The Dakota Cipher (2 page)

The music began and I wandered, gaping like the American I was, at the splendor 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 midforties, 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 civilization 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.

“Y
OU WOULD NOT CONSIDER RETURNING HOME, THEN
?” D
AVIE
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. Rumors 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 colors, 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 practiced. 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 gray
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 mesmerizing, 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 traveled 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 skepticism 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…”

T
HE
T
UILERIES
P
ALACE, NEGLECTED AFTER THE CONSTRUCTION
of Versailles and then damaged by Paris mobs during the Revolution, still smelled 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 moldy in thought and soggy in prose anyway.” As I came up to the tub I saw him in a convivial mood, dark hair plastered, gray 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 toward 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 wast
ing 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 favor 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 dreamed 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 recognized 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 meters 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!”