Why do you want me to know this?
Don Simon walked for a long time, through the streets of Paris.
Partaking of the vampire’s memories, feeling behind them the shadow of another’s thought, Asher saw what he saw: the close-crowding walls of half-timbered houses, held together only with caked soot and filth; the twisting alleyways of the market district, Rag-Dealer’s Street, Coal-Heaver’s Street, the Street of Mutterings. Saw the poor who slept in doorways, shivering in the spring cold; they appeared as shape and heat and scent in the darkness, as vampires saw them. Every window was shuttered tight, every house a fortress. Rats picked at the garbage in the streets. Cats stalked them with careful steps, taking care not to get themselves into a place where they could be swarmed. In one place Simon, cognizant of such things, glimpsed the woman Gabrielle Batoux standing in the stinking black mud of a street, eyes half-shut like a woman in a dream, hands stretched out to one of those tall closed-up houses.
As Asher watched – as Simon watched – a man opened the door of the ground-floor shop, emerged like a sleepwalker, leaving the door open behind him and treading across the black goo underfoot as if he did not feel it between his bare toes. Gazing only at the woman before him, shining like a goddess in the dark.
Simon walked to the top of Montmartre and stood long beside the flat gray stones where he had lain waiting for the dawn. Thin rain sleeked his ivory silk hair into the illusion of its former darkness. Paris slumbered below him like a bed of quenched coal, tight within its medieval ramparts, but from the towers of a thousand convents and monasteries rose the soft chiming of bells, a thousand voices calling the holy to night-offices in churches where the holy water was ice in the fonts.
After that he went to a house on the Rue de la Fontaine and stood outside a shuttered window, looking through a crack. The only light inside came from a range of charcoal burners near another window of the long chamber inside, the glow only enough to pick out the gleam of vampire eyes. A coal flared, caught the shape of the vampire alchemist Emeric Jambicque’s hooked nose and tufted orange eyebrows as he brought up a wire cage containing half a dozen huge rats. This he set on the table, beside a vat with a faintly rotten stink and eye-burning vapors which drowned even the stench of the streets. The tall vampire grinned, took from his pocket a small sand-glass. He lifted the top from the rat cage, plunged one hand in, his grin widening as the animal he seized writhed, clawed, and bit his wrist until blood splattered down. He held it up for a moment as if enjoying its terrified efforts to escape, then turned the sand-glass and dropped the frantic animal into the vat.
Even outside the shuttered window Simon could hear – Asher could hear – the rat screaming: screaming and screaming as the sulfuric acid (though Don Simon identified it as vitriol) ate away its flesh. Emeric stood looking from the sand-glass to the vat, absent-mindedly wrapping a rag around his bitten arm, observing as the shrieks stopped. After a few minutes he took up a pair of tongs, poked, and stirred.
Simon turned away.
TWENTY-TWO
‘Will you help me?’
Stanislas Greuze studied for a moment the paper Lydia had given him. Morning sunlight buttered the Avenue du Maine, but there was little traffic; the Café de l’Arc et de la Hache was nearly empty. A few cab-drivers loitered, reading newspapers, and its proprietor had settled down himself with the most recent edition of Le Monde.
‘MASS EXECUTIONS OF CIVILIANS IN BELGIUM’. (Lydia had seen the headlines before leaving Ysidro’s house on Montmartre. Without her glasses, they could have been announcing a Chinese invasion for all she knew.)
‘FRENCH AND BRITISH FORCES RETREAT TO NAMUR’.
The Germans were coming.
The cab-driver’s dark eyes flicked from the instructions to Lydia’s face. ‘Who is he?’ he asked. ‘This Spaniard you had me bring to Rue Caulaincourt Monday night? Who is the man in the hospital, the one you call your husband? The night I sat beside him he whispered of strange things.’
‘He is my husband.’
‘I dreamed about your Spaniard last night, madame. Dreamed I was at the rally last year in Montparnasse, when Jean Jaurès spoke against conscription and pleaded for peace. Telling us – and he spoke the truth! – that we must not be lured into a war. That war is how the rich trick our minds, distract us with words like patriotism and righteous hate, to keep us from demanding justice. He spoke of the world as it could be, with working men and women striving for their rights. Telling us that we must stand against those who would send us forth with the tactics of Napoleon against the weapons of Krupp. And your Spaniard was there in the front row, a few steps from me.’
Lydia looked aside, unable to answer, but she felt her face burn. Hating Ysidro. Hating herself.
‘Only he wasn’t, you know.’ Greuze set the paper down. ‘I have a good memory for faces, and your Spaniard has one that’s hard to mistake. In my dream I saw Jaurès embrace him, Jaurès whom the so-called patriots murdered the day the war was declared, Jaurès who was I think this country’s last hope for peace and justice for the working-men who’re dying by the thousands now … That husband of yours was there, too. In my dream. So who is he? Who are they?’
He was silent for a few moments, hands folded, his ugly, hook-nosed face still. ‘Who are you?’
‘There is …’ she began, and stopped. Vampires killed those who told their secrets. Those who knew them.
Ysidro would probably protect her, but whatever he said about not wanting to have his servants killed, she guessed it wouldn’t save this man’s life.
‘There is a weapon,’ she said, picking her words carefully. ‘Not exactly a weapon, but it can be used by the Germans against us – against Britain, against France, against the Belgians … I know about it because my government wanted to get hold of it to use it against them. My husband and I – and Don Simon – are trying to keep it out of everybody’s hands, because whoever gets hold of it will abuse it. We know this. I can’t … I can’t explain more fully than that, and I can’t explain why I can’t explain. And you have no reason whatsoever to trust me, or to believe what I say.’
‘This thing – this weapon that isn’t a weapon … it’s whatever it is that lets your friend get into my dreams?’ The edge of anger still glinted in his voice. ‘Isn’t it?’
Well, he should be angry, she thought.
‘In part, yes.’
‘You tell your friend: don’t ever do that to me again.’
‘I will. I’m sorry.’ She looked up into his face. Across the avenue a man and two boys were nailing up boards over the windows of a tobacconist’s shop. Though it was mid-morning the shops on either side were still shuttered as well.
The Germans were coming.
‘He was wrong,’ she said at length. ‘He should not have done that. He should have trusted … I’d like to think that if he’d told me what he intended I’d have asked him not to, but we have very little time. My husband spied for Britain before we were married. That’s how he knows about these … these people, who can do this. He quarreled with the Department and quit, years ago. The man who accused him is working for the Germans; they can kill him more easily inside the prison than they could in the hospital, where Don Simon or I could be with him at night when the danger was greatest. We have to get him out. Get him away.’
Greuze’s fingers brushed the paper Lydia had handed him, along with a stack of silver five-franc coins. ‘So I see.’
His gaze rested on her face again. Calculating the cost of that dream, she wondered: the dream and its implications against … what? A half-dozen encounters with her? Whatever it was Jamie had whispered in his delirium while Greuze sat at his side last – Monday? Tuesday? She couldn’t recall. She prayed she hadn’t done anything egregiously stupid or conceited while he’d been with her, but the days blurred together with exhaustion and dread, and there was much that she simply couldn’t remember.
He put the money in his jacket pocket, glanced down at the instructions,
and asked, ‘Can you drive a car?’
Lydia took a deep breath, refrained from bursting into tears, and said, ‘Yes. Not well …’
‘There’s no traffic these days, you should be all right. Your Spaniard says here he’s rented a car for us, a Crossley saloon. That’s a big car. You familiar with the streets in the fourteenth, madame? No?’ He finished his coffee. ‘You better come with me, then.’
For the next two hours Lydia piloted Greuze’s cab through the half-empty streets of Montparnasse. Fortunately the area between the Place d’Italie and the cemetery was fairly straightforward (I will never permit Mrs Flasket to speak ill of Baron Haussmann again!), without the confusing tangle of older streets that one found closer to the river, and with a little practice Lydia could circle the prison in a matter of minutes. ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen once we get past the guards,’ remarked the cab-driver as Lydia swung around the bronze lion in the Place Denfert-Rochereau and turned up the Boulevard Saint-Jacques. ‘It might be safer if you just wait in the Rue de la Santé from the beginning.’
Since Lydia knew that she’d be safer in a moving vehicle than sitting still where Hyacinthe – or one of the other members of the Paris nest, or Jürgen Schaumm – could come upon her in the fifteen to twenty minutes Ysidro had calculated it would take him to bring a bedridden and possibly unconscious prisoner to the gates, she only said, ‘I think Don Simon is afraid that the car will be identified and traced if it stands too long.’ The cab – a powerful little Renault – was harder to drive than her Aunt Isobel’s Detroit Electric, but she suspected that even more strength would be required to maneuver the Crossley. The thought of tonight made her heart pound; when she returned to Montmartre, slipping into the house through the cellar as she had exited it, she lay down in the little bedroom she had taken, but could not sleep.
Nowhere, she understood, was safe now.
On Wednesday night Ysidro had taken her into the tunnels, and shown her not only the one leading to her former safe house, but another that debouched on to waste ground behind the Café Arabie on the Rue Gabrielle. The light of Ysidro’s lantern barely illuminated the gallery in which they stood, which was surprisingly high – as indeed was the ceiling of the cellar behind them, which Lydia realized had itself been part of the gallery at one time – and marked by a line of square stone pillars down its center, the living rock of the hill.
‘These mine tunnels extend for miles,’ the vampire said. ‘One can go to the Cemetery of Montmartre and the Buttes-Chaumont. They reach beyond the Cemetery of Père-Lachaise, and have a hundred entrances into the Métro tunnels, and at various places about Montmartre itself. Be careful if you explore them.’ From his pocket he took a hunk of white chalk, which he pressed into her hand. ‘Though ’tis safe enough in the daytime. And take care you mark your way secretly, with signs not readily perceived by those who do not know where and how to look.’
‘Do the others in the Paris nest know about this?’ Her footfalls whispered away down the side drifts and passageways whose entrances were barely more than hints of deeper darkness. Of Ysidro’s there was not even a shadow.
It was in these mines, she guessed, rather than in the house above, that Ysidro had concealed his coffin. The cold down here, and the damp, can’t be good for him in his condition …
She wanted to slap herself for the concern she felt. The unwillingness of the various members of the Paris nest to hide down here suddenly became much more understandable, Facinum or no Facinum.
‘Does Hyacinthe know?’
‘She knows they exist. Hence the stoutness of the door that leads into the cellar. To the best of my knowledge she has never devoted her time to the arts of lock-picking.’
They had reached the entrance of a smaller gallery, which at one time had been fenced across with a desiccated wooden barrier. Lydia wondered at the optimism of whatever parents had thought such a thing would keep inquiring children from further exploration – such a fence wouldn’t stop her daughter Miranda for so much as a moment. Old chalk-scribbles contributed by children of all ages enlivened the walls at varying heights. The light of Ysidro’s lantern fell on a childish scrawl of an arrow and the words ‘Rue Gabrielle’.
‘When you ascend at the end of this passageway, listen through the door to make sure the yard behind the café is deserted. The ground there used to be someone’s garden. I think Communards used that entrance during the siege in seventy-one. If Elysée begot fledglings for their brains rather than their looks there would probably be someone in the Paris nest who knew Montmartre in those days, but in that respect we are safe. The vampires who remained in Paris to hunt during the days of the Commune are gone, and ’tis not a neighborhood she would have deigned to enter since.’
He’d taken her hand then and led her back to the cellar, and so up to the kitchen above. They had played cards for a time, and talked: she of her girlhood as an heiress, he of the Paris of his memories. ‘’Twas twice as large as London, and a thousand times more sophisticated. My servant was forever getting himself lost, and swore he learned of vices then that he’d never heard of …’
‘Was your servant Spanish?’
‘English.’ A flicker of something – memory? – moved in the back of his yellow eyes. He looked away from her and drew more closely about his shoulders the Persian shawl he’d brought down from one of the attics. Though the night was warm he shivered, exhausted still from their attempt on the Hôtel Batoux two nights before. ‘Timothy Quodling. A simple-hearted rascal.’
‘I thought the English back then hated the Spanish.’
‘Tim was of the True Faith.’
‘Was that why you didn’t return to Paris?’ asked Lydia after a time. ‘Because of the Protestant vampires?’ She remembered what Jamie had told her, of his confused visions of the war among the vampires of Paris and their living followers.
‘Dios, no. After I left in the spring of 1603 there was naught here that I wished to see badly enough to justify the risk of enlisting a traveling companion. By the time of my departure there were no Protestant vampires left in Paris.’
He had been worn out, and to Lydia’s distress had very soon retired to curl up in a chair beside the fire in the salon like an exhausted old man, staring into the flames. Lydia herself, sitting in the other chair, had dozed, and when she’d wakened an hour before dawn it had been to find him gone.
To his damp coffin underground, she thought, with a pang.
STOP IT! He deserves no pity. He KILLED someone tonight.
One of the prisoners in La Santé? That’s where he was earlier, finding Jamie, telling the guards to be extra watchful. Surely there are murderers there, rapists, two-legged beasts who deserve to die …
Or would he say that the guards there keep too close an eye on the prisoners for one to be found drained of blood?
She’d slept again, and had dreamed – or thought she’d dreamed – of those dark grids of passageways and galleries beneath the hill of Montmartre. And instead of finding them dank and fearsome, in her dream she’d felt a child’s delight, such as she’d felt in the big old country houses of various branches of her mother’s family, houses shut up and draped in holland covers, cobwebs, and dust. She’d run through them, exploring and finding wonders, and in her dreams of the old mines she could see in the darkness, and ran through that spooky world of endless night, marveling at its ancient complexity.
When she woke – early, with the first sunlight of Saturday streaming in white needles through the slits of the shutters – she bathed and washed her hair and put on her usual careful application of rice-powder and mascaro and the tiniest touch of rouge (even if she faced no more than a day of reading and prowling the house and wondering if Jamie were safe, if he’d made it through the night … ), and the thought of the tunnels didn’t leave her. Yesterday’s inactivity had left her restless and aching, and the prospect of another endless summer day like the one before appalled her.
Besides, she thought, I sh
ould find out where he’s got his coffin down there, in case I need to know.
So with the fascination of her dream still lively in her heart she located a compass in one of the salon’s desk drawers, took Ysidro’s chalk, the dark-lantern, and a map of Paris, and set off exploring. She took care, as Ysidro had cautioned her, to make her guiding marks well below eye level, and in places not obvious to the casual glance. (Who down here is going to be glancing CASUALLY?) Those passageways that smelled of sewage she avoided, and shrank, shuddering, from those where she heard rats moving about in the blackness. Out of an obscure uneasiness she kept her dark-lantern closed down to the smallest possible slit, and stopped, often, to shut it entirely (rats notwithstanding) and listen.
In the silence she felt the far-off vibration of the Métro Line A, and calculated she must be somewhere near the Cemetery of Montmartre at the foot of the hill. If she made her way to her right …
Somewhere near her, echoes carried the whisper of voices.
And the thin edge of light bobbed into view on the black corners of the passageway ahead.
Lydia double-checked her own shut lantern-slide, wrapped her skirt tight around her legs, and edged forward. It’s broad daylight overhead, it can’t actually be …
‘Where is she?’ Spectacle lenses flashed in the reflected gleam of another dark-lantern.
DAMN it! Lydia hastily pulled hers off.
But now I can’t see who it is.
But she knew.
The vile little man with the spectacles, Ysidro had called him.
A lightning peek around the corner confirmed it. In addition to two rounds of flashing glass she could easily make out the striped jacket, beige and black, whose matching skirt she’d seen splattered with blood in the apartment of Camille Batoux. The jacket she’d glimpsed – or thought she’d glimpsed – in the courtyard of the Lariboisière Hospital …
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