on his single suitcase, he headed for the kitchen, nearly colliding with a waiter. The surprised cook staff watched him walk briskly to the rear and exit a door. He found himself in a short hall leading to a loading dock. In seconds, he was in an alley. Scabrous dogs competed with rats the size of cats among trash cans overflowing with rotting food that smelled bad enough to bring bile to the back of Lang’s tongue.
A couple of the dogs growled defensively at the potential rival as he hurried to the daylight at the end. He reached a street just as one of the city’s aging yellow three-car trams made a stop at a corner fifty feet or so away. Yellow meant the tram was part of the east line, toward the terminal. Blue would have denoted west line, or so Lang remembered from the brief information he had read on the flight. Since the numbers and routes posted on the front were in Arabic script, he could not be sure of the destination. The important thing was to get away from here, not where he might be going.
He was careful to approach the first car, not the middle, the one reserved for women. Reaching in his pocket for a handful of piastres, he climbed aboard and held out his palm for the motorman to select the fare. No doubt the man would include a generous tip for himself, but Lang was not in a position to haggle.
The car was full, its worn seats crowded. Lang stood as the car clanked along its rails at a walk. Periodically, he twisted around for a glimpse out of the dirty windows. No one seemed to be following, and if he was having trouble seeing out, any pursuer would have equal difficulty looking in. At last, the tram reached Ramla, the main downtown terminal. If Lang remembered the city map, the bus depot was not far away.
The bus depot reminded him of a stockyard he had seen in Texas: teeming, noisy and odoriferous. In fact, the stockyard smelled better. The good news was that the destinations were posted in multiple languages. It took fifteen minutes for him to reach the front of the line and purchase a ticket to Cairo. Other than a few municipal police vainly trying to keep order, he saw little in the way of an official presence. He had arrived at the depot before the security police had had time to post men at all departure points.
A few minutes later, he boarded a bus that could have begun life as a 1950s Greyhound, definitely not one of the “Superjet” buses of the Arab Union transport company, with the impala on its side, which boasted all the comforts of air travel including videos and hostesses walking the aisle to sell high-priced snacks. He could not afford the luxury of waiting for more suitable transportation. Sooner or later the security police would be covering the bus terminal.
The moment he shoved his bag into the overhead rack, he was assaulted by a cloying heat that only the movement of air through the open windows would diminish. The price of a ticket apparently did not include air- conditioned comfort. A quick glance toward the back, the women’s section, confirmed it did include toilet facilities, though how functional remained to be seen. Lang was glad he had not succumbed to the temptation to down another cold Stella before departing the hotel.
His seat was on the aisle next to a bearded man wearing a white skullcap. His fingers constantly moved a string of beads through them as his lips moved in silent prayer. As Lang slid into his seat, the man paused long enough to give him the disdainful glare a true believer reserves for the infidel.
Ah well, Lang hadn’t been looking for a chatty seatmate, anyway.
As the bus rumbled through Alexandria’s outer slums, Lang remembered Rossi’s button. Hadn’t taken it to the museum, hadn’t exactly had time to. He took it out of his pocket, emptied it into his palm and frowned at the encircled 12 on the front and the inscription on the back.
Where had he seen that before?
The possibility dawned like an Old Testament prophet’s revelation. A long-ago visit to Les Invalides in Paris, site of Napoleon’s elaborate tomb. The upstairs of the former military hospital was a museum of French military glory with battle flags, uniforms and arms. Each room represented a different period. The largest by far was of the Napoleonic era, the rooms dwindling in size in proportion to France’s military prowess. World Wars I and II were little more than the average bedroom, Indochina and the siege of Dien Bien Phu by the Vietcong a closet.
The largest display, that of the Napoleonic Wars, included some of the uniforms worn by Bonaparte’s troops. Lang had marveled at the diversity that had been implemented in 1811. Red pom-poms, for instance, on line troops, red plumes on the shakos of fusiliers, yellow lining on the lapels of others. He supposed the different battle dress had served as a form of communication, allowing the commander to actually see what parts of his army were where. The differences, though, even applied to the smaller details of the uniforms, like this button. Numbers had been fairly common, denoting the wearer’s organization, in this case the Twelfth Brigade.
He turned the button over again. “Fenson amp; Co. Brux.” The Brux. was an abbreviation for the French word for Brussels, home, most likely, to Fenson amp; Co. He leaned back, trying to find what little softness remained in the shabby bus seat. Most of the seat’s foam stuffing had spilled out through a series of cracks and tears long ago, and the Browning in its holster was jabbing at his back. At the same time, he turned the significance of the button over in his mind. A Napoleonic uniform in what was possibly a Macedonian tomb that predated Bonaparte by over two millennia?
The idea wasn’t as absurd as it first seemed. Someone had intentionally sealed off the main burial chamber, someone who had had to use a smoking candle or oil lamp. Hadn’t Napoleon spent time in Egypt? Of course he had. It was his troops, or one of the scientists, the savants, who accompanied them, who had found the Rosetta Stone. It was highly probable they had found and explored the tomb in Alexandria as well. But why close it off?
He stared across his seatmate, now gently snoring, and watched the desert glide by, occasionally replaced by palmfringed green fields along the sluggish brown Nile. Where the river was hidden by levees, its course was marked by the triangular sails of feluccas, small craft virtually unchanged since the time of the Pharaohs.
Lang forgot the scenery. It was time to devise a plan.
From the diary of Louis Etienne Saint Denis, secretary to Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France Tuileries, Paris June 1, 1815 The mob cheered the emperor today as they have each day since his return from Elba. ^ 1 He has all but completed the restoration of his officer corps who have, in turn, reorganized the Imperial Army, men who served with the emperor before and will gladly do so again. It is good to be away from Elba. We had barely arrived when we received news of the death of Josephine. ^ 2 Though the emperor took his duties as the island’s ruler seriously, making many improvements, ^ 3 he soon tired of such banal chores and longed to return to the task he viewed as given him by fate, uniting all of Europe. Once, brooding upon this unfinished task, he asked his mother what he should do, to which she replied he should fulfill his destiny. I know not if these words inspired him to complete his escape plans, of which few of us were aware. The Congress of Vienna ^ 4 has declared the emperor an outlaw and is raising armies to meet him. It will not be long before he must take to the field again. It was with this in mind, I believe, that he spoke to me last evening. After the usual polite inquiries into the health of myself, my wife and children, he remarked upon the uncertainties of war, a fact I suppose is much in his mind of late. I bespoke my certainty of his success in the coming campaigns. Then, he spoke most strangely, saying, “Saint Denis, you have been a loyal servant. It is in your name I leave that which is my most dear possession.” I took this to mean he intended to bequeath to me some treasure for my long service upon his death and endeavored to convince him I expected his demise no time soon. I much desired, though, to know the nature of this legacy to be bestowed upon me. He must have sensed my eagerness to know more, for he added, “It is upon the heel of a return from anonymity” At first, I thought I had not heard correctly, the phrase was so odd and seemingly out of context. Before I could further query, one of the emperor’s generals, I believe Marshal Ney, insisted upon an immediate audience. ^ 5
1 At his forced abdication and May 1814 exile to an island off the Tuscan coast, Napoleon was given the duty of ruling it and its twelve thousand inhabitants. He arrived with his mother, his sister Pauline and one thousand men who agreed to go with him, including Napoleon’s mistress and their illegitimate son and Saint Denis. Napoleon’s second wife and their legitimate child refused to come or, for that matter, answer his letters. By means still not certain, he eluded over a hundred guards and a British frigate, escaped the next February and returned to Paris March 20, 1815. The recently installed Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, fled. The police sent to arrest Napoleon knelt before him and joined his army which, like the phoenix, quickly arose from the ashes of its own destruction.
2 May 29, 1814. Though she and Napoleon had divorced so he might sire a son, they continued to exchange letters. He spent the last days before his exile at her home at Malmaison.
3 The water-delivery system, for instance.
4 The first such gathering of representatives of European states since the days of the Holy Roman Empire (see the author’s monograph, “The Holy Roman Empire: Neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire,” University of Paris Press, 2006). The Congress of Vienna had been convened to decide how to undo what most crowned heads of Eu rope viewed as the damage Napoleon had done to the old status quo, most particularly, the institution of royalty.
