The Dakota Cipher (9 page)

N
OT KNOWING HOW TO EXPLAIN THE
N
ORWEGIAN AND HIS
odd theories, I took him to dinners and balls as an example of an oversized Scandinavian idealist come to see democracy in action.

“So you’re a man of liberty yourself, Mr., er, Bloodhammer?”

“The Danes are our British,” he would growl.

“And you hope to emulate our republic?”

“I want to be the Norwegian Washington.”

When I confided Astor’s warning he took to wearing his map case like an arrow quiver everywhere we went, and with his eye patch, his cloak, and a new cane topped with an ivory unicorn’s head, its horn a steel protuberance, he was inconspicuous as a rooster in a henhouse. “We should go west
now
,” he insisted.

“We can’t in the dead of winter.”

In February word finally came that a president had indeed been chosen. “Ethan, shouldn’t we be journeying on to Washington?” Magnus pressed.

“Exploration needs money,” I said as I dealt another hand of faro,
which I was playing along with piquet, basset and whist. “Talleyrand’s silver dollars are already half-gone.” Like so many men, I consistently ignored the good advice I gave others, particularly about gambling. But my real reason for stalling was that we’d recently been given hospitality, thanks to my minor fame, in the home of one Angus Philbrick. He had a young German serving girl with braids that bounced on her breasts like drumsticks, and I suspected she’d be a fine bedwarmer if I had just a day or two more to practice diplomacy. The fact that I knew no German, or she English, seemed an advantage.

It’s true that Magnus and I had been experiencing a curious run of bad luck I blamed on coincidence. There was a sausage cart that somehow got away from its donkey and almost ran us down. Then a fire in a hotel that led to Philbrick’s offer of temporary shelter. We’d slipped on a midnight sheet of ice from a carelessly spilled bucket, our downhill skid arrested only by the horn of Bloodhammer’s cane, which sent up a shower of sparks. Hooded figures coming up to presumably assist us took one look at the potential weapon in the fist of my hulking, one-eyed companion and disappeared.

“I think we’ve been followed,” Magnus concluded.

“Across the ocean? You’re daft, man.”

That night, however, when I arranged for Gwendolyn to come to my room and tidy up when the others were abed, our Manhattan sojourn came to an abrupt end. She arrived as promised, and performed as hoped, and I had drifted off when something—the click of the door and the scrape of heavy furniture, perhaps—startled me awake. Gwendolyn’s place beside me was cooling, and there was an odd smell to the air. I slipped on my nightshirt, went to the door, but couldn’t pull it inward: it felt like the latch on the other side was tied to a dresser or chest jammed against the outer wall. I sniffed. Sulfur? I looked more closely. Smoke was drifting from under my bed.

The window was stuck fast, too, and my longrifle and tomahawk were gone!

Gwendolyn clearly had not finished as sleepy as I had, and had actually been quite busy, the cunning trollop. With no time to think, I picked up a heavy crockery washbasin, swung it to smash the glass and sash of my locked window, and dove headfirst toward the backyard. I managed to roll as I came down, cartwheeling into cold snow, and came up bearing the durable basin as a shield.

“Ethan!”

I looked toward the kitchen door and there was Magnus Bloodhammer, twirling his cane overhead and looking straight at me as if to attack. Was
he
my enemy? I crouched, holding out the basin as meager protection and then it exploded in my hands—but not from his cane, which went whickering overhead. I dimly realized a shot had come from somewhere, and then there was a surprised grunt and I turned to see a black-clad assailant pitch backward into the necessary house, a pistol dropped, and the point of Bloodhammer’s walking stick stuck fast between the bastard’s neck and shoulder. As he crashed down into the outhouse, I saw the flare of another fuse.

“What in Hades?”

There were twin roars. Behind me my bedroom erupted in a gout of flame, glass, and brick, making me crouch even more, and then poor Philbrick’s necessary house blew up in thunderous counterpoint, sending skyward a fountain of slivers, my would-be assassin’s body parts, and sewage. I tucked into a ball between the two blasts. Debris, much of it odoriferous, rained down to pock-mark the snow and spatter me with offal. Feathers from my destroyed mattress drifted down like flakes, sticking to my nightshirt and hair in each spot I was splattered with shit. I realized that my enemies had intended to be thorough. If the bedroom bomb could not be set, I was to have met my maker when I mounted the outhouse throne.

Though half-deaf, I could hear dogs barking and bells ringing.

Before I could do something more productive about my situation—
like run—Magnus appeared again, waving my longrifle. I cringed, but he didn’t shoot me.

“I charged her with a poker and she dropped this after she missed her shot and hit your basin,” he explained. “You’ve used up three lives in thirty seconds! Plus my perfectly good cane!”

“I thought I’d performed with her better than
that
,” I said with numb wonder, shaking at my near-escape. I tottered toward him, my bare feet freezing and my body covered with feathers, and he began laughing. My assassins may not have killed me, but they had certainly finished off my dignity.

“You look like a drowned chicken!” my companion said. “You need more care than a three-legged dog!”

“I wonder if the lovely Gwendolyn was really speaking German. Maybe it was Danish.” I brushed at the feathers.

“Too late to ask her. She ran to some horsemen and galloped away.”

A flabbergasted Philbrick was looking out at us from the gaping new hole in the side of his house.

“Maybe it’s time to get on to Washington, after all,” I said.

O
UR HURRIED DEPARTURE WAS IN LATE
F
EBRUARY, SHORTLY
after Jefferson’s election in the House on the thirty-sixth ballot—a contest so drawn out and nefarious that it resulted in proposals to amend the Constitution. Burr would be vice president after all, and both men would be inaugurated on March 4. I kept notes because Napoleon would press me for details. He was as curious about our democracy as he was skeptical.

“Magnus, do you really think Danish assassins trailed us here?” I asked, looking warily back as our hastily hired stagecoach rolled out of New York before Philbrick recovered wit enough to bring suit. “It’s not like we’ve found anything to prove your claims. Why bother? And why me instead of you?”

“They could be church agents,” he said, ticking the possibilities off on his fingers, “believing you a pagan blasphemer by association. If it’s the Danes, they assume you’re my guide and easier to finish off than a true warrior like me. The British, of course, will suspect
you as an agent of the French. The American Federalists think you a Republican, while the Republicans are whispering that I bought too many maps from the disgraced Tory bookseller Gaine. French royalists no doubt believe you a Bonapartist, while French revolutionary veterans might want to seek some measure of revenge for your defense of Acre against their comrades. The Spanish probably want to delay your announcement about the change in ownership of Louisiana, and all the powers fear I’ll prove Norway has first claim to the continent. Who
cares
who’s after us? The sooner we get protection from your young government, the better.”

The trip south over the rock, rut, and root of American highways was travel’s typical misery. We shared our coach squeezed shoulder to shoulder with six other male passengers smelling of tobacco, onions, and wet wool, and at the end of winter the road was a wreck. Puddles were the size of small lakes and brooks had swollen into rivers. At the Delaware, we ferried.

The landscape was a somber brown quilt of winter farms and woodlots. At least twice a day we passengers would be commanded to shoulder the wheel to get us unstuck, and our privy was whatever brush we were near when need struck our driver. We’d shamble out, stiff and cold, to piss in line like a chorus. The inns were squalid, all the men having to share beds and all the beds sharing rooms. Magnus and I squeezed onto a tick mattress no wider than a trestle table, with four other beds in our dormitory besides. The crammed bodies provided the sole heat. My bedmate snored, as did half the company, but did not turn overmuch, and he was always solicitous enough to ask if I had enough room. (There was no point to stating the obvious: “No.”) Exhaustion brought me blessed unconsciousness each midnight, and then the innkeeper would rouse us for breakfast in darkness at six. Philadelphia is supposed to be a two-day journey from New York, but it took us three.

“Do you really want to be Norway’s Washington?” I asked my companion once to break the tedium. “It sounds like the kind of ambition Napoleon boasts of.”

“That was just flattery for you Americans.”

“So what
is
your modest goal, Magnus?”

He smiled. “Immodest. To be much
more
than Washington.”

Eccentrics always aim high. “More how?”

“With what we seek. To reform the world, good men have to have the power to control it.”

“How do you know you’re good?” This is a more complicated question than many people admit, in my opinion, since results don’t always match intentions.

“Forn Sior enlists the righteous and grooms the good. We try to be knights ourselves in ethics and purpose. We’re inspired by the best of the past.”

“Not tilting at windmills, I hope.”

“People call quests quixotic as if to ridicule them, but to me it’s a compliment. Purpose, perseverance, purity. Believe me, it will be worth the hardship to get there.”

In Philadelphia I was regarded as somewhat the prodigal son, having many years before unwisely deflowered one Annabelle Gas-wick and fled to an apprenticeship in Paris with Benjamin Franklin, who offered refuge, thanks to his Masonic connections with my father. I’d managed to spend my meager inheritance in six months of gambling, but now I’d returned with a measure of notoriety: a hero of sorts, bridge between nations!

“We thought you a rascal, but you have some of your sire’s character after all.”

“None of his sense,” I admitted.

“Yet you know men like Bonaparte and Smith and Nelson.”

“Franklin’s mentorship allowed me to travel in high circles.”

“Ah, Franklin. Now
there
was a man!”

We were stalled two days in Delaware by late snow, and then reached Baltimore a wearying five days after leaving Philadelphia.

“We’re close, are we not?” Bloodhammer finally asked crankily. “This is a big country you’ve invented here.”

“You’ve seen but the smallest fraction. Are you beginning to wonder if your Norsemen could have marched as far as your map claims?”

“Not marched, but rowed, paddled. Sailed.”

The road to the new city of Washington was little more than a track. Gone were the neat farms of Pennsylvania, and the woods between Chesapeake Bay’s principle city and the new seat of government were as raw as Kentucky. Our way would open to a clearing of stumps and corn, with shack cabin and ragged children, and then close up again into a tunnel of trees. Some homesteads were attended by two or three slaves, and while Magnus had seen Negroes in Paris and New York, he was fascinated by their ubiquity and misery here. They made up, I knew, more than a fifth of my nation.

“They’re black as coal!” he’d exclaim. “And the rags…how can they work outside dressed like that?”

“How can an ox work without an overcoat?” said one of our coach-mates, a Virginia planter with a whiskey-reddened nose and gnawed pipe he never actually lit. “The Negro is different than you and I, sir, with smaller brain and broader shoulders. They’re as fit for the field as a mule. You might as well worry about the birds of the air!”

“Birds can fly where they wish.”

The planter laughed. “You have wit, sir! You have wit! And our darkies are as content as a good milker, following the path to the barn each night. They are certainly more content than they look, I assure you. They have longings, but only for the belly, music, and the bed. It’s a favor we’ve done, bringing them here. Saved their souls, we have.”

“Yet they don’t seem grateful.” Magnus, I’d observed, had a sly way of getting to the heart of an issue, and his eye would take on Odin’s gleam.

“God has made the order of things plain, sir,” the planter said, looking flustered. “The Indian has done nothing with America, and the black man nothing with Africa. The Negro harnessed and the Indian confined—both for their own good!”

I was too much the Pennsylvanian, exposed to Quaker beliefs, to accept this nonsense. “How can Americans claim to be free when some of us are in fetters?”

“As I told you, sir, they are not us.” He looked annoyed. “You have contracted liberal ideas in France, but stay with us here in the South and you’ll see what I mean. Washington knew. So does our new president. All things, and all men, in their place.” Then he turned his head to end the conversation, looking out the coach window at the endless trees. I could hear branches clawing at the top of our vehicle as we creaked on, the driver halting occasionally to chop the worst away.

I began to fear we were lost when we finally hailed a passing black freeman with a box of carpenter tools, and asked him where America’s capital was.

“Why, you’s in it!” he replied. “You passed the boundary stone half a mile back.”

I looked out. There were two farms, a pile of cleared slash smoking from a desultory fire, and a split-rail fence that seemed to contain nothing.

The Negro pointed. “That way to the Big House!”

We came to the crest of a low hill and saw the awkward infancy of Washington. Four months after its occupation by the three hundred and fifty clerks of the federal government, my nation’s capital was a cross between swampy wilderness and ludicrous grandeur. Mud avenues broad enough for a Roman legion cut diagonally across farm, forest, and marsh, extending grandly from nothing to nothing. Beyond, the broad Potomac glinted. There were thousands of stumps, still bright yellow, and three hundred brick and wooden
houses thrown like dice on a plan a hundred times bigger than required. I’d heard the district for this city was ten miles square, but why? A decade after the start of construction, all of Washington had just three thousand inhabitants.

The houses, poking up from muddy yards paved with sawdust, led like crumbs toward a neighboring village called Georgetown, far away on the Potomac. There was a small port there, and more homes across the river on the Virginia side. The four official buildings in Washington were preposterously imposing and oddly isolated from each other. These, I was to learn, were the President’s House, Congress, the Treasury, and the War Department. Most of the legislators lived in a cluster of rooming houses and hotels between the capitol building and the president’s house along a road called Pennsylvania Avenue, still not entirely cleared of stumps. I suppose Washington will grow into itself—institutions have a way of evolving to serve their employees instead of the other way around, and any intelligent clerk will hire yet more clerks, to make himself a foreman—but still, it seemed laughably grandiose. The only good news was that the place was so empty it would be hard for assassins to sneak up on us.

“It’s as stupefying as Versailles, but in completely the opposite way,” I murmured. “There’s nothing here.”

“No,” Magnus insisted, leaning excitedly out the coach window. “Look at the angles those avenues cut. This is sacred Masonic architecture, Ethan!”