The Rosetta Key Read online

  “Charming yet unavailable. The very best ladies are.”

  He reacted to my wit with as much animation as a stone idol.

  “Smith sent word of your mission, so I can offer temporary lodging and time-tested advice: any foreigner who pretends to understand the politics of Jerusalem is a fool.”

  I remained my affable self. “So my job might be brief. I ask, don’t understand the answer, and go home. Like any pilgrim.”

  He looked me up and down. “You prefer Arab dress?”

  “It’s comfortable, anonymous, and I thought it might help in the souk and the coffee shop. I speak a little Arabic.” I was determined to keep trying. “As for you, Jericho, I don’t see you falling down anytime soon.”

  I’d merely puzzled him.

  “The biblical story, about the walls of Jericho coming down? Solid as a rock, you seem to be. Good man to have on one’s side, I hope?”

  “My home village. There are no walls now.”

  “And I didn’t expect to find blue eyes in Palestine,” I stumbled on.

  “Crusader blood. The roots of my family go far back. We should be a paintbox mix, but in our generation the paleness came out. Every race comes through Jerusalem: Crusaders, Persians, Mongols, Ethiopians. Every creed, opinion, and nation. And you?”

  “American, ancestry brief and best forgotten, which is one of the advantages of the United States. I understand you learned your English through their navy?”

  “Miriam and I were orphaned by the plague. The Catholic fathers who took us in told us something of the world, and at Tyre I signed onto an English frigate and learned ironwork repairs. The sailors gave me my nickname, I apprenticed to a smith in Portsmouth, and sent for her. I felt obligated.”

  “But didn’t stay, obviously.”

  “We missed the sun; the British are white as worms. I’d met Smith while in the navy. For passage back and some pay, I agreed to keep my ears open here. I host his friends. They do his bidding. Little useful is ever learned. My neighbors think I’m simply capitalizing on my English to take in the occasional lodger, and they’re not far wrong.”

  Bright and blunt, this blacksmith. “Sidney Smith thinks he and I can help each other. I got caught up with Bonaparte in Egypt. Now the French are planning to come this way.”

  “And Smith wants to know what the Christians and the Jews and the Druze and the Matuwelli might do.”

  “Exactly. He’s trying to help Djezzar mount resistance to the French.”

  “With people who hate Djezzar, a tyrant who keeps his slipper on their neck. More than a few will regard the French as liberators.”

  “If that’s the message, I’ll take it back. But I also need help for my own cause. I met a woman in Egypt who disappeared. Fell into the Nile, actually. I want to learn if she’s dead or alive and, if alive, how to rescue her. I’m told you may have contacts in Egypt.”

  “A woman? Close to you?” He seemed reassured by my interest in someone other than his sister. “That kind of inquiry is more costly than listening to political gossip in Jerusalem.”

  “How much more costly?”

  He looked me up and down. “More, I suspect, than you can afford to pay.”

  “So you won’t help me?”

  “It’s my contacts in Egypt who won’t help you, not without coin.”

  I judged he wasn’t trying to cheat me, just tell me the truth. I needed a partner if I was going to get anywhere in my quest, and who better than this blue-eyed blacksmith? So I gave him a hint of what else I was after. “Maybe you can contribute. What if I promised, in return, a share of the greatest treasure on earth?”

  He finally laughed. “Greatest treasure? Which is?”

  “A secret. But it could make a man a king.”

  “Ah. And where might this treasure be?”

  “Right under our noses in Jerusalem, I hope.”

  “Do you know how many fools have hoped to find treasure in Jerusalem?”

  “It’s not the fools who will find it.”

  “You want me to spend my money looking for your woman?”

  “I want you to invest in your future.”

  He licked his lips. “Smith found a bold, impudent, rascal, didn’t he?”

  “And you are a judge of character!” He might be skeptical, but he was also curious. Paying for word of Astiza would not really cost him much, I bet. And he had the same avarice as all of us: Everyone dreams of buried treasure.

  “I could see if it’s affordable.”

  I’d hooked him. “There’s another thing I need as well. A good rifle.”

  Jericho lived simply, despite some prosperity from his ironmonger trade. Because he was a Christian his house had more furnishings than a Muslim abode: Muhammadans rely on cushions that can be moved so the women can be sequestered when a male guest arrives.

  The habit of the Bedouin tent has never been left behind. We Christians, in contrast, are accustomed to having our heads closer to the warm ceiling than the cooler floor, and so sit high and formal, in stationary clutter. Jericho had a table, chairs, and armoires instead of Islamic cushions and chests. The carpentry was plain, however, with a Puritan simplicity. The plank floors were bare of carpets, and any decoration on the plaster walls was limited to the odd crucifix or pic-ture of a saint: clean as a convent, and just as disconcerting. Miriam, the sister, kept it spotless. Food was plentiful, but basic: bread, olives, wine, and what greens the woman could buy each day in the market stalls. Occasionally she’d bring meat for her muscled, hungry brother, but it was relatively rare and expensive. Winter was coming, but there was no provision for heat except that given off by the charcoal of the cooking hearth and the forge below. There was no glass in the screened windows, so the coldest were blocked up by bags of sawdust for the season, adding to the autumn gloom. The basin water was cold, winds penetrating, candles and oil precious, and we slept and rose at farmer hours. For a Parisian layabout like me, Palestine was a shock.

  It was the forging of my new rifle that first bonded us. Jericho was steady, skilled, quiet, diligent (all things I should emulate, I suppose) and had earned the town’s respect. You could see it in the eyes of the men who came into the sooty courtyard to buy iron implements: Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike. I thought I might have to tutor him in the design of a good gun, but he was ahead of me. “You mean like the German jaegar, the hunting rifle?” he said when I described the piece I’d lost. “I’ve worked on some. Show me on the sand how long you want the piece to be.”

  I sketched out a forty-two-inch barrel.

  “Won’t that be clumsy?”

  “The length gives it accuracy and killing power. Just forty-five caliber is enough; the rifle velocity makes up for bullets smaller than a musket’s. I can carry more ammunition for a given weight of shot and powder. Soft iron, deep grooving, a drop to the stock to bring the sights up to my eye for aiming but keep my brow out of the pan flash.

  The best I’ve seen can drive a tack three times out of five at fifty yards.

  It takes a full minute to load and ram, but the first shot will actually hit something.”

  “Smoothbores are the rule here. Quick to load and you can shoot with anything—pebbles, if need be. For this gun, we’ll need precise bullets.”

  “Precision means accuracy.”

  “In a close fight, sometimes speed wins.” He had the prejudice of the sailors he had served with, who fought in sharp brawls when boarding.

  “And the right shot can keep them from getting close at all. To my mind, trying to fight with an ordinary musket is like going to a brothel blindfolded—you might get the result you want, but you can miss by a mile, too.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.” Damned if I could get him to joke.

  He looked at the pattern in the sand. “Four hundred hours of work. For which you’ll pay me out of this treasure of yours?”

  “Double. I’m going to be searching hard while you craft the rifle.”

  “No.” H
e shook his head. “Easy to promise money you don’t have. You’ll help, and not just with this but other projects. It will be a new experience for you, doing real work. On slow days you can hunt for buried treasure or learn enough gossip to satisfy Sidney Smith. You can bill him to satisfy your debt to me.”

  Honest work? The idea was intriguing—truth be told, I’m sometimes envious of solid men like Jericho—but daunting, too. “I’ll help at your forge,” I bargained, “but you have to guarantee me enough hours to peck about. Get me the rifle by the end of winter, when Napoleon comes, and by that time I’ll find the treasure and get Smith’s money, too.” Squeezing anything out of the Admiralty is like getting gravy from a shoelace, but spring was far off. Things could happen.

  “Then bellow that fire.” And when I leaped to obey, and shoveled charcoal, and shifted enough metal to make my shoulders ache, he grudgingly nodded. “Miriam thinks you’re a good man.”

  And with her endorsement, I knew I had some trust.

  Jericho first fetched a round metal rod, or mandrel, slightly smaller than the intended bore of my future rifle. He heated a bar of carbonized Damascus steel, called a skelp, the same length as my gun barrel.

  This he would wrap around the mandrel. I held the rod and handed tools while he placed these on a groove in a barrel anvil and began to beat to fuse the barrel’s cylinder. He’d do an inch at a time, removing the rod while the metals were still slightly pliable, then plunging the result into sizzling water. Then it was reheat, wrap another inch of the steel, hammer, and reweld: inch by inch. It was tedious, painstaking work, but curiously enthralling too. This lengthening tube would become my new companion. The duty kept me warm, and hard physical work was its own satisfaction. I ate simply, slept well, and even came to feel comfortable in the pious simplicity of my lodging. My muscles, already toughened by Egypt, became harder still.

  I tried to draw him out. “You’re not married, Jericho?”

  “Have you seen a wife?”

  “A handsome, prosperous man like you?”

  “I have no one I wish to marry.”

  “Me neither. Never met the right girl. Then this woman in Egypt …”

  “We’ll get word of her.”

  “So it’s just you and your sister,” I persisted.

  He stopped his hammering, annoyed. “I was married once. She died carrying my child. Other things happened. I went to the British ship. And Miriam …”

  Now I saw it. “Takes care of you, the grieving brother.”

  His gaze held mine. “As I take care of her.”

  “So if a suitor would appear?”

  “She has no wish for suitors.”

  “But she’s such a lovely girl. Sweet. Demure. Obedient.”

  “And you have your woman in Egypt.”

  “You need a wife,” I advised. “And some children to make you laugh. Maybe I can scout about for you.”

  “I don’t need a foreigner’s eye. Or a wastrel’s.”

  “Yet I might as well offer it, since I’m here!”

  And I grinned, he grumped, and we went back to pounding metal.

  When work was light I explored Jerusalem. I’d vary my dress slightly depending on which quarter I was in, trying to glean useful information through my Arabic, English, and French. Jerusalem was used to pilgrims, and my accents were unremarkable. The city’s crossroads were its markets, where rich and poor mingled and janissary warriors casually shared meals with common artisans. The khaskiyya, or soup kitchens, provided welfare for the destitute, while the coffeehouses attracted men of all faiths to sip, smoke water pipes, and argue.

  The air, heady with the dark beans, rich Turkish tobacco, and hashish, was intoxicating. Occasionally I’d coax Jericho to come along.

  He needed a cup of wine or two to get going, but once started, his reluctant explanations of his homeland were invaluable.

  “Everyone in Jerusalem thinks they’re three steps closer to heaven,” he summarized, “which means that together they create their own little hell.”

  “It is a weaponless city of peace and piety, is it not?”

  “Until someone steps on someone else’s piety.”

  If anyone questioned my own presence I’d explain I was a trade representative for the United States, which had been true in Paris.

  I was waiting to make deals with the winner, I said. I wanted to be friends with everyone.

  The city was so filled with rumor of Napoleon’s coming that it buzzed like a hive, but there was no consensus about which side was likely to prevail. Djezzar had been in ruthless control for a quarter century. Bonaparte had yet to be beaten. The English controlled the sea, and Palestine was but an islet in a vast Ottoman lake. While the Shiite and Sunni sects of the Muslim communities were at bitter odds with each other, and both Christians and Jews were restless minorities and mutually suspicious, it was not at all clear who might take arms against who. Would-be religious despots from half a dozen faiths dreamed of carving out their own puritanical utopias. While Smith hoped I might recruit for the British cause, I’d no real intention of doing so. I still liked French republican ideals and the men I’d served with, and I didn’t necessarily disagree with Napoleon’s dreams of reforming the Near East. Why should I take the side of the arrogant British, who had so bitterly fought my own nation’s independence?

  All I really wanted was to hear of Astiza and find out if there was any chance this fabled Book of Thoth might improbably have survived over three thousand years. And then flee this madhouse.

  So I learned what I could in their hookah culture. It was a small town, and word inevitably spread of the infidel in Arab clothes who worked at the forge of a Christian, but there were any number of people with foggy pasts seeking any number of things. I was just one more, who did what life chiefly consists of: waiting.

  CHAPTER 5

  T o pass the winter, I did my best to tease Miriam. I’d found a piece of amber in the market, an insect preserved inside. It was being sold as a slick and shiny good-luck charm, but I saw it as an artifact of science. I stole up behind her once when she was cleaning a chicken, rubbed the amber briskly on my robes, and then lifted my hand above the downy feathers. Some floated up to my down-turned palm.

  She whirled. “How are you doing that?”

  “I bring mysterious powers from France and America,” I intoned.

  She crossed herself. “It’s evil to bring magic into this house.”

  “It’s not magic, it’s an electrical trick I learned from my mentor Franklin.” I turned my palm so she could see the amber I held. “Even the ancient Greeks did this. If you rub amber, it will attract things. We call the magic electricity. I am an electrician.”

  “What a foolish idea,” she said uncertainly.

  “Here, try it.” I took her hand, despite her hesitation, and put the amber in her fingers, enjoying the excuse to touch her. Her fingers were strong, red from work. Then I rubbed it on her sleeve and held it over the feathers. Sure enough, a few levitated to stick.

  “Now you’re an electrician, too.”

  She sniffed and gave it back to me. “How do you find time for useless games?”

  “But perhaps they’re not useless.”

  “If you’re so clever, use your amber to pluck the next chicken!”

  I laughed, and ran the amber past her cheek, pulling with it strands of her lovely hair. “It can serve as a comb, perhaps.” I had created a blond veil, her eyes suspicious above it.

  “You are an impudent man.”

  “Simply a curious one.”

  “Curious about what?” She blushed when she said it.

  “Ah. Now you’re beginning to understand me.” I winked.

  But she wouldn’t allow things to go any further. I’d hoped to while away spare time by finding a card game or two, but I was in the worst city in the world for that. Jerusalem had fewer amusements than a Quaker picnic. Nor did there turn out to be much sexual temptation in a town where women were wrapped as tightl
y as a toddler in a Maine blizzard: my celibacy in Jaffa was involuntarily extended. Oh, women would give me a fetching eye now and again—I’ve got a bit of dash—but their allure was poisoned by lurid stories one heard in the coffeehouses of genital mutilation by angry fathers or brothers. It does give one pause.

  In time I was so frustrated and bored that I took inspiration from my amber play and decided to tinker with electricity as Franklin had taught me. What had seemed a clever Parisian hobby to charm salons with an electric kiss—I could make a spark pass between a couple’s lips, once I’d given a woman a charge with my machines—had taken on more seriousness after my sojourn in Egypt. Was it possible ancient people had turned such mysteries into powerful magic? Was that the secret of their civilizations? Science was also a way to give myself status during my winter of discontent in Jerusalem. Electricity was novel here.

  With Jericho’s reluctant tolerance, I built a frictional hand crank, with a glass disk to make a generator. When I rotated it against pads connected to a wire, the static charge was passed to glass jugs I lined with lead: my makeshift Leyden jars. I used strands of copper to wire these spark batteries in sequence and sent enough electricity to a chain to make customers jump if they touched it, numbing their limbs for hours. Students of human nature won’t be surprised that men lined up to be jolted, shaking their tingling extremities in awe. I gained even more of a reputation as a sorcerer when I electrified my own arms and used my fingers to attract flakes of brass. I’d become a Count Silano, I realized, a conjurer. Men began to whisper about my powers, and I admit I enjoyed the notoriety. For Christmas I evacuated the air from a glass globe, spun it with my crank, and laid my palm on it. The ensuing purple glow lit the shed and entranced neighborhood children, though two old women fainted, a rabbi stormed from the room, and a Catholic priest held up a cross in my direction.

  “It’s just a parlor trick,” I reassured them. “We did it all the time in France.”

  “And what are the French but infidels and atheists?” the priest rejoined. “No good will come from electricity.”