Games of State

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The wood-paneled room was large and dark. The only light came from a single lamp which stood beside the massive mahogany desk. The only items on the desk itself were a telephone, fax machine, and computer, all of them collected in a tight semicircle. The shelves behind the desk were barely visible in the shadows. On them were miniature guillotines. Some were working models, made of wood and iron. Others were made of glass or metal, and one was a plastic model sold in the United States.

Guillotines had been used for official executions in France until 1939, when murderer Eugen Weidmann was beheaded outside St. Peter's Prison in Versailles. But Dominique didn't like those later machines: the guillotines with the large, solid buckets to collect the heads, screens to protect the executioners from the spray of blood, shock absorbers to cushion the thunk of the blade. Dominique liked the originals.

Across from the desk, lost in the ghostly dark, was an eight-foot-tall guillotine which had been used during the French Revolution. This device was unrestored. The uprights were slightly rotted and. the trestle was worn smooth from all the bodies that "Madame La Guillotine", had embraced.

Drawn nearly to the cross-beam on top, the blade was rusty from rain and blood. And the wicker basket, also the original, was frayed. But Dominique had noticed particles of the bran which had been used to soak up blood, and there were still hairs in the basket. Hairs which had snagged the wicker when the heads tumbled in.

It all looked exactly as it did in 1796, the last time those leather straps were fastened under the armpits and over the legs of the doomed. When the lunette, the iron collar, had held the neck of its last victim— held it within a perfect circle so the victim couldn't move. However much fear possessed them, they couldn't squirm from the ram and its sharp blade. Once the executioner released the spring, nothing could stop the eighty-pound deathblow. The head dropped into its basket, the body was pushed sideways into its own leather-lined wicker basket, and the vertical plank was ready to receive the next victim. The process was so quick that some bodies were still sighing, the lungs emptying through the neck, as they were removed from the plank. It was said that for several seconds, the still-living brains in decapitated heads enabled the victims to see and hear the ghastly aftermath of their own execution.

At the height of the Reign of Terror, executioner Charles Henri-Sanson and his aides were able to decapitate nearly one victim every minute. They guillotined three hundred men and women in three days, thirteen hundred in six weeks, helping to bring the total to 2,831 between April 6, 1793, and July 29, 1795.

What did you think of that, Herr Hitler? Dominique wondered. The gas chambers at Treblinka were designed to kill two hundred people in fifteen minutes, the gas chambers at Auschwitz designed to kill two thousand. Was the master killer impressed or did he scoff at the work of relative amateurs?

The guillotine was Dominique's prize. Behind it, on the wall, were period newspapers and etchings in ornate frames, as well as original documents signed by George Jacques Danton and other leaders of the French Revolution. But nothing stirred him like the guillotine. Even with the overhead lights off and the shades drawn he could feel it, the device which was a reminder that one had to be decisive to succeed. Children of nobles had lost their heads to that sinister blade, but such was the price of revolution.

The telephone beeped. It was the third line, a private line which the secretaries never answered. Only his partners and Home had that number.

Dominique leaned forward in the fat leather chair. He was a lanky man with a large nose, high forehead, and strong chin. His hair was short and ink black, a dramatic contrast to the white turtleneck and trousers he was wearing.

He hit the speaker button. "Yes?" he said quietly.

"Good morning, M. Dominique," said the caller. "It's Jean-Michel." Dominique glanced at his watch. "It's early." "The meeting was brief, M. Dominique." "Tell me about it," he said.

Jean-Michel obliged. He told him about the lecture he had been given under torture, and about how the German considered himself M. Dominique's equal. Jean-Michel also told him about what little he had picked up about Karin Doring.

Dominique listened to it all without comment. When Jean-Michel was finished, he asked, "How is your eye?" "I think it will be all right," said Jean-Michel. "I've arranged to see a doctor this afternoon." "Good," Dominique said. "You know you shouldn't have gone without Henri and Yves. That is why I sent them." "I know, monsieur," Jean-Michel replied, "and I'm sorry. I didn't want to intimidate Herr Richter." "And you didn't," Dominique said. His voice was tranquil and his wide mouth was relaxed. But his dark eyes were heavy with rage as he asked, "Is Henri there?" "Yes," Jean-Michel replied.

"Put him on," Dominique said. "And Jean-Michel? Be sure to take them with you tonight." "I will, M. Dominique," Jean-Michel replied.

So the little Fhrer is on the march, thought Dominique, bullying representatives. He wasn't terribly surprised. Richter's vanity made him ideally suited to believe his own press. That, plus the fact that he was German.

Those people did not comprehend the notion of humility.

Henri came on the line, and Dominique spoke with him for just a few seconds. When they were finished, Dominique punched off the speaker button and sat back.

Richter was as yet too weak to be a real force in Germany, but he would have to be put in his place before he became one. Firmly, and not necessarily gently. Richter was still Dominique's first choice, but if he couldn't have him he would have Karin Doring. She was also independent, but she also needed money. And after seeing what was going to happen to Richter, she would be reasonable.

The anger began to leave his eyes as he looked at the dark shape of the guillotine. Like Danton, who began his crusade against the monarchy as a moderate man, Dominique would become increasingly more severe.

Otherwise, his allies and enemies both would perceive him as weak.

It would be a delicate thing, making sure that Richter was disciplined without driving him away. But as Danton had said in a speech to the Legislative Committee of General Defense in 1792, "Boldness, and again boldness, and always boldness!" The boldness of the guillotine, the boldness of conviction. Then as now, that was what people required to win a revolution.

And he would win this. Then he would settle an old debt. Not with Richter but with another German. One who had betrayed him on that long-ago night. The man who had put everything in motion.

He would destroy Richard Hausen.