It was wearing a frock of green-and-black plaid. The frock didn’t fit very well, because her right arm was pointed in a direction no arm can point and her left ankle now lay beneath her left shoulder. The splattered confetti of her former torso was the color of dark blood and yellow bone, and many of those standing in the court bore some trace of it.

In profile, her face was just a porridge of blood. Most heartbreakingly, she was still wearing her little fake emerald-and-pearl barrettes, meticulously placed in her tightly arranged coif.

In one pocket of her frock would be found a woman’s wallet, with a temporary working permit in conjunction with the Folies Bergère. She was from the south of France. Her Christian name was Marie. Her family name was Prasquier, as she had told me herself.

Chapter 7

7

The Blunt Instrument

As the crowd gradually realized that the vile mess scattered across what I later learned was the Court of the Moon had moments earlier been a human being, many of us became occupied with retching. Bob Culpepper had clearly stomached worse than this in his time, but even he struggled with his gag reflex for a moment.

“Damn fucking damn,” he swore to fortify himself, no one reprimanding him for his language. With the back of his hand, he wiped some saliva from the corner of his mouth and moved toward the woman’s body.

The children in the crowd were the only ones not sickened, likely because they had no grasp of their own mortality and thus their correlation to this human refuse. Some of them had gathered around Mademoiselle Prasquier’s faceless head with the same studious interest they might have given their first dead robin, covered with a tidal wave of ecstatic ants.

I had control of my stomach for the moment, but I knew I wouldn’t if I didn’t turn away. I did so and saw Gail splashing water onto her face at a drinking fountain. The man named Russ was trying to calm a wailing little girl whose father had fainted at her side. A nun was attempting to pray over Marie Prasquier and touched the torso as she gave a blessing. Pulling back her hand, she saw the blood upon it and her courage and stomach fled her. She crossed herself and raced for the sanctuary of the restrooms. No one in heaven and earth or the Court of the Moon would have faulted her.

A uniformed policeman was approaching at far too much of a saunter for Culpepper’s liking. He waved the flatfoot over and snapped, “Horvath, I want you to run to the dispatcher and get as many men over here as we’ve got on the island. We could use some of the Pinkerton guards too, if they’re willing to help.”