We were driven there in the jail’s iron wagon, watching Paris through iron bars. The city seemed drab in November, the people apprehensive, the skies gray. We were watched in turn, like animals, and it was a depressing way to introduce Astiza to a great city. All was foreign to her: the great cathedral steeples, the clamor of the leather and linen and fruit markets, the cacophony of neighing horse traffic and sidewalk merchants, and the boldness of women wrapped in fur and velvet strategically opened to give a glimpse of breast and ankle.
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Astiza had been humiliated by her stripping to copy the key, and didn’t speak. When we alighted alongside the outer keep, in a cold and treeless courtyard, something caught my eye at the compound gate. There were people staring through the grillwork, always glad to see wretches even less fortunate than they, and I was startled to spy one head of bright red, wiry hair, as familiar as a bill of rent and as pesky as an unwanted memory. Could it be? No, of course not.
Temple Prison, which dated from the thirteenth century, was a narrow, ugly castle that rose two hundred feet to the peak of its pyramidal roof, its tower cells lit by narrow barred windows. They opened on the inside to galleries around a central atrium, climbed by a spiral staircase. It says something for the efficiency of the Terror that the prison was largely empty. Its royalist inmates had all been guillotined.
As prisons go, I’ve seen worse. Astiza and I were allowed to stroll the parapet around the roof—it was much too high to try to jump or climb from—and the food was better than in some of the khans I’d experienced near Jerusalem. We were in France, after all. If it wasn’t for the fact that we were shut up tight, and that Bonaparte and Silano seemed intent on mastery of the world, I might have welcomed the rest. There’s nothing like treasure hunting, ancient legends, and battles to make one appreciate a good nap.
But the Book of Thoth pulled on us, and Boniface was a gossip who enjoyed relating the machinations of a city at war and under strain.
Plots and conspiracies were fried quick as a crêpe, each cabal looking for “a sword” to provide the necessary military muscle to take over the government. The Directory of five leading politicians was constantly reshuffled by the two legislative chambers. And the Council of the Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred were raucous, pompous assemblies who wore Roman mantles, indulged in shameless graft, and kept an orchestra on hand to punctuate legislation with patriotic songs. The economy was a wreck, the army was beggared for supplies, half of western France was in a revolt fueled by British gold, and most generals had one eye on the battlefield and the other on Paris.
“We need a leader,” our jailer said. “Everyone is sick of democracy.
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You’re lucky to be here, Gage, away from the turmoil. When I go into the city I never feel safe.”
“Pity.”
“Yet people don’t want a dictator. Few seek the return of the king.
We must preserve the republic, but how can anyone take the reins of our fractious assembly? It’s like controlling the cats of Paris. We need the wisdom of Solomon.”
“Do you now?” We were sharing supper in the confines of my cell.
Boniface had done the same with Smith because the jailer was bored and had no friends. I suppose his company was supposed to be part of our torture, but I’d taken an odd liking to him. He showed more tolerance of his prisoners than some hosts show guests, and paid better attention. It didn’t hurt that Astiza remained quite fine to look at and that I, of course, was uncommonly good company.
Now he nodded. “Bonaparte wants to be a George Washington, reluctantly accepting stewardship of his country, but he hasn’t the gravity and reserve. Yes, I’ve studied Washington, and his stoic mod-esty is a credit to your young nation. The Corsican arrived thinking he might be swept into the Directory by popular acclaim, but his superiors received him with coldness. What is he doing back from Egypt without orders? Have you two seen Le Messenger?”
“If you will recall, Monsieur Boniface, we are confined to this tower,” Astiza said gently.
“Yes, yes, of course. Oh, that brave periodical denounced the Egyptian campaign! Made a mockery of it! An army abandoned! Soldiers thrown uselessly at the ramparts of Acre! Bonaparte humiliated by the man once imprisoned here, Sir Sidney Smith! The newspapers are a voice for the assembly, you know. It’s all over for Napoleon.” Talma had told me that Bonaparte feared hostile newspapers more than bayonets. But what no one knew was that Napoleon had the book, and that Silano once again had the full code to read it. So much for bargaining with Josephine, the scheming slut. That woman could seduce the pope, and reduce him to beggary in the process.
When I asked Boniface about the Knight Templars who’d built this place, it was like turning the handle on a pump. Facts and theo-t h e
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ries gushed out. “Jacques de Molay himself was grand master here and then tortured! There are ghosts here, young people, ghosts I’ve heard shrieking in winter storms. The Templars were burned and beaten until they admitted to the worst kinds of abominations and devil worship, and then they were sent to the stake. Yet where was their treasure? The rooms you’re confined in were supposed to be stuffed, yet when the French king arrived to pillage them, they were empty. And where was the rumored source of Templar power? De Molay would say nothing, except when he went to the stake. Then he prophesized king and pope would be dead within the year. Oh, the shiver in the crowd when he prophesized that! And it was true!
These Templars were not just warrior-monks, my friend, they were magicians. They’d found something in Jerusalem that gave them strange powers.”
“Imagine if such power could be rediscovered,” Astiza murmured.
“A man like Bonaparte would seize the state in an instant. Then we’ll see things change, let me tell you, for better and worse.”
“Is that when our trial will be?”
“No. That’s when you’ll be guillotined.” He gave a Gallic shrug.
Our jailer was eager to hear our adventures, which we cautiously edited. Had we been inside the Great Pyramid? Oh yes. Nothing to see.
And Jerusalem’s Temple Mount?
A Muslim holy site now, with Christian access prohibited.
What about rumors of lost cities in the desert?
If they are lost, how could we find them?
The ancients could not raise their great monuments without colossal secrets, Boniface insisted. Magic had been lost with the priests of yore. Ours was a pale modern age, stripped of wonder, mechanical and cynical. Science was subduing mystery, and rationalism was trampling wonder. Nothing like Egypt!
“Yet what if it were found again?” I hinted.
“You know something, don’t you, American? No, don’t shake your head! You know something, and I, Boniface, am going to get it out of you!”
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On October 26, our jailer brought electrifying news. Lucien Bonaparte, age twenty-four, had just been elected president of the Council of Five Hundred!
I knew Lucien had been working on his brother’s behalf in Paris long before Napoleon left Egypt. He was a gifted politician. But president of France’s most powerful chamber? “I thought you had to be thirty years old to hold that post?”
“That’s why Paris is buzzing! He lied of course—had to, in order to comply with the Constitution—but everyone knows the lie. Yet they elected him anyway! This is Napoleon’s doing, somehow. The deputies are frightened, or bewitched.”