Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die
Page 46
Chapter 45
The Expedition
To guide their suspended successors to possible freedom, Louis would have liked to mark the number of the tunnel door on the wall, but he knows administrative tar would censor it. Instead, he scrawls, in giant letters: DO NOT GIVE UP HOPE GOD IS WITH YOU.
Then he kneels and prays for Margaret, prays for success in their liberating and punitive venture.
On the way to the Administrative Hub, they stop off at Louis’ armory. He chooses and allocates weapons and tools. He thrusts a knife in his belt, slings a loaded crossbow over one shoulder and over the other a quiver extemporized out of an old boot and crammed with needle-sharp steel bolts. In his right hand he grips a long spear, like Seymour and Max.
Even more tightly than the spear, Max grips the key Louis has finally let him have, because he (Louis) will be doing most of the fighting so if something happens to me you’ll be able to leave. Basically Max and Seymour are pack animals, bearing on their backs sledgehammer, pick, crowbar, shovel, rope-ladders, flashlights with spare bulbs and batteries plus elephant-balls.
Helen has nothing. She’d insisted on having her arms and back free to carry Margaret. When the men had protested at the impossible burden, she’d replied, terribly, but in her usual self-controlled voice, “She can’t weigh more than forty pounds now,” and they said nothing.
Four-strong, the column works its way through the rubble of the devastated corridors. Louis’ stabbing flashlight beam lights up the long black stretches. The booming is incessant.
Perhaps half a day later, Louis raises his hand, stops and gags the lens of the flashlight with his handkerchief. In the muffled light they move toward the growing tumult ahead. Helen twists her ankle and trails behind.
Finally the men halt and kneel for concealment behind the rubble that obstructs the mouth of the corridor. They recall their long-ago first view, upon materializing, of the Hub: under a dome of darkness the gigantic poorly lighted circular passageway with a drab alternation of hundreds of doors and open corridors running about a black pit a mile in diameter. Obscurity has progressed. The dim stuttering wall lamps are blurs in the dusty howling gale that shrouds most of the passageway. But the little they see allows them to realize the enormity of the challenge.
A dozen yards away, three massive Exiters stand guard before the peristyle of the Prefect’s dwelling, the first goal. The transparent shields and the wicked flexible clubs are raised for immediate action and the goggle-eyes scan in a crossfire of vigilance.
Further on, other Exiters are trying to beat back a mob of maddened functionaries waving their arms and crying: “Exit her! Exit her!” The Exiters’ black clubs and, worse, the functionaries’ perilously bare hands lie between the Four and their second goal: on the other side of the black chasm the distant invisible corridor, Corridor 46, that leads to the tunnel.
Spectral in the dust storm, more functionaries stumble out of their collapsing offices and join the mob. It surges forward. Some, impaled on the barbed and pointed fence that delimits the circular chasm, scream thinly. Plaster fragments rain down from the darkness overhead. “The Dome is collapsing! Exit her! Exit her!” The Exiters tirelessly flail functionaries to their knees but move back under the pressure.
The three Exiters guarding the peristyle now concentrate their vigilance on the nearing rioters, turning their vulnerable backs to the three men. Tersely Louis assigns a target for Max and Seymour. He rises out of crouch and commands: “Now!” Gripping his long spear like a pole-vaulter, he starts running forward. They have to imitate him.
Max’s Exiter wheels about at the last moment and receives the spear point with Max’s hurtling weight behind it on the shield. He totters back a few steps, then halts. The steel spear bends, straightens out and propels Max sprawling and stunned to the flagstones.
Seymour, running toward the assigned leather back, imagines his spear point visiting entrails and squeamishly squeezes his eyes shut a second before a contact which doesn’t take place. He misses the Exiter and barges into a badly cracked marble nude, one of six survivors of the original ten, barely upholding the sagging Doric roof. The nude falls apart under the impact of his violent embrace; the roof sags even more perilously; the massive bronze eagle wrenches half-loose; Seymour drops stunned to the floor.
Louis expertly rams his spear through the third Exiter at the level of the liver and all the way to his joined fists. Both fall, dangerously entangled. The Exiter who had survived Max’s amateurish assault strides over and raises his flexible club over Louis’ head. Louis has a lightning image of a long-ago wooden dummy exploding under a Force Ten blow. He jerks away. The club smashes a flagstone to pieces an inch from his head.
As the Exiter tries to regain balance Louis rolls over, frees the crossbow, aims and releases the bolt with a musical twang. The keen steel penetrates the Exiter’s throat. Thick gray blood spouts out of his open mouth. He crumples.
Before Louis can get to his feet and grab Seymour’s spear or reload the crossbow, the last of the three Exiters is upon him, club lifted. The wall lamps go out at that instant. Muttering thanks to God for decreeing darkness, Louis picks himself up. He gropes in the direction of his goal, the peristyle, and collides with a marble nude.
The lights stutter back on, revealing the menacing Exiter a foot away. His club whips like a scythe. Louis dodges and sprawls. The marble nude receives the blow, Force Ten or more, and she explodes into fragments. With the loss of still another pair of supporting arms the roof slumps radically and the massive eagle wrenches loose and topples onto the Exiter just as his club rises above Louis’ head. The sharp bronze wing with a ton behind it pierces the helmet and the man’s skull, emerging from his jaw like a pharaonic beard.
Surely a sign from the Lord, Louis thinks, stepping over the man’s body and the bird’s imperial beak.
By this time Max and Seymour are back on their feet. Wrenching the ornate door open, Louis signals to them and they race through the rococo antechamber and burst open the door of the huge neo-classical office with blank-eyed Roman busts in wall-niches and a giant desk. Behind it a locked door. Louis kicks it open on an intimate room with a wealth of drapes. A small circular table set for two is covered with decayed delicacies and fragments of ceiling. A bottle of champagne lies drunkenly on a rotting camembert. Plaster dust shrouds caviar and pâté de foie gras. Crepe-paper flowers blossom from a fluted crystal vase.
A crumpled knit dress and an old-fashioned hand-cranked gramophone with piles of vinyl records lie on the floor next to a space cleared, it can only be, for dancing. To one side of a door, draped on a high-backed chair, is the prefectoral uniform and, leaning against the chair point upward, the unsheathed ceremonial sword.
The door is locked. Louis kicks it open.
Seymour, stumbling behind, sees him cross the threshold, gripping a knife, followed by Max and then hears Louis’ drained voice: “Almighty God, Almighty God.” And Max, whispering: “Jesus, Jesus.” Seymour, approaching the threshold, steels himself against the coming sight of the bed, imagining Margaret naked and drained, a practical skeleton, her brain a voided vault, alongside a sated monstrously bloated naked Prefect, apoplectic with total recall.
Again Louis’ “Almighty God, Almighty God” and Max’s “Jesus, Jesus” and as if in answer to those pleas, there comes from the room ahead the biblical fragrance of what Seymour can’t know is balsam, santal, myrrh, frankincense, stacte, onycha and galbanum.
Now choking brimstone as he advances into the smoke-filled room, nothing visible, thank God. A sizzle like a bad short-circuit almost covers sobs (could that be Louis?), then his eyes are seared by a glare of blue and the room explodes in thunder. Seymour is hurled to the floor and loses consciousness.
Comes to, half-blind with persistent blue, thunder persistent in his ears, dazed, being dragged out of the ruins. The new barbecue stench makes him gag on the names he tries to pronounce but Max keeps dragging him, panting that it’s too late for the two
back there, they gotta get out of here and fast and now pulling him to his feet and forcing him back the way they had come.
They totter into the rococo waiting room just as Helen hobbles in. Seymour expects her to stop them and ask: “What’s happened to Margaret? Where is Louis?” But she limps past, as if the two of them didn’t exist, as if she expected nothing better than ignominious flight on the part of the men she’d called murderers.
Stumbling out of the Prefect’s dwelling, Seymour and Max work their way, in worsened gloom, through the chaos of the fallen peristyle, the roof fragments and dismembered nudes, skirting the bodies of the Exiter with the steel bolt in his throat, the one with the midriff pierced by the spear and the one with his skull skewered by the bronze eagle’s wing.
They emerge into the circular passageway and absolute silence. The booming has stopped. The gale has fallen, the dust settled. No more dome fragments fall from the darkness overhead. The insurrectionary tumult has ceased although in the nearly extinct light of the bulbs they can make out the mass of the motionless functionaries and Exiters who hopelessly block the way to Corridor 46 and the door marked 147 and behind it the possible tunnel to freedom.
Just as the thousands of wall bulbs start brightening they hear movement behind them. The Exiter with the arrow in his throat stirs in his vast puddle of thick gray blood and rises to his feet, as does the spear-pierced one. The third with his ton headpiece of imperial bronze resurrects too out of blood and impossibly arises. All three stand at stiff attention.
Terrorized, Seymour, followed by Max, starts running toward distant Corridor 46 on the other side of the massed functionaries and Exiters. Strangely reconciled now, they stand stock still at attention, statues of obedience, dangerous clubs and even more dangerous bare hands tight to their bodies. Weaving past them, followed by Max, Seymour makes out in the growing light Hedgehog with his bottle-glasses, and Sadie and Philippe and Turnkey, all stiff with allegiance, paying no attention to the suspended duo, as though they were invisible. Functionaries and Exiters face, as at a rising sun, the Reception Room on the threshold of which stands once ragged once Sub-Prefect Marchini.
Prefect Marchini now, subordinate to none but the Most High, resplendent in a spotless white integrally buttoned lavishly braided and medalled uniform. He outshines the brightening bulbs. The functionaries’ pale lips move in their expressionless masks as they hail in chorus: “Glory to the Supreme Echelon!” “All delegated power to Prefect Marchini!” Even the functionaries impaled on the barbs and points of the wrought-iron fence join in.
The way is free.
Puffing badly, Max and Seymour race toward Corridor 46. Prefect Marchini’s voice echoes behind them: “A new era in the history of the Prefecture has commenced. The work of reconstruction shall begin immediately. Return to your offices.”
Advocate’s voice reaches them faint and quavering from the other side of the black chasm:
“Monsieur Stein … return … all is well. Return … I implore you … Return … all is well now …”
When they finally reach Corridor 46 Seymour halts, turns about and sees Helen held limp, surely dead, in the arms of an Exiter.
He starts bawling for her and for Louis and for Margaret. Max yells that the Exiters are coming for them, yanks Seymour into the corridor and forces him to run, the way Louis did at the beginning here for both of them in the interest of physical and mental well-being until kind sad Helen came to their rescue and convinced him to stop.