The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

His breath smelt of onions. “Thank you,” I said.

“Your experiment with the golden crown — ”

“Actually,” I really didn’t want to hear him sing my praises, “I was rather taken with your latest effort. Mechanical advantage, wasn’t it? The application of balanced forces in opposing vectors?”

He blushed red as a winestain. “You’ve actually read my paper?”

“Of course,” I said. “Excellent work. And it happens to be a field in which I’ve dabbled quite a bit myself.”

“Dabbled,” he repeated. “You’ve only written the most significant monograph on the subject in human history. Your wonderful dictum — ”

I raised my hand, not really wanting to hear my wonderful dictum, but he ignored me. “‘Give me a firm place to stand’, you said, ‘and I can move the Earth.’ Inspirational.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t say that.”

“Excuse me?”

“What I said was,” I told him, “something along the lines of ‘if a fellow had a really solid place to stand on and a long enough bit of good, strong wood, there’s no reason I can see why he shouldn’t be able to move something really quite big.’ Not the same thing at all,” I added, smiling. “Actually, I prefer your version. Much neater.”

“Thank you,” he said, frowning. “Of course, my little paper’s really only a series of footnotes to yours. The truly groundbreaking conceptual thinking — ”

“You’re here as a negotiator?” I asked. “In place of poor Naso.”

He sighed. “A great man,” he said. “We miss him.”

“You read my report,” I said. “About his disappearance?”

He tried to look surprised. “That was your report? Well, I suppose I should’ve known. Very persuasive, of course, and the evidence presented with such clarity — ”

“It was signed,” I said. “Perhaps you didn’t read the first line.”

Eventually someone rescued me, and I hobbled away into a corner and hid behind a couple of tall colonels until we were called in to dinner.

* * *

On the first day of the negotiations, Scaurus raised the question of his predecessor’s death.

A report had been received, he said, in which King Hiero tried to make out that Naso had been, in effect, responsible for his own death; that he’d crept furtively away from a party held in his honour, somehow evading the guards provided at his own request for his own protection, scrambling over a high wall — which Caecilius Naso could never have done, he pointed out, having been severely wounded in battle in the service of his country, as a result of which he walked with a pronounced limp, something which anybody who had ever met him couldn’t possibly have helped noticing. The report, he went on, his eyes blazing with righteous indignation, was nothing less than an insult to the memory of a loyal and valiant officer, propagated by the very people who had brought about his death, in a callous attempt to disrupt the peace process which the Roman people had worked so hard to bring about.

I was there, at Hiero’s insistence. I got as far as opening my mouth, but then Scaurus started up again.

Fortuitously, he continued, a thorough investigation had been conducted by a team of dedicated Roman public servants, including Naso’s private secretary, the guard commander and a commission of officers of propraetorian rank — one of whom he had the honour to be. He was therefore in a position to prove that Naso was murdered, in cold blood, by a trained assassin acting on the orders of the criminal Agathocles, who in turn was carrying out the direct command of King Hiero himself, with the intention of subverting the peace process. The assassin, one Maurisca, a young woman of exceptional strength and agility, presently in custody in Rome, had been disguised as a flute-girl, in which guise she was introduced to Naso at the party. Naso, plied by his host with wine far stronger than that to which he was accustomed, was enveigled into following the assassin to the upstairs room of the house. There she murdered him. Then, with a view to covering up the crime and allowing Syracuse to evade the proper wrath of the Roman people, she proceeded to dispose of the body.