Prowling now around the throbbing traffic junction and bus terminus at Largo Argentina, he knows that something is very wrong indeed. On the face of it, no crime was ever more open and shut. On the ides of March, 44BC, the demigod Caesar arrives at the Senate in Rome and is hacked to death by a mob of senators. The conspirators, all prominent members of noble families, make no attempt to disguise themselves or to hide their guilt. On the contrary, after the deed is done they spill into the street, boasting of their achievement and crying freedom. Even without Shakespeare's help, the names of Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus would have been marked down for the history books.
To a modern policeman, however, and particularly to one weaned on mafia slayings, the catalogue of unanswered questions remains far too long to justify a 'case closed' sticker. Why did Caesar, the greatest soldier and political genius of his age, offer deliberate provocation to his most powerful enemies? Why, having done so, did he sack the bodyguards who might have saved him? Why did he ignore explicit warnings that he was walking, unprotected, into mortal danger?
More bizarre, but possibly just as important, was the condition of Caesar's bowels. Could it have been diarrhoea that made him insult the Senate and so fuel the hatred that drove his killers? Many people seemed to think it could. All this, and the dozen other questions nagging in his mind, are what persuades Garofano to accept the invitation of the award-winning London-based film maker Atlantic Productions to conduct the first police investigation of history's most famous murder. He begins, as all investigators must, at the scene of the crime. This is not, as most people still believe, the Forum, but rather Pompey's Portico, a kind of Roman entertainment complex of theatre, park and meeting house built in a low-rent, swampy area north of the Tiber, where the senators congregated after the Senate itself burnt down. The remains of it under the Via di Torre Argentina are meagre, unvisited by tourists and in continuous use as a cat sanctuary. Animal-lovers, oblivious to irony, pour dried cat food next to the place where the greatest soldier-politician in human history spilt his blood. Even the neighbours seem not to know what happened here. Seen from above, the ground swarms and ripples with fur. At street level there is a cafe in an ancient vault; a motorcycle repair shop under an arch. So hard is it to make any sense of what he sees that Garofano has to engage the help of Warwick university to reconstruct it on a computer.
Next, he considers the body. Caesar's bloodied corpse was left where it fell for two or three hours before being retrieved by servants and carried to his house. Here, to Garofano's considerable satisfaction, a physician named Antistius conducted the world's first recorded autopsy. Despite their military experience, the conspirators are not exactly natural born killers. They are literal backstabbers, their nerves strung out by a five-hour wait and far too afraid of their victim to attack him immediately from the front. In raining blows on Caesar they cause almost as much damage to each other as they do to him, and - though they try soldierly tricks such as stabbing at the groin - their success is only narrowly achieved. Of the 23 stab wounds recorded by Antistius, only one could have been fatal. To make the most of Antistius's observations, Garofano plots the wounds on a computer and repeats the autopsy with a forensic pathologist. What he wants to know is how many senators were involved, and which of them delivered the blow that made history.
He also needs an accurate profile of Caesar himself, a detailed account of his mental and physical health, and an introduction to the social and political mores of ancient Rome. This is where a solid background in serial killings comes in handy. The comparison between the aristocratic families of Caesar's Rome and the mafia clans of modern Italy is not as fanciful as it sounds. In both cases there is an expectation of unquestioning loyalty to the family heads, or godfathers. There is a ruthless pursuit of financial and political advantage, little respect for the weakness of others, and an acceptance of violence as a valid instrument of persuasion. There is little regard for the abstract 'state', and personal relationships are paramount. In this context, Caesar himself is the very capo di capo - a hero among heroes, if only by the peculiar values of the society that created him. Nowadays such a man would be bound for the Hague as a war criminal. His lauded victories involved not just consummate generalship in the field but also the purposeful massacre of women and children. Plutarch reckons that in less than 10 years in Gaul his armies fought a total of 3m men, of whom they killed a million and took another million prisoner.The multiple stabbings, too, are another parallel with the modern mafia - a ritualistic, all-for-one pooling of guilt. And another: once Caesar has fallen, someone slashes his face. 'That's a favourite Sicilian trick,' Garofano says, 'disfiguring a man's looks.' Twenty-three wounds are nothing special, though; Garofano is used to seeing anything up to 60 from a single assailant. 'Psychologically,' he says, 'it's important for all the conspirators to bloody their hands.' This does not mean that the number of wounds will match the number of assailants - mafiosi don't queue up to take turns, and neither did the families of ancient Rome. Exactly how many pierced Caesar's skin is a question that Garofano can settle only by experiment. Back in Parma, in what looks oddly like a Shakespearian theatre workshop, he instructs police laboratory technicians to re-enact the killing. They do it three times - once with 23 attackers, once with 11 and once with only five. With 23 it is a shambles. Given a skilled fight-arranger and the willing co-operation of the victim, it might be possible for that number of people to simultaneously attack the same person. In an uncoordinated melee, however, it is impossible. With 11 attackers the task is still difficult but, just, possible. With five it is easy. Garofano's conclusion is that the assassins numbered between five and 10 and that the fatal blow, a stab in the back, was the second in the sequence of 23, possibly delivered by Brutus himself. Shakespeare alone attributes to Caesar the famous protestation in Latin, Et tu, Brute? The words recorded by Roman historians, in Greek rather than Latin, are even more poignant: Kai su, technon?
'You too, my child?' Poignant because the promiscuous, oversexed Caesar's many mistresses have included Brutus's mother, Servilia, and - rightly or not - it has been commonly put about that Brutus was Caesar's bastard. The poignancy is not obvious to all, however. In the mind of one of the world's leading experts on the period, Professor Barry Strauss of Cornell University, Kai su, technon is less the lament of a cruelly disappointed father than the parting insult of a calculating brute. 'First of all, he's saying, 'How can you betray me after all I've done for you?' And secondly, he's saying, 'By the way, you're my illegitimate son. I'm your father, and you have just committed parricide. Have a nice day.'' There is even a suspicion that the bon mot, being delivered rather pretentiously in Greek, may have been rehearsed. Having uttered it, Caesar pulls his toga over his head and waits for the mob to do its worst.
Brutus himself foreshadows the mafia in yet another way, for this pillar of old Roman rectitude is a shameless loan shark. In the days before banking, borrowers had to throw themselves on the mercy of the godfathers. Among these, Brutus was both famous for his readiness to lend, and notorious for his pound-of-flesh interest rate of nearly 50%.
Violence, too, was in the bloodline. Five hundred years earlier, his ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus had driven out the tyrannical king Tarquin and so launched the Roman republic.
The senators' grievance against Caesar is well understood. His genocidal military campaigns, his bribery and vast sexual incontinence they could accept (for what was wrong with any of that?). Kingship, however, was the enemy of the republic and, by extension, a threat to the families' power. Caesar's genius and restless energy were both strengths and weaknesses: in making himself the most powerful man in the world, he had grown too big for his sandals. He had accepted for himself the unprecedented title of 'dictator', had renamed after himself the month formerly known as Quintilis, had taken to wearing imperial purple and had brazenly set up the queen of Egypt as his mistress. To cap it all, when members of the Senate come to offer him the ultimate accolade of deification he responds with an insult. Instead of rising to receive the gift, as the senators expect, he stays obstinately in his throne as if their good opinion is of no account to him. Like Garofano, Professor Strauss is much exercised by this shocking breach of etiquette. 'It's like not kissing the mafia don's ring,' he says, 'and it's taken extremely poorly by the Senate.'
Caesar's contempt is manifest even in the way he dies. His spies cannot have failed to warn him of the impending plot - there have been persistent rumours of it throughout the city. And yet he dismisses his bodyguard and walks alone. Weeks ago the soothsayer Spurinna warned him unequivocally to beware the ides of March. The portents of doom are powerful enough for his wife, Calpurnia, only the night before, to dream that he will be killed at the Senate meeting and to beg him not to go. For five hours in the morning he hesitates, but then sets out unprotected on the last walk of his life. Even as he goes, someone in the crowd pushes a written warning into his hand: he is going to be murdered. The paper is still there, clamped in his stiffening fingers, as the physician Antistius begins to examine the cold, bloodstained body many hours later.Is Caesar mad? Or so blinded by his own godliness that he believes himself inviolable? What can have got into him? When Garofano crosses the Atlantic to consult Dr Harold Bursztajn of Harvard Medical School, one of the world's leading forensic psychiatrists and criminal profilers, he finds him wrestling with a puzzle. 'Here's Julius Caesar, who by all accounts is the best-informed, the shrewdest politician with the highest intelligence and the greatest power of anyone in the world. As a general he was always prepared for every battle. He left very little to chance, always used intelligence and always took the trouble to know his enemies. The same was true politically in Rome. He always got what he wanted because he had good intelligence about his enemies.
'And yet when it comes to his murder, he seems to be entirely helpless, defenceless and vulnerable. How could he not know that there would be some attempt on his life? And why wouldn't he take steps to protect himself?'
Bursztajn's conclusion is startling. The godfather who directs and controls the events of March 15, 44BC, is not hot-headed Cassius or scheming Brutus. They are, as they always have been, far out of their depth, minnows in a political ocean patrolled by sharks. No: the man pulling the strings, the orchestrator of his own death, is none other than Julius Caesar himself. The outcome is exactly as he had planned it. In every particular, he gets what he wants. The naive and foolish conspirators, on the other hand, go away empty-handed, beaten by superior tradecraft and the poverty of their own imagination. In defending the republic they ensured its demise. In fighting dictatorship they have guaranteed its victory. By killing Caesar they have made him immortal.
