“Two dozen. As agreed. I’ll want better payment next time,” he hisses at me. “It’s getting harder, you know. Harder to get black powder. Saltpeter, too. I have to pay a man to steal it from the military stores.” His eyes travel to the wound on my forehead. “You were injured a few nights ago, no? That’s what the papers say. Be careful. You are worth far more to me alive than dead. Bring me more jewels—good ones. And a handful of gold Louis. I have my eye on a very fine house. It belonged to a marquis.”
We hear footsteps approaching. “I’ve tarried too long,” Fauvel says. “I must go.”
As he finishes speaking, a newsboy walks by. He calls out the headlines and shouts that Bonaparte has upped the bounty on the Green Man to three hundred francs, dead or alive.
Fauvel’s eyes narrow. “Did I say a handful of gold Louis?” he says. “Make that a sackful.”
“Who is the Green Man? Who is the Green Man?” the newsboy shouts as he passes us. The words sound like a taunt.
“Who is the Green Man? Who is the Green Man?” The echo carries down the long arcade.
Fauvel chuckles. He raises his hand in the darkness and points. At me.
72
“Please, Amadé. Just for a night or two.”
“No.”
I’m sitting in his doorway. It’s late. I’m cold. I’ve been waiting here for hours. He’s just come home. He’s wearing a red ribbon around his neck and smells of wine.
“I’ll be quiet. I won’t break anything. I swear,” I tell him.
“Move.”
I get to my feet but I don’t get out of the way. “I have food. Lots of it. Enough for both of us,” I tell him. I open my bag and pull out a salami, a hunk of cheese, and a loaf of bread. I’ve already wolfed a turkey leg and a basket of strawberries. I bought the food with the coin one of the drunk guys dropped down my pants.
He pushes me aside. Puts his key in the lock.
“I’ll give you the salami. The whole thing,” I say.
“I don’t want it.”
The key turns. The door opens. I reach in my bag and dig around.
I offer him gum, a pen, my flashlight. I have to get inside. I have to sit by a fire.
“I don’t want anything of yours. I just want you to leave,” he says, going inside.
“I’m so cold,” I tell him. “I’m going to die if I don’t get warm.”
He starts to close the door. And then my hand, still in my bag, closes around my iPod.
“Wait!” I say, holding it out to him. “I’ll give you this. It’s a music box. Just like the one from the catacombs. Remember?”
His eyes widen. He reaches for it but I hold it away from him.
“All right, then,” he says, opening the door. “You can stay. But if you start shouting and throwing things again, you’re out for good.”
“Thank you,” I tell him. “You won’t even know I’m here. I swear.”
I give him the iPod, put the food on the table, then stash my bag and Fauvel’s bundle under the bed. I ask if I can borrow a shirt, then I get out of my wet clothes and hang them over the back of a chair to dry. I make a sandwich and a fire and then I sit down to eat. I don’t think I’ve ever been so profoundly grateful for anything in my life as I am for the warmth of the fire and the sandwich.
“Eat something,” I say to Amadé through a mouthful of food.
But he doesn’t want to eat. He’s messing with the iPod. Finally he hands it to me and says, “How do I wind this? Where is the key?”
“There’s no key,” I tell him. “Here, look.…” I show him what to press to turn it on. “You’ll need earbuds, too,” I say, getting up to pull a pair out of my jacket pocket. “Here you go. That’s the index; see it? What do you want to hear?”
My iPod is chockful. It’s a virtual history book of music because of Nathan and all his assignments. Amadé watches as I scroll from the As to the Bs.
“Beethoven?” he says. “The pianist? The one from Vienna?”
“Yep.”
“I’ve heard good things about him. They say he’s written some pretty pieces.”
“Yeah, one or two. Here, try this.”
I dial up Eroica, help him with the earbuds, then watch as he listens. His closes his eyes and his face, already beautiful, grows even more so. He smiles. Frowns. Nods. Gasps. He moves his graceful musician’s hands as if he’s conducting. After a few minutes, I see tears on his cheeks and I’m jealous of him. To hear that music for the first time—not in a movie or a car ad, broken up in bits and pieces, but complete, like Ludwig wanted you to—it must be amazing.
I finish my sandwich and put the leftover food up on the mantel so Hugo can’t get it. Then I crawl into Amadé’s bed. I’m so tired it hurts.
As I’m pulling the covers up, Amadé takes the earbuds out. He tries to speak but he can’t. He wipes his eyes, then says, “When did he write this?”
“He didn’t. Not yet. But he will. He’ll finish it in 1804 and dedicate it to Napoléon Bonaparte.”
“Bonaparte the soldier?” Amadé asks, looking shocked. “How do you know this?”
“Everyone knows it. It’s in every tenth-grade history book in America,” I mutter wearily.
“I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, I know you don’t. I don’t either,” I say. “Look, Amadé, I think something happened when I ran through the catacombs with you last night. I was in Paris—Paris of the twenty-first century. Now I’m in the eighteenth.”
Amadé gives me a look. “You drank too much. That’s what happened. Then you fell and hit your head.”
“No, it’s more than that. Something else happened. I don’t know what, but something.”
But he’s not listening to me. He’s back with Beethoven. I want to watch him, to enjoy his enjoyment, but my eyes are closing.
It dawns on me, as I’m lying here, that I’m hanging out with Amadé Malherbeau, the subject of my thesis, and that sources don’t get any more primary. If he’s still here tomorrow when I wake up—if I’m still here tomorrow when I wake up—I’ve got a million questions for him.
“No! It’s over,” he suddenly cries. He runs over, hands me the iPod. “More, please.”
I take his hand in mine, make him point his finger, and show him, again, how to dial and select. “Now you do it,” I say. “Choose something.”
He stabs at the dial. Hits Jane’s Addiction. Ritual de lo Habitual.
“Wait, Amadé, you skipped two whole centuries,” I say. “I wouldn’t do that.”
But it’s too late. The earbuds are in. He listens for a few seconds, then rips them out.
“Is this truly the music of the future?” he whispers, wide-eyed.
“Yes,” I say.
“Then the future is a very strange place.”
“It’s got nothing on the past,” I mumble.
Then, finally, I sleep.
73
Dead people can’t sit up. They can’t run after you. They can’t move at all. Right?
Then why is that one, the one in the green dress, moving her arm?
Oh, wait. She’s not moving it. Silly me. A rat is. A bulging brown rat. He’s tugging on it. Gnawing on it. Pulling off pieces of flesh and gobbling them down.
Whew. I feel so much better. I feel happy. So happy that I start laughing. Like a maniac. So hard that I can’t stop. And then I hyperventilate. And then I yell at myself to shut up and keep walking before the gravediggers find me down here, rocking in a corner.
I smelled the dead people before I saw them, but this time I was ready. I had Amadé’s little sack of cinnamon and orange peel. It helped with the smell of them a little. It helped with the sight of them not at all. There are so many. Hundreds. Thousands. Headless bodies are everywhere—stuffed into small rooms, stacked along walls. How many people did Robespierre kill?
Once I’m past them I stop and shine my flashlight on the map of the catacombs. The one Virgil made. I stuffed it in my bag right before the police ra
ided the beach. I’d forgotten about it but I found it this morning while I was digging in my bag for Tylenol. I looked at it, then asked Amadé how to get to the crypt—the one we came out of with his friends.
He told me it was in the Ste-Marie-Madeleine church and told me not to let myself be seen entering it. I ate another salami sandwich for breakfast, got dressed, and packed up my stuff. I thanked him for his hospitality. He barely heard me. I tried to ask him my questions, things like: Where were you born? Why did you stop writing for the theaters? When did you become a genius composer? But he waved me away. He was still listening to the iPod. He’d never stopped listening to it. He hadn’t slept all night. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it would run out of juice in another day or so.
I said goodbye and then I took off. Through the streets of Paris. To the church. Into the crypt and down the long cold tunnel into the catacombs.
I peer at Virgil’s map now until I find a section that contains the Madeleine. His drawings indicate that the tunnel leading down from the church is blocked. I guess it will be a couple hundred years from now, but it’s open today. I’m standing in it. I follow the path with my finger. After the block, the tunnel continues, forks and Ts a few times, goes under the river, and eventually leads to the beach.
I don’t know how all this happened. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know why it all feels and looks and tastes and smells real when it can’t possibly be. And I don’t care. All I want is to get back to where I was. To the twenty-first century. To Virgil. So I’m going to try to get back to where this all started, back to the beach.
“Virgil?” I call out now, hopefully. “Hey, Virgil, you there?”
The only answer is my voice echoing back at me. He’s not there. I’m alone. As usual. I wasn’t alone when I was with him. Which sounds stupid. Of course I wasn’t alone if I was with someone, but the thing is, I’m usually the most alone when I’m with someone.
I keep walking, shining my flashlight ahead of me. It’s quiet down here. I hear water dripping, rats squeaking, and the sound of my own feet—that’s it. The ground dips and rises. I have to duck in places, skirt a well, climb over a pile of stone from a wall that caved. After trudging for about half an hour, I find the first exit on Virgil’s map—St-Roch—a church in the center of the St-Honoré district. I remember the name from Alex’s diary. She came and went from the catacombs through St-Roch. I decide to check it out. Maybe I don’t have to walk all the way to the beach. Maybe there’s a quicker way back. I climb a narrow staircase cut into the limestone. There’s a door at the top, an ornate iron grille. I try the handle, but it’s locked. I shine my flashlight through the bars and see from the statues and crosses and cobwebs and dust that it leads to some sort of storage room. I look for lightbulbs in the ceiling, a vacuum cleaner, some sign of modern life—but there’s nothing.
“That’s only because it’s an old room. Nobody comes down here anymore,” I tell myself. And I try to believe it.
I head back into the tunnels and continue eastward. It’s hard to navigate. It’s really, really dark down here. Virgil has more tunnels drawn on his map than I’m seeing. But the main ones are here and I’m following them. I hope. After only another fifteen minutes or so I come up in what I think is a basement room under the Louvre. Which is good. It means I’m still heading east and working my way south, too.
What’s not good, though, is what I find in that room. Meat stored on ice. Milk in jugs, not cartons. Eggs in a basket. Dead chickens hanging from the ceiling. I’m still in the eighteenth century. Voices and footsteps scare me out of there and back into the tunnels.
I walk for a while. Under the river. Cold, murky water comes up to my ankles. Then to my knees. It drips on my head. I go slowly, sliding my feet, feeling for holes in the ground. As I get closer to the left bank, the ground slopes up and the water starts to recede. But it’s still murky, so much so that I don’t see the dead guy lying in it until I trip over him.
I scream and stumble, but manage to catch myself against a wall. After a minute or so, when my heart stops trying to batter its way out of my chest, I look at him. He’s propped up against the wall, half in and half out of the water. He’s not one of Robespierre’s, he can’t be—he still has his head. There’s a lantern in the water near him. He probably got lost down here and used up his candle, or his whale oil, or whatever the hell, and became disoriented and hysterical and died all alone in the dark, screaming and crying and clutching the walls.
And I realize something: it could happen to me. If I trip and drop my flashlight and it rolls away from me. If my batteries die. If I fall into a well.
The thought almost makes me turn around. But I don’t. I’m getting closer to the beach with every step. If I turn back now I’ll only have to try again later with weaker batteries. I keep walking and after a few minutes the ceiling finally stops dripping. I check the map. I’m on the other side of the river. Halfway there.
I walk on. I’ve got to get to the church of St-Germain. According to the map, the tunnel I’m in splits into three there. One path leads west, into the seventh arrondissement. One leads east, deeper into the sixth. The middle one, the one I want, continues south toward the fourteenth.
About forty-five minutes later, I’m there. I know because there’s a sign over a gated doorway that says Saint-Germain. I’m psyched. I’m actually doing it. I’m getting myself to the beach. I stop to rest for a few minutes, nibble a bit of bread that I brought with me, then get going again. The map says the tunnel should split soon. I pick up my pace, expecting to see the three-way fork any second, but instead I see a big fat wall.
“This is unexpected,” I say.
I shine my light over it. Panthéon is scrawled on it, with an arrow pointing east. Next to it Invalides is written, with an arrow pointing west. I’m standing at a T, with tunnels to either side of me.
“I must’ve read the map wrong,” I say, confused.
I peer at the map again, and as I’m following the path to St-Germain with my finger, I remember how the entrance to the tunnel, back at the Madeleine, was shown as being blocked, but really wasn’t. And I realize, with a sick feeling, that I didn’t read the map wrong. It is wrong. It was drawn in the twenty-first century and I’m in the eighteenth century and some of the tunnels it shows—including the one I very much need—have not been dug yet.
And suddenly, I lose it. I start crying and yelling and kicking the wall. “Why?” I scream at it. “Why?”
Why am I here? Why did this happen to me? Why can’t I make this whole bad trip stop? It can’t still be a drug reaction. The effects of the Qwellify would’ve worn off by now. It can’t be a vision quest thing. I mean, how long do those things last? Half an hour? I can’t be crazy. I just can’t be. I’ve survived so far. I’ve figured out how to get money. Buy food. Find shelter. I’ve figured out how to get back into the catacombs. Navigated my way through miles of tunnels in the pitch black with a flashlight and a homemade map. Could a crazy person do all that?
“So then why?” I shout. “Tell me why!”
But the walls and the dead people and the rats and the bugs are all silent. I sink down and sit on the ground. Back to the wall, arms wrapped around my knees.
I want to go to the Rue St-Jean. To Lili and G’s. Right now. I miss Virgil. And Rémy’s café. I miss Brooklyn, too. And my house. And Mabruk’s Falafel. I miss the smell of the city buses. Good coffee. The bridge all lit up at night. I miss my mother. And Nathan. And Vijay. And Jimmy Shoes.
But I don’t miss Arden. Or Beezie. Or St. Anselm’s. Or my father. That’s something. It means I’m not totally desperate. Not yet.
Maybe I’m in a coma. I fell running in the tunnels and hit my head, didn’t I? Maybe I hit it so hard I knocked myself out and the police found me and took me to a hospital and I’m lying in intensive care right now with a million tubes in me and all this is just my brain trying to amuse itself while I lie immobilized in a vegetative state.
Oddly enough, the coma idea cheers me up. It explains a lot—like why I haven’t snapped out of this yet. I pick up my head and wipe my nose on my sleeve. The beam of my flashlight is lighting a patch of ground and the black spider crawling across it. As I watch the spider, the beam dims. Just slightly.
Time to go. I don’t want to be down here when the batteries die. Just in case I’m wrong about the coma thing.
I stand up and start the long walk back.
74
“Hugo stinks. Don’t you ever wash him?” I ask Amadé.
The hellhound is lying on the bed next to me. He growls every time I try to push him off.
“Seriously. You could take him for a swim in the Seine, you know. Anything would help.”
I get no answer. Just the same chords over and over again. Amadé’s composing, or trying to. I’m lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. It’s where I’ve been ever since I got back from my stroll through the catacombs. Amadé wasn’t exactly thrilled to see me, but he let me back in.
I put a pillow over my head now and try to block out the sounds he’s making but it doesn’t work. How did he ever get to be such a famous composer if he can’t get past the same three chords?
I can’t take it anymore. I raise the pillow. “Switch to B minor! There should be a tritone in the third measure. God!” I shout.
Amadé swears. He bangs his fist on the table. “Did I ask you for advice? No! I do not need advice. What I need is coffee!”
Coffee’s the least of our problems. We have no food. We’ve eaten everything I bought yesterday. We’ve run out of firewood, too. I sit up. Hugo’s funk is suffocating me.
“We need to eat,” I say. “I’ll go to the Palais. See if I can get a few coins. If I do, I’ll get some coffee.”
Amadé mutters something, but I don’t catch it. He’s bent over the table now, scribbling music.
I don’t want to go to the Palais—the memory of those drunken goons who groped me makes me shudder—but I don’t have much choice. I open my guitar case, to tune up before I go, and see that my E string has snapped.
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