The Napoleon Complex Read online

  The Napoleon Complex

  E.M. DAVEY

  For Anna

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One. Ennui

  Part Two. Grandiloquence

  Part Three. The Augur

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also Published by the Author

  Copyright

  complex – noun.

  1. an intricate or complicated association or assemblage of related things, parts, units, etc.

  2. Psychology. a system of interrelated, emotion-charged ideas, feelings, memories, and impulses that is usually repressed and that gives rise to abnormal or pathological behaviour.

  3. a fixed idea; an obsessive notion.

  Far-called, our navies melt away;

  On dune and headland sinks the fire:

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  Rudyard Kipling

  for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee

  Every quotation attributed to a historical figure in that which follows is genuine.

  Part One

  Ennui

  (JAKE)

  Shake your chains how you may, the man is too great for you.

  Goethe, on Napoleon

  Prologue

  The explorer was dying at last. His fever was coming back harder this time, and when he stood the world began rotating: mud huts and reeds, baobab trees and acacia, all of it billowing around him. From the far side of the village he heard a snatch of boisterous song, the blast of an antelope horn. No steam train could get him out of here, no horse – the tsetse flies saw to those. There probably wasn’t a horse in a thousand miles. The rasping of the bush seemed to mesh with the heat and humidity to become a single thing. Something like panic hit the explorer then. He was destitute, a prisoner of the wilderness.

  It had rained for weeks on end, and the clouds unravelled towards the horizon before becoming entwined once more in a knot of black. As he staggered towards his hut the fever peaked in a spasm of hallucination. He heard clicking in his ears, as if he were deep underwater. There was a rumble of thunder, and at this the explorer emitted a low moan.

  He couldn’t resist looking back.

  As if in reply the lightning broke: a trunk of violet-white streaking from the north-west, spreading its forks instantaneously across the sky, like a nervous system spreading out at immense speed. The boom was maddening – it shook the ground – and the explorer clamped his hands over his ears and howled.

  Industry was a known cure for the fever. He had to keep up the pugnacious spirit, set an example for the natives. He fumbled for his field diary, the ink he had made from tree sap and berries. Mosquitoes formed a haze in the candlelight and he swatted them away without interest.

  The journal fell open on a recent entry.

  No rain fell today for a wonder, but the lower tier of clouds still drifts past from N.W. The stratum of clouds is composed from cottony masses, the edges spread out as if on an electrical machine.

  He turned the page, blinking away the hallucinations, and in a trembling script wrote what he thought was the date:

  23rd January, 1873.

  Somewhere out in the darkness came the tortured growl of a lion. The explorer paused, panting with exertion. He whispered the next sentence to himself twice before admitting it on paper: I don’t know where we are.

  Another crack of thunder echoed across the savanna.

  *

  Another crack of thunder echoed across the Gulf of Thailand.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” whispered Jake Wolsey.

  The journalist was standing alone on the balcony of a beach hut in Thailand. It was 5 am, and he had been up all night. He was bare-chested, breathing slowly in and out as if trying to absorb the hedonism of this place through the skin, by osmosis. Koh Phan Ngan was the most lawless island in the gulf, but also the most beautiful. The mountains had a Jurassic quality, pterodactyl wings of jungle unfolding from the sea. He was living in a playground for adults – wild deeds would be taking place that very moment. The sand was a sickle of silver and ridges of rock and jungle flanked the cove, silhouetted against the moonlight. Candlelit gangplanks connected the huts, perched upon giant boulders of granite, like something from Tolkien. This was the most magical spot he had discovered in three decades on the planet. It was his beach, his special place. So he had come back, in the hope that being here would help him. For Jake Wolsey, who could have broken the biggest story in the history of journalism but chose not to, was undergoing a personal crisis.

  Yet coming back hadn’t helped him.

  It had made things worse.

  “Jake?” Her voice wheedled him from the gloom of their hut. “Are you coming to bed?”

  He ran a hand through long blond hair, matted with sea salt. “In a bit.”

  “Hey, you …”

  “In a bit, baby.”

  The lightning had moved away: mushrooms of light diffracting over the horizon, like a First World War bombardment.

  What’s out there?

  Bare feet thudded onto wood; planks creaked as she approached. “Storm watching again?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  An arm snaked around Jake’s neck; the tip of a tongue brushed his throat. “Come on, Jakey. Bed time.”

  Her name was Chloë and she had once been a journalist too, based in Hong Kong. She had quit to become a diving instructor and after she’d packed that in too they had met. He had always found the name Chloë sexy. There was something creamy about it, like rich latte. Chloës were meant to be unattainable to him, far beyond reach. It would have been daft to resist her – bagging a girl with such weapons-grade sex appeal was near-miraculous. But Chloë was not Jenny. Jenny had left him.

  And Jenny was … Jenny was …

  The arm pulled at him, the pull turned into a tug, and Jake allowed himself to be led into the hut. Empty Coke bottles clinked at his feet, rolling across the balcony which wore the signs of long habitation: salt-curled paperbacks, a washing line, candle stubs melted onto the planks. As Chloë led him into the darkness a bar of moonlight fell sideways across her face at eye level, so she momentarily resembled a ninja. She smiled and closed the door.

  Jenny was god knows where by now.

  1

  Jenny was in a restaurant in Bangkok when she saw the boy who changed everything. This was a woman of unimpeachable self-discipline, and most observers would have noticed no change in her body language. But on spotting him she sat with a frisson of extra poise, like a cat in that half-second before it jumps, unaware of its own body despite the static crackling through it.

  Jenny Frobisher looked different. She had brown contact lenses in and her hair was dyed chestnut; she wore fisherman’s trousers and a single dreadlock that her mother would have hated. What would Mum have thought of her new life? Jenny had been pondering this question as she dined alone. She worked for a charity, providing advocacy to village girls tricked into entering Bangkok’s sex trade. That led briefly to thoughts of Jake: his loathing for the business. She recalled a story he’d told her about being talked into one of the strip clubs as an eighteen-year-old. How upset he had been by it all, almost in tears.

  Through the swell of Israeli travellers, elderly Brits and waitresses in miniskirts, she saw the boy.

  In his mid-twenties; scruffy brown hair; tall and handsome in that well-bred, Berkshire way. He was playing the gap-year hippy and sported a Glastonbury wristband – nice touch. But at home this breed wore tailored shirts and cashmere jumpers, timeworn in the fashion of families too affluent to care much about appearance. His limbs were bronzed and lean, his tee
th very white. An undeniably beautiful boy.

  Jenny examined him using her peripheral vision. She had learned the technique at MI6: how to observe with your pupils fixed ahead as the picture is filled in, like a computer downloading detail. Once she was certain, Jenny placed her knife and fork together. She glanced over the road, where a tuk-tuk driver snoozed in his three-wheeled contraption. She produced a banknote and tucked it under her glass.

  Then she leaped out of the restaurant.

  The boy was on his feet, but he hadn’t paid his bill and waiters pulled him back. Already Jenny was on the far side of the street. She planted her left foot on the front wheel of the tuk-tuk. Her right hit the bonnet with a prang, startling the driver awake. Her third stride took her onto the canopy of the vehicle and in two more bounds she had propelled herself off the back and over a six-foot wall.

  She landed on grass. The Wat Chana Songkhram lay ahead. Somehow it felt cooler in the temple grounds, away from the lights and licentiousness of the street.

  The boy was scrabbling over the wall.

  Jenny fled, panther-like, through the compound. But he was a sprinter and the gap between them was closing. She leapt onto the dais, eliciting a scandalised hand clap from an octogenarian monk. Orange-robed figures descended on them from all directions, flames converging on a single point. Jenny reached the far side of the compound, hurtled over another wall and dropped into an alleyway. Cockroaches scuttled away from her feet and pools of some noxious liquid glimmered in the streetlight. Two palms slapped on the wall behind her.

  As Jenny ran the alley widened into a street gym. The pair raced through a press of Muay Thai fighters, brushing limbs and ducking hands. The boy made a grab for her, grasping a handful of shirt. Her front buttons pinged off, the sleeves turned inside out and suddenly Jenny was attached to it only by her wrists, arms wrenched backward like a sprinter crossing the finishing line. Jenny strained against the leash; with a ripping noise she was free again, wearing only a T-shirt. The pair streaked from the alleyway into the choking beeping melange of Bangkok proper. Khao San Road, dead ahead.

  At 10 pm backpacker central oozed with tourists. Stalls sold bongs and throwing stars and cocktails were distributed from an open-top VW Combi; women in the costume of the northern hill tribes palmed off trinkets on the uninitiated. The bedlam was illuminated by a blaze of neon signs: this was a dystopian hive of the future, addled on sex and drugs. The smell was of LPG fumes and cheap pad Thai noodles, greasily sweet. Each pace took them deeper through a babel of tongues. The boy made another grab for her, raking his fingernails down her back and drawing blood.

  “What do you think you’re playing at, bru?”

  He was being surrounded by burly Afrikaners, buffeted from one to the other. The last thing Jenny heard was, Mistreating a lady?

  As she turned away the first punch went in. A figure emerged before her and she jerked to a halt.

  During her years with the British Secret Service, Jenny had encountered thugs and fanatics and wicked individuals. But standing in her path – grinning like a dog grins, his arms outspread – was the person she feared most. A man who was supposed to be dead.

  2

  As the woman he still loved fought to preserve her liberty, Jake was lying on the beach and reading a book. It was about the Battle of Trafalgar and a quote from Nelson’s chaplain brought him up short.

  Our dear admiral is killed. Chaps that fought like the devil sit down and cry like a wretch. I am become stupid with grief for what I have lost.

  He stared out to sea. He breathed out long into his fist and a shudder went through him.

  Stupid with grief for what I have lost.

  He picked up a handful of sand and let it bleed away. His twenties had drifted past either going out with girls he didn’t love or loving girls he didn’t go out with. Then he’d met the love of his life – and let her slip through his fingers. Why had she ended it? He didn’t know.

  Jake had found this sanctuary aged eighteen. That was the era of Alex Garland, when legions of backpackers were tramping across Thailand after their own slice of The Beach. By sheer good fortune he’d found it – a spot discovered only by word of mouth, where the police were paid off and residents dreaded the creep of tarmac towards their corner of the island. Years later he and Jenny would arrive as fugitives on this beach, before one terrible day she had summoned him to sit next to her on the bed.

  Pat, pat, pat.

  He had not known then that each touch of the mattress was a tremor preceding a devastating earthquake which would reshape his life completely.

  I’ve been thinking about the future. I need to do something more than this with my life. I’ve fallen out of love with you, Jake. I’m leaving you. I’m sorry.

  For their mutual security, Jenny ordered him not to contact her. Their panic button would be an online message board for car enthusiasts: if either was in trouble, they should post a coded message. That done, she left him to his beach. Her last words to him: “Stand tall, Jake. Stand tall.”

  He set off up the mountain, heading in a straight line through the jungle until he was weeping and staggering and torn to shreds.

  That was six months ago, and here he was. In his pre-Chloë life, Jake had slept with two attractive girls and two unattractive ones. That made him an absolute slag by Victorian standards, but by the barometer of twenty-first-century London it wasn’t a particularly impressive tally. He was quite good looking, but when it came to seduction he was an absolute duffer. For some reason he was incapable of flirtation: not for him the mystic arts of the forearm touch, nor the look that simmered with meaning. Of the two attractive girls, one was a fluke and the other was Jenny. Heartbreak clichés Jake had ticked off so far included: crying, long walks, a risky telephone call to his mother. Jesus, he’d written poetry.

  After a few months, Jake decided a new lover might help him. With history as a guide, he was braced for the long haul. But strangely enough, this time it was easy. For along came Chloë Fleming.

  Jake was playing Grandmaster Flash’s The Message on his balcony. Chloë complimented his taste – and it went from there. She had a vaguely Italian look with eyes somewhere between green and blue, and long slim legs with dimples beneath each knee that he found inexplicably attractive. He had looked up her bylines in the South China Post, and it was clear she’d been a gifted reporter. She was from Salisbury (his neck of the woods) and they shared interests in history, surfing and old school hip-hop. Were it not for the fact that she loved getting wasted, she might have been designed for Jake. Not only that, she actually liked him. If Chloë couldn’t cure him of heartbreak, nobody could. Jake respected her; he wanted to fall in love with her. He felt if he could achieve this, Jenny would be behind him. He could look upon their love affair with nostalgia instead of tragedy.

  Chloë came to sit with him now, producing the Bangkok Post and a joint. The lead story was about Ebola – another outbreak was raging in West Africa and Sierra Leone’s government couldn’t cope. Banditry and rebellion had sprung up in the vacuum, rival warlords turning on each other; Upcountry had become a cyclone of bloodletting and rapine.

  Jake didn’t read the article, it was all too depressing. But an item on page five caught his eye: the new British Prime Minister Victor Milne had announced the construction of the biggest dockyard in the world on an artificial island in the Thames Estuary; Milne wanted Britain to dominate global trade once more. Fat chance. That ship has sailed, pal.

  When Jake turned the page he gasped. The newspaper rattled in his hands.

  “My god,” he managed.

  The British businessman and historian Michael Beloff has been killed by a bolt of lightning in Jerusalem, his spokesman has announced.

  Mr Beloff, who made his fortune in fashion and telecoms before turning his hand to popular history, was struck dead in the garden of his second home by the Wailing Wall yesterday evening, during a grandchild’s bar mitzvah. Mr Beloff, whose recent biography of Napoleon w
as a best-seller …

  Before Chloë could read the story Jake was away and sprinting across the beach.

  “What’s the matter?” she shouted as he flew across the sand ahead of her. “Why is this important, Jake?”

  He was kneeling in their hut when she caught him. The contents of his backpack were strewn across the floor; a yellowing Telegraph article was in his hand. Jake’s eyes worked across the story like the needle of a seismometer and he sank onto his knuckles.

  An important painting of Napoleon has been bought at auction by Michael Beloff, the mobile phone and retail billionaire. The Peace of Amiens, by Antoine Devosge, was painted to commemorate the 1802 treaty signed between Britain and France after an astonishing run of victories made Napoleon the most powerful man in Europe. The peace may not have lasted long, but …”

  The cutting was eighteen months old. The painter had portrayed France as a new Rome; Napoleon assumed the role of Emperor Augustus. In Napoleon’s hand was a scroll, and on that scroll were characters.

  Etruscan characters.

  Jake was kneading thin air between his thumb and forefinger – as if there was an ether to be felt in it. He stared out of their hut, past a gibbous moon hanging low over the sea which winked at him like the eye of a hyena. Past the Milky Way, to outer space.

  “They’re looking for it again,” he said.

  Someone was at the door.

  “Mister Jake, Mister Jake.” It was a teenager who worked at the bar. “Letter for you.”

  He laughed uneasily. “I don’t think so.”

  “For you, for you.” she insisted.

  “But nobody knows I’m here. How the hell can there be a letter for me?”

  3