Chapter Twenty-Nine

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Four hours and about fifty wrong turns later, we stopped. Natalie rummaged in her pack for a water bottle and a few of the energy gels we had bought at the sporting goods store. They were nasty but they did the trick, topping us up as we took stock of our surroundings.

Natalie was comparing a dozen printouts of various maps and overlays with the step counter we’d brought and a tiny compass she wore on a chain around her neck.

“This is it,” she said, pointing towards a small flight of steps cut into the stone. We climbed, dodging a few broken steps, until we got to an ancient door cut into the rock. A doorjamb had been fitted and the door itself was stout, old oak. The lock was rusted and the hinges were crumbling into piles of red dust. Natalie wanted to pick the lock, but I was tired at that point and picked up a handy piece of broken stone. Two good hits and the lock dropped off.

“Subtle,” she said.

“Natalie, I am tired, I am covered in mud that is at least seventy percent dead people, and I am hungry. Do not test me.”

The hinges were so wonky it took two of us to open the door enough to slip through. We didn’t leave it entirely open—no point in advertising our presence in case anybody else happened along. We hadn’t seen anyone during our recon and I was happy to keep it that way. We emerged into a wine cave, long abandoned, the barrels empty and cobwebbed. I flashed the light onto the name stenciled on the barrels and nearly whooped out loud. D’Archambeau. Natalie pointed and gave me a smug look.

“Natalie, you are flaky as a Pillsbury crescent roll, but you have a damned fine sense of direction,” I told her. Tactfully, I ignored the hours we’d spent making wrong turns and hitting dead ends. We’d found it and that was all that mattered.

We moved through the wine cave and up a flight of stairs into the cellar proper. It was stacked with broken cribs and empty demijohns and piles of rotting copies of Paris Match and newspapers curling with age. There was a fair bit of scuttling around—mice, no doubt—but no other signs of life. We picked our way carefully around the piles towards the door in the opposite wall. It was all beginning to feel a bit too easy, and I was a little relieved when we hit a snag. I’m not a pessimist, but all jobs have complications and it’s better to get them out of the way early. Our complication was a bright, shiny new biometric lock set in a heavy door of reinforced steel.

Natalie turned to me and swore. “I can’t pick that, and even if I could, I don’t have the tools.”

I looked around for another way in. Sometimes when a lock is impossible, the gods will smile and the hinge will be on your side of the door. Hammering out a hinge pin is heavy work, and we didn’t have mallets, but it didn’t matter. Scars on the doorframe showed where the door had been reset, the hinges safely inside the house proper.

I shook my head. “It’s locked up tighter than a Baptist virgin. Come on.”

We took our time moving around the cellar, searching for any sign of another way in. We had given up and were about to leave when Nat saw it. She lowered to her knees, groaning only a little, and pushed aside a stack of magazines. A few rodent bones went flying and I slapped them away.

“If I never see another bone, it will be too soon,” I said, kneeling beside her. “What have you found?”

She was working her fingertips around a panel set into the rock wall. It was no more than three feet square, flimsy wood that gave way as soon as she pushed. Air, stale and clammy, rushed out from the dark cavity behind.

“Natalie, if you have just opened the seventh seal and kicked off the End Times, give me a heads-up,” I told her.

She flashed a light inside the opening, her head and shoulders disappearing. When she popped back, she was grinning.

“It’s a utility chase. Plumbing,” she informed me, pointing to where the tangle of pipes snaked through the darkness. “I’m going to follow it. Stay here, and if I don’t come back in fifteen minutes, go for help.”

“Go for help? Shouldn’t I come and get you?”

“Nope,” she said, wriggling through the opening. “If I’m not back it means I got stuck, and if I got stuck, you’re definitely not fitting through there.”

“Did you just call me fat?” I asked her ass as she disappeared. The small glow of her light disappeared and I sat back, checking the luminous dial on my watch. I clicked off my light and sat in the darkness. There was no point in wasting the batteries. The only threat down there might be an overzealous mouse or a spider that mistook my wig for a handy place to hang out.

I checked my watch every five minutes, testing myself to see how accurate my sense of time was. It’s easy to lose track when you’re not relying on visual cues. There was no sign of Natalie as the minutes ticked past. I had already decided to ignore her instructions to go for help—how exactly was I supposed to explain this to the authorities? And neither Mary Alice nor Helen were good with tight spaces. I didn’t much care for them either, but I never stepped away from a job that required pushing myself, testing the edge of that tiny tendency towards discomfort when I couldn’t move freely. It was a way of toughening myself up, and I had just about made up my mind to go after her when I saw the glow coming back. She was a mess, poncho shredded and sneakers covered in cobwebs, but she was smiling.

“Got it?” I asked, putting out a hand to haul her back through the opening in the wall.

“Got it,” she said, smiling even bigger. “And he’ll never see it coming.”

We scrambled out of the cellar, through the wine cave, and back to the catacombs, following the grubby yarn trail I’d left until we reached the gate. The trip back was much faster, maybe twenty minutes now that we knew the way. We took off our torn ponchos, rolling them up neatly and stashing them in our pockets. Fresh ones went over our clothes, hiding the worst of the stains, and we dusted off our wigs, cleaning the streaks of dirt from our faces with baby wipes. We were pink-cheeked and only a little the worse for wear when we emerged from the catacombs into the gift shop, chattering in German about the atmosphere. A sleepy staff member made two clicks on their counter and we gave a little smile and wave.

As we took the long way back to the hotel, strolling casually down the Boulevard Raspail, Natalie outlined the plan. I poked holes in it wherever I could, but she had an answer for everything.

“It’s a damned good idea,” I admitted finally. “But it’s going to be hard.”

Natalie grinned. “Just like old times.”