by M. J. Rose
“It’s water up to my thighs. But perfectly clear. Very cold. Fresh. There must be springs under here.”
Jac wanted to stop. To tell Griffin that she couldn’t do this. This newest challenge was testing her sanity.
“It’s a two-foot slide, then a drop of about three feet. I’m standing right here at the bottom.”
Jac climbed inside. Looked at the edge of the opening: eighteen inches. This was as close as she could get. She was going to have to work at this one. She took a deep breath. Inhaled the stale, damp air. Focused on the smells. Mold. Stone dust. Dirt.
She was almost at the edge of the opening.
Crawled another inch. Took another breath. Another inch. She imagined Robbie in here two days ago. What had he been doing for the forty-eight hours? Worked his way through these tunnels and somehow gotten to Nantes? Concocted the elaborate ruse with his shoes and wallet and then made his way back? All to make the police believe he was dead? All to protect the pottery shards? Or was she wrong? Maybe an animal had disturbed the pebbles. Gotten dirt on the needle. Maybe it was wishful thinking that the dirt smelled like the Fragrance of Loyalty. She’d been wrong about it all. Convinced Griffin.
“Forget it! Let’s go back!” she called out. “Robbie’s not here.”
“You can do it, Jac. I’m right here waiting for you. I’ve never known anyone more determined that you. What was it you used to say: ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ Right?”
She was a little girl. On the beach in Cannes with her grandmother and Robbie. The turquoise water shimmered and invited her in, but when it lapped her toes, it was too cold. Robbie was already in—swimming and howling with pleasure. Her grandmother watched Jac.
“Just run in. Don’t stop to think about it. Plunge fast. The pain of it will be over in a moment, and then your body temperature will adjust. You have to be brave, ma chérie,” her grandmother said. “It’s only cold water—what’s the worst that can happen?”
Be brave, ma chérie, Jac said to herself. What’s the worst that can happen?
Jac propelled herself down the smooth stone chute. As she landed, her right ankle went out from under her, and she tripped.
Griffin reached out and helped her catch her balance.
“You okay?”
She nodded, not wanting him to hear the fear in her voice.
He put his hand up to her face, brushed away some dark curls that had escaped her barrette. “Really, are you okay? You’re doing great. Like you’ve been doing it for years. Your brother knows how to take care of himself. You both do, Jac. You’re survivors.”
Ten yards into this tunnel was a set of five steps leading up to a dry landing. From there Jac and Griffin looked into a stone cathedral, majestically carved from the quarry itself. The vaulted ceiling soared up almost twenty feet. Where windows would be were hollowed-out openings looking into more stone.
Black stenciled letters on the wall spelled out: Rue de Sèvres 1811.
The night before, she had read an article on the internet explaining that the underground was marked with street signs to designate the areas above. Not just so the workers didn’t get lost but also so they were able to orient themselves. It prevented panic, the writer said. And seeing one now, Jac understood why. It was oddly reassuring. Even though she couldn’t burrow up a hundred feet through rock, knowing where she was had a calming effect.
On the wall to her right was more graffiti: men’s names written in white paint and dated 1789 through 1799. On the left wall was more, with dates that continued into the early 1800s. There was a mural of a devil being followed by a mass of people in black robes. A chalk drawing of a guillotine. There were symbols and sayings in an old-fashioned typeface that appeared to have been created with the smoke from a lantern or candle. Other phrases were painted more recently with green and blue Day-Glo paint.
And three archways.
Finally they had arrived at a crossroads.
Jac walked over to each and sniffed the air. Took it deep into her. Tried to find some remnant of her fragrance. But there was nothing.
“Robbie had to have left us some kind of clue,” Griffin said. He examined the areas around the openings. There was nothing on the one on the left or the right. But words were etched into the lintel of the middle archway. Not something Robbie could have done—this had taken time and looked as if it had been there for hundreds of years:
Arête! De l’autre bord de la vie est la mort.
Jac translated: “‘Beware. On the other edge of life is death.’ Knowing my brother,” she theorized, “we can go this way. I can hear him laughing at how perfect the clue would be.”
“Look.” Griffin pointed to one of the columns supporting the middle arch.
In dark charcoal was the drawing of a crescent moon with a star inside of it.
Without hesitating, they walked through that archway and entered the next chamber.
The walls were uneven. Made of rocks. Yellowed. Wet.
Beside her she heard Griffin gasp.
She was about to ask him what he’d seen when she realized it for herself.
Everything she was looking at was made of bones. Bone walls. Shelves of bones. Brackets of bones. Altars of bones. Bone beams and arches. Even crosses made of bones. Not bleached white and purified, but decayed with dirt. Damp. Hundreds of bones. No. Thousands of bones. Skulls. Femurs. Pelvis bones. Bones stacked one on top of the other in perfect symmetry. Rounded ends out. Creating designs. Architectural details.
They’d entered the consecrated cemetery. The repository for the overcrowded cemeteries aboveground. They were now in the city of the dead.
“It’s so strange, isn’t it?” Jac remarked as she walked around the room, mesmerized. “They’re not people. Not at first. Are they? It’s just all a design.”
Interspersed with the bones were cracked tombstones. Most were from the seventeen hundreds. The detritus of aboveground cemeteries had been deposited here with the calcified remains they’d once identified.
“I’ve spent so much time in tombs . . . but there’s one thing I never get used to. So many silenced people whose names we will never know,” Griffin said.
“When I was little,” said Jac, “I used to go with my grandmother when she went to tend to her family’s cemetery plots. She brought bouquets of fresh flowers or wintergreen to her parents once a month. And a single stem to a baby she’d had that lived for only a week. One day I realized there were no tombstones from before 1860. She explained all the bodies buried before that had been emptied into the catacombs.” Jac faced the long dead, the rows and rows of bones. The more she looked, the more she saw. A bullet hole in one of the skulls. A large crack in another. A smashed cranium. “Emptied them here.”
Somewhere in the distance, water dripped. Slowly. Methodically.
Jac imagined she heard the name of the woman from her hallucination in their rhythm: Ma-rie—Ma-rie—Ma-rie.
And then another noise.
Jac couldn’t be sure which direction it came from. It seemed as if it was above them. Or around them.
She looked at Griffin. She started to ask him what it was—but he put his finger to his lips.
There it was again. Louder this time. It was more than pebbles spilling. It sounded like bones falling. Or rocks collapsing.
Forty
12:49 P.M.
Valentine didn’t hurry. William was on duty in the car. She was on a break. Trying to walk off the emotional cacophony playing in her head.
She stopped in a small grocery store. Bought two apples and two bananas. A liter of bottled water. And cigarettes—her indulgence.
Back on the street, she listened to the street noises and snatches of conversation. Tried to notice the rest of the world going by; to pretend, for a few minutes, that she wasn’t wound up and anxious. Wasn’t worried about failure. Didn’t miss François. That she believed she could take on this herculean task of running the mission herself. A mission that had become personal.<
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In the reflections in the store windows she passed, Valentine checked to see if anyone was following her. She didn’t expect there to be. But she always watched.
A few people inside glanced back idly at her. Some with mild curiosity. They didn’t see her. Not really. It was her look that caught their eyes. Diverted them from noticing her identifying features.
The uniform, cultivated over the years, was calculated to be just slutty enough so that the people who looked twice didn’t see past the outfit: shoulder-length, thick black hair. Bangs. Oversize black sunglasses that hid half her face. At night she substituted an oversize pair of tinted glasses even though she had 20/20 vision. Skintight blue jeans. Leather boots up to her knees. A white or black T-shirt. Never a bra, so there was typically a suggestion of nipples. Depending on the weather, either one of two old worn leather jackets: a fawn-colored blazer she’d appropriated from François’s closet years before, with double pockets inside and out; or a thrift-shop black bomber with a dozen pockets. She always had to have her hands free. Around her waist, she wore a belt. Halfway back, her knife hung off it. Invisible under the jacket, she felt it. And there was a gun tucked into the right boot.
She punched in the code and went through the door. William was where she’d left him. Sitting inside the parked car.
“Anything happen while I was gone?” she asked.
“Music. Kitchen noises. Dead fucking nothing.”
Earlier that morning, Valentine and William had followed the Citröen to the café. While Griffin and Jac were eating, Valentine had managed to attach a GPS device to the underside of their car. It had been routine, simple: she went to a bakery and bought some croissants, then walked down the street where they’d parked the Citröen. Just as she passed the car, she pretended to trip, dropping the bag. While she bent over to pick it up, she reached out and voila—it was done.
But the damn device had only helped them track the car to a parking lot used by a complex of stores. Too many stores. There had been no way to tell which one they’d gone into or what they’d bought.
No way to watch all the doorways and create a diversion and abduct Jac L’Etoile. They were going to have to find another opportunity.
Back on Rue des Saints-Pères, she and William had watched them get out of the car. Griffin carrying a suitcase. The two of them accompanied by another man. From the scraps of conversation they were able to hear with the directional mike in the following half hour they were able to pick up his name—Malachai—and a few words suggesting Jac and Griffin were going to make another effort to find Robbie. But no one had left the house or the boutique.
On every job, there were always stops and starts. But there were usually breakthroughs. If they didn’t come, you made them happen. So far there had been only stops.
She pointed to the laptop he had opened.
“Any luck getting information about the guy?” she asked him.
“Loads. Yeah. Malachai Samuels. He’s a past-life therapist from New York City.”
“Someone else who’s after the damn pottery,” Valentine said. “So do you think he’s still there alone?”
“Yeah. It’s too quiet for there to be three people there. Even if they were all just sitting around.”
“Where did they go, William? Where do they think L’Etoile is?”
He handed Valentine the computer. “I got this, too. You’re not going to like it much.”
Was it her imagination, or did he sound slightly pleased?
She looked down. It was a blueprint. It took her only a few seconds to recognize the mansion across the street. There were two exits. The door to the shop. The door to the house. A courtyard in between. A wall around the courtyard.
“No exits other than the two we have under surveillance,” William said.
She bit into the shiny red apple. “Well, they aren’t being helicoptered out.” The fruit tasted mealy. She threw it on the floor with the rest of the mess that had been accumulating. Rubbed her eyes. “We have to create some kind of diversion. Force her out of the house. And take her.”
“The police aren’t going to let her out of their sight.”
She was so sick of William. Of his negativity. Of his high-pitched, whiny voice. Of his habit of clearing his throat before he spoke. Of his red-rimmed eyes.
The wrong partner had lived. She wanted François back. She tried to think. What would her mentor tell her to do?
A melody might be set, but you could change the key. The tempo. You could always riff.
The hair against the back of her neck was making her hot. The collar of her T-shirt was damp.
Riff.
Forty-one
1:10 P.M.
Through a crack in a wall, Jac and Griffin watched a group of four women and two men, all wearing dark robes, pass through a narrow corridor. Their faces were in shadows, hidden by their hoods.
Jac tried not to move. Not to breathe. Afraid to alert the strangers to her presence. On the internet, she’d read about the artists and musicians, drug users, and adventurers who visited the catacombs. Among the cataphiles were satanic groups who, for centuries, had been using the stone galleries to hold ceremonies.
Is that who these people were? What if they knew they’d been seen? What if they discovered her and Griffin? Were they dangerous? What if they’d already found Robbie? Would they have hurt him?
The group moved slowly. Their progress through the tunnel seemed endless.
Finally the corridor was empty again. Footsteps no longer echoed in the rock cavern. Jac started to step forward. Griffin reached out and held her back, his hand on her shoulder.
“Let’s just make sure they are gone,” he whispered.
Five minutes later, certain enough time had passed, Griffin nodded. “Okay. Let’s get going.”
The path ahead was wide but arduous. Jac and Griffin crawled side by side through the pebbles as the passageway twisted and turned. Finally, they reached an opening.
As she dropped down into the next room, Jac sensed something here was different. But before she had time to look around, before she even saw him, she heard his voice echoing in the small rock chamber.
“I knew it!” Robbie laughed as he ran to her. “You always were such a wonderful puzzle solver.”
Jac threw her arms around her brother. They’d followed a faint clue into an impossible place and found him! He held onto her just as tightly.
Robbie smelled of the underground. Of the same mold and dust and death smell that she’d been inhaling for the last hour. Slightly vinegary. Definitely unpleasant. But that hardly mattered. The path to reaching her brother had been treacherous. She and Griffin had dislodged rock and bones, but they were here.
When she pulled back, she saw dried blood on his cheek. His shirt was filthy and ripped. “Are you hurt?”
He shook his head. “Why?”
“You’re scratched. On your face.”
“I suppose I brushed against some rock. In the beginning, I was moving so fast.”
“But you’re all right?” She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She wanted to put her fingers on his wrist and feel his pulse. To be certain. She’d been so afraid of what might have happened, of what might have been.
“It’s all right.” He put his arm around her. “I’m all right, Jac.”
She rested her head on his shoulder. Closed her eyes for a minute.
“You can stop worrying about me now.” He rubbed her back. “I didn’t want to scare you, but it was impossible to get a message to you any sooner or any other way.”
She smiled. He was always so good at reading her.
“Did you know who the man in the studio was? Robbie, he’s dead. You know that he’s dead?”
“He wasn’t supposed to die. But he had a gun. He was going to kill me if I didn’t give him the pottery. I burned just enough to knock him out.” His voice was trembling.
Griffin pulled a bottle of water out of his knapsack and handed it to him.
>
“Have some. There’s time to go over everything that happened.”
Gratefully, Robbie unscrewed the cap and gulped down half the bottle.
“How did you know about this place?” Jac asked.
“Come, there’s a table and chairs in the next chamber—we can all sit down. I can explain everything. And you can tell me what’s going on. It’s unsettling being a hunted man.”
“A table? Chairs?” Griffin asked.
“Come see. There are beds down here, too. Ways to cook food. An entire universe if you know where to look.”
Sure enough, there was a stone slab in the next room and makeshift benches made from tombstones piled on top of each other. At first Jac didn’t want to sit. These were sacred stones. Memorials. But after Griffin and Robbie did, she sat as close to her brother as she could. And while they talked she kept reaching out to touch him. To finger the rip on his sleeve, to stroke his arm.
“Have you been down here since Monday night?” Griffin asked.
“More or less. I came down here first. Then took a train to the Loire Valley.”
“At first I thought you were—that you’d drowned.”
He put his hand on his sister’s arm and leaned toward her. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I couldn’t think of any other way. I needed to make them think that so they’d direct their attention somewhere else.”
“And pick a place that would itself serve as a message?” she asked.
He nodded. “Do the police think that I’m dead?”
“They aren’t sure. Marcher—he’s the detective in charge of the case—isn’t convinced. How did you find this place? Did Grand-père show you?”
Robbie nodded and pulled out a wadded-up paper from his pocket. Unfolding it, he laid it on the tabletop and smoothed it out.
He was always so careful with things.
The map was an unwieldy two-foot square, creased, worn, and stained. “We started coming down here after you moved to America. He gave me the map and let me guide him, so I’d learn how to navigate. He said everyone needed to have a safe place.