Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (74 page)

‘He nurses some private blood feud against me.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tannhauser. ‘I haven’t asked him.’

The
Lieutenant Criminel
of Paris balanced on his one good knee behind his polished oak desk. His eyeballs vibrated in his brain-slaked face. The blood-and-mucus-wetted ruff dangled from his mouth like some obscene tumour. He swayed and uttered a medley of muffled cries. With his crossed hands he might have been engaged in some bizarre form of prayer. Perhaps he was.

Orlandu made some sound in his throat.

‘Save your pity,’ said Tannhauser, ‘and if it be disgust, swallow it.’

Tannhauser had moulded this gruesome clay with little feeling. Now he was angry. He questioned the rightness of none of what he had done. It had been necessary. But it affronted him that such grim labours had been set by so base a hypocrite; and that such trash should have corrupted his son. He laid the crossbow on the desk.

‘You, policeman, look at me.’

Le Tellier tried. It was beyond him. He dropped his eyes.

‘Your former acolyte wants to hear your confession, though since neither of us have the power to absolve you, you will shortly join the damned.’

The Catholic fanatic was not unaware of his eternal destiny.

‘You will answer me by nodding,’ said Tannhauser. ‘Nod.’

Le Tellier nodded.

‘You paid for Carla to be murdered in order to torment me.’

Le Tellier nodded.

‘When you learned I was in Paris, you hired bravos to deliver me to you.’

Le Tellier nodded.

‘With Carla captive, you hoped to make me watch her die.’

Le Tellier started to sob.

‘You knew she was pregnant,’ said Tannhauser. ‘Answer.’

Le Tellier nodded.

‘You did this for revenge.’

For the first time, Le Tellier looked at him. He nodded.

‘And before you had me killed,’ said Tannhauser, ‘you were counting on the pleasure of telling me why I deserved a punishment so vile.’

Le Tellier nodded. Squeezed tears dribbled into his beard.

‘If I take the rag from your mouth, will you tell me what it was I did to earn your hatred?’

Le Tellier didn’t need to nod. His desperation to accuse the guilty of his crime blazed brighter than hope. He nodded thrice.

‘Good,’ said Tannhauser. ‘Because I don’t want to know.’

Le Tellier didn’t believe him.

Orlandu did. He walked around the table and reached for the gag.

‘Leave it where it is,’ said Tannhauser.

‘I want to know,’ said Orlandu.

‘You have no say in this.’

Orlandu confined his pain to the blackness in his eyes.

‘There are many with cause to curse the day I was born,’ said Tannhauser. ‘I need no more cause to remember this one.’

‘Won’t it haunt you?’

‘If I were the type to be haunted, I would be insane.’

Le Tellier garbled. Tannhauser looked at him.

‘Whatever I did to you or yours, I feel no morsel of regret. Your revenge and your reasons mean nothing to me. Your anguish means nothing at all.’

Le Tellier struggled to take this in. His eyes became deranged.

Tannhauser leaned forward and stared into them.

‘And before I leave this city, of which you believed yourself master, I will butcher your son.’

Le Tellier mewled through his gag.

Tannhauser drew his sword.

‘Let me kill him,’ said Orlandu.

Tannhauser swallowed on something sour.

‘In Malta, as brothers, we faced honourable foes, and I took pains not to let you take a single life. There is no honour in taking this one.’

He took Orlandu to the window and opened it.

‘Nor in taking these.’

He let him see the shameful doings on the gore-blackened strand.

‘There are your Pilgrims. There’s your war.’

Orlandu held onto the sill with his one good hand.

‘Our war,’ said Tannhauser, ‘for I’m guiltier than thee.’

He left Orlandu to make of it what he would.

He returned to Le Tellier.

He lifted the policeman’s chin with the sword for a clear stroke.

‘And so,’ said Tannhauser, ‘to the burning lake below.’

Le Tellier’s eyes brimmed with a final vision of horror.

Tannhauser swung two-handed and cut him clean through the nape.

Le Tellier’s bald head bounced across the desk and rolled at Christian’s feet. A tide of blood swept the oak and set papers to floating. The broken corpse dropped and dangled from the bolt.

Tannhauser took the cup of wine and drained it. It was excellent. As he put it down, one of the papers caught his eye. He recognised the handwriting.

La Fosse.

In the turmoil above he hadn’t grasped the significance of Boniface’s presence.

He looked at Petit Christian, who was leaning against the wall by the door.

‘Playwright, you gave the letter I sent you to Le Tellier.’

‘No, no, sire, that is, it was not my intention to do so, but Boniface –’

‘You have one last chance to save your life. Tell me their stratagem.’

Petit Christian was an animal of the sort that is quite unable to believe in its own doom, no matter how compelling the signs. While he lived, he thought he would survive.

‘You ordered me to meet you at midnight, sire, under the gallows in the Place de Grève. Dominic and Captain Garnier, and of course their men, are lying in wait, dispersed around the square among the other militia, and the streets thereabouts. They believe you’ll be there early. The letter was the first news we had of you.’

‘So Garnier knows about the printer’s house.’

‘I knew nothing of that, sire, until Frogier, well, in fact it was Le Tellier who told Garnier that you’d massacred nineteen militia. I myself played no part in –’

‘What time are you to take your place beneath the gallows?’

‘Eleven thirty.’

‘Are you to go alone or escorted?’

‘Alone, in case you were watching me.’

They’d give Christian at least five minutes to be late before sending for him.

‘Orlandu,’ said Tannhauser, ‘tell me the time by the clock tower.’

‘It’s just after ten.’

Tannhauser turned back to Petit Christian. ‘Are the Pilgrims on foot?’

‘Dominic, Garnier and Thomas Crucé are mounted.’

Three minutes to get here, five to recover their wits, three to get back to the Place de Grève, ten at least to rally the troops and move them out. Call it midnight. Move out where? He had to assume that they had more wit than they’d shown so far.

The Porte Saint-Denis was still Tannhauser’s best option.

The Temple, and the protection of the knights, lay beyond the Place de Grève, or at the end of a long detour. That problem hadn’t changed: persuade some night guard to open the gates while he conducted a broil in the street, for the Temple was the one place the militia were sure to blockade. They could hide, as Grymonde had suggested, but could he hide so many? And for how many days? By which time Dominic might have the Châtelet, and worse, on their track.

He had to find Carla and Pascale and get back to the Porte Saint-Denis by midnight. Any later and the torrent of traffic would be against them, perhaps even impassable. They had to be first through the gate. The livestock would slow the militia; but Garnier would be no more than half an hour behind them, and unencumbered by a wagon. Should he go and pick off the mounted men now? No. Pursuit would be immediate. They’d flood the
quartier
. Whatever his own chances, in a running street fight the wagon would have little or none. Garnier would pursue him beyond the city; that, he didn’t doubt.

He flicked Le Tellier’s blood and sheathed his sword.

He had to make sure that Dominic would join the pursuit. With those two dead, along with as many more as he could cut down, there’d be few among the survivors who cared enough to continue to hunt him. If any were feeling spiteful, there were still plenty of Huguenots left in Paris.

Tannhauser considered his resources for a fight on the open road.

His resources were him.

Under a full moon? Find a spot, strike from their flank. Scatter them like quail. He could double back towards the city and ambush what was left of the covey.

He picked up Le Tellier’s head by one ear and drew his dagger.

‘Orlandu.’

Orlandu turned from the window. His face was paler than ever.

‘In the lobby you’ll find two cuirasses. Collect them and wait. Helms, too. Take that mace with you. Playwright, give me your belt.’

He laid Le Tellier’s head on the desk and cut two parallel incisions in the top of the scalp. He worked the blade through one incision and out of the other, and scraped the strap of skin so formed away from the surface of the skull. He lifted the flat of the blade and the skin strap became a kind of handle. Christian proffered his belt. Tannhauser threaded the belt through the skin strap and buckled it. As he lifted Le Tellier’s head, the wrinkled brow smoothed. Christian gagged.

‘Your master looks ten years younger, wouldn’t you say?’

Tannhauser took the crossbow and herded the pimp through the ante-room and along the landing. He stopped.

‘Garnier escorted Carla to his home.’

‘Yes, sire, precisely, in person.’

‘You told him. In the street below, before he left.’

‘Told him what, sire?’

‘That I’d slaughtered those scabs at the printer’s house. That’s how you got him to come back here so promptly.’

‘No, sire. I told him only that we knew who had killed his men, not that it was you. That’s why he hurried back. Marcel told him it was you.’

Tannhauser kicked him down the main stair.

He followed, dragging the mattress.

He flipped the loop of the buckled belt over one arm of the main chandelier that hung in the hallway. He steadied the suspended head on the tilted apparatus. The neck drained as it gyrated back and forth. The whole face was hauled upwards, the eyes whited, the mouth stretched up around the bloody gag in a crazed smile. The shadows thrown by the candles gave it the aspect of a comedic mask sculpted by a maniac.

It would be the first thing anyone entering the house would see.

Tannhauser stepped back and collected Altan’s weapons from the baluster.

He saw Orlandu, holding the armour with one arm, looking at him.

‘Will that make Dominic scream and run? Or fill him with rage?’

‘First one, then the other,’ said Orlandu.

Tannhauser hefted the cask on his shoulder.

‘Playwright, pass me the mattress, and bring that basket.’

‘You want Dominic to come after you?’ said Orlandu.

‘Dead men settle no scores.’

As Tannhauser reached the foot of the steps – as if to do so were to cast a spell – Grégoire pulled out from some invisible nook large enough to conceal a horse and wagon, and rolled down the street towards him. He grinned and Tannhauser grinned back. Clementine snorted in the traces. Lucifer trotted between her front hooves.

Tannhauser regretted not telling Grégoire to bring some other horse. Yet who better than Clementine to drag a cartload of demons through the halls of Hell?

‘Is it good?’ asked Grégoire.

‘High sides and thick boards. I’ve never seen a finer war wagon.’

He loaded the cask and the mattress. Grymonde emerged from the stockyard, using the
spontone
. His other hand was held by a boy Tannhauser hadn’t seen before. The boy was wet. Estelle came behind them. Amparo sat inside her shirt in the goatskin, cradled against the tiller of the armed crossbow Estelle carried in both hands.

Tannhauser saw Orlandu take stock.

‘Orlandu, my crew. Grégoire, Grymonde, Estelle, and her sister, Amparo.’

‘Amparo?’ said Orlandu.

‘They’re your sisters, too.’

‘My sisters?’

‘Carla gave birth to Amparo this afternoon.’

Tannhauser wanted to dwell deep on the tiny face peering over the rim in the moonlight, but he couldn’t dawdle. He took the bolts from his own crossbow and Estelle’s.

‘Load as you need to. If there’s shooting, hold that breastplate over Amparo.’

He stacked gear and food in the wagon.

He lifted Estelle in after it. He looked at the damp youth.

‘Who’re you, boy?’

‘That’s Hugon,’ said Estelle.

‘I take it the city needs a new chief of police,’ said Grymonde.

‘Le Tellier was just another obstacle,’ said Tannhauser. ‘There are plenty more.’

‘Where’s that little green turd, Petit Chris?’

‘I told him I wouldn’t kill him.’

‘That’d better mean what I hope it means. Let me have him.’

Christian shuffled closer to Tannhauser.

‘He’s going to take us to Carla,’ said Tannhauser.

‘Well, I can take you to Carla,’ said Hugon.

Tannhauser looked at him. Hugon looked back.

‘Hugon followed her,’ said Estelle. ‘He swam across the river, while the soldiers took Carla over the bridge. Then he swam back and Rody caught him, and I shot Rody.’

Tannhauser took off the gold collar. He hung it round Hugon’s neck.

‘Don’t go swimming in this. Don’t try to sell it as it is.’

‘I’m not a fool. I’ll melt it down.’

Hugon slid the shells inside his shirt.

Tannhauser took a rope from the wagon. He coiled it round Christian’s chest.

‘Hugon, which bridge should we take?’

‘They’re all chained, except for the Millers’ Bridge, which isn’t for public use. A covered road runs through the mills, for the grain wagons. It’s guarded.’

Tannhauser cinched the rope. He dropped the ends and turned away.

Killing to cross the river, killing to cross it back. The gate. The road.

For a moment, at the very moment he could not afford to be, Tannhauser felt crushed. By all of it. The blood. The atrocity. The madness. The love. And all of it his. He loved these people. These children who looked to him for a safety he couldn’t provide, a wisdom he didn’t possess. He was a man looking for his wife. That was all. Yet that was no longer true. He looked at the children. The street was deserted, but for them.

‘Go back to your lives,’ he said. ‘You’ll stand a better chance.’