The Rosetta Key

Well, resourcefulness can start right now, I said to myself, and I wondered if I and the off-duty crewmen might while away the hours with a friendly game of cards. When I was still in good standing as a savant on Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, I’d enjoyed discussing the laws of probability with famed mathematicians such as Gaspard Monge and the geographer Edmé François Jomard. They’d encouraged me to think in a more systematic way about odds and the house advantage, sharpening my gambling skills.

“Perhaps I can interest your men in a game of chance?”

“Haw! Be careful they don’t take your breakfast, too!”

c h a p t e r

2

I started with brelan, which is not a bad game to play with simple sailors, contingent as it is on bluff. I had some practice at this in the salons of Paris—the Palais Royale alone had one hundred gambling chambers on a mere six acres—and the honest British seamen were no match for the man they soon called a Frankish dissembler. So after taking them for as much as they’d tolerate by pretending I had better cards—or letting slip my vulnerability when the hand actually left me better armed than the weapon-stuffed sash of a Mameluke bey—I offered games that seemed to be more straightforward luck. Ensigns and gunner mates who’d lost half a month’s pay at a card game of skill eagerly came forward with a full month’s wager on a game of sheer chance.

Except that it wasn’t, of course. In simple lansquenet, the banker—

me—places a bet that other players must match. Two cards are turned, the one to the left my card, the one to my right the player’s. I then start revealing cards until there’s a match with one of the first two.

If the right card is matched first, the player wins; if the left card is matched first, the dealer wins. Even odds, right?

But if the first two cards are the same, the banker wins immedi-1 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

ately, a slight mathematical advantage that gave me a margin after several hours, and finally had them pleading for a different game.

“Let’s try pharaon,” I offered. “It’s all the rage in Paris, and I’m sure your luck will turn. You are my rescuers, after all, and I am in your debt.”

“Yes, we’ll have our money back, Yankee sharp!” But pharaon is even more advantageous to the banker, because the dealer automatically wins the first card. The last card in the deck of fifty-two, a player’s card, is not counted. Moreover, the dealer wins all matching cards. Despite the obviousness of my advantage they thought they’d wear me down through time, playing all night, when exactly the opposite was true—the longer the game went on, the greater my pile of coins. The more they thought my loss of luck to be inevitable, the more my advantage became inexorable. Pickings are slim on a frigate that has yet to take a prize, yet so many wanted to best me that by the time the shores of Palestine hove into view at dawn, my poverty was mended. My old friend Monge would simply have said that mathematics is king.

It’s important when taking a man’s money to reassure him of the brilliance of his play and the caprice of ill fortune, and I daresay I distributed so much sympathy that I made fast friends of the men I most deeply robbed. They thanked me for making four high-interest loans back to the most abject losers, while tucking away enough surplus to put me up in Jerusalem in style. When I gave back a sweetheart’s locket that one of the fools had pawned, they were ready to elect me president.

Two of my opponents remained stubbornly uncharmed, however.

“You have the devil’s luck,” a huge, red-faced marine who went by the descriptive name of Big Ned observed with a glower, as he counted and recounted the two pennies he had left.

“Or the angels,” I suggested. “Your play has been masterful, mate, but providence, it seems, has smiled on me this long night.” I grinned, trying to look as affable as Smith had described me, and then tried to stifle a yawn.

“No man is that lucky, that long.”

I shrugged. “Just bright.”

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 3

“I want you to play with me dice,” the lobsterback said, his look as narrow and twisted as an Alexandrian lane. “Then we’ll see how lucky you are.”

“One of the marks of an intelligent man, my maritime friend, is reluctance to trust another man’s ivory. Dice are the devil’s bones.”

“You afraid to give me a chance of winning back?”

“I’m simply content to play my game and let you play yours.”

“Well, now, I think the American is a bit the poltroon,” the marine’s companion, a squatter and uglier man called Little Tom, taunted.

“Scared to give two honest marines a fighting chance, he is.” If Ned had the bulk of a small horse, Tom carried himself with the compact meanness of a bulldog.