Ethan Gage Collection # 1 Read Online Free PDF Page B

other.” I was still an occasional participant because of its social connections. France had thirty-five thousand members in six hundred lodges, a fraternity of the able so powerful that the organization had been accused of both fomenting the revolution and conspiring to reverse it. Washington, Lafayette, Bacon, and Casanova had all been Masons. So had Joseph Guillotin, who invented the guillotine as a way to alleviate the suffering of hanging. In my country the order was a pantheon of patriots: Hancock, Madison, Monroe, even John Paul Jones and Paul Revere, which is why some suspect my nation is a Masonic invention. I needed advice, and would turn to my fellow Masons, or to one Mason in particular: the journalist Antoine Talma, who had befriended me during my irregular lodge visits because of his bizarre interest in America.
    â€œYour red Indians are descendants of ancient civilizations now lost, who found serenity that escapes us today,” Talma liked to theorize. “If we could prove they are a tribe of Israel, or refugees from Troy, it would show the path to harmony.”
    Obviously he hadn’t seen the same Indians I had, who’d seemed cold, hungry, and cruel as often as they were harmonious, but I could never slow his speculations.
    A bachelor who didn’t share my interest in women, Antoine was a writer and pamphleteer with lodgings near the Sorbonne. I found him not at his desk but at one of the new ice-cream cafés near the Pont Saint-Michel, nursing a lemonade he claimed had curative powers. Talma was always faintly ill, and continuously experimenting with purgatives and diets to achieve elusive health. He was one of the few Frenchmen I knew who would eat the American potato, which most Parisians regarded as fit only for pigs. At the same time, he was alwayslamenting that he’d not lived life fully enough and longed to be the adventurer he imagined me to be, if only he didn’t have to risk a cold. (I’d somewhat exaggerated my own exploits and secretly enjoyed his flattery.) He greeted me warmly as always, his young features innocent, his hair unruly even after being cut short in the new Republican fashion, his day coat rose-colored with silver buttons. He had a broad forehead, wide, excited eyes, and a complexion as pale as cheese.
    I nodded politely at his latest remedy and asked instead for a wickeder drink, coffee, and pastry. The black brew’s addictive powers were periodically denounced by the government to obscure the fact that war made the beans hard to come by. “Could you pay?” I asked Talma. “I’ve had something of a mishap.”
    He took a closer look. “My God, did you fall down a well?” I was unshaven, battered, dirty, and red-eyed.
    â€œI won at cards.” I noticed Talma’s table was littered with half a dozen failed lottery tickets. His luck at gambling didn’t match my own, but the Directory relied on his kind of dogged optimism for much of its financial support. Meanwhile the café’s gilt-bordered mirrors, reflecting endlessly, made me feel entirely too conspicuous. “I need an honest lawyer.”
    â€œAs easy to find as a scrupulous deputy, vegetarian butcher, or virginal prostitute,” Talma replied. “If you tried lemonade, it might help correct such fuzzy thinking.”
    â€œI’m serious. A woman I was with has been murdered. Two gendarmes tried to arrest me for the deed.”
    He raised his eyebrows, not certain whether I was joking. Once more, I had trumped his voyeuristic life. He also wondered, I knew, whether this was a tale he could sell to the journals. “But why?”
    â€œThey had as witness a lantern bearer I’d hired. It was no secret her chamber was my destination: even Count Silano knew.”
    â€œSilano! Who’d believe that rascal?”
    â€œPerhaps the gendarme who discharged a pistol ball past my ear, that’s who. I’m innocent, Antoine. I