Three Emperors (9780062194138) (4 page)

Chapter 5

I
t was just as well Astiza wasn't in Venice, given my need to sneak into bedchambers, make arrangements at brothels, and resort to aggrieved theft. In fact, considering my wife's prolonged absence, I'd have preferred to spend more time admiring the Countess Nahir, since I'd been celibate for nearly a year and was addled as a stag in autumn. Not that I could justify a liaison, particularly one with a lover of my new enemy, though on the other hand my wife would never know, but still, I'd taken vows, however, a man can't be blamed for looking, yet it was foolish to risk my marriage when I was about to save it, though it had been a bit of a slapdash ceremony on the deck of an American naval vessel and my, how the light silhouetted Nahir's form . . .

The baron's steady aim cut short my moral debate. As he cocked the hammer, I did the only thing that occurred and charged the four-poster, breaking the frame and bringing the silk canopy down on the interrupted lovers.

The pistol went off, but missed.

I went back to scooping up my money, listening to the shouts of Richter's agents hurrying from below. I'd half-finished reassembling my fortune when a rapier—did the baron keep an arsenal under his pillow?—slit the canopy fabric. The hideously scarred man struggled upright, waving his blade with one hand and hauling up his breeches with the other. He was a terrible sight, in more ways than one. Half-naked Nahir was shrieking like a ninny but had the wits to purposely crawl out from under the other side, making for the door to the boudoir and sitting room.

Someday I'm going to find a quieter way to make a living.

“It's no good, American,” the baron said. “We knew that spymaster and scoundrel Ethan Gage, the most hated man in Europe, would come this way to get to his family. And that his own groveling greed would snare him.”

Richter's men began hammering on the apartment door.

“The name is Franklin,” I insisted. I abandoned the purse and wrenched at one of the toppled posts of the bed, ripping it free of fabric and turning it into a crude lance. “You've obviously got me confused with someone else, because I'm quite popular everywhere I go.”

“No, you're the sharpshooter and electrician Ethan Gage. We've been expecting you in Venice, and we are going to appropriate the broken sword hilt you stole from the grand chamberlain of France.” He nodded at the relic resting on the table. So Talleyrand's antique rubbish was actually somehow valuable. Interesting. I'd been using it like a shop tool.

Richter gave a leap from the tangle, landed like a cat, fastened a strategic button, turned sideways, and lifted the rapier: en garde. The poise was impressively athletic, but what the devil had happened to his face? His jaw was a wretched pudding.

“The hilt was given, not stolen,” I corrected. “Not that I have any idea what you're talking about.” I raised the bedpost like a quarterstaff. En garde yourself.

“Talleyrand told his agents the hilt would identify you, and one of his agents was persuaded to tell us.”

He lunged, and I parried with the post. We circled the table where the gold waited, the baron on one side and me on the other. At least he'd called me spymaster and electrician, which was better than dawdler and mercenary. And I had been a spy, if not a particularly effective one. But spies are required to deny their profession; it's part of the job. So I gave it a try. “I bought a piece of junked weaponry from a rogue in Batavia. Or was it Brussels? His name was Gage, now that I recall.”

Richter thrust, and his blade tipped the table and threw purse, hilt, and gold onto the carpet. He grinned, or tried to. Parts of his lips were burnt through, and the injury had settled into a permanent grimace. I slashed at him with the bedpost and he hopped back.

“What the devil happened to you?” I asked.

“When you learn that, you'll understand your doom.” Another advance, my parry, and then a sharp thrust of wood toward his shoulder to make him spring back yet again.

“The injury has addled you. I'm Franklin, I say.”

His sword tip cut back and forth like a darting hummingbird. Elegant as a dancer, despite his disfigurement. “Monsieur Gage, you left entirely too many clues at the gaming table with your prattle and your play. I'm impressed you somehow got to Venice from Cadiz, but mystified that Talleyrand ever trusted you at all.”

“Never met the man. Well above my station.”

We clashed again, steel against wood. He got past my guard to flick at my chin and it was my turn to jump back, but then I swung, driving the point of the rapier into the carpet and pressing until it snapped.

He cursed, backed to the fireplace, and snatched up a poker. Then he circled like a tiger. “You're supposed to be serving as Napoleon's envoy with the Combined Fleet at Cadiz but somehow deserted to Venice. Or can you be two places at once, monsieur?”

“But that proves I'm Hieronymus Franklin, does it not?” The charge of desertion was unfair, since my French ship had been shot out from under me. I did try to get Captain Lucas to sail for Gibraltar and abandon the rest of the French to the late and ferocious Admiral Nelson, but the officer had too much pride to listen to my realism. Now he was a British prisoner, his ship was at the bottom of the Atlantic, and I was dueling with a half-melted madman.

“Your quick arrival only proves you're slippery as an eel.”

“I've heard of this Gage,” I tried, “and he's a rascal and a sycophant. Not a man of character at all. By reputation he hardly manages to be at even one place, given his wandering attention, so I can't imagine how he'd conspire to be in two. No, I'm the affable Phineas Franklin, relative of the famed . . .”

“I thought you said it was Hieronymus Franklin,” Nahir spoke up. The object of my momentary infatuation had come back into the bedchamber wearing a robe and armed with a blunderbuss.

I backed from both of them. “It's hard to remember in all the excitement. Please put that weapon down, my dear. I've seen those guns at work, and they're not very discriminatory.”

She raised it instead. “You should have knocked.”

I eyed the purse on the floor. “If the pair of you aren't working for Talleyrand, who are you?” I stalled.

“Scholars of the rose,” Richter said. “Like your wife.”

He knew of Astiza, too? Could this card cheat know her whereabouts? I felt panic and hope. “Not the same, surely.” I had to anger them into mistakes. The men outside were thundering on the latched and barricaded door and calling for a beam to batter it down. “You're considerably deformed, Baron, and it's easier to kiss a man who still has lips, my lady.”

She flushed, and aimed.

I charged Richter, holding the bedpost like a lance. He dodged my joust but tripped, knocking one of the candles into the wreckage of the bed, which caught fire. From his knees, the baron swept the poker upward. My bedpost was whacked from my hands, striking a mirror and shattering it into shards. A decanter exploded, spattering the wallpaper with wine.

“Stand still!” Nahir cried in frustration, the muzzle of her gun rotating.

I scrambled for the sword hilt and the purse.

The apartment door smashed open, men charging, so I hurled the little table in their direction, making Nahir duck. It banged into a knot of sentries, who fell into a tangle, cursing.

“That sword hilt is useless to a man as shallow and ignorant as you, Ethan Gage,” Richter seethed, coming up behind to brain me with the poker.

Fortunately, Nahir had struggled back to her feet. “Surrender or I shoot!” She was inadvertently aiming at both of us. I dropped to the carpet, Richter rolled toward the burning bed, and the shotgun went off with a roar, its pellets kicking up a flurry of silk wallpaper and plaster dust.

The room was filling with smoke, and now shots came from Richter's guards crouched in the boudoir, punching holes through the fog to drill the room's paintings. The volley forced Nahir to fall to the floor as well, all three of us scrabbling like worms. So much for dignity.

“Stop shooting, you fools!” Richter cried. “Seize him!”

It was time to leave.

The sword hilt and the purse were within reach. I grabbed, jumped up, ran, and dove.

I smashed through glass and fell into blackness toward the Grand Canal, the risk of drowning superior to staying with lunatics. Shouts and shrieks followed my exit. I fell for what seemed endless seconds and hit cold, dirty, and brackish water, making a spectacular splash. I sank to the muddy bottom, pushed off, and surfaced gasping.

I looked up. The baron's form was silhouetted in the illuminated window high above, flames behind him. I glanced about. Could I find a boat?

“There!” Richter shouted, pointing. “Bring him to me!”

I turned, treading water. Gondolas were bearing down from either end of the Grand Canal. In the bow of each was a caped poltroon with a lantern that illuminated their guns, swords, and pikes.

I quickly struck out as planned for the Palazzo Grassi, across the canal from Rezzonico, a little heavy in the pockets from purse and broken hilt. The guns on the gondolas went off, bullets slapping water. My strokes accelerated.

I came to a palazzo foundation slimy with weed and surged onto its stone quay like an otter. Someone took another shot at me from Ca' Rezzonico, a bullet chipping a cherub. A skiff was moored at the palace's dock, but the pursuing gondolas were converging, preventing escape by water, and there were no walkways along the canals. With foresight, I had scouted my escape before sunset and now scaled a palace pillar as if it were a tree trunk, using memorized sculptures, balconies, and pediments for hand- and footholds. Gunfire supplied boldness.

I dragged myself onto a steep tile roof, scrambled to its ridge, and stood, swaying. Below I could hear shouts as the gondolas banged against the quay and pursuers leaped ashore. More boats were converging.

I waited like a fox to lead the posse on a merry chase. Richter said they were scholars of the rose. Were my pursuers Rosicrucians? Or had I run afoul of some new secret society I'd never heard of?

I heard shouts, pounding on doors, shutters opening, a bell clanging, and then the rat-a-tat tramp of boots racing up stairways. Richter's allies were ascending like an army of ants.

Ahead was a jumbled sea of roofs, with the bell tower of the church of Santa Maria del Giglio half a mile distant. Another shot, this one whining past as the shooter aimed at my silhouette against the sky. I took off running on the ridge crests and didn't gauge the leap required by the first alley so much as stumble onto its yawning cavity, lunging across from sheer momentum. I crashed onto tiles on the other side, lurched up, and looked back.

Two dozen caped figures had heaved themselves over the eave of the palazzo's roof and were fanning out to pursue and surround me. Yes, this was about more than a card game.

I scampered along roof crests like a cat, pistols banging behind me. The sizzle of the shots got the blood up. I became reckless, vaulting from housing block to block like a madman. I learned to leap the canal canyons at full tilt, legs and arms pumping as I churned into space. I'd slam onto the other side, slide perilously down the clay tiles, grab desperately to arrest my fall, kick with my legs, and be off again. I could hear the crashes and grunts of agile men making the same jumps.

They were bunching into a pack, as I'd intended.

I wove in and out of narrow chimneys, feeling their heat, and made for the clothesline I'd earlier stretched between two of them. I hopped across the taut rope and kept running, my pursuers bounding like bats, with capes flaunted behind. When I paused and shouted to taunt, I drew more shots. The excitement helped them come on heedlessly.

“He's slowing! We've got him!”

They vaulted a roof ridge, came down charging, and ran full tilt into my tripwire. It snapped, breaking the clay tube of a chimney, but not before half a dozen gave a snarling shout of surprise and went tumbling over the edge, hitting a canal below with cannonball splashes.

The rest had to slow, wary of more mischief.

I spied the brothel I had earlier scouted. There was an attic dormer window hung with translucent red linen and illuminated by a candle. I eased myself in, gave a somewhat damp salute to a couple's buttocks arrested in mid-coitus, and descended narrow stairs to the salon below. It's best to be bold when striding into a place you don't belong, especially when dripping from a canal. I strutted like a rooster, complimented the madam that “the clothed bath” was as invigorating as her strumpet had promised, tossed a coin from my recovered purse, slipped out a balcony door, and scrambled across another roof to where I could clamber through the bell windows of the adjacent church tower. Ladders led down to Santa Maria del Giglio.

I was in a marble side chapel with baptismal font. I looked about, panting. A few candles illuminated a baroque facade of winged angels, fat cherubs, and draped saints. There was a brass organ mammoth enough to herald the Second Coming, and paintings the size of mainsails that showed pious people doing virtuous things. More to the point was a line of rough-hewn wood coffins to transport Venice's dead to a burial place outside the city.

The church was a way station, I'd learned, where the deceased were gathered for transfer to a cemetery island.

This, like so many things, had been Napoleon's idea. One reason perfume is so popular in Venice is the city's stink, and the odor of the insufficient lagoon circulation was made worse by the Venetian practice of disposing of corpses. There's no ground, the city being built on pilings in a marshy lagoon, and the age-old habit of interring relatives in watery cellars meant that their decay added to the rankness. The French emperor has a nose offended by anything but a battlefield, and when in Venice he ordered that cadavers be buried on the nearby island of San Michele, occupied by a monastery of the Camaldolese Order. Funeral gondolas exiled the bodies in the same way that Parisians are reburying millions of skeletons in limestone quarries under their city.