Spectacle(71)

Nathalie shook her head. “If we’re in our sixties and you’re still doing cabaret and I’m still dressing as an errand boy, we’re in trouble.”

They shared a laugh, probably a heartier one than the joke deserved.

It felt good.

“Did Louis tell you he ran into me?”

Simone nodded. “On your way to the hypnotist. What—what was that like?”

When Nathalie explained that Simone was actually “with” Nathalie during her almost-hypnotized state, Simone got choked up.

A tacit carefulness framed the healing moments between them, the way a timid pianist holds back during that first attempt to play Mozart or Chopin. Each sentence brought them closer.

Eventually, each told the other all that had happened since their quarrel at the Musée Grévin—an argument which, despite lasting a few weeks, seemed as long as one of Papa’s sea excursions. The more they talked, the easier it became. At one point, Céleste awoke, and Simone sang her and Nathalie a nonsensical ditty about the tiger and the puppy that she’d learned for a new act at Le Chat Noir.

Céleste propped herself up and giggled. “Can you teach me the words?”

“And me,” Nathalie chimed in. “I’ll sing it to Stanley. I’m sure he’d be happy to hear about tigers and puppies.”

Simone laughed. “For my sister and for my dearest friend’s cat? Absolutement.”

As she taught them the song, guilt seized Nathalie like a cramp. Agnès’s slain body was being transported to Bayeux to be subsumed into the earth, and here they were, learning silly lyrics. Was that wrong?

Maybe. Or maybe it was just a way to get through all of this and remember, for several fleeting moments anyway, what normal felt like.





32


She hadn’t written the morgue report the day Agnès was there. Christophe had sent word to M. Patenaude, and Kirouac covered for her that day. She still hadn’t read the article.

Her hands had been heavy writing the subsequent morgue reports, and the trek to Le Petit Journal now seemed eternal. Perhaps because of her vigilance. Even with a policeman around, she found herself studying the face of any man she could get a good look at, wondering if he was the one who’d taken Agnès from her. And she kept reaching for a vial of catacomb dirt that wasn’t there.

The day after her heartfelt conversation with Simone, she dropped off her column and searched the mail room for a small box. She found one with a cover. Exactly what she needed.

When she went back outside, there was some commotion surrounding a carriage accident. Onlookers flooded the street, including the steam tram depot. Nathalie walked several blocks to a different one and confirmed with a professorlike man that the route went through Place Denfert-Rochereau.

Thirty minutes later she disembarked, next to the Lion of Belfort monument, which she quite liked (mostly because it was a lion, but its symbol of French resistance in response to the German blockade was impressive, too). There was no queue outside the Catacombs entrance, and she hoped that meant no tourists, either.

Not that she would notice, unless she happened to be within earshot of a group. Paris’s underground crypts, full of the bones of souls given up centuries ago, was the final resting place of six million. Papa said you could go from Paris to Germany if the tunnels were end-to-end in a straight line.

One step onto the spiral-stepped descent into the Catacombs, one breath into the stale, damp air that hummed with death, and Nathalie retreated many years to the first time she’d visited the underground crypt.

Papa had brought her. Both he and Maman resisted, despite her pleas for months on end. But once Juliette Lavigne bragged about having gone, Nathalie just had to go. (Juliette boasted about all her exotic “grown-up” experiences, and when she switched schools a year later, Nathalie was both relieved and sorry that her daring rival had left.) It wasn’t just envy that drew her. It was also, and even more so, the stories she read about or heard at school—spirits roaming and skeletons dancing and, according to Simone, who’d been there twice before Nathalie, curses falling on those who followed a particular route through the Catacombs.

Nathalie simply had to see for herself.

She pled in many ways and on many occasions. Finally, when she’d almost made a game of asking because she expected refusal, Papa conceded. For my birthday, Papa. I’m eight. I’m not a baby anymore. That one worked.

To Nathalie’s surprise, Maman didn’t object, either.

So they went into the Catacombs on her eighth birthday, just her and Papa. She was proud, practically skipping through the entrance.

The darkness in the Catacombs was heavier, blacker, than any she’d ever known. Candles affixed to the walls offered little pockets of light on some of the paths, but Papa had a kerosene lamp and led the way, with confidence, down some of the smaller, unlit paths. She followed him from several meters behind.

Stacked-up bones lined the walls. Skulls. Limbs. Ribs. Hips. All swirling in different shapes and patterns. She took a fistful of dirt from the floor near a skull display and put it in her pocket. You weren’t supposed to do that, according to whichever adult made up “don’t touch this” and “don’t touch that” rules in Paris. She made sure Papa didn’t see.

Every centimeter from floor to ceiling. More bones than she could ever count, room after room. A hotel for the dead.