“Oh sir,” she said, “forgive me, but I suddenly felt no pain in my knees.”
“Lucky you,” said Bonaparte. “Along with this miracle, do you also find that you see no ink on the floor?”
She looked down. “Sir, with all my scrubbing, I can't get up the whole stain. I'm afraid it's gone down into the stone, sir.”
Calvin at once sent his doodling bug into the surface of the marble and discovered that the ink had, indeed, penetrated beyond the reach of her scrubbing. Now was the chance to have Bonaparte notice him, not as a prisoner– even his guards were gone– but as a man of power. “Perhaps I can help,” he said.
Bonaparte looked at him as if seeing him for the first time, though Calvin was quite aware that the Emperor had sized him up several times over the past half-hour. Bonaparte spoke to him in accented English. “Was it for scullery work you came to Paris, my dear American friend?”
“I came to serve you, sir,” said Calvin. “Whether with a stained floor or a pained leg, I care not.”
“Let's see you with floors first,” said Bonaparte. “Give him the rags and bucket, girl.”
“I don't need them,” said Calvin. “I've already done it. Have her scrub again, and this time the stain will come right up.”
Bonaparte glowered at the idea of serving as interpreter for an American prisoner and a scullery maid, but his curiosity got the better of his dignity and he gave the girl the order to scrub again. This time the ink came right up, and the stone was clean again. It had been child's play for Calvin, but the awe in the girl's face was the best possible advertisement for his wondrous power. “Sir,” she said, “I had only to pass the rag over the stain and it was gone!”
The secretaries were eyeing Calvin carefully now– they weren't fools, and they clearly suspected him of causing both their discomfort and their relief, though some of them were pinching the legs to try to restore feeling after Calvin's first, clumsier attempts at numbing pain. Now Calvin went back into their legs, restored feeling, and then gave the more delicate twist that removed pain. They watched him warily, as Bonaparte looked back and forth between his clerks and his prisoner.
“I see you have been busy playing little jokes on my secretaries.”
Without an answer, Calvin reached into the Emperor's leg and, for just a moment, removed all pain. But only for a moment; he soon let it come back.
Bonaparte's face darkened. “What kind of man are you, to take away my pain for a moment and then send it back to me?”
“Forgive me, sir,” said Calvin. “It's easy to cure the pain I caused myself, in your men. Or even the pain from hours of kneeling, scrubbing floors. But the gout– that's hard, sir, and I know of no cure, nor of any relief that lasts more than a little while.”
“Longer than five seconds, though– I'll wager you know how to do that.”
“I can try.”
“You're the clever one,” said Bonaparte. “But I know a lie. You can take away the pain and yet you choose not to. How dare you hold me hostage to my pain?”
Calvin answered in mild tones, though he knew he took his life in his hands to say such a bold thing in any tone: “Sir, you have held my whole body prisoner this whole time, when I was free before. I come here and find you already a prisoner of pain, and you complain to me that I do not set you free?”
The secretaries gasped again, but not in pain this time. Even the scullery maid was shocked– so much so that she knocked her bucket over, spilling soapy, inky water over half the floor.
Calvin quickly made the water evaporate from the floor, then made the residue of ink turn to fine, invisible dust.
The scullery maid went screaming from the room.
The secretaries, too, were on their feet. Bonaparte turned to them. “If I hear any rumor of this, you will all go to the Bastille. Find the girl and silence her– by persuasion or imprisonment, she deserves no torture. Now leave me alone with this extortionist, while I find out what he wants to get from me.”
They left the room. As they were going, Little Napoleon and the guards returned, but Bonaparte sent them away as well, to his nephew's ill-concealed fury.
“All right, we're alone,” said Bonaparte. “What do you want?”
“I want to heal your pain.”
“Then heal it and have done.”
Calvin took the challenge, twisted the nerves just right, and saw Bonaparte's face soften, losing the perpetual wince. “Such a gift as that,” murmured the Emperor, “and you spend it cleaning floors and taking stones from prison walls.”
“It won't last,” said Calvin.
“You mean you choose not to make it last,” said Bonaparte.
Calvin took the unusual step of telling the plain truth, sensing that Bonaparte would know if anything he said was a lie. “It's not a cure. The gout is still there. I don't understand the gout and I can't cure it. I can take away the pain.”
“But not for long.”
Truthfully, Calvin answered, “I don't know how long.”
“And for what payment?” asked Bonaparte. “Come on, boy, I know you want something. Everyone does.”
“But you're Napoleon Bonaparte,” said Calvin. “I thought you knew what every man wanted.”
“God doesn't whisper it in my ear, if that's what you think. And yes, I know what you want but I have no idea why you've come to me for it. You're hungry to be the greatestman on Earth. I've met men with ambition like yours before– and women, too. Unfortunately I can't easily bend such ambition into subservience to my interests. Generally I have to kill them, because they're a danger to me.”
Those words went like a knife through Calvin's heart.
“But you're different,” said Bonaparte. “You mean me no harm. In fact, I'm just a tool to you. A means of gaining advantage. You don't want my kingdom. I rule all of Europe, northern Africa, and much of the ancient East, and yet you want me only to tutor you in preparation for a much greater game. What game, on God's green Earth, might that be?”
Calvin never meant to tell him, but the words came blurting out. “I have a brother, an older brother, who has a thousand times my power.” The words galled him, burned his throat as he said them.
“And a thousand times your virtue, too, I think,” said Bonaparte. But those words had no sting for Calvin. Virtue, as Alvin defined it, was waste and weakness. Calvin was proud to have little of it.
“Why hasn't your brother challenged me?” asked Bonaparte. “Why hasn't he shown his face to me in all these years?”
“He's not ambitious,” said Calvin.
“That is a lie,” said Bonaparte, “even though in your ignorance you believe it. There is no such thing as a living human being without ambition. St. Paul said it best: Faith, ambition, and love, the three driving forces of human life.”
“I believe it was hope,” said Calvin. “Hope and charity.”
“Hope is the sweet weak sister of ambition. Hope is ambition wishing to be liked.”
Calvin smiled. “That's what I've come for,” he said.
“Not to heal my gout.”
“To ease your pain, as you ease my ignorance.”
“With powers like yours, what do you need with my small world-conquering gifts?” Bonaparte's irony was plain and painful.
“My powers are nothing compared to my brother's, and he is the only teacher I can learn them from. So I need other powers that he doesn't have.”
“Mine.”
“Yes.”
“Then how do I know that you won't turn on me and try to take my empire?”