The Dakota Cipher E-Book

William Dietrich

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Ethan Gage
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 518

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Ethan Gage wants to enjoy the fruits of victory after helping Napoleon win the Battle of Marengo. But an ill-advised tryst with Bonaparte's married sister has made that impossible. And the fantastic schemes of the wild Norwegian Magnus Bloodhammer soon have Ethan dodging hostile Indians on America's frontier. With President Thomas Jefferson's blessings, Ethan and Magnus embark upon an expedition into the Western wilderness - keeping their eyes open for woolly mammoths. But another prize secretly impels them: the mythical hammer of the Norse god Thor, allegedly carried to North America more than a century before Columbus. Across a landscape no white man has ever traversed, Gage's skills will be tested as never before - as he braves unimaginable peril en route to the most incredible discovery of all time.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR WILLIAM DIETRICH

‘A magnificent adventure, shot through with mystery … a marvellous tale!’ Bernard Cornwell

‘Fast, fun and full of surprises … a tale rich in intrigue and impressive historic detail with abundant wit and humour’ Publishers Weekly

‘The Dakota Cipher should be read by anyone who loves adventure at its grandest, or humour both smart and sharp, or romance with a wild heart. For that matter … the novel should simply be read by everyone’ James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author

‘Dietrich’s dialogue is crisp and the characters believable … This fun blend of history and adventure makes for a terrific, fast-paced read as Gage once again winds up inadvertently impacting history’ Library Journal

‘A supple, elegant thriller that carries the reader triumphantly from one exciting climax to the next’ Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author

‘Rich in period detail and ancient mythology …

THEDAKOTA CIPHER

William Dietrich

To my son-in-law, Sebastian

Contents

PraiseTitle PageDedicationMapCHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEENCHAPTER FIFTEENCHAPTER SIXTEENCHAPTER SEVENTEENCHAPTER EIGHTEENCHAPTER NINETEENCHAPTER TWENTYCHAPTER TWENTY-ONECHAPTER TWENTY-TWOCHAPTER TWENTY-THREECHAPTER TWENTY-FOURCHAPTER TWENTY-FIVECHAPTER TWENTY-SIXCHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENCHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTCHAPTER TWENTY-NINECHAPTER THIRTYCHAPTER THIRTY-ONECHAPTER THIRTY-TWOCHAPTER THIRTY-THREECHAPTER THIRTY-FOURCHAPTER THIRTY-FIVECHAPTER THIRTY-SIXCHAPTER THIRTY-SEVENCHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHTCHAPTER THIRTY-NINECHAPTER FORTYCHAPTER FORTY-ONECHAPTER FOURTY-TWOCHAPTER FOURTY-THREECHAPTER FOURTY-FOURHISTORICAL NOTEAbout the AuthorBy William DietrichCopyrightAdvertisement

Map

CHAPTER ONE

I suppose it’s not precisely true that it was solely I who consolidated Napoleon’s power and changed the course of world history. I did contribute to his idea of crossing the Alps and outflanking the Austrians, and then had to help save the day at the Battle of Marengo – but frankly, my role was somewhat accidental. Yet what of that? Enlarging one’s part does make a good tale for the ladies, and while I, Ethan Gage, am a paragon of candour when it suits my purposes, I do have a tendency towards exaggeration when it comes to matters of the bed.

It is true that my timely service in northern Italy got me back in Bonaparte’s good graces, that my affable charm made me instrumental in forging the Treaty of Mortefontaine with American diplomats, and that my raffish reputation won me a place at the glittery château gathering to celebrate that Convention. There I managed to get embroiled in the new diversion of roulette, was sidetracked into a tumultuous tryst with Napoleon’s married sister, and still squeezed in enough time to almost be killed by fireworks. I may inflate my history to women, but no man can fault me for not keeping busy.

Unfortunately, my incautious boasting also persuaded a half-mad Norwegian to enlist me in a dubious and mystical quest a continent away from comfort – proof again that vanity is peril and modesty the wiser course. Better to keep one’s mouth shut and be suspected of being a fool than open and confirm it.

Ah, but the breasts of Pauline Bonaparte were lifted like white pillows by her bewitching gown, her brother’s wine cellar had my head swimming, and when powerful men are urging you to share your exploits, it’s difficult not to admit you’ve had a role directing history. Especially when you’ve taken your audience for a hundred francs at the gaming table! Pretending to be important or clever makes one’s victim feel better about losing. So on I prattled, the eavesdropping Norseman with a beard the colour of flame eyeing me with ever-greater interest, and my own eye on flirtatious Pauline, knowing she was about as faithful to husband General Charles Leclerc as an alley cat during a full moon. The minx had the beauty of Venus and the discrimination of a sailor in a grog shop. No wonder she winked at me.

The date was September 30th, 1800 – or, by the French Revolutionary calendar, the eighth day of Vendémiaire in the Year IX. Napoleon had declared the Revolution over, himself as its culmination, and we all hoped he’d soon throw out the annoying ten-day-a-week calendar, since rumour had it that he was attempting to cut a deal with the pope to bring back Catholic priests. No one missed Sabbath services, but we all were nostalgic for lazy Sundays. Bonaparte was still feeling his way, however. He’d only seized power some ten months before (thanks in part to the mystical Book of Thoth I’d found in a lost city), and barely won Marengo by a whisker. Settling France’s hash with America – my nation had won some impressive duels with French warships and played havoc with French shipping – was another step towards consolidating rule. Our feuding countries were, after all, the world’s only two republics, though Napoleon’s autocratic style was straining that definition in France. And a treaty! It was no accident that the French elite had been turned out at

Mortefontaine for this celebration. No warrior was better at publicising his peacemaking than Bonaparte. Mortefontaine is a lovely château some thirty-five kilometres north of Paris. Far enough, in other words, for France’s new leaders to party in style well out of sight of the mob that had put them there. The mansion had been purchased by Bonaparte’s brother Joseph, and none of those assembled dared suggest it was a tad ostentatious for the inheritors of the Revolution. Napoleon, just thirty-one, was the most astute observer of human nature I ever met, and he’d wasted little time giving France back some of the royalist trappings it had missed since chopping off the head of King Louis and guillotining the nation’s lace makers. It was permissible to be rich again! Ambitious! Elegant! Velvet, which had been forbidden during the Terror, was not just permitted but in style. Wigs might be a relic of the last century, but gold military braid was de rigueur in this one. The lovely grounds were swarming with newly powerful men, newly seductive women, and enough silk and brocade to get the haberdasheries of Paris humming, albeit on more classical, Republican lines. Lafayette and La Rochefoucauld had invited every prominent American in Paris, even me. Our total assembly numbered two hundred, all of us heady with American triumph and French wine.

Bonaparte had insisted that his festival organiser, Jean-Etienne Despeaux, achieve perfection in record time. Accordingly, that famed marshal of merriment hired the architect Cellerier to revamp the theatre, recruited a troupe from the Comédie Française to play a ribald sketch on transatlantic relations, and prepared the fireworks display with which I was about to become all too familiar.

Three great tables were set out in the Orangerie, in three adjoining rooms. The first was the Room of the Union, the head wall hung with a scroll of the Atlantic, with Philadelphia on one side and Le Havre on the other, the intervening sea topped by an airborne half-naked woman who represented peace by holding an olive branch in her fingers. Why the doxies in these European paintings always have their clothes slipping off I don’t know, but I must say it’s a custom my own more staid America could emulate. Next to the mural were enough foliage, flowers, and folderol to start a forest fire.

The next two rooms had busts of my late mentor Benjamin Franklin and the recently deceased George Washington, respectively. Outside in the park was an obelisk with allegorical figures representing France and America, and the whole affair was frocked with tricolour bunting. Rose petals floated in pools and fountains, rented peacocks strutted on lawns, and artillery banged salutes. It seemed to me that Despeaux had earned his money, and that I, finally, was among friends.

At Joseph Bonaparte’s request, I’d brought along the longrifle I’d helped forge in Jerusalem. A nasty thief named Najac had knocked the piece about, but I’d disposed of him by pushing a ramrod through his heart and later paid twenty francs to restore the stock’s finish. Now I gave a demonstration of the gun’s accuracy. I broke a teacup at one hundred paces and struck a cavalry breastplate five times running at twice that distance, a perforation that impressed officers resigned to the stray aim of muskets. While more than one soldier remarked on the tedious time the rifle took to load, they also said it explained the feared accuracy of our frontiersmen in the North American wars. ‘A hunting piece,’ one colonel judged, not inaccurately. ‘Light to carry, wickedly accurate. But look at the narrow neck! A conscript would break this beauty like a piece of china.’

‘Or learn to take care of it.’ Yet I knew he was right, this was not practical for massed armies. Rifles clog with powder residue after half a dozen shots, while cruder muskets can be banged away by idiots – and are. A longrifle is a sniper’s gun. So I fired again, this time drilling a gold louis at fifty paces. Pretty ladies applauded and fanned themselves, uniformed men sighted down the barrel, and hunting dogs yelped and ran in furious circles.

Napoleon arrived in the September glow of late afternoon, his open carriage drawn by six white horses, gold-helmeted cavalry clopping in escort, and cannon thumping in salute. A hundred paces back, his wife followed in an ivory-coloured coach that gleamed like a pearl. They pulled up with a flourish, steeds snorting and pissing on pea gravel as liveried footmen swung doors open and grenadiers snapped to attention. Bonaparte stepped out in the uniform of his personal guard, a blue tunic with red and white collar, and a sword and scabbard with filigree of wrestling warriors and reclining goddesses. Far from haughty, he was gracious: the fame of the victor at the Pyramids and Marengo spoke for itself! You don’t rise to first consul without some measure of charm, and Napoleon could seduce grizzled sergeants, ladies of the salon, conniving politicians, and men of science in turn – or, if need be, all at once. His calculated sociability was on display this evening. He deferred to Lafayette, who’d helped my own country win independence, and toured the American peace commissioners through the gardens like a country squire. Finally, when the clocks chimed six, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the minister of foreign affairs, called us to hear the text of the treaty read.

Josephine had popped out of her coach too, and it was all I could do not to scowl. Power became her, I must admit: though never quite beautiful (her nose a little too sharp, her teeth a little too discoloured), she was more charismatic than ever. She sported a string of pearls that had reportedly cost a quarter million francs, coaxing state finance ministers to cook the books so the strand would escape Bonaparte’s scrutiny. Yet no one else begrudged her the jewels. While her husband’s moods could be mercurial, she was consistently well-mannered in gatherings like this, her smile earnest as if the well-being of every guest were her personal concern. Thanks to my help, she’d staved off divorce after cheating on Napoleon and in a few years would find herself empress. But the ungrateful wench had betrayed me and my Egyptian love Astiza, sending us into Temple Prison as payment, and it was because I hadn’t forgiven her that the risk of rutting with Bonaparte’s sister Pauline was somehow more tempting. I wanted to tup a Bonaparte as I’d been tupped. I’d been made a fool of (not the first time), and Josephine’s inevitable presence as first lady, beaming as if she’d won the Revolution’s lottery, was to me a small cloud on an otherwise brilliant day. Widowed by the Terror, she’d bet on the young Corsican and improbably found herself in the Tuileries Palace.

If Josephine brought back pained memories of Astiza’s parting, I was flattered that the American commissioners who’d sought my counsel were generous enough to offer public thanks. Oliver Ellsworth had worked on my nation’s Constitution and served as chief justice of the Supreme Court before taking on this diplomatic task. The two Bills were almost equally renowned: William Richardson Davie, a hero of the Revolutionary War, and William Vans Murray, a Maryland congressman who was now ambassador to the Netherlands. All three had risked the diplomatic snubbing earlier envoys had received in hopes of salvaging John Adams’s sagging presidency. I, their adviser, was younger and rawer and a frustrated treasure hunter, gambler, sharpshooter, and adventurer who had somehow wound up on both the French and the British sides in the recent fighting in Egypt and the Holy Land. But I’d also served briefly as an assistant to the late, great Franklin, had a growing reputation as an ‘electrician’ myself, and – most importantly – had Bonaparte’s ear when he was inclined to listen. We were both rogues (Napoleon was simply better at it than me), and he trusted me as a fellow opportunist. Honorable men are hard to control, but those of us with self-interested common sense are more predictable. So after Marengo I was enlisted as go-between, shuttling from Talleyrand to the impatient Americans, and here we were, making peace.

‘What I like about you, Gage, is that you focus on what is practical, not what is consistent,’ Bonaparte whispered at one point.

‘And what I like about you, First Consul, is that you’re as happy to use an enemy as to destroy him,’ I cheerfully replied. ‘You tried to have me executed, what, three or four times? And here we are, partners in peace.’ It’s splendid how things work out, the English captain Sir Sidney Smith had told me.

‘Not partners. I am the sculptor, you are the tool. But I care about my tools.’

This was hardly flattering, but part of the man’s charm was his blunt, sometimes clumsy honesty. He’d tell women their dresses were too bright or their waists too thick, because he liked his females slim, demure, and dressed in white, apparently as part of some fantasy of virginal beauty. He got away with it because his power was an aphrodisiac. I, meanwhile, was learning to be a diplomat. ‘And I appreciate your toolbox, Paris.’

I can be obsequious when I’m in the mood, and Napoleon’s chambers at the Tuileries were littered with grand plans to make his city the most beautiful in the world. The theatre was flourishing from new government subsidies, the tax and civil codes were being overhauled, the economy was recovering, and the Austrians were beaten. Even the whores dressed better! The man was a brilliant rascal, and gambling salons were so crowded with newcomers that I’d been able to supplement my modest salary with winnings from drunks and fools. Things were going so well that I should have crawled into a hole and braced for the worst, but optimism is like wine. It makes us take chances.

So here I was at the French château of the first consul’s brother, semi-respectable to my American brethren, and with a certain cachet as a savant who had charged a chain to electrocute attacking soldiers at 1799’s siege of Acre in the Holy Land. The fact that I’d done this for the British side, not the French, seemed to bother no one, since I was presumed to have no real loyalties or convictions in the first place. Rumours that I had slain a prostitute (absolutely untrue) and burnt a sorcerer (accurate, but he had it coming) simply added to my allure. Between that, my longrifle, and my tomahawk, I was accorded the distinction of being a potentially dangerous man, and there is nothing more likely to raise a flush on the neck of a lady.

I sat smugly through the interminable speeches (my name was actually mentioned, twice) and ate energetically at the state dinner since the food was better than what I could normally afford. I pretended to modesty as I shared adventures that left me with a reputation as somewhat diabolical, or at least oddly durable. Many leading Americans were Freemasons, and theories of Knights Templar and ancient mysteries intrigued them.

‘There may be more to those old gods and ancient ways than we modern men of science have allowed,’ I said grandly as if I knew what I was talking about. ‘There are still secrets worth recovering, gentlemen. Mysteries yet veiled.’ Then we joined in toasts to martyrs for liberty and finally stood from the ceremony. My vanity satisfied, I looked forward to a night of gaming, dancing, and sexual conquest.

The music began and I wandered, gaping like the American I was, at the splendour of French architecture. Mortefontaine made the fancy houses I’d seen in my homeland seem like stables, and Joseph was sparing no expense – now that his brood had access to the French treasury – at making it even better.

‘Grand, but not entirely different from our new home for our president,’ a voice murmured at my side.

I turned. It was Davie, amiable after those champagne toasts. He was handsome, with thick hair, long muttonchops, and a strong, cleft chin. Being in his mid-forties, he was a good ten years older than me.

‘Really? If they produce this in that swamp between Virginia and Maryland, my nation has come a long way indeed.’

‘The president’s house is actually based on a government building in Ireland – used to be a Masonic temple, I understand – and yes, quite grand for a new nation.’

‘They use a Masonic lodge for the president? And what an extraordinary idea, building a new capital in the middle of nowhere!’

‘It was the fact that it was nowhere – and near Washington’s home – that made political agreement possible. The government is moving into a place that has more stumps than statues, but our capital of Washington, or Columbia, is expected to grow into itself. Our nation has doubled in population since Lexington and Concord, and victory against the Indians has opened the Ohio country.’

‘The French say that they rut like rabbits and we Americans breed like them.’

‘You are a confirmed expatriate, Mr Gage?’

‘More a confirmed admirer of the civilisation that produced this château, Mr Davie. I do not always like the French – I even found myself fighting them, at Acre – but I like their capital, their food, their wines, their women, and, at this scale, their houses.’ I picked up a new novelty from one of the tables, chocolate that had been cleverly hardened into little squares instead of taken as liquid in a cup. Some ingenious Italian had solidified the delicacy and the French made it fashionable. Knowing how quickly fortunes can turn, I pocketed a fistful of them.

Good thing, for they were about to save my life.

CHAPTER TWO

‘You would not consider returning home, then?’ Davie asked me.

‘Frankly, I’d planned to, but then I became embroiled in Napoleon’s recent Italian campaign and these negotiations. The opportunity has not arisen, and perhaps I can do more for my country here in France.’ I’d been seduced by the place, as Franklin and Jefferson had been.

‘Indeed. And yet you’re a Franklin man, are you not? Our new expert on the science of electricity?’

‘I’ve done some experiments.’ Including the harnessing of lightning in a lost city and turning myself into a friction battery to ignite my arch-enemy, but I didn’t add that. Rumours floated, and they served my reputation well enough.

‘The reason I ask is that our delegation has encountered a gentleman from Norway who has a particular curiosity about your expertise. He thinks you may be able to enlighten each other. Would you care to meet him?’

‘Norway?’ I had a vague mental picture of snow, dank forest, and a medieval economy. I knew people lived up there, but it was hard to understand why.

‘Governed by Denmark, but increasingly interested in its own independence after our American example. His extraordinary name is Magnus Bloodhammer – it’s of Viking origin, apparently – and his looks fit his moniker. He’s an eccentric, like you.’

‘I prefer to think of myself as individualistic.’

‘I would say you both are … open-minded. If we find him, I’ll introduce you.’

A modicum of fame requires you to meet people, so I shrugged. But I was in no hurry to make conversation about electricity with a Norwegian (to tell the truth, I always worried about betraying my own considerable ignorance), so I had us stop at the first amusement we came to, a new gambling device called a roulette, or ‘little wheel.’ Paulette was playing there.

The French have taken an English device and improved upon it, adding two colours, more numbers, and a patterned board that offers intriguing betting possibilities. You can wager on anything, from a single number to half the wheel, and play the odds accordingly. It’s been eagerly seized on by a nation enthralled with risk, fate, and destiny since the Terror. I don’t play roulette as much as cards, as there is little skill, but I like the convivial crowding at the tables, men smelling of smoke and cologne, ladies leaning provocatively to give a glimpse of décolletage, and croupiers raking chips as adroitly as fencers. Napoleon frowns on both the wheel and the new female exhibitionism, but he’s smart enough not to prohibit either.

I talked Davie into placing a small bet or two, which he promptly lost. Competitive enough to bet again, and then again, he lost still more. Some men are not born to gamble. I repaid his losses from my own modest winnings, earned by conservative wagers on column and row. Pauline, excitedly leaning across from me, bet more recklessly. She lost money I’m sure she’d been given by her famous brother, but then did win a single number at odds of 35 to 1 and clapped her hands, squeezing her breasts together most enchantingly. She was the loveliest of Napoleon’s siblings, sought after by portraitists and sculptors. There were reports she was posing in the nude.

‘Madame, it seems your skill matches your beauty,’ I congratulated.

She laughed. ‘I have my brother’s luck!’ She wasn’t particularly bright, but she was loyal, the kind who’d stick to Bonaparte long after craftier friends and siblings had deserted him.

‘We Americans could learn from a Venus such as you.’

‘But, Monsieur Gage,’ she returned, her eyelids flashing like a semaphore, ‘I am told you are a man of much experience already.’

I gave a slight bow.

‘You served with my brother in Egypt in the company of savants,’ she went on. ‘Yet found yourself opposed to him at Acre, embroiled with him at 18 Brumaire when he took power, and allied yet again at Marengo. You seem a master of all positions.’

The girl did make herself clear. ‘Like a dance, it’s all in the partner.’

Davie, no doubt seeing banter with the first consul’s married sister as a diplomatic disaster in the making, cleared his throat. ‘I don’t seem to share the luck of you and the lady, Mr Gage.’

‘Ah, but you really do,’ I said generously – and honestly. ‘I’ll tell you the secret of gambling, Davie. You lose eventually as certainly as we all die eventually. The game is about hope, and the mathematics about defeat and death. The trick is to beat the arithmetic for a moment, take your winnings, and run. Very few can do that, because optimism trumps sense. Which is why you should own the wheel, not play it.’

‘Yet you have a reputation as a gambling winner, sir.’

‘Of battles, not the war. I am not a rich man.’

‘But an honest one, it seems. So why do you play?’

‘I can improve my odds by taking advantage of the less practised. More important is the game itself, as Bonaparte himself told me. The play’s the thing.’

‘You are a philosopher!’

‘All of us ponder the mystery of life. Those of us with no answers deal at cards.’

Davie smiled. ‘So perhaps we should adjourn to a table and let us supplement your income by playing pharaon. I suspect you can handle your rustic countrymen. I see Bloodhammer over there, and there’s considerable curiosity about these experiments of yours. Moreover, I understand you’ve experience in the fur trade?’

‘In my youth. I daresay I’ve seen some of the world. A cruel, fascinating, rather unreliable planet, I’ve concluded. So, yes, let’s have some claret and you can ask me what you’d like. Perhaps the lady would care to join us?’

‘After my luck turns here, Monsieur Gage.’ She winked. ‘I do not have your discipline to retreat when I am ahead.’

I sat with the men, conversing impatiently until Pauline – I was thinking of her as a pretty Paulette by now – could drift over. Ellsworth wanted to hear about the Egyptian monuments that were already inspiring Napoleon’s plans for Paris. Vans Murray was curious about the Holy Land. Davie beckoned to the odd bear of a man lurking in the shadows, the Norwegian he’d referred to earlier, and bade him sit. This Magnus was tall like me, but thicker, with a fisherman’s rough, reddened face. He had an eye patch like a pirate’s – his other eye was icy blue – and a thick nose, high forehead, and bushy beard: most unfashionable in 1800. There was that wild glint of the dreamer to him that was quite disturbing.

‘Gage, this is the gentleman I told you about. Magnus, Ethan Gage.’

Bloodhammer looked like a Viking, all right, as ill fit in a grey suit as a buffalo in a bonnet. He gripped the table as if to overthrow it.

‘Unusual to meet a man from the north, sir,’ I said, a little wary. ‘What brings you to France?’

‘Studies,’ the Norwegian replied in a rumbling bass. ‘I’m investigating mysteries from the past in hope of influencing my nation’s future. I’ve heard of you, Mr Gage, and your own remarkable scholarship.’

‘Curiosity at best. I’m very much the amateur savant.’ Yes, I can be modest when women aren’t around. ‘I suspect the ancients knew something of electricity’s strange power, and we’ve forgotten what we once knew. Bonaparte almost had me shot in the garden outside the Tuileries, but decided to retain me on the chance I might be useful.’

‘And my brother spared a beautiful Egyptian woman at the same time, I heard,’ Pauline murmured. She’d come up behind us, smelling of violets.

‘Yes, my former companion Astiza, who decided to return to Egypt to continue her studies when Napoleon talked of sending me as an emissary to America. Parting was sweet sorrow, as they say.’ In truth I longed for her, yet also felt unshackled from her intensity. I was lonely and empty, but free.

‘But you’re not in America,’ Ellsworth said. ‘You’re here with us.’

‘Well, President Adams was sending you three here. It seemed best to wait in Paris to lend a hand. I do have a weakness for gaming, and the little wheel is rather mesmerising, don’t you think?’

‘Have your studies helped your gambling, Mr Gage?’ Bloodhammer’s voice had a slight aggression to it, as if he were testing me. Instinct told me he was trouble.

‘Mathematics has helped, thanks to the advice of the French savants I travelled with. But as I was explaining to Davie, true understanding of the odds only persuades that one must eventually lose.’

‘Indeed. Do you know what the thirty-six numbers of a roulette wheel add up to, sir?’

‘Haven’t thought about it, really.’

The Norwegian looked at us intently, as if revealing a dark secret. ‘Six hundred and sixty-six. Or 666, the Number of the Beast, from Revelations.’ He waited portentously for a reaction, but we all just blinked.

‘Oh, dear,’ I finally said. ‘But you’re not the first to suggest gambling is the devil’s tool. I don’t entirely disagree.’

‘As a Freemason, you know numbers and symbols have meaning.’

‘I’m not much of a Mason, I’m afraid.’

‘And perhaps entire nations have meaning, as well.’ He looked at my companions with disquieting intensity. ‘Is it coincidence, my American friends, that nearly half of your revolution’s generals and signers of your Constitution were Masons? That so many French Revolutionaries were members as well? That Bavaria’s secret Illuminati were founded in 1776, the same year as your Declaration of Independence? That the first boundary marker of the American capital city was laid in a Masonic ceremony, as well as the cornerstones for your capitol building and president’s house? That’s why I find your two nations so fascinating. There is a secret thread behind your revolutions.’

I looked at the others. None seemed to concur. ‘I frankly don’t know,’ I said. ‘Napoleon’s not a Mason. You’re one yourself, Bloodhammer?’

‘I’m an investigator, like you, interested in my own nation’s independence. The Scandinavian kingdoms united in 1363, a curious time in our region’s history. Norway has been in Denmark’s shadow since. As a patriot, I hope for independence. You and I have things to teach each other, I suspect.’

‘Do we, now?’ This Viking seemed rather forward. ‘What do you have to teach me?’

‘More about your nation’s beginnings, perhaps. And something even more intriguing and powerful. Something of incalculable value.’

I waited.

‘But what I wish to share is not for all ears.’

‘The usual caveat.’ People have a habit of talking grand, but what they really want is to milk me for what I know. It’s become a game.

‘So I ask for a word with you in private, Gage, later this evening.’

‘Well.’ I glanced at Pauline. If I wanted a private word, it was with her. ‘When I complete my other engagements, then of course!’ I grinned at the girl and she returned the volley.

‘But first the American must tell us his adventures!’ she prompted.

‘Yes, I’m curious how you found yourself in Italy,’ Ellsworth added.

So I played up my deeds in the season just past, more anxious to explore Napoleon’s randy sister than my nation’s beginnings. ‘France this spring was beset by enemies on all sides, you’ll recall,’ I began with a storyteller’s flair. ‘Napoleon had to win a European peace before he had the strength to negotiate an American one. Despite his scepticism of my loyalties and motives, I was called to the Tuileries to answer some questions about America. I wound up making a casual remark about Switzerland.’ I smiled at Pauline. ‘Without exaggerating too much, I think I played a critical role in the French victory that followed.’

She fanned herself, the crowd and candles making all of us too warm. A little moisture glistened in the vale between her enchanting orbs. ‘I think it grand you could aid Napoleon as Lafayette helped Washington,’ she cooed.

I laughed. ‘I’m no Lafayette! But I did have to kill a double agent …’

CHAPTER THREE

The Tuileries Palace, neglected after the construction of Versailles and then damaged by Paris mobs during the Revolution, still smelt of wallpaper paste and enamel when I was summoned to visit Napoleon the previous spring.

Since my stay of execution and unexpected employment by Bonaparte in November of 1799, I’d conferred with his ministers about the slow negotiations with America. But beyond offering ignorant opinions – I was badly out of date with events in my own homeland – I really hadn’t done much for my French stipend besides renew acquaintances and read months-old American newspapers. Apparently, Jefferson’s Republicans were gaining on Adams’s Federalists, as if I cared. I gambled, flirted, and recovered from the injuries of my latest adventures. So I could hardly complain when I was finally ordered, in March of 1800, to report to the first consul. It was time to earn my keep.

Napoleon’s secretary, Bourrienne, greeted me at eight in the morning and led me down the corridors I remembered from my duel with Silano the autumn before. Now they were bright and refurbished, floors gleaming and windows repaired and bright. As we neared Bonaparte’s chambers I saw a line of busts carefully selected to show his historical sensibility. There was a marble Alexander (his boyhood hero) and stalwarts like Cicero and Scipio. When the cavalryman Lasalle was asked by his captors how old his youthful commander was during Napoleon’s first Italian campaign, he had wittily replied, ‘As old as Scipio when he defeated Hannibal!’ Also frozen in marble was the late George Washington to show Napoleon’s love of democracy, Caesar to suggest his command of government, and Brutus for his act of stabbing Caesar. Bonaparte covered all his bets.

‘He begins his day in the bath and will receive you there,’ Bourrienne said. The novel idea of bathing every day was a new fad among French Revolutionaries. ‘He can spend two hours in the tub reading correspondence.’

‘I don’t remember him as so fastidious.’

‘He has a rigorous regimen of cleanliness and exercise. He keeps telling me he fears growing plump, though I can’t imagine why. His energy leaves him meatless, and us exhausted. He’s still lean as a boy. It’s odd for a man in his prime to have a picture of himself heavier and more torpid in the future.’

Odd unless you’ve lain in the sarcophagus of the Great Pyramid as Napoleon did, and possibly saw visions of your own coming life. But I didn’t say that, and instead pointed at one of the busts. ‘Who’s this bearded fellow, then?’

‘Hannibal. Bonaparte calls him the greatest tactician, and worst strategist, of all time. He won almost every battle and lost the war.’

‘Yes,’ I said, nodding as if we shared the military assessment. ‘Hannibal and his elephants! Now that must have been something.’

‘I’ve seen one of the animals at the menagerie the savants have founded at the Jardin des Plantes,’ Bourrienne replied. ‘God has an imagination.’

‘Franklin told me they’ve found bones of ancient elephants in America.’

‘Your famous mentor! We should have his bust here too! I will make a note of it.’ And with that I was ushered into the bathroom, the door clicking shut to hold the heat. There was such a fog of steam that I could barely see Napoleon, or anything else.

‘Gage, is that you? Come forward, man, don’t be shy. We’ve all been in camp.’

I groped forward. ‘You seem to like your bath hot, General.’

‘Four years ago I could barely afford my uniform. Now I can have all the water I want!’ He laughed, and splashed at a servant waiting with a towel in the murk, spattering the poor man with suds. ‘It wilts some of my correspondence, but most is mouldy in thought and soggy in prose anyway.’ As I came up to the tub I saw him in a convivial mood, dark hair plastered, grey eyes bright, the fine hands he was so vain of shuffling missives from across Europe. The brass basin had a relief of mermaids and dolphins.

‘You seem more relaxed than when we last met, when you seized power,’ I remarked. He’d been quite anxious to shoot me.

‘A pose, Gage, a pose. The Directory has left me at war with half of Europe! Italy, which I conquered just four years ago, is being taken back by the Austrians. In Germany, our troops have fallen back to the Rhine. In Egypt, General Desaix would have surrendered to Sidney Smith in January except an idiot English admiral wouldn’t accept the terms, giving our General Kléber the chance to beat them again at Heliopolis. Still, without a navy, how long can my poor colleagues hold out? And how can I deal with the Austrians? They’re pushing Massena back towards Genoa. I have to win or expire, Gage. Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest alone can sustain me.’

‘Surely you don’t want my military advice.’

He stood in the tub, water pouring off as a servant wrapped him. ‘I want to know how I can settle with the Americans. I’m wasting ships fighting your country when our two nations should be deep friends. Don’t think the British don’t want you back! Mark my words; you’ll have to fight them again one day! France is your greatest bulwark. And lack of a proper navy is my curse. I can’t waste frigates clashing with your republic.’ Servants ushered him to a dressing room. ‘Tell me how to deal with your Anglophile president, Gage. The man distrusts us French and flirts with the perfidious English. President Adams would move to London if he could!’ Adams had been a reluctant diplomat in France who found Paris effete and untidy. He’d spent his days cranky and homesick.

I waited awkwardly as Napoleon began to be dressed. Hair was combed, nails filed, and unguents rubbed into his shoulders. The general had come a long way.

‘John Adams?’ I opined. ‘He’s a prickly sort, to tell the truth. My understanding is that it’s become a test of national pride. Adams’s Federalists, who favour a stronger central government, are using the conflict with France as an excuse to build a bigger navy and levy larger taxes. Jefferson’s Republicans say we’ve picked the wrong enemy, that Britain is the real threat. He and Burr are vying to take the next election. If you offer Adams a way out, I think he’ll take it.’

‘I have agreed to new peace commissioners. You are to work with them and Talleyrand, Gage, and make everyone see reason. I need trade and money from America, not gunfire.’ He looked down. ‘By God, will you finish with those buttons!’ Then, dressed at last, off he rushed to the next room where a map of Europe, stuck with little pins, was spread like a carpet on the floor. ‘Look at the ring my enemies have me in!’

I peered. Little of it made sense to me.

‘If I march to relieve Massena in Genoa,’ Napoleon complained, ‘the Riviera becomes a narrow Thermopylae where Melas and his Austrians can block me. Yet Italy is the key to outflanking Vienna!’ He threw himself down on the map as if it were a familiar bed. ‘I’m outnumbered, my veterans trapped in Egypt, raw conscripts my only recruits. All Revolutionary enthusiasm has been lost, thanks to incompetence by the Directory. Yet I need victory, Gage! Victory restores spirit, and only victory will restore me!’

He looked restored enough, but I tried to think of something encouraging. ‘I know the siege of Acre went badly, but I’m sure you can do better.’

‘Don’t talk to me of Acre! You and that damned Smith only won because you captured my siege artillery! If I ever find out who told the British about my flotilla, I’ll hang him from Notre Dame!’

Since it was I who told the British – I’d been a little peeved after Napoleon’s riffraff had dangled me above a snake pit and then tried to include me in a massacre – I decided to change the subject. ‘It’s too bad you don’t have any elephants,’ I tried.

‘Elephants?’ He looked annoyed. ‘Are you once more employed to waste my time?’ Clearly, the memory of Acre and my ignorance at the pyramids still rankled.

‘Like Hannibal, out in the corridor. If you could cross the Alps with elephants, that would get their attention, wouldn’t it?’

‘Elephants!’ He finally laughed. ‘What nonsense you spout! Like that silly medallion you carried around in Egypt!’

‘But Hannibal used them to invade Italy, did he not?’

‘He did indeed.’ He thought, and shook his head. But then he crawled and peered about on the map. ‘Elephants? From the mouths of imbeciles. I would come down into their rear. And while I lack pachyderms, I have cannons.’ He looked at me as if I’d said something interesting. ‘Crossing the Alps! That would make my reputation, wouldn’t it? The new Hannibal?’

‘Except you’ll win instead of lose, I’m sure of it.’ I hadn’t dreamt he’d take me seriously.

He nodded. ‘But where? The accessible passes are too near Melas and his Austrians. He’d bottle me up just as he would on the Riviera.’

I looked, pretending I knew something about Switzerland. I saw a name I recognised and a chill went through me, since I’d heard it bandied about in Egypt and Israel. Do certain names echo through our lives? ‘What about the Saint Bernard Pass?’ This was farther north, away from the little pins. French mathematicians had told me about Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who’d seen God in width, height and depth.

‘Saint Bernard! No army would attempt that! It’s twenty-five-hundred metres high, or more than eight thousand feet! No wider than a towpath! Really, Gage, you’re no logistician. You can’t move armies like a goat.’ He shook his head, peering. ‘Although if we did come down from there we could strike their rear in Milan and capture their supplies.’ He was thinking aloud. ‘We wouldn’t have to bring everything, we’d take it from the Austrians. General Melas would never dream we’d dare it! It would be insane! Audacious!’ He looked up at me. ‘Just the kind of thing an adventurer like you would suggest, I suppose.’

I’m the world’s most reluctant adventurer, but I smiled encouragingly. The way to deal with superiors is to give them a harebrained idea that suits your purposes and let them conclude it’s their own. If I could pack Napoleon off to Italy again, I’d be able to relax in Paris unmolested.

‘Saint Bernard!’ he went on. ‘What general could do it? Only one …’ He rose to his knees. ‘Gage, perhaps boldness is our salvation. I’m going to take the world by surprise by crossing the Alps like a modern Hannibal. It’s a ridiculous idea you’ve had, so ridiculous that it makes a perverse kind of sense. You are an idiot savant!’

‘Thank you. I think.’

‘Yes, I’m going to try it and you, American, are going to share the glory by scouting the pass for us!’

‘Me?’ I was appalled. ‘But I know nothing of mountains. Or Italians. Or elephants. You just said I’m to help with the American negotiations.’

‘Gage, as always, you are too modest! The advantage is that you’ve proved your pluck on both sides, so no one will be certain who you’re sleeping with now! It will take months to get the new American commissioners here. Haven’t you wanted to see Italy?’

‘Not really.’ I thought of it as poor, hot, and superstitious.

‘Your help with the American negotiations can wait until their delegation arrives. Gage, thanks to your elephants, you are going to once more share my fame!’

CHAPTER FOUR

Some fame. The Alps in spring, I learnt, are cold, windy, and wet, with snow the colour of snot. The Saint Bernard of Switzerland was not even the Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: there are too many saints in the world, apparently, including two Bernards within a few hundred miles of each other. And no one believed I was hiking to the pass out of idle American curiosity, carrying my Pennsylvania longrifle like a walking stick. Everyone assumed I was exactly what I kept denying, an early scout for Bonaparte, since the first consul was visiting the encampments near Geneva and taking the unprecedented step of actually explaining to the common soldiers what it was he wanted them to do – to emulate the Carthaginians who’d stormed Rome. I was so obviously an agent that I found myself bargaining with the monks at the summit hospice to supply Napoleon’s troops with food. Indeed, the first consul ran up a bill of forty thousand francs from wine, cheese, and bread sold from trestle tables the enterprising friars put out in the snow. What the holy men didn’t grasp is that Napoleon always bought on credit, and was a master of evading bills at the same time he was extorting tribute from provinces he’d overrun. ‘Let war pay for war,’ his ministers said.

The painter David gave us a portrait of Bonaparte at the crest on a rearing charger, and it’s as inspiring a piece of nonsense as I’ve ever seen. The truth is that Napoleon ascended the Alps on a sure-footed mule and slid down the far side on his own ass, he and his officers whooping with delight. Most of his sixty thousand soldiers walked, or rather trudged, up steadily worsening roads until, for the last seven miles, they were on a trail of ice and mud, potential avalanches poised above and yawning gorges below. Each hour they’d rest for a five-minute ‘pipe,’ or smoke, which was one of the two pleasures of army life – the other being to curse the stupidity of their superiors. Then on again! It was a hard, dangerous ascent that had them sweating in the cold. The soldiers slept at the summit, two to a blanket, great heaps of them huddled together like wolves, and by morning half had fevers and raw throats. Ice cut shoes to pieces, lungs gasped at thin air, and gaiters couldn’t keep cold mud out of socks. Extremities went numb.

Yet they were proud. It was one of the boldest manoeuvres of its age, made more so when the French snuck by a stubborn Austrian fort on the far side of the pass by muffling the hooves of their animals with straw. They hauled their artillery muzzles across the Alps in hollowed-out pine trees. Sixty thousand men crossed that pass, and every powder keg, cannon ball, and box of biscuit was packed or pulled by men with tumplines to their foreheads.

They sang Revolutionary tunes. I handed out cups of wine in encouragement as they passed the summit. A friar kept tally.

Once over the pass, Bonaparte was everywhere, as usual. He studied the mountain fortress of Bard from concealing bushes, ordered different placement of his siege guns, and got it to capitulate in two days. We entered Milan on June 2nd. In a masterstroke he’d occupied the Austrian rear and made the French surrender of Genoa suddenly irrelevant. (The siege had been so horrific that Massena’s hair had turned white.) The Austrians had driven their enemy out one side of Italy, only to have Napoleon’s army show up on the other! Of course there was nothing to prevent General Melas from doing what Napoleon had done. He could have marched the opposite way across a different Alpine pass, left the French stranded in Italy, captured Lyon without a shot, and probably forced Bonaparte’s abdication. Except that the Austrian was forty years older and didn’t think in such sweeping terms. He was a superb tactician who saw a few leagues at a time. Napoleon could see the world.

Unless, that is, Napoleon was distracted. While Josephine’s infidelities had made him come close to divorcing her, he set no such moral bounds on himself. Milan featured the famed diva Giuseppina Grassini, who conquered the French general first by song and then with her smouldering eyes, swollen lips, and bountiful bosom. Bonaparte spent six long days in Milan, too much of it in bed, and that was time enough for Melas to wheel his troops from the Italian coast and concentrate towards the French. Somewhere between Genoa and Milan, the great showdown would take place. It happened at Marengo.

My plan was to be well away. I’d seen plenty of war in the east, had played my part as scout for Hannibal, and was more than ready to scuttle back to Paris. There was no diva in Milan for me, and no other amusement, either. The Italians had been looted by rival armies too many times, and the best women had too many generals to choose from.

Then Bonaparte found a way to harness my talents. A spy had come, a swarthy imp of a man named Renato, oily as a neapolitan salad, who told us Melas and the Austrians were running. The French had merely to march forward to scoop up the reward for their alpine crossing! The spy carried Austrian documents in his boot heel as proof, and displayed a con man’s confidence. But as a rogue myself, I was suspicious. Renato was a little too ingratiating, and kept glancing at me like a rival. In fact, he looked almost as if he knew me.

‘You don’t believe my spy, Gage?’ Napoleon asked after the agent had gone.

‘He has a rascal’s manner.’ I should know.

‘Surely I pay better than the Austrians. I must, at his price.’

That was another thing that annoyed me: Renato undoubtedly made more money than I did. ‘He may be too slippery to be properly bought.’

‘He’s a spy, not a priest! You Americans are squeamish about such things, but agents are as necessary as artillery. Don’t think I don’t have my own reservations, about everyone.’ He gave me a hard stare. ‘I remain outnumbered two to one, my army is living on captured supplies, and I’m fearfully short of cannons. One loss and my rivals will have my throat. I know very well I have no true friends. Thank God Desaix has arrived from Egypt!’

Louis-Antoine Desaix, his favourite general, had landed in Toulon the same day we’d left Paris and been given a division here in Italy. Loyal, modest, shy of women, and extremely able, he was happiest sleeping under a cannon. He had Napoleon’s talent without his ambition, the perfect subordinate.

‘Perhaps I could carry word of your predicament to ministers in Paris?’ The last thing I wanted was to be caught on the losing side.

‘On the contrary, Gage, since you’re so suspicious I want you to spy on our spy. Renato suggested a rendezvous to pass on the latest from the Austrians and mentioned your reputation for daring. Take the road to Pavia and the Po, trail Renato, make the rendezvous, and report back. I know you like the perfume of gunsmoke as much as I do.’

Perfume of gunsmoke? ‘But I’m a savant, not a spy, First Consul. And I don’t speak German or Italian.’

‘We both know you’re an amateur savant at best, a dabbler and a dilettante. But when you look, you actually see. Humour me, Gage. Take a ride towards Genoa, confirm what we’ve been told, and then I’ll send you back to Paris.’

‘Maybe we should just believe Renato after all.’

‘Take your rifle, too.’

CHAPTER FIVE

So off I went, on a confiscated Italian horse (that’s a fancy word for ‘stolen’ that invaders use) and nervous as a virgin that I might stumble into the Austrian army. When you read about campaigns it’s all arrows and rectangles on a map, as choreographed as a ballet. In reality, war is a half-blind, sprawling affair, great masses of men halfheartedly groping for each other across yawning countryside while looting anything that can be carried. It’s all too easy for the observer to become disoriented. Gunshots echo alarmingly: fired accidentally, or from boredom, or sudden quarrel. Frightened, homesick eighteen-year-olds poke about with thirteen-pound muskets topped by wicked, two-foot bayonets. Passed-over colonels dream of suicidal charges that might restore their reputation. Sergeants stiffen a line in hopes for a sleeve of braid. It’s no place for a sensible man.

Within an hour after setting out on June 9th, I heard the ominous thunder of combat. Lieutenant General Jean Lannes had crashed into the Austrian advance force at the villages of Casteggio and Montebello, and by day’s end I was riding past long columns of Austrian prisoners, white uniforms spattered with blood and powder, expressions weary and sour. French wounded called insults to the prisoners plodding by. Wrecked wagons, dead horses and cows, and burning barns added to my disquiet. Gangs of pressed peasants were commandeered to tip heaps of battlefield dead into mass graves, while survivors matter-of-factly cleaned the muskets they called ‘clarinets’ with beef marrow and whitened crossbelts with pipe clay. Some soldiers hoped filth might make them less tempting a target, but others thought fastidiousness brought luck. They used a slit piece of wood called a patience to hold their buttons out from their uniform cloth, shining them with mutton fat until they gleamed.

‘Bones were cracking in my division like a shower of hail falling on a skylight,’ Lannes reported to Napoleon. The battle had produced four thousand casualties between the two sides – a mere dress rehearsal – and it was through this carnage that I reluctantly passed to skulk in the wake of the retreating Austrians into that netherworld between two armies.

What Napoleon didn’t realise is that, look as I might, I couldn’t really see. The Po Valley is flat, its fields bordered by tall poplar and cypress, and rain that June came down in buckets. Every rivulet was swollen, the landscape as different from Egypt and Syria as sponge from sandpaper. I could have plodded by the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan and not spotted it, should they happen to take this muddy lane instead of that one, down a cut and behind a hedge. So I wandered, asking directions of Italian refugees in sign language, sleeping in hayricks, and squinting for the missing sun. If Renato was lying, I was unlikely to catch him at it.

Instead, he told me himself.

At an abandoned farmhouse near Tortona I spied a red sash draped on a loose shutter, the agreed signal that our spy was waiting with information. Families had scurried out of the path of the armies like mice darting between the hooves of cattle, and rummaging soldiers had torn off the home’s door, eaten the barn’s animals, and burnt the furniture. What was left, walls and a tile roof, offered shelter from another spring downpour. I was nervous, but the Austrians seemed to be falling back. The enemy had reportedly destroyed the bridge leading to lightly defended Alessandria, and more Austrians were running southwest towards Acqui. Accordingly, Bonaparte had split his forces, with Lapoype’s division racing north and Desaix’s division south. In the confusion, we spies were surely safe. I tied my horse, checked the load on my longrifle, and warily entered the dark home.

‘Renato?’ I almost tripped. He was seated on the stone floor, muddy boots outstretched and bottles at his side. I heard the click of his pistol hammer. ‘It’s Gage, from Napoleon.’

‘You’ll forgive my caution.’ A softer tap as the hammer was eased back to rest near the pan. As my eyes adjusted I saw the muzzle lower, but he didn’t put his pistol away. He was watchful as a cat.

‘My orders are to meet you.’

‘How convenient for us both. And your reward, American?’

Why not the truth? ‘I go back to Paris.’

He saluted me with his pistol muzzle and laughed. ‘Better than this cold farmhouse, no? You have the loyalty of a mosquito. Some blood, and you’re off.’

I seated myself across from him, rifle by my side, only slightly reassured by our candour. ‘I’m no warrior. I’ve been riding around in the rain for four days, no good to anyone.’

‘Then you need this.’ He tossed me a bottle sitting next to him. ‘I found the trap to the cellar’s sparkling wine, just the thing for a party. To a fellow spy! And of course I could believe you really are a mosquito, irritating and aimless. On the other hand, I’ve heard you have a reputation for pluck and persistence as well. No, don’t deny it, Ethan Gage! So perhaps you’re here to fetch my latest missive. Or perhaps to spy on me.’

‘Why would I spy on you?’

‘Because the French don’t trust me! Yes, we men of intrigue see things clearly.’ He nodded to himself. ‘I don’t blame you for trying to get back to France. Can you imagine being a soldier in regimental line, shoulder to shoulder with a rank of similar idiots just fifty paces distant, everyone blazing away?’ He shuddered. ‘It’s amazing what armies get conscripts to do. If the morons survive, it will be the highlight of their lives.’

I took a drink, thinking. His bottle was two-thirds empty, the champagne loosening his tongue. ‘People better than me say they believe in something, Renato.’

He drank again too, and wiped his mouth. ‘Believe in Bonaparte? Or that old ass, Melas? What are they fighting about, really? Ask any of those soldiers to explain a war of a hundred years ago and they’ll go blank. Yet they’ll march to their death for this one. They’re all fools, every one. Fools universal, except for me.’

‘You serve the French, too, don’t you?’

‘Alas.’ He winked. ‘The cabbages pay better than the vain Corsican.’

‘Napoleon would find that hard to believe, at your price.’

‘I’m a double agent, my naïve friend. If you are really that naïve.’ He belched, and drank again. ‘While I report, I spy, and then cross the lines to report and spy again. Why not keep everyone informed? Now Bonaparte is going to get a surprise.’

‘What do you mean?’ I took a more vigorous swallow and lightly reinserted the cork, eyeing the pistol he kept in his lap.

‘The Austrians are not running. They’re concentrating. Napoleon has split his forces to catch an army massing against him.’

‘But you told him the opposite!’

He shrugged. ‘If he wanted the truth, he should have paid more than Melas.’

‘Men will die!’

‘You think they won’t die otherwise? Bonaparte believed what he wanted to believe. He remembers the clumsy Austrians of four years ago and gives Melas no credit. That old man is a fox, let me tell you. Fox enough to outbid Bonaparte for me. So I tell the French what they want, and the Austrians what I’ve told the French. Now the little despot will get his comeuppance.’

He massaged the butt of his pistol, making me feel safe as a goose at Christmas. Why was he telling me this? I rocked my bottle, considering.

‘Yes, American, Napoleon is about to get his nose bloodied. When he loses, I’ll sell him still more advice – he’ll be desperate enough to pay double – and then I’ll go back and sell what I sold him to the Austrians for triple. This is how to make money in our business.’

‘Our business?’

‘Bringing people together.’ He laughed.

‘You’re very candid.’

He shrugged. ‘Just half-drunk. And confident of your discretion.’

‘Because I’m a spy, too?’

Now he looked at me seriously. ‘Of course not! You’re a man like me, American, able to see the value in what you’ve been told. You’d betray me in an instant just as I’ve betrayed Bonaparte, and count your thirty pieces of silver as I swing from a tree. No, no, don’t deny it … I’d do the same if our positions were reversed. This is the way of the world.’ Lazily he raised his pistol. ‘So you’ll go to your grave with a secret! Ah, don’t touch your rifle!’ He smiled. ‘You must realise by now that I was sent to find you, not Bonaparte. My true employers remember your crimes.’

‘True employers?’

He pulled the hammer back. ‘Do you think the Rite forgets?’ He aimed for my heart.

So I shot him with my cork.

He was a little too confiding and too