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 Hébert 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 Hébert!” the head gravedigger said, leaping up and brushing the crumbs from his shirt. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“The hell you have,” Hébert 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.