William Dietrich: Napoleon’s Pyramids

‘Invaded? They said you invited them!’

‘Who said?’

‘Soldiers, ruffians, vagabonds… they had hats, capes, and heavy boots. They told me there’d been an argument over cards and you would pay for damages.’

‘Madame, I was almost murdered. I was away all night, came home, surprised thieves, and was knocked unconscious. Though I don’t know what I had to steal.’ I glanced at the wainscoting and saw it had been pried loose. Was my hidden rifle safe? Then my eye strayed to my chamber pot, as rank as before. Good.

‘Indeed, why would thieves bother with a shabby fellow like you?’ She looked at me sceptically. ‘An American! All know your kind has no money.’

I set a stool upright and sat down heavily. She was right. Any neighbourhood shopkeeper could have told robbers I was behind on my debts. It must have been my winnings, including the medallion. Until the next game, I’d been rich. Someone from the cozy followed me here, knowing I’d leave shortly for Minette’s. The captain? Silano? And I’d caught them with my dawn return. Or had they waited because they hadn’t found what they were looking for? And who knew of my amorous plans? Minette, for one. She’d pressed herself against me quickly enough. Was she in league with a scoundrel? It was a common enough ploy among prostitutes.

‘Madame, I take responsibility for all repairs.’

‘I would like to see the money to back that up, monsieur.’

‘As would I.’ I stood unsteadily.

‘You must explain to the police!’

‘I can best explain after questioning someone.’

‘Who?’

‘The young woman who led me astray.’

Madame Durrell snorted, and yet showed a glimmer of sympathy. For a man to be made a fool by a woman? Very French.

‘Will you allow me the privacy to right my furniture, repair my clothes, and dress my bruises, madame? In spite of what you think, I’m modest.’

‘A poultice is what you need. And keeping your breeches belted.’

‘Of course. But I am also a man.’

‘Well.’ She stood. ‘Every franc of this goes on your rent, so you’d better get back what you lost.’

‘You can be certain of it.’

I pushed her outside and closed the door, setting the big pieces to right. Why hadn’t they just killed me? Because they hadn’t found what they were looking for. What if they returned, or a snoopy Madame Durrell decided to do her own cleaning? I put on a new shirt and fully pried open the wainscot by my washbasin. Yes, my Pennsylvania longrifle was safe: it was too obvious to carry about in a Paris street and too conspicuous to hock, since it might be identified with me. My tomahawk was also there, and this I tucked into my favourite place, the small of my back beneath my jacket. And the medallion? I went to the chamber pot.

There it was under my own sewage. I fished it from its hiding place, washed myself in my basin, and threw waste and soiled water out the window to the night garden.

As I’d expected, it was the one place a thief wouldn’t look. I slipped the cleansed medallion around my neck and set off to confront Minette.

No wonder she’d let me win our sexual contest! She was expecting to get the medallion another way, by distracting me!

Back I went the way I’d come, buying bread with the few coins I had left in my pocket. With full morning, Paris had erupted with people. Entrepreneurs accosted me with brooms, firewood, brewed coffee, toy windmills, and rat traps. Gangs of young louts lounged near fountains, where they extorted money for water. Children marched in uniformed troops to school. Draymen unloaded barrels into shops. A pink-cheeked lieutenant stepped from a tailor’s shop, resplendent in the uniform of the grenadiers.

Yes, there was her house! I galloped up the stairs, determined to question her before she awakened and stole away. Yet even as I came up to her landing I sensed something was wrong. The building seemed curiously empty. Her door was slightly ajar. I rapped, but there was no answer. I looked down. The knob was askew, the stop splintered. When I swung it wide a cat darted out, its whiskers pink.

A single window and the coals of the fireplace gave adequate light. Minette was on the bed as I had left her, but with the sheet pulled from her naked body and her belly cut through with a knife. It was the kind of wound that killed slowly, giving its victim time to plead or confess. A pool of blood had formed on the wooden floor beneath the bed, and the cat had been lapping.

The slaying made no sense.

I glanced around her room. There was no sign of robbery. The window, I saw, was unlatched. I opened it to peer out at the muddy yard behind. Nothing.

What to do? People had seen us whispering together at the cozy, and it had been plain I’d intended to spend the night with her. Now she was dead, but why? Her mouth was agape, her eyes rolled back.

And then I spied it, even as I heard the heavy boots of men pounding up the stairs. The tip of her forefinger was bright with her own blood, and with it she had drawn something on the planks of pine. I tilted my head.

It was the first letter of my last name, the letter G.

‘Monsieur,’ a voice said from the landing, ‘you are under arrest.’

I turned to see two gendarmes, a police formed by the revolutionary committees in 1791. Behind was a man who looked as if his suspicions had been confirmed. ‘That’s the one,’ the swarthy fellow said with an Arab accent.

It was the man I’d hired as lantern bearer.

If the Terror had abated, French revolutionary justice still had a tendency to guillotine first, investigate later. Better not to be arrested at all. I left poor Minette by springing to her chamber window, vaulting its frame, and dropping lightly to the muddy patch below. Despite the long night I hadn’t lost my agility.

‘Halt, murderer!’ There was a bang, and a pistol shot sizzled by my ear.

I bounded over a picket fence to the alarm of a rooster, kicked my way past a territorial dog, found a passageway to an adjoining street, and ran. I heard shouts, but whether of alarm, confusion, or commerce I cannot say. Fortunately, Paris is a maze of six hundred thousand people and I was soon lost under the awnings of the markets of Les Halles, the damp earthiness of wintered apples, bright carrots, and shiny eels steadying my senses after the fantastic shock of the butchered body. I saw the heads of two gendarmes hurrying by the cheese aisle, so I went the other way.

I was in the worst kind of trouble, meaning I was not entirely sure what the trouble is. That my apartment had been ransacked I could accept, but who had killed my courtesan – the thieves I thought she was in league with? For what? She had neither my money nor my medallion. And why would Minette implicate me with a bloody fingertip? I was as baffled as I was frightened.

I felt especially vulnerable as an American in Paris. Yes, we’d depended on French aid to achieve our independence. Yes, the great Franklin had been a witty celebrity during his years as our nation’s diplomat, his likeness reproduced on so many cards, miniatures, and cups that the king, in a rare display of royal wit, had him painted inside one ardent female admirer’s chamber pot. And yes, my own connection to the scientist and diplomat had won me a few well-placed French friends. But relations had worsened as France interfered with our neutral shipping. American politicians who welcomed the idealism of the French Revolution became disgusted by the Terror. If I had any usefulness in Paris, it was trying to explain each nation to the other.

I’d first come to the city fourteen years before, age nineteen, as a means for my shipping merchant father to disentangle my emotions (and his fortune) from Annabelle Gaswick and her socially ambitious parents. I didn’t know for certain that Annabelle was with child, but I’ll allow it was theoretically possible. It was not a match my family desired. A similar dilemma had reportedly driven young Ben Franklin from Boston to Philadelphia, and my father gambled that the ancient statesman might sympathise with my plight. It helped that Josiah Gage had served in the Continental Army as a major and, more importantly, was a third-degree Mason. Franklin, a longtime Freemason in Philadelphia, had been elected to the Paris Lodge of the Nine Muses in 1777, and the following year was instrumental in getting Voltaire initiated into the same august gathering. Since I’d made early trading trips to Quebec, spoke passable French, and was reasonably gifted with letters (I was in my second year at Harvard, though I’d already grown impatient with musty classics, the scholarly self-absorbed, and debates over questions for which there is no answer), my father suggested in 1784 that I might be an assistant to the American ambassador. In truth Franklin was seventy-eight, declining in vigour, and had no need of my naive counsel, but he was willing to help a fellow Mason. Once I was in Paris the old statesman took an odd liking to me, despite my lack of clear ambition. He introduced me to both Freemasonry and electricity.