Floats the Dark Shadow (6 page)

Lantern aloft, the guide and his son led them ever deeper. When they reached the next large room, Paul turned around with a grim smile. “Victims of the Reign of Terror found their final resting place here.”

“Danton and Robespierre lie entangled with Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette,” Averill added. His hands entwined in a fluid gesture.

“In this room?” Theo gazed in horror at the mass grave of riot and revolution. All that fury and passion, that vicious violence and lofty hope, reduced to these bleak remains?

“Somewhere,” Paul said with relish. “No doubt missing their heads.”

Sadness permeated Theo, one with the cold air that sank through skin to muscle, through bone to marrow. The longer they walked, the heavier the bleakness weighed. They crossed wet patches where mineral-laden water dripped continuously from the ceiling, forming small stalactites. The shiny fluid trickled over the heaped skeletons, embalming them in a foul resinous varnish. Damp gravel crunched underfoot like crushed bones. They entered a stretch of dry chambers, and Theo realized she could not hear their footsteps any more. The cold silence was unnerving. No one spoke. Even breath seemed to vanish.

Here the guide stopped them, holding a finger before his lips. “The chalk walls muffle sound.” Stepping back, the man raised the lantern high then shuttered the light.

They vanished into darkness absolute. No sight, no sound but the pounding of her heart in an eternity of utter smothering nothingness.

Fingers brushed hers, linked. A hand closed around hers, warm and firm.

“Averill,” Theo whispered. Emptiness swallowed the word, but warmth rushed through her, breath returning, blood returning. Life returning.
Not alone in the dark.
Her fingers tightened in answer.

Love filled her, pure and glowing, lighting her from within.

In the surrounding blackness, Dondre gave an eerie laugh, too theatrical to scare them as he obviously hoped to do. It made Theo want to giggle with relief. She heard a rasping of metal, and Averill released her hand just as the guide opened the lantern again. It glowed dimly, a fragile blessing lighting them on their way.

The memory of the tour sent icy rivulets coursing through Theo. She pressed her hand to her lips. After that blinding darkness, the watching skulls and bright candles in the Crypte de la Passion seemed positively cheerful, the murmur of human voices sweeter than music.

The master of ceremonies rose. “Fellow mortals, we offer the ultimate piece to complete our uncanny concert, from the brilliant composer Saint-Saëns—
La Danse Macabre
.”

“Your brilliant composer was inspired by a grotesquerie in verse by Cazalis,” Paul declared. Annoyed, the man seated behind him tapped Paul’s chair with his gloves. The leather fingers gleamed white as new bone in the gloom. Paul turned and glared balefully. “They even call the work a symphonic poem,” he added, then assumed an offended silence.

“The poet was inspired by a peasants’ legend.” Averill bent to her, his whisper barely audible as the musicians lifted their instruments. “Each year, on All Hallows Eve, the Grim Reaper appears at the stroke of midnight.” Twelve strokes of the harp strings sounded, quieting the rustle of skirts, the shuffle of boots. “Death flicks his bony hand and calls forth the dead from their graves. He sets his violin to his chin and tunes it…” Averill paused as strange, dissonant chords were plucked on the violinists’ strings.

Zig and zig and zag.

Death beats a cadence

Stamping a tomb with his heel

Just at midnight, Death strikes a dance tune

Zig and zig and zag on his violin….

Averill wove words into sound. Theo’s gaze darted to Casimir as the music built, his face intent, his bow flashing as the strident commands of the violin strings merged with the percussive clang of the xylophone, evoking the dry bones clattering in a frantic dance as Death compelled the dead to dance for him. Zig and zig and zag.

The winter wind blows in the blackest night,

Wailing shivers through the linden trees.

White skeletons dart through dark shadows,

Running, leaping under billowing shrouds.

Averill’s voice whispered like a winter wind rustling leaves, relentless and oddly insinuating. Shrouds fell away. Naked skeletons abandoned themselves to lust, hungering to taste the long-lost sweetness of the flesh. Dispossessed kings cavorted with peasants. Queens coupled with cartwrights. Dismay and delight spun inside Theo as the music quickened. The words licked at her. She trembled at the caress of Averill’s breath in the hollow of her ear, at the touch of his lips on the tender lobe. All around her, yellow candle flames leaped and quivered. Then the fervor stilled. The violins sighed, and the notes of an oboe rose—a cock crowing at dawn. Abruptly, Paul leaned forward, his voice joining Averill’s to finish the poem.

But hush. Suddenly they quit the dance.

They push all in a panic. They flee—for the cock has crowed.

Oh! The dark beauty of the night blesses the poor world.

Long live death! Long live equality!

Theo shivered, feeling strangely feverish as a final quiver of sound mingled with the teasing, almost taunting whispers.

Then silence fell.

Chapter Five

Do I reject all authority? No, not all!

When it comes to boots, I acknowledge
the authority of the bootmaker.

~ Mikhail Bakunin

PAUSING at the narrow cross street, Michel glanced cautiously up the rue Lepic. He signaled the gendarmes following him to wait. Lit by the street lamps, a prostitute and her drunken customer tottered along the rising curve of the street. The woman’s chartreuse feather boa slithered along the pavement behind her like a molting snake. Someone was always awake in Montmartre, but at this hour they were mostly drinking inside the cabarets. The night breeze carried odors of tobacco smoke and beer drifting out with the music, mingling with the stink of urine and semen that saturated the narrow lane. But Montmartre was still a village topping the modern city of Paris, scattered with midnight lights below, and Michel caught a rustic whiff of cow dung and the bittersweet nostalgia of cherry blossoms.

“It’s been three years since the last bombing.” The mutter behind him came from Brigadier Sorrell of the
Police Judiciaire.

Michel ignored him. Sorrell and his three gendarmes were all fuming at having their authority usurped. No crime had been committed yet and prevention was the provenance of the
Police Judiciaire
, not the Sûreté.
But the tip was Michel’s and Sorrell knew he was one of Cochefert’s special agents.

Michel waited for the meandering couple to pass out of sight. He didn’t want them raising an alarm. Montmartre had long been home to the city’s rebels, both political and artistic. The Montmartrois favored anarchists over
flics
any night of the year. Michel felt Sorrell’s boots nudging his heels impatiently. He stepped sideways rather than forward onto the rue Lepic and turned to face him. Sorrell again moved closer, trying to use his huge height to intimidate. Michel was an inch short of six feet, but the other man had four inches on him. Sorrell frowned with heavy brows that were perhaps intended to achieve the same end. When Michel refused to back up further, Sorrell asked, “You’re sure your source is good?”

“Impeccable.” And secret. If Blaise Dancier wanted his name touted, he’d arrange a parade on the Champs Élysées. Michel nodded in the direction of the basilica crowning the butte Montmartre, the highest point in Paris. “The man upstairs bragged that he would plant a bomb at the Sacré Coeur.”

“Bragging is probably all he does,” Sorrell snorted. “A lot of drunks are members of the dynamite club.” The detectives snickered nervously. They were well aware of their leader’s overbearing stupidity, but they would have to go on working with him long after Michel left.

“He bought mercury,” Michel explained yet again. With mercury one could make mercury fulminate, an essential of dynamite. “Work continues at the Sacré Coeur. It‘s an easy and desirable target.” This anarchist was no benevolent dreamer. The violence and terror of a bombing followed the criminal Ravachol’s footsteps, or Bakunin’s school of revolutionary socialism. Such men saw the perfidy of the rich clearly but seemed blind to the same human flaws in the poor.

The street was clear now. Michel guided the men around the corner and up the block. Midway, he stopped at a door and drew his revolver. The others followed suit. Looking down, Sorrell grunted, “It’s propped open. You’ve gotten help from the concierge.”

“Yes.” It was the worried concierge who had tipped off Dancier. Quietly but swiftly, they entered the apartment house and started up the seven flights of stairs to the top. So late, they had hoped for quiet, but noise filtered down the stairwell. A party to celebrate April Fools’ Day. Michel paused on the first landing and looked up, but no one was visible yet. Deep in his gut, anticipation knotted with old anger and older fear. He ignored them all, fixing his attention on taking this anarchist—alive, if possible.

They reached the penultimate floor undetected. Just ahead, the door to the party stood open. Someone was singing and the smell of cheap wine and cigarettes saturated the air. Cautiously, Michel moved to the doorjamb and glanced inside. A dozen someones were celebrating, playing music and waltzing squashed together. He passed the door without being spotted. The commotion inside was good cover for their raid, but Sorrell paused at the door and gestured officiously for silence.

Instead of quieting, the party poured into the hall. They penned Michel and his companions into the far corner of the hallway, bellowing, “
Flics
! Hey
flics
, what’s up?” Others squawked out
, “Poulets!”
or
“Vaches!”
—depending on their preference for chicken cops or cow cops.

A floor above, the door they wanted opened and a burly, bearded man peered out. Michel saw an uncanny resemblance to Bakunin, but except for that bearish quality, it was not a face he knew from either the present or the past. Relief loosened the knot in his belly.

The face vanished. The door slammed.

Brigadier Sorrell broke through the crowd and stormed the last flight of stairs. Michel felt a new knot tighten hard inside him. He shouted a warning as the gendarmes rushed to the top floor. Yanking the last man back to the landing, he yelled again for Sorrell to stop. The Brigadier ignored him and kicked in the door. It was rigged from the inside. The explosion sent the splintered door flying outward. The impact sent Sorrell and the nearest gendarme over the railing into the open stairwell. The gendarme screamed shrilly all the way down. Missing half his head, Sorrell fell silently, dead before he hit bottom. A shattered piece of the door hit the third gendarme in the arm, slicing the artery. Blood and brains splattered the hallway.

Michel felt a blast of fury in his gut, like a furnace door swinging open. Instantly he closed it inside a wall of ice
.

“Can you do a tourniquet?” he asked the uninjured gendarme, who choked out an affirmative. He let the man tend to his fellow officer. Some of the partygoers, hit by the debris, were screaming and cursing. Useless chaos. “Someone get a doctor.”

“Oui. Oui. Immédiatement!”
Now the
flics
were their friends. One of the more sober women ran down the stairs.

Sidestepping the debris, Michel went through the doorway, watching for traps. The window was open. There were no tripwires. Muffled sounds came from the roof. Running, or waiting with a weapon? He ducked his head out, pulled back, waited a heartbeat. No shots from the bomber. Michel climbed out the window, pulled himself up to the window arch, then onto the roof.

Below, the few streetlamps and windows of the Montmartre nightclubs cast light on the street. Above and ahead, the rooftops caught little but starlight. Michel moved forward cautiously, taking cover at a chimney as his night vision returned. He heard a heavy thud as the bomber jumped to the next roof. There was only one other building before the alley, but its roof line fell away in flat, staggered sections, like a giant’s staircase. The bomber had a long head start, but his running and jumping sounded clumsy.

As swiftly as the murky light allowed, Michel moved to the edge of the building and dropped to the next roof. If the bomber had a gun, he’d have taken a shot by now. Ahead, Michel heard an ungodly clatter as the bomber hurled junk at the foot of the next wall. There was the crack of breaking crockery, the soft thump of earth, and the rustle and snap of plants as the bomber pillaged a rooftop garden. Crossing to the edge, Michel slid down the wall close to the far end but still landed in the rubble. He kicked aside an overturned bench, then clambered over spilled earth, smashed pots, and broken branches to the next edge. Below him, he glimpsed the bomber’s silhouette above the roof line. The man paused long enough to look back, his face no more than a pale blotch. Then he leaped the three meters down across the alley to the next building.

Michel holstered his gun then jumped down to the next level. Running hard, he made the leap across the alley but tripped forward, skidding on the slippery lead roofing before he slid to a stop and regained his footing. The bomber was clearer now, thundering across the last roof. At the far end, dimly illuminated by window lights, an ash tree grew up from an enclosed garden, its top branches in reach. In a moment, the bomber would be down it, over the garden wall, and vanished into the alleys of Montmartre. Michel raced forward. Still long meters away, the bomber dove and disappeared from sight.

Reaching the edge of the building, Michel looked down into the slender, swaying branches. Farther below, barely visible, the dark shape of the bomber shimmied down a central branch toward the trunk. Michel launched himself after, reveling in the brief, intoxicating flight before his hands closed on a sturdy branch two meters below. He locked his grip as it dipped under his weight, scraping his hands against sharp twigs. It swayed again as the bomber plunged downward with a grunt, shaking the entire tree. Michel quickly gauged his position. The building was four tall stories, too high to jump to the ground. His quarry was halfway down, with stronger holds as he descended. Swinging down to the next limb, Michel followed him through a maze of branches that slapped at his eyes and blocked his vision. Through a sudden gap, he saw the bomber dangle from a thick limb close to the bottom.

Fire burned through the ice inside him. He would not let this killer escape.

As the bomber dropped to the ground, Michel leapt into the narrow space between two limbs. Branches snapped, raking his face and arms, and then he was clear. Plummeting fast, he landed on the bomber’s back, broad and hard as a sack of grain under thick, rough wool. The sudden impact sent them sprawling in opposite directions. Stunned by the fall, Michel struggled for breath. He glimpsed movement, saw the bomber kneeling. Michel heard the metal snick of a blade as the man snatched a knife from a sheath at his ankle.

He rolled as the bomber sprang. The blade sliced open his jacket, scoring his upper arm with a hot line of pain. Not his right arm. Michel jumped to a crouch, retreating backward over the uncertain ground. The bomber pursued, the knife slashing viciously. Two feints, then a thrust. Again. Seeing the pattern, Michel stepped in quickly between the feints and seized the bomber’s knife hand between his own. He held on grimly as the man gripped Michel’s slashed arm with his other hand, grinding his palm into the knife wound. Michel shut off the pain, looking directly into his adversary’s eyes. Startled, the bomber stared back, jaw agape. His grip slackened. Michel twisted the man’s wrist sharply. The knife fell. A hard
chasse-bas
kick to the bomber’s thigh broke his balance. As he pitched back, Michel’s whipping
fouetté
knocked him onto his back
.
In an instant Michel had him flipped and pinned. Another instant had the
ligote
around his prisoner’s wrist—one twist tightened the metal strands and stopped any struggle. Michel jerked him to his feet. The man stank of sausage, sweat, and gunpowder.

“You are under arrest.”

“
Salaud—je vais te niquer la gueule! Fils de pute! Espèce de con
.” The man bared his teeth, snarling an unending stream of guttural curses. Bastard, I’m going to fuck up your face. Son of a whore.
Cunt brain. “
Mes couilles sur ton nez!”
My balls on your nose?
That was a new one. Michel dragged the bomber to the doorway of the house and knocked, pounded, until the owner came to let him through the house. Outside again, Michel pushed his cursing prisoner up the now crowded street.

“À bas les flics! À bas les vaches!”
The crowd began chanting down with cops as soon as they appeared.

“
Espèce de merde!
Va te faire foutre!”
The bomber spewed curses. Piece of shit. Go fuck yourself. His accent was Russian, Michel thought, or perhaps from some Balkan state. He walked his prisoner steadily, keeping a sharp hold on the
ligote
.

“
Vache r
éactionnaire
—va encule les mouches!”
The jeering crowd urged him to butt fuck some flies—in cow form. Despite his tension, Michel’s lips twitched a little. It was an insult usually extended to useless politicians. The crowd waved their fists over their heads, pinkie fingers sticking out and wiggling.

“Bouffe ta merde!”

“Nique ta mère.”

“Brûle en enfer!”

Michel guessed that “burn in hell” was meant for the anarchist. Otherwise, the deluge of obscenities was all for him. They both took a share of angry buffeting, but Michel got the bomber back to the apartment house without major incident. He locked his prisoner in the concierge’s broom closet, verified what had happened in his absence, and then arranged for transport. No marching through the streets for this man. Michel wanted him safe inside a Black Maria. The wounded officer was doing all right, pale but stoic as he waited for the ambulance. The corpses had been decently covered.