Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  To our right was Mount Zion and the Tomb of David. To the left was the Valley of Hinnom, the Pool of Siloam somewhere in the darkness below. “We’ll circle the city wall to the north and take the Nablus Road,” I said. “If we travel at night we can make Acre in four days and get word to Sidney Smith.”

  “What about the treasure?” Tentwhistle asked. “Is that it? Do we give up?”

  “You saw it wasn’t there. We have to figure where next to look. I hope to God they didn’t catch Farhi. He’ll know where to try next.”

  “No, I think he’s betraying us. Why’d he slip off like that?”

  I wondered that too.

  “It’s our own skins first,” said Big Ned.

  And with that his lieutenant jerked and the sound of a shot echoed up the hill. Then another and another, bullets whapping into the dust. Tentwhistle sat down with a grunt. Then I heard the words in French:

  “There they are! Spread out! Cut them off!”

  It was the group that had tried to brick us up in the tunnels, the same Frenchmen who had accosted Miriam. They’d crawled back out of the Pool of Siloam, heard the chaos, and waited under the wall for someone to appear.

  I crouched by Tentwhistle and aimed. My lens found one of our ambushers and I fired. He went down. Pretty rifle. I feverishly reloaded.

  Ned had taken Tentwhistle’s pistol and he fired too, but our assailants were not within pistol range. “All you’ll do is draw their aim with your flash,” I told him. “Get Tom and the lieutenant back through the gate. I’ll hold them here a moment and then we can lose them in the Armenian Quarter.”

  Another bullet whined overhead. Tentwhistle was coughing blood, his eyes glazed. He would not live long.

  “Right, guv’nor, you buy us time.” Ned began dragging Tentwhistle back, Tom groggily following. “Potts dead, two more of us wounded. Bloody inspiration, you are.”

  It was getting lighter. Bullets pinged as the Frenchmen swarmed closer. I fired again, then glanced behind me. The sailors were back through the gate. No time to reload, time to go! In a crouch, I sidled backward toward it. Dark forms were closing like circling wolves. Then I heard a creak. The gate was closing! I scuttled rapidly, and just made it to the city wall when the gate boomed shut, locking me out. I heard the thud of its bar being slid home.

  “Ned! Open up!” There was a French command and I threw myself flat just before a volley went off. Bullets hammered against the iron like hail. I was like a condemned man at an execution wall. “Hurry, they’re coming!”

  “I think we’ll be going our own way, guv’nor,” Ned called.

  “Own way? For God’s sake…”

  “I don’t think these frogs will care that much about a couple of poor British sailors. You’re the one with the treasure secrets, ain’t you?”

  “What, you’re leaving me to them?”

  “Maybe you can lead ’em on like you did us, eh?”

  “Damn, Ned, let’s stand together, as the lieutenant said!”

  “He’s done, and so are we. Doesn’t pay to cheat honest seamen at cards, guv’nor. Lose your friends, you do.”

  “But I didn’t cheat, I outsmarted you!”

  “The same bloody thing.”

  “Ned, open this gate!”

  But there was no reply, just the mute slab.

  “Ned!” Lying prone, I hammered on the unyielding iron. “Ned! Let me in!”

  But he didn’t, of course, as I strained to hear their retreat over the city’s tumult. I turned back. The French had crept to just yards away, and several muskets were trained on me. The tallest one smiled.

  “We said good-bye beneath the Temple Mount and yet we meet again!” their leader cried. He doffed a tricorn hat and bowed. “You do have a talent of being everywhere, Monsieur Gage, but then so do I, do I not?” His was a torturer’s grin. “Surely you remember me, from the Toulon stage? Pierre Najac, at your service.”

  “I remember you: The customs inspector who turned out to be a thief. So is Najac your real name?”

  “Real enough. What happened to your friends, monsieur?”

  Slowly I stood. “Disappointed in a game of cards.”

  CHAPTER 10

  I knew I was in hell when Najac insisted on showing me his bullet wound. It was the one I’d given him the year before, red and scabby, on a torso that couldn’t have seen soap or a washcloth for a month. The little crater was a few inches below his left nipple and toward his left side, confirming that my aim had been off by degrees. Now I knew he smelled bad, too.

  “It broke a rib,” he said. “Imagine my pleasure when I learned after my convalescence that you might be alive and that I could help my master track you down. First you were stupid enough to make inquiry in Egypt. Then, when we came here we caught a doddering old fool who squealed about meeting a Frank carrying Satan’s gold angels, once we’d roasted him enough. That’s when I knew you must be close. Revenge is sweeter the longer it is delayed, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll let you know when I finally kill you.”

  He laughed at my little joke, stood, and then kicked the side of my head so hard that the night dissolved into bright bits of light. I toppled over by the fire, bound hand and foot, and it was the smoldering of my clothes and resulting pain that finally jarred me enough to wriggle away. This greatly amused my captors, but then I always did enjoy being the center of attention. Afterward the burn kept me feverish. It was the night after our departure from Jerusalem, and fear and pain were the only things keeping me conscious. I was exhausted, sore, and frightfully alone. Najac’s party of bullyboys had somehow swelled to ten, half of them French and the rest bedraggled Bedouin who looked like the kitchen grease of Arabia, ugly as toads. Missing, besides half this complement’s teeth, was the Frenchman I’d stabbed in the fight over Miriam. I hoped I’d finished him, a sign I was getting better at dispatching my enemies. But maybe he was convalescing too, dreaming of the day he could capture and kick me as well.

  Najac’s mood wasn’t improved by his discovery that I carried nothing of value but my rifle and tomahawk, which, being a thief, he appropriated. My seraphim I’d entrusted to Miriam, and in all the excitement I hadn’t noticed that someone—Big Ned or Little Tom, I assumed—had also relieved me of my purse. My insistence that we’d found nothing underground, that Jerusalem was as frustrating as Egypt, did not sit well.

  What was I doing if nothing was to be found down there?

  Seeing the root stone of the world from its other side, I answered.

  They pounded on me but hesitated to kill me. The passageways under the Temple Mount were as stirred up as an ant nest, the Muslims probably puzzling over what we’d been looking for. The ruckus eliminated any chance of this French-Arab gang going back, so I was the only clue they had.

  “I’d roast you right now if Bonaparte and the master didn’t want you alive,” Najac snarled. He let the Arabs amuse themselves by using their daggers to flick embers on my arms and legs, but not much more. Time enough later to make me scream.

  So I finally lapsed into exhausted blackness until I was yanked painfully awake the next morning for a breakfast of chickpea paste and water. Then we continued down a trace from the Jerusalem hills to the coastal plain, the horizon marked by columns of smoke.

  The French army was hard at work.

  Despite my captivity, I had an odd sense of homecoming when we reached Napoleon’s camp. I’d marched with Bonaparte’s army and encountered Desaix’s division at Dendara. Now, pitching white tents before the walls of Jaffa, were men in European uniforms again. I smelled familiar food, and once more heard the lilting elegance of the French tongue. As we rode through the ranks, men looked curiously at Najac’s gang and a few pointed at me in surprised recognition. Not long before I’d been one of their savants. Now here I was again, a deserter and a prisoner.

  Jaffa itself was familiar, but viewed this time from the vantage of the besieger. Canopies and hanging carpets had disappeared, its ramparts bearing
the fresh bite of cannonballs. Similarly, many of the orange trees that sheltered Napoleon’s army showed raw wood where Ottoman fire had smashed their tops. Fresh earth and sand were being thrown up for siege works, and long lines of French cavalry horses shifted nervously where they were picketed in the shade, whinnying and shuffling as cannon popped. Their tails flicked at flies like metronomes, and their manure had that familiar sweet scent.

  Najac went inside Napoleon’s broad canvas pavilion while I stood hatless in the Mediterranean sun, thirsty, dazed, and feeling fatalistic. I’d fallen once on a cliff above the St. Lawrence River, pivoting endlessly, and felt this same vague sense of sickening regret that time—only to bounce off a bush, over the rocks, and into the river.

  And here, perhaps, came my savior bush. “Gaspard!” I called.

  It was Monge, the famed French mathematician, the man who’d helped solve some of the puzzle of the Great Pyramid. He’d been a confidant of Napoleon since the general’s triumphs in Italy and had mentored me like a wayward nephew. Now he was accompanying the army into Palestine.

  “Gage?” Monge squinted as he came closer, his civilian dress increasingly shopworn, his knees patched, coat ragged, and face rough with stubble. The man was fifty-two, and tired. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you to go home to America!”

  “I tried. Listen. Do you have word of Astiza?”

  “The woman? But she went with you.”

  “Yes, but we were separated.”

  “Took a balloon, the two of you did—that’s what Conte told me. Oh, how furious he was at that prank! Floated away, how the rest of us envied you…and now you’re back in this asylum? Good God, man, I knew you weren’t a true savant, but you seem to have no sense at all.”

  “On that point we can agree, Doctor Monge.”

  Not only did he know nothing of Astiza’s fate, he clearly didn’t know of our entry into the pyramid, and I quickly decided it best not to tell him. If the French ever became aware there were things of value down there, they’d blow the edifice apart. Better to let Pharaoh rest in peace.

  “Astiza fell into the Nile and the balloon eventually came down in the Mediterranean,” I explained. “Is Nicolas here too?” I was a little nervous at meeting Conte, the expedition’s aeronaut, having stolen his observation balloon.

  “Fortunately for you he’s back in the south, organizing the shipment of our siege artillery. He had a rather brilliant plan to construct multiwheeled wagons to carry the guns across the desert, but Bonaparte has no time for new inventions. We’re risking bringing the train by sea.” He stopped, realizing he was relating secrets. “But what are you doing here, with your hands tied?” He looked puzzled. “You’re filthy, burned, friendless—my God, what’s happened to you?”

  “He’s an English spy,” said Najac, emerging from the tent. “And you risk suspicion too, scientist, simply by talking to him.”

  “English spy? Don’t be ridiculous. Gage is a dilettante, a hanger-on, a dabbler, a wanderer. No one could take him seriously as a spy.”

  “No? Our general would.”

  And with that Bonaparte himself appeared, the tent flap billowing grandly as if infused with his electricity. Like all of us he was browner than when we’d left Toulon nearly a year before, and while he was still just thirty, success and responsibility had given new hardness to his face. Josephine was an adulteress, his plans to reform Egypt on French republican lines had been answered with his condemnation as an infidel, and he’d had to put down a bloody uprising in Cairo. His idealism was under siege, his romanticism breached. Now his gray eyes were icy, his dark hair shaggy, his countenance more hawklike, his stride impatient. He marched up to me and stopped. At five-foot-six he was shorter than me, and yet inflated with power. I couldn’t help flinching.

  “So. It is you! I’d thought you dead.”

  “He went to the British, mon général,” Najac said. The man was like a schoolroom tattletale, and I was beginning to wish I’d shot him in the tongue.

  Bonaparte leaned into me. “Is this true, Gage? Did you desert me for the enemy? Did you reject republicanism, rationality, and reform for royalism, reactionaries, and the Turk?”

  “Circumstances forced us apart, General. I’ve simply been trying to discover the fate of the woman I’d acquired in Egypt. You remember Astiza.”

  “The one who shoots at people. My experience is that love does more harm than good, Gage. And you expected to find her in Jerusalem, where Najac caught you?”

  “As a savant, I was trying to make some historical inquiry…”

  He erupted. “No! If there is one thing I’ve learned, you are not a savant! Don’t waste my time anymore with damned nonsense! You’re a turncoat, a liar, and a hypocrite who fought in the company of English sailors! You probably are a spy, as Najac said. If you weren’t so silly, as Monge also points out.”

  “Sir, Najac there tried to rob me of my critical medallion in France when I was already committed to your expedition. He’s the traitor!”

  “He shot me,” Najac said.

  “He’s a henchman of Count Alessandro Silano and an adherent of the heretical Egyptian Rite, enemy of all true Freemasons. I’m certain of it!”

  “Silence!” Bonaparte interrupted. “I’m well aware of your dislike of Count Silano, Gage. I also know he has shown admirable loyalty and perseverance despite his tumble at the pyramids.” So, I thought: Silano is alive. The news was going from bad to worse in a hurry. Had the count pretended his fall from the balloon had been from the pyramids? And why did nobody say anything about Astiza?

  “If you had Silano’s loyalty, you wouldn’t have condemned yourself now,” Bonaparte went on. “By the saints, Gage, you were accused of murder, I gave you every opportunity, and yet you switch sides like a pendulum!”

  “Character tells, mon général,” Najac said smugly. I longed to strangle him.

  “You were actually looking for treasure, weren’t you?” Napoleon demanded. “That’s what this is all about. American mercantilism and greed.”

  “Knowledge,” I corrected, with some semblance of truth.

  “And what knowledge have you found? Speak honestly, if you value your life.”

  “Nothing, General, as you can see from my condition. That’s the truth. All I tell is the truth. I’m just an American investigator, caught up in a war not of my…”

  “Napoleon, the man is clearly more fool than traitor,” the mathematician Monge interrupted. “His sin is incompetence, not betrayal. Look at him. What does he know?”

  I tried to grin stupidly—not easy for a man of my basic sense—but I figured the mathematician’s assessment was an improvement over Najac’s. “I can tell you the politics of Jerusalem are very confused,” I offered. “It is unclear where the loyalty of the Christians and the Jews and the Druze truly lie…”

  “Enough!” Bonaparte looked sourly at all of us. “Gage, I don’t know whether to have you shot or let you take your chances with the Turk. I should send you into Jaffa and let you wait for my troops there. They are not patient men, my soldiers, not after the resistance at El-Arish and Gaza. Or perhaps I should send you to Djezzar, with a note saying you are a spy for me.”

  I swallowed. “Perhaps I could aid Doctor Monge…”

  And then came the sound of gunfire, horns, and cheering. We all looked toward the city. On the south side, a column of Ottoman infantry was boiling out of Jaffa while Turkish guns thudded. Flags thrashed, men skittering down the hill toward a half-finished French artillery emplacement.

  French bugles began to sound in response.

  “Damn,” Napoleon muttered. “Najac!”

  “Oui, mon général!”

  “I’ve a sally to attend to. Can you find out what he really knows?”

  The man grinned. “Oh yes.”

  “Then report back to me. If he’s truly useless, I’ll have him shot.”

  “General, let me talk to him…” Monge tried again.

  “If you t
alk to him again, Doctor Monge, it will be only to hear his last words.” And then Bonaparte ran toward the sound of the guns, calling his aides.

  I’m no coward, but there’s something about being hung upside down above a sand pit in the Mediterranean dunes by a gang of hooting French-Arab cutthroats that made me want to tell them anything they want to hear. Just to stop the damned blood from welling in my head! The French had repulsed the Ottoman sally, but not before the plucky Turks overran the uncompleted battery and killed just enough Frenchmen to get the army’s fire up. When told I was an English spy, several soldiers enthusiastically offered to help Najac’s gang excavate the pit and construct the palm-log scaffold I was suspended from. Officially, the idea was to wring from me any secrets I hadn’t already shared. Unofficially, my torture was a reward to Najac’s particular assortment of sadists, perverts, lunatics, and thieves, who existed to do the invasion’s dirty work.

  I’d already told the truth a dozen times. “There’s nothing down there!” And, “I failed!” And, “I didn’t even know exactly what I’m looking for!”

  But then truth isn’t really the point of torture, given that the victim will say anything to get the pain to stop. Torture is about the torturer.

  So they roped my ankles and hung me upside down from the crossbeam over the sandy pit, my arms free to flap. They’d dug the hole a good ten feet deep before striking something hard, declaring it good enough for my grave. Now one of the Bedouin came forward with a wicker basket and emptied its contents. Half a dozen snakes fell to the bottom of the pit and writhed in indignation, hissing.