The Emerald Storm

Chapter 6

Luck is fickle.

I’ve come near to drowning more times than I care to remember, and I’ve decided it’s the “near” part that makes the experience so unpleasant. If one truly drowned, consciousness would be mercifully lost, and the victim would pass to other worlds. But I have the habit of never quite succumbing, and thus revisit the experience in all its horror. Which was precisely the intention of a renegade secret policeman named Leon Martel. One week after my first visit to Nitot’s shop, he had my ankles roped, I was suspended upside down from a butcher’s hook, and an iron collar was locked to my neck. He was methodically lowering me into a trough of cold water.

“I regret the necessity, Monsieur Gage,” he told me as I sputtered. “My ambition is to become a gentleman, but you are notoriously uncooperative.”

“No, I’m not! I’m just confused!”

And down I’d go again.

I’d hold my breath as long as I could, suspended so my hair just grazed the bottom of the tin. Finally I’d writhe in growing terror, explode a gush of bubbles that sucked water into my lungs with searing pain, and then be lifted, coughing and gasping. The idiot leaned close with garlic breath and asked, “Where is the lost treasure of the Aztecs?”

“I’d never heard of it until last week!”

Down I’d submerge once more.

There were at least two reasons I should have suspected something like this was about to take place.

First, my luck always falls short of true fortune, so why did I expect to neatly sell my fabulous emerald the way an ordinary man might? Treasures have been elusive every time I’ve touched them.

Second, Nitot’s jewelry shop was uncharacteristically quiet when we returned as scheduled to learn the history of our stone and receive payment. Its front was closed to customers, and it was only by tapping on the window that a clerk let us in. Astiza was once more impatient, nervous about leaving Harry to play with his toys. She’d argued that people kept looking at us in odd ways, and that she’d seen the same scrutinizer three different times. I suggested that they were looking at her. “You’re too modest,” I reassured. “You’ve no idea how lovely you truly are.”

“Let’s beg off sick and go some other time. The portents aren’t aligned.” She was superstitious as a sailor.

“And leave a king’s fortune with Nitot? Now there is something to worry about. You’re the one who’s in a hurry. If you’re so concerned about impending war, the best thing is to conclude our bargain and be off to America.”

Merchants are usually affectionate when money changes hands, but the clerk avoided my eye when he allowed us into the shop, scurrying to his bench.

“Where’s Nitot?”

“In the back, monsieur.” His eye was pressed to a loupe to watch a diamond as if it might get away. Of course I’d already spent my new fortune in my imagination several times over, and was oblivious to the odd atmosphere. My naive assumption was that our sale was so monumental that the jeweler wanted privacy to let me scoop up my gold.

I had purchased a small magnifying glass hung on a cord around my neck as I’d hung the jewel. I’d prudently studied my stone before surrendering it for appraisal, and would examine it again. I didn’t want Nitot switching emeralds and then backing out of a sale. So I was being clever and cautious, in my own modest way. Just not clever and cautious enough.

To Astiza I’d given Napoleon’s N pendant to advertise our importance and discourage any sales nonsense about “decorating my ornament.” It actually looked good on her, and except for the fact it came from a megalomaniac, I rather liked the piece.

Now she put her hand on my arm. “I should have stayed with Horus,” she whispered. “Paris always smells wicked to me.”

“That’s just the fish market and the plumbing. Let’s finish our business.” Our boy had also been playing quite happily with thimbles and spools, rolling the latter into the former while his nursemaid watched. I doubted he missed us a whit.

So we returned to the back room. “Marie-Etienne?” I called. I thought he could have set out little cakes or a decanter of brandy to celebrate, but the room was gloomy. The clerk, oddly, moved behind us.

“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.