The Barbary Pirates (2 page)

So I had a thimbleful of fame and a dram of respectability, and decided I should finally live up to both. Admittedly, I couldn’t resist embroidering my military exploits when I was given trans-Atlantic passage by an American naval squadron headed for Europe to protect our shipping from the Barbary pirates. It was convenient to me that the bashaw of Tripoli, a pirate king named Yussef Karamanli, had declared war on the United States the year before, demanding $225,000 to make peace and $25,000 a year in tribute. As so often happens in politics, Jefferson—who had argued against a large military—was using five frigates built by his predecessor, Adams, to respond to this extortion with force. “Even peace may be purchased at too high a price,” my old mentor Benjamin Franklin once said. So when Jefferson offered me a ride on his flotilla, I accepted, provided I was able to get off in Gibraltar before any fighting could start.

I needn’t have worried. The squadron commander, Richard Valentine Morris, managed to be at once unqualified, timid, and procrastinating. He brought his wife and son along as if going on Mediterranean vacation, and was two months late setting sail. But his congressman brother had helped Jefferson win the presidency over Aaron Burr, and even in young America, political alliances trump inexperience. The man was a connected idiot.

My own war stories during the voyage convinced half the officers I was a regular Alexander, and the other half that I was a habitual liar. But I
was
trying, you see.

“You’re some kind of diplomat?” Smith tried to clarify.

“My idea is that Bonaparte sell Louisiana to my own country. It’s emptiness the French have no use for, but Napoleon won’t negotiate until he learns if his French army in St. Domingue, or Haiti, defeats the slaves and can be moved on to New Orleans. I have a connection to the general here, Leclerc.”

I didn’t add that my “connection” was that I had tupped Leclerc’s wife, Pauline, back in 1800, before she’d joined her husband in the Caribbean. Now, while Leclerc fought yellow fever as well as Negroes, my former lover—who was also Napoleon’s sister—was reportedly learning voodoo. You can get an idea of her character from the debate in Paris on whether it was she, or Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, whom the Marquis de Sade used as inspiration for his latest depraved pamphlet, “Zoloe and Her Two Acolytes.” Bonaparte resolved the issue by having the author thrown into prison for either possibility. I read the book to monitor the debate and spark erotic memory.

So I’d made my way from Gibraltar to Paris, living on a modest American government allowance and pledging to finally make something of myself, once I figured out what that something should be. The Palais, Gomorrah of Europe, was as good a place to think as any. I bet only when I could find an unskilled opponent, consorted with courtesans only when need became truly imperative, kept myself in physical trim with fencing lessons—I keep running into people with swords—and congratulated myself on self-discipline. I was pondering whether my talents could best be harnessed for philosophy, languages, mathematics, or theology when Cuvier sought me out and suggested I take Smith and Fulton to the Palais Royal.

“You can talk mammoths, Gage, and show us the whores as well.”

I was the link in our quartet. I was deemed an expert on woolly elephants because I’d gone looking for them on the American frontier, and there was more excitement in Europe about animals that aren’t around anymore than those that are.

“The elephants’
extinction
may be more important than their former
existence
,” Cuvier explained to me. He was a pleasant-looking, long-faced, high-domed man of thirty-three with arched nose, strong chin, and pursed lower lip that gave him the appearance of constant deep thought. This accident of nature helped his advancement, as so often happens in life. Cuvier also had the fierce seriousness of a man who’d risen by merit instead of odd luck like me, and his organizational flair had put him in charge of the Paris zoo and French education, the latter task striking him as the more thankless.

“In any system the bright shine and the dull yearn only to escape, but politicians expect educators to repeal human nature.”

“Every parent hopes their unexceptional child is the teacher’s fault,” I agreed.

Cuvier thought that I—without rank, income, or security—was the enviable one, dashing about on this mission or that for two or three governments at a time. Even I have trouble keeping it straight. So we’d become unlikely friends.

“The fact that we’re finding skeletons of animals that no longer exist proves the earth is older than the Biblical six thousand years,” the scientist liked to lecture. “I’m as Christian as any man, but some rocks have no fossils at all, suggesting life is not as eternal as Scripture suggests.”

“But I thought a bishop had calculated the day of Creation rather exactly. To October 23, 4004 B.C., if I remember right.”

“Claptrap, Ethan, all of it. Why, we’ve already cataloged twenty thousand species. How could they all fit on the Ark? The world is far older than we know.”

“I keep running into treasure hunters who think the same thing, Georges, but I must say their abundance of time makes them balmy. They never know when they belong. The nice thing about the Palais is that there’s never any yesterday and never any tomorrow. Not a clock in the place.”

“Animals have little sense of time, either. It makes them content. But we humans are doomed to know the past and looming future.”

Smith was a bone hunter, too, and theories were rife about what kinds of ancient calamities might have wiped out ancient animals. Flood or fire? Cold or heat? Cuvier was also intrigued by my mention of the word “Thira,” which I’d read on medieval gold foil unearthed during my North American adventure. A particularly evil woman named Aurora Somerset had seemed to think the scroll had some importance, and Cuvier told me Thira, also known as Santorini, was a Greek island of great interest to European mineralogists because it might be the remains of an ancient volcano. So when “Strata” Smith came over from London, anxious to talk rocks and see strumpets, it was natural we all be introduced. Cuvier was excited because Strata concurred with his own findings that fossil bones of a particular kind were found only in certain layers of rock, and thus could be used to date when that rock was laid down.

“I’m using the exposures in canals and road cuts to begin drawing a geologic map of Great Britain,” Smith told me proudly.

I nodded as I’ve learned to do in the company of savants, but couldn’t help asking, “Why?” Knowing which rock was where seemed a trifle dull.

“Because it can be done.” Seeing my doubt, he added, “It could also be valuable to coal or mining companies.” He had that defensive, impatient tone of the bright employee.

“You mean you’d have a map of where the seams of coal and metal are?”

“An indication of where they might be.”

Clever. Accordingly, I agreed to organize our trip to the Palais, hoping that after a night of drinking Smith might let slip a vein of copper here or pocket of iron there. Maybe I could hock word of it to stockjobbers or mineral speculators.

Fulton, thirty-six, was my own contribution to our foursome. I’d met him upon my return to Paris when we’d both waited fruitlessly for an audience with Bonaparte, and I rather liked that he seemed even less successful than I was. He’d been in France for five years, trying to persuade the revolutionaries to adopt his inventions, but his experiment at building a submarine, or “plunging boat,” had been rejected by the French navy.

“I tell you, Gage, the
Nautilus
worked perfectly well off Brest. We were underwater three hours, and could have stayed six.” Fulton was good-looking enough to be a useful companion when looking for ladies, but he had the fretfulness of the frustrated dreamer.

“Robert, you told the admirals that your invention could make surface navies obsolete. You may be able to keep from drowning, but you’re the worst salesman in the world. You’re asking men to buy what would put them out of work.”

“But the submarine would be so fearsome as to end war entirely!”

“Another point against you. Think, man!”

“Well, I’ve a new idea for using Watt’s steam engine to propel a riverboat,” he said doggedly.

“And why would any man pay to fuel a boiler when the wind and oars are free?” Savants are all very bright, but it would be hard to find common sense in a regiment of them. That’s why they need me along.

Fulton had been far more successful painting lurid circular panoramas for Parisians on great city fires. They’d pay a franc or two to stand in the middle rotating, as if in the conflagration themselves, and if anything is better testament to the peculiarity of human nature, I can’t name it. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t take my advice that the real money was not in steam engines that nobody really needed, but rather in frightening pictures that made people think they were somewhere other than where they were.

My idea, then, was this. We’d have a lads nights out at the Palais Royal, I’d pump the savants for information on lucrative veins of coal or why medieval knights with a taste for the mystical and occult might have jotted down “Thira” on gold foil in the middle of North America, and then we’d see if any of us could come up with something that could be sold for actual money. I’d also continue working on reformation of my character.

What I wasn’t counting on was the need to bet my life, and the French secret police.

CHAPTER TWO

Horror we can habituate to. Defeat can be accommodated. It is the
unknown that causes fear, and uncertainty that haunts us in the hollow of the night. So my resolution to reform myself was weaker than I knew because the truth was that I hadn’t sworn off women entirely. After the agony and heartbreak I’d experienced on the American frontier, I wanted to reestablish contact with Astiza, a woman I’d fallen in love with four years before during Napoleon’s Orient campaign. She’d left me in Paris to return to Egypt, and after the heartbreak of my latest adventure, I began writing her.

If she’d declined to renew our relationship, I’d have understood. Our time together had been more tumultuous than satisfying. But instead I got no answer at all, despite her promise that we might one day find ourselves together again. Of course Egypt was still recovering from the British expulsion of the French the year before, so communication was uncertain. But had anything happened to my partner in adventure? I did manage to contact my old friend Ashraf, who said he’d seen Astiza after her return to Egypt. She’d been her usual mysterious self, reclusive, troubled, and living in near seclusion. Then she abruptly vanished about the time I returned to Europe. I knew it would have been more surprising to hear she’d settled into domesticity, and certainly I’d little claim on her. But to not know nagged at me.

Which is how I led my companions into the wrong bordello.

It happened this way. The Palais Royal is an enormous rectangle of pillared arcades, its courtyard filled with gardens, fountains, and pathways. We ate at an outdoor café and gawked at the trollops who costumed themselves as the most prominent socialites of the republic, in between the trio’s tediously learned arguments on bone classification and the merits of screw propellers. I showed them where Bonaparte used to play chess for money as an artillery captain, and the arcade where he’d met the prostitute to whom he’d lost his virginity as a young soldier. Yonder was the club where foreign minister Talleyrand once spent 30,000 francs in a single night, and nearby was the shop where Charlotte Corday bought the knife with which she stabbed Marat in his bath. Sodomites with plumage as elaborate as the whores walked the Street of Sighs arm in arm, given that such love has been decriminalized by the revolution. Beggars mingled with millionaires, prophets preached, cardsharps prowled, and the perversely pious sought out chambers where they could negotiate sexual whippings to the most precise calibration of penance and pain. We descended into the cellar “circus,” where couples danced amid “nymphs” posing in diaphanous clothing, and pretended to study with an academic’s objectivity the complex’s forty-four statues of Venus.

As we circulated, Cuvier was persuaded to try his hand at the new game of “21” that Napoleon had helped popularize, Smith sampled varieties of champagne with a pub crawler’s endurance, and Fulton studied the acrobats’ use of leverage.

He had to be dragged away from a fire-eater. “Imagine if we could invent a dragon!”

“The French wouldn’t buy that, either.”

I guessed this group was as happy looking at the prostitutes as hiring them. Given that half the Palais’ amusements were technically illegal—French kings had issued thirty-two decrees against gambling since 1600—it was my full intention to keep us out of trouble. Then I heard, while leading our little squad through a dim arcade of shops and descending stairways, a female voice call my name.

I turned to see Madame Marguerite, or, as she preferred to be called, Isis, Queen of Arabia. She was a bordello manager of entrepreneurial ambition whom I’d encountered before I reformed. “Monsieur Gage! You must introduce me to your friends!”

Marguerite operated one of the more ostentatious brothels in the Palais, a warren of vaulted caverns under a crowded gambling salon. Its decor was Oriental, and the courtesans’ filmy costumes were inspired by feverish European fantasies of the seraglios of Istanbul. By rumor you could sample hashish and opium there, while imagining yourself master of a harem. It was costly, decadent, illegal, and thus quite irresistible. It was also no place for esteemed savants. My instinct was to hurry by, but Marguerite rushed out to block us, my companions bunched up nervously behind as if we were at the entrance to the maze of the Minotaur.

“Hello, Isis,” I said warily. “Business going well?”

“Brilliantly, but how we’ve missed our Ethan! We’d been told you’d disappeared in America. How heartbroken were my concubines! They wept, thinking of you at the mercy of Red Indians.”

Well, I had spent money in the place. “I’m back, my hair still attached, but newly reformed,” I reported. “Celibacy is good for character, I’ve decided.”