Page 8 of Love Beneath the Guillotine
He clicked his fingers. “Like Mont-Saint-Michel! Sharp and angular, and very precise, but in a non-deliberate sort of way. Very unique. Singular, one might say—isolated and bold.”
“Beautiful?” Souveraine suggested.
“No, ghastly!” Léon corrected. “He had lips like… like, oh, I don’t know. The curving arches of the Cathedral, perhaps. The buttresses. Those smooth, sensual lines, you understand? The way they meet overhead, lofty and strong, yet comforting, yet forbidding.”
“Sounds awful,” she muttered, eyes sharp on the pensive face of her would-be lover.
“Oh, he was dreadful,” he insisted. “Hideous! His eyelashes, I would liken to?—”
Her mouth curved tartly in on itself. “I’m not sure we’re getting anywhere with this. Was he tall?”
“Yes. Tall and strong, like the pillars of?—”
“And which direction did he go?”
“West, down Rue Pasteur, but from there, I have no indication. To the forest, I suppose, where I’m due to give him what he wants. But now the sun is rising, and I have precious few hours to fix this. Souveraine, do you know this man?”
She replied flatly, “No, I do not know any man who is tall and strong like pillars with eyes like a furnace at midnight and cheekbones like cathedral arches.”
“No, cheekbones like Mont-Saint-Michel,” he amended, quite seriously. “The arches were more an overall impression of his bone structure. His jaw, specifically, was like?—”
“I don’t think I care if you get thrown in prison for murder,” she muttered.
“Then why are we still here?” he cried. “Let me kill this man and let’s have done with it!” This time, Souveraine was not fast enough to stop him, and Léon was out the door, striding back to the prison so fast and so intent on murder that she had to sprint to catch up with him.
7
THE NATIONAL RAZOR
Léon had his trusty rock back in hand, as he hadn’t thought the second attempt through any more than he had the first. He marched straight past the open outer doors of the prison, barely noticing the huge pile of firewood that was thrown down beside him on the way in, making for a cacophonous entrance. On he strode, through a small stone forecourt, into the dank office of the prison complex, where the eyes of five men who were huddled in some kind of meeting turned on him as one moving organism. “There he is!”
The man who had shouted was Bernard DuPont, head administrator of Reims, the most important and influential man in the entire city. The same man who, when Léon was orphaned, took him under his wing. A man who Léon had more time and respect for than almost anyone else.
Léon shoved the cobblestone behind his back. “I didn’t do anything.” He took a step away from the group and directly into Souveraine, who plucked the weapon out of his hand, then turned and left the room without another word.
A sheep bleated in the corner. Léon’s eyes went first to it, then to the huge wooden structure the men all stood around, then back to the wide and beardy face of DuPont.
“You’ve arrived just in time, Léon.” DuPont, who had always looked kindly on Léon, crossed the small room to give him an inviting pat on the back before shoving him forward into the middle of the group.
“Just in time for what?” asked Léon, his boots snapping down on an unexpected bed of straw and sawdust strewn across the office floor.
“Your retirement,” Mollard muttered. “We won’t be needing you ‘round here no more.” He augmented the comment with a foully resentful wrinkle of his nose that Léon itched to wipe off his face with his fist.
“Now, now…” DuPont held a placating hand up to each of them, and just in time, before Léon’s fragile mental state could fracture an inch deeper. “Léon, there’s nothing to worry about. We’ll need your services for some time to come. Perhaps more than ever, in the coming days.”
“What do you mean, ‘in the coming days’?” Léon asked. “What’s going on?”
“Allow me to demonstrate,” said a keen man that Léon had never met before, who spoke with a thick Parisian accent.
“Here we go,” shouted DuPont, clapping his hands together.
A third man, until then motionless, made a move for the sheep in the corner. It bolted forward in fright, and the Parisian headed it off with a jump, the two men cornering the still-bleating creature against the side of the… whatever this thing was.
One of the men got their arms around the sheep and lifted it up onto a platform attached to the object’s frame. Léon stood at the head of the structure, facing the sheep, in front of two reaching beams of thick wood. His eyes on the animal, the men, distracted by Mollard’s idiotic giggling at the sheep’s arrest, Léon failed to immediately take the meaning of the lopsided hunk of metal at the top. From his vantage point, he saw nomechanism, nothing of real interest but a bunch of ridiculous men hustling a sheep about the place, all while the keys he so desperately needed jangled at Mollard’s hip.
The sheep was shoved forward, its dirty, fluffy legs hitting a low bar of wood right at the base of the contraption.
“Citizen DuPont, are you ready?” asked the Parisian.
