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timelier than you think. I need to speak to the right people, men of science.”
    “Men of science?”
    “Men close to the rising young general Napoleon Bonaparte.”

CHAPTER THREE
     
    T he chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet was, at age forty-nine, the most famous student of the guillotined Lavoisier. Unlike his master, he’d ingratiated himself to the revolution by finding a nitrate soil substitute for saltpeter, so necessary to gunpowder. Rising to leadership of the new National Institute that had succeeded the Royal Academy, he’d shared with his mathematician friend Gaspard Monge the task of helping loot Italy. It was scholars who advised Bonaparte on which masterpieces were most worthy of being carted back to France. This had helped make both scientists the confidants of the general and privy to strategic secrets. Their political expediency reminded me of an astronomer who, when making surveys for the new metric system, had been forced to replace his white survey flags, seen as a symbol of King Louis, with the tricolor. No profession escapes the Revolution.
    “So you’re not a murderer, Monsieur Gage?” the chemist asked with the barest hint of a smile. With a high forehead, prominent nose, stern mouth and chin, and sad, lidded eyes, he looked like the weary lord of a rural manor, regarding science’s growing alliance with governments the same dubious way that a father contemplates the suitor of his daughter.
    “I swear by God, by the Great Architect of the Masons, or by the laws of chemistry.”
    His eyebrows barely elevated. “Whichever I happen to worship, I presume?”
    “I’m only trying to convey my sincerity, Doctor Berthollet. I suspect the killer was an army captain or Count Silano, who had an interest in a medallion I’d just won.”
    “A fatal interest.”
    “It seems strange, I know.”
    “And the girl wrote the initial of your name, not theirs.”
    “If she wrote it.”
    “The police claim the width of her final calligraphy matched her fingertip.”
    “I’d just slept with her and paid. I had no motive for killing her, or she of accusing me. I knew where the medallion was.”
    “Hmm, yes.” He took out a pair of spectacles. “Let me see it.”
    We examined it while Talma watched us, clutching a handkerchief in case he could find some reason to sneeze. Berthollet turned it as Silano and Talma had done and finally leaned back. “Aside from the modicum of gold, I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”
    “Nor do I.”
    “Not a key, not a map, not a symbol of a god, and not particularly attractive. I find it hard to believe that Cleopatra wore this.”
    “The captain said it simply belonged to her. As queen…”
    “She’d have as many objects attributed to her as chips of wood and vials of blood are attributed to Jesus.” The scientist shook his head. “What easier claim to make to inflate the price of clumsy jewelry?”
    We were sitting in the basement of the Hôtel Le Cocq, used by a branch of the Oriental Lodge of Freemasonry because of the cellar’s east-west orientation. A table with a cloth and closed book rested between two pillars. Benches were lost in the gloom under the arches of the vault. The only illumination was candlelight, flickering on Egyptian hieroglyphics that no one knew how to read and Biblical scenes of the raising of Solomon’s temple. A skull rested on one shelf, reminding us of mortality but contributing nothing to our discussion. “And you vouch for his innocence?” the chemist asked my Masonic friend.
    “The American is a man of science like you, Doctor,” Talma said. “He was apprenticed to the great Franklin and is an electrician himself.”
    “Yes, electricity. Lightning bolts and flying kites and sparks in a salon. Tell me, Gage, what is electricity?”
    “Well.” I did not want to exaggerate my knowledge to a renowned scientist. “Doctor Franklin thought it a manifestation of the basic power that animates the universe. But the truth is,