Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (21 page)

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?’

‘Is she pregnant?’

Juste hesitated. His eyes darted this way and that.

‘Is she carrying a baby inside her? Is her belly swollen?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘You think?’

‘Yes, she is pregnant, perhaps.’ Juste’s pallor turned red. ‘That is, I don’t know for sure. I can’t. She is stabbed, cut –’ He made vague gestures about his torso.

‘Did you see the baby? Did they cut it out of her? Speak, lad.’

‘No, I don’t know. I don’t know! I am sorry.’

Tannhauser took a breath. ‘I’m not angry with you. Please. Go on.’

‘She is – kneeling, her face down. There are – things – stuck in her.’

‘Things?’

‘A chair. The leg of a chair, but the chair is still complete – ’

Juste covered his mouth, perhaps to stop his words; perhaps his nausea.

Tannhauser turned away. He couldn’t let the boy see his face. He was in the wrong. He should go and look for himself. Yet he felt less able to do so than before. He reached out to pat Juste. Juste cringed away.

‘Juste, I shouldn’t have asked you to see that. Forgive me.’

‘I am glad to protect you. It wasn’t so bad as seeing my brothers.’

‘No. That must have been worse.’

He wondered if there were not some small satisfaction in the youngster’s heart. If there were, he could hardly blame him. Perhaps that was his own malice speaking.

‘Go and wait with Grégoire and Clementine.’

‘I didn’t go up to the floor above.’

‘Were there any other bodies in the chamber?’

‘No. Just – the woman. What are you going to do?

‘Go and wait outside.’

When Juste was out of sight Tannhauser gave in and vomited into the blood caked around his feet. He felt better. He headed up the staircase.

The dead footman, the parlour of dead children, Symonne D’Aubray strung by the ankle from two yards of gold braid, all as Juste had described. The severed genitals lying by the back door had belonged to no one here. The victims had been cut and stabbed numerous times, their hands and arms slashed, killed with enthusiasm but without skill, without knowledge of the lethal organs and vessels. The man who had killed Altan would have known better. His crew were not seasoned cutthroats, but even among criminals, killers were few.

Tannhauser climbed a narrower stair and found two bedrooms, both stripped. In the second room he smelled Carla. Her natural scent. The perfumes she favoured. He quelled a surge of grief. He was not entitled to it.

Fresh soot lay piled in the hearth and was smeared on the floor. Now that he looked back, it was smeared in small tracks out of the door. An old trick. They had sent a little boy down the chimney to open the door. Obviously, he had failed. He was certain Carla would not have permitted the killing of a child.

He saw a chamber pot, half-full. Grief swelled from his chest and up through the bones of his face, a black tide of sorrow and shame, love indistinguishable from penetrating pain. He leaned out of the broken window to the rear and breathed deep. He had scolded Juste for less. Much less. He had slapped him. He choked on some inchoate sound expelled by his deepest vitals.

‘Master?’ Juste’s voice rose from the garden below. He was afraid.

The sound had been louder than Tannhauser realised. He mastered himself.

‘Don’t fear,’ he called in reply.

He had hoped to find a corpse whose head he might have paraded around the fouler taverns of the Ville; but they had taken their dead away with them. No small chore and surely not to honour their fallen. They – he, the dangerous one – did not want to be identified.

Tannhauser left the room and went down the narrow steps. At the top of the main staircase he hesitated. The bedchamber door was just behind him. He should at least cover her up. But with what? Anguish. Nausea. Rage. He did not know how to do the right thing any more. The very notion of right seemed a lie. He could not bear to see Carla butchered and pierced by the leg of a chair. He did not want to smell her blood, or whatever else they had deposited inside her and on her. He had walked through sacked towns the world over. He had seen such things, the same things, the ugliest things, too many times before. He had heard the laughter, the excitement, the glee, of those who thought they were inventing such atrocities, when in truth they were as old as human time.

He could bear it. He took a step towards the chamber and stopped.

The part of his mind that remained always cold stopped him; the part that knew no feeling and mistrusted the parts that did. He would need his judgement. He would need some bridle on his sanity. The coldness, cold as it was and well as it knew him, had no idea what the violation might provoke.

He could not risk seeing Carla as he would find her in that room.

He did not want to remember her that way.

He did not want such an image to join the others.

He could not blind what little was left of his humanity.

Tears rose in his throat and he was ashamed and amazed.

He swallowed them.