The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER TWO

Horror we can habituate to. Defeat can be accommodated. It is the unknown that causes fear, and uncertainty that haunts us in the hollow of the night. So my resolution to reform myself was weaker than I knew because the truth was that I hadn’t sworn off women entirely. After the agony and heartbreak I’d experienced on the American frontier, I wanted to reestablish contact with Astiza, a woman I’d fallen in love with four years before during Napoleon’s Orient campaign. She’d left me in Paris to return to Egypt, and after the heartbreak of my latest adventure, I began writing her.

If she’d declined to renew our relationship, I’d have understood. Our time together had been more tumultuous than satisfying. But instead I got no answer at all, despite her promise that we might one day find ourselves together again. Of course Egypt was still recovering from the British expulsion of the French the year before, so communication was uncertain. But had anything happened to my partner in adventure? I did manage to contact my old friend Ashraf, who said he’d seen Astiza after her return to Egypt. She’d been her usual mysterious self, reclusive, troubled, and living in near seclusion. Then she abruptly vanished about the time I returned to Europe. I knew it would have been more surprising to hear she’d settled into domesticity, and certainly I’d little claim on her. But to not know nagged at me.

Which is how I led my companions into the wrong bordello.

It happened this way. The Palais Royal is an enormous rectangle of pillared arcades, its courtyard filled with gardens, fountains, and pathways. We ate at an outdoor café and gawked at the trollops who costumed themselves as the most prominent socialites of the republic, in between the trio’s tediously learned arguments on bone classification and the merits of screw propellers. I showed them where Bonaparte used to play chess for money as an artillery captain, and the arcade where he’d met the prostitute to whom he’d lost his virginity as a young soldier. Yonder was the club where foreign minister Talleyrand once spent 30,000 francs in a single night, and nearby was the shop where Charlotte Corday bought the knife with which she stabbed Marat in his bath. Sodomites with plumage as elaborate as the whores walked the Street of Sighs arm in arm, given that such love has been decriminalized by the revolution. Beggars mingled with millionaires, prophets preached, cardsharps prowled, and the perversely pious sought out chambers where they could negotiate sexual whippings to the most precise calibration of penance and pain. We descended into the cellar “circus,” where couples danced amid “nymphs” posing in diaphanous clothing, and pretended to study with an academic’s objectivity the complex’s forty-four statues of Venus.

As we circulated, Cuvier was persuaded to try his hand at the new game of “21” that Napoleon had helped popularize, Smith sampled varieties of champagne with a pub crawler’s endurance, and Fulton studied the acrobats’ use of leverage.

He had to be dragged away from a fire-eater. “Imagine if we could invent a dragon!”

“The French wouldn’t buy that, either.”

I guessed this group was as happy looking at the prostitutes as hiring them. Given that half the Palais’ amusements were technically illegal—French kings had issued thirty-two decrees against gambling since 1600—it was my full intention to keep us out of trouble. Then I heard, while leading our little squad through a dim arcade of shops and descending stairways, a female voice call my name.

I turned to see Madame Marguerite, or, as she preferred to be called, Isis, Queen of Arabia. She was a bordello manager of entrepreneurial ambition whom I’d encountered before I reformed. “Monsieur Gage! You must introduce me to your friends!”

Marguerite operated one of the more ostentatious brothels in the Palais, a warren of vaulted caverns under a crowded gambling salon. Its decor was Oriental, and the courtesans’ filmy costumes were inspired by feverish European fantasies of the seraglios of Istanbul. By rumor you could sample hashish and opium there, while imagining yourself master of a harem. It was costly, decadent, illegal, and thus quite irresistible. It was also no place for esteemed savants. My instinct was to hurry by, but Marguerite rushed out to block us, my companions bunched up nervously behind as if we were at the entrance to the maze of the Minotaur.

“Hello, Isis,” I said warily. “Business going well?”

“Brilliantly, but how we’ve missed our Ethan! We’d been told you’d disappeared in America. How heartbroken were my concubines! They wept, thinking of you at the mercy of Red Indians.”

Well, I had spent money in the place. “I’m back, my hair still attached, but newly reformed,” I reported. “Celibacy is good for character, I’ve decided.”

She laughed. “What an absurd idea. Surely your friends don’t agree?”

“These are savants, men of learning. I’m just showing them about.”

“And there is much my girls can show. Collette! Sophie!”

“I’m afraid we can’t stay.”

“Is this the Arabian place?” Cuvier interrupted behind me, craning to look. “I’ve heard of it.”

“It looks like an Ottoman palace in there,” said Smith, squinting through the doorway. “The architecture is quite intricate.”

“Do you really want to be seen entering?” I asked, even as Marguerite seized my arm with enthusiasm. “I am responsible for your reputation, gentlemen.”

“And we in this house are mistresses of discretion,” our hostess assured. “Esteemed savants, at least experience my décor—I work so hard at it. And it’s so fortuitous we meet, Ethan, because my assistant inside was just asking about you!”

“Was she now?”

“It’s a man, actually. He plays the role of Osiris.” She winked.

“I’m not of that taste.”

“No, no, he only wants to talk and wager with you. He’s heard of your gambling skills and says you’ll want to bet for the thing you most desperately wish to learn.”

“Which is?”

“Word of your Egyptian friend.”

That startled me, given my puzzlement about Astiza. I’d never mentioned her to Marguerite. “How could this Osiris know that?”

“Yes, come in, come in, and hear his proposition!” Her eyes gleamed, her pupils huge and waxy. “Bring your friends, no one is looking. Share some claret and relax!”

Well, it was against all my resolutions, but why would a stranger know about my long-lost love in Egypt? “Perhaps we should take a look,” I told my companions. “The scenery is worthy of the theater. It’s a lesson in how the world works, too.”

“And what lesson is that?” Fulton asked as we descended into Marguerite’s grotto.

“That even looking costs money.” Isis pulled us into the welcoming chamber of her seraglio and my savants gaped at the “Arabian” beauties on parade for inspection, since their costumes combined would be about enough to account for one good scarf. “This won’t take a minute,” I went on. “Go on to the rooms just to be polite. Fulton, buy a girl a glass and explain steam power. Smith, the auburn-haired one looks like she’s got all kinds of topography to map. Cuvier, consider the anatomy of the blond over there. Surely you can theorize about the hourglass morphology of the female form?” That would keep them occupied while I learned who this Osiris was and whether he knew anything but rubbish.

The savants were so content to pretend it was all my idea that Marguerite should have given me a commission. Unfortunately, she was tighter with a franc than my old landlady, Madame Durrell.

“And which fancy would you care to tickle, Ethan?” the brothel keeper asked as the girls dragged the savants into a chamber tented with gauze curtains. Negro servants brought tall brass Turkish pitchers. Candles and incense made a golden haze.

“I’ve adopted rectitude, I said. ‘Be at war with your vices,’ Ben Franklin used to tell me. A regular bishop, I am.”

“A bishop! They were our best customers! Thank God Bonaparte has brought the church back.”

“Yes, I heard they sang a Te Deum in Notre Dame at Easter to celebrate the new Concordat with Rome.”

“It was delicious farce. The Kings of Judah above the entrance are still headless, ever since the revolutionary mobs mistook them for French kings and knocked their tops off. It’s like a stone monument to the guillotine! The church itself, which the Jacobins designated a Temple of Reason, is in wretched disrepair. The Te Deum was the first time the bells had rung in ten years, and none of his generals could remember when to genuflect. Instead of kneeling, the rabble presented arms when they elevated the host at consecration. You could hardly hear the Latin for all the snickering, whispers, and clatter of sabers and bayonets.”

“The common people are happier the Church is back, which was Napoleon’s point.”

“Yes, the country is drifting to the old ways: faith, tyranny, and war. No wonder the mob has voted overwhelmingly to make him first consul for life! Fortunately, my kind of business thrives in every political climate. Be they royalist or revolutionary, cleric or marshal, they all like to tumble.” She raised a flute of champagne. “To desire!”

“And discipline.” I took a swallow, eyeing the girls wistfully. The savants seemed to be chatting away as if this were the Institute—trollops can pretend fascination with anything, it seems, even science—and the air was heady with hashish and the aroma of spirits. “I tell you, it feels good to abstain,” I continued doggedly. “I’m going to write a book.”

“Nonsense. Every man needs vice.”

“I’ve sworn off gambling, too.”

“But surely there is something you would wager for,” a male voice interrupted.