The Napoleon Complex

by E. M. DAVEY

  Moments later the lid of the nearest urn was lifted aloft and a figure unfolded itself from the vessel to prowl invisibly through the gallery. Special Agent Bradley Günther listened at the doorway and half-nodded in approval, like a gourmand sampling a rare and expensive dish. There was something of the razorblade to his face; those angled cheekbones. A garrotte dropped into his hand as he followed Jake into the vault.

  *

  The storerooms resembled an auctioneer’s warehouse, artefacts stacked high and without theme. Discoveries that shake Egyptology were made down there regularly, and Jake’s spirits sank as he explored forgotten vaults of untold wares. He crept through a chamber of statuary, the antiquities shrouded beneath sheets as if awaiting removal. The next corridor was lined with wooden drawers – Jake opened one to reveal shards of pottery, each marked with a scrawl of ink. Papyrus was pricey in the ancient world, so notes, bills and rude cartoons of one’s boss were executed on potsherds instead. Jake appreciated once more the swoop of an ancient hand, had the feeling of touching history. Behind him he heard a noise and he shrank behind the shelves, mopped up by the shadows. But no cry of challenge followed, no swinging light of a janitor’s torch. The corridor was dark and still, like an oil painting that has aged badly and regressed into murk. He swallowed, heard a click inside his skull. Thrill had turned to fear now: he wanted to get this done. In the next vault the mummies were stacked on shelves, a library of them sleeping away the afterlife like sailors in bunkbeds. Caskets lined the walls too, staring drunkenly at the ceiling. His phone illuminated painted eyes and patterned breasts, each as fabulous and intricate as a bird of paradise.

  This place is crazy …

  Günther watched as Jake hunted through the collection. It was decidedly not in the Brit’s interest to find something. If he did, the American would obtain it by murder. The garrotte hung limply, an inverted ankh in the assassin’s hand.

  Jake had found something.

  A Ptolemaic casket with hair of cobalt blue. He checked the serial number and swallowed. He was staring at the celestial vessel of Pakhar-en-Khonsu. The mummy was wishbone-light as Jake laid it on the floor, all moisture purged long ago from both wood and corpse. But the casket was sealed with beeswax; he needed a tool. Back he went, heading for the corridor of the many shelves. The about-turn took Günther by surprise – he had no time to retreat, so instead he simply faced the wall. Jake walked right past.

  As Jake entered the corridor he thought he saw a light extinguished at the far end. The adrenaline was immediate, blaring in his veins, but the harder he listened the more the soundlessness confused his ears. Where that flash had been was only darkness, and Jake wondered if he had seen it at all.

  The cord dangled in Günther’s fist.

  Jake select a pointed sherd before returning to the High Priest and using it to scrape the beeswax from the join in the casket. He clawed his fingers into the crack and heaved. The ancient wood parted with a croak and the top half clattered onto the floor, echoing through the basement. The tomb robber froze. But there were no footsteps, no rushing torchlight, and he let his eyes be pulled downward. Linen stretched over a gasping face; Jake had the impression of a ghoul, surfacing for air.

  “Hello friend,” he whispered.

  No writing upon the bandages. But what about on the inside?

  There was nothing else for it, so Jake began tearing at the bandages. A surreal moment, this act of desecration, this violation of every code by which he’d lived. The destruction of something ancient was as anathema to him as punching an elderly relative in the face at Sunday lunch. As Jake unrolled the bandages like twine from a spool the priest rotated in his casket. A spindly forearm revealed itself before snapping into dust, sheared bone protruding. Next the priest’s face became visible, puckered and grey, the one-toothed mouth a maw of bewilderment. A fossilised chest came into view: skinny, pathetic beyond description. The linen spilling onto the floor was unmarked. But something wasn’t right. Jake tugged at the linen, admiring its fineness and its strength. He’d handled ancient fabric at university and it crumbled at the touch.

  These bandages have been replaced.

  A new sickness overcame Jake then, a darker torpor. A sense he was being laughed at, played for a fool by predecessors who thought many moves ahead. Jake pocketed a strip of linen and photographed the casket – the priest was no more than a pile of filth amid bundles of lacerated swaddling. He swept the bandages back into their case and fiddled the halves back together; he needed to return to his hiding place before the museum awoke.

  Special Agent Günther prepared to strangle him.

  *

  Günther heard each of Jake’s footsteps as though it was the crash of cymbals, his consciousness vivid in a way most men never know: the heightened wakefulness of a killer of men.

  A blade was drawn across his throat.

  He sighed and knew at once that he was a dead man. The slice was so surgical it had caused a mere lancing of pain, though Günther felt clearly the warm slick of blood flooding across his breast. The sensation was almost pleasant. He had only seconds to appreciate this, only seconds to think of his wife Alice who was undergoing fertility treatment in Tennessee, before the blade of the stiletto was thrust into his earhole up to the hilt. Günther quivered on the end of the dagger, skewered through the brain and dead as Pakhar-en-Khonsu himself.

  The beautiful boy’s first murder had gone as Davis had predicted. Training and instinct had taken over; a nasty moment followed by the satisfaction of a job well done. His mentor would be proud. Alexander Coppock-Davoli hauled the corpse from sight moments before Jake passed by, the burglar unaware this evil had transpired at all. Jake returned to the gallery and clambered into his sarcophagus. Coppock-Davoli followed at a safe distance: the boy who had lost his innocence.

  43

  On the seventh day, they came for Serval again. Both Suleiman and Captain Bracknell were wild with fever and dehydration; helicopters passed, but rescue attempt came there none. That morning Bracknell had actually used the phrase, ‘We’re gonna die here, man.’

  Serval remained unaffected. The explorer’s constitution was every bit as unbreakable as his will, and though he would have appreciated a shower he felt he could take another fortnight. Not so the child. Serval reckoned that without medical attention he had days to live. Then one stifling afternoon, the bamboo cage was thrown open.

  It was No Ears. “Kohmoht, wit-man.”

  “Come out, white man,” Suleiman translated.

  “I know, I got that,” said Serval.

  He hauled himself up.

  “An de bohboh,” said No Ears.

  “And the small boy.”

  The interpreter handed the infant up to Serval, who plucked him out by the wrists. Suleiman clambered up too and they left Bracknell lying comatose in the pit. Serval rested his hand on the child’s head as they walked, a skullcap on the tiny cranium. It was the first time the boy had not shied away from contact and they might have been father and son on a day-trip were it not for the guns, the air of menace, the stoned meander of the boy’s footsteps. They stopped beneath an African Greenheart tree, fifty metres tall, and No Ears said something in Mende.

  “He says this tree, the bark is a magic bark,” said Suleiman. “They using it to make tea. In the tea, they are placing the …”

  His words petered out.

  “Placing what?” said Serval.

  No Ears’s grin was brilliant, the whites of his eyes fully encircling the pupils.

  “Placing the skin of child,” muttered Suleiman. “This tea, if you drinking, is making you popular. Is making you, like …” he sought the word.

  “Charismatic?” suggested Serval.

  “Yes, charismatic. At election time in our country, no parents are letting the children onto the street. Because the Honourables, they are wanting to make this tea.”

  This detail had the ring of truth to it.

  No Ears giggled and said something wit
h the air of a punchline.

  “But of course, I am not a member of this secret society,” translated Suleiman.

  Holy Mary mother of Christ, Serval thought. Travel in sub-Saharan Africa is … well, it’s definitely not like being in Thailand.

  They will eat you up.

  He was led to an abandoned research station. Spent shotgun cartridges were everywhere and a satellite dish lay on the ground: it was a scene from a zombie movie. Jason Bourne squatted in the doorway of the nearest hut, bush wives perched on each side of him. His distended stomach protruded grotesquely from his vest.

  “Mr Bourne,” said Serval grimly. “And how are we today?”

  The warlord patted his stomach. “Rohtin behleh.”

  “Rotting belly,” said Suleiman. “It is meaning, ‘glutton’.”

  “Not at all,” said Serval. “You look in fine condition.”

  The toad king’s eyes glittered as he calculated the sincerity of the remark. “Butu.”

  Suleiman and the boy threw themselves to ground; Serval remained erect.

  “Bow down,” whispered the translator.

  “Butu,” the warlord repeated more dangerously, a gravelled hiss from the back of his throat.

  “Bow down,” pleaded Suleiman, who was grasping the dirt. “Please bow down.”

  But Serval did not move and Bourne physically bristled at the challenge. A new wildness was in Bourne’s eyes; the juju warriors shifted on their feet. The bush wives looked between the males in patent terror.

  One finger at a time, the warlord clenched his fist. “Butu!”

  With the sigh of an adult wearying of childish games, Serval bowed his head. All around the compound tension went out of shoulders and necks, a single breath released.

  Bourne cleared his throat. “Dis wok ya, a go ebul am.”

  “This work,” said Suleiman. “I am able to do it.”

  “Good. That’s excellent news.”

  “A noh lehk dat wan de.” Bourne pointed at the boy.

  “But I don’t like that one there.”

  “He’s my friend.” Serval put an arm around the youngster but the boy, sensing danger, pulled away.

  “Yu de gi ram to me,” Bourne smirked.

  “You will give him to me,” said Suleiman.

  “Fo de it.”

  “For the eating.”

  “Tell me, Suleiman,” Serval muttered sideways. “What’s Mende

  for the phrase, ‘Not on your nelly’?”

  The translator shook his head rapidly.

  “Di pikin, ram dai,” said Bourne reasonably.

  “The child, he will die anyway.”

  “Yu de kohstamohnt,” he went on. “Me di makit uman.”

  “You are the customer, I am the market man.”

  “A want see di wit-man mek di sara.”

  “I want to see the white man make the sacrifice …”

  Slowly the price of cooperation dawned on Serval. On top of the money and arms and the fine clothes from London, he himself had to kill the boy. A test, a challenge, a symbol of devotion. The throb of anger that went through him was so powerful this time that his knees trembled, and for a few moments he saw nothing at all.

  The research station reformed itself and a giddy sickness was in him as he realised what he was about to do.

  *

  The boy would die anyway, nothing could stop that. By this single action – this mercy – he could end the barbarism in western Sierra Leone. The ends justify the means: did this not underpin every civilisation from Rome to the British Empire? He would put down the boy, as gently as he could. He would release him from all this. And one day he would kill Jason Bourne too. Serval swore this to himself with silent vehemence.

  “De bohboh,” the warload coaxed him. “De bohboh, de bohboh, de bohboh …”

  Serval kneeled down and opened his arms. The boy was trusting now, as if sensing deliverance; willingly he entered the explorer’s embrace. Serval enfolded the diminutive frame in his limbs. He wrapped one hand around the child’s jaw, the other around his left shoulder. He leaned into the child’s ear and whispered that he was sorry. Then he jerked his arms counter-clockwise, so the bohboh’s neck went click and he fell asleep.

  When Serval stood his cheeks were wet with tears.

  “Ohlman de pan in you wa-ala,” Jason Bourne was telling one of his bush wives matter-of-factly.

  Every man has his troubles.

  Serval was free to go.

  He staggered through the jungle to fetch Captain Bracknell, struck dumb at what he had done. He focussed on his shoes, trying not to think of the face of his father. Then a funny thing happened. He thought of the ground beneath his feet, the wealth it contained. What could be done with it, the transformative power of civilisation at the barrel of a gun. His paces became surer. And this fury he had discovered in himself was back: no longer in peaks and troughs but in the background, ticking through him at a residual level, like pneumatic fluid powering his cyborg stride. Another image came to Serval: that red pillar box in Freetown, slot choked with weeds. The weeds would be removed soon, and the people better for it. For the ends do justify the means. Rome wasn’t built in a day; you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

  White man’s burden, he thought.

  He would do what needed to be done.

  Bracknell had revived by the time the explorer returned.

  “We’re free to go,” said Serval.

  The captain brightened. “Thank god for that. What happened?”

  “Nothing important. Now get out of that stinking bloody pit, will you?”

  They will eat you up.

  In Tel Aviv, Mr Aberlieb had started to talk.

  44

  Dr Marie-Elise Babineaux placed the scrap of linen into a quartz tube with some copper oxide and silver wire. She attached a vacuum line to expel the air and used a blowtorch to seal it, placing the tube in an industrial furnace. This resembled a domestic appliance from a space station, crudely joined in the manner of specialist devices. The laboratory was elegant with long windows through which the Cairo sunlight spilled, reminding Jake of physics classes at school in Bath.

  L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale was the only place in Egypt to offer radiocarbon dating. It inhabited a handsome nineteenth-century mansion south of Tahrir Square, in one of Cairo’s most fashionable districts. Jake and Jenny had stepped with trepidation through the parqueted entrance hall, passing Egyptian mummies in display cases and a library full of French archaeologists. They made it to the laboratory unchallenged, where Jake introduced himself as Dr Robin Matthews of Warwick University.

  Dr Babineaux was a tiny Frenchwoman in her fifties with chic silver hair and darting eyes, like a rather pretty sparrow. Oui, for €330 the tests were possible but approval from the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities was required. Oh, and there was a two-week waiting list. Jenny offered a €5,000 donation that would fund a PhD student for months; paperwork was no longer required.

  “But how can we afford it?” Jake murmured.

  “I told you, there are ways and means to get money,” she replied cryptically.

  At 900 degrees centigrade the copper oxide caused the textile to combust. The tube now contained carbon dioxide and a little water, which Dr Babineaux mixed with hydrogen and iron powder inside a graphite reaction vessel. This was a tube of burnished aluminium: another spaceship part.

  As the mixture was heated Jake continued through Sir Neil’s memoirs; folded page corners and scuffmarks denoted his progress through the book. The commissioner had recounted a meeting with Wellington.

  Enlarging upon the influence Napoleon possessed over the minds of French soldiers in the field, Wellington said that under him they performed what no other chief could obtain from them …

  A French trill interrupted his reading. “Aha! The next stage is complete.”

  The carbon absorbed from the atmosphere by a flax plant long ago was now deposited on the
iron powder as graphite. From there the equipment got even more space age. Dr Babineaux placed the graphite into a tiny aluminium bullet and inserted it into a metal disc rather like the cylinder of a revolver. This was placed into the accelerator, a tangle of aluminium tubes and drums. The carbon was blasted with a caesium beam into the Mass Spectrometry Accelerator where magnets separated the isotopes into C12, C13 and C14. Only the last was allowed through into the final snarl of metal tubing.

  As the C14 was analysed Jake returned to the diaries.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Listen to this …”

  It was another missive from the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh:

  You have already been informed of the Act of Abdication passed by Bonaparte, and of the assurance given him of a pecuniary provision of six millions, with safe asylum in the island of Elba. The Act in question was to be given up on the due execution of engagements, with respect to the proposed arrangement.

  “What proposed arrangement?” said Jake.

  “Who knows?” said Jenny. “The treaty must have run to pages and pages.”

  Dr Babineaux frowned as she studied the data spilling down her screen. “You said this is from a Ptolemaic mummy, Dr Matthews?”

  “That’s right.”

  She shook her head. “That is archeologically unacceptable. This textile is not antique.”

  A tightening in Jake’s throat.

  “I calculate this sample to be from the early modern era.”

  “How precise can you be?” asked Jenny.

  Dr Babineaux studied her graph. “With a margin of ten years error either side, I calculate that this linen dates from the year 1797.”