Fortune

by Lenny Bartulin

  ‘Entregar o morir!’

  Even with the limp, a broken body, in a flash the Negro had slipped a knife and slashed the wrist of the gunman. Before the pistol had clattered on the ground, the second man clutched at his throat and collapsed. The third ran, desperate for his life, followed by the bleeding gunman, crying out, ‘El diablo! El diablo!’

  And that later midnight, docked in Rotterdam, Wesley Lewis Jr asleep in his hammock, then waking with a jolt and Mr Hendrik there above him, staring down, his bloodshot eyes glowing moon-yellow in the dark; and then, in a blink, gone! Only the creaking of briny timbers, the hull groaning, burdened, the dark ghouled. He was shaken for days. How often had the Negro watched him sleeping? What had he read in Wesley Lewis Jr’s dreams?

  Josephine. He must surely have seen Josephine.

  A most deceitful and murderous Negro!

  Claus von Rolt said, ‘Then we are in accord?’

  Mr Hendrik nodded.

  ‘Good,’ Rolt said and indicated for his assistant to take care of the barrel of eels. ‘We can take my carriage and complete our transactions over brandy in my home.’

  LIQUORICE

  A native woman called Susanna had retrieved the shell for her husband, Georg Eberhard Rumpf, who collected plants and seashells and worked for the Dutch East India Company. This was in Ambon, in the Moluccan Archipelago, about a century ago. She’d dived expertly through twenty feet of water as clear as sky to pluck it from the sea-floor. Maybe it was already a thousand years old, maybe more. However old it was, hers were the first human hands ever to touch it. And Johannes Meyer’s the last! In between, it had traced an invisible route to Rolt’s mahogany side table (as had the mahogany).

  On Unter den Linden, Bonaparte casually slipped a piece of liquorice into his mouth; and here, three men walked in to surprise Johannes, holding Susanna’s rare shell in his hands. Shocked, frightened, he dropped it and watched open-mouthed as it shattered into pieces across the floor.

  HOW GREAT IT IS TO RUN

  Mr Hendrik didn’t try to stop the boy. In fact, he moved a little to the left, out of the way of the door, and let the boy run past.

  Claus von Rolt lunged, cried, ‘Stop!’ but couldn’t get hold of him. The boy burst outside and into the street.

  ‘Why didn’t you grab him?’ Wesley Lewis Jr said with disgust. He quickly ran off after the boy and Rolt followed.

  Mr Hendrik stood in the doorway and watched. His face was inscrutable, but inside he urged the boy on.

  Run.

  He felt the flutter of nerves in his own legs, even the useless one. The dull ache there sharpened, a memory triggered, a twitch from the past.

  Run, boy.

  A CHILDHOOD

  Mr Hendrik was twelve years old, thin and long-legged.

  His own uncle wielded the knife and four slaves held his limbs, splayed out over the ground, and there was another hand that pushed his face down, so that he thought they meant to drown him in the mud. His miserable uncle with the blade, given the task and no choice about it, the blade blunt and crude and purposely so, sawing the boy’s leg with gruesome imprecision, through skin and flesh and then at last the tendon above and at the back of the ankle, hacked and severed with a whip snap. The boy howled and thought he was going to die.

  When he finished, the uncle wiped the blade on the grass. This wasn’t the first or last hamstrung Negro he’d midwife. And he’d told the boy too, warned him before and shaken him as he did so: Don’t run, you fool. There’s nowhere to run.

  But Mr Hendrik hadn’t planned on a destination. It was enough just to run, in any direction. It was at the core of him and thoughtless, like life.

  POET

  The crowds were packed into every street, every lane. Johannes crashed into them and tried to push through, but not even a crack opened to him. As he struggled, a hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back, threw him roughly to the ground. A French soldier.

  Claus von Rolt’s voice: ‘He’s the one!’

  Wesley Lewis Jr stood beside him, hands on his knees, looking up but breathing hard from the pursuit.

  All Johannes could see were legs and boots. He tried to get to his feet but was kicked in the stomach, hard enough that all the air was punched out of his lungs. Then he was slapped across the head and dragged along the cobblestones by his coat collar. The coat ripped at the shoulder stitching and one of his shoes came off.

  Somebody said, ‘What’d he do?’

  ‘A rioter!’

  ‘No!’ Johannes said. He couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He wasn’t thinking of the seashell, of being caught in the house; it was that they’d already tried to sweep him up before, the authorities, gather him in their net, his friends too, for war, for death, for the Fatherland. He was a poet, not a soldier, never!

  Johannes was pulled up onto his feet. Two French soldiers had him by the arms and more of them stood around. Some of the crowd had heard the commotion and they turned now to see Johannes in the hands of the French. Their compatriot and the enemy. A whisper began, more heads turned, and then a few people approached the soldiers.

  The French, battle-worn but sharp to the changing atmosphere, closed ranks. Muskets were unslung and bayonets pointed. More of the crowd turned, more faces frowned, the whispers grew louder. A young man jumped out and waved his fist.

  ‘Verdammte Französische fotzen!’

  The blow from the stock of a soldier’s musket knocked him to the ground.

  Now the crowd hesitated, shocked. The moment shaped itself to each individual fear. The French soldiers, who’d marched hundreds of miles and knew every kind of fear there was, waited, firm, resolute. Johannes raised his head, grimacing in pain, saw his countrymen step back and dissolve into the larger crowd behind them, still waving and cheering for Napoleon Bonaparte.

  AGITATOR

  Twelve days later, Sous-lieutenant Hubert Pessac, the new prison commandant in Berlin, ran his finger down a list of names written in the ledger open before him on the desk. The list recorded everyone arrested in the city on 27 October 1806. There were twenty-two names in total, written in a slanting script. He dragged his finger down and found the next entry.

  Meyer, Johannes, eighteen, Hirtengaße.

  Pessac called for the man, and his sergeant went out to bring the prisoner up from the cells.

  ‘Make sure you tell them you’re a deserter,’ a man called Wolfie said. He was the only man in the cells who’d bothered to speak to Johannes. He didn’t have many teeth left but liked to smile. The boy reminded him of a brother, long gone now and buried in the mud of some forgotten battlefield.

  ‘But they’ll know,’ Johannes said.

  ‘Just tell them. They’ll put you in the army if they think you can hold a musket. Then at least there’s a chance to run. Otherwise it’s the galleys and an oar at your guts until your beard reaches your balls. That’s if you don’t die first and they throw you overboard. Right?’

  ‘But I didn’t do anything!’

  ‘That doesn’t matter anymore, my friend. Best forget it.’

  The day everybody went out to see Napoleon Bonaparte enter the city, Wolfie had been caught breaking into houses. His wife had sewed long pockets inside his coat and Wolfie had filled them with bread, brandy, sausage, silk handkerchiefs, jewellery, silver cutlery. He told Johannes it had been a grand day, the best day ever, until they caught him. ‘I was greedy,’ he said. ‘I should’ve gone home after the first few houses. But what a day! I couldn’t resist. It felt so good to be rich.’

  He slapped Johannes on the back. ‘Trust me, boy.’

  ‘But what will I say? I don’t know anything about the army.’

  ‘Tell them you deserted from the Puttkammer Infantry Regiment. Number forty. Auerstedt. Got it?’

  ‘They might check.’

  ‘Be confident! What’s there to check? They always need soldiers.’

  When the sergeant came and took Johannes away, Wolfie called after him, ‘L
ook ahead, son. Dead straight ahead. The past is over.’

  In Pessac’s office, the sergeant pushed Johannes towards the desk. His wrists were shackled and so were his ankles.

  ‘Stand there.’

  Pessac sniffed a lavender-scented handkerchief at his wrist, tucked inside the cuff of his jacket.

  ‘Proceed,’ he said.

  The sergeant began to narrate the circumstances of the boy’s arrest. Johannes quickly interrupted.

  ‘Sir, I did nothing wrong!’ he said. ‘I’m innocent of all charges!’

  ‘Silence!’

  ‘It’s a misunderstanding!’

  The sergeant punched Johannes in the kidneys.

  Pessac held up his hand and nodded. The details really had no bearing on things. While Johannes Meyer groaned and kneeled into the pain ripping through him, Pessac dipped his quill into the inkpot. He wrote agitator into the last blank column.

  Johannes managed to look up. He knew for certain now that everything was over. He wasn’t going home. The realisation came coldly and, to his surprise, with strange relief.

  ‘Sir, I’m sorry,’ he said. There was nothing to lose now. ‘Sir … I’m a deserter.’

  The prison commandant frowned. ‘From where?’

  ‘Puttkammer Infantry Regiment, sir. Number forty. Auerstedt.’ Pessac cleared his throat, took a deep breath. Really, they wasted so much of his time. He’d have to blot out what he’d already written. Fine. He did so, and changed agitator to deserter. Then in another column he wrote 4e Régiment Étrangers. Then he waved the boy and the sergeant away.

  GODS

  They’d also watched Bonaparte’s victory parade, as they watched many things in the world and would always watch them, and (among others) they’d picked Johannes Meyer out. It mostly always happened like that, for no reason and at random. Probably they were bored with Bonaparte; he’d had such a good run since being plucked out of Corsica, and here was just more of the same pomp. Everyone knows the gods love a good joke, and look … They grinned and nodded between themselves and then pointed down at the crowd, made more random selections: him, her, her, him et cetera. Choices made, they whipped up the sticky tendrils of fate and loosed the surging winds of change (those puff-cheeked cherubs) and young Johannes Meyer felt a shiver down his back.

  And then the gods took a well-deserved afternoon nap.

  All that’s left for us are the incomplete maps, to conjecture and argue their scale.

  THE PEAKS OF SUCCESS

  Général de Brigade Michel François Fourés had given up on being received by the Emperor.

  At the Battle of Jena, and then leading his cuirassiers against Prussian forces along the Isserstadt–Vierzehnheiligen line, he’d forced General Hohenlohe’s troops into a wild retreat, all the way beyond Gross Romstadt and into the dewy Capellendorf Valley, the Prussians abandoning artillery, arms and supplies as they ran, surrendering by the hundreds. No matter, it seemed, this success. Instead of an audience with the Emperor, instead of orders to pursue the fleeing Prussians and their king (instead of honours), he’d been assigned administrative duties in Berlin.

  The général was aware they all disliked him—Berthier, Soult, Lanne, Ney and Davout, the marvellous maréchals of this Prussian campaign (and before that the Italian, and before that the Austrian, and before that all the other campaigns). They had the Emperor’s ear. A ring of whisperers. The further up the ranks of the Grande Armée Fourés had risen, the more he’d had to contend with their politics and manoeuvring. Finally, it seemed, he’d reached his summit. There was no place else for him to go.

  Administrative duties.

  Of course, it didn’t help that his younger brother was a royalist who’d fled to England after the Revolution. For years now Étienne had published scurrilous pieces against Bonaparte in the Courier de Londres. It was said the Emperor hated Étienne Fourés the most of all the exiled royalist writers. Maybe, Général Fourés thought, maybe it’s true that I’ve done better than could be expected. If only Letizia hadn’t gone and left him, also.

  Beautiful, young, cushioned Letizia.

  ‘I’m a lady,’ she’d said. ‘And I refuse to make love under grey canvas any longer. Surrounded by indecent soldiery!’

  She’d often accompanied Fourés on campaign and it had never bothered her before. Then again, Captain Philippe Ducasse had never been around before either, handsome and dashing and just returned from distinguished service in the West Indies. A young man on the rise. Letizia knew a good bachelor when she saw one, especially in the wild like this, so to speak, away from tenacious Parisian competition. She also knew that Fourés’s wife refused him a divorce. And no doubt the young captain’s tent was bright and warm, anything but grey.

  The général’s carriage pulled up in the street. His aidede-camp leaned across and looked out of the window.

  ‘The von Hoffmann house, Général,’ he said.

  SUFFERING IS ONLY A SMALL PART OF THE TRUTH

  Krüger sat in a corner at Otto Kessler’s coffee house on Taubenstraße. His notebook was open on the table in front of him. On a fresh page, he’d written:

  All that can be known is there to know and is already known.

  Only courage remains for us to author.

  Courage the deed to this knowing.

  But that was yesterday. All last night and this morning, too, he’d been unable to continue. Every word he wrote embarrassed him. It was all nonsense. And now he’d drunk too much coffee and his stomach burned. Berlin was a disappointment. Maybe the carriage out in the morning would jolt his thinking, break in some new ideas. For now, it was like being curled up and nailed into a box.

  In Magdeburg, before she died, Hilde had said to him, ‘you think too hard, Heinrich.’ With her illness, her criticisms were sharper, without prologue, and they stung him. ‘But it’s not in there, my love,’ she said. ‘Everything is outside, all around you.’

  Krüger frowned. There was that tone again, loving, sincere, calmly intelligent. Unimpeachable. He said, ‘What is?’

  ‘Everything you could wish to know.’

  He rubbed his face with both hands; held them there, pressed and traced the ridges of bone over his eyes.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be so painful,’ she said. ‘Suffering is only a small part of the truth.’

  ‘Thank you, Fräulein Philosophia,’ Krüger said through his fingers. (How he regretted that childish tone now!)

  Heinrich and Hilde. Hilde and Heinrich. Like the title of a play: a romance or tragedy, or a comedy perhaps.

  She was a thousand times more gifted, more brilliant, more deserving of life’s riches, even now when she was gone.

  BLOODLINES

  The Tricolore flapped brightly over Charlottenburg Palace.

  Inside, the Prussians were grim and lost. Their good King Frederick was gone, fled to Osterode with Queen Louisa and a thin cabinet of ministers. Their hearts ached for their king and they moved dejectedly among the striding French. Up and down the magnificent hallways of the palace and inside the magisterial rooms and chambers, the French! Enemy messengers, aides-de-camp, adjutants, soldiers and officers, instantly familiar, right at home, moved about with purpose, ignored them. Salt in the wounds. And yet, even in their whispering, defeated huddles, each man desired to see their conqueror in the flesh. To be tied to history, to have a story to tell their grandchildren. They looked up at every sound of footsteps and click of door latches, hopeful for a glimpse. He’s here, somewhere! Right now! they all thought. Napoleon!

  The loyal, the shamed but not defeated (the truly loyal), were of course appalled by their fickle compatriots. They held the fight to the French. They’d hidden the wine and the brandy. They’d taken the firewood away in carts (as much as they could shift in the short time they had) and they’d stolen the candles and chamber-pots and the sugar, and they’d opened all the windows to let the cold evening air into the vast palace hallways and rooms. They’d be damned if Bonaparte would pass any comfortable
days here.

  Their heroism, inevitably, amounted to not much. They were only a small group. Most of their fickle compatriots thought them absurd and idiotic. The French paid no attention to their childish sabotage. They had plenty of brandy and pissed out the windows.

  At the palace now, it was gossip and rumours at their zenith, every subject imaginable. The future of Prussia, the fate of Europe, the Emperor’s luncheon menu, his favourite cologne. A chambermaid had seen his penis.

  ‘Small,’ she’d said. ‘Like a little snail lost its shell.’

  Every keyhole an eye.

  Bonaparte had instructed the fires be lit in his chambers (the palace was like a tomb, he said). He was still waiting for someone to come. His fearful staff eventually broke the furniture and piled the mahogany splinters high. In the early morning he would depart for Poland.

  The Empress Josephine had written that she was pleased for him, his great triumph. She’d sent him more liquorice from the confiseur on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Paris was grey without him, she wrote. And, no, she wasn’t pregnant.

  INTRODUCTIONS

  Günther Jagelman and the von Hoffmann family lawyer Seidlitz greeted Général Fourés and his aide-de-camp, Christophe Bergerard. Aunt Margaretha refused to come out of her bedroom (she would spend the next few weeks there). As they stood awkwardly in the entrance hall, soldiers brought the général’s things inside from the carriage and piled them on the parquet floor.

  ‘Welcome, Général,’ Seidlitz said.

  ‘Thank you, Monsieur.’

  ‘I must apologise, Général, for Frau von Hoffmann’s absence. She is suffering from the grippe and has taken to her bed.’