The Barbary Pirates

by William Dietrich

  The trio behind me was trying to follow all this with dazed bewilderment. “At least let my friends go,” I said. “This was all my doing.”

  “Your friends, Ethan, are the only reason I am saving you.” He snapped an order. “Lock them all up before they trample someone else.”

  This was not the way I’d intended meeting Bonaparte, given that I fancied myself as a diplomat. He did have a habit of seeing people on his own time and at his own advantage. As we were herded into a waiting prison wagon it occurred to me that it was highly coincidental that the French minister of police, considered by many the most feared and powerful man in France after Napoleon himself, happened to be waiting at the gates of the Palais Royal just as I’d made a thorough fool of myself. Did the mysterious Osiris or treacherous Marguerite have some connection with the equally mysterious Fouché?

  “Ethan, what the devil?” Fulton asked as the door clanged shut. We started with a lurch.

  “It’s all part of our visit,” I said vaguely. “We’re off to see Bonaparte. You did want an audience with him, didn’t you?”

  “Not as a criminal! I told you we shouldn’t have stolen the fire wagon.”

  “You should feel complimented. We’ve been arrested by Fouché himself.”

  “For what?”

  “Me, mostly.”

  The other two savants were still drugged and groggy about our arrest, and I knew I’d have to ask Bonaparte for the favor of releasing them, putting me in his debt. In short, the first consul had saved my appointment with him until I was dependent on his mercy. I suppose such tactical maneuvering was the reason he was ruler of France, and I was not.

  Our wagon, with only tiny windows for air, wound through the streets of Paris in the darkest hour of the night. By peering out the openings I could occasionally discern a landmark in what was still a sprawling, medieval mélange of a city in recovery from the revolution. Its population had dropped a hundred thousand to just over half a million, thanks to the flight of royalists and an earlier economic depression. Only under Napoleon was the economy reviving. I guessed our destination from our westerly direction.

  “We’re going to his château of Malmaison,” I predicted to the others. “That’s good news. No one you know will see us.”

  “Or see us disappear,” muttered Cuvier, who was beginning to regain his wits.

  “Malmaison? Bad house?” Smith translated.

  “A neighborhood name in memory of an old Viking raid, Bill. Probably your ancestors.”

  “Bah. They sacked England, too. And came from France, the Normans did.”

  Paris as always was a hodgepodge of palaces, crowded houses, vegetable plots, and muddy pasture. The only people I saw at that predawn hour were some of the thousands of water carriers who laboriously carry buckets to homes from the city’s inadequate fountains. The average Parisian makes do with a liter of water a day, and one of the reasons Bonaparte is popular is because he’s beginning to remedy the shortage.

  My companions finally dozed.

  From Paris’s crowded center we passed into its greener periphery, then through the Farmers-General enclosing wall built by Louis XVI to combat smuggling. We crossed the bending Seine and entered the sprawling suburbs of villages, estates, and hunting preserves. Somewhere off to the south was Versailles, I guessed.

  Finally, an hour after dawn, we came to the first consul’s new home west of the city. Since seizing power just three years before, Napoleon had lived at the Luxembourg Palace, the Tuileries Palace, and was spending upward of 1.5 million francs to ready the old château of Saint-Cloud. Meanwhile, he liked to get away from the city to this estate Josephine had bought while he was in Egypt. He’d been infuriated by her purchase at the time, but had since warmed to Malmaison’s country charm.

  We followed a high stone wall to an iron gate guarded by soldiers, and after a word from Fouché passed into a gravel lane between two rows of linden trees. When we were finally let out, stiff, unkempt, and hungover, I saw evidence of Josephine’s sweet taste. If her husband’s eye was for grandeur—how he loved a military review—Josephine’s was for beauty.

  Malmaison is a pretty château in the French style, with yellow stucco, pale blue shutters, and a slate roof. Its long rectangle is only a single room in width, meaning that light floods through from windows on both sides of its public spaces. Ornamental trees are planted in trim green boxes, and a riot of flowers grows up to the sills of the windows, cut to fill countless vases inside. We could hear birdcall from the park.

  “We’re here to see the first consul,” Fouché announced to some potentate in braid, sash, and black patent slippers.

  “He’s already out by the pond. He never seems to sleep. This way.”

  We stepped through a room with Roman columns and peeked left and right. The dining room had frescoes of Pompeii dancers, which made sense because Josephine was an avid fan of the recent excavation of that ash heap. Roman antiquities filled the shelves. On the other side of the entry was a billiard room and beyond it a rather opulent drawing room with expensive embroidered chairs, the arms decorated with winged Egyptian goddesses. It was homage to Bonaparte’s adventure at the pyramids. Two large and melodramatic paintings flanked the fireplace.

  “Odysseus?” I guessed.

  “Ossian,” Fouché replied. “The first consul’s favorite poem.”

  Then into a grand music room with harp, piano, and portraits of constipated-looking French ancestors, the morning sunlight pouring on warm wood like honey. The marble eyes of Roman generals followed us with opaque gazes.

  “There’s a meeting room upstairs draped with fabric as if the occupants are in an oriental campaign tent,” the policeman said. “The furniture is carved with Egyptian deities and Nubian princesses. It’s all quite imaginative.”

  “A little fevered with the furnishings, isn’t he?”

  “Bonaparte believes even a chair can sing his praises.”

  Smith turned slowly about. “This isn’t like a British prison at all,” he marveled blearily.

  “The French like to tidy up.”

  We left the home again by glass doors and followed a gravel path toward a pond fed by a small river. Butterflies flitted in Josephine’s little paradise, sheep cropped to keep the grass down, and peacocks strutted. We were nearing the decorative lake when a gun sounded.

  “Napoleooon!” We heard a woman’s protest, coming from a window high in the apartments behind us.

  She was answered by another shot.

  We passed through trees and came to a cluster of a dozen aides, officers, and groundsmen, proof that the great are seldom alone. One servant was reloading a fowling piece while Napoleon hefted another, squinting at some swans swimming and flapping at the opposite end of the water. “I purposely miss,” he told the others, “but I can’t resist teasing Josephine.” He aimed and fired, the shot hitting the water well short of the birds. The swans erupted again.

  “Napoleooon, please!” her wail came.

  “There’s swan shit everywhere,” he explained. “She has too many of them.”

  Fouché stepped forward. “It’s the American Gage,” he announced. “He’s made trouble, as you predicted.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Bonaparte turned. Again he exhibited that electrical presence, that firmness of command, which inspired and intimidated. The shock of dark hair, the bright gray eyes, the oddly sallow skin for a soldier of Corsican descent (a slight yellow tint, which I wondered might hint at some malady), and the tense energy were all there as I remembered. He was thicker than when I’d last seen him almost two years before—not fat, but the leanness of youth was gone. Napoleon had the mature muscle of a thirty-two-year-old soldier dining at too many state banquets. His hair was combed forward in the Roman style to cover a hairline already beginning to slightly recede, as if he lived and aged faster than most men. His gaze was calculating, yet amused.

  He pretended surprise to the French scientist. “You, too, Cuvier?”


  “First Consul, I don’t even remember what happened. We were following Gage. I lapsed into unconsciousness and awoke in catastrophe…”

  “Yes, I quite understand. I’ve met the American myself.” He shook his head and then glanced with slight distaste at Fouché, as if wishing he didn’t need the policeman. But of course he did, if he wanted to stay in power. “Savants with your abilities should think twice before enlisting Ethan Gage as a guide to depravity. No man attracts more trouble. Or gets out of it so frequently.” Now he looked directly at me. “The last time we met, you crawled out of a pond at Mortefontaine with your hair almost on fire. I sent you on to America to get you away from my sister. What did you learn there that is useful?”

  I blinked, trying to summon coherent thought. Was I a prisoner or a diplomat? “Louisiana is almost unimaginably large and unimaginably distant,” I said. “It is full of fierce Indians and desired by the British. Unless you have an army to hold it, it’s more liability than asset. I suggest you sell it to the United States to keep it out of English hands.” I turned. “Sorry, Smith.”

  The geologist blinked. “I really have no opinion. It’s a long way from my canals.”

  “I have an army, in St. Domingue, if Leclerc doesn’t lose it to disease and those damn blacks,” Napoleon said. “What would your nation do with Louisiana?”

  I shrugged. “Jefferson thinks everyone should be a farmer, if it can be farmed.”

  “And can it?”

  “Eventually it is empty of trees, like the steppes. The weather is terrible. I don’t know.”

  He sighed. “At least you don’t tell me what you think I might like to hear. That’s the only reason I didn’t shoot you long ago, Gage. And these savants are experts at bones and rocks?”

  “Yes, First Consul. We went to the Palais Royal on a lark and were lured into a brothel. We entered simply to study its interior décor, and then a fire broke out…”

  “Which you set. Fouché’s report got here before he did. I know more about what went on there than you do. I asked about your friends, Gage, not your stupidity.”

  “Fulton is…”

  “Yes, yes, I know all about his damn plunging boat. He might have crept up on the British navy but could never catch it.”

  “With additional money for improvements…” Fulton began eagerly.

  “Enough, I said!” It was a military bark, and Fulton’s mouth snapped shut. “You, Gage, were trying to learn something of an old lover, am I correct?”

  Fouché had clearly been spying on us, if he hadn’t arranged the entire affair himself to embarrass me. I took a breath. “You remember Astiza, First Consul. You were going to shoot both of us outside the Tuileries.”

  “Women.” He glanced back at the château. “Josephine is mucking up our estate with her damned swans, which I have threatened to shoot, but she pleads, and so I relent, so there is more shit, so then I take out my guns, and eventually we reconcile…” He smiled a moment at a private memory. “Women by natural order should be the property of men, but the reality is that we’re slaves to them, are we not?”

  “I don’t think even Josephine would call you a slave, First Consul.”

  “Well, you are indentured to me. I gave you two hundred dollars and clear instructions and yet you spent much of your time in North America with the British, just as you did in the Holy Land. Are you their spy, Gage? What are you doing with this ditch-digging Englishman, Smith? What is it about Smith’s grasping nation of pirates and tinkerers that makes you find their company so appealing?”

  “Pirates and tinkerers?” Smith protested.

  “It is Paris I came back to, First Consul,” I interrupted. “I ended up fighting the English couple I met in America, not allying with them. They were part of the same perfidious Egyptian Rite I kept warning you about at the pyramids. Now I’ve encountered it in the Palais Royal as well. I declare it’s a conspiracy you should fear. And what the British taught me is that it would be easier for you to sell Louisiana than to lose it.”

  “Hmph.” Napoleon sighted at the swans again, but didn’t fire, handing the gun back to a servant. “Well, I have a new mission for you now, and if you help, then maybe I’ll consider your arguments about a sale, which should make Jefferson happy.” He addressed my companions. “You were arrested, gentlemen, thanks to the impetuousness of Ethan Gage here. The man is a brilliant imbecile. But you are about to have an opportunity for clemency and a quiet expurgation of this incidence of whoring and drug-taking. I want you to take ship for the Greek island of Thira and investigate a peculiar rumor.”

  “Thira!” Cuvier exclaimed.

  “Your presence as savants should help blind the Ottomans to your true task, which is to sound out Greek patriots about the idea of revolt against the Turks. We have lost Egypt and the Ionian Islands, and the damnable British are refusing to evacuate Malta as required by our new peace treaty. Yet Greece as an ally would be a thorn to Istanbul, Austria, and the English, and a rose to us. All we need is a steady ally, and I have one in mind, a scholarly firebrand named Ioannis Kapodistrias. You’re to meet him, under the guise of an archaeological mission, and see if French help could instigate a revolt.”

  “Didn’t you try that in Ireland?” I reminded, undiplomatically.

  “It will work this time.”

  “And what archaeological mission?” If I sounded wary, it was because I associated the trade with trick doors, collapsing tunnels, and near drowning. Pyramids and temples have a way of pinching in on you, I’ve found.

  Fouché answered. “As minister of police, it’s my responsibility to keep an eye on all factions that represent a possible threat to the state, including the Egyptian Rite. One of my investigators learned that you’d been asking your scientific associates in Paris about the island of Thira at the same time these renegade Freemasons were acquiring books and maps on it.”

  “But all I know of Thira is the name.”

  “So you say. Yet what a remarkable coincidence that so much attention is being paid to an obscure rock on the Aegean Sea. And you, Ethan Gage, return from America after association with the British and seek out the American inventor Fulton, the British surveyor Smith, and a French expert on ancient cataclysms. How conspiratorial! The idea of using a bordello as cover was really quite ingenious.”

  “It was Madame Marguerite who lured us.”

  “Come, Gage, we know each other too well for you to play the fool with me,” Napoleon said. “This charade of bumbling confusion is all very amusing, but you insert yourself in every mystery and conspiracy there is. Nor do I think your esteemed friends would associate with a rake and wastrel like yourself unless there was advantage to be gained. You meet the Rite in the bowels of the Palais Royal, start a fire, initiate a riot, run down your competitors, and pretend to ignorance? All of us know you must be in pursuit of what’s been long rumored.”

  “First Consul!” Cuvier cried. “I swear I know nothing about his plotting!”

  “Of course not,” Bonaparte said mildly. “Gage is using you. Using all of you. He’s a devious rascal, a master of intrigue, and if he were French I’ve no doubt Fouché would have recruited him to the police long ago. Is that not true, Minister?”

  “Even now I do not fully understand his motives and alliances,” Fouché admitted.

  I, of course, had not the slightest idea of what was going on, and was trying to decide if I should be proud or insulted by this new description of me as brilliant, devious, and a master of intrigue. All I’d seen was the word “Thira” on a scrap of golden foil in the middle of the American wilderness—a Norse Templar artifact, according to my late companion Magnus Bloodhammer—and nothing else. Still, if the police were so smart, maybe I could learn something from them.

  “I’m also looking for Og,” I tried. That was written on the foil, too, before Aurora Somerset made a mess of the whole thing. She was the reason I’d sworn off women.

  At that word, Fouché stiffened and looked at me wa
rily. Cuvier, too, stared curiously. But it was Napoleon who’d gone white.

  “What did you say?” the first consul asked.

  “Og.” It sounded silly even to me.

  The first consul glanced questioningly at my three companions, and then addressed the others. “I think Monsieur Gage and I need a moment alone.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  We walked fifty paces from the group and stopped by the pond shore, out of hearing from anyone else. “Where did you hear that word?” Napoleon asked sharply.

  “In America.”

  “America! How?”

  I sighed. It was the first time I’d even tried to relate what really happened, and I didn’t expect anyone to believe me. “You may remember a Norwegian named Bloodhammer who visited Mortefontaine when we celebrated the treaty between France and my own country,” I began. “He found a place in the Louisiana Territory, far beyond the frontier, which had Norse artifacts.” I decided not to mention anything more about the bewildering site. “One was a gold metal sheet, encased in a rotting shield, which had writing that bore that word. It stuck in my mind because it was so odd.”

  “What else did it say?” Bonaparte looked disturbed, almost queasy.

  “The inscription was in Latin, which I can’t read. I could only make out a few words and then a fight broke out and the foil was destroyed. It happened in a struggle with a British woman from the Egyptian Rite, actually—quite a long story.” No need to mention I’d been her lover. “Just as I was telling you, I was fighting the British, not spying for them.”

  “So you don’t know what it means?”

  “No. Do you?”

  He frowned, looking out across the pond. The cluster of aides and police were looking at us curiously from a distance, envious of my sudden intimacy with their leader. “Gage,” he finally asked quietly, “have you ever heard of the Little Red Man?”