Angel City (35 page)

“It's where the smart people live in Lausanne.”

She tipped her head as if Harper were a curious thing.

“Why are you pretending?”

Harper smiled.

“Like you said, mademoiselle, those are the rules.”

“So maybe I'm supposed to tell you what it means. That must be it, the reason we met.”

“I'm listening.”

She sat back in her seat, started flipping her beads.

“He. Is. Born.”

Harper stared at her.

“Who's born?”

She smiled, leaned across the aisle, whispered, “A child conceived of light who will take us to the next level of evolution. He's already here. That's what it's all about. That's the real deal, the big scoop.”

“And you know this how?”

She sat back in her chair, gave her beads a twirl.

“Everyone in my gang knows it. It's our job.”

“At the ashram.”

“No, in the band.”

Karoliina from Tampere was mad, Harper thought, but nicely mad. The kind for whom life was a journey from one guru to the next and who jumbled all her life experiences into a place she called the ultimate truth of everything there is. And Harper had to admit, her take on the comet was entertaining. Had a kid's-Christmas-pageant feel about it. Matthew 2:2:
Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.
Adding to the imagination, a guitar sounded from on high. Strumming a progression of descending chords built around a tonic note. The sound hung in the air, then repeated. It was a mobile ringtone. The young woman dug through her overstuffed Prada bag. She found her phone, checked her messages. Harper chuckled to himself. Even the sensitive ones in search of universal truth need to be connected 24/7, it seemed.

The train slowed.

A recorded announcement played through the train car.
“Mesdames et messieurs . . .”
The train would be coming to a stop in Dijon. Next stop after Dijon, French-Swiss frontier. Harper waited for the announcement to run through French, German, Italian, and English. While it continued, the young woman closed her phone and dropped it in her bag. She started flipping beads again, staring at Harper the whole time. When the announcement finished, there was the
clackityclack
of the train running over steel rails and the rattle of the woman's beads,
andante moderato
. Harper gave it a few beats to see if the young woman would pick up with the he-is-born riff. She didn't.

The train eased to a stop at Dijon station. She pulled her Prada bag over her shoulder and stood up.

“Where are you going?” Harper said.

“I'm getting off.”

“You said you were going to Montreux.”

“I did, and I was. But the band is doing a gig in Toulouse. I have to be there.”

“Toulouse is south, toward Spain.”

“I know. I'll catch a train from Dijon. I'll be there in five and a half hours. It was all in the message.”

“What?”

“This is how it works. The band announces a gig, sends you directions from wherever you are in the world. People drop what they're doing and get there. We get together, make a flash mob, do some stuff. Maybe you should come. Check it out.”

Harper ran Matthew 2:10:
When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

“Got it. But, if you don't mind, I'll say good-bye.”

“There are no good-byes in the universe, only nice to see you again.”

“If you say so, mademoiselle.”

She reached to the overhead rack, grabbed a small suitcase. She pulled her Ray-Bans from the collar of her T-shirt. Her sheepskin coat opened making the move, and Harper saw the image on the shirt. A winged form, falling through the fog at Pont des Arts in Paris. Harper was looking at himself during the Paris job. He saw the words:
Older Than Dreams Tour . . . Locomotora . . . Aladdin Theater, Portland.

“Hang on a sec.”

“Yes?”

“Your shirt.”

“What about it?” she said.

“Where did it come from?”

“From the band. Locomotora. Like it?”

“Sure. What does it mean?”

She slipped on her Ray-Bans, smiled.

“You're really funny.”

She turned, walked away.

Harper looked out the window, watched her climb down the steps and walk along the platform and down the stairs. Then he watched the locals coming and going with their bags. He checked the billboard above the platform. He'd be in Lausanne in another two hours. Lausanne. He flashed Inspector Gobet coming back onto the rooftop in Paris, just after Bruno Silvestre of Brigade Criminelle dropped “the time of the prophecy is at hand.” Unfortunately, no idea what the prophecy was, or meant. Inspector tells Harper to get on the next train to Lausanne . . .

Lausanne? What the hell am I supposed to do in Lausanne?

Oh, I'm sure you'll figure it out along the way, Mr. Harper.

Just then, Harper did.

“Not a damn thing.”

Harper blinked, looked across to the next platform.

TGV 5001. Dijon–Toulouse. Departing in seven minutes.

“Bloody hell.”

He got up, grabbed his coat, pulled it over his shoulders. He jumped off the train as the doors closed.

A
T
M
ONTPELLIER, THE ONE
TGV
STOP EN ROUTE TO
T
OULOUSE,
Harper stepped off the train with the rest of the smokers desperate for a fag. A voice blared over the public address system, announcing it'd be a five-minute stop. Harper found a shadow to hide in. They'd redone his bandages in Paris as part of cleaning him up, and the wrappings were less clumsy. Still took him half a minute to pull a smoke from his cigarette case; ditto with lighting the bloody thing. He inhaled deeply, let the radiance seep into his blood. He scanned the crowd, especially the ones heading for the exits. Karoliina from Tampere was nowhere to be seen. He'd walked the length of the train, checking all the cars of the train, twice. Couldn't find her. And she wasn't on the platform now. He worked the odds that he'd been a right prat in changing his itinerary. They came up dead even. No worries, Harper thought; there was always the universal truth of everything regarding his job in paradise: No matter where Harper ran through time and space, trouble always had a way of being there when he arrived.

The trainman's whistle screeched, warning the TGV's doors were about to close. The locals all took last puffs and tossed ciggie butts onto the tracks. They climbed on board. Harper took a quick hit, dropped his fag on the platform, ground it into dust. Climbing onto the train, he kept his eyes drilled to the floor to avoid the notice of the locals.
Convenient trick,
he thought, settling into his seat. The art of being invisible in a crowd. Not the least for the fact he hadn't bothered to buy a ticket to Toulouse.

The train pulled out of Montpellier, and Harper kept his eyes focused out the windows now. Off to the left, the land flattened and there were towns built along a string of saltwater ponds. There was a horizon rising beyond the ponds to the southeast. Grayish blue, shimmering in the midday light. The Mediterranean Sea, it was. And it was the first time he'd seen it since taking the form of Jay Harper. It felt familiar, like some long-forgotten thing suddenly found . . . Then something in the hippocampus region of his brain kicked in and the thing was forgotten again.

Out the right windows, there were autumn-colored fields dotted with small villages, and farther on was the Massif Central. Bits of information connected in Harper's brain. One: The Massif covered eighty-six thousand square kilometers, making it twice as big as Switzerland. Two: The region was packed with mountains, canyons, high plateaus. There were nearly four hundred fifty volcanoes quietly simmering away, as they had for the last ten thousand years. Three: The Massif was made famous by one George Julius Poulett Scrope, nineteenth-century English geologist and economist who published
Memoir on the Geology of Central France, including
the Volcanic Formations of Auvergne, the Velay, and the Vivarais
in 1827. Harper chuckled to himself, wondering where the hell, or who the hell, the info came from. Then he hit it on his timeline. Captain Jay Michael Harper. Studied geography at the University of St. Andrews. Before any more info bled through, the hippocampus region of Harper's brain did its thing and the not-so-dead captain went the way of the Med Sea.

“C'est la
bloody
vie.”

The train slowed passing through Béziers. And slowly crossing the trestle over the river Orb, Harper saw a great gothic cathedral towering over the town on the far bank. Looked more like a castle than a cathedral, and whilst looking at it, his mind ran through another info thread he'd picked up somewhere in time. La Cathédrale Saint-Nazaire, completed in the sixteenth century. The cathedral on the hill had been built over the ruins of another one, destroyed in the thirteenth century. Then something flashed in Harper's eyes, so fast he nearly missed it. Coming into Montpellier, Harper had crossed into the Languedoc region of France.
Languedoc.
It meant “tongue of the Ocs”—the language of Occitania. Then came an episode of the History Channel:
In the Name of God: The Slaughter of the Cathars.
The episode ripped through Harper's eyes. It was here, Béziers, July 22, 1209, the French Crusaders drew first blood. The army surrounded the town, demanded the surrender of all Cathars. The Catholic citizens of Béziers refused to hand over their friends and neighbors who were Cathars. The Crusaders attacked. Thousands of innocents sought sanctuary in the old cathedral and the churches of Marie-Madeleine and Saint-Jude. The Crusaders surrounded the buildings; they hesitated. Inside were not just Cathars, but fellow Catholics. There was a man among the Crusaders, Arnaud Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, personal representative of His Holiness the Pope. He sensed the hesitation of the Crusaders. He climbed the cathedral steps, held up the cross of his rosary and commanded them . . .

“In the name of God, kill them! Kill them all! For He will know his own!”

So blessed, the Crusaders smashed through the doors of the churches and put to the sword more than twenty thousand innocents in a single afternoon. The flow of blood only fueled the slaughter, and the Crusaders ran amok through the town. Women were raped in their beds as their throats were cut open. Children were forced to run through the streets and used as target practice by archers. Hundreds had their noses cut off and eyes gouged out. They were banished to wander the earth like the living dead as a warning to any and all who would defy the infallibility of the Church. When the Crusaders had sated their lust, they sacked the town and burned it to the ground. And that was the end of the first Cathédrale Saint-Nazaire.

Harper blinked, focused back out the window. The cathedral and Béziers were well out of sight. And now, watching the land of vines and maquis scrub whip by, Harper flashed one more map from geography studies at St. Andrews, matched it to the History Channel. The train wasn't just carrying him to Toulouse on a wild hunch to check out some Finnish rock band; it was carrying him close to Bernard de Saint-Martin's last stand at Montségur in 1244. Odds there was a connection: 325,747,053 to 1.

“What have you got yourself into this time, boyo?”

No idea
was his response to himself. But it was a long way there. He settled back in his seat, eased into hibernation mode. Slow breaths, stillness, until the train stopped at Gare de Toulouse Matabiau. Harper snapped to, checked his watch: 15:00 hours on the nose. He followed the crowd through the station. Outside, on the square, he took in the view. Like any big-town train station. At least the ones he could recall, which would be Gare de Lyon in Paris, Simplon and Montreux in Switzerland. Cafés and two-star hotels across the boulevard, people in a state of perpetual motion. Except for those who stopped the world to have a smoke after being cooped up in a train for hours.

He pulled his cigarette case from his coat and lit up, considering the great unknown;
id est
, where does one go in Toulouse to find a merry band of Finnish rock-and-rollers? He puffed on his smoke, walking to the left; turning around and walking to the right to see if he could pick up a vibe in the air. Not that it was some wizardly technique at discovering the great unknown, but it's how he found Café du Grütli in the old quarter of Lausanne after his memory scrub a few days ago. This way, that way. Pace, pace, pace . . . An hour later, “Oh, yeah, it's that way.”

While smoking and pacing, he dug through his pockets looking for his mobile. Found it. Took some effort to open the flip-top and push the buttons with his bandaged hands, but he managed. No messages, no missed calls.

“Fine then.”

He closed his phone, dropped it in his pocket. Saw a drawing on the pavement. It'd been done with a stencil and blue chalk. He watched the locals passing by. None of them noticed it. It was the angel falling through the sky in Paris. Lettering under the form:

OTDT

21:00, ce soir

La Dynamo

Harper flashed lettering on the T-shirt of the woman on the train.
Locomotora. Older Than Dreams Tour.
La Dynamo had to be the venue. He looked for a taxi stand; it was ten meters away. He walked over, saw the same stencil drawing on the pavement outside each of the station exits. The taxis were parked in a long line with no takers at the moment. Harper approached the lead car, a Renault Vel Statis with a Capitole Taxi sign on top. The driver's window was down, and the man inside, North African–looking, was sleeping. Harper stood there, waited for the man to become aware of his presence. The man opened one eye.

“Qu'est-ce que vous voulez?”

“Excusez-moi. Connaissez-vous un club appelé La Dynamo?”

The driver sat up, rubbed his eyes, looked at Harper. Saw an English man speaking French with a very bad accent and looking much too old and dressed completely out of step with anyone wanting to know the way to such a place.

“
You
want to go to La Dynamo?”

“That's right.”

The driver shrugged.

“It's in the Colombette Quarter of the city.”

“And where might that be?”

The driver pointed through the windshield.

“Walk to the canal, by the trees over there. It runs down the middle of the boulevard. Cross over the canal, go left, and walk along the embankment. Keep walking till you come to the second bridge, go right. The next block, go left. That's Rue Amélie. There's no sign for it, but it's there. Number Six.”

“Actually, I thought you might drive me there.”

“You want me to drive you there?”

“That is the general idea of a taxi, isn't it?”

The driver returned to his sleeping position, waved Harper away.

“Lâchez-moi.”

Harper saw the next taxi. The driver behind the wheel was sleeping, too, and the next one. Must be bloody siesta time at the taxi ranks in Toulouse.

“Cheers for the help.”

The driver snored.

Harper followed the crosswalks through the boulevard till he got to the trees. He saw the canal hemmed in between stone embankments. It was like a small river. There was a barge going upstream, one going downstream. Harper had another shot of geography studies. Canal du Midi. Two hundred forty kilometers up and over the mountains and down to the Mediterranean Sea after working through ninety-one locks. Going the other way it hooked up with the Garonne River, and from there it was a winding trip to the Atlantic Ocean. Someone, somewhere, had called it one of the technical wonders of the world. That's all Harper could dig up about it. His eyes caught the graffiti job on the sign pointing to the footbridge.
Canal du Midi
had been squiggled out with yellow paint and replaced with
Canal de las Doas Mars
. Harper ran the words. Wasn't Spanish, wasn't French. It was Occitan, and it meant Canal of the Two Seas.

Not bad
, Harper thought, questioning if it was himself knowing it or if he was getting a boost from Bernard de Saint-Martin, who probably roamed the town nine hundred years ago. He stopped on the bridge to finish his smoke, forgetting the question immediately. In its place he watched another barge coming up the canal. It was packed with Japanese tourists. All of them wearing the same colored hats and windbreakers. All of them with a camera of some sort in their hands. And as they passed under the footbridge, all of them looked up at Harper. Some of them connected with his eyes. Those ones waved. He waved back. Why not? He dropped his fag into the canal. It dissolved into nothing.

He walked to the embankment path, went left, as instructed by the cabbie. Ten minutes later he was making the turn onto Rue Amélie. It was a narrow street with the right side lined with flats, circa 1970s. Left side was what must have been a factory row from the nineteenth century. Solid-looking buildings made of brick. From somewhere, Harper recalled that was typical in Toulouse. Same sort of bricks were used all over the city back then. The local soil gave the bricks a tint of pink. The bricks gave the city its nickname,
La Ville Rose
. He stood a moment, taking note of the fact there was no one about noticing the bricks, or anything else that might happen at the moment.

He walked ahead, passing the doors of the factory row. He passed a joint called Le Rest'Ô Jazz. That was Number 8. At Number 6, no sign on or above the door. Harper heard a guitar. Strumming a progression of descending chords built around a tonic note. The sound hung in the air, then repeated. He flashed back to the train from Paris to Lausanne: Karoliina from Tampere, busily swinging her
japa mala
beads, her mobile rings. It was the same damn riff coming from behind the door. And as the guitar finished the riff, drums and bass kicked in with a slow 4/4 beat. Down on the pavement, another blue chalk stencil job of an angel falling from the sky. This time the words under the drawing read,
This must be the place.

“Sure. But for what?” Harper said.

He checked his watch: 15:45 hours. Five hours, fifteen minutes to showtime. Maybe it was a matinee behind the doors. He pulled open the door, entered a small vestibule; the ticket window was closed. He walked ahead through a set of heavy curtains. There was a very large man standing there to greet him. Well over two hundred kilos. Black sneakers, black trousers, black shirt, black leather vest over the shirt. Badge on vest: S
ÉCURITÉ
. The man had already seen Harper's eyes, so there was no getting around him without negotiating safe passage. Harper watched the man's lips move, which was about the best there was for communication, as the music nearly drowned the spoken word.