Authors: Tony Strong
Five days later, Claire flies to France with Christian.
Within hours of Furnish's death, journalists were camping on Christian's doorstep. The NYPD offered them a safe house for as long as they needed it, but it seemed just as easy to bring the wedding forward and escape. They chose the dress together, Christian apparently unbothered by the superstition that to see it before the wedding day would bring bad luck. She guesses that, on the contrary, he's in the grip of a more personal hex: that, if she were to get hold of the pictures from his previous wedding, she would find that Stella had worn just such a dress to speak her ill-fated vows.
There is a distance between herself and Christian now. Not that he isn't solicitous about her well-being —
on the contrary, he clearly still feels racked with guilt that he wasn't with her when the killer struck —
but a part of her has withdrawn from him, replaying the events of that strange afternoon on an endless loop of film, so much more vivid and intense than what is happening here and now. She still has a ringing in her ears from the stun grenades the police used as they stormed the mortuary. But even when she can hear what's being said to her, she finds it hard to attend to it.
Paul told the class once about a kind of Japanese drama in which a character has to relive the circumstances of his death over and over again, until it no longer holds any emotion for him; only then can his spirit leave the earth. She feels a bit like that now, unable to move on from the past until it has become less urgent than the present.
===OO=OOO=OO===
He takes her to a tiny hotel near the Arc de Triomphe, a quiet haven of understated eighteenth-century elegance. While she unpacks and fills the vast white bath, he goes out. On his return, he tells her to put on some warm clothes.
'Why?' she says. It's a sunny autumn evening, much warmer than the chilly Fall they've left behind.
'We're going somewhere very cold,' he says simply. He picks up a backpack he has brought with him from New York. 'Ready?'
Outside, he tells the taxi to take them to the rue Dareau. On the way, he converses easily with the driver in French about his football team, and she's amazed by the change in him. In New York, Christian would rather die than swap sports chat with a cab driver.
Eventually they pull up alongside a small park. The taxi driver shoots Christian a sly, sideways look.
'Vous visitez les catacombes, monsieur ?'
Christian shrugs.
'Oui, peut-être. La mademoiselle ne les a jamais vu.'
'Il faut faire attention. Ne pas s'égarer.'
'Bien sûr. Nous avons une carte.''
'What was all that about?' she asks dully as the driver speeds off with his tip.
'Over here,' he says, not answering. There's a small iron gate set into a wall. Beyond it are some steps. It looks as if it leads down into some kind of cellar. Christian produces a key and unlocks the gate.
'We're in luck. I was afraid they might have changed the locks.'
The stairs lead into darkness. He produces two heavy flashlights from the backpack and hands one of them to her.
'Where are we going?'
'Into the catacombs,' he says over his shoulder. 'There are hundreds of entrances, all locked of course, but keys are readily available on the black market. The taxi driver could probably have procured one if we'd needed it. Students like to throw parties down here. There'll be several in full swing right now.'
She listens. 'I can't hear anything.'
He laughs. 'You're unlikely to, unless your hearing's very good. These tunnels stretch for over three hundred kilometres, underneath the whole of Paris and as far out as the suburbs. We're heading for the bit Baudelaire liked best, the ossuary.'
In the light of the torch, she sees a crude rock ceiling looming overhead. Apart from the crunch of their footsteps and the dripping of water, they are surrounded by an absolute, impenetrable silence.
'They were limestone quarries originally. Some of them date back to Roman times. The more they built above ground, the more they quarried below. During the Second World War the resistance had its headquarters down here, and some of the galleries used to be mushroom farms. But it was in the eighteenth century that they had the bright idea of freeing up building land by moving the cemeteries down.' He shines his light at the roof. Some words have been carved into the rockface.
'Arrêtez! C'est ici l'empire de la mort,'
he reads aloud. 'Here is the kingdom of the dead.' He steps forward. 'Ready?'
'I guess,' she says doubtfully.
She directs her torch all around her. At first she thinks she's in quite a narrow space. Then she realizes that the gallery they've stepped into is actually huge. What she had taken for walls are actually piles of human skulls, and other bones, black with age, that rise as far as her torch can reach.
'These are the remains of six million Parisians, probably more than there are in the city above us. Everyone from Rabelais to Robespierre.'
Slowly, they walk through empty limestone chambers as high as churches. Some are lit by openings high above them, through which the evening sunshine falls.
At last Christian stops. 'Here,' he says, gesturing.
They are at the top of some steps which have been carved into the rock. Below them is a vast, clear pool of water.
'The workers who quarried here needed to bathe. So they simply dug down to the water table. Look.' He leads the way, scoops up a handful of water and lets it pour through his fingers. 'It's purer than Evian and twice as old.' He puts the torch down and holds out his hand to her. 'Shall we bathe?'
'Won't it be cold?'
'Almost freezing.' He starts to unbutton her clothes. 'There's a towel in my backpack. As well as some essentials.' He takes out a silver candelabra and three candles, a half-bottle of Chateau Yquem and glasses, a sliver of foie gras and a fresh baguette. 'Pleasure and pain.'
'In that case…' She steps out of her clothes, and he does the same. The candles throw a yellow glow over the cavern, their flickering fingers gouging the rocky walls. Even before she gets into the pool it's cold. Her skin dimples with goose bumps. She gasps as she extends a foot into the pool.
'Come,' he says, and steps into the water. It reaches up to his thighs. 'A baptism,' he says softly. 'And a rebirth. Here, in the empire of the dead, we are still alive.' He reaches for her, lifting her to him with strong arms. Despite the cold, he's erect. Her legs touch the icy water and involuntarily she raises them up, clasping them around his hips.
'Put me inside you,' he whispers. She reaches down and angles him so that he can push into her. She's cold and tense, and she winces as he pulls her all the way onto him.
He makes love to her gently, and she wraps one arm around his neck to take some weight and let him use his hands to guide her movements. She starts to moan, and in the complete silence it's as startling as the sound of a stranger. 'Now,' he says, 'trust me.'
In one fluid motion he bends at the waist, letting her fall backwards into the water, his hands holding her under the surface as easily as they had supported her above it. The shock of the freezing water drives the air from her lungs and she swallows some, chokes on it and tries to come back up to breathe. But his hands are still holding her down. Through the water she can see his face, see how carefully he's watching her, and then his hands are round her neck, and even if she wanted to she couldn't breathe, couldn't swallow yet more water. The hammering in her lungs and the hammering in her sex are somehow connected, are somehow joining together, each thrust of his cock pounding behind her ears, her eyes, lighting up the limestone cavern with fiery Catherine wheels, sky rockets and lightning bolts of pain.
Afterwards, he rocks her in his arms, caresses her and wipes the bloody snot off her face gently with his hand.
'Thank you,' he whispers. 'Thank you for going there with me.'
She isn't sure whether he means this place, or the dark catacombs in his head.
===OO=OOO=OO===
Yet if he intended, quite literally, to lay her ghosts to rest, it seems to have succeeded. The shock of the freezing water and the violence of his need have cleared some of the cobwebs from her brain, and slowly she starts to come to life again. He takes her to the haunts he knows best — the tiny cobbled streets of the African Quarter, where they eat couscous in crowded bars, full of noise and the stench of cheap French cigarettes, drinking rough wine from unmarked carafes. There are hookahs bubbling in the cafe windows, their mouthpieces tipped with silver foil in a token gesture at twentieth-century hygiene, and he shows her how to smoke them, pulling the hot smoke through a bath of spirits to smooth the taste. It's thick as the smoke of a cheroot, a powerful surge of nicotine and alcohol that, after just a couple of pulls, leaves her dizzy and lightheaded.
'Wait here,' Christian says, and he goes to the zinc counter at the back of the room to have a muttered conversation with the proprietor. When he returns, it's with an unmarked bottle in his hand.
'Absinthe,' he says, pouring her a shot of lurid green liquid. 'Just to complete the decadent experience. It contains a mild hallucinogen made from wormwood. You know what Oscar Wilde said about this stuff? "After the first glass you see the world as you wish it was. After the second, you see things as they are not. And after the third glass you see things as they really are."' He takes a spoonful of sugar from the bowl on the table, dips it into the green liquid and holds it over the flame of the candle. As the sugar starts to bubble and caramelize, he stirs it into the absinthe.
'If we're getting married tomorrow,' she says, lifting her glass, 'shouldn't we be trying to avoid hangovers?'
'Unlike Baudelaire, we have access to ibuprofen.
Salut!'
'
Salut
,' she says. 'I love you.'
===OO=OOO=OO===
They take the bottle back to the hotel. She can remember nothing about the rest of the day, just a vague recollection of pulsing colours, rollercoaster vertigo and Christian reciting Verlaine and Rimbaud while her brain expands seamlessly, like helium.
===OO=OOO=OO===
The next morning they go to the American Embassy to pick up their paperwork. They spend over three hours negotiating the elegant labyrinth of French bureaucracy, then just three or four minutes at the town hall being married by a representative of the
maire,
the mayor. Married by the
maire —
the words seem to go round and round in her brain. Maybe she's still a little high. The service is all in French, of course, and occasionally she loses her way, so that Christian has to prompt her when it's time to say her vows.
The
maire
is looking at her expectantly, and she realizes that something else is required of her: her hand. Christian reaches for it, produces a ring from his breast pocket and slides it down her finger. Not a conventional wedding ring, but an antique signet ring of heavy white gold, bearing the same family markings as the torc around her neck and the ring on Christian's finger.
The
maire
speaks more words. Her French isn't really good enough to follow this, either, though she catches the odd word. She can tell by the cadences when he's winding up. She looks at her hand, twisting the ring from side to side.
Then Christian is kissing her and the
maire
is all smiles. More paperwork, and then they're outside, and Christian is hailing a cab, bustling her back to the hotel for more sex.
He sees her looking at the ring. 'Do you like it?'
'It's heavy,' she admits.
'It's very precious to me,' he says. 'As are you.'
In a dream, she allows herself to be carried over the threshold of her room, laid on the bed and fucked in all her finery. There is a candlestick beside their bed, and somehow it doesn't seem at all strange that Christian should break off making love to light the candle and rub some ointment into her right thigh, high up on the inside; heat up her new wedding ring in the yellow cuticle of the flame and press the glowing metal against her now-numbed skin, so that she will always be marked there by his family crest.
===OO=OOO=OO===
Afterwards he sleeps. Quietly, she slips out of bed and, wincing, pulls on some loose-fitting clothes. She takes her passport and a little money.
She walks stiffly down to the concierge on the front desk and asks for directions to the nearest police station.
'Is there a problem?' the concierge wonders. 'Has madame perhaps suffered a theft?'
'The nearest police station,' she repeats. The concierge, shrugging, tells her how to get to a gendarmerie a few minutes' walk from the hotel. Although, as she limps away, it occurs to him that, in Madame Vogler's case, it might take rather longer than that.
Eh bien.
She's just got married. Perhaps her husband was a little too energetic with his nuptials. He smiles to himself, picturing the scene.
And when the lady's husband comes down twenty minutes later, the concierge sees no reason not to tell him where his wife has gone.
She demands a detective, and the man who comes to see her after what seems like an age is both impossibly good-looking and impossibly well dressed, his dark green shirt and lighter tie hanging on him elegantly. He looks, she thinks, more like a young doctor than a cop.
'So, tell me what I may do for you' — he looks down at his notes —
'Mrs Vogler.' His English, thank God, is good.
'I've just found out that my husband is a murderer,' she says.
'I see,' he says impassively. 'Who has he murdered?'
'His last wife. Her name was Stella.'
'Do you have any proof?'
She slides the ring off her finger and puts it on the table between them. The policeman picks it up. 'A ring?'
'His first wife was murdered in New York. When her body was found there was no jewellery on it. I saw her wearing this ring myself, earlier the same evening.'
He raises one eyebrow. 'You knew his first wife?'