He took a closer look. ‘My God, did you fall down a well?’ I was unshaven, battered, dirty, and red-eyed.
‘I won at cards.’ I noticed Talma’s table was littered with half a dozen failed lottery tickets. His luck at gambling didn’t match my own, but the Directory relied on his kind of dogged optimism for much of its financial support. Meanwhile the cafe’s gilt-bordered mirrors, reflecting endlessly, made me feel entirely too conspicuous. ‘I need an honest lawyer.’
‘As easy to find as a scrupulous deputy, vegetarian butcher, or virginal prostitute,’ Talma replied. ‘If you tried lemonade, it might help correct such fuzzy thinking.’
‘I’m serious. A woman I was with has been murdered. Two gendarmes tried to arrest me for the deed.’
He raised his eyebrows, not certain whether I was joking. Once more, I had trumped his voyeuristic life. He also wondered, I knew, whether this was a tale he could sell to the journals. ‘But why?’
‘They had as witness a lantern bearer I’d hired. It was no secret her chamber was my destination; even Count Silano knew.’
‘Silano! Who’d believe that rascal?’
‘Perhaps the gendarme who discharged a pistol ball past my ear, that’s who. I’m innocent, Antoine. I thought she’d been in league with thieves, but when I went back to confront her, she was dead.’
‘Wait. Thieves?’
‘I surprised them tearing apart my own apartment and they clubbed me. I won some money at the tables last night, and an odd medallion, but…’
‘Please slow down.’ He was patting his pockets looking for a scrap of paper. ‘A medallion?’
I took it out. ‘You can’t write about this, my friend.’
‘Not write! You might as well say not breathe!’
‘It would only make my situation worse. You must save me with secrecy.’
He sighed. ‘But I could expose injustice.’
I put the medallion on the marble table, shielding it from the view of the other patrons with my torso, and slid it to my companion. ‘Look, the soldier I won it from said it was from ancient Egypt. Silano was curious. He bid on it, and even wanted to buy it, but I wouldn’t sell. I don’t see that it’s worth killing over.’
Talma squinted, turned it over, and played with its arms. ‘What are all these markings?’
I looked more closely for the first time. The furrow across the disc, as if marking its diameter, I have already described. Above, the disc was perforated in a seemingly random way. Below were three series of zigzag marks, the way a child might draw a mountain range. And beneath them, scratches like hash marks that formed a little triangle. ‘I have no idea. It’s extremely crude.’
Talma spread the two arms that hung down to make an upside-down V. ‘And what do you make of this?’
He didn’t need to explain. It looked like the Masonic symbol for a compass, the construction tool used to inscribe a circle. The order’s secret symbolism often paired the compass with a carpenter’s square, one overlying the other. Spread the medallion arms apart to the limit of their hinge and they would draw the circumference of a circle about three times the size of the disc above. Was this some kind of mathematical tool?
‘I don’t make anything of it,’ I said.
‘But Silano, of the heretical Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry, was interested. Which means that perhaps this has something to do with our order’s mysteries.’
Masonic imagery was said to be inspired by that of the ancients. Some were commonplace tools such as the mallet, trowel, and trestle board, but others were more exotic such as the human skull, pillars, pyramids, swords, and stars. All were symbolic, and meant to suggest an order to existence I’ve found hard to detect in everyday life. In each degree of Masonic advancement, more such symbols were explained. Was this medallion some ancestor of our fraternity? We hesitated to speak of it in the ice-cream cafe because lodge members are sworn to secrecy, which of course makes our symbolism all the more intriguing to the uninitiated. We’ve been accused of every kind of witchcraft and conspiracy, while mostly what we do is parade around in white aprons. As one wit declared, ‘Even if that is their secret – that they have no secret – still, it is an achievement to keep that a secret.’
‘It suggests the distant past,’ I said as I put it back around my neck. ‘The captain I won it from claimed it had come with Cleopatra and Caesar to Italy and was owned by Cagliostro, but the soldier thought so little of it that he gambled it away in chemin de fer. ’
‘Cagliostro? And he said it was Egyptian? And Silano took interest?’
‘It seemed casual at the time. I thought he was simply bidding me up. But now…’
Talma pondered. ‘All this is coincidence, perhaps. A card game, two crimes.’
‘Perhaps.’
His fingers tapped. ‘Yet it could also be connected. The lantern bearer led the police to you because he calculated that your reaction to the ransacking of your apartment would be to unwittingly plunge yourself into the scene of a horrific murder, making you available for interrogation. Examine the sequence. They hope to simply steal the medallion. Yet it is not in your apartment. It has not been given to Minette. You are a foreigner of some standing, not assaulted lightly. But if charged with murder and searched…’
Minette had been killed merely to implicate me? My head was whirling. ‘Why would anyone want this so badly?’
He was excited. ‘Because great events are in motion. Because the Masonic mysteries you irreverently mock may at last have an effect on the world.’
‘What events?’
‘I have informants, my friend.’ He loved to be coy, pretending to know great secrets that somehow never made their way into print.
‘So you agree I’m being framed?’
‘But naturally.’ Talma regarded me gravely. ‘You have come to the right man. As a journalist, I seek truth and justice. As a friend, I presume your innocence. As a scribe who writes about the great, I have important contacts.’
‘But how can I prove it?’
‘You need witnesses. Would your landlady attest to your character?’
‘I don’t think so. I owe her rent.’
‘And this lantern bearer, how can we find him?’
‘Find him! I want to stay away from him!’
‘Indeed.’ He thought, sipping lemonade. ‘You need shelter, and time to make sense of this thing. Our lodge masters may be able to help.’
‘You want me to hide in a lodge?’
‘I want you safe while I determine if this medallion could give both of us an unusual opportunity.’
‘For what?’
He smiled. ‘I’ve heard rumours, and rumours of rumours. Your medallion may be timelier than you think. I need to speak to the right people, men of science.’
‘Men of science?’
‘Men close to the rising young general Napoleon Bonaparte.’
CHAPTER THREE
The chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet was, at age forty-nine, the most famous student of the guillotined Lavoisier. Unlike his master, he’d ingratiated himself to the Revolution by finding a nitrate soil substitute for saltpeter, so necessary to gunpowder. Rising to leadership of the new National Institute that had succeeded the Royal Academy, he’d shared with his mathematician friend Gaspard Monge the task of helping loot Italy. It was scholars who advised Bonaparte on which masterpieces were most worthy of being carted back to France. This had helped make both scientists the confidants of the general and privy to strategic secrets. Their political expediency reminded me of an astronomer who, when making surveys for the new metric system, had been forced to replace his white survey flags, seen as a symbol of King Louis, with the tricolour. No profession escapes the Revolution.
‘So you’re not a murderer, Monsieur Gage?’ the chemist asked with the barest hint of a smile. With a high forehead, prominent nose, stern mouth and chin, and sad, lidded eyes, he looked like the weary lord of a rural manor, regarding science’s growing alliance with governments the same dubious way that a father contemplates the suitor of his daughter.