Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (55 page)

Tannhauser let him slot the bolt between the fingers of the nut, then embossed him though the chest unto the wings. He swayed from the waist to avoid the spray that blurted black and foamy from the sundered gullet, and he held the fellow skewered against the rail while he stole an extra bolt from his belt and put it between his teeth. He tugged the crossbow from the slackened hands and let the corpse slide from the blade to befoul the narthex. He flipped his right hand to take the
spontone
in a javelin grip, in case he was called upon to throw it. He lanced the one-armed man through the liver and kicked him free of the blade to splash in the shambles.

He strode towards the sacristy door.

The door stood open, just short of the chancel, in the wall of the right hand aisle. It was hinged on the left and opened into the corridor. Tannhauser checked the crossbow. The lath was steel, the bolt holder shaped from a strip of antler. The bolt head looked like a giant horseshoe nail. It was small as crossbows went, as befitted an assassin’s needs, but at forty yards it would punch a hole through plate steel.

He heard the priest begging the last two hirelings to free him, with the desperation of one not ashamed to repeat himself. They had not done so. La Fosse’s bleating must have drowned what little noise the first three had made in meeting their end. Tannhauser craned his left eye around the doorjamb.

The fourth bravo stood in half-crouch, some fifteen feet along the corridor. His back was to Tannhauser. Just beyond, La Fosse stood on his toes, his face tilted up between his pinioned arms, and pleaded with God. His body on the door blocked a good half of the passageway. As Tannhauser had calculated, the geometry had forced the fourth man into a cramped position on the left, requiring cumbersome footwork to turn and fire. Judging by the skittish movements of his head and shoulders, he was trying to see what was going on beyond the priest.

‘Munt! By the shit of Jesus, where are you?’

A muffled shout was returned from his unseen confederate.

Tannhauser strode down the passageway, his javelin arm cocked, the priest’s anguish once again a boon. At his fourth step the assassin heard him but the walls were too narrow to allow him to spin with the crossbow levelled. He had to point the bolt upwards as he shifted both feet to step and turn, then lower it to aim. He reacted with admirable speed but before the vertical arc was half-complete, Tannhauser had rammed a foot of steel through his armpit. The damage to the lights and heart was so instant and so vast, the only sound to mark his death was a bubbling wheeze. Tannhauser booted him from the blade and advanced as far as the shield provided by La Fosse. He nudged him with a shoulder and La Fosse howled.

Tannhauser spoke through the bolt between his teeth.

‘Pray louder.’

La Fosse clenched his eyelids and did his best.

Tannhauser stepped past the priest and was back in the house. He stopped short of the doorway to the main room and stacked the
spontone
by the jamb. He hefted the crossbow. He called, his voice disguised by the bolt and La Fosse’s Latin.

‘Munt? Where are you?’

‘Get out! He’s in the chapel! Schmidt’s dead!’

Tannhauser stepped into the doorframe and levelled the crossbow.

Munt was standing in the rain outside the front door.

He fled south.

Tannhauser strode to the door and used the jamb as a bench to steady his elbow. Munt had dropped his weapon to aid his flight but the target would hardly have taxed a lesser marksman. Tannhauser shot him between the shoulders and saw the bolt vanish. It kicked up water from a puddle thirty paces down the street. Munt arched his back and veered aslant on buckling legs. He slithered to his hands and knees. He looked up towards the crossroads, as if some miracle might be found there. His arms went and his face hit the mud and he stirred no more.

Tannhauser laid up the crossbow on its stirrup and took the spare bolt from his mouth. He stepped from the doorway and waved, even though, apart from Munt’s corpse, he saw nothing of note. Sure enough, and conjured as if from nothing more material than sunlight, Grégoire appeared and charged through the rain towards him.

Grégoire hurdled Munt and clapped his spade-like hands. He laughed as he ran with the strange halting laugh that had first so taken Tannhauser’s fancy. The bald dog cavorted by his ankles, sheathed in a scaly black carapace of human blood. Grégoire spread five fingers. Tannhauser nodded.

Grégoire cocked an ear. ‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s La Fosse thanking God for our deliverance.’

Tannhauser remembered the coffin.

Despair dimmed the afterglow of combat.

‘Fetch Clementine. Haul that body to the chapel.’

Tannhauser dragged Schmidt into the narthex. He searched all three and found twelve
écus d’or
and some silver between them. A doubloon apiece.

He went to the corpse in the corridor and found four more
écus
. La Fosse was trembling and muttering like a man who had lost his mind. In an attempt to persuade the Almighty of his worth, he appeared to be comparing himself to the Thief on the Cross.

‘The Good Thief joined Christ in Paradise, not the good pederast.’

Tannhauser searched him and recovered both his double pistoles. He braced the priest’s hands to the door and pulled the dagger free. La Fosse groaned and slid to the floor. It didn’t seem necessary to tell him not to move.

Tannhauser dragged the fourth corpse to join the others in the chapel. Grégoire appeared, soaked. In Munt’s purse he had found a bowstring with short iron rods attached to either end for grips. By garrotting Munt’s feet with one hand, and wrapping a turn of Clementine’s tail around the other, he had delegated the bulk of the effort to her. He showed Tannhauser four
écus
.

‘At least we’re making a profit,’ said Tannhauser.

‘This is yours, too.’

Grégoire gave him a fistful of small coins, mainly coppers.

‘I sold the shoes. I hope it’s enough.’

The sum was a small fraction of what Tannhauser had paid the day before.

‘You drove a hard bargain. Well done.’

Grégoire nodded.

‘And I commend you on your honesty.’

‘I’m not a thief any more.’

‘We may yet call on that talent, but you’re right not to steal from your mates.’ Tannhauser nodded towards the street. ‘Fetch the crossbows. Remove any bolts and pull the triggers before you pick them up. Watch your fingers.’

Tannhauser laid out Munt alongside his four accomplices. Their blood slaked the floor of the narthex and their mouths and eyes gaped up at Heaven, as if struck down by a peevish god while caught in some arcane ritual of penitence. He wondered if he shouldn’t decapitate them and leave their heads on the altar for Marcel. It was no bad thing to have one’s enemies think one deranged. But Carla’s remains were not yet desecrate, for he had killed them all outside the bounds of the chapel proper, and so it should stay.

He glanced at the coffin. Guilt and grief intermingled in his gut.

He sought further practical diversions.

In the corner behind one door he found a leather satchel. It contained rope and a pair of leg irons, lead-weighted cudgels, spare bolts, half a loaf and a heel of cheese. He discarded the cudgels and leg irons. Grégoire returned and they examined the five crossbows. All were trued and fettled. All were small and could be cocked by a stout back and a strong pair of hands. One was made all of steel and dressed with ivory and silver. The draw weights were double that of Frogier’s bow.

‘If you didn’t grow up in a stable, where were you raised?’

‘Here in the Ville,’ said Grégoire. ‘In Les Halles.’

Whoever had adopted Grégoire from the crib in Notre-Dame had done so not out of charity but to use him as the pawn of a gang of beggars. Beyond a certain age his face had been so repellent that his earnings in disgust far exceeded those in alms. After that he had been used as a decoy and a tout for a variety of cutpurses and snatchers. He chewed soap and feigned fits. He trailed rich men to their homes to furnish burglars. He watched his comrades disembowelled and hung in the Place de Grève. One day he saw some thieves about to steal a horse and cart filled with supplies. He warned the owner, who discovered his own boy was their accomplice. In a fit of gratitude that proved to be uncharacteristic, Engel had given Grégoire the job.

‘So you’d made good,’ said Tannhauser, ‘until I came along.’

‘A new boy means more work for Engel. He’ll take me back.’

‘I doubt that.’

Lucifer trotted in from the street, panting with the air of a dog which, despite its scorched condition, had found a female of the species willing to be mounted. He inspected the dead bodies and selected two to piss on.

‘If you’re going to take him home, he’ll have to be better trained.’

As a matter of fact, not of self-pity, Grégoire said, ‘I don’t have a home.’

‘I mean my home, in the south. Will you come?’

Grégoire stared at him. He blinked his eyes, as if at some inner vision.

‘Yes, master. If we can get there.’

‘I’m not going to die in Paris. And having a varlet seems to suit me.’

‘A varlet?’

‘It’s a nobler version of a lackey, with better wages.’

These details seemed to make the prospect more plausible. Grégoire brightened up. As if eager to be on the road he said, ‘Have you seen your wife yet?’

‘My next duty, and one I’ve put off long enough.’

‘I am sad for you.’

‘Take the satchel and these weapons to the kitchen. Get something to eat.’

Grégoire reached into his shirt and produced a crumpled mass of fabric saturated with sweat and water. He held it out. It wasn’t until Tannhauser made out that it was tied with a sodden ribbon that he realised it was the christening robe.

Tannhauser crossed himself and walked up the nave to the coffin.

The head of the body was pointed towards the altar. He stopped short.

The body was the wrong size.

The wrong shape, length and build.

He lunged forward. The corpse was wrapped in a white sheet with a flap covering its face. He pulled the flap aside. The face was a woman’s, the features waxy, grey, indistinct in the way that death has of erasing character.

But the face was not Carla’s.

Tannhauser dropped the christening robe on the floor.

He had been prepared to feel pain, not absolute confusion. He was relieved that the corpse was not Carla’s, but the relief was abstract, a thought, not a feeling. He had grieved for her. The weight of his grief had almost crushed him. No weight he had ever carried had been so heavy. No substance, not steel, nor stone, nor even love, had ever been more true. And he had carried it. His grief had become him. He had become the man who carried it. It had not destroyed him. It had not driven him mad. Had he had no right to it? Was it gone? How could something so material vanish? Yet in an instant it had and he was emptied. Into the emptiness, he felt fear creep out.

Carla’s death had banished fear.

He turned his back to the coffin wherein Carla did not lie.

Where was she?

Was she alive?

The fear came.

If Carla was alive, he might have to lose her – and mourn her – all over again. He did not know if he could. If he couldn’t, he wouldn’t be a man worth being.

If Carla had not been murdered in the Hôtel D’Aubray, it was certain she had not escaped. Altan’s body proved that. Only death could have forced him to abandon her side. At that point she had been theirs to do with as they pleased, and Tannhauser had seen what pleased them. The only reason to take her alive was for sport. That she was pregnant could appeal to any number of appetites. And they’d had all day to go at it; at her; at her unborn child. Whether Carla was still alive or if they had tired of such amusements and killed her, Tannhauser had wasted the day that might have saved her from either.

That lay at the doors of his guilt and his fear. It had not been grief that had stopped him from climbing those stairs, let alone a weak stomach. It had been guilt, for guilty he was: of failing as a husband; of selfishness and vanity and misguided loyalties; of leaving her alone with child; of every wrong decision he had made since entering Paris; of not getting there in time. It had been fear, for he had been afraid: of fatherhood and its obligations; of the freedom he would lose; of another dead babe. That was why he had lacked the courage to climb the stairs; to face the accusations of her corpse and his conscience. By that act of cowardice he had abandoned her yet again, to monsters, while he grovelled in bloodshed and self-pity.

He had known nothing of guilt and nothing of fear.

But he knew them now.

He would know them forever.

Enough.

Enough of fear and guilt and self-disgust.

All that and forever, too, could wait until tomorrow.

He looked up at the crucifix above the altar. He had believed his soul to be dark; but had known nothing of darkness either. He said no prayer. Light he did not need. Night was falling and only darkness would get him through it.

He summoned cold rage.

Tannhauser strode down the corridor, where La Fosse sat cradling his wounds. He clasped his hands around the priest’s skull, thumbs wedged under the cheekbones, and hauled him aloft against the wall. La Fosse’s eyes rolled like those of a roped cow. As the nerves in his face were compressed, he screamed.

‘Where is my wife?’

‘I don’t know! I tried to tell you she wasn’t in the coffin –’

‘Is she alive?’

‘I don’t know!’

La Fosse’s pain was so extreme he dared in his writhing to grab at Tannhauser’s wrists. Tannhauser kneed him in the pubes. He increased the pressure with his thumbs.

‘Where is my wife?’

‘Do you think I’m keeping it secret? Do you think I fear anything more than I fear you? I fear you more than God. I pray I knew where to find your wife. Christ on the Cross, even they don’t know. Please stop hurting me. Please.’

Tannhauser let go. La Fosse sagged over. Tannhauser shoved him upright.