by Tom Wilde
Your Expectant Servant,
Joseph Fouché
“Damn,” I breathed. “So Fouché was planning to rat out Napoleon’s escape plan?”
“Yep,” Weir replied. “Just as soon as Wellington agreed to his terms. Fouché was smart enough to provide proof to Wellington, but held back the crucial information, no doubt thinking Wellington would pay a lot for the full story.”
“So where did this letter come from?”
“Trieste, Italy. It’s where Fouché was exiled to when the French Royalists got back into power and everyone decided they’d had enough of the old boy. You’ll note the letter’s dated 1820, which is the same year Fouché died and a year before Napoleon kicked the bucket. For all we know, Fouché may have been secretly killed to keep from spilling the beans about the escape plan.”
“But Napoleon never did escape from Saint Helena Island.”
“Not for lack of trying. This little conspiracy wasn’t the only escape plot cooking, by a long shot. The British intercepted other plans similar to this one. One of my favorites, from the British Library, described a plan for Napoleon to use a ‘boat shaped like a wine cask and painted the colour of the sea’ to sneak past the British ships.”
Weir paused, then said in a doubtful tone, “You know, there’s still a lot about Napoleon’s death that’s screwy. The latest buzz is that he died of stomach cancer.”
“So I’ve heard. What’s so screwy about that?”
Weir gave a knowing grin. “Check this out: Napoleon had his own physician on Saint Helena, a fellow Corsican named Antommarchi. But just a couple of months before he dies, he calls for one of the British contingent, one Dr. Archibald Arnott, to see him.”
“Maybe he wanted a second opinion?”
“Hold that thought,” Weir said as he turned and went for one of the precariously piled stack of books. He yanked one out like a magician pulling a laden tablecloth off a table and flipped it open to a marked page, then read aloud: “‘The room was perfectly dark and he could barely distinguish the form of Napoleon as he lay on his camp bed.’” Weir shut the book with a clap. “That was on April first, 1821, the month before Napoleon died. Helluva way for your new doctor to first examine his patient. Then, on May third, Napoleon gives the order that no English physician is to touch him except for Dr. Arnott.”
Weir began to pace the room, avoiding the pillars of books. “Now, Napoleon was buried on Saint Helena and then exhumed nineteen years later and taken to France, even though he stated he wanted to be buried back on his Corsican homeland. Oddly enough, Napoleon’s body was perfectly preserved when they dug him up. And that brings us to the teeth.”
“Teeth?”
“Yep. The account of his exhumation mentions the Corsican corpse had ‘perfectly white teeth.’”
“So?”
“So according to Sir Henry Bunburg, the man who gave Napoleon the bad news that the British were shipping him off to exile in Saint Helena, Napoleon’s teeth were ‘bad and dirty.’ That was written in 1815, just six years prior to his death.”
“Just what are you saying here, Sherlock?”
Weir stopped his pacing and folded his arms. “Let’s just say there’s still some mystery here. Turns out that a couple of years before Napoleon supposedly died, his majordomo and constant companion, Franceschi Cipriani, also died. Only no one’s ever been able to find his body. It flat-out disappeared.”
“Go on.”
“So here we have a pile of inconsistencies and some outright bizarre circumstances along with two deaths and only one body. Who’s to say they buried the right one?”
I let the swirl of information rattle around my head for a bit until I said, “You’re kidding. Are you trying to tell me that wasn’t Napoleon Bonaparte they buried?”
Weir shrugged. “Think about it—just how many discrepancies does it take before it adds up to something? And if the best independent witness to Napoleon’s death is the good Dr. Arnott, my question is this: How reliable would his identification be if the first time he met Napoleon, he couldn’t even see who he was talking to? For that matter, why would Napoleon call for any British physician, even though Arnott was actually Scottish. Unfortunately, even modern science might not help in a positive identification.”
“How so?”
“There’s some evidence to suggest that Cipriani was Napoleon’s half brother. Even a DNA test might not be conclusive proof to tell the two apart.”
I followed Weir’s argument like I was tracking a particular leaf in a windstorm, then gave up and shook my head. “You know what I think? I think you’ve been kept underground too long. Can we leave the Murder Mystery of the Century for a while and get back to this letter?” I pointed to the translated Fouché document. “What’s this here about an American ship that supposedly Napoleon used to escape from Elba? I never heard of anything like that before.”
Weir grumbled “Philistine” under his breath, and then grinned and said, “Your guess is as good as mine. The best historical record we have of Napoleon’s escape from Elba comes from the man himself, in his memoirs that he dictated, but were actually written by Louis Antoine Fauvelet while he was stuck on Saint Helena with the former emperor. Fauvelet wasn’t actually at Elba, but he wrote that Napoleon left the island with about a thousand men on a ship named the Inconstant, along with ‘six small craft.’ No one else has ever recorded actually seeing Napoleon leave the island, but there’s no question he arrived at the port of Frejus on the French coast. Coincidently, this is the same port he retuned to after his Egyptian campaign. But as far as any American ship helping Napoleon escape from Elba, there has never been any mention anywhere. The United States kept their Mediterranean squadron in the area from 1801 forward, and there were countless American merchant vessels in the sea, but I’ve never found any evidence that any of them got involved with Napoleon.”
“So there was no American connection at all?”
“Actually, there were a few,” Weir said. “Right before Napoleon got shipped off to Saint Helena, his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, was trying to get him to America, and when that failed, Joseph went to live in the U.S. from 1815 until 1830 or so. And Napoleon’s brother Jerome actually married an American woman, Elizabeth Patterson, the daughter of a wealthy American merchant, although Napoleon disapproved and had their marriage annulled. Still, Jerome was an experienced naval commander and is a prime suspect to be the ship captain referred to in the Fouché document.”
“Great. So in regard to Captain Nameless and the Secret Island, are there any other clues?”
Weir laughed. “When you say it like that, you make it sound like Jules Verne. But no, unfortunately, we’ve got nothing. But thanks to you we do know now that ‘The Doctor’ who Fouché referred to is none other than Dominique Jean Larrey. Now there was a real hero. He was one of Napoleon’s military surgeons and accompanied the army from the Italian campaigns to the Egyptian expeditions and all the way until Waterloo. He not only pioneered medical advances in wound treatment, but he also designed the forerunners of the modern ambulance. Napoleon himself once said that if they ever started putting up statues, that Larrey was the man who deserved one the most.”
I thought back to the dark, dangerous night in Paris. “They did,” I said. “He’s got a big monument right in the courtyard of the church of Val de Grâce.”
“It makes sense,” Weir said. “If Napoleon was going to trust anyone outside his own family, it’d be a man like Larrey.”
The memory of the catacombs brought something else to mind. “Wait a minute. The only other thing I was able to get out of the catacombs was a handful of Maltese coins. That’s not Egyptian treasure by a long shot.”
Weir’s eyes brightened. “Maltese coins? Really? Perfect!” He sprang to a map of the Mediterranean Sea that took up half a wall. “Look at this,” he beckoned.
I came over and watched as he traced lines on the map written in red felt pen. “See? Napoleon departs for Egypt from the south
of France here, then his first stop is the island of Malta. He took over the island, reorganized their government, then raided the treasury right before he took off and landed in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1798. Then from that point, Admiral Horatio Nelson blows the crap out of the French fleet, and in August of 1799 Napoleon leaves most of his troops behind in Egypt and sails away, making a brief stop home in Corsica, and then returns to France. So those Maltese coins you found are a direct connection to the Egyptian campaign.”
“Could be,” I admitted. “But I still haven’t seen any evidence that states Alexander’s tomb is part of the treasure that Fouché wrote about.”
“What do you want? A map with an X to mark the spot? Thanks to you, we know that Alexander’s sarcophagus wasn’t among the treasure hidden in the Parisian catacombs, so this here mysterious island would be the next most likely place.”
“You really think so?”
“Well,” Weir said slowly, “Napoleon is on record as saying that one of his wishes was to be buried in the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great.”
“So how many islands are there in the Mediterranean Sea?”
“Hundreds. But I’m sure we can narrow it down some.”
I was studying the path of the lines on the wall map when I heard the heavy door open up and turned my head to see Rhea. She looked weary as she said to me, “You have to come with me, Mr. Blake.”
“Why?”
She didn’t answer at once, then she tilted her head slightly as she said, “Remember when I asked you what you would do if you ever saw Ombra again?”
I felt my gut tighten. “Yes,” I said slowly.
“Now is your chance. We’ve had him here on the island since we collected you from Paris.”
I felt the shock of the news course through me like electricity, and then Rhea said, “And he’s been asking to see you.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
My hand itched.
I’ve got a small star-shaped scar on the back of my right hand. There’s a matching mark on my palm. That’s where I had a nail pounded into my skin, transfixing my hand to an old wooden chair in a squalid shack in the outback of a Central American country, where I had the bad fortune to be taken and “questioned” about my involvement with illegal drugs. I never knew if my captors were actually policemen or drug smugglers or both. I also never knew the name of the man who nailed my hand to the chair, but I remember with vivid clarity his bored, brutish face; his guttural, phlegm-muted voice; and the acrid stink of his breath and body. The only time he showed anything close to a human emotion was after he pried the nail out of my hand, right before I was dragged away to rot in a festering pit of a third-world prison. I remember him running his fingers over the blood-soaked arm of the chair, shaking his head over the damage to the wood.
My days as a prisoner are like fragments of a fever dream now, one that I woke out of after Nicholas Riley came and rescued me. One of the doctors I met with during my recovery period told me how lucky I was that I still retained full use of my hand, despite the partial nerve damage. For years afterward, I would scratch the palm of my hand and feel shooting sparks of pain fired by the damaged nerves, and I would remember the man who did it to me. All through my early combat training, I would recall the man with the old hammer and corroded nail, and I’d focus that much harder on learning my lethal lessons. Sometime along the way, I don’t recall exactly when, I stopped planning to go back to that little shack near the jungle and find the man, and then show him all the painful, maiming techniques I had learned. But every once in a while, I trip over that memory. And when that happens, my hand starts to itch.
Rhea had led me through the concrete maze to a room marked L-13. It was mostly dark inside, but with pale light that came from wall-sized glass panels separating it from the next room. On the other side of the glass was a fully equipped operating theater, painted a stark white and filled with stainless steel accoutrements. The operating table in the center of the room held a human body, looking at first glance like a subject of a pending autopsy. It was Ombra.
He was strapped naked to the table, and his small, wiry frame looked pale beneath the bright overhead lights. The closer I got to the glass separating us, the more I could see the welts and dark discolorations inflicted on his body. Ombra’s eyes were closed and his breathing was labored. I could feel my own respiration kicking up a notch, a combination of the memory of my own torture mixed with revulsion of what I was witnessing now.
And my hand itched.
Rhea, standing close behind me, spoke up. “He’s been very difficult to work with, but I was finally able to reason with him.”
I kept my eyes on the small, beaten body. “Reason? Looks like you’ve damn near killed him.”
“Oh, he’s strong enough,” Rhea said, almost absently. “And very stubborn. What was surprising was the fact that he wants to speak with you directly.”
“About what?”
Rhea came and stood next to me, and I was aware once again of the scent of jasmine. “I’ve been asking him about the Fouché document, and where we can find the secret island the document refers to. He’s finally ready to tell us. Or rather, he specifically said he would tell only you.”
“Why me?”
“I have no idea,” Rhea said softly.
I kept my eyes on the slender man strapped to the table as I asked, “So who is he?”
“I’m still not certain,” Rhea replied. “According to the papers and pocket lint he carried, his name is Simon Ombra, and he’s an antiques dealer living in Paris, but it’s probably all false information.”
“Pocket lint?”
“Pocket lint,” Rhea repeated. “You know, incidental papers and business cards used to bolster a false identity. You don’t know the phrase?”
“It’s a new one to me.”
“Really?” she said with interest. “It comes from your own American intelligence services. How long have you worked as an operative of your government?”
I shrugged to cover a wince. “I must have cut school that day,” I said quickly, then nodded toward Ombra. “So what did you do to him?”
“What I had to,” she replied simply. “Are you ready?”
Hell, no, I was tempted to say. I wanted nothing to do with this cold, clinical obscenity. But I couldn’t escape the fact that if I didn’t play along, it could just as easily be me strapped down on that operating table. Or worse, Caitlin. I just nodded acquiescence and hoped my face didn’t reveal even a fraction of what I was feeling.
“Good,” Rhea said. She took my hand and led me back into the concrete-lined hallway and one door down. She activated the lock and the heavy metal door popped open slightly with an audible hissing sound. The hatch opened to reveal a small, airtight chamber. Ahead was a matching metal door with a small window built in. Rhea gave me a gentle push, and I heard the hatch shut and lock behind me, then the door ahead buzzed and slid open, revealing the white tile-lined area beyond.
It was the smell that hit me first. There was a tang of burnt flesh that the antiseptic hospital overlay couldn’t quite mask. Ombra was flat on the operating table, strapped down and wired up to monitors that reported the fact that he was alive. Close by was a stainless steel table on wheels that held a collection of medicine bottles and hypodermics, and a pair of heavy, insulated gloves. On a steel pedestal next to the table was a square electronic device connected to a pair of insulated wires that terminated in slim needles—obviously the source of all the burns that pockmarked Ombra’s body.
I moved the tables and torture devices out of the way. Ombra appeared to be in a deep sleep. “You wanted to see me?” I asked.
His eyes opened and blinked in the bright overhead lights. His mouth worked, but nothing came out. I spotted a plastic water bottle with a bent straw, and I took the bottle and placed it near his cracked lips. The bruise I had given him on his face had purpled, and I saw that he obviously hadn’t gotten the same close, personal shaving job Rhea gave me. He manage
d to draw some water in, but then started sputtering and choking. I put the bottle down and located a set of handles on the side of the table, and managed to tilt it upward. Ombra’s head lolled forward to his slender chest, but he managed to quit coughing. “Merci,” he mouthed.
“Je vous en prie,” I replied.
Ombra wheezed and rolled his head back against the table, almost forcing a smile from his desiccated mouth. “Please,” he said with effort. “Your attempt at speaking français is more than I can bear.”
I blinked, stopped dead in my tracks for a moment in pure amazement. After everything the guy had been through, he could still make a joke. “Well, ‘excusez le mot’ all to hell,” I said. Then before I knew what I was saying, I added, “I’m sorry.”
Ombra didn’t reply, but he tried to focus his eyes on me. “Pour quoi?” he wheezed, then said, “For what?”
“For everything that brought us both here today,” I said. “Look, I don’t know what you think you’re protecting, but trust me, nothing can be worth dying for.”
Ombra’s watery blue eyes narrowed, then he said in a hoarse whisper, “Nothing? You truly believe that?” His eyes searched my face, and then closed as he let his head fall back against the stainless steel table and said, “Then I feel sorry for you, monsieur.”
I couldn’t help it—I got angry. “Look, damn it, in case you haven’t noticed, these people here aren’t screwing around. Whatever it is you’ve got that they want, they’re going to drag it out of you piece by piece. Now let’s just put a stop to all this and tell me what they want to know. Please?”
Ombra didn’t respond to my outburst at first. Finally, he sighed, opened his eyes, and said in a low voice, “You said ‘these people.’ You are not one of them?”
“Let’s just say I’ve been drafted into their cause.”
Ombra’s eyes took on a faraway look, as if he could see something beyond the sterile, white-painted walls. “If I name a place where you could find what you seek, you would go there yourself?”