I’ve had better conversations.
“I took it from a heathen pasha!” I sputtered. “It’s only proper recompense for serving the first consul. He’s a friend, I warn you!” And down they sank me again.
Each time was longer, but instead of loosening my lips, the torture was turning me insensible. They began to realize this, as Martel started pacing.
“Maybe he’s really as stupid as he says,” one of his henchmen suggested.
“The great Ethan Gage? Hero, explorer, and negotiator? He makes fools of men by playing the fool. The one man in the world to find this emerald just happens to be the one who has roamed from the Holy Land to Canada? Who befriends savants and politicians? Who served the foul Englishman Sir Sydney Smith? No, Gage knows far more than he’s telling us. Look at him hang there, playing the idiot.”
“But I am an idiot,” I tried. And down I plummeted again.
Living a significant life is terribly overrated.
“I believe the treasure is in the Great Pyramid of Egypt,” I tried the next time, making up nonsense just to get them to stop. “The Aztecs and Egyptians were one happy bunch, you see, with nearly the same kind of architecture. Of course I’ve no idea how to get back inside, but with enough gunpowder—”
They lashed me again, grunting each time they swung the switch. Flogging never works, but we live in an age when it’s the first solution to everything. Lord, it hurt! But at least they didn’t dunk me, since I truly was on the brink of drowning.
“What do we do now, Martel?” the accomplice said. “Fouché can’t protect us anymore, and Bonaparte will be impatient. I warned you that no man brings his wife on a treasure hunt, or dawdles in Paris while riches await.”
“Silence!” He glared at me. “He must know more than he’s telling.”
Why do people assume this? Men never want my advice when I have any, and whip me for it when I don’t.
“To hell with him,” Martel went on. “Let’s drown Gage and throw the body into the Seine.”
“His wife had Bonaparte’s ornament.”
“And Gage his iron collar. By the time anyone finds him he’ll be rotted to cheese.”
An unpleasant picture. “Why don’t you just keep the emerald?” I countered. “I promise not to tell, and if I hear of any more riches, I’ll be sure to let you know. . . .”
Then there was a shot, loud and shocking in the close cellar, and a bullet hit the rope I was suspended by, twanging it like a harpsichord string. It frayed, I twirled, it broke, and then I dropped like an anchor toward the tub of water, hitting the bottom with a great splash. Even submerged, I heard a blaze of other shots ring out. And then I truly began to drown.
I should have sold the thing in Naples.
Chapter 8
At first, being shot down into water deep enough to drown seemed worse than being deliberately dunked, since there was no block and tackle to haul me out and the iron collar kept my head hard against the bottom. I wiggled in my ropes like a worm, but I’d awkwardly jammed.
Thinking further, I remembered the gunfire and considered whether staying under for a spell might not be the safest strategy after all. Instead of thrashing, I tried to be inconspicuous while hard things pounded the tub’s sides.
Soon I neared the limit of how long I could hold my breath. There was an unholy clamor through tin and water, and I wondered what the devil was going on.
Should I surface?
The decision was made for me when my nose emerged of its own accord. Bullets had pierced the tub, missing me, and the receptacle was rapidly draining.
Strong hands grasped and hauled me upright.
“I know nothing!” I sputtered again. Which was close enough to the truth.
“Good God, Gage,” someone said in English, “you’re just as much trouble as Sidney Smith said you’d be.”
Sidney Smith? My old savior (or was it nemesis) from the Holy Land? I’d fought for him against Napoleon until fate cast me again on the French side, and he seemed to have retained a fondness despite my confusion of alliances. I am profoundly likable. “You’re English?” I asked the men, more baffled than ever.
“A French Anglophile. Charles Frotté, sir, at your service, with compliments of Sir Sidney.” He began sawing at my bonds with a knife large enough to make me hope his energy was matched by precision. Two bodies of renegade gendarmes were sprawled on the floor, and the others had fled. Frotté’s companions were reloading their guns. “I’m afraid Martel has gotten away and is no doubt mustering help. We must hurry.”
My veins stung as circulation began to return. “I’m afraid I’m not up for running.”
“We have a coach.”
Frotté had that intensity common to small, wiry men that can be wearying except in an emergency, which was now. My bonds fell away, and one of his confederates worked the latch on the iron collar at the back of my neck. It toppled with a clang, narrowly missing a toe. My boots had disappeared. The magnifying glass had dropped from my neck to the bottom of the tub, and I instinctively snatched it up again, in case I somehow got my gem back. When your income is as uncertain as mine, you don’t forget anything that might help preserve your fortune.
Frotté’s men half carried me from the cellar. Dark and caped, they looked exactly like the ruffians I’d just escaped from. There’s uniformity to the spy trade; its practitioners have far more in common with one another than whichever nation they serve.
A black coach waited in an alley, its hubs almost touching each wall. Two heavily muscled black horses were in harness, snorting and steel-shod, with a restlessness conjured out of a nightmare. Vapor huffed from the animals’ nostrils, and a coachman hooded like death hunched on the driver’s seat. I looked about. Unfortunately, there was no frilly cabriolet.
“We have to save my wife, too,” I finally managed as my wits returned.
“Your wife, Monsieur Gage, has saved you. We’re off to confer with her.” Frotté shoved me into the coach with him, a shotgun and musket leaning against its seats. Two companions hung off the back, and with a crack of the coachman’s whip we were off.
“Who the devil—” I began.
“They’re running to block us, sir!” the coachman shouted from above.
“Excuse me,” said Frotté politely. He picked up the shotgun, leaned out the carriage door, and fired ahead.
There were howls, answering shots, a pop as a bullet hole dilated our coach cabin a foot from my head, and then we bumped over something prone and yelling on the muddy street. I heard a crack of bone. The horses galloped, mud spraying. One of our saviors grunted in pain and fell off the rear of our vehicle with a thud. Our wheels skidded, then held.
There are proposals to pave Paris’s streets, but it’s a faddish and wayward idea. A dirt lane can be repaired by anyone with a shovel, and swallows its own manure and refuse. Stone cobbles, in contrast, keep horse droppings on display, like one of Nitot’s jewels. Dirt isn’t clattery like cobbles, and horses can get up a good grip. Paving sounds very smart, but it’s as questionable a strategy as steamboats and submarines. Dandies complain of the mud, but that’s what boots and planks are for.
I’m nothing if not opinionated, and right more often than I’m listened to.
Another ball punched a hole in our coach, the hole as round as a trollop’s lips, its appearance jerking me out of my civic reverie. The other confederate hanging on our stern fired a pistol in reply. We were being chased.
“Gage, I’m told you’re something of a shot?”
“With an American long rifle. Mine, alas, was lost to a dragon in Tripoli.”
Frotté raised his eyebrows but decided not to pursue this history. He thrust the musket into my hands. “Can you slow them while I reload the shotgun?”
I don’t think I’m so much an expert marksman as a sensible one, so I picked up the piece, leaned out my window, looked back, and considered the situation. At least three men were atop a coach chasing us: the driver and two renegade po
licemen struggling to reload their own guns. I figured my first shot was critical, since I might not get another. Yet muskets are notoriously inaccurate, and even more so from a bouncing platform.
I could aim for the coachman.
Or, his propulsion.
“Take a corner!” I shouted.
I felt our speed dangerously slacken to make a turn into another twisting lane, our pursuers whooping as they closed the distance. Then we scraped the side of a house, hub squealing, sparks flashing, and with a cry and crack of whip we accelerated again. I leaned farther out. Our foes were making the same turn, their driver swearing. At the moment their horses and harness had made the corner, but the coach had yet to follow, I fired at my biggest target, a lead animal. The horse fell in its harness, dragging its companion sideways, and by doing so the coach crashed where we’d scraped. The frame exploded, and occupants flew. A mess of horse, harness, wheels, and men tumbled into the street.
Frotté pounded my shoulder. “Perfect shot, Gage!”
“It was perfect, because it was easiest,” I said modestly. I peered back. The coach’s disintegration was particularly satisfying after my torture, and no one else seemed to be following. So I flopped against the seat back and watched Frotté finish loading his own gun, the ramrod chattering as our vehicle rattled and he tamped down buckshot.
“Who are those rogues?”
“Renegades, Jacobins, freebooters, and pirates.”
That seemed to cover most mischief I could think of. “And now, what of my wife, son, and emerald?”
“We’re going to meet her in a house outside the city and set you on a course to retrieve not just the stone, but more treasure than you’ve ever imagined.”
“More treasure?” Was this bunch lunatic, too? “But I’ve retired.”
“Not anymore. You’re working for England now.”
“What?”
“We’re your newest friends. Gage, your proper alliance is with Britain. Surely Bonaparte has taught that by now.”
“And the cost of this alliance?”
“Breaking the King of Saint-Domingue out of Napoleon’s grimmest prison, and solving a mystery that has baffled men for almost three hundred years.”
Chapter 9
Any man is flattered by a job offer, not stopping to think he’s probably being asked to do something the employer prefers not to do himself. So I’d felt for a moment that maybe I was lucky after all, until Frotté made clear he’d saved me for what sounded like certain suicide. We pulled our coach into a barn at a farm outside Paris, hiding it from pursuing police, and came into a stone house with plank floors, hand-hewn beams, and a blaze in a fireplace big enough to roast a goat. Astiza was impatiently waiting, anxious and angry, and our son was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Harry?”
The trouble with love is that it exaggerates other emotions as well, from lust to disgust. Now she looked at me with an expression of agonized loss and frustrated regret that cut to the quick. Happiness had turned to horror in an instant. I was taken aback, and felt guilt without thinking myself entirely guilty. Imagine a painting of paradise that you could magically step into so that a viewer identifies you with all things sweet and serene. This magic happens to lovers, in lovely places, all the time. Now imagine a painting of hell. It was as if Astiza were studying damnation, and I’d wandered into her view.
It was unfair, and yet why did I, the father, have to ask her where my own son was? I felt the shame that comes from miscalculation, and the emptiness that drops the bottom out of your chest when you lose a child. Yet I wouldn’t express my fear, lest I make it true. “Is he still at our hotel?”
Her eyes had the same blaze as the fire. “The renegade gendarmes kidnapped him,” she said. “When I ran to our inn, the maid was tied and gagged, and Harry was gone. The girl said men seized him shortly after we set out for Nitot’s shop.”
My God. I’d lost my son once before to the Barbary pirates, and now this? I mislaid my boy as easily as a bookmark. Being dipped upside down in a tub is nothing compared to the monstrosity of making a child a pawn in a game of nations. I silently cursed Leon Martel. He’d regret not killing me.
Nor could Astiza keep a mother’s accusatory tone out of her voice. She’d urged me to be prompt, and I’d procrastinated. She’d had a hunch to stay with Horus, and I’d insisted she come along so I could show how clever I was. She’d wanted to retire to her studies, and I’d wanted to play a hand in the disposition of Louisiana.
The Greeks, I believe, called it hubris.
“And you?” My voice was a little strangled.
“I ran from one band of spies into the hands of another: these men.” She was impatient. “Instead of pursuing the French bandits, they’ve held me here while finding you. Ethan, what if Harry is dead?”
“Not dead, madame,” Frotté tried to reassure. “A hostage, surely.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because while alive, he can be used to manipulate you. For us to rush a rescue without planning is the one error that would assure he dies. You don’t want your boy in a gun battle.”
This new spy confirmed to me that Astiza had been rescued by English scoundrels, trading one band of hooligans for another. The worst people pursue me, as persistent as gulls after a fishing smack. I felt sick. I’d lost my son for a piece of green glass.
A stone that would have fed my family forever.
“This is the worst luck,” I managed. “The French took our only child?”
“To control you, not to do harm,” Frotté reassured.
“And you saved my wife?”
“To manipulate you, again.”
At least he was candid. Spies understand spies, and Frotté was confident his foe’s motive mirrored his own. Agents depend on one another to be nefarious masters of calculation and the double-cross, lest they all become unemployed. “How?”
“We British need your desperate daring to rescue Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Black Spartacus of Saint-Domingue, from an icy French prison. We believe L’Ouverture may know the truth about the fabled treasure of Montezuma, and that we can use his secrets to find it ourselves. At that point, we can negotiate with Martel for your son and the emerald, ransoming both while keeping a truly important secret out of French hands. You’ve unwittingly become necessary again, Ethan Gage—the key to France and England.”
What bitter honor. “But I was practicing being unnecessary. I should tie strings to my arms. Ethan Gage the puppet! And now you want me to rescue a condemned Negro? How?”
“The plan is to make an escape with a flying machine, a birdlike contraption called a glider.”
Ridiculous. “I’ve flown once before, in a French balloon. It was more terrifying than a ministerial meeting on tax reform, and more disastrous than a mistress wanting to discuss a relationship’s future. Astiza fell into the Nile, and I crashed into the sea. I can assure you, men don’t have wings for good reason. God’s intention is that we stay on the ground.”
“We don’t have gills, either, but you’ve journeyed under the sea,” Frotté argued. “Yes, yes, we know all about your adventures in Tripoli with Robert Fulton’s plunging boat. Come, Gage, we’ve entered the modern nineteenth century. You’re a man of science—no one should be more excited about the future than you.”
“My future is a dignified retirement, financed by a gem I went to no small trouble to steal but that has now sundered my family to pieces.”
“Martel has restolen your gem as well, which means your retirement is on hold until you can get it back. He’s kidnapped your only son and tried to seize your wife. Your only hope is to have something to bargain with, meaning that your chance is alliance with England. Sir Sidney Smith says you’re the most expert treasure hunter in the world. Get L’Ouverture, and you can put your life back together again.”
He was earnest as an undertaker, but his compliment was nonsense, since despite my best efforts of grubbing in tunnels and tombs I continu
ed to come up penniless. But I am susceptible to flattery. I’m also accustomed to fate being frustrating. Nonetheless, I stubbornly shook my head. “You realize that, as usual, I haven’t the slightest idea what is really going on.”
“At stake is the thwarting of a Bonaparte invasion of England and mastery of the world, which means we’re fighting for nothing less than civilization itself. You, I’m afraid, are key.”
I had a headache. “I’m a neutral American trying to help negotiate a land purchase with the first consul.”
“You’re Harry’s only chance, my love.”
“Astiza, you know I’m as heartbroken as you.”
“I’m the mother, Ethan.” It was a trump I couldn’t match. “Horus is why fate brought us together again, and Horus is all I care about now. We have to do whatever it takes to save him.”
“I just wanted to give you peace and security for your studies,” I said wearily. “My plan was precisely to avoid dilemmas like this.”
She took a breath, summoning back her familiar courage. “Destiny has other plans for us. This Martel has pointed the way toward a challenge greater than we wanted, and then the gods sent these English spies to give us a slender opportunity. We’re being punished for trying to relax, I think, but also given a chance for redemption. The only way we’ll get Harry back is to ransom him with what everybody seeks.”
Astiza believed in fate, you see, which gave her an equanimity most people lack. It’s relaxing not having to blame everything on yourself, though that didn’t stop her from silently blaming a good part of this fiasco on me. If I were an ordinary fellow, none of this would have happened, but then again, she’d married me because I wasn’t ordinary. For which she probably blamed herself.
The Emerald Storm Page 5