Page 7

7

THE NATIONAL RAZOR

L éon 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 no mechanism, 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.

“Yes!” DuPont wrapped a feverish hand around Léon’s forearm.

“Just watch.”

“Watch what?” Léon snapped, finally at the end of his tether.

“Why are we standing around, staring at a—” The Parisian yanked his arm, pulling a rope with it.

The slanted metal dropped.

Fast . Faster than Léon could ever have estimated it might fall.

It slid with a loud shink!

landing with a deadly squelch, which dropped the sheep’s head at Léon’s feet in less time than it took him to finish his sentence: “—sheep…”

A stunned silence took the room before shouts of excitement, congratulations, and calls to get more sheep filled the small space.

All this while Léon stared down at that yellow eye that twitched up at him, at the tongue that fell fat and useless on the floor, at the mouth that moved still, but bleated no more.

“An instant kill!” the Parisian narrated as though he were at a horse race.

“Painless, efficient, the great leveller of the people!”

Blood ran down the front of the machine, across the floor, beneath the severed head, beneath Léon’s shoes.

“It’s called the Louisette,” DuPont explained.

“I know what it is!” Léon shouted.

“I told you I didn’t want one.” Of course he knew what it was.

In theory. He’d heard talk of the great killing machine, not that he’d ever seen a picture to recognise one.

But he had fought with DuPont over it many times, always insisting his axe would do the job a dozen times better.

With a placating nod, as though mollycoddling a child who’d just made an incredibly stupid remark, DuPont spoke over him in a kind voice.

“They’re all the fashion in Paris. And never let it be said Reims couldn’t keep up with the demands of the age, eh?” He raised his chin to the Parisian.

“Show him how it’s done.”

Léon was man-handled around behind him to where the sheep’s body lay on the platform, lifeless.

Léon was no stranger to headless corpses, but there was something unnerving about this one, up on a plank designed for death, body against the blade, that Léon now noticed was weighted with a huge chunk of heavy stone.

That, he figured, must have provided all the raw power his arms had been honed to wield for so many years.

“Pull this rope,” the Parisian directed.

He held it out for Léon, and Léon took it, weakly, horrified but curious.

“Pull it,” the man insisted.

Léon’s hand tensed on the waxed rope, and he pulled.

He didn’t have to pull hard.

The blade slid easily.

With a sickening suction of flesh against a slanted cleaver, the metal lifted, and the sheep’s remains sloughed off.

Dripping, the blade rose up and up until it hit the top with a thud.

The Parisian took the rope back and fastened it to a hook.

“And now,” he said, a wide and secretive grin about his face, “the pièce de résistance…”

With that, he took hold of the board upon which the headless sheep’s corpse lay, slid it back, and flipped it up.

The body rolled off the plank and flopped down on the floor, sawdust and straw glistening red with still-seeping blood.

“So you see,” the man concluded, “the body goes directly into a box or onto a wagon, and you are done. Minimal fuss, minimal clean-up.”

DuPont’s eyes could not have been wider or more excited.

“See that, Léon? We’ll have them at the pit in no time!”

Léon could barely gather his thoughts to provide either enthusiasm or condemnation, but he didn’t have to provide an answer just then, because Mollard wandered over to the sheep’s head and kicked it, settling a glower on Léon.

“Any man can do your job now.”

It took the repetition of this idea for it to successfully seep into Léon’s harried brain.

When it did, it was even more horrifying than the machine before him and the dead creature lying limp next to it.

The fear of losing his livelihood at the drop of a blade was too sharp and fast a shock for Léon to try to hide from his expression.

DuPont caught it and rushed to ease the blow.

“We’ll always require a respectable hand to pull the rope,” he said decisively and warmly, giving a nod in Léon’s direction that sent Mollard striding off angrily to the other side of the room, keys swaying with every step.

DuPont had loved Léon for the position of executioner from the moment he saw him with an axe in his hand, and he treated him well to keep him chopping.

In general, Léon put a nice face on things, played the crowd to both their advantage, and that alone made him irreplaceable.

But more than that, he was, very nearly, actually irreplaceable, as per the traditional system.

Léon’s noble blood put him front and centre at the end of a long and unbroken line of executioners.

Respected men, once upon a time, father then son, then son, then son, who were all damned to the family business ever since the day one of their kin, way back when, had picked up the axe.

From that moment, the line was tainted.

There was no other work available to the eldest male of that line, quite deliberately, and there never would be.

It was an expectation and assignation that sat heavily on Léon from the moment of his birth.

It wouldn’t have been completely impossible to find someone else whose rank would add the required polish to the tarnished job.

But it would have been hard.

And they wouldn’t have been a beautiful showman like Léon was.

Not even little émile, who was a few years away yet from being able to lift the axe quite so effectively as his big brother.

Meanwhile, Léon needed the money, what little he could get, desperately.

Famine had swept the nation for years, jobs were difficult to come by, especially for him, so he made sure his relationship with DuPont worked as unquestionably as good wine with good cheese.

Reassured by DuPont’s words, Léon quickly attempted to turn the approval to his advantage.

“I think it’s marvellous,” he lied, eyes on the keys swinging across Mollard’s dirty pants.

“Who shall we execute first? I propose I do an assessment of the prisoners and pick someone who would make a fine spectacle.”

“Wonderful!” DuPont virtually yelled.

Léon stepped forward, exultant, hand out, ready to accept the keys, when DuPont continued, “But there’s no need.”

Pale, Léon floundered.

“No need? What do you mean?”

“I’ve just received news that we’re expecting an influx of prisoners. The revolution is moving ahead at a faster pace, and that means we’ll be expecting the cells to be a little more crowded than usual. They’re transporting men from some of the neighbouring prisons so they can all have their day in court a little sooner. Therefore, all our current condemned are being moved up the line to make space. We’re going to do the lot tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Léon cried.

“Tomorrow!” DuPont confirmed.

“Everybody?” Léon cried.

“Every last soul. The lot. All in one go.”

“Then…” Léon’s voice escaped him.

What if the prisoner he required was to die in the morning?

He would never get émile back if he had nothing to barter.

He all but leapt on Mollard, locking his fingers around the ring of keys.

“Back!” Mollard shouted, shoving him off and stumbling several steps away with the volition of his push.

All the men stared at Léon, who grasped the side of the killing machine for balance.

He stuttered out, “But… M-Mollard, do you not w-want it to be a good show? Are you so short sighted?” Warming to the line he’d randomly hit upon, he spoke more vehemently, admonishing Mollard, “Can you be so narrow minded? Don’t you want the people to embrace this wonderful—” He gestured at the shining blade.

“The Louisette,” the Parisian offered.

“Some are calling it the guillotine, but I don’t think it will catch on.”

Léon nodded uncertainly, then continued with his impressive job of seeming excited.

“Our first execution should be someone enormous, who has done something absolutely terrible. We’ll spill so much blood they can bathe in it! We’ll spill it straight on the ground. We’ll let the head drop to the crowd—let them have the first one. Perhaps all of them! Just for tomorrow.”

DuPont let out an approving chortle, rubbing his hands together.

“I like it, Léon.”

Léon, desperately hopeful his plan was working, turned back to Mollard.

“You pass me those keys, and I shall organise a show like you’ve never seen.”

Mollard spat straight down on the sheep’s head.

“He’s been trying to get these keys all morning.”

The bastard!

Léon could no longer hold back the glare of hatred, but he knew his place in DuPont’s heart well enough to push Mollard a little further.

“That’s because some of us are professional. Some of us believe in the revolution. And sometimes I wonder why you wish to stand in the way of progress.”

A fearful look came over Mollard, his eyes scampering up to DuPont.

“I do not stand in the way of the revolution.”

“Then why,” Léon pursued, “when I ask for your help, do you not help? Is there someone you’re protecting? A journalist, perhaps? Or worse, a priest?”

“No,” Mollard insisted, gelatinous lips wobbling about the place.

“No! Take the keys. Kill them all. See if I care.”

Léon snatched the keys Mollard held out, then turned to DuPont, and, just for good measure, said quietly, but loudly enough for Mollard to hear, “It’s strange that I had to ask so many times, don’t you think?”

DuPont, aware of their mutual hatred, even if he preferred Léon’s looks and company, attempted to keep on neutral ground.

“Perhaps Léon needs his own set of keys.”

Léon could not believe his luck, and he entirely failed to hide that fact when he cried, “Why, yes! I can just keep these?—”

“That’s the only pair I’ve got!” Mollard yelled.

The spiteful, spiteful bastard!

“Surely you have more than one set?” Léon rounded.

“What happens to the prisoners when you lose them?”

“I don’t lose them,” Mollard threw back.

“I’m careful. That’s why I never let them out of my sight.”

“I’m not convinced.” Even as he said it, Léon knew it was a stretch, but he still gambled on, “I think I should hold on to them for safe keeping.”

“You little shit?—”

“Léon. Mollard. Enough.” DuPont spoke exactly like a bored adult breaking up a fight between two children.

“Mollard has been running the prison for thirty-five years. I believe he’s capable of running it a few days more while we await the new keys.”

“I could…” What was the time?

How long exactly had all this taken?

“I wonder, could we do it now?” Léon asked as innocently as possible.

“I could take these keys to the locksmith this very moment?—”

“What are you after?” Mollard’s words came long and cold, like a slug on Léon’s back.

“If-if we’re to have so many e-executions, and prisoners—w-well, someone needs to be efficient around here.” Léon thrust his handsome head up arrogantly.

“And anyway, I don’t have time for this right now. I must plan tomorrow’s show.” He disliked the use of the word ‘show,’ but it rolled off his tongue with cunning ease and landed just right in DuPont’s ear, provoking a grin.

Léon nodded in response, and all but ran for the cells.

But he was grabbed on the biceps by DuPont on the way past, pulled in close, and the low voice against his ear said, “One moment. I need to talk to you about one of the prisoners.”

Léon could have screamed.

“Yes?”

“Not here.” DuPont glanced around at the other men.

“It’s a delicate matter. There are some special circumstances regarding one of the condemned… Around their execution…”

He refused to be drawn out now, not when he was so close.

“Then I shall come straight back to you. And I can tell you my plans for tomorrow then, too.”

“Léon!” DuPont called, but Léon had already, quickly and forcefully, pulled away.