before him, had been a pro… and as soon as he had shown signs of getting close to the center of the web, Rigaud, on instructions from Linz, had plucked him up, flown him by helicopter to the chateau. After a bit of casual interrogation, they had dropped him down the ever-reliable oubliette. It was all like a game of chess, and if removing Palliser was like taking the queen, dispensing with David and Olivia would be like eliminating a couple of pawns. They were less trouble alive than dead.
At the hotel, Rigaud and Ali surveyed the lobby, just on the off chance that the two young sleuths were there, then went up to their own suite. As Ali called room service, Rigaud, getting undressed, called out to him to order his usual-a Campari and soda, with a twist of lemon. Then he stepped into the shower and turned the hot water on full blast.
He let his head hang down under the spray, his ropy, well-muscled arms leaning on the wall, and thinking, not for the first time, what an empty game it all was. Linz already had what he wanted; his position was unassailable. But he always kept his guard up, always kept his network of spies and loyalists, experts and assassins, working for him. He lived for intrigue-what else was there?-and the possibility, however remote, that someone, somewhere, might stumble upon some dark secret or device that he had so far overlooked. Sometimes, Rigaud suspected that he did it just to keep his mind alive and his spirits engaged.
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 Vendemiaire.
“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 Revolution, 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.
Throwing off his robe, he dressed quickly in the priestly black vestments he had set aside in the armoire and concealed the garland under his starched white collar; then he hung the harpe -the short sword with its distinctive notched end-beneath his robe and stuck a sack of gold coins in his pocket. Racing down the stairs with a letter and a breviary in hand, he passed Ascanio and warned him to have the carriage ready for a hasty departure to the Chateau Perdu later that day.
“Keep the horses in harness and the curtains drawn!” he bellowed, as he raced into the streets of Paris.
Although the queen had been interrogated for the past two days, the sentence of death had only been passed at four in the morning, and the whole city was abuzz. Everywhere, people were gathered at street corners, or in the doorways of shops and taverns, chattering away, laughing, slapping each other on the back, singing a few bars of “La Marseillaise.” It was a holiday mood, and Sant’Angelo’s heart sickened.
What did they truly know of the woman who had been sentenced?
He, too, had heard the vile stories that had been spread for years.
That she had purchased a diamond necklace with two million livres stolen from the national treasury.
That she and her loyal retainers Lamballe and Polignac had enticed the members of her Swiss Guard to join them in orgies at Le Petit Trianon.
That she had advised the starving peasants, who had no bread, to eat cake.
But all of the stories, he knew, were lies-lies designed to sell papers and pamphlets. Calumnies whose sole purpose was to inflame the mob and feed the fires of the Revolution-fires that needed constant stoking. For all of their talk of reform and revolution, the likes of Danton and Robespierre and Marat had plunged the country into even greater turmoil and despair, into war with neighboring countries and abject poverty at home. If these self- anointed leaders did not keep the people aroused with calls to preserve the Revolution, or to defend it from one imaginary foe after another, then the people might shake themselves awake from the trance they were in and begin to question the very men who had drenched their streets in blood and made France a pariah among the civilized nations of the world.
Even his clerical garb, with his broad-brimmed black hat shielding his face, made Sant’Angelo an object of unwelcome attention on the streets. Much of the clergy had been purged, and only those priests who had taken the constitutional oath were permitted to perform the customary ecclesiastical functions. Marie Antoinette had never wavered from her firm Catholic faith, and the marquis knew that she would never admit to her presence-
