Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris

by Tim Willocks

  Tannhauser urged Clementine into a trot.

  ‘If we don’t protect our city who will? The magistrates? The Knights of Malta? And gramercy for your generous contribution to the cause!’

  The street remained empty, the hoof beats loud in the early morning shadow. The shuttered fronts of the houses, some three storeys, some as many as six, showed no signs of occupation, not even kitchen smoke from their chimneys. They could not all be inhabited by terrified Huguenots, but it wasn’t much safer for peaceable Catholics. Only the reckless, the militant and the criminal would venture out this morning. The city was caged by swords. In some form or other every living soul he had met had been afraid. Now that he was so close to Carla, he realised how afraid he was himself.

  The boys at his stirrups ran at full pelt now, each of their steps, should it falter, threatening to pitch them under Clementine’s irons.

  ‘Let go the straps, lads. You’ll find me up ahead.’

  He left them behind and almost at once Clementine cleared her nostrils with distaste. Tannhauser smelt it, too. Burned flesh and hair. Blood. Death.

  Up ahead he saw the old city walls of Philippe Auguste to either side of the road. Petit Christian had mentioned the wall. Three honeybees above the door. On the west side he saw a splendid house, designed with an abundance of glass. In its faith in light he saw the hopes of a new era, of a new way of thinking, of living, of being. The windows were shattered, the door agape. A body was suspended from an upper sill and clots the colour of aubergines were splashed in fantastic patterns on the paving stones below. He didn’t need to see the honeybees.

  He reined in Clementine and walked her slowly past the charnel house in which he had hoped to find his wife, and in which he knew he would find her corpse.

  He saw drag marks in the puddled blood in the street. The half-burned carcass of a maimed dog lay in the gutter. A dead man, naked, lay inside the doorless threshold.

  The body at the second-storey window was a woman, nude and suspended by one ankle from a golden cord tied to the mullion. Her free leg was bent and twisted behind the other. Her throat had been cut by someone with insufficient practice, or will, for the gashes were many and most of them shallow, and some had carved her jaw as she struggled. One breast had been cut off and an attempt made on the other but abandoned. Trickling gore had caked her head entire and was congealed in her dangling hair like melted wax. Dark drips still fell, but so drained was her corpse that her skin was the hue of lard. She looked to be of middle years, perhaps forty. She had been dead less than an hour. As far as he could tell in such a condition, Symonne D’Aubray – if this was she – had not been the most handsome of women, in either face or build. The observation was unkind but he could not help making it.

  Carla was fair.

  The contrast would not have been lost on those who had done this.

  Most windows on all three floors had been broken, which at six panes per casement was a lot of glass; yet little had fallen into the street. Only slings, or an unlikely band of arquebusiers, could have reached so high and done such damage. No sound came from within. He scanned the houses either side of the street, but the Black Death might have swept them clean for all the signs of life they showed.

  He rode through a side alley to the courtyard and garden at the back of the house. Here, too, all the windows had been smashed inwards. The only reason to break so much glass – and to do so had required many hands – would be to create chaos, to distract the defenders while one or more intruders forced an entrance. And there: one window in the first storey was not smashed; but gaped wide open. The main back door was also open but showed little damage, the lock none at all. It had been opened from inside.

  The lower half of the door was streaked with crusted blood. A gelatinous pool, now trampled, had hardened on the outer steps below. The bloodstains puzzled him.

  He dismounted and left Clementine to crop grass and white cabbage. The trampled dirt of the vegetable patch was carved with the tracks of several two-wheeled carts. There were no hoof prints. A palliasse lay on the ground: Altan’s, he guessed.

  He drew his dagger and approached the back door.

  On the flagstones that bordered the house he noticed a raw lump. He crouched and poked the lump with his dagger. It was a man’s severed cock and scrotum. One ball was missing, though its owner must have been past caring. He noted the heavy knocker on the door, and again the congealed puddles, the vertical stains. Someone had been hung from the knocker and left to bleed.

  He stepped inside and stopped and listened. He heard nothing. Several planks had been pulled from the floor just within. They were not to be seen. To his left a door led down into a cellar; to his right was a large kitchen suite that spanned the depth of the house. Glass on the floors. Pantry, cupboards and shelves ransacked and emptied. There wasn’t so much as a wooden spoon to be seen. A little flour had been spilled but not scattered. Burglars who considered flour and spoons worth stealing.

  He thought about that. It was easier than thinking about Carla. He walked down the hallway where numerous feet, many of them shoeless, had trampled through a mass of blood. The blood clung to the soles of his boots. Like that spilled by the back door, it was black and the consistency of warm tar. In the front hallway lay a great deal more blood, this as thick as cold gravy, also well trodden but more recently spilled by perhaps an hour. Glass. Glass. Bare feet hard enough to brave it. His own feet trod on a lead musket ball. He picked it up and found it distorted by impact but without any trace of burned powder. Slings. He had faced them in the grain riots in Adrianople; cheap, but in expert hands or massed attack, deadly enough.

  He examined at closer quarters the body he had seen from the street.

  It was Altan Savas. He was set in a great pool of jellied gore like an edible figurine on a confectioner’s fancy. Rats, as if thus tempted, squatted on his thighs and chest and nibbled at his wounds. Tannhauser kicked them away. He sheathed his dagger.

  He had expected to find Altan dead since the moment he had seen Symonne D’Aubray bleeding from the window. Altan had not been a man to abandon a breach, nor anything else to which he had committed himself. When Tannhauser had bought him from the Sea Knights, in Malta, there had been other janissary slaves in the dungeons of Saint Anthony. Instinct had prompted the choice, that and his broader faith in Serbian mettle. He recalled the words that had sealed their understanding, when Altan, after brief reflection, had said, If, as the price of freedom, you expect me to forswear the Prophet, blessed be his name, you’d best leave me chained to an oar.

  Red Dawn Rising was his Turkish name. In a bloody dawn he had died.

  Their friendship had been the more profound for being without much warmth. Altan had only ever smiled at him after a fight, when they were cleaning the blood from their weapons. During the recent wars, when the countryside had been scourged by rabid bands of mercenaries and deserters, there had been more than a few occasions for such smiles. Looking at his corpse, Tannhauser felt pain.

  He studied Altan’s injuries.

  Altan had been shot in the left eye at close range, with a pistol. His face was blackened and peeled by the powder burns. His skull was otherwise intact. A number of knife wounds were well grouped to pierce the heart. He had been stripped of his clothes and weapons. Large patches of skin had been incised and peeled from his thighs. His killers had taken his janissary tattoos for trophies. They had not taken his privates; but even among killers, to cut off a man’s pizzle took the coldest blood.

  Tannhauser guessed that Altan had captured a forward scout, mutilated him and strung him from the back door to deter and unnerve further intruders. Several candle stubs burned on the hallway floor. There had been light to fight by. A killing floor and choke point. Altan had been ready for those who had come through the broken door and, judging by the quantity of blood, he had killed several. Attacking from the street, Tannhauser himself would not expect to get the better of Altan, and never to get close enough to sho
ve a pistol in his face. His killer must have come from behind. A single shot at close range had taken him unawares, probably intended for the back of his head.

  Tannhauser looked up the staircase.

  The stink of burned hair. Glass and blood and silence.

  Altan Savas had died to protect Carla, but in dying he had failed. Murderers, rapists and thieves came to murder, rape and steal. From what he has seen so far, these villains set few bounds upon their appetites.

  Carla would be up there. Nude, dead, probably mutilated, perhaps eviscerated of her babe. Raped. Trophies taken. He had often seen women used thus, in every corner of the world. Just such a woman – his mother – formed the floor of his memory, for he had no memories at all that predated the last time he had seen her. In that image she was splayed naked and defiled on the flanks of a dead horse. He thought of Amparo, whom he had loved, and then he tried not to think of her, for his last image of her, too, was of an atrocity he had failed to prevent.

  Now Carla was a victim of the curse the stars must have laid upon him in the moment of his birth. It was the price cosmic justice had demanded in advance for the crimes he had been destined to commit. Carla was gone. He had no fears for her soul. What would be the fate of the soul of her child unborn? He did not know.

  He was alive and they were not.

  And now he was free.

  No longer would he have to endure the toil of love, to carry its vast weight, to live with the fear that accompanied it. He would no longer have to miss her, only mourn her. The relief that flooded through him revolted him, but he could not deny it. He would love no more. He would lose no more. He had lost too many. He felt no pity for himself. He neither needed it nor deserved it, nor would it profit him, for whom did it ever? Neither would he suffer. By an act of will he would keep suffering at bay, for its purposeless ubiquity had come to disgust him. Carla was dead and he was free and he would feel free. Free to join hands with the Devil and dance his pavane. Free to cast aside tenderness, hope and joy, and all other trappings of weakness. Free to wander the desert places of the world and of his own inner realms. Free to become what Fate, time and again, had invited him to be: a beast at last unburdened from the pain of being a man.

  The staircase was still there.

  So was whatever he would find at the top.

  He didn’t move.

  ‘Master?’

  Tannhauser was leaning forward, hands on his knees, and breathing hard. He had not noticed. He looked up and out into the street and saw Grégoire and Juste. They were concerned. For him. He laughed an ugly laugh. The candle stumps guttered.

  ‘Master?’ Their fears for his sanity were plain.

  ‘Clementine is at the back. Give her water. Juste, come here.’

  Juste stopped at the edge of the maroon pudding setting on the floor.

  Tannhauser waved his thumb. ‘Use the back door.’

  Juste disappeared at a run.

  Did he need to send the boy upstairs?

  Could he not go himself?

  He could; but in matters of squeamishness he was decades beyond the need to test himself. He had enough pictures of dead women graved into the marrow of his mind. If he saw Carla dead he feared it would unhinge his reason. He was in the killing vein. They had murdered his wife. His unborn child. At that thought – and with the thought a sudden cascade of sounds and visions: her voice at daybreak, her face in the throes of passion, the laughter she reserved for his follies – his every muscle clenched in a paroxysm. He thirsted for absolute destruction, for absolute waste, absolute chaos, absolute violence and annihilation. He would cleanse himself of the clinging filth of his humanity.

  ‘I will wade through rivers of blood.’

  ‘I brought you some water, sire.’

  Tannhauser turned. He nodded and took the cup. He drank.

  He should go upstairs alone. He decided he would not.

  ‘Juste, I need your help. I want you to go upstairs and look all about, and I want you to tell me everything you see. Everything. It will be ugly. Can you do that?’

  Juste studied him. ‘Yes, sire.’

  ‘There’ll be corpses but you’ve seen your share. To you they are strangers.’

  ‘You don’t want to see your wife dead.’

  ‘Not just dead.’

  ‘I understand. I saw dogs eating my brothers.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Tannhauser.

  Juste skipped up the stairs through the tinkle of glass. He stopped.

  ‘A man lies on the landing, stabbed many times. He is old, older than you. A servant or gardener, I should say. He has rough hands.’

  ‘Good lad. Go on.’

  Tannhauser waited. His conscience nagged him to follow. His gut swilled with dread. His mind, aware of the precipice on which it stood, advised patience.

  ‘I am in the parlour. Dead boys, two dead boys, stabbed many times. A girl, stabbed, stabbed, stabbed. My God. All dead.’

  For a moment Juste didn’t speak.

  ‘At the window is a woman. Her ankle is tied to a golden rope. And the rope to the window post. She is quite old, I think, but not very old, it’s hard to tell. She has been cut, everywhere, and her –’

  ‘I saw her. Madame D’Aubray, I presume. Anyone else?’

  ‘No. Three dead children, the servant, the hanging woman. It is very empty. No carpets, no paintings, no furniture. Not a stick left.’

  ‘Good. Go to the next room.’

  ‘It’s a bedchamber.’

  Tannhauser waited. He drove down his nausea by seeking some thread of logic in these events. The thieves had come for plunder, to kill some wealthy Huguenots. Why not? He had killed and robbed one himself hardly an hour since. But why this house? Their determination in pursuit of such profit as this house offered did not ring true. Burglars wanted easy pickings, not a battle; a defenceless house, not one adorned with the castrated corpse of one of their fellows.

  He looked again at Altan’s body. His killer had breached the upper rear window during the storm of breaking glass. A daring man. A dangerous man. A man whose design – a clever one – had hinged on his own courage.

  The attack must have been synchronised with the assault on the Hôtel Béthizy – signalled by the tocsin – which would not have been possible without forewarning. From some confederate in the militia or the palace guard? The militia had not been thus coordinated; they were late and even now confused. How much forewarning? To prepare an attack on this scale, even with a disciplined crew to call on – to be ready to haul away furniture, clothes and flour, in the dead of Saturday night – would require at least, what? Four hours?

  No one could have taken Altan Savas the way they did without foreknowledge, not only of his presence but of his ability. Had they been mere burglars, even had they come by the score, Tannhauser would have found Altan building a wall with their bodies. To design and execute so elaborate a siege, the killers must have had detailed intelligence of the building. It could not possibly have been improvised.

  More than hours. Perhaps days.

  Tannhauser had worked beyond the law, in Messina, Venice, Istanbul. He could put himself in the shoes of the Parisian criminal brotherhoods. By now every criminal in the city was rubbing the drink from his eyes and staring at the chance of a lifetime. The best would have got wind of the attack on the Huguenots before the police or the militia. Perhaps even before the palace guard. Their people were the lowly – and thus the invisible – who enabled the Louvre to function, who disposed of the royal stool, whose women were raped by the Duc d’Anjou to demonstrate his manliness to his mother. Even so, this crew had sacked the Hôtel D’Aubray, against stiff opposition, and vanished before day had broken. And while there had been booty in this house, hundreds of others offered richer plunder at lower risk.

  This house had been targeted.

  This was not a random crime exploiting chaos.

  This was not bad luck.

 
Neither were the delays that had prevented him from getting here sooner.

  The appointments he had kept but hadn’t made.

  Carla had not been murdered; she had been assassinated.

  The only alternative was that Madame D’Aubray and her children were the targets, and Carla an unfortunate bystander. But that did not explain why he and Orlandu had spent the night in a cell. Or why Orlandu had been shot in the back.

  The assassins had been instructed by someone with advanced knowledge of the plan to kill Coligny and his supporters, a decision that, according to Arnauld, had not been made until late the previous evening. That decision was merely the final assent of a weak king. The plot itself could have been concocted long before; there were sufficient liars and schemers for the job. In either event, this plot against Carla had depended on intelligence from the inner councils of the Louvre.

  He looked up to find Juste coming down. He was pale and scared.

  ‘The chamber has been plundered too – even the mattress is gone –’

  ‘You found a dead woman in the chamber.’

  ‘Yes, sire.’

  ‘Tell me everything.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Is she old? Young?’

  ‘She is not so young, but not old. A normal age for a woman. Thirty years?’

  Carla was thirty-five. ‘What colour is her hair?’

  Juste frowned and looked upwards to think. He shook his head in apology.

  ‘I don’t know. There was a pot on her head.’

  ‘A pot?’

  ‘A chamber pot.’

  Tannhauser’s jaws clenched. Juste retreated one step upwards.

  ‘I took it off, but there was blood, too, a lot. Should I look again?’