The Barbary Pirates Read Free Page A

companions bunched up nervously behind as if we were at the entrance to the maze of the Minotaur.
    “Hello, Isis,” I said warily. “Business going well?”
    “Brilliantly, but how we’ve missed our Ethan! We’d been told you’d disappeared in America. How heartbroken were my concubines! They wept, thinking of you at the mercy of Red Indians.”
    Well, I had spent money in the place. “I’m back, my hair still attached, but newly reformed,” I reported. “Celibacy is good for character, I’ve decided.”
    She laughed. “What an absurd idea. Surely your friends don’t agree?”
    “These are savants, men of learning. I’m just showing them about.”
    “And there is much my girls can show. Collette! Sophie!”
    “I’m afraid we can’t stay.”
    “Is this the Arabian place?” Cuvier interrupted behind me, craning to look. “I’ve heard of it.”
    “It looks like an Ottoman palace in there,” said Smith, squinting through the doorway. “The architecture is quite intricate.”
    “Do you really want to be seen entering?” I asked, even as Marguerite seized my arm with enthusiasm. “I am responsible for your reputation, gentlemen.”
    “And we in this house are mistresses of discretion,” our hostess assured. “Esteemed savants, at least experience my décor—I work so hard at it. And it’s so fortuitous we meet, Ethan, because my assistant inside was just asking about you!”
    “Was she now?”
    “It’s a man, actually. He plays the role of Osiris.” She winked.
    “I’m not of that taste.”
    “No, no, he only wants to talk and wager with you. He’s heard of your gambling skills and says you’ll want to bet for the thing you most desperately wish to learn.”
    “Which is?”
    “Word of your Egyptian friend.”
    That startled me, given my puzzlement about Astiza. I’d never mentioned her to Marguerite. “How could this Osiris know that?”
    “Yes, come in, come in, and hear his proposition!” Her eyes gleamed, her pupils huge and waxy. “Bring your friends, no one is looking. Share some claret and relax!”
    Well, it was against all my resolutions, but why would a stranger know about my long-lost love in Egypt? “Perhaps we should take a look,” I told my companions. “The scenery is worthy of the theater. It’s a lesson in how the world works, too.”
    “And what lesson is that?” Fulton asked as we descended into Marguerite’s grotto.
    “That even looking costs money.” Isis pulled us into the welcoming chamber of her seraglio and my savants gaped at the “Arabian” beauties on parade for inspection, since their costumes combined would be about enough to account for one good scarf. “This won’t take a minute,” I went on. “Go on to the rooms just to be polite. Fulton, buy a girl a glass and explain steam power. Smith, the auburn-haired one looks like she’s got all kinds of topography to map. Cuvier, consider the anatomy of the blond over there. Surely you can theorize about the hourglass morphology of the female form?” That would keep them occupied while I learned who this Osiris was and whether he knew anything but rubbish.
    The savants were so content to pretend it was all my idea that Marguerite should have given me a commission. Unfortunately, she was tighter with a franc than my old landlady, Madame Durrell.
    “And which fancy would you care to tickle, Ethan?” the brothel keeper asked as the girls dragged the savants into a chamber tented with gauze curtains. Negro servants brought tall brass Turkish pitchers. Candles and incense made a golden haze.
    “I’ve adopted rectitude, I said. ‘Be at war with your vices,’ Ben Franklin used to tell me. A regular bishop, I am.”
    “A bishop! They were our best customers! Thank God Bonaparte has brought the church back.”
    “Yes, I heard they sang a Te Deum in Notre Dame at Easter to celebrate the new Concordat with Rome.”
    “It was delicious farce. The Kings of Judah above the entrance are still