Linz could no more exist without an adversary than night could exist without day.
There was a cool draft as the bathroom door opened and closed, and a moment later, the door to the shower stall opened. Ali held out a glass of Campari, with a lemon twist clinging to the rim, and then, naked, stepped into the stall to join him.
Chapter 27
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Archduchess of Austria and Lorraine, widow of Louis XVI, who had been decapitated ten months before, had just been sentenced to death herself.
From the bedroom of his Paris town house, the Marquis di Sant’Angelo was awakened by the cries of exultation in the street. The lowly sansculottes, so named by the aristocrats because they wore pantaloons instead of the knee breeches fashionable at court, were running riot with joy. As the marquis wrapped a dressing robe around his shoulders and stepped out onto the balcony, he saw the revelers banging on the doors of the houses they passed, slapping back the shutters, waving their stocking caps in the air. A misty dawn was breaking, and it appeared that it would be a beautiful day for an execution.
It was October 16, 1793. Or, according to the new (and more “scientific”) revolutionary calendar that had recently been implemented, the sixth of Vendémiaire.
“She’s condemned!” a sweaty laborer shouted up at the marquis: he was wearing the tricolored cockade of the Republic on his cap. “The Austrian bitch gets the razor today!”
The national razor was one of the many colloquial names for the guillotine. Every week there was a new one.
The laborer remained there, grinning and waiting for Sant’Angelo to display his own revolutionary zeal, but he received no such response. The marquis knew that it was unwise to appear anything but pleased—he could be denounced and tried and executed himself—but he was not about to betray his true sentiments for even a moment. He glared down until the brute in the street, feeling a strange chill enter his bones, slunk away like a whipped dog.
Still, Sant’Angelo could hardly believe his ears. The queen had been kept a prisoner of the National Assembly for nearly two years thus far, and for all that time, the marquis had awaited some rational resolution of her ordeal. An American patriot then in Paris, a man named Tom Paine, had suggested that she be exiled to his own country, and many others were confident that the royal house of Habsburg would never let a member of its own family perish on the scaffold. They would either send an armed force to rescue her from her terrible captivity—their troops were stationed only forty leagues from the capital of France—or would make some diplomatic arrangement involving an exchange of hostages. (They held several members of the French Assembly as potential bargaining chips.) Failing that, there was always the possibility of a hefty ransom, which was the customary means of rescuing royalty suddenly stranded in foreign and hostile territory.
But nothing—none of it—had happened. For strategic reasons that the marquis could guess, and practical considerations that made any rescue attempt too dangerous to attempt, her allies had decided to remain idle. They were simply going to let this reign of terror that held all of France in its grasp devour the daughter of the Austrian empress, Maria Theresa. Every day, the marquis had listened in horror as the tumbrels rattled over the cobblestoned streets on their way to the Place de la Révolution, carrying the prisoners, condemned at the Palais de Justice, on their last journey. Most of the time, the marquis, whose house stood well back from the main thoroughfare, heard only the catcalls of the onlookers, shouting epithets and taunts, but there were times when he could make out the victims’ sobs and screams, their pleas for mercy or prayers for deliverance, as the open carts rumbled on.
The procession seemed endless.
Indeed, so much blood had been spilled beneath the guillotine that deep trenches had been dug to channel the flood away.
And still the tumbrels kept rolling.
But ever since Count Cagliostro had revealed to him that the queen had not only owned the Medusa but spent a very unpleasant night before abruptly giving it away, he had prepared for this grim occasion. If, as he suspected, she had looked into its depths, if the moonlight had caught her reflection in the beveled glass, then the fate that awaited her now might be unthinkably horrifying. As the creator of the mirror, it was his duty to come to her aid, at any cost.