The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  And then the executioner took a step back and released the gleaming blade. It hurtled down with a rattle and a crash. When the head was displayed-its mouth open, its eyes bulging wide-a cheer like nothing the marquis had ever heard before went up from the happy crowd.

  Chapter 28

  When Escher came up out of the Metro at the Pigalle station, he was more than satisfied with his day’s work.

  Breaking into the suite at the Crillon had been no trouble at all, and although David had taken his precious valise with him, both he and Olivia had done him the great favor of leaving their laptops in the room. Ernst had spent so many hours opening, downloading, and transmitting their various files that he had had to order up some room service. He’d had lobster, champagne, and a perfect lemon souffle. Why not?

  But what a strange haul it had been. Franco’s files included everything from a gallery of Bronzino’s portraits to treatises on ancient glassblowing techniques. And the woman’s? Hers were even crazier, ranging from mythology to mesmerism, Egyptian burial practices to Nazi training manuals. Just like the bookshelves at her apartment. For Escher, who was usually forced to operate on a strictly need-to-know basis, it was nice to get a glimpse, however inscrutable, of what his quarry was up to, and what it was that Schillinger and his mysterious overseers might be after. He always liked to know more than his employers thought he did.

  As he crossed the alleyway, he glanced up to see lights on in his room. Jantzen must be back. But when he came through the doors, the concierge furtively waved him over. She had just been eating candy, and her fingers were sticky with caramel. “You have visitors upstairs,” she muttered.

  “How many?”

  “I’m not sure. There were three, but I think a couple left.”

  Escher certainly wasn’t expecting anyone, and he asked the old lady to wait five minutes and then go upstairs to offer a turn-down service. Going back around the alley, he climbed the fire escape as quietly as he could. When he got to the top floor, he crept to the window and looked inside through a part in the curtains.

  There was no sign of Julius, but a man in white shirtsleeves and a red necktie was sitting in a chair right between the beds. A man he didn’t know, holding Escher’s own gun in his hands.

  God damn it. Escher, knowing it would have been confiscated at the Louvre security desk, had left the gun behind.

  There was a knock on the door and the man stood up silently, holding the weapon steady, with both hands, in front of him. This was no amateur.

  The concierge unlocked the door, and with fresh towels in her arms, came in. The man hastily slipped the gun under the bedclothes, and Escher could hear the old lady apologizing for the intrusion. While the gunman was distracted, claiming to be waiting for his friends to return, Escher slipped his fingers under the window and raised the frame a foot or more.

  When the old lady left, the man tossed the towels on the bed and resumed his vigil.

  Escher no longer had to guess what the others had left him behind to do.

  It was only a matter of minutes before the gunman noticed the draft in the room, and the curtain billowing out. Escher could see him debating whether or not to get up, but then, putting the gun on the bed, he got up, stretched and rolled his neck. Escher flattened himself against the brick wall of the hotel and waited. A few seconds later, the curtain was pulled back, but instead of trying to close the window, the guy did Escher a favor and opened it wider. Escher’s hand shot out and snagged his necktie, then yanked his head out the window. With his other hand, he clubbed him in the face. The man’s hands groped at his assailant, but Escher twisted the necktie tighter. The guy was halfway out and already strangling when Escher shoved the window down on his shoulder blades.

  The wind went out of him, and Escher used the moment to stand up and stamp on the back of his neck. There was a nasty crunch, and Escher stamped again. The body was twitching when Escher dragged it all the way out and rolled it, like a heavy bag of laundry, over the edge of the fire escape. It plummeted onto an array of trash cans, making an enormous crash, before slumping out of sight behind them. Escher held his breath, waiting for any reaction from a neighboring window or passerby, but it was a cold night, windows were closed, and in this neighborhood people knew better than to stick their nose in where it wasn’t wanted.

  Bending double, he slipped into the room, and quickly retrieved his Glock 9mm. The ashtray was filled with cigarette butts, one of those flavored Eastern brands, Samsun or Maltepe. He looked all around the room, and then, with his gun cocked, moved toward the bathroom door. It was ajar, and Escher could hear the drip of the faucet in the tub.

  With one finger, he pushed the door open. The shower curtain was drawn, but even before he pulled it back, he knew what he was going to find.

  Julius, his face scrunched up like a rabbit’s, was lying in the water, fully dressed, with a sliver of white soap bobbing around his chin. His skin was blue.

  Escher felt insulted. Not because he’d particularly liked Jantzen, or even trusted him. But it was an affront to him as a professional. Your partner, however incompetent, was not supposed to die.

  Escher swiftly packed up his own things, along with anything that might identify Jantzen’s body-most notably his cell phone and PDA. Who knew what kind of information-marketable information-might be on those? Then he climbed back out the window and down the fire escape. The body behind the trash cans had already attracted some curious rodents.

  On the street, he drew no notice, and as he walked away from the hotel, he reminded himself to send the concierge, along with a few hundred euros, a box of her favorite caramels.

  Chapter 29

  After the blade had fallen, the head and corpse of Marie Antoinette were summarily tossed back into the tumbrel and taken to the Madeleine, an out-of-the-way cemetery on the grounds of what had once been a Benedictine monastery. Although the journey was less than a kilometer, the rue d’Anjou was unpaved and the wheels of the tumbrel sometimes became stuck. It was already midday by the time the cart got there, with the marquis, still invisible, trudging along behind it on foot.

  The gravediggers, unwilling to interrupt their lunch, told the driver simply to leave his cargo on the grass while they finished eating. They had been working for weeks, digging trenches, packing them full, then applying a liberal dose of quicklime to dissolve the remains. As far as they were concerned, this was just one more customer, and she could wait.

  The marquis kept watch from a safe distance, where the head lay on the grass, its white bonnet now encrusted with blood and plastered across its features. Standing beside a stone bench, left there by the monks who had all since been executed, he forced himself to think of happier times, when the young Marie Antoinette, uprooted from everyone and everything she knew, had eagerly accepted his guidance and support through the maze of the most formal court in the history of the Continent.

  And though it was true that she had had her faults-she could indeed be frivolous and wildly extravagant, petty and jealous, fickle and unfaithful-he had yet to find any human being who did not. And her life, despite its outward grandeur, had also had far more than its share of loneliness, lovelessness, and despair. Born in a palace, she had died on a scaffold.

  And at the last she lay a few yards off, dismembered and defiled, on a patch of dirt. When he was confident that the gravediggers were paying more attention to their apples and cheese than to the queen’s remains, he ventured closer. Though any rational man would have thought him insane even to question it, he had to be sure that no magic had prevailed, that the queen was well and truly dead. He was just reaching down to brush away the cloud of flies and lift the bonnet away from her face when he heard someone shout, “I hope we’re in time!”

  Looking up, he saw Hebert himself, his rapier jingling at his side, and his two accomplices approaching the gravediggers. A young woman wearing a kerchief over her head, and carrying a heavy basket, struggled to keep up.

  “Citizen Hebert!�
�� the head gravedigger said, leaping up and brushing the crumbs from his shirt. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “The hell you have,” Hebert said, “but it’s just as well. Mademoiselle Tussaud has her work cut out for her.” With a flick of his finger, he directed the woman toward the body of the queen, and Sant’Angelo flinched. What fresh desecration was this to be?

  As the Chief of the Committee of Public Safety and his cronies bantered with the gravediggers not far off, Mademoiselle Tussaud knelt beside the remains and dug into her basket. The marquis stood stock-still, hardly daring to breathe. She looked vaguely familiar to the marquis, then suddenly he placed her; he had seen her at Versailles, giving drawing lessons to the king’s sister, Madame Elizabeth.

  And now, here she was, with a kerchief concealing her own shaved skull. So she was a prisoner, too, Sant’Angelo thought, one who had no doubt been given a reprieve by the Tribunal so long as she did their awful bidding.

  With the efficiency any artisan would admire, she smoothed a patch of canvas on the ground, then arranged her supplies on it. As the marquis silently observed, she turned her back to the men and murmured to the head, “Please forgive me, madame. I wish you no harm.” The tips of her fingers made a hurried cross on her own bosom… and then she peeled the soiled bonnet away from the queen’s head and laid it to one side.

  Peering close, the marquis was relieved to see no sign of animation. The eyes were closed, the mouth slack and twisted.

  With a dampened sponge, Mademoiselle Tussaud wiped away the dirt and caked blood, dabbing at the drooping Habsburg lip.

  “I am sorry to be so rough,” she confided, as if she was accustomed to such conversations, “but they never give me enough time. A mask needs to be done right, or it shouldn’t be done at all.”

  The death masks of prominent victims had been exhibited in Paris for some time now. The marquis had seen the mask of the butchered Princesse de Lamballe, for example, exhibited in a store window like the latest fashion. But this one, the marquis feared, would undoubtedly be the biggest draw of them all.

  Then, with a handful of rags, the young woman dried the features of the face, and set the head upright.

  “The barber really took a hatchet to you, didn’t he?” she said. “Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I will make you beautiful again.”

  Taking up her hairbrush, Tussaud pulled the bristles roughly through the tangled mat of hair, once, twice, but on the third stroke-just as Sant’Angelo felt sure that his worst fears had not been realized-the eyes of the queen flew open, in an expression of utter bewilderment and horror. It was as if she had been willing herself to remain in some dream, concealed by the bonnet, but now, with these constant ministrations, could no longer sustain her disbelief. The mouth opened, struggling to speak, but the only sound was a wet smack. Tussaud fainted away on the grass, as the famous blue-gray eyes flitted about the cemetery, lost, confused, in terror.

  And the marquis-who knew now, without a doubt, that she had looked into the glass of La Medusa -also knew what had to be done. And swiftly.

  The mouth opened wider, as if to scream, the teeth stained pink with her own blood.

  If he meant to save her from suffering for eternity, he would have to act quickly.

  Running to the open grave, he grabbed the first woman’s head he could find and plunked it down on the cloth. This one made no protest.

  And then, with his invisible hands, he lifted the head of Marie Antoinette, covering her eyes with the bonnet as a final mercy, and said, “Be at peace.” Then he dropped it into the copper-lined barrel of quicklime. There was a hissing and bubbling as the head sank, the caustic brew instantly working to dissolve the skin and devour the bone. In a matter of a minute, the flesh was gone and the skull had disintegrated. Only a few stray hairs stuck up out of the boiling stew.

  “What’s taking so long?” Hebert called out to Tussaud, who was just recovering her senses. “We haven’t got all day.” He was sharing a bottle of wine with his committee members-one of whom still sported the white feather in his cap. Its tip was now scarlet, and Sant’Angelo knew perfectly well how it had come by its color.

  “Even now, this queen keeps everyone waiting,” the man with the bloody feather quipped, and everyone laughed.

  “We’ll have to put that in the paper,” Hebert said. “Make a note of it, Jerome.”

  The third man, with the ink-stained hands of a printer, said, “I won’t forget.”

  The young Tussaud swallowed hard and looked at the head on the cloth, and even if she knew that this was no longer the head of the queen, she knew enough to say nothing. Bewildered, she draped the damp muslin cloth over the face, spread an even coat of plaster, and after allowing it to dry, pried the mask loose and laid it in her basket, covered with a scrap of cotton. Brushing her hands clean on her skirts, she stood up and said to Hebert, “I am done here, Citizen.”

  “It’s about time,” he replied, strapping on the sword he had laid on the grass. “I’ve got a newspaper to get out.” He slapped his tricornered hat back on his head.

  “Tomorrow’s edition should be a sellout,” the head gravedigger predicted, in his most unctuous tones.

  “I’m going to write the whole issue myself,” Hebert announced, snapping his fingers at Tussaud, who was struggling to gather up all her things. “Octave, go help her, for God’s sake, or we’ll never get back to the office.”

  When they had gone, Sant’Angelo waited, as silent witness and friend, until the gravediggers threw all that was left of the queen’s remains into the open pit. Without the head, he was relieved to see, life was at last extinguished. Using the bottom of his boot, the head gravedigger tipped the barrel of quicklime over on top of the bodies, waiting for the brew to sizzle and hiss its way through the carnage. Then, as they started to shovel the dirt in after, the marquis turned and went to exact his revenge.

  Sant’Angelo, like everyone in Paris, knew where Le Pere Duchesne was published, and he waited outside for many hours, watching Hebert at a desk above the printing press, writing in full view of passersby. Page after page flew off his desk, written in the earthy, lewd voice of the titular character, depicted as an angry peasant with a pipe between his teeth. The marquis also caught glimpses of Jerome and Octave, setting type, cranking the press, reading proofs.

  When the work was finally done, it was almost midnight, and they adjourned to celebrate at what was once the barracks of the Swiss Guard. But now that the entire Guard had been slaughtered in defense of the royal family, it was called the Tavern of the Guillotine, and it offered an unequaled view of the scaffold; on the back of the menu each day there was a list of the people to be executed.

  The marquis, still wearing the garland, sat at a table outside, listening to their boisterous laughter as Hebert read aloud passages from the next day’s paper.

  “When the widow Capet saw that she had traded a coach-and-four for a dung cart, she stamped her pretty little foot and demanded that someone answer for it.”

  And then, “With the rudeness for which the bitch was widely known, she purposely trod on the foot of Monsieur Le Paris”-as the executioner was commonly known-“and would have thrown a proper fit if she’d only been able to keep her wits, and her head, about her.”

  It went on like that for well over an hour, but the marquis used that time to stoke his anger and resolve. He rested the harpe, an exact duplicate of the sword he had fashioned for the hand of his Perseus, against the knee of his cassock.

  And when the Chief of the Committee of Public Safety-and publisher of the scurrilous paper-emerged, again with his two accomplices, Sant’Angelo followed them. They were going, he soon realized, to the Conciergerie, perhaps to select some more victims for the next day. The streets were dark and grew damp as they approached the banks of the Seine. The lower level of the prison, where the pailleux were confined like cattle in a pen, looked out, through a grating of iron bars, onto a walkway that ran along the river. It was the only air that
penetrated the dreadful caverns. But the path was narrow and at that hour no one was around, except for the prisoners who saw Hebert through the bars. Most of them were silent as he passed-many had been denounced and sentenced by this very man-but a few could not restrain themselves and reached out their arms to plead for mercy or beg for a chance to argue their innocence one last time. Their frightened faces, grimy with sweat and tears, glistened in the torchlight from within the cells.

  The marquis would not get a better opportunity. Moving up swiftly behind the printer Jerome, he whispered in his ear, “Wouldn’t you like to wash that ink off your hands?”

  The man whirled around and saw only the slick cobblestones shining in the moonlight. But he shouted, “Who’s there?” and Hebert and Octave, who was still sporting the bloodstained feather in his cap, turned around.

  “What are you shouting about? Can’t you see that these people need their rest?” Hebert said with a laugh.

  An elderly prisoner called out to him, “Citizen Hebert-a word, I beg you-just one word!”

  “There was someone right here,” the printer insisted. “He just spoke to me.”

  “And what did he say?” Octave asked, smirking.

  “He asked… if I wanted to wash the ink off.”

  And then, before Hebert or Octave could make some rejoinder, the marquis grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him, his boots scuffing wildly at the stones, to the stone parapet above the riverfront.

  “Help me!” the printer screamed. “Help me!”

  With a mighty shove, Sant’Angelo sent him toppling over the wall. There was a loud splash as he plunged into the Seine.

  Octave and Hebert ran to the parapet, staring down into the swiftly flowing stream, but there was no sign of him. Octave drew a pistol from his belt, and Hebert pulled his rapier from its scabbard.

  But they could see nothing, and no one, to fight.