The Napoleon Complex

by E. M. DAVEY

  Conteh’s eyebrows shot up and he emitted a high-pitched “Ee” – the characteristic West African exclamation from Banjul to Brazzaville.

  But before Chloë could reply they heard the roar of powerful engines and a frisson of excitement went through the crowd. The chairman of Jaguar had arrived in a 1950s XK120 Roadster, four brand new F Types in his convoy. The new roads made sports cars a viable proposition in the capital at least, and Conteh scampered away to have a look.

  “I tried,” sighed Whalley.

  Chloë had to let him do the pursuing. She worked the room, keeping the princeling on her radar; ignoring him completely. A bottle-blonde Sierra Leonean woman had Conteh in her embrace now, all billowing dress and nail extensions. Chloë had that sweaty, sickly feeling of a career opportunity slipping away. Only once did Conteh look in her direction; he appeared to have a limited attention span.

  It was dark when Chloë tried again. The bolder partygoers were waltzing. She stood close enough that he noticed her and stared out to sea, the breeze stirring her long silk dress to reveal a few inches of calf. The Freedom canoe had disappeared.

  Conteh was beside her.

  “So tell me, Chloë, which college did you study at? I am a proud Balliol man.”

  She deployed her most dazzling smile: the one that had almost entangled Jake. But before she could reply she was interrupted by the bash of a gong. The piano fell silent and a hundred heads turned. It was the 600th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and some inspired soul had arranged for a scene from The Tempest to be performed. The cast were from the local International School: half British, half rich Sierra Leonean. The perfect showcasing of this special new relationship. Tables were cleared and the crowd gathered around.

  When she recognised the scene, Chloë saw her chance.

  Some sports are painful.

  Some kinds of baseness, Are nobly undergone.

  For this to work, she had to be directly opposite Conteh. She manoeuvred around the circle, lifting elbows and stepping over feet.

  This my mean task,

  Would be as heavy to me as odious.

  Ferdinand’s famous line was imminent. It had to be natural when she entered Conteh’s line of sight, feel like his lead.

  Poor worm, thou art infected!

  This visitation shows it.

  She was in position. She composed herself, letting a lock of lustrous chestnut brown hair fall across her chest. Far more ravishing than mortal man deserves.

  The very instant that I saw you, did

  My heart fly to your service.

  At that exact moment Conteh’s eyes were pulled to hers, by that inexplicable force-field of attraction. Chloë held his gaze, looked away – and blanked him for the rest of the evening. But the damage was done, and sure enough three days later the invitation came. The pretext was some new diamond contract he wanted to discuss.

  To make me slave to it.

  76

  “It’s up there,” said Jenny. “Watching us.”

  “Or He.”

  “Or She.”

  Night had fallen on that side of Africa, and they were looking at the stars from the hill above their campsite. Jake set much store by Jenny’s sixth sense, honed on scores of MI6 operations, and when she had suggested removing to the upper slopes there was no argument. Two shooting stars crossed the lake, then a third, like a child catching up with its parents. The celestial voyagers were mimicked by a manmade traveller as a satellite trundled across the heavens.

  They were lying on soft grass, a gap between their bodies. Close but not too close; and in that space Jake detected the conflict within her. He recalled her tears in Jerusalem – it was one of the most powerful moments of his life. He had been convinced they would be one again. And she’d voiced such respect for him in Vienna, only to pull back. Had she taken him up here merely as a precaution? Or did part of her want them to be alone in such a setting? Then there was that other thing, that reluctance he could sense but not explain. It was almost as though she felt she was not worthy of him, ludicrous though that might seem.

  The man in Vienna? Something she had done?

  He would forgive her almost anything.

  Jake lay back on the grass and stared at the constellations. Taurus, Orion’s Belt, Cancer. The stars burned through the black velvet of the heavens as if they were pinpricks, revealing a higher power behind.

  “How strange it is,” Jenny muttered.

  “What’s strange?”

  “That even now, some people believe that the arrangement of balls of flaming gas configures your destiny.”

  Jake remembered Pasquier.

  There was nothing to shield Napoleon from dangers brought on by his excessive confidence in his star.

  “Strange?” he said. “No stranger than our fates being foretold by thunder.”

  What he did not say: the same fate that pushes us together, although you try to leave me. Like two positive magnets forced to touch. And sometimes when you do this, one turns. Plus meets minus, and connects. Fate had forced them to do this thing. What was the end design?

  Another shooting star hurried after its family and he saw Jenny following it by the movement of her chin.

  “What does your future hold, Jake?”

  “I honestly dread to imagine.”

  “If someone could tell you – would you want to know?”

  “No.”

  He closed his eyes, thinking not of his future but his past: the wild and elemental journey he had been on. National newspaper reporter; drunk; hunted man; bearer of a knowledge shared by a dozen people alive.

  “Jake …” she hissed.

  He sat bolt upright. But no Chinese agents were ghosting through the undergrowth: he was looking at a caracal, pointed ears trembling with surprise at human presence on the hilltop. The cat darted off into the bush.

  “Amazing place,” said Jake.

  Jenny drew her knees to her chest and stared towards the Congo. In the moonlight she had something of the Navaho Indian about her – a watchfulness, that nobility. He turned to the constellations again, thinking of all the explorers who had crisscrossed this land with those stars as their compass. There was the Southern Cross, four points of light forming the crucifix of Jesus. Which led to thoughts of …

  “Oh my god,” he said.

  “Another caracal?”

  “No. No! David Livingstone.”

  “Livingstone? What about him?”

  “Additional agreed activities. Maybe Livingstone was Palmerston’s man.”

  “But he can’t have been,” said Jenny. “Wasn’t he a Christian missionary? Hardly a candidate for tramping around Africa to bury pagan texts.”

  “You wouldn’t have thought Eusebius the sort either,” said Jake. “A Christian scholar – and he kept the Disciplina from Emperor Constantine’s bonfires.”

  Jenny checked her phone. “No signal. It’s just coming up to 10 pm – if we go into town now we might be in time.”

  “For what?”

  “To get online. I think we need to do some reading.”

  77

  Kigoma’s internet café was a breezeblock hovel with a cheery painting of a computer outside. It boasted two infirm Amstrads with yellowed housing, the letters long ago rubbed from the keyboards. A fan stirred the air and mosquitoes gambolled around a naked lightbulb. It took an age to warm up the machines and the internet connection was lamentable. But at once things began to leap out at them.

  “Livingstone set off on his hunt for the source of the Nile in January 1866,” read Jake. “That was three months after the death of Palmerston.”

  “The dates line up perfectly.”

  “And Jenny …”

  It was a line by the historian Tim Jeal.

  Stanley wrote that he sensed ‘something seer-like’ in Livingstone.

  “You’d better tell me about Stanley and Livingstone’s meeting,” said Jenny. “What was it all about?”

  “Dr Livingstone was h
ands down the greatest explorer of the age,” said Jake. “A living legend. But during his final expedition he disappeared off the face of the earth. The smart money had it that he’d perished – and a brash young American called Henry Stanley was sent by the New York Herald to find him. Stanley knew nothing about African exploration, but he did have resources – and true grit.”

  “And Stanley actually found him.”

  “Astonishingly, yes. He tracked Livingstone down at a slaving settlement called Ujiji, very close to here. Livingstone was destitute, his stash of beads and copper having been stolen. That’s when Stanley came out with the most famous line in the history of exploration.”

  “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”

  Jake nodded. “Although many suspect he never actually spoke the words, because the pages in his diary describing their first encounter were ripped out. Cynics think he dreamt up some memorable first words long after the event. After travelling together for a while, Stanley went back to civilisation to file his story – but Livingstone kept on going. He finally died a couple of years later.”

  A power cut interrupted him. Two seconds later the lightbulb came on; it took thirty minutes to get the computers going again.

  “Hello …” muttered Jenny, staring at another article. “It says here that when they parted, the doctor instructed Stanley to take his diaries back to London for authentication. Not by the Royal Geographical Society. By the Foreign Office.”

  “Authentication,” Jake repeated dubiously.

  “Are those diaries published?”

  “Of course – thank god for the nineteenth-century mania for diary writing.”

  “And Google Books,” she said.

  “If it ever loads …”

  The lightbulb went plink, the machines groaned and everything turned off again.

  “Oh, Africa,” said Jake to the darkness.

  *

  When the power came back they explored the doctor’s journals.

  “Livingstone said quite explicitly that finding the source is not actually important,” said Jenny.

  The Nile sources are valuable only as a means of enabling me to open my mouth with power among men. It is this power which I hope to apply to remedy an enormous evil.

  “We can take a guess at the power he’s referring to,” said Jenny. “But what’s this enormous evil he’s on about?”

  “The slave trade,” said Jake. “It all falls into place.”

  “How come?”

  “Christianity wasn’t the only thing that drove Livingstone,” said Jake. “His life’s work was to fight the Arab slave trade, which still flourished in Africa. He hoped that charting the African interior would open it up to ethical commerce and prosperity might follow, replacing the slave trade. To his mind, if the African people could be ‘civilised’, they might be strong enough to repel Arab slavers. Livingstone’s goal was, in his own words, to bring the light to the African continent.”

  The only sound was the clatter of the fan and the rasping of insects outside.

  “I think you might be right.” Jenny’s voice was tight. “Livingstone named the source of a river he discovered out here after Palmerston. Check out his reason.”

  I honoured the name of the good Lord Palmerston, in remembrance of his unwearied labour for the abolition of the Slave Trade. It pleases me, here in the wilds, to place my little garland of love on his tomb.

  I have shed light of another kind, and am fain to believe I have performed a small part in the grand revolution which our Maker has been for ages carrying on.

  “When Livingstone was brought into the Foreign Office’s secret, he knew it had to be kept safe from Gladstone,” said Jake. “Gladstone was emphatically not an imperialist. But ever since he was a young man, Livingstone had believed colonies were the best way to spread Christianity and trade in Africa. Like Palmerston, like Queen Victoria herself, Livingstone was a believer in Empire.”

  78

  And suddenly Jake saw it very clearly. Rome; Napoleonic France; Victorian Britain; Nazi Germany. All had possessed the Book of Thunder at some point, but they had something else in common too. They were imperial powers. The Network and the actions of its devotees tended towards empire. That reminded Jake of something a quantum physicist had told him – the man who had first detected the consciousness’s presence.

  It is true that at our level – the level of planets, snooker balls, people – objects tend towards disorder. If you knock a plate off a table it shatters to thousands of pieces. You don’t see shards of china leaping off the floor and reforming themselves. But at the level of the quark and the electron the opposite is true. Particles tend to order themselves …

  This was a game it played, and Jake renewed his vow to destroy the Disciplina. For freedom – and also for humanity. Because after imperium comes collapse, as night follows day, the whole ghastly cycle laced with death and anguish. Jake considered everything happening in the world at that moment. He hadn’t been able to follow politics much recently, but he’d seen enough to know the Prime Minister had quite the Napoleon Complex. The Disciplina in the hands of Victor Milne? Jake shuddered to think of it.

  A Third World War.

  “Read this.” Jenny interrupted his thoughts. “Another snippet from Livingstone’s journal. He’s haemorrhaging from cholera and on the brink of death.”

  An artery gives off a copious stream and takes away my strength; nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair. Oh! How I long to be permitted by the Over Power to finish my work.

  “The ‘Over Power’. Doesn’t that sound like a description of …” Her eyes went up.

  Jake heard the thrum of the Network within his skull.

  “It does,” he managed.

  She looked at him curiously. Outside they could hear the distant rumble of thunder – but storms were a daily occurrence in central Africa. Jake tried to ignore it.

  Jenny was staring at the screen.

  “So it was Livingstone,” she said.

  25th October, 1870. In this journey I have endeavoured to follow with unswerving fidelity the line of duty, though my route has been torturous. Mine has been a calm, hopeful endeavour to do the work that has been given me to do. I had a strong presentiment through the first three years that I should never live through the enterprise. And an eager desire spellbound me. For if I could confirm the Sacred Oracles, I should not grudge one whit all the labour expended.

  “Livingstone meant to do good,” said Jake. “But the Over Power played him for a fool, had him do its bidding. All the time Livingstone was trekking through Africa he was, I don’t know … laying its eggs. So it could spawn again, in our world. Today.”

  Jenny scratched her forearms. “Ugh. What a horrible analogy.”

  “Then let’s firebomb the nest.”

  She nodded slowly. Her eyes were like the surface of Lake Tanganyika when the morning sunlight hit it, turning water into jade.

  “We’ll succeed where Burton failed,” he said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Lord Randolph must have sent Burton to collect it after Gladstone died – who better than a grizzled explorer who’d already been to the Great Lakes region? Remember Burton’s letter to Lord Randolph?”

  I beg you to favour me by placing my name on the civil list for a pension of £300. There are precedents for such a privilege, but I would not quote names unless called upon.

  “The ‘precedent for the privilege’ must be Livingstone. And he’s threatening to reveal the real reason for the return expedition if Churchill doesn’t give him a pension of his own.”

  “But if Burton didn’t find it, how are we supposed to?”

  “Burton was tramping on foot through a malarial warzone infested by cannibalistic tribes.”

  “We’re being hunted too, Jake.”

  “Touché.”

  “Anyway, let’s get looking.” Jenny returned to Livingstone’s journal. “Because there must be something here. Some clue as to
where he buried it.”

  At 3 am there was another power cut. They stood in the doorway to watch an inky mass of cloud over the lake, from which concentric rings of lighter-coloured nebula emanated like a magical void, or the flesh of some preternatural jellyfish. Without warning there was a crack of thunder like the splitting of rock, right overhead. Lightning raced from the north-west – tongue of dragon, flicking out across the water. It tore the heavens in two and a curtain of rain fell straight through the gap; the surface of Lake Tanganyika became murky and disturbed, the Congo beyond the water swallowed up by grey.

  “The Over Power,” whispered Jenny.

  “It’s angry.”

  *

  It was 4 am when Jake spotted something else in Livingstone’s diary.

  The heathen philosophers were content with mere guesses at the future. The elder prophets were content with the Divine support in life and death.

  The later prophets advance further: “Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust. The earth shall cast out her dead.”

  This seems a forecast of the future.

  An ambassador at Istanbul was shown a hornbill spoon, and asked if it were really the bill of the Phoenix.

  “God is great,” said the Turk. “This is the phoenix of which we have heard so often.”

  “Prophets, forecasts of the future, the earth shall cast out her dead,” said Jake. “You can’t get much more of a signpost than that.”

  The good news was that Dr Livingstone had provided directions and coordinates. The bad news was that they were in Burundi. Which according to the BBC website was on the verge of civil war.

  “I really didn’t want to go there,” said Jake.

  79

  “I’m Jacob. How do you do?”

  “All right, fella? I’m Frank. Sit yourself down.”

  Their handshake was like the grinding of tectonic plates, and Parr smiled as the alpha males got acquainted. The friendly psychopath and the one-time explorer, projecting all the old school English reserve of Speke himself. It would be an interesting relationship. They sat under a tattered tarpaulin at Kigoma’s central roundabout, half a mile from the internet café. An elderly Muslim gent boiled up coffee over charcoal in battered kettles, swatting flies from his face with a loop of horsehair.