The Rosetta Key (2 page)

Frankly, I’d never have ventured within a hundred miles of the place, except that Astiza was convinced that Moses had stolen a sacred book of ancient wisdom from the bowels of the Great Pyramid and that his descendants had carried it to Israel. That meant Jerusalem was the likeliest place to look. So far this Book of Thoth, or the rumors of it, had been nothing but trouble. Yet if it did hold keys to immortality and mastery of the universe, I couldn’t quite forget about it, could I? Jerusalem did make a perverse kind of sense.

Smith imagined me a trusted accomplice, and in truth we did have an alliance of sorts. I’d met him in a gypsy camp after I’d shot Najac. The signet ring he gave had saved me from a yardarm noose when I was hauled before Admiral Nelson after the fracas at the Nile. And Smith was a genuine hero who’d burned French ships and escaped from a Paris prison by signaling one of his former bedmates from a barred window. After I’d picked up a pharaoh’s treasure under the Great Pyramid, lost it again to keep from drowning, and stolen a balloon from my friend and fellow savant Nicolas-Jacques Conte, I’d crash-landed into the sea and found myself wet and penniless on the quarterdeck of the
Dangerous
, fate putting me face-to-face with Sir Sidney once more, and as much at the mercy of the British as I’d been the French. My own feelings — that I’d had quite enough of war and treasure and was ready to go home to America — were blithely ignored.

“So while you make inquiries from Syrian Palestine about this woman you took a fancy to, Gage, you can also feel out the Christians and Jews for possible resistance to Bonaparte,” Smith was telling me. “They might side with the frogs, and if he’s taking an army that way, our Turkish allies need all the help they can get.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “You’re just the man for this kind of work, I judge: clever, affable, rootless, and without any scruples or belief. People tell you things, Gage, because they figure it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s just that I’m American, not British or French…”

“Exactly. Perfect for our uses. Djezzar will be impressed that even a man as shallow as you has enlisted.”

Djezzar, whose name meant “the Butcher,” was the notoriously cruel and despotic pasha in Acre whom the British were depending on to fight Napoleon. Charmed, I’m sure.

“But my Arabic is crude and I know nothing of Palestine,” I pointed out reasonably.

“Not a problem for an agent with wit and pluck like you, Ethan. The Crown has a confederate in Jerusalem by the code name of Jericho, an ironmonger by trade who once served in our own navy. He can help you search for this Astiza and work for us. He has contacts in Egypt! A few days of your artful diplomacy, a chance to walk in the footsteps of Jesus Christ hisself, and you’re back with nothing more than dust on your boots and a holy relic in your pocket, your other problems solved. It’s really quite splendid how these things work out. Meanwhile I’ll be helping Djezzar organize the defense of Acre in case Boney marches north, as you’ve warned. In no time we’ll both be bloody heroes, feted in the chambers of London!”

Whenever people start complimenting you and using words like “splendid,” it’s time to check your purse. But, by Bunker Hill, I was curious about the Book of Thoth and tortured by the memory of Astiza. Her sacrifice to save me was the worst moment of my life — worse, honestly, than when my beloved Pennsylvania long rifle blew up — and the hole in my heart was so big you could fire a cannonball through it and not hit a thing. Which is a good line to use on a woman, I figured, and I wanted to try it out on her. So of course I said yes, the most dangerous word in the English language.

“I
am
lacking clothes, weapons, and money,” I pointed out. The only things I’d managed to retain from the Great Pyramid were two small gold seraphim, or kneeling angels, which Astiza contended came from the staff of Moses and which I’d stuffed rather ingloriously into my drawers. My initial thought had been to pawn them, but they’d acquired sentimental value despite their tendency to make me scratch. At the very least they were a reserve of precious metal I preferred not to reveal. Let Smith give an allowance, if he was so anxious to enlist me.

“Your taste for Arab rags is perfect,” the British captain said.

“That’s quite the swarthy tan you’ve developed, Gage. Add a cloak and turban in Jaffa and you’ll blend like a native. As for an English weapon,
that
might get you clapped in a Turkish prison if they suspect you of spying. It’s your wits that will keep you safe. I
can
lend you a small spyglass. It’s splendidly sharp and just the thing to sort out troop movements.”

“You didn’t mention money.”

“The Crown’s allowance will be more than adequate.”

He gave me a purse with a scattering of silver, brass, and copper: Spanish reales, Ottoman piastres, a Russian kopek, and two Dutch rix-dollars. Government budgeting.

“This will hardly buy breakfast!”

“Can’t give you pound sterling, Gage, or it will give you away in an instant. You’re a man of resources, eh? Stretch the odd penny! Lord knows the Admiralty does!”

Well, resourcefulness can start right now, I said to myself, and I wondered if I and the off-duty crewmen might while away the hours with a friendly game of cards. When I was still in good standing as a savant on Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, I’d enjoyed discussing the laws of probability with famed mathematicians such as Gaspard Monge and the geographer Edmé François Jomard. They’d encouraged me to think in a more systematic way about odds and the house advantage, sharpening my gambling skills.

“Perhaps I can interest your men in a game of chance?”

“Haw! Be careful they don’t take your breakfast, too!”

I
started with brelan, which is not a bad game to play with simple sailors, contingent as it is on bluff. I had some practice at this in the salons of Paris — the Palais Royale alone had one hundred gambling chambers on a mere six acres — and the honest British seamen were no match for the man they soon called a Frankish dissembler. So after taking them for as much as they’d tolerate by pretending I had better cards — or letting slip my vulnerability when the hand actually left me better armed than the weapon-stuffed sash of a Mameluke bey — I offered games that seemed to be more straightforward luck. Ensigns and gunner mates who’d lost half a month’s pay at a card game of skill eagerly came forward with a full month’s wager on a game of sheer chance.

Except that it wasn’t, of course. In simple lansquenet, the banker — me — places a bet that other players must match. Two cards are turned, the one to the left my card, the one to my right the player’s. I then start revealing cards until there’s a match with one of the first two. If the right card is matched first, the player wins; if the left card is matched first, the dealer wins. Even odds, right?

But if the first two cards are the same, the banker wins immediately, a slight mathematical advantage that gave me a margin after several hours, and finally had them pleading for a different game.

“Let’s try
pharaon
,” I offered. “It’s all the rage in Paris, and I’m sure your luck will turn. You are my rescuers, after all, and I am in your debt.”

“Yes, we’ll have our money back, Yankee sharp!”

But
pharaon
is even more advantageous to the banker, because the dealer automatically wins the first card. The last card in the deck of fifty-two, a player’s card, is not counted. Moreover, the dealer wins all matching cards. Despite the obviousness of my advantage they thought they’d wear me down through time, playing all night, when exactly the opposite was true — the longer the game went on, the greater my pile of coins. The more they thought my loss of luck to be inevitable, the more my advantage became inexorable. Pickings are slim on a frigate that has yet to take a prize, yet so many wanted to best me that by the time the shores of Palestine hove into view at dawn, my poverty was mended. My old friend Monge would simply have said that mathematics is king.

It’s important when taking a man’s money to reassure him of the brilliance of his play and the caprice of ill fortune, and I daresay I distributed so much sympathy that I made fast friends of the men I most deeply robbed. They thanked me for making four high-interest loans back to the most abject losers, while tucking away enough surplus to put me up in Jerusalem in style. When I gave back a sweetheart’s locket that one of the fools had pawned, they were ready to elect me president.

Two of my opponents remained stubbornly uncharmed, however. “You have the devil’s luck,” a huge, red-faced marine who went by the descriptive name of Big Ned observed with a glower, as he counted and recounted the two pennies he had left.

“Or the angels,” I suggested. “Your play has been masterful, mate, but providence, it seems, has smiled on me this long night.” I grinned, trying to look as affable as Smith had described me, and then tried to stifle a yawn.

“No man is that lucky, that long.”

I shrugged. “Just bright.”

“I want you to play with me dice,” the lobsterback said, his look as narrow and twisted as an Alexandrian lane. “Then we’ll see how lucky you are.”

“One of the marks of an intelligent man, my maritime friend, is reluctance to trust another man’s ivory. Dice are the devil’s bones.”

“You afraid to give me a chance of winning back?”

“I’m simply content to play my game and let you play yours.”

“Well, now, I think the American is a bit the poltroon,” the marine’s companion, a squatter and uglier man called Little Tom, taunted.

“Scared to give two honest marines a fighting chance, he is.” If Ned had the bulk of a small horse, Tom carried himself with the compact meanness of a bulldog.

I began to feel uneasy. Other sailors were watching this exchange with growing interest, since they weren’t going to get their money back any other way. “To the contrary, gentlemen, we’ve been at arms over cards all night. I’m sorry you lost, I’m sure you did your best, I admire your perseverance, but perhaps you ought to study the mathematics of chance. A man makes his own luck.”

“Study the what?” Big Ned asked.

“I think he said he cheated,” Little Tom interpreted.

“Now, there’s no need to talk of dishonesty.”

“And yet the marines are challenging your honor, Gage,” said a lieutenant whom I’d taken for five shillings, putting in with more enthusiasm than I liked to hear. “The word is that you’re quite the marksman and fought well enough with the frogs. Surely you won’t let these redcoats impugn your reputation?”

“Of course not, but we all know it was a fair…”

Big Ned’s fist slammed down on the deck, a pair of dice jumping from his grip like fleas. “Gives us back our money, play these, or meet me on the waist deck at noon.” It was a growl with just enough smirk to annoy. Clearly he was of a size not accustomed to losing.

“We’ll be in Jaffa by then,” I stalled.

“All the more leisure to discuss this between the eighteen-pounders.”

Well. It was clear enough what I must do. I stood. “Aye, you need to be taught a lesson. Noon it is.”

The gathering roared approval. It took just slightly longer for the news of a fight to reach from stem to stern of
Dangerous
than it takes a rumor of a romantic tryst to fly from one end of revolutionary Paris to the other. The sailors assumed a wrestling match in which I’d writhe painfully in the grip of Big Ned for every penny I’d won. When I’d been sufficiently kneaded, I’d then plead for the chance to give all my winnings back. To distract my all-too-fervent imagination from this disagreeable future, I went up to the quarterdeck to watch our approach to Jaffa, trying my new spyglass.

It was a crisp little telescope, and the principal port of Palestine, months before Napoleon was to take it, was a beacon on an otherwise flat and hazy shore. It crowned a hill with forts, towers, and minarets, its dome-topped buildings terracing downward in all directions like a stack of blocks. All was surrounded by a wall that meets the harbor quay on the seaward side. There were orange groves and palms landward, and golden fields and brown pastures beyond that. Black guns jutted from embrasures, and even from two miles out we could hear the wails of the faithful being called to prayer.

I’d had Jaffa oranges in Paris, famed because their thick skin makes them transportable to Europe. There were so many fruit trees that the prosperous city looked like a castle in a forest. Ottoman banners flapped in the warm autumn breeze, carpets hung from railings, and the smell of charcoal fires carried on the water. There were some nasty-looking reefs just offshore, marked by ringlets of white, and the little harbor was jammed with small dhows and feluccas. Like the other large ships, we anchored in open water. A small flotilla of Arab lighters set out to see what business they could solicit, and I readied to leave.

After I’d dealt with the unhappy marine, of course.

“I hear your famous luck got you into a tangle with Big Ned, Ethan,” Sir Sidney said, handing me a bag of hard biscuit that was supposed to get me to Jerusalem. The English aren’t known for their cooking. “Regular bull of a man with a head like a ram, and just as thick, I wager. Do you have a plan to fox him?”

“I’d try his dice, Sir Sidney, but I suspect that if they were weighted any more, they’d list this frigate.”

He laughed. “Aye, he’s cheated more than one pressed wretch, and has the muscle to shut complaints about it. He’s not used to losing. There’s more than a few here pleased you’ve taken him. Too bad your skull has to pay for it.”

“You could forbid the match.”

“The men are randy as roosters and won’t get ashore until Acre. A good tussle helps settle them. You look quick enough, man! Lead him a dance!”

Indeed. I went below to seek out Big Ned and found him near the galley hearth, using lard to slick his imposing muscles so he’d slide out of my grip. He gleamed like a Christmas goose.

“Might we have a word in private?”

“Trying to back from it, eh?” He grinned. His teeth seemed as big as the keys of a newfangled piano.