All Fall Down

by James Brabazon

  Then I was on it. Pont Louis Philippe. No room for error driving against the one-way system. I came in as tight as I could to the curb on the left and let the brake go, left knee skimming stone. The back wheel held. A patrol car handbrake-turned parallel to me, the officers inside shouting, weapons drawn. But they were too slow and I outpaced their pistols as they fought with windows and doorframes. I checked over my shoulder as I straightened up. The motorcycle cops were still on me, but one of them oversteered. Another gave it too much front brake, and their bikes collided, fiberglass fragmenting as the frames skidded side-on into the patrol car. One rider hopped clear; the other catapulted over the handlebars, first walking on air and then turning somersaults into the windshield of the stricken patrol car. Two cops and the plainclothes pursuer stayed on me.

  My tires hit cobbles and the timbre of the road changed to a fast rip as the little square stones shook the Yamaha’s suspension. Either side of the road the bridge’s stone balustrade was punctuated with apertures, capturing the bateaux mouches plying the river in dozens of frozen images juddering past like a reel from an old movie camera. Ahead and close, the red awning of a café on the southwest corner of the bridge; far distant, the colonnaded dome of the Panthéon crowning the urban horizon.

  I twisted the throttle, leaning right and low, cutting the corner off the little island and burning over the pedestrianized Pont Saint-Louis onto the Île de la Cité. The M4’s suppressor hung down behind me, scraping for an instant on the road as I stooped into the turn. Water flashed to the left of me and I was beside Notre-Dame, rising above the winter-dead gardens that spread out beyond the cathedral’s iconic east end. In seconds I was back on Pont de l’Archevêché, which I’d crossed the day before on the way to Lukov’s apartment.

  I was far enough away now from the gunfight in La Fée Verte for pedestrians to be ignorant of the shootout. People fell back. Couples grabbed each other. Near misses swore and flipped me off—but I heard nothing except the rattle-roar of the engine on cobbles and stone and asphalt; that, and the thump-thump, thump-thump of my own heart pounding a metronomic pulse in my ears. From the moment the Bulgarian had bitten the dust until I crossed Boulevard St.-Germain and came screaming out onto Rue Monge, less than ten minutes had passed. I put my face down behind the Perspex that remained intact in the battered bike’s windshield and gritted my teeth, eyes half-closed, squinting through the sunglasses against the hurricane breeze blown back by the surge forward.

  The two bikes were still with me, a steady pistol shot behind. The visored BMW rider let them keep pace, a constant twenty meters farther back. Another kilometer. Southeast. Due south. And then, in seconds, onto Avenue des Gobelins. From there it was a direct, wide run southeast to Place d’Italie, along a street I’d first walked with my father as a teenager. Now I gunned it at ninety, straight toward the Thirteenth Arrondissement. Past a supermarket, over a broad junction, weaving through unsuspecting traffic crisscrossing me on their green light. A blacked-out police van, a blue light flashing on the dashboard, swerved to hit me but missed, T-boning a garbage truck exiting Rue le Brun with a bone-cracking bang.

  And all the while the chopper shadowed me. I jumped the curb, dropped the revs and zapped down the pavement. At my three o’clock one of the police bikes shadowed me along Avenue des Gobelins. I dodged Sunday strollers who unfailingly dived in the wrong direction, and zoomed over the zebra crossing at Rue du Banquier, sticking to the sidewalk.

  Rue du Banquier. Shit.

  It was too tight to turn. I pulled out into the street, over the crossing that cut Gobelins, straight into the motorcycle cop who’d been on my right. SIG drawn, arm out. But my sudden move had wrong-footed him. I veered left, toward him. He fired. The round snapped across my face. As our bikes closed, I leaned out with a straight right. I caught him under the chin, into his neck. His pistol discharged again, high this time. As he toppled backward, his Yamaha slid out from under him. I looped around him. His stray shot had shattered a pharmacy window. Passersby lay flattened on the street.

  And then the rev-roar of the second police bike coming at me from the southeast. I’d not seen him pass me. As I doubled back on myself to leave him behind me, the plainclothes rider pulled up ahead. I stopped. He stopped. Blue jeans, black biker’s jacket, mirrored full-face visor. Five-eleven, maybe, and wiry. I watched his hands. Tactical Kevlar gloves. Behind, the police Yamaha closed in. I flattened myself against the tank, right hand opening up the revs, left hand on the clutch lever. As I ducked down, I looked around. The motorcycle cop was on me, SIG up. I was stuck there on the street, sandwiched between two would-be killers. I was finished.

  I stared into the cop’s eyes and read the rapt concentration etched across his face that was keeping pistol and pistons moving together. I blinked and saw for a fraction of a second Rachel staring out of the void. And then the policeman’s face folded in on itself, distorting surprise into disgust. His nose, cheek, eye vanished into an eruption of thick, meaty gore as the round ricocheted inside his skull, trapped by his helmet. I hugged the Yamaha hard and snatched the clutch. The BMW rider’s arm swung down. The tip of his suppressed pistol arced across me, but there was no second shot. I pressed on, looking over my left shoulder just long enough to see the policeman I’d punched out spin sideways from a single shot to the side of the head.

  I rode the stolen police bike as hard as the cylinders would let me, plunging along Rue du Banquier, lying flat against the body of the bike, estimating the turn from the space in the buildings and trees above me. I flew past the first right and then down the second. It was flanked by high-rise apartment blocks, and I realized the chopper had banked away, out of sight, looking for a new angle on me. If there was a sniper on board, he was out of luck. I raised my head and checked the mirror. The cop-killing BMW rider was still on me, matching me move for move.

  But I was close now, seconds from my destination. I kicked up into third and ran the intersection at Boulevard de l’Hôpital, swerving around a baby buggy. The trees of Rue Pinel loomed up on either side. I asked the stolen Yamaha for everything it’d give me. As the bike growled, I sat up straight, put my hands down onto the saddle and leapfrogged backward. The heavy police machine sped away from me between my legs. I found the road feetfirst, then with my left shoulder, back and right shoulder. I spun head over heels, twisted facedown, braced with my forearms—and stopped. I pushed up. Hands bleeding. The elbows of my jacket ragged, knees of my jeans scuffed. Nothing broken. I stood, staggered, righted myself and brought the M4 up as the BMW behind me hit the crossroads.

  Inhale. Exhale. Settle. Fire.

  As my finger squeezed the trigger, the rider pulled up on the handlebars, rearing into a roaring wheelie. Instead of shredding his sternum, the suppressed 5.56 round tore the front tire apart. The handlebars jerked. The fork twisted. The bike was too heavy to hold. The BMW jackknifed and went over, the plainclothes rider with it, pitching him out of sight behind a delivery van. Meanwhile my bike had carried on to the next, wide junction, smashing into a row of parked cars, triggering a slew of alarms. The chopper buzzed above them, out of sight, zooming in on the crash site, not on me. I turned to get my bearings and ducked right, under the trees and scaffolding at the back of the ParisTech engineering college.

  The street was deserted.

  It had been nearly twenty-eight years since I’d stood in front of that white paneled door and old stone wall. It had been dark then—exactly three a.m. on a warm summer night. I didn’t know who lived there in 1990, and I didn’t now. It wasn’t what was in the house I needed. I dropped to my knees to the right of the door, kneeling in front of three adjacent manhole covers. I took the screwdriver from my coat pocket and quickly put the tip under the wide lip of the cover farthest to the left . . . and took the longest shot of my life.

  15

  Sparks of light erupted across the emptiness. Deep greens and reds brightened, swirled and died. Yellow flares
twisted into nothingness. All I could see was a patchwork of fractals spinning away from me.

  I closed my eyes.

  Nothing changed.

  I blinked hard and waited for my eyes to become accustomed to the dark. Eventually the crazy patterns dancing across my retinas spun themselves into oblivion. As they faded, my heartbeat steadied. And then there was nothing except darkness. No shapes, no depth, no shadows. No light at all. I was engulfed in perfect pitch-blackness.

  I stood at a half crouch, stock-still, and cocked my head and listened, but there was nothing to hear. No sirens. No alarms. No helicopter. Silence so profound I could feel it on the edges of my teeth. The fast buzzing of the road had evaporated. All that was left was the high-pitched whine that the firefight in the café had scored into my eardrums.

  But then, close, very close: the unmistakable sound of breathing.

  I tensed, right hand on the pistol grip of the rifle. I held my own breath and strained into the void. The rasping stopped. I waited—and then exhaled in a rush of relief. It was my own lungs I could hear. There was no one nearby, no one in pursuit. I laughed out loud, just as I’d done when I first stood there.

  But an entire lifetime had elapsed since then. This time I was alone.

  My laugh went nowhere, bouncing back at me in a flat, close echo. I checked with my thumb that the fire selector was still on semiauto, brought the rifle up, pressed my back against stone and went white.

  The LED torch beam stretched out from under the barrel of the M4 along thirty meters of low limestone tunnel—illuminating, at its farthest point, what looked like a dogleg in the passage. There was just enough clearance for the barrel to traverse the 180 degrees to light up the other direction. As I whipped the rifle round to my left, the wall directly in front of me flared up in a bright white hot spot. In the middle of it a circle of slack-jawed skulls stared back at me—empty eye sockets filled with deep, moving shadows; teeth missing, broken, discolored by cave slime; craniums cracked and moldy. Around the skulls a ragged circle of femurs set them off like a shield on the passage wall. As I moved the LED beam across them, the shadows made the dead eyes flit this way and that, as if they were following the rifle, examining me.

  It was exactly as I remembered. I jumped, anyway.

  I was neither in the sewers nor in the shafts servicing the Métro. I hadn’t ended up in a basement or a siege tunnel. The manhole I’d slipped through wasn’t a door so much as a portal, because it wasn’t just an entrance to an underground passageway; it was a gateway into a parallel Paris.

  Beneath the capital’s pavements, limestone quarries mined centuries ago to build the houses and churches above spread out in a network of caverns and wells, galleries and caves—all connected by three hundred kilometers of pitch-black passages. But all that, my father had told me as we sank into the darkness together that first time twenty-eight years ago, wasn’t what made Paris unique.

  It was what happened after the quarries were dug, he said, that was truly remarkable. The basements and cellars of huge swaths of the city south of the Seine sat on top of—and in many cases, were connected to—more than just an ancient mining complex. In the eighteenth century the abandoned chambers were used as the perfect solution to an unspeakable problem: what to do with the horror show of the capital’s overflowing cemeteries. Into those acres upon acres of suburban caverns had been interred the bones of six million bodies.

  It was not a journey to be undertaken without maps—though maps alone, my father had impressed upon me, were not enough to save anyone down there. Most of the tunnels were hardly tall enough to stand up in; some shrank to barely a foot high. Seemingly bottomless wells that plumbed the black abyss of underground aquifers; cave-ins; flooded tunnels; eye-gouging metal spikes; ankle-breaking holes; and deep, dark pits that could swallow a man all lay in wait. The fresh corpses of careless explorers were easily added to the ancient, unnamed remains.

  All those years ago we’d emerged from that vast, random city of the dead in Montrouge Cemetery, south of the center near the Périphérique—the busy highway that ringed Paris. If I could escape the city, I could escape—period.

  The stretch of tunnel where I stood formed the elbow of a bend. Right led southeast; left, northwest—where, barely two meters farther on, the continuation of the tunnel was also masked by a crook in the stone passage. I straightened carefully from my crouch, turned about face and looked up. The footholds I’d used to drop down the shaft disappeared into the blackness above. I killed the torch, and kept staring up, listening, squinting into the darkness.

  Still nothing.

  If anyone had followed me underground, they’d used a different entrance. I switched the torch on again and played the beam across the rock around the crude ladder. The name of the street above was chiseled into the stone in mid-nineteenth-century letters, along with the date the passage was reinforced: 1865. But in between these signposted convergences, the routes of the tunnels and the city streets diverged wildly. I looked carefully around the inscription, putting my hand on the cool stone as if that would guide my eyes. I found what I was looking for almost immediately: two small sets of letters carved at head height.

  MMG JMG

  Max and John Mac Ghill’ean. The initials were scratched deeper than I remembered; and although covered with fine green mosslike mold, they were as clear as the night we’d cut them, if you knew where to look. I traced my fingers over my father’s initials and slipped into a kind of shock. It was the only physical trace of him that remained. Beneath the letters we’d carved a St. Patrick’s saltire. To the left of where the two arms of the cross joined, a dot, bored into the stone with the punch of a Swiss Army knife.

  Turn left.

  And in the V that made the top of the cross, another.

  Climb up.

  It was an adaptation of the same simple system of waypoints he’d first taught me when I was a child. Together we’d marked the tree trunks in the plantation that stretched out behind our house in County Wicklow so that I could find my way home again if I lost my compass. Alone, I’d mapped onto the bark of the trees themselves vast tracts of the woodland that swallowed me for hours. My wanderings were stopped abruptly when my mother realized how far from home her nine-year-old was venturing.

  “If you did this where Mamka and Babushka grew up, you would have been eaten by wolves,” she told me firmly in Russian—which meant there was no arguing with her. I never looked at the forest in the same way again.

  I snapped out of the reverie and willed myself to concentrate. The calm of being underground was deceptive. Only a couple of minutes before I’d been running a full-scale escape and evasion. Just because I’d paused didn’t mean my pursuers would. The gunfight was bound to trigger a manhunt of an epic scale. The helicopter, the police vans, the army and the Foreign Legion would all still be up there—but that was just for starters. They’d already been joined by the mystery bike rider and whoever else had been stirred up by Benjamin Franklin.

  The Navy SEAL, if that’s what he was, could have still been working for the Americans if he was out, or he could have been working freelance. The guys in kaffiyehs, the phony cop—all of them could have been on anyone’s payroll, from the Brits to the Bulgarians, the CIA to the FSB. In a strange twist of irony probably the only people not after me were the IRA—although I wasn’t ruling them out, either.

  But sting-ball grenades and Tasers weren’t what I usually went up against. And if I’d been on the other end of that sniper rifle, I’d have shot me dead vaulting that bar. The only firm conclusion I could draw was that the people actually trying to kill me were the French. And fair enough.

  I steadied myself against the wall and slowed my breathing.

  Clarity in darkness.

  I’d dropped twelve meters under the city streets—if not out of mind, then at least, for the moment, out of sight. But the city wasn’t simply hidin
g me now; it had buried me: no satellites, no thermal imaging, no cell phone signal and no CCTV. It was as if modern technology had never happened. Above all, my one advantage persisted: they didn’t know where I was going or why. The fact that I didn’t either was, I tried to convince myself, neither here nor there. All I had to do was stay the one step ahead that I’d kept up since diving into the Channel, and hope that I might find some answers before I was tripped up for good.

  I turned my back on the crook of the passage. So many of the tunnels around the Place d’Italie were blocked off that traveling in a straight line was impossible. It had been years since I’d been down here, too—and although the tunnels had been hewn out over two centuries before, they’d never stayed the same for long. An organic, ever-changing network, it was more like the intestines of the city than its foundations. Ultimately, I needed to be going southwest, but to take that bearing I’d first have to head southeast and then loop round.

  I set off into the world’s largest catacombs still guided by my father’s helping hand. But the sheer immensity of the labyrinth was almost overwhelming. The rough earthen floor was strewn with small loose stones; the walls were mined rock, patched with brick and injections of cement. I walked slowly, head down. After twenty meters a short passage opened up on the left, which terminated in a T junction after only a few paces. On the wall to the right of the entrance, another cross with another marker.