For our story purposes, the treasure could have always been kept inside some hollow Phoenician idols (also the gods of Hannibal’s Carthage) outside his door.
A weaver of rugs, following a legend handed down in his family for generations, found the treasure room at Eski Hissar, but took only a few pieces away with him.
Arrested in trying to sell a gem, he was imprisoned and after a while, because he was a weaver, was put to work. He refused to tell the whole story, claiming he had found only a few things buried in a ruin miles from Istanbul. After a while, he was believed, but he was kept busy weaving rugs for the Ottoman Turks. Into one of the rugs he wove the secret of the treasure, and into four other rugs he wove a key that only his own family would understand.
He died without knowing his son had died before him, and his daughter had been sold into slavery in India. A beautiful girl, she was taken into the harem of one of the Maharajah’s family. With her she took the secret of the rug and a bracelet that had once belonged to Hannibal.
The Maharajah of Kasur’s great-grandfather had finally found what the rug was, but not until Jay had they found anyone who could read the secret, and he read it too late.
COMMENTS: I believe that, had Louis continued on with this novel, he would have improved it considerably. The treatment you have just read seems to have been a fairly “quick and dirty” attempt to make a sale to a movie studio. If Dad had pressed on with this project, there would have been more development of the backstory between Decebilus and Ballantyne, and certainly some sort of mano a mano final fight between them. The arrival of the villagers at the finale feels like a cop-out intended to wrap up the treatment so he could get on to the next project. It is not the sort of thing that Louis ultimately would have gone on to actually write in a book.
Given that Decebilus discusses the difficulty of unloading a treasure, I suspect that Louis would have realized that Jay, being a fairly wise man, had worked out how to transport and dispose of whatever he finally discovered. Perhaps Jay had even been intending to use Decebilus in this capacity but Decebilus double-crossed him by planting the bomb in his plane once he decided (erroneously!) all he had to do was grab the rug from Villette. It is also clear that, unless Louis was planning to rewrite the beginning yet again, Villette knows more than she is letting on. The story starts with her spending part of several days at Eski Hissar. That indicates she already has a general sense of where the treasure is buried.
Louis left behind notes that suggest part of the secret is how the ruins look as the light changes toward the end of the day. It’s not just that the pattern of walls is woven into the rug; the shadows they cast are also a part of the weaving. He also included a good deal of information on rug-weavers’ knots, so much that I began to think that the ultimate trick in a story like this would be to have a certain thread that could be picked out of the rug and then pulled. This would unravel the section around the rug’s archway lamp, leaving behind a different design…the one that showed the location of the treasure. I became so enamored with this idea that I added the line where the weaver mentions his family’s secret knot. I may not be done with this story. We’ll have to see.
At another point in his notes, Louis seemed to consider the idea that two different groups might be searching for the treasure, one a bunch of crooks, the other with political motives….I believe this idea came before he conceived of the Decebilus character. The “political” group might have created a way of using the treasure for a higher purpose, as well as a method of unloading all that precious metal in a world that was still on the gold-exchange standard.
As was his way, Louis included a pep talk for himself in his notes:
Make this a suspense story in line of The Maltese Falcon, but make it deeper, better, a fine love story, a story of background and suspense, a sexy story.
Make the love affair gay, lighthearted, two people at an outpost of the world, both skating on thin ice.
Make this a definitely superlative book, something completely out of the ordinary. Discuss books, politics, painting, jewels, beliefs, folklore, magic, etc.
Make this something really fine. With a great suspense yarn and a beautiful love story. Make the writing something very special.
A final comment on the one thing about this story that I have never been able to figure out. It is this piece of the opening line:
He lay on his face in the wet sand, a tall old man in shabby clothes, and looking down at the body, Ballantyne knew that it had begun again but this time he did not know why.
“…knew that it had begun again…” It’s a great opening and Louis definitely had something particular in mind. Initially, I thought “again” referred to the bombing of Jay’s plane—chronologically, that is the first death related to the plot—but now I’m not so sure. At a guess, taking other drafts and notes into consideration, “again” may imply Ballantyne suspects that those who got too close to the treasure were being bumped off by someone guarding it…maybe an individual, maybe a secret group, who didn’t even really know what they were guarding. Perhaps Dad realized later on that having the hero know too much in the beginning of the story wasn’t going to work all that well and started to pull back from that concept, or at least from Ballantyne’s knowledge of an ongoing plot or series of murders.
* * *
LOUIS RIEL
* * *
The First Three Chapters of a Historical Novel
CHAPTER 1
He stood upon the street in St. Paul and watched the people go by. Here he was a stranger, a lonely man with an aching in his heart that he did not understand. He wanted the nearness of people, but something within held aloof, feeling the difference within himself.
This was Minnesota, and off to the north lay his own land. Yet even here he glimpsed the blanket-coats of the métis, the half-breeds from the northern prairies and rivers, his own people.
For years they had been coming south to St. Paul or St. Cloud for their trading. This was the United States, and the cities of Canada lay far to the east over some rough country that made crossing a struggle. It was so much easier just to come south, to travel with the Red River cart caravans or to take the steamboat on the Red.
People brushed by him. He shifted his valise to the other hand and walked up to the door of the Merchants Hotel. He opened the door, catching the old familiar smell of the place: the stale cigar smoke, the warm, close air of the lobby.
This, at least, remained the same. The worn leather settees, the brass cuspidors, the buffalo head upon the wall. As a child he had once come to this place. To a boy from the vast plains this seemed a mysterious and somehow magical place.
He paused inside the door, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the change of light.
“Louis? Is it you? Mon dieu, but how long it has been?” It was Ambroise Lepine, a welcome face in a city of strangers.
“Ten years.”
“Well, you have your father’s look. More handsome, I think, and broader in the shoulder. He was a man, your father.”
They sat down at a table and stared at each other, amused and curious, Lepine the woodsman and Riel the scholar. Lepine wore a coat made from a Hudson Bay blanket, typical of the country, Riel a plain, black, neatly cut suit.
“You are not a priest, then?” Lepine said. “Not a priest after ten years of study?”
“I am a religious man, Ambroise, but toward the last I believe the good fathers were worried. I doubt if it is in me to become a priest.”
“Was it money? We could have found it. For a son of your father, nothing would be too much.”
“My mother needs me. You know that better than I, for you have been here. I have done little for her, and there are the girls, my sisters. I worked for a lawyer in Montreal but the pay was very poor. Besides…”
“Besides what?”
Riel was embarrassed. “I was homesick.”
Lepine nodded. “I know. A man cannot go far wrong when he is close to the trees, the rivers,
and the plains. After all, Louis, we are a part Indian, you and I.”
Riel’s smile was twisted. “I have had cause to remember that, Ambroise.”
Lepine put down his pipe and reached for his glass. “It is better that you have come back, Louis, and better that you are not a priest. We need you.”
“Is Mother well? She never writes of herself.”
“She is well, I think.” Lepine shook his head in awe. “She is a woman, your mother. But she does need you; it has not been easy for your mother, and now with the surveyors—”
“Surveyors?”
“Have you heard nothing? Men have come from Ontario who survey right across our lines. They say we own nothing, that the whole land must be resurveyed and reallotted.
“They say this to us! Three, four generations we have lived on this land. We have built our homes, cut hay in our meadows, fished in the streams, and trapped for fur. Old men have died here and young men have had sons.
“I reached out and touched a tree and it is mine, it has grown with me, as has the grass beneath our feet. I drink from a cold stream, smell the pines and the grass warmed by the summer sun. I turn the sod and see the corn grow where the seeds fell….And now they say the land is not ours, that we are only métis, we are nobody.”
“You have spoken to the Company?”
“The Company is no more. The Company is selling out, it is leaving us. The Hudson Bay Company was our father and our mother and now it goes from us.”
“But who is to govern? The Company administered the land. It has been the government. What will be done?”
“Who knows?” Lepine spread his hands helplessly. “Some say the Queen does not want Prince Rupert’s Land, that Canada does not want it, but Louis…those men from Ontario…I think they want it. I think they mean to have it, and that is why we need you.”
“Me?”
Lepine looked down at his huge hands. “I can lift anything, Louis, anything I can take hold of, but words do not come to me. You are your father’s son, and when in the old times there was trouble, we went to your father, the miller. It was he who led our fight for free trade. It was he who went to Ottawa to speak for us. He was a man of words, as you are.”
“You have spoken to the governor?”
“Mactavish is an old man, and he is ill. He is tired now, and soon will leave us. I do not believe he likes what is happening, for he has always been a just man. A stern man, but just.”
Louis Riel was silent. The love of his people for the land was no small thing. They had not come to get rich and get out. They knew nothing of politics or land speculation, for they were a people of the earth, of the forest, the lake, and the stream. They walked where the grizzly walked, and hunted the elk for meat on its own pastures. They knew the whistle of the marmot and where the beaver built his dams.
When the Company first sent its men west to trade with the Indians, many of them, French, English, and Scottish, married with the Indian girls, and from them came a different people, a fine, strong people. They were woodsmen and canoemen by birth, natural horsemen, confident hunters.
Louis Riel was himself one-eighth Indian; the rest was French, Irish, and Scandinavian. Yet he was considered a métis, a half-breed. He had borne the designation with pride, never really thinking of what it meant to some until…
“We must talk of this, Ambroise. I have been gone too long and have missed much. In Montreal there are rumors, sometimes, but to Montreal this is a far and savage land. They know nothing of us, and care less.”
“They know of us in Ontario. They hunger for our land.” Lepine got to his feet. “I have much to do, Louis. You are going home now?”
“I have no money, Ambroise, and cannot go empty-handed. To have an education is one thing, to have money, another. In Montreal I could save little, then like a fool I stayed overlong with friends in Chicago. I was like a child. My money just seemed to melt away, while I dined and talked with friends.”
Lepine chuckled. “It is the way of money. They make the coins round so they can roll. But when did a métis save money?”
“I kept hoping a way would open for me, Ambroise. Out here there is little need for educated men.”
“Bah! You can do anything, Louis! At St. Boniface you were the brightest of the lot.”
“I had too many questions, Ambroise. There were books to read, and I read them, but it worried the fathers that what I saw in the books was not always what they saw, so I did not become a priest; but what is a man to become who studies to become a priest and then is not a priest?”
Lepine chuckled. “He becomes a politician, Louis. Come home; help us. You know them, these men of the cities. You know their minds.”
The big man scowled, but it was worry, not anger. “Louis, men come among us and say disturbing things. You will meet them in Pembina, when you go north. One of them is an American who has no legs.”
“No legs?”
“From the waist up, he is magnificent. He has a special saddle, this one, and you should see him ride. It is a miracle that he rides, but he does.”
“What about him?”
“He wishes to see Rupert’s Land a part of the United States. He wishes us to sign a paper to the United States asking them to govern us.”
“We are Canadians,” Riel objected. “We are not Americans.”
“Agreed. But do we not have more in common with the men of Dakota and Minnesota than with Ottawa? When we ride north from here, where is the line between us? The color of the grass does not change, nor does the air have a different smell, or the wind blow in a way other than it does here. God made no line upon the earth; it exists only in the mind.”
“We are British subjects,” Riel objected. “We should remain so.”
Lepine nodded unhappily. “So I believe. I believe it in my belly, but I have no words to answer the men from Pembina. They say the Queen does not know we are here, and they say the men in Ottawa wish to please the voters in Ontario, so they will give our lands to them, and who are we to object? They say Ottawa will not listen.”
“They will listen, Ambroise. We must send somebody to talk to them.”
Riel was silent, thinking of what had been said. “You spoke of men who would resurvey the land? Who are they?”
“They come from Ontario, most of them. They are Protestants.”
“There are many Protestants, Ambroise. The Company was Protestant, and we got along with the Company.”
“I do not believe the Company had any religion but fur. They treated us fairly…most of the time.” Lepine grinned cheerfully. “And we treated them fairly…enough of the time. These men are not the same.”
“They have a leader?”
“A man named Schultz. He is a Swiss, I believe. A very big man, very strong…but not so strong as me, I think.” Lepine hesitated, no longer joking. “There is MacDougall who says he will be a king out here. And there is Dennis.”
“MacDougall I know of. There are others?”
“There is Scott…Thomas Scott. He is a loudmouth and a troublemaker. He gets along with no one, but he hates Catholics, Indians, and métis. He says we are dogs.”
“He said that to you?”
“Not to me, nor does he say it where I am. If he did I would squeeze him…so,” and he closed his huge fist.
—
When Lepine had gone, Louis Riel stayed at the table. Only a few men remained in the lobby. Two were talking in a desultory fashion of the wheat crop, and across the room a big man was telling of a cattle drive he expected to meet in Rapid City.
“Longhorns,” he was saying. “They’re big and they’re mean, but they could walk across the world. These come from Texas. Last year, in ’68, nearly three hundred thousand head came over the trail from Texas to Kansas!”
Riel was scarcely listening, for his thoughts had gone back to his last meeting with his father, who had been returning from a business trip as Louis left for school in the East. They met on the trail, and none o
f the words they had to say to each other had anything to do with what they were thinking.
The bond between them had been strong, but unspoken. Why had he not told his father he loved him? Why had he never said it aloud? Yet his father had not said the words to him, either.
How could he guess the father he loved would die while he was away at school?
Yet when the news came it was his mother of whom he thought. She had always been strong, original, and with a great appreciation of the amusing. Never while her husband was alive had she had to exert her strength or her will, for Louis Riel the elder had been a forceful man, although quiet, lifting his voice rarely, his hand never. He had given off a feeling of strength, of quiet assurance, and his mother had drawn upon that, and been all the more warm and loving because of it, there being no need to expend elsewhere the strength she herself possessed.
His was a strong heritage. Was he worthy of it? Was he half the man his father was? Or a quarter the person his mother was known to be?
The Merchants Hotel was old, born with almost the first breath of St. Paul, and over the years it had become a hodgepodge of logs, lumber, bricks, and stone with all the various repairs and additions. During the late summer and fall rooms were scarce, but Louis Riel went to the desk and asked for John Dodge, the clerk.
“I would like a room,” he said, “and I should like to stay for a while.”
Dodge hesitated, puzzled by the half-familiar features. “Have we met before, Mr….?”
“Riel…Louis Riel.”
“Of course. I knew your father. Knew him well.” He glanced over the register. “Yes, yes. I think we can find something for you.”
“Thank you, sir. I will be also looking for employment. If you hear of anything I would appreciate it.”
“Of course. Yes, I have a room for you, and Mr. Riel? Do make yourself at home. Your father was very helpful on many occasions and your people have been coming here for years.”
Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists Page 21