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Marianne is, in the manner of very clever people, much more clever than her reputation: and Francis has no idea where her body lies. She died first, but only by a scrape of moments, and when Francis woke up (with a face full of his own blood-matted hair, in a house that smelled of things that belong behind your skin) she was gone. He suspects an alliance with Monaco.
(The Monacos are hideously cordial. Two glasses of wine, one poisoned, for as long as they’ve been large enough to grasp the cup. Microstates.)
Francis feels her waking up, but has no idea where. They are neither of them poetic enough, this century, to risk them both dying. She must be coming for him.
So he paces the floor. He waits, and he watches. The metal of the gun grows warm in his hands, and eventually Francis stops even noticing the unfamiliar pressure of the switchblade in his pocket. Marianne, he thinks, would do well to hurry up. Francis has his own alliances to tend to.
Sixty years seems even longer than usual, this time. The world has changed so much. Weapons technology has changed so much—he remembers the first rifle he saw, beautifully tooled (so earnest and precise and German) but the barrel would have dragged the ground slung across the saddle of all but the tallest horse—
Her timing is almost perfect. Francis sees movement when the piano wire is already descending, yanks his hand up and catches it on the side of his throat and the meat of his palm. It slices deep and he has lost, lost before the fight even truly began. (The women always cheat, he should have remembered—) He throws himself backward with all his strength and takes them both to the ground in a thrashing tangle.
Her muscles are grave-weak, but the wire is sharp. His rifle drops uselessly to the floor.
”How,” he says, spits the word in a splatter, the wire has nicked his jugular and shredded the skin off his hand. It’s barely a word, but she understands, and hauls harder.
“Andorra burned my body,” Marianne whispers in his ear. The wire scrapes bone. “We should move more often, perhaps.”
”—How—”
“I’ve been in the wall,” Marianne said. “Goodbye, Francis.”
The last thing Francis does before he dies is drive his knife hilt deep into her hip, and the nation of France will affect a delicate women’s cane, this go around. In the spirit of charity, she buries him with the piano wire: in the spirit of not being completely stupid, it is looped around the corpse’s wrists.
(In 1951 Julchen came up out of the ground like—like things no one wants to think about, and Gilbert put the gun in his own mouth. But it is almost never that simple.)