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taken?”
    Eco pointed to the first gap, then performed a very complicated mime, snarling and gnashing his teeth, until I grasped that the missing figurine was of three-headed Cerberus, the watchdog of Pluto. He passed an open palm behind a horizontal forearm—his gesture for sundown—and held up two fingers.
    “The day before yesterday your Cerberus went missing?”
    He nodded.
    “But why didn’t you tell me then?”
    Eco shrugged and made a long face. I gathered that he presumed he might have mislaid the figurine himself.
    Our exchange continued—me, asking questions; Eco, answering with gestures—until I learned that yesterday his Minotaur had disappeared, and that very morning his many-headed Hydra had vanished. The first disappearance had merely puzzled him; the second had alarmed him; the third had thrown him into utter confusion.
    I gazed at the gaps in the row of monsters and stroked my chin. “Well, well, this is serious. Tell me, has anything else gone missing?”
    Eco shook his head.
    “Are you sure?”
    He rolled his eyes at me and gestured to his cot, his chair, and his trunk, as if to say, With so little to call my own, dont you think I’d notice if anything else was gone?
    Eco’s figurines were of little intrinsic value; any serious burglar would surely have been more likely to snatch one of Bethesda’s bracelets or a scroll from my bookcase. But as far as I knew, nothing else in the house had gone missing in the last few days.
    At that time, I was without a slave—other than Bethesda, whom I could hardly justify calling my slave anymore, considering that she tended to prevail in any contest of wills between us—so the only occupants of the house were Bethesda, Eco, and myself. In the last three days, no tradesmen had come calling; nor, sadly for my purse, had any client come to seek the services of Gordianus the Finder.
    I raised an eyebrow. “Fortunately for you, Eco, I happen to be between cases at the moment, so I can bend all my efforts toward solving this mystery. But the truth can never be hurried. Let me ponder this for a while—sleep on it, perhaps—and I’ll see if I can come up with a solution.”
    Bethesda was out most of the day, shopping at the food markets and taking a pair of my shoes to be resoled by a cobbler. I had business to attend to in the Forum, as well as a special errand to take care of on the Street of the Plastermakers. Not until that night, after Eco had retired to his room and the two of us reclined on our dining couches after the evening meal—a simple repast of lentil soup and stuffed dates—did I find time to have a quiet word with Bethesda about Eco’s problem.
    “Disappearing? One at a time?” she said. By the warm glow of the nearby brazier, I thought I saw a subtle smile on her lips. The same light captured wine-colored highlights in her dark, henna-treated hair. Bethesda was beautiful at all hours of the day, but perhaps most beautiful by firelight. The black female cat she called Bast lay beside her, submitting to her gentle stroking. Watching Bethesda caress the beast, I felt a stab of envy. Cats were still a novelty in Rome at that time, and keeping one as a house pet, as others might keep a dog, was one of the peculiar habits Bethesda had imported with her from Egypt. Her last cat, also called Bast, had expired some time ago; this one she had recently acquired from a sailing merchant in Ostia. The beast and I got along passably well, as long as I didn’t attempt to interpose myself between Bast and her mistress when it was the cat’s turn to receive Bethesda’s caresses.
    “Yes, the little monsters seem to be vanishing, one by one,” I said, clearing my throat. “I don’t suppose you know anything about it?”
    “I? What makes you think I might have anything to do with it?” Bethesda raised an eyebrow. For an uncanny moment, her expression and the cat’s expression were identical—mysterious, aloof, utterly self-contained. I shifted