The Napoleon Complex

by E. M. DAVEY

  He didn’t want to be here, but there was nowhere to go.

  He didn’t love his lover, yet he was terrified to leave her.

  Plus the woman he did love didn’t want him any more.

  Surely no man in all of history had experienced heartbreak of this magnitude, Jake reflected. Not in the Iliad nor the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  Jake wasn’t always this way. He remembered discovering the beach, all those years ago. He’d got lost in the jungle, scooter running out of petrol, the night coming in at tropical speed. He’d needed somewhere to stay, anywhere. That was when he emerged onto this stretch of sand for the first time, drunk on the beauty of the place and cackling with laughter. Jake had been young then, erudite and witty, full of potential.

  What happened to that guy?

  Finally there was all this Napoleon stuff, and here was the most intractable tangle of all. Three more cards had arrived that morning. March 1809, war against Austria, and Napoleon told his confidant Roederer:

  “If it seems I am ready to meet everything, it’s because before entering on a challenge I have meditated lengthily, and foreseen what may happen.”

  Jake had checked the quote online – once again it was authentic. A shiver of unreality. Who the hell is sending me this crap?

  He read about the campaign. A month later, when a captured Austrian officer refused to reveal their order of battle, Napoleon had replied: “Don’t worry, I know everything anyway.”

  To the astonishment of the officer he’d gone on to outline the position of every corps in the Austrian army.

  The next card bore a quotation from Molé, one of Napoleon’s ministers.

  “When Napoleon was leading our armies they became irresistible, and the generals obeying him all seemed great captains. But when he was absent, those armies found it hard holding their own …”

  The thesis forming in his mind was becoming hard to deny. Finally there was a rumination from Napoleon after final defeat at Waterloo, incarcerated on his island-prison of St Helena in the South Atlantic:

  “One should never ask more of Fortune than she is able to grant.”

  Why was Jake not running? Engaging with this stuff would catapult him once more into the ghastly race between MI6 and the Chinese Secret Service, fix upon him the eye of Fate itself. A capricious entity; when he thought about it a darkness seemed to roll in from the Gulf of Thailand, like a fog. Was he suffering from psychosis? On balance he thought not, though it was certainly a possibility. He briefly considered the insane possibility of having a drink. But that would only further constrict the tangle that enmeshed him. He clenched a fist.

  No way.

  From nowhere Jake felt a whisper of ambition, of duty, even. The knowledge in his head could prevent terrible crimes, make him the most high profile journalist on the planet. But this was swiftly dampened by a sense of his own inadequacy. If you can’t keep a girlfriend, you can’t bring down MI6.

  “Hello gorgeous.” Chloë’s eyes danced with some new mischief. “I’ve got something for you. Come with me.”

  Her hand ran down his forearm with the touch of lace, tightening around his wrist, and Jake allowed himself to be led down the beach in the twilight. The bar hadn’t changed in fifteen years: psychedelic paintings, Bob Marley on the stereo, ultraviolet lights daubing it with a feel of the underworld. Chloë threw herself down on some cushions. Something small and brown was in her fingers.

  “Good gracious, you don’t give up, do you?” he said. “I don’t smoke hashish, never have.”

  But the knavery in her smile told a different story.

  “It’s opium, Jake.”

  Madness, the point of no return. But all of a sudden he felt reckless. What did he have to lose? Fear and temptation enfolded him; when he closed his eyes he heard that deep vibration of the void.

  “It’ll soothe you,” she said gently, as if reading his mind. “It comes from the hill tribes in the north. The high’s milder than you might think – it’s natural, very organic. It’ll bring you some peace.”

  Or put me out of my misery.

  The ultraviolet picked out broken veins on the bridge of Jake’s nose, souvenirs of his drinking days. In the purple light the skin resembled the shell of a sea urchin. His shoulders hunched inward as he eyed the drug.

  “You’re on,” he said.

  15

  Jenny had needed to get close to the inquisitor, that was the key to it. Her only chance was to obtain his phone, get a GPS reading to Jake and pray that he worked out the significance. He was clever, still recklessly in love with her; there was a chance he could get her out, however minuscule. Besides, she had nobody else to turn to. But to steal Fung’s mobile, she’d needed proximity.

  Jenny had assessed Fung as a ‘driver’: results-driven and competitive, but forceful, a risk taker. To heighten these characteristics she’d simulated an amiable personality type, hidden within a false shell of bravado for him to penetrate. After her goading had provoked a reaction Fung was allowed to unearth the submissive within. Like a hunter taking baby steps towards a watchful prey – seeing if the animal is alert to the meaning of the movements – Jenny gave him the feeling of being in control. When it came to psychology and the power of suggestion, she had once been the most gifted officer at MI6. Fung never stood a chance. He fell for this deception; assumed the role of teacher with child; deduced that information could be elicited by brute aggression. A physical encounter became inevitable. When he had Jenny pinned against she wall, she’d pushed back against his lapels, pressing the phone in his jacket pocket against his body. As he shouted in her face, her forefinger and thumb were extracting it; then it was clamped against his chest only by her palm, so he could still feel it there had he been paying attention. When she removed her hand to shield herself from the headbutt the phone dropped out of Fung’s jacket. His sightline was blocked as she turned to protect herself and her left hand caught the phone, which promptly vanished.

  Jenny had watched Fung type in his pin number on the first day of the interrogation. Now she keyed it in and the locking screen slid blissfully upward. She was looking at the menu of a BlackBerry with five bars of signal.

  When she opened BlackBerry Maps the screen juddered.

  There was no GPS signal.

  “Don’t do this to me.”

  Jenny restarted the phone. Still no signal.

  “Please …” she whispered.

  Nothing.

  Her captors must have known about MI6’s tactic of inserting bugs inside their most important targets. A GPS jammer had been installed nearby. Jenny stood rigidly, breathing fast and thinking hard.

  The window.

  In a single movement she had scrambled onto her bed, stretching to her fullest height to take a photo through the porthole. The image was a smear of light in a sea of dark, like the view from a dislocated telescope. Jenny strained to remain stable, the tendons in her body a single cord. She tried again. A blurred street scene set in outer space. Jenny landed on the floor, uploaded the photograph to the car forum without comment and deleted the image. As Fung walked into the room tears sprang back into her eyes.

  Now that the space between them had been broached, getting the phone back into his pocket would be simpler. Jenny could enter his force-field without suspicion. And she was trained in distraction, how to direct the spotlight of someone’s attention.

  “Your watch,” she said.

  “What about it?”

  “My dad has that exact same one.” A convulsion of sobs. “I haven’t seen him for two years.”

  Fung watched – smug, fatuous – as the beaten spook undid the strap, pathetic in her distress. She raised the Omega before her face like a talisman, directing his concentration.

  “Daddy,” she whispered, collapsing onto his shoulders like a landslide.

  Cue hiccups, rasping for breath. Fung pushed her away roughly.

  The phone was back in his pocket.

  Now it was down to Jake. Whether
he still loved her enough to try. Whether he could summon the brilliance that had once outfoxed the entire British Secret Service. Whether he was sober.

  16

  Chloë produced a length of bamboo with a ceramic-lined hole at one end and plastered a fingernail of opium around the aperture. She held a lighter to it, pulling on the bamboo until the opium bubbled and spat. She exhaled a lungful of smoke, eyelids fluttering, and fell onto her back. A violet cloud dissipated through the eaves of the beach bar as she repeated the preparation.

  The smoke tasted sweet, like petals. There was no catch in the back of Jake’s throat; he felt a pleasant heaviness in the limbs. From nowhere a measure of contentment materialised.

  Chloë loaded up the bamboo, working briskly. “Have another,” she said. “In the north the shamans smoke fifty pipes a night. We could go up to five or ten, no worries.”

  Jake took a second hit, and his neuroses were pad, pad, padded down again. As they smoked the high became more cerebral, moving like a beneficent fever from the body into the brain until the night danced with magic. Speaking was an effort, but her voice comforted him.

  “Don’t stop talking,” he said.

  “But I can’t think of what to say.” – Dreamily.

  “Read me something,” he murmured. “I’d like that.”

  “You first.”

  Jake army-crawled to the bookcase, which was a typical backpacker selection: Howard Marks’s Mr Nice, John Grisham and J.R.R. Tolkien. At random he selected The Odyssey.

  “Homer? Trippy, baby. Hit me.”

  He read to her of Calypso the nymph, who enchanted Odysseus with song and sex: detaining him on her island for seven years. Keeping him from his duty and from his wife.

  Calypso came to Odysseus sitting upon the shore. He had been weeping. Sweet life was ebbing away in the tears he cried for his lost home. For the nymph had stopped pleasing Odysseus. By night he was forced to sleep with her in the vaulted cave, icy lover. But in daytime he sat on the beach, torturing himself with tears, looking at the sea.

  Jake gazed out of the bar, reminded suddenly of himself: thinking about Jenny, as sand slipped through his fingers. Something else was nagging at him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  “My turn,” said Chloë, snatching the volume and letting it fall open.

  She recited Odysseus’ visit to the island of Circe, a goddess of magic, an enchantress. Jake’s grip on that half-formed thought began to loosen before his neurones let go completely, the notion lost to an enfeebled brain.

  Circe’s house was in a clearing, made of polished stone. Guarding it were wolves and lions Circe had entranced with magical drugs. Circe made a meal of cheese, barley-meal and honey for them. Into it she poured a potion, to make them forget their native land.

  It was bothering Jake again, that intuition he could not bring to the forefront of his consciousness. But still Chloë lulled him with her tongue and she loaded up another pipe. His eyes were drawn to her shadow, projected onto the wall behind her, and in the spectral ultraviolet, drugs pulsing through his eyeballs, her tresses dangling, the shadow morphed into Circe herself.

  At once Jake was alert.

  Revelation hit him like water and dazzling ice.

  Terror made him cold.

  That errant thought had emerged dripping from the fog of his mind, and he examined it and knew it the truth. He had been living in an intelligence trap. And Chloë was an MI6 agent. That explained why such a beauty was interested in him. That explained why she tempted him with booze, tried to wean him onto more powerful substances. He was to be kept here supine, satiated with sex and drugs. His thoughts on Napoleon monitored; lost to his own self more with each passing day. Kept from Jenny, like Odysseus from his Penelope.

  Oh Jesus. Jenny …

  He hadn’t checked the message board for days. Chloë was unaware he had awoken, that he had rediscovered the ability to make connections. Just as connections were being made in the air around them. In outer space.

  I have to get out of here. This very evening.

  Jake lurched to his feet; with panic he realised how high he was.

  Chloë stopped reading and put down the book. “You all good, baby?”

  “Feeling a bit sick. Need some air. Going for a walk.”

  Jake knew nothing about this woman – her real name, where she grew up. And they’d slept together for crying out loud. So there had been two of them trying to convince him he was making love. She must have loathed it: a sacrifice, for Queen and country. Was MI6 his mysterious correspondent, feeding titbits to his copious intellect to provoke the breakthrough that had eluded them?

  Somehow Jake made it onto the beach. The sand was cool on his ankles; the stars were beautiful and beyond counting, each a swivelling diamond set in a blackness somehow potent with menace. And still the opium throbbed through him, heightening in power with each heartbeat. Jake realised he was in a trance. The world was melting … hard to say if he was asleep or awake … he was beyond pleasure or fear now, floating down the beach in this chimerical state, through a world that was shimmering.

  Trying to remember something.

  Perfect silence.

  His passport …

  Circe’s realm.

  17

  Jake awoke to sunlight and the sound of waves. He sat up and vomited, retching until his abdomen had turned concave and he was thoroughly emptied out. The beach was unfamiliar – long and windswept, scrubby development strung along it. It looked like the south coast of the island. He had his backpack (good start!), but an unknown towel lay alongside him. He felt the flare of sunburn on his face; he also had no shoes on.

  “Hey! Are you ok?” A German tourist, full of motherly concern. “I tried to wake you up, but too much the alcohol last night, I think?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I put this towel on for protecting from the sun, but you are always throwing it away. You just … take care of yourself. This island is not so safe, you know?”

  Jake’s memory of events after leaving the bar was like a jigsaw puzzle in the early stages of completion: scattered images on a bed of nothingness. There had been a frustration, something he needed not to forget – something that bled away as he grasped at it.

  Passports.

  With a rush of terror Jake patted himself down. But there in his pockets were both of his clean passports, procured by Jenny before their flight from London, a bankcard too. He couldn’t remember packing them – it might as well have been done by a different person – but years of getting smashed had bequeathed him a highly functional autopilot setting. He had a vague recollection of being on someone’s moped. And one image was seared into his mind: crossing Koh Phan Ngan’s highest peak, all four corners of the island stretched across the sea like a dark virus, moonlight slick on the water’s surface.

  Jake hitchhiked into Thong Sala. It was a typical backpacker town: a straggle of bars and beach shops run by weather-beaten ex-pats, Thais in flip-flops zipping about on motorbikes. He found an internet café and logged on to the car forum.

  “Oh no.” Jake gripped his forehead in his hands. “You idiot, you idiot.”

  Jenny had posted two messages at the beginning of the week, and he had been so wrapped up in his own thoughts he had not even bothered to check. A surge of anger went through him then – at Chloë, at Beloff, at Antoine Devosge and Napoleon; at himself.

  The first message mentioned a Hyundai. They are on to us. Then Jake saw the second message, and felt only confusion. The photograph had been taken from an upstairs window. Beyond a security fence topped with razor wire lay an alleyway of yellow stone. The impression was of a medina, somewhere ancient. He and Jenny had codified numerous messages, but she’d never mentioned photographs. He stared at the screen, willing his brain to generate the answer. A funny thing, the mind: command it to produce and the response is sullen. Jake tried to let go, allowing his grey matter to absorb the problem. Disassembling it, examining each compon
ent.

  The first deduction was that it must mean something. Jenny knew the unexpected would freak him out. He smiled – it felt good to be using his head again. What was she telling him?

  She was saying …

  She was saying I am here.

  Jake grinned again, had the feeling of progress. The opium hangover retreated another notch. Why was Jenny telling him where she was? Did she miss him?

  I’ve fallen out of love with you, Jake.

  Jake felt a whisper of tragedy at the recollection; with an effort he pushed it away. What else could it be? Suddenly his mind became clear.

  This is where they are keeping me prisoner.

  And therefore:

  I need your help.

  There was no other answer, and the admixture of anger and fear produced a fresh surge of adrenaline. And he felt another emotion. What was it now, this long-forgotten sensation? It was hope. The most important human sentiment, one that trumped loyalty and even love. It was hope that propelled the species out of Africa. It was hope that crossed deserts.

  *

  The clue was an Orthodox priest, striding along in black robes and a cylindrical hat. A kalimavkion, Jake remembered from childhood holidays. What the hell was Jenny doing in Greece? The city was made of yellow stone and graffiti trailed meaninglessly along a near wall; a flying buttress soared over the alleyway at the vanishing point. The middle of a sign on the building opposite protruded over the security fence – it was curved, evidently following the arch of a doorway. Only six letters could be seen above the razor wire: ian Hos.

  But Googling ‘Greece and ian Hos’ produced junk. Jake perused images of various Greek cities. Athens looked completely different. Corfu Town bore a resemblance, but wasn’t quite right.

  It was sunny, no clouds in the sky. Something about the sunshine – the purity? – reminded him of the Middle East.