6 Small by the standards of Versailles, perhaps. Even today the formal garden surrounding Malmaison is impressive.
7 In June or July of 320 BC, Perdiccas arrived on the banks of the Nile to do battle with Ptolemy to retrieve Alexander’s mummified body. He was defeated by a combination of better intelligence by Ptolemy, having to cross a river with tricky currents and the voracious appetite of the Nile crocodiles, who fed on the living and dead for days afterward.
8 In spite of the mania for “logic” and “science” in postrevolutionary France, Napoleon had his personal astrologer, whom he consulted on matters both military and civil.
1 In November of 1799, Napoleon, aided by troops of General Leclerc, staged a coup, overthrowing the revolutionary government and bestowing this title upon himself.
2 Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc was only twenty-nine at the time of the nuptials. Pauline, or Paulette as she was known to her family, was twenty-one. He was not her first choice of husbands.
3 Haiti. At this time, the name included what is today the Dominican Republic. There is some evidence Leclerc’s mission was somewhat more ambitious and included a stepping-stone conquest of what are today Puerto Rico, Cuba and then the newly independent United States by way of French Louisiana. This theory might be indirectly supported by the fact Napoleon sold Louisiana within months of France’s withdrawal from Haiti, thereby ceding her last interest in the Western Hemisphere, other than an enclave in South America and a few insignificant islands.
CHAPTER THREE
Westview Cemetery, Atlanta
The next morning
Lang turned off I-20 onto Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, made a left and drove through the arch that marked the entrance to Atlanta’s largest cemetery. Passing the newer grave sites marked only by bronze plaques, he entered the older section, rolling hills dotted with an eclectic selection of gravestones, statues and funerary monuments. He parked the Porsche behind a vintage Cadillac. It and the Porsche were the only cars in sight. He climbed a slight rise, walking toward a giant oak tree whose winter-bare limbs seemed to be supplicating the heavens.
A few yards to his left, an elderly woman in black leaned on the arm of young Latino in chauffeur’s uniform as she hobbled up the hill, using her free hand to clutch a flat of pansies. He had seen her here on more than one occasion.
Just short of the tree, Lang stopped in front of three headstones. Dawn, his first wife, Janet, his sister, and Jeff, her adopted son. Lang came here to visit just before every trip he took out of the country. It was as if he were saying a possible farewell to the only kin he had before Gurt had re-entered his life with Manfred. For reasons he could not have explained, he never mentioned these trips to the cemetery. Although he was sure Gurt would understand, he felt some vague sense of disloyalty to his present family that had kept him silent on the subject of visiting his previous one.
Facing the three graves, he sat on the base of a statue of an angel, its arms reaching out as though imploring observers to follow through a closed door behind it, an early and exuberant display of early-twentieth-century family wealth by people he had never heard of.
Not far away, the old woman was directing the planting of the pansies around the marble figure of another angel, this one weeping.
If Lang could have spoken to his wife, his sister and much-loved adopted nephew, what would he tell them? Dawn, he knew, would be proud of his success in the legal world, thrilled he had the son she could not give him. Conversely, she would be less than happy about the violence that had stalked his life. Like the affair in Venice.
“Dammit,” he said aloud. “I don’t go looking for trouble.”
Not quite true, he reproved himself. He and Gurt weren’t leaving for Haiti entirely for a vacation.
“I can’t just sit by,” he explained to the breeze that was gently ruffling his hair. “I can’t just hope those people will go away.”
The woman in black interrupted the instructions to her chauffeur to glance sternly in his direction. Lang had not realized his voice had carried. He gave her an embarrassed smile.
Turning slightly, he faced Janet’s headstone. A pediatric orthopedist, she had spent four or five months of the year donating her services to the children of undeveloped countries. In Central America she had encountered the small boy on the dirt streets of a nameless village, homeless and parentless. She had fought a two-year paper war to adopt him.
Lang took a deep breath. She would be proud of the foundation he had created to provide children’s medical care across the globe. But perhaps not so proud about how he had funded it with an accord with the very organization responsible for her and Jeff’s deaths.
Lang stood, weary of the accusations of the dead, perhaps a little angry. It always ended this way.
“I did the best I could,” he said, not caring whether the old woman heard him or not.
Lang walked back down the hill, stopping for a final look at the three headstones before driving away. For reasons as inexplicable as his failure to tell Gurt of these visits, he felt he had completed a duty.
Cap Haitien
Two days later
Miles and Lang had decided that arrival in Haiti would be less likely observed if made at the north-coast port of entry. With the country’s communications system still somewhere in the mid-twentieth century, there was an excellent chance they would be gone by the time the paperwork associated with their landing found its way into any central system.
Scheduled service to Cap Haitien by commercial carriers having been long abandoned, Gurt and Lang had taken Delta to Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands and chartered a flight from there. Lang was in the right front seat of the lumbering antique Beech B18, nervously watching the number-two engine spew oil onto a wing whose white paint had been bleached into chalk by the Caribbean sun. There were more empty holes in the instrument panel than instruments.
Lang had mentioned this when he and Gurt first boarded the venerable old machine nearly an hour ago.
“No worry, mon,” the native pilot had assured them. “Ain’ no radio, no instrument landin’ equipment at Cap Haitien nohow.”
Lang looked apprehensively at the panel. “I don’t see any GPS. How do you find it, the airport?”
The pilot shrugged. “You goes to the first ocean and turns right. Afta ’bout an hour, you looks for de tallest clouds. Haiti be unner ’em. Ain’ but one airstrip on de no’th coast.”
Unmollified but out of objections, Lang had uneasily strapped himself in. Before GPS, before navigational instrumentation, this was how flying was done, right? Lindbergh had made it all the way from New York to Paris with only a compass, right? Jimmy Doolittle had found Tokyo with not much more, right?
None of the above eased his concern in the least.
A flash of green caught his eye and in the next moment the aircraft banked left to parallel golden sands. On the right side of the plane jagged mountains seemed to grow from the beach’s edge and claw at the clouds like the talons of a raptor.
There was a grinding sound and the Beechcraft shuttered. Lang desperately hoped he was experiencing only the lowering of the landing gear into the airstream. As if to reassure him, the plane banked again. When it rolled out, an airstrip filled the windscreen, increasing in size as the plane descended. The paving seemed out of place among what looked like postage-stamp-sized fields of sugarcane. At the runway threshold, and what Lang guessed was no more than a hundred feet, the pilot leveled off, flying the length of the strip without farther descent. At the end, on the edge of the ocean, he added power and began a 180-degree turn back toward the other end.
“What…?”
“Livestock, mon,” the pilot replied nonchalantly. “Natives’ pigs sometimes gets loose and onto de runway. De airplane go over low, scare ’em off. You got any idea what a mess o’ dis plane hittin’ a pig make?”