“A tattoo of what?”
“The initial N, surrounded by a laurel wreath.”
“You must be joking.”
“Life is filled with enemies. There has to be some way to tell friends.”
“Not by wearing another man’s brand.”
“It’s a secret legion.” He was annoyed that I wasn’t flattered. “Or you can have a more temporary badge, but you must give it back should you ever displease me.”
“What’s that?”
He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out a small medal on a chain. It was the same design as the tattoo but in gold, an ornament to wear around the neck. “Only a handful of agents are so favored.”
It would give me credibility, I supposed. I took it in my palm. Small, light, unobtrusive, and removable. “Not very much metal.”
“There are a million men who would pledge their lives for such favor.”
“I appreciate the honor.” I didn’t, but wanted to avoid insult.
“And your discoveries, when on missions for me, belong to France.”
“A last mission on Louisiana, in Paris, and then home. Something to buy bread would help in the meantime,” I persisted.
When it came to money, he could be evasive as a loan officer. “Get Louisiana for your president, Gage, and they’ll make you a congressman.”
Chapter 4
So I worked to double the size of my homeland, arranging a meeting with Livingston to plant the idea of buying every savage-infested acre. We actually had something in common. Robert Livingston had been the grand master of Freemasonry’s Grand Lodge in New York before traveling to France. I was a Mason as well, although I didn’t tell him it was of the most casual and disreputable kind.
“It was Benjamin Franklin himself who introduced me to the precepts of your fraternity,” I said to ingratiate myself. “I’ve striven to live up to them ever since.” Striven, but not succeeded. “If my government could afford a modest salary, I might be able to linger in Paris to see the bargaining through. I’m a confidant of Napoleon, you know.” I showed him the pendant.
It helped that Livingston had struck up a friendship with my American colleague Robert Fulton after meeting the inventor at one of his “panoramas,” or huge circular paintings on such lurid themes as “city conflagrations.” Fulton charged admission to earn a living while designing unnecessary machines. We’d lost the tinkerer’s submarine Nautilus when rescuing Astiza and Harry from Tripoli, but now Fulton had a grander scheme for a contraption called a steamboat. It was to be two and a half times as long as his submersible, and painted bright as a carnival. It would be captained by a man called a mechanician and would go three miles an hour against the current, cutting the time for freight to go from Nantes to Paris from four months to two weeks.
Such speed seemed unlikely, but Livingston (a steam engine enthusiast who’d written to the inventor of that device, James Watt, in London) had joined Fulton’s project. The eccentrics were as happy as boys with a play fort, so to keep their favor, I quit pointing out that machines are expensive, heavy, and deafening. Like all men, the pair liked things that made noise, be it a lusty wench at full gallop, the crack of a cannon, or the headache-inducing thump of boiler and crank.
“I guess we could spare you a small stipend,” Livingston said.
Bonaparte also gave me a letter of introduction to his minister Francois Barbe-Marbois, the French negotiator. I got on famously with him as well, because we were both victims of the unpredictability of fortune. Francois had actually served as intendant of Saint-Domingue in 1785 before the slave revolt began, and was well aware the colony was swallowing Napoleon’s army. After the revolution, his moderation made him suspect by royalist and revolutionary alike, since reasonable men like us are always threatening to the ambitious and fanatic. For a while he was imprisoned in hellish French Guiana. Now that Bonaparte was firmly in power, his common sense was deemed useful again.
I confided that I’d had my own ups and downs. “I’ve had a pharaoh’s hoard and a book of magic slip through my fingers, and until I got married I had the devil’s own time with women. But I remain ambitious. I’ll try to get the Americans to raise their sights. If you could advance me a French salary for my expenses, I can afford to wait to bend the ear of James Monroe.”
“You really think your countrymen will pay to take this wasteland off our hands?” Barbe-Marbois could scarcely believe we Americans were so gullible.
“I had companions who thought Louisiana was the Garden of Eden. One killed, the other wounded, but they were optimists.”
So my chance to draw pay from both America and France, and to encourage the greatest real estate deal in history, caused us to linger in Paris into the spring of 1803.
It was a pleasant interlude. We strolled the Tivoli Gardens, where fireworks and acrobats delighted my son. There was a tethered elephant, two rather bored and ratty-looking lions in iron cages, and an ostrich that Napoleon’s troops had brought back from Egypt. It displayed considerably more ferocity than the cats.
At the competing Frascati amusement park (only a franc a day per person) there was a miniature village of mills and bridges that absorbed my boy like a Gulliver. “Look, a real castle!” he’d cry at fortifications three feet high.
The balloon ascents we watched at the Tuileries brought powerful emotions to Astiza and me, given our history in Egypt. The exotic costumes of street performers brought to mind perilous times in the Holy Land.
I found married life altogether different from our frequently interrupted courtship. We were no longer allied by danger and didn’t have the flush that comes from novelty and infatuation. Instead, there was deepening affection and security. Like many great men, my mentor Benjamin Franklin had been a poor husband who hadn’t hesitated to expound on what makes a good one. Marriage was an investment in time, commitment, and compromise, he told me, a work for which the profit was contentment and even, “at times,” bright happiness. “The most natural state of man,” he’d counseled.
“If natural, then why are our heads always swiveling toward the next woman like a dog spying a rabbit?”
“Because we don’t catch the rabbit, Ethan, or, if we do, we scarcely know what to do with it.”
“On the contrary.”
“Marriage saves us from confusion and heartbreak.”
“Yet your wife is five thousand miles away, in Philadelphia.”
“And I take comfort knowing she is there, waiting.”
I counted myself astoundingly lucky, then. I’d snatched an emerald, yes, but what was the real jewel from Tripoli? My wife beside me. We walked arm in arm under rose arbors, ate sugared ices, swayed to accordion bands playing on brilliantly lit stages, and watched up to three hundred people at a time wheeling to the new German waltz. The crowd thinned when the more complicated quadrille and mazurka were danced, but gaiety had returned to Paris.
There was also quiet anxiety, because the newspapers were full of tension with England. Rumor contended that Napoleon had ordered work on an invasion fleet of barges to cross the Channel. Once the boats were ready, war would return, predictions went.
“Ethan, if we tarry much longer, we may be trapped in Paris,” Astiza warned as we crossed the new pedestrian Bridge of the Arts at the Louvre, an iron novelty that was one of several bridges Napoleon had ordered to unite both banks of the city. “Britain will blockade, and France may arrest any aliens.”
She was not just beautiful (the antiquity-inspired fashion of high waist, puffed sleeves, and a vale of decolletage enhanced her Greek Egyptian sultriness to a bewitching degree) but practical as well. She thought ahead, a novel quality, and despite Napoleon’s prejudices, was probably closer to his habits than I was.
She also gave me a wifely elbow when my eye lingered too long on other consular beauties, some of them with breasts in mere gauze. Unfortunately, that happy fashion was being discouraged by a more conservative, militarist ethic that began with Bonaparte himself. The Co
rsican was proving stern, announcing that the primary purpose of women was not to display their charms but make future soldiers. Given male instincts, I thought the two went hand in hand, but I think he wanted sex, like everything else, bent to efficient purpose.
For myself, I saw fashion as one of life’s pleasures and necessities, its display as articulate as bright conversation. Astiza and I made quite the dashing couple, given that I’d copied the incroyable dandies with the long boot, tight coat, carefully wrinkled shirt, and stylish top hat, a precisely calculated mix of elegance and disorder to mirror the turmoil of our times. We were a couple at the height of fashion, and I enjoyed being glanced at. It was mostly bought on credit, but once I sold the emerald my debts would be erased.
“The British are already leaving the city,” Astiza went on as we strolled. Harry would run ahead and then come back to announce he was exhausted, and then run ahead again. “There are rumors Napoleon wants to invade England.”
“Since he’s ordered the building of boats, it’s more than a rumor.” I paused to watch the traffic on the Seine. Paris was a pleasing spectacle on a sunny March day. The polluted river glittered, its banks skirted with bright arcades and singsonging merchants. Palaces and church towers punctuated bright blue sky like exclamation points. Napoleon’s rule had brought stability and reinvestment. “But I’m supposed to wait for Monroe and finish the purchase of Louisiana. Even if war breaks out, we’re neutral as Americans.” I knew she didn’t think of herself as American yet, but I intended she become one.
“Two dueling navies, and Ethan Gage, the hero of Acre and Mortefontaine?” she responded. “You’ve managed to make enemies on all sides. We’ve a son to think about. Let’s take ship for New York or Philadelphia, settle before Nelson or Napoleon strikes, and you can seek an appointment from Jefferson. You’ve got a family now, Ethan.”
Indeed I did, a revelation no matter how many times I remembered it. “But we still have to sell the emerald. We’ll get a far better price here than in the United States, but I don’t want to have to worry about coin until negotiations are concluded. Let’s wait until the proper moment.”
“The proper moment is now. The first consul is not content without a war.”
This was true. People repeat what they’re successful at, and Napoleon had made himself with generalship. For all his trumpeting of peace, he was forever listening for the roll of the drums. I suspected this next war would dwarf all that had come before.
So I looked at her fondly and decided to indulge. Worry made her look vulnerable, uncommon for Astiza, with a beauty that stirred my heart. “Very well. I’ve lent the negotiators what wisdom I can. Let’s sell the stone and retire to the everlasting peace we both deserve.”
Chapter 5
Josephine Bonaparte’s favorite jeweler was Marie-Etienne Nitot, a man who had apprenticed to the great Auber, jeweler to Marie Antoinette. His success demonstrates anew that revolution disrupts everything but the desire for luxury. Nitot coupled his mentor’s artistry with a salesman’s flair, and after the queen lost her head he’d quickly built a clientele among the new elite of France. Gossip said the jeweler met Bonaparte when grasping the bridle of Napoleon’s skittish horse on an avenue of Paris, preventing a fall, and that he’d cultivated the relationship ever since. The handsome craftsman opened a smart shop called Chaumet at 12 Place Vendome, near the clockmaker Breguet, and both did a bustling business. The plunder of Napoleon’s early victories had fueled a mania for bright baubles displaying France’s new pride and power.
The necklaces and rings on display were clustered near Chaumet’s bright windows. For an appraisal of my emerald, Nitot took us to the rear of his establishment, locking the workshop door for privacy and carefully washing his hands in a basin, a delicacy few surgeons would bother with.
Gray light filtered from a skylight gridded with iron bars to discourage thieves. Lamps lent a honeyed glow. There were banks of drawers that no doubt held treasures, and a workbench with vises, clamps, and jeweler tools, bright bits of silver and gold glittering like fairy dust. Thick ledger books held records of trades and treasures from all over the world.
I could almost smell my coming coin.
“Monsieur Gage, I’m so honored to have your business,” Nitot began. “A man of dash and daring, and rumored to have recently returned from a secret mission against the pirates for Bonaparte.” I couldn’t help puffing. “And your beautiful wife, so exotic, so regal! I beg you, madame, to allow us to grace your lovely neck.”
“We’re here to sell a jewel, not buy one, Monsieur Nitot,” she replied. “I have a young son we had to leave in the care of a nursemaid in our apartment, and I’m eager to have our business concluded and get back to my boy.” She had a mother’s instinct to stay close to her young.
“Yes, but how wonderful to sell and buy, no?” Nitot went on. “It’s merely a suggestion inspired by your radiance. Just as a great picture deserves an inspiring frame, so does jewelry demand exquisite complexion. And yours, of amber and olive, alabaster and silk! Your neck, your ears, your wrists, your ankles! You are your husband’s ornament, and the world begs to decorate you!”
I’d had quite enough of this, since the compliments seemed a little forward, and potentially expensive to boot. No wonder this rascal was doing so well; he had the persuasive instincts of the devil. But I was no mere brigadier looking for a way to hang martial plunder on a consort. I was a savant of sorts, an electrician and a Franklin man, determined to finance a contemplative life with a rock stolen from a pasha. So I kept my emotions in check. “We need an appraisal, not a commentary on my wife.”
“Of course, of course. I’m just so vulnerable to beauty! I lay at its mercy, a poor artisan, helpless at my desire to bring splendor to the world. My apologies, monsieur, at being at all presumptive. I am here only to assist.”
I was partially annoyed because Astiza had actually suggested she stay home to watch little Harry, and now I wished I’d let her.
“Why do you need me to sell a jewel?” she’d asked in our hotel.
Because this was the first time in my life I could anticipate real wealth, and I wanted to show off by letting my bride watch me impress a jaded jeweler. Now I was foolishly jealous that Nitot’s attention was on her, and not on my cleverness for getting the stone in the first place.
“I’m just a man who’s prompt about business,” I told him. I was nervous, because the simple job of hawking my trophy was tinged with foreboding. I hadn’t, after all, really earned the stone. Though I attribute my gambling success to my wits, this time I was selling plunder.
“Oui, oui, ” he said. His eyes assessed me, guessing my discomfort and fearing he might miss a bargain. “Your stone, please.”
I kept it in a felt purse on a metal chain hung round my neck to discourage any thief or pickpocket. Now I fished out an emerald the size of a robin’s egg.
Nitot gasped, which was gratifying. Even in this light the jewel glowed with green fire, heavy, slick, and imposing. It was decoration fit for a king, and my hope was that the jeweler would know a royal in Russia or Rome eager to pay dearly.
“Where did you get this?” He seemed almost in shock.
“From an Ottoman who got too close to my wife.”
“It is truly incredible.”
“And worth quite a bit of money, I’m betting.”
He set the stone on his workbench and went to a shelf with old, leather-bound volumes. He pulled one down called Lost Treasures of the Pagans, and for some minutes studied it, occasionally glancing at the emerald.
“And where did the Ottoman get it?” he finally asked.
“Stole it, I imagine. The man was a pirate who wounded his mother and killed his brother, and wasn’t very polite to me. He kept that jewel in a cage with a leopard grumpier than a tax auditor. Astiza was in the thick of a catfight.” It was quite a tussle, but I said no more because I doubted the jeweler would believe me.
“I see,” Nitot said, even th
ough he didn’t see at all. “Well, there are stories about this stone. This may have been the legendary Green Apple of the Sun, Monsieur Gage. If so, it was stolen while en route to the pope as a present from his Catholic majesty Philip II of Spain, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century. That has always been conjecture, however, because both the jewel’s existence, and the greater treasure it came from, have been a matter of historical mystery.”
“I love a good mystery. So the stone is worth what, exactly?” When dealing with an expert, you have to work to keep them on track, like putting blinders on a horse.
“As a precious gem, it has one price tag. But as a piece of tragic history, its value is almost incalculable. You may have stumbled on one of the most astonishing artifacts in history.”
I swelled again. “I’d like to think it was more than just a stumble.”
“Monsieur, have you ever heard of La Noche Triste?”
“Is that another jewel?”
“It means ‘The Sad Night,’ Ethan,” Astiza said. “In Spanish.” Did I mention one reason I loved the girl was because she was bright as a penny?
“I’ve had a few of those, I’m afraid.”
“La Noche Triste, Monsieur Gage, was when the Aztecs managed to briefly drive the Spanish out of their capital in Tenochtitlan. They rose in a fury, overcoming the volleys of conquistador muskets with fearless numbers. Jade club against Spanish steel! Hernan Cortes lost hundreds of men and most of his artillery, but also something even more significant. As he retreated on the causeways that led across a lake from the spectacular city, his men lost the captured treasure of Montezuma. They died with it in the waters of Lake Texcoco.”
“You think this stone is part of a larger treasure?” He had my attention.
“Look in the book here. Legend describes that one of the Aztec emperor’s treasures was a spectacular emerald from the jungles of South America, the size and cut of this gem. It was a small but distinct part of riches that would dwarf those of our own kings: a bounty of gold, jewels, and silver such as Europe had never seen. There were great golden and silver wheels said to predict the future of the universe. Gold collars that could bend a proud warrior with their weight. A metal alligator, with gems for eyes and crystals for teeth. Silver birds; golden idols. If this is really part of the Aztec emperor’s hoard, it means at least part of the treasure was not just lost, but at some point found. And then lost again.”
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