over my face and smelled like an ashtray that woke me up some hours later, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. I stared out the window at the now-quiet city and watched the light revolving around the Eiffel Tower, hoping it might lull me to sleep, but instead it was my thoughts that spun slowly. I pulled on my jacket. Maybe I’d just catch a little night air. Of course, I had a pretty good idea of where Les Halles was. I tiptoed past Rudee, snoring happily, his hands in his gloves resting on the blanket, keeping the music in.
Thirteen
The shops at Les Halles were long closed, but there were lots of stragglers on the streets in the area, some stumbling home from a long night of lifting glasses and emptying them, some looking for a quiet doorway to rest in until morning. This was a different Paris than the one I’d been shown so far, sadder and lonelier.
At night, with the lights out in the shops, the buildings looked the same, except for the old churches, dark and silent. I was about to give up, thinking what a crazy idea this was, wandering the city by myself at night, when a pair of truck headlights blinded me for a moment before turning down a narrow dead end street. If it hadn’t been for the lights of the truck reflecting off its shiny surface, I would have missed seeing the building altogether. Then I saw the sign in raised letters above the steel doors: SHADOWCORPS.
The building was like a shadow itself, seeming to have no real shape in the darkened street, just a presence, and not a very pleasant one. The back of the truck opened, and two men got out and began unloading long, heavy-looking identical crates. The doors of Shadowcorps opened, and three more men emerged, one barking orders at the others as they assembled a conveyer belt that led into the building. I tucked myself into a doorway and watched them work with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. As they finished emptying the truck, curiosity took over for the moment, and I inched down the wall beside the truck, hoping that they would be too busy and it would be too dark for them to notice me. Four of them struggled with the conveyer belt, trying to fold it up, and the one giving orders stepped away from the doors and snorted, “Can’t do anything right without me, can you, you bunch of lugs?”
As they groaned and tugged, I saw my chance and slipped unnoticed into the foyer of Shadowcorps. A vacant reception desk provided the only hiding place. I told my breath to hold steady as the three men rolled their cargo on huge dollies around a corner and out of sight. I didn’t dare look, but I heard elevator doors opening and closing and the sound of wheels and muffled voices, then nothing more. I waited for the silence to last a minute or so before quietly unfolding myself from behind the reception desk. My eyes slowly got used to the dark, cavernous lobby. It was completely empty — no plants, no directory, no signs telling you where to go, no chairs, no lamps, nothing. Even the reception desk was as naked as a landing strip. What kind of business went on here? And what was in those boxes?
My curiosity pulled me along to a set of elevator doors behind a wall that divided the entry area. The arrow above the gleaming silver doors pointed to minus five, and I stared at the dial, not understanding. With the exception of G for ground, all the floors were marked with a minus. The air seemed to blow around me like I was in a tunnel that went up and down, then it hit me — this building was completely and totally empty. I pushed the “down” button and waited, hoping that no one else was watching the arrow move at the same time as me.
I held my breath as the doors slid open, revealing what was more like a small room than a conventional elevator. I’m not sure what I would have done if someone had been there to greet me. I got in and pushed -5. The doors opened quietly onto a small hall. Nearby I could hear the sound of voices and activity and a lot of machinery in action. I peered around the corner into a vast warehouse-sized room with a low ceiling lit by tubes of bluish silver lights. Men in smocks, wearing goggles and holding blowtorches, were working on a piece of criss-crossed metal hundreds of feet long in sections of about thirty feet each. Was this what was being unloaded from the truck tonight?
At the far end of the room, a cluster of workers, also wearing goggles and heavy, padded gloves, were loading a giant hook into a huge fiery oven. I was so fascinated by this activity, I almost didn’t hear the elevator doors hissing open behind me. I looked around frantically for a hiding place and had to take what I could find. I jumped behind a large rack on wheels, hung with cables, torches, and other tools that didn’t look at all like the ones my grandfather kept in his garage. I crouched as low as my body would go. The crunch of three sets of footsteps stopped no more than a few feet from where I was hiding. Through the cables I could see only the bottom halves of their bodies, dressed in black, of course. It must be in season here. I spotted the shoes of the man in the middle of the little group. Actually, they weren’t shoes at all, but highly polished silver cowboy boots, a sight that was becoming all too common for my liking.
“Did you remember to feed the gargoyles, Phlegm?” wheezed a familiar voice that I recognized as belonging to the bony-handed Shadow from the club.
“Yeah, bones and all, Scar,” the other Shadow replied. “Looking good, Louche. Every construction crew in Paris would want to run this baby.”
A third voice I’d heard at the table of ghosts added, in his own special hiss, “Except we’ll be doing some deconstruction.” If a snake could laugh, I think I knew then what it would sound like.
They moved closer to the work in progress, and I heard Louche, or Luc as I was sure he was, saying, “Yesss ... ouiii” approvingly as he examined what I now understood was a giant crane. He stepped up onto a workbench, steadied by a couple of his henchmen. The blowtorches were lowered, and the buzz of machinery slowed as he smiled and gestured at the proceedings. “Well done, my friends. The Shadows always work late, n’est-ce pas?” A ripple of quiet laughter reverberated in the huge room. “And in a few days, we will have our very own Bastille Day celebrations!”
My curiosity was disappearing, and my desire to be above ground was getting stronger by the second. I moved slowly along a darkened wall in the flickering bluish light toward a doorway that I hoped would get me out of there quickly. The workers applauded Fiat’s words, providing the distraction I needed.
I stepped into an ancient passageway of large stones with puddles of blackish water pooling at my feet. One hallway led to another just like it, then another. Pipes twisted like ropes were attached to the walls, and the passages rose and dipped as I made my way through them to who knew where. The sounds of work became a dull throb in the distance. Even if I could find my way back, I knew it would be the wrong choice. That bad taste in the back of the throat called fear was making its way into my mouth. I was concentrating hard on not having it turn to panic when my shoulder bumped against a metal ladder. Feet dripping, I hauled myself up to the lowest rung and began climbing. I looked up into complete blackness, but it seemed to hold more hope than what was below.
After what must have been ten minutes of climbing, during which I did not slip once, nor think of how high I must have been, I saw light. I banged my head against something cold and hard and peered through metal bars onto a street. I realized I was looking through a sewer grate. Anyone larger would have been facing the return trip on the ladder, but not me. I tucked my hair into my hood and squeezed and pushed and wriggled until I was standing on a dark street, covered in things that should have been going down a drain, with wet feet and no idea where I was. A lone car sat at a taxi stand on the corner. I almost cried when I saw the exhaust pipes shaped like trombones. When I threw open the back door and fell in, I must have looked like a creature crawling out of a swamp.
Dizzy turned and looked at me from under his porkpie hat. “Where’ll it be, mademoiselle? The Russian church?”
The street and the church were dark when Dizzy dropped me off back at Rudee’s. He hadn’t asked me a thing, and I don’t think I would’ve had the energy to tell him anyway.
“The Hacks are rehearsing tomorrow.
