The Wolves of Paris Read Free Page B

not.
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    They had difficulties crossing onto the island of the Cité. To Lorenzo’s surprise, the Petit Pont—the little bridge—was crawling with watchmen. The men inspected wagons, opening grain baskets and thumping great casks of wine and olive oil—anything big enough to conceal a man, it seemed. The Florentine wagon train made it onto the bridge, then stalled as they fell under inspection.
    Demetrius rode his horse up from the wagons a moment later. “Two men want to inspect the strongbox.”
    “Open it,” Marco said. “But don’t let them touch anything.”
    When Demetrius had gone, Marco turned to Lorenzo. “We’re inside the walls. A little late to be searching for English spies, don’t you think?”
    Lorenzo frowned. Yes, strange.
    Finally at the toll gate itself, they waited while a band of filthy, crippled men and women argued they were mendicants and not subject to the toll.
    “What’s your business?” a guard asked.
    “The Hôtel Dieu,” one of the beggars said. He waved a scrap of parchment. “This here is from the bishop.”
    The toll collector glanced at the parchment, but neither he nor the beggar likely could read what was written there. “Show your faces. All of you. Arms and hands, too.”
    The beggars pulled back cowls and lifted sleeves to prove they were not escapees from the leprosarium outside the city walls. The toll collector waved them in.
    Lorenzo dropped from his horse to present his credentials. A copy of his orders, the list of his goods to trade, with the wax seal of the Boccaccio and Father’s signature—forged by Mother, since Father couldn’t grip a quill since the apoplexy struck his body. The toll collector gave a perfunctory glance, then handed it back for the Florentine to read aloud. Lorenzo read it first in Latin, then translated to French. He looked up to see the toll collector staring at the yellow cross on his breast.
    He remounted. Waiting for the mule train to pull into motion, his eyes wandered along the riverbank toward the grand manor houses, thinking about Lucrezia again. A chilling sight caught his eye. Live bodies hung in the gibbets that dangled over the stone wall to the left of the gatehouse. He hadn’t paid them much attention from a distance, except to notice the shear number of them—at least forty metal cages at the end of twelve-foot poles. Criminals—both civil and ecclesiastic—might end their days in one of the metal contraptions, condemned to die from thirst or exposure. More typically, they’d winch up a convicted murderer after his execution, let the crows pick his flesh. The skeletons might sit in that position for years.
    Indeed, most of the gibbets held nothing but bones and a few greasy strands of hair. But the nearest three gibbets held bodies. The first, strangely enough, held a dead dog—a mastiff or some other large breed. The other two held young men, dressed in rags. They gripped the bars and stared back at him.
    Lorenzo couldn’t look away. He imagined his own hands on the cold metal, thought of the miserable twenty-four hours he’d spent at the priory of San Domenico, doing penance in just such a contraption. Summer then, not winter, the heat like hammer and tongs on his tonsured scalp. His tongue like worn-through boot leather. His hand went to the cross at his breast.
    Marco and the rest of the wagon train were ahead of him, passing through the gates onto the island with the clomp of hooves and the shouts of muleteers. Lorenzo turned his horse to follow, but hesitated as he passed beneath the gatehouse.
    “Tollmaster,” he called up at the man staring down from a window above him. “Who are those men in the gibbets?”
    A shadow passed over the man’s face. “ Loup-garou .”
    Lorenzo wasn’t sure he properly understood the French. “I’m sorry—did you say wolf man?”
    “Yes, exactly. Those two—plus the dead one—tore out the throat of a toll collector. Ravished two young girls in wolf