William Dietrich - The Emerald Storm

“Are you here?” I repeated.

The door slammed shut and shadows became animated. Half a dozen ruffians in tricorn hats and heavy black cloaks, dark as morticians, materialized from the gloom. The workshop was suddenly as crowded as a privy at the opera when the singing has gone on too long.

“Damnation. Robbery?” I was so surprised that I was momentarily stupid. Then I realized we didn’t have the jewel to rob and felt momentarily cheered. “I’m afraid we have nothing of value, gentlemen.”

“Not robbery, Monsieur Gage,” said their leader. “Arrest.”

“Arrest?” I groaned with annoyance. Even though I try to do the right thing, people are constantly trying to incarcerate me. I make a poor prisoner, having a knack for escape. “For what this time?”

“Withholding information from the French State.”

“Information?” My confusion was growing. “About what?”

“A significant archaeological discovery, the Green Apple of the Sun.”

Were they greedy gendarmes or impatient historians? “It’s exactly such information that I’m seeking, not that I have. And arrest on whose authority?”

“Minister Fouche.”

“But he is no longer minister of police. Don’t you read the papers?”

“He should be.”

When Joseph Fouche had arrested me the year before, he was one of the most powerful men in France, his ministry the stronghold of Napoleon’s military dictatorship… but by his very success Fouche had become dangerously powerful, and Bonaparte had temporarily dismissed him. Napoleon liked to keep his acolytes off-balance. However, the ambitious policeman had left behind a police organization more efficient and insidious than the world had ever seen, and the reassignment of their superior to the legislature had apparently not dampened his investigators’ conspiratorial instincts. This bunch had decided to act as if their boss had never changed.

“And you are?”

“Inspector Leon Martel,” the ringleader said, his heavy cavalry pistol pointed at my midsection. His colleagues also had guns out. Their piggish gaze lingered a little too long on Astiza’s figure for my taste, and for policemen these seemed a loutish bunch. I tensed for the worst. “You must share with us what you know.”

While Fouche had the sly, thin-lipped look of a lizard, Martel had the bright concentration of a cat, hazel eyes giving him a look of feline cunning. “You came into possession of a valuable jewel, and we require answers on its history.”

“I know nothing. And where is my valuable? Where’s Nitot?”

“It’s been confiscated, and the jeweler has been sent home.”

“Confiscated? You mean stolen?”

“It is you who stole it first, monsieur, from the pasha of Tripoli.”

“Help! Thieves!” I cried.

“No one can hear you. The real employees have been ordered to leave the shop for the day. You’ve no allies or hope of rescue.”

“On the contrary, the first consul is my friend and patron,” I warned. “Look at my wife’s neck. She wears his pendant.”

He shook his head. “He’s no patron when you hide secrets critical to the future of France. Present your wrists for manacles, please.”

I’ve learned that hesitation with unpleasant people only encourages them; it’s best to establish immediately where the relationship stands. I was also heartily tired of people pointing firearms at the lover who was now my wife, and mother of my child. So I did present my wrists, but only to lock my fists together like a hammer and launch them fiercely up under Martel’s annoying pistol, knocking its muzzle toward the ceiling. The gun went off, flew like a juggler’s pin, and I kept swinging, ramming my fists into the bastard’s nose. Martel howled, quite satisfyingly, with pain. Astiza, as quick-witted as me, fanned her cloak like a batwing in front of the scoundrel’s henchmen, packed too tight in our closet of a room. I leaped after the cape, plowing into the lot while more pistols went off, gun smoke roiling. The renegade gendarmes and I crashed together into the bank of jewel drawers, toppling them and spilling baubles everywhere.

By some miracle no one was hit, though a quite-expensive cloak was ruined with half a dozen bullet holes. But the nice thing about muzzle-loaders is that everybody’s weapon was now empty. “Run for Harry!” I shouted as we thrashed and cursed on the floor, the jeweler’s workbench turning over. And then, as I clawed for one of their pistols in hopes of using it as a club, hands grabbing my throat and ankles, something struck my head, and everything went black.

I awoke in a vaulted cellar of smoky stone, suspended upside down like an unhappy possum and annoyed that the police, if that’s who they were, wanted me, since I knew not a whit.

As I woozily came to, I got an upside-down look at my assailants, including Martel, recognizable because he had a bandaged nose and foul expression. Corruption had hardened him. His jaw was shovel-shaped, as if in the habit of digging into others’ affairs, and his skin was cribbaged from some kind of pox. I theorized this cruelty of fate made flirtation difficult and kept him in bad humor; people who don’t have frequent congress are sour and mean. Martel’s Gallic skin was dark from sun and weather, and his thick, unruly hair was barely controlled by a cord on his queue. Dark brows met over his now-broken nose, heavy lips tended toward a sneer, and his face had the overall grimness that comes from a desperate childhood, too much drink and disappointment, or both. He was the sort of man who either guards a prison or inhabits it. Not a cat, I decided, but a feral rodent. While useful to superiors, he can never be one of them because his edges are too rough. I could tell Martel knew that, and it gnawed at him. He could rise only so high.

“Where did the emerald originate, Gage?” His breath was like that of a diseased Neapolitan whore who subsists on cheap wine and suspect foods like tomato and eggplant. Italians, I’d learned, would eat anything.

Not that I necessarily know anything about diseased Italian whores.

“Where’s Astiza?” I countered.

It seemed a reasonable question, but one of his henchmen hit me with a carriage whip for asking it. I yelped. Martel stuck his bandaged nose in my face again. The man needed a good toothbrush, and a pick, too. “What do you know of the flying machines?”

“The what?” It occurred to me that I’d been captured by lunatics, which is always more dangerous than the merely covetous. “Say, did my wife get away?”

The switch struck again, which I took to be an answer in the affirmative. They were angry at how things had gone, which was encouraging. But they also plunged me into cold, filthy water, which was not.

I didn’t even have time to take a breath that first time, and began choking immediately. They hauled me back up as I wheezed and coughed, shaking my head like a dog so I could spray their breeches. It was all the defiance I could muster.

“Who the devil are you?” I gasped. “You’re not just thieves. You’re worse.”

“We’re the police, I told you. Inspector Leon Martel. Remember that name, because in time I’ll make you pay for my nose with your own, unless you tell me what I want to hear. The fact we’ve lost our patron in the ministry doesn’t erase our loyalty to France. We act on our own for the good of the state.”

A criminal with a badge is the very worst kind. “Your superiors have no idea what you’re up to here?”

“They’ll thank us for it.”

It’s never good when evil thinks it’s doing the right thing.

“I do know one secret,” I tried. “I have friends trying to build a steamboat, which is a vessel powered by one of Watt’s clamorous engines. It’s going to be demonstrated for Napoleon on the Seine this summer. I wouldn’t care to fetch the boiler wood myself, but it may prove a brilliant investment opportunity, though personally I can’t see the logic, yet men like you wagering on the idea at this opportune stage-”