The Barbary Pirates

by William Dietrich

  “I tell you, Gage, the Nautilus worked perfectly well off Brest. We were underwater three hours, and could have stayed six.” Fulton was good-looking enough to be a useful companion when looking for ladies, but he had the fretfulness of the frustrated dreamer.

  “Robert, you told the admirals that your invention could make surface navies obsolete. You may be able to keep from drowning, but you’re the worst salesman in the world. You’re asking men to buy what would put them out of work.”

  “But the submarine would be so fearsome as to end war entirely!”

  “Another point against you. Think, man!”

  “Well, I’ve a new idea for using Watt’s steam engine to propel a riverboat,” he said doggedly.

  “And why would any man pay to fuel a boiler when the wind and oars are free?” Savants are all very bright, but it would be hard to find common sense in a regiment of them. That’s why they need me along.

  Fulton had been far more successful painting lurid circular panoramas for Parisians on great city fires. They’d pay a franc or two to stand in the middle rotating, as if in the conflagration themselves, and if anything is better testament to the peculiarity of human nature, I can’t name it. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t take my advice that the real money was not in steam engines that nobody really needed, but rather in frightening pictures that made people think they were somewhere other than where they were.

  My idea, then, was this. We’d have a lads nights out at the Palais Royal, I’d pump the savants for information on lucrative veins of coal or why medieval knights with a taste for the mystical and occult might have jotted down “Thira” on gold foil in the middle of North America, and then we’d see if any of us could come up with something that could be sold for actual money. I’d also continue working on reformation of my character.

  What I wasn’t counting on was the need to bet my life, and the French secret police.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Horror we can habituate to. Defeat can be accommodated. It is the unknown that causes fear, and uncertainty that haunts us in the hollow of the night. So my resolution to reform myself was weaker than I knew because the truth was that I hadn’t sworn off women entirely. After the agony and heartbreak I’d experienced on the American frontier, I wanted to reestablish contact with Astiza, a woman I’d fallen in love with four years before during Napoleon’s Orient campaign. She’d left me in Paris to return to Egypt, and after the heartbreak of my latest adventure, I began writing her.

  If she’d declined to renew our relationship, I’d have understood. Our time together had been more tumultuous than satisfying. But instead I got no answer at all, despite her promise that we might one day find ourselves together again. Of course Egypt was still recovering from the British expulsion of the French the year before, so communication was uncertain. But had anything happened to my partner in adventure? I did manage to contact my old friend Ashraf, who said he’d seen Astiza after her return to Egypt. She’d been her usual mysterious self, reclusive, troubled, and living in near seclusion. Then she abruptly vanished about the time I returned to Europe. I knew it would have been more surprising to hear she’d settled into domesticity, and certainly I’d little claim on her. But to not know nagged at me.

  Which is how I led my companions into the wrong bordello.

  It happened this way. The Palais Royal is an enormous rectangle of pillared arcades, its courtyard filled with gardens, fountains, and pathways. We ate at an outdoor café and gawked at the trollops who costumed themselves as the most prominent socialites of the republic, in between the trio’s tediously learned arguments on bone classification and the merits of screw propellers. I showed them where Bonaparte used to play chess for money as an artillery captain, and the arcade where he’d met the prostitute to whom he’d lost his virginity as a young soldier. Yonder was the club where foreign minister Talleyrand once spent 30,000 francs in a single night, and nearby was the shop where Charlotte Corday bought the knife with which she stabbed Marat in his bath. Sodomites with plumage as elaborate as the whores walked the Street of Sighs arm in arm, given that such love has been decriminalized by the revolution. Beggars mingled with millionaires, prophets preached, cardsharps prowled, and the perversely pious sought out chambers where they could negotiate sexual whippings to the most precise calibration of penance and pain. We descended into the cellar “circus,” where couples danced amid “nymphs” posing in diaphanous clothing, and pretended to study with an academic’s objectivity the complex’s forty-four statues of Venus.

  As we circulated, Cuvier was persuaded to try his hand at the new game of “21” that Napoleon had helped popularize, Smith sampled varieties of champagne with a pub crawler’s endurance, and Fulton studied the acrobats’ use of leverage.

  He had to be dragged away from a fire-eater. “Imagine if we could invent a dragon!”

  “The French wouldn’t buy that, either.”

  I guessed this group was as happy looking at the prostitutes as hiring them. Given that half the Palais’ amusements were technically illegal—French kings had issued thirty-two decrees against gambling since 1600—it was my full intention to keep us out of trouble. Then I heard, while leading our little squad through a dim arcade of shops and descending stairways, a female voice call my name.

  I turned to see Madame Marguerite, or, as she preferred to be called, Isis, Queen of Arabia. She was a bordello manager of entrepreneurial ambition whom I’d encountered before I reformed. “Monsieur Gage! You must introduce me to your friends!”

  Marguerite operated one of the more ostentatious brothels in the Palais, a warren of vaulted caverns under a crowded gambling salon. Its decor was Oriental, and the courtesans’ filmy costumes were inspired by feverish European fantasies of the seraglios of Istanbul. By rumor you could sample hashish and opium there, while imagining yourself master of a harem. It was costly, decadent, illegal, and thus quite irresistible. It was also no place for esteemed savants. My instinct was to hurry by, but Marguerite rushed out to block us, my companions bunched up nervously behind as if we were at the entrance to the maze of the Minotaur.

  “Hello, Isis,” I said warily. “Business going well?”

  “Brilliantly, but how we’ve missed our Ethan! We’d been told you’d disappeared in America. How heartbroken were my concubines! They wept, thinking of you at the mercy of Red Indians.”

  Well, I had spent money in the place. “I’m back, my hair still attached, but newly reformed,” I reported. “Celibacy is good for character, I’ve decided.”

  She laughed. “What an absurd idea. Surely your friends don’t agree?”

  “These are savants, men of learning. I’m just showing them about.”

  “And there is much my girls can show. Collette! Sophie!”

  “I’m afraid we can’t stay.”

  “Is this the Arabian place?” Cuvier interrupted behind me, craning to look. “I’ve heard of it.”

  “It looks like an Ottoman palace in there,” said Smith, squinting through the doorway. “The architecture is quite intricate.”

  “Do you really want to be seen entering?” I asked, even as Marguerite seized my arm with enthusiasm. “I am responsible for your reputation, gentlemen.”

  “And we in this house are mistresses of discretion,” our hostess assured. “Esteemed savants, at least experience my décor—I work so hard at it. And it’s so fortuitous we meet, Ethan, because my assistant inside was just asking about you!”

  “Was she now?”

  “It’s a man, actually. He plays the role of Osiris.” She winked.

  “I’m not of that taste.”

  “No, no, he only wants to talk and wager with you. He’s heard of your gambling skills and says you’ll want to bet for the thing you most desperately wish to learn.”

  “Which is?”

  “Word of your Egyptian friend.”

  That startled me, given my puzzlement about Astiza. I’d never mentioned her to Marguerite. “How could this Osiri
s know that?”

  “Yes, come in, come in, and hear his proposition!” Her eyes gleamed, her pupils huge and waxy. “Bring your friends, no one is looking. Share some claret and relax!”

  Well, it was against all my resolutions, but why would a stranger know about my long-lost love in Egypt? “Perhaps we should take a look,” I told my companions. “The scenery is worthy of the theater. It’s a lesson in how the world works, too.”

  “And what lesson is that?” Fulton asked as we descended into Marguerite’s grotto.

  “That even looking costs money.” Isis pulled us into the welcoming chamber of her seraglio and my savants gaped at the “Arabian” beauties on parade for inspection, since their costumes combined would be about enough to account for one good scarf. “This won’t take a minute,” I went on. “Go on to the rooms just to be polite. Fulton, buy a girl a glass and explain steam power. Smith, the auburn-haired one looks like she’s got all kinds of topography to map. Cuvier, consider the anatomy of the blond over there. Surely you can theorize about the hourglass morphology of the female form?” That would keep them occupied while I learned who this Osiris was and whether he knew anything but rubbish.

  The savants were so content to pretend it was all my idea that Marguerite should have given me a commission. Unfortunately, she was tighter with a franc than my old landlady, Madame Durrell.

  “And which fancy would you care to tickle, Ethan?” the brothel keeper asked as the girls dragged the savants into a chamber tented with gauze curtains. Negro servants brought tall brass Turkish pitchers. Candles and incense made a golden haze.

  “I’ve adopted rectitude, I said. ‘Be at war with your vices,’ Ben Franklin used to tell me. A regular bishop, I am.”

  “A bishop! They were our best customers! Thank God Bonaparte has brought the church back.”

  “Yes, I heard they sang a Te Deum in Notre Dame at Easter to celebrate the new Concordat with Rome.”

  “It was delicious farce. The Kings of Judah above the entrance are still headless, ever since the revolutionary mobs mistook them for French kings and knocked their tops off. It’s like a stone monument to the guillotine! The church itself, which the Jacobins designated a Temple of Reason, is in wretched disrepair. The Te Deum was the first time the bells had rung in ten years, and none of his generals could remember when to genuflect. Instead of kneeling, the rabble presented arms when they elevated the host at consecration. You could hardly hear the Latin for all the snickering, whispers, and clatter of sabers and bayonets.”

  “The common people are happier the Church is back, which was Napoleon’s point.”

  “Yes, the country is drifting to the old ways: faith, tyranny, and war. No wonder the mob has voted overwhelmingly to make him first consul for life! Fortunately, my kind of business thrives in every political climate. Be they royalist or revolutionary, cleric or marshal, they all like to tumble.” She raised a flute of champagne. “To desire!”

  “And discipline.” I took a swallow, eyeing the girls wistfully. The savants seemed to be chatting away as if this were the Institute—trollops can pretend fascination with anything, it seems, even science—and the air was heady with hashish and the aroma of spirits. “I tell you, it feels good to abstain,” I continued doggedly. “I’m going to write a book.”

  “Nonsense. Every man needs vice.”

  “I’ve sworn off gambling, too.”

  “But surely there is something you would wager for,” a male voice interrupted.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I turned. A swarthy, hawk-nosed man in the getup of a sultan had entered the antechamber. His eyes were predatory and his lips thin as a lizard’s, giving him the reptilian guise of an inquisitor, or one of my creditors. His turban was decorated with an ostrich feather of the kind the soldiers had collected in Egypt, by shooting the dim-witted beasts that ran wild there. He didn’t really look Arab, however, but French. We all like to pretend.

  “May I present Osiris, god of the underworld,” Isis/Marguerite introduced. “He’s a student of Egypt like you.”

  The man bowed. “Of course I haven’t found treasures like the famed Ethan Gage.”

  “Lost everything, I’m afraid.” People always hope I’m rich, in case I might share. I disabuse them as quickly as I can.

  “And left Egypt before the campaign was over, did you not?”

  “As did Napoleon. I’m American, not French, and I control my own life.” This wasn’t quite true, either—who does control his life?—but I didn’t want it implied I’d scuttled.

  “And would you care to wager that life?”

  “Hardly. I’ve been telling the Queen of Arabia here that I’ve reformed.”

  “But every man can be tempted, which is the lesson of the Palais Royal, is it not? All have something they long for. None are completely guiltless. Which is why we congregate, and never judge! We may admire the righteous, but we don’t really like them, or entirely trust them, either. The most pious are crucified! If you want good friends, be imperfect, no?”

  My companions, I realized, had been led by their consorts out of sight. The savants were either bolder or drunker than I thought. Which meant that I was suddenly quite alone. “Nobody’s more imperfect than me,” I said. “And just who are you, Osiris? Do you procure?”

  “I assist, and learn. Which is how I can offer a wager to tell you what you want to know, and you don’t have to bet a sou to win it.”

  “What do you think I want to know?”

  “Where the priestess is, of course.”

  Astiza was a priestess of sorts, a student of ancient religion. I felt a jolt of memory.

  “She still touches your heart, I think. Men call you vain and shallow, Ethan Gage, but there’s spark and loyalty in there as well, I’m guessing.”

  “How do you know about Astiza?” I was aware that with the absence of my companions, two new men had materialized in the shadows, bulky as armoires. They now guarded the brothel door. And where was Marguerite?

  “It’s my fraternity’s business to know what men wish to know.” And he drew from his robe that symbol I’d encountered before on the neck of my enemy in North America: a golden pyramid entwined with the snake-god Apophis hanging from a chain: the crest of arms, of sorts, of my old nemesis the Egyptian Rite. The last time I got entangled with this bunch it was for torture at an Indian village, and I automatically stiffened and wished for my longrifle, which of course I’d left at home. This Osiris seemed snakelike himself, and I felt dizzy in the smoky musk of the room. It smelled of hashish.

  “You’re part of the Rite?” The Egyptian Rite was a renegade group of corrupt Freemasonry founded a generation before by the charlatan Cagliostro, and which had been plaguing me since I won a medallion in a Paris card game four years before. I’d hoped I was done with them, but they were persistent as taxes.

  “I’m part of a group of like-minded people. Pay no attention to rumor. We’re reformers, like you.”

  “Can I see the emblem?”

  He handed it to me. This one was heavy, perhaps solid gold. “Try wearing it, if you like. I think it conveys a sense of power and confidence. There’s magic in what one puts on.”

  “Not my style.” I hefted it, considering.

  “I respect your pledge against gambling, Monsieur Gage. How inspiring to encounter reform! But please don’t be alarmed by this symbol. I’m offering alliance, not enmity. So I propose a simple riddle, a child’s puzzle. If you answer it correctly, I will take you to Astiza. But if you answer it incorrectly, your life will be mine, to do as I say.”

  “What does that mean? Are you the devil?”

  “Come, Monsieur Gage, you have a reputation as a master of electricity, a savant. Surely a child’s game doesn’t daunt you?”

  Daunt me? I was holding in my hand a symbol of what, as far as I knew, was a cabal of snake worshippers, sorcerers, perverts, and conspirators. “And what do you risk?”

  “The priceless information I hold. After al
l, you’ve staked no money.”

  “Nor have you! So if you want to play riddles, we both must play. Your purpose against my life, Osiris.” That should give him pause. “If I win my riddle and you lose mine, you must not only send me to Astiza but explain once and for all the business of your odd Rite. What are you eccentrics really after?” I’d remembered a puzzle Franklin had told me once, and decided to try it on him.

  He considered, and shrugged. “Very well. I never lose.” He held up a minute glass.

  My blood was up. “Start the sand, then.”

  “My riddle first. Two condemned men are at the bottom of a sheer pit that can’t be climbed, and are scheduled for execution at dawn. If they could reach the lip of the pit they could escape, but even with one standing on the other’s shoulders, they cannot reach that high. They have a shovel to tunnel, but to dig far enough will take days, not hours. How can they escape?” He turned the timer.

  I watched its hiss of grains and tried to think. What would old Ben have advised? He was a font of aphorisms, half of them annoying. Buy what you have no need of and soon you will have to sell your necessaries. True enough, but what fun is money if not to squander?

  Confinement? They that can give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety deserve neither. That was no help either. The sand was piling up at the bottom of the glass and Osiris, or whatever his name really was, was regarding me with amusement. We get old too soon and wise too late. Well, that certainly applied to me. Sand, sand, draining down…

  But that was it! Sand! “They tunnel,” I announced, “but only to obtain sand to pile on one side of the pit. When it is high enough, they stand on it to reach the well’s lip.”

  My riddler slowly clapped his hands. “Congratulations, Monsieur Gage, your reputation for a modicum of wit is not entirely undeserved. It appears I’m to take you to Astiza.”