“Where are you?” Hébert cried out. “Who are you?”
But for this last act, the marquis did not want to be invisible. He wanted Hébert to know who was about to kill him. Taking off the garland, he slowly came into view, like an image coalescing from the moonbeams themselves.
“The priest?” Hébert said.
The black cassock whipped around Sant’Angelo’s legs, blown by the wind from the river. The bloody sword glittered at his side.
“Guards!” Hébert shouted at the top of his lungs. “Guards!”
Wordlessly, the marquis moved closer.
Hébert swung wildly with his rapier, all the while retreating, but when a blow came close enough, Sant’Angelo parried it with the edge of his own sword. The clang of the steel rang out through the night air.
The prisoners shouted, “Kill him, Father! Kill him!”
Hébert’s tricornered hat fell from his head and blew along the stones. His face was white with terror, and suddenly he found himself so close to the bars that the frenzied hands of the inmates were clutching at his sleeves and collar. He whipped around, slashing at the arms extended through the grate, then turned again to confront the marquis.
There was the clatter of hooves, as mounted gendarmes, aroused by the commotion, appeared at the end of the concourse.
“Who’s down there?” the captain cried. “What’s going on?”
“Shoot him!” Hébert called out to them. “I order you! Shoot the priest!”
Sant’Angelo saw a musket lowered, and a puff of smoke. The bullet whizzed over his head and clanged off the iron bars.
With a sweep of his blade, he knocked the sword from Hébert’s hand, but a fusillade of shots suddenly ricocheted around him; the gendarmes were galloping down the concourse. Putting a hand on Hébert’s chest, he thrust him up against the seething wall of fingers and hands, hundreds of them, all intent on tearing him to pieces. Like a pack of harpies, they grabbed hold of him, rending his clothes and ripping out his hair, scratching at his flesh, digging in their nails like claws. An old man gnawed ferociously at one arm. A hollow-eyed girl inserted a knitting needle into the back of his neck as delicately as if she were making lace.
Slipping the garland back onto his brow, and holding his arms out as if in surrender to the coming soldiers, the marquis left the prisoners to their deadly work. In seconds, he had melted back into the night.
And as the horses whinnied around him, and the gendarmes swung their muskets this way and that—“Where’s the priest?” their captain cried, waving his sword, “Where did he go?”—Sant’Angelo turned toward home. The streets now were dark and silent, and most of the day’s celebrants were asleep, or lying drunk in the gutter. For the moment, their bloodlust had been sated.
Chapter 30
As he had watched their mysterious stranger descend into the Metro station across the street, David’s first impulse had been to run after him and force him to explain himself, to tell them something concrete about their adversaries. Otherwise, what use were these cryptic warnings?
But he sensed that the doctor—if that’s what he really was—had already taken as much of a chance as he was willing to.
“So what’s next?” Olivia asked. “We could camp out on the marquis’s doorstep, which might get cold, or go back to the hotel.”
Truth be told, neither of those was what David wanted to do; what he wanted to do was climb the wall around the town house, break in through the first window he could find, and scour Sant’Angelo’s collection himself, from top to bottom.
Taking out his cell phone, he checked for messages, but there were none of any consequence. He tried Sarah, got her voice mail, then tried Gary and got his voice mail, too. Every time he called, or spoke to them, his heart was in his mouth, afraid that Sarah might have taken a turn for the worse. Although he hoped for the best, he was always—secretly, and to his own dismay—expecting the worst.
“The hotel,” David conceded, as he pulled his coat off the back of his chair. “You can fill in some of the blanks on Cagliostro on the way.”
Outside, the street was nearly deserted, but on the train platform he felt oddly exposed. There were a couple of men loitering near the tracks, reading papers, or studying their BlackBerries, and though there was nothing overtly menacing about them, David got a strange vibe. He was starting to wonder if the good doctor had given him the willies, or worse yet, dropped something into his drink again. But glancing at Olivia, he could tell she was feeling edgy, too.
“Maybe we should splurge on a taxi?”