Mid-December 1993

He shrugged again. “The usual, I suppose: let out the ground floor to some well-to-do tenant and the upper floors to the less affluent. He owned many such properties.” He smoothed a fold of his exceptionally white toga. “Will there be anything else?”

“Not at present. But I may wish to speak with you again.”

“Anything for one on the service of the Senate and People of Rome,” he said, none too warmly.

With the crowd gone, I went back to my inspection duties, giving them less than half of my attention. Much as I disliked the man’s attitude, Quintus Cosconius had spoken nothing but the truth when he said that Rome needed a police force. Our ancient laws forbade the presence of armed soldiers within the sacred walls, and that extended to any citizen bearing arms in the city. From time to time someone would suggest forming a force of slave-police, on the old Athenian model, but that meant setting slaves in power over citizens and that was unthinkable.

The trouble was that any force of armed men in the city would quickly become a private army for one of the political criminals who plagued the body politic in those days. In earlier times we had done well enough without police because Romans were a mostly law abiding people with a high respect for authority and civic order. Ever since the Gracchi, though, mob action had become the rule in Rome, and every aspiring politician curried favor with a criminal gang, to do his dirty work in return for protection in the courts.

The Republic was very sick, and despite my fondest hopes, there was to be no cure.

“You’ve been drinking,” Julia said when I got home.

“It’s been that sort of day.” I told her about the dead senator while we had dinner in the courtyard.

“You have no business investigating while you’re in another office,” she said. “Varus should appoint a iudex.”

“It may be years before a Court for Assassins is appointed to look into this year’s murders. They’re happening by the job lot. But this one occurred in my territory.”

“You just like to snoop. And you’re hoping to get something on Clodius.”

“What will one more murder laid at his doorstep mean? No, for once I doubt that Clodius had anything to do with it.” Luckily for me, my Julia was a favorite niece of the great Caius Julius Caesar, darling of the Popular Assemblies. Clodius was Caesar’s man and dared not move against me openly, and by this time he considered himself the veritable uncrowned king of Rome, dispensing largesse and commanding his troops in royal fashion. As such, sneaky, covert assassination was supposedly beneath his dignity. Supposedly.

At that time, there were two sorts of men contending for power. The Big Three were all that were left of the lot that had been trying to gain control of the whole empire for decades. Then there were men like Clodius and Milo who just wanted to rule the city itself. Since the great conquerors had to be away from the city for years at a time, all of them had men to look after their interests in Rome. Clodius represented Caesar. Milo had acted for Crassus, although he was also closely tied in with Cicero and the star of Crassus was rapidly fading, to wink out that summer, did we but know it at the time. Plautius Hypsaeus was with the Pompeian faction, and so it went.

“Tell me about it,” Julia said, separating an orange into sections. She always believed her woman’s intuition could greatly improve upon the performance of my plodding reasoning. Sometimes she was right, although I carefully refrained from telling her so.

“So you think a prostitute killed him?” she said when she had heard me out.

“I only said that was in keeping with the weapon. I have never known a man to use such a tool to rid himself of an enemy.”

“Oh yes. Men like sharp edges and lots of blood.”

“Exactly. This little skewer bespeaks a finesse I am reluctant to credit to our forthright cutthroats.”

“But if the man owned property all over the city, why take his hired companion to the cellar of an unfurnished house?”

“Good question,” I allowed. “Of course, in such matters some men have truly recondite taste. Why, your own Uncle Caius Julius has been known to enjoy...”

“Spare me,” she said, very clearly considering that her teeth were clamped tightly together.

With my fellow aediles I shared the warren of office space beneath the ancient Temple of Ceres. A man was waiting for me the next morning when I climbed the steps. “Aedile Metellus?” He was a short, bald man, and he wore a worried look that furrowed his brow all the way back to the middle of his scalp. “I am Manius Varro, the builder.”

“Ah yes. You recently completed a townhouse property for Aulus Cosconius?”

“I did,” he said, still worried. “And I used only the best...”

“You will be happy to learn that I found no violations of the code concerning materials or construction.”