“And is it not possible that the people in Venice who tried to kill us were Chinese?”
“Certainly possible,” Lang had to agree.
Miles clapped his hands. “Good! It’s settled then. I’ll make the arrangements. Now, where am I taking you to lunch?”
“Not so fast,” Lang cautioned. Turning to Gurt, he said, “We’ve just come back from several days in Venice. I don’t want to impose on our neighbors to keep Manfred again so soon…”
Gurt turned to Miles, saying conversationally, “Lang believes his son cannot live a few days without him. When he is away, he has to call the child at least twice a day. It as though Manfred is some sort of vegetable that will perish without his attention.” To Lang, she said, “Manfred will get along fine with Wynn Three, his best friend. Besides, we are keeping the neighbor’s little boy for two weeks this summer.”
News to Lang. What wasn’t news was the fact they were going to Haiti. Gurt had made up her mind.
From the diary of Louis Etienne Saint Denis December 20, 1802 The First Consul’s ^ 1 favorite sister is again troublesome! For some years the sexual conduct of Pauline, the second of the three sisters, has been the talk of all France. Though charming and beautiful, the woman is without discretion. In June of five years past, the First Consul was at Mombello Palace near Milan when he walked in on his sister in the process of having congress with one of his generals, Leclerc. ^ 2 Feigning fury, the First Consul demanded her honor be salvaged, and on June 14 of that year, they were married at the home of the then general, all as previously described in this diary. The couple do not match each other. Leclerc is serious, his face in a perpetual frown, while his bride is frivolous and quick to laugh. She continues her flirtatious ways, while he blushes at attention from other women. In October of this year, realizing how tenuous is this union and aware of the scandal already growing concerning Pauline’s ill-concealed infidelities, the First Consul appointed Leclerc to put down the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue. ^ 3 She refused to go despite the pleas of her new husband, who in desperation appealed to her brother. Pauline also refused him. Under no illusions as to the scope of the scandals Pauline would create if left alone, Napoleon ordered a sedan chair to be brought to his sister’s home by ten of his largest grenadiers. The soldiers strapped her into the chair and marched her to a carriage in which she was sent to the port and bodily carried aboard ship, screaming and cursing. The First Consul is well shed of her. A strange thing happened as the ship slipped its moorings and let the tide take it from the quay. I was sitting in the carriage with the First Consul when General Leclerc appeared at the rail with what looked very much like the selfsame box the First Consul had held so dear when we departed Egypt. Leclerc held it aloft for the First Consul to see. The First Consul replied with a salute, and Leclerc turned and disappeared from view.
1 Josephine thought her husband was to arrive at Le Havre and rushed there to meet him in hopes of squelching the news of her multiple adulteries. Napoleon was in Paris before she caught up to him.
2 Junot was the only general of Napoleon’s staff at this time who did not eventually achieve the rank of marshal of France. Could it be Napoleon blamed him for his wife’s indiscretions, a killing of the messenger?
3 She was born Marie-Josephe-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie. “Josephine” was the name Napoleon gave her.
4 Robespierre was overthrown and sentenced to the guillotine himself. A much-admired orator, he was on the scaffold addressing the mob when someone shot him in the jaw. He went to his death mute. Thus ended the Terror.
5 Martinique.
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
