The Lucifer Gospel fr-2 Page 16

  “Next stop then,” Hilts said. Once again they moved toward the doors. The train slowed then came to a squealing halt. They got out of the car and headed down the crowded platform. As the train pulled out Finn glanced across to the opposite side of the tracks and saw the startled look of a man on the other side-the same man who had pushed Finn and Hilts into the car outside the Canadian embassy. He stared for a moment, open-mouthed, then sprinted for the exit.

  “They’re on to us!”

  Finn and Hilts ran to the nearest exit, then climbed up the long flight of stairs, ignoring the parallel escalators. They reached the upper lobby and crossed it, rushing out of the big station. They pushed through one of the three arched entrance doors, breathing hard. Without stopping they ran out into the street, dodging traffic, and made it to the circular plaza in the center, mounted with a huge bronze statue of yet another man on a horse. Once upon a time Paris must have been a wonderful place to own a foundry, Finn thought.

  “Which way?” she said.

  “Doesn’t matter. We have to lose him. Run!”

  He took her hand and pelted into the street. A car screeched to a halt next to a taxi stand. A Mercedes, this one blue. The man with the rottweiler jumped out, minus the dog. Behind them the man on the platform was dodging through traffic, crossing the street toward them. They swerved, reaching the sidewalk, and ran headlong up a short flight of steps and through a pair of tall black doors, open against the summer heat.

  A man in a uniform sat on a stool beside a turnstile set up in the middle of a large, dark, marble-floored room. He looked bored. A sign on the turnstile read: E10. Ten euros. Hilts jammed his hand into his pocket, pulled out a few crumpled notes and shoved them into the attendant’s hand. They rushed through the turnstile, and Finn looked back over her shoulder to see if the men were following. So far there was no sign of them. She turned again. In front of them was nothing but the circular entrance to a staircase in the floor.

  “What is this place?” Hilts asked, staring at the dark spiral of stairs at his feet. “Is this some kind of sewer tour?”

  Finn knew. She’d read about it in a guidebook the last time she was in Paris. Not the sewers.

  This was the entrance to the Paris Catacombs, home to the dead of centuries, millions of them, hidden deep beneath the streets of the old city.

  27

  As a city Paris has been in existence for more than two thousand years. It began as a small village on the Ile de Paris, where Notre Dame Cathedral now stands, then spread out on both sides of the Seine, north, south, east, and west. Like any rapidly expanding urban center, Paris had two major problems, both of which caused terrible and sometimes fatal health problems: garbage and dead bodies. Both brought disease on their ragged coattails. By the Middle Ages the garbage crisis caught up with Paris in the form of the Black Death-bubonic plague. A little while later the dead bodies caught up with Napoleon as he tried to create his vision of the city and kept tripping over putrid corpses in overflowing cemeteries from one side of Paris to the other. For a millennium or more the thousand or so churches in the city had each maintained its own cemetery, but as Napoleon renovated, the graveyards kept on getting in the way of his version of town planning. Paris, like Washington, D.C., after it-both designed by the same man, Pierre L’Enfant-was built on a swamp. Bodies weren’t so much buried as floated in a sea of muck. Napoleon, dictator, emperor, and practical man that he was, decided that every cemetery was to be emptied and the remains transferred to the old Roman limestone workings on what was then the edge of the city. As the redevelopment of the city continued the plan was put into effect. The newly dead were interred in three main burial grounds, Pиre Lachaise, the best known, which holds the remains of famous people as diverse as Jim Morrison of the Doors and Frederic Chopin, while the other two, Montparnasse and Montmartre, got the leftovers. The bones of seven million others were gathered up and taken to the limestone quarries to be hidden away two hundred feet below the surface. Over time, limestone quarries and boneyards combined covered more than a hundred and fifty miles of galleries on both sides of the Seine, with secret exits and entrances through sewers, manholes, and old buildings across half the city. The Nazis used some of them as communications bunkers and air raid shelters. At the same time, the Paris Resistance used other sections of the same network for meetings and to store weapons. According to history, the two factions never once ran into each other. The one squad of SS sent down to rout out the freedom fighters vanished without a trace.

  Finn and Hilts headed down the stairway. The temperature began to drop almost immediately, the summer heat turning to a clammy, naturally air-conditioned coolness that made Finn shiver. They kept on moving down the narrow, shallow steps, deeper and deeper. Small bulbs hanging from a frayed cable wrapped around the stone core of the staircase lit their way. Finn began to count the steps to take her mind off the steadily increasing sense of claustrophobia. They hit bottom at 234. She could hear footsteps echoing behind them but she had no idea if it was their pursuers or just a bunch of tourists who’d paid their ten euros. A marker on the wall informed them that they were seventy meters below ground-230 feet. A line of dim bulbs ran away into the distance. There was no other way to go except back up the stairs and into the clutches of the men chasing after them. The floor beneath their feet crunched wetly. Damp gravel. The walls and ceiling of the stone-lined tunnel were dripping. A hell of a place to die, Finn thought.

  A hundred yards farther on the tunnel began to widen and she felt her claustrophobia lessen slightly. Suddenly the tunnel emptied out into a broad and well-lit vestibule. The ceiling, sweating coldly, was still no more than a yard above their heads. The vestibule was oblong, with a pair of Egyptian-style obelisks carved into the rock on either side of a gaping doorway. The obelisks were white with rectangular inserts of black. Above the doorway, carved into the stone, was a message and a warning, written in Latin. Finn translated the words aloud:

  “Stop! You are about to enter the Empire of the Dead.”

  “Lovely,” muttered Hilts. They stepped between the obelisks and went through the dark doorway into a vision from the depths of a cave-cool hell.

  Stretching away in all directions, lit only by the pale clear bulbs that hung from the ceiling, stacked like cordwood and piled head-high in ornate rows twenty feet thick, were piles of human bones. Yellow, damp, old-it was layer upon layer of thighbones, pelvic bones, arms, legs, collar-bones and spinal vertebra, tens of thousands of skulls, eye sockets leering blindly jaws and teeth locked together into perpetual smiles by the dripping lime from above, all sense of humanity fled like the inner workings of a mass murderer’s most passionate dreams of bony carnage, an enormous mass of bone that was slowly, as secretions fell, becoming a single, monumental and monstrous fossil. The damp air was filled with a sweet-sick musty odor of old age, and the only sound was the muffled whispers of their rasping breaths.

  “My God,” said Finn, awe-stricken. She took Hilts’s hand and squeezed it hard.

  “There’s probably other people up ahead. Come on,” he said. Together they moved down the corridor of bones, peering ahead through the deadly gloom. Every fifty feet or so along the loose-floored passage they could see side tunnels blocked by wrought-iron barriers. It was clear that major sections had been blocked off to keep people from wandering through the entire place, becoming lost forever. They passed a wheelbarrow with a shovel laid across a load of assorted bones; clearly the gigantic ossuary was still in use.

  Hilts stopped. “Wait,” he said. He turned and listened. At first there was only silence, and then they both heard it: a soft, rodentlike scuffle, like rats on a barn floor. Running feet on gravel. “They’re coming!” He looked around wildly, then picked up the shovel on the wheelbarrow. He hefted it. No match for a gun, that was sure enough. Finn spotted a side passage on the opposite side of the main corridor. The wrought-iron gate was hanging off its simple hinge.

  “In there!” she said. Hilts nodded. They
moved across to the other side of the passage and squeezed through the opening. The sounds of their pursuers were getting dangerously close. Hilts turned and lifted the narrow gate, dropping the rusty pins back into their sockets with a loud scraping sound that made him wince.

  “No!” Finn exclaimed with a groan.

  “What?”

  “Look!” She pointed through the grating. There on the floor of the tunnel, ten feet away, was a brand-new passport, the gold-stamped Canadian crest gleaming proudly in the sullen light from the dim bulbs overhead.

  “Which one is it?” Hilts said. Finn reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out the passport she’d picked up no more than an hour before.

  “Idiot!” groaned Hilts, chiding himself.

  “What do we do?” asked Finn.

  “Hope they don’t notice,” said Hilts. He pulled Finn back into the shadows. The sound of footsteps was very clear now. Finn was suddenly aware of the impenetrable darkness behind them, and her imagination was more than capable of visualizing what that ghastly blackness held. Miles of corridors, millions of skulls, twice as many sightless eyes staring into eternity.

  The footsteps slowed. Finn saw shadows cast off their pursuer by the thin light overhead. The footsteps stopped dead. One person. He’d seen the passport and was trying to figure out what it meant. The figure stepped forward into his own shadow. It was the bearded man from the car; he’d managed to switch back and meet with his companion from the opposite platform at Denfert-Rochereau. He had a gun in his hand, a very modern-looking automatic made from some sort of flat black composite polymer. There was a fat sausage-shaped thing attached to the barrel. A silencer, she guessed. He wasn’t going to draw any attention to himself. As he bent to pick up the passport, the gate pin settled into its socket with a small clanking sound and the moldy old bones finally proved too much for Hilts. He sneezed.

  The man whirled, gun arm extended. A cold green light leapt out from the top of the weapon like a sinister ghoulish thread-not only a silencer, but a laser sight. Finn felt Hilts’s hand on her shoulder, pulling her back even farther into the darkness. She held her breath and stepped back as quietly as possible. She reached up with one free hand to guide herself back through the dark, her fingers trailing over the stacks of bones. The bearded man shoved the passport into his jacket pocket, then stepped up to the gate and started manhandling it out of its sockets. Hilts’s hand squeezed her shoulder again, and silently she kept moving back. Her free hand suddenly reached out and touched empty air. Hilts guided her around into a second side passage, this one running away at a right angle from the first. Finn’s fingers touched a skull in the wall to her left. She slid her fingers into the eye sockets, hooking them around the nasal sinus. She eased the skull from its place in the wall. It slid into her hand with a faint wet scraping sound. She gritted her teeth and hefted the skull. About two and a half pounds. It suddenly occurred to her that she was ahead of Hilts. If the bearded man turned and fired she’d be the one to get shot. She froze. Directly ahead of her she could see the line of green light from the laser sight. She felt her muscles tightening. If he continued along the side passage there was a chance they could get in behind him and escape. She held her breath again, listening for the sounds of the man’s footsteps. Instead she heard a small scurrying noise behind her and then a squeak. Hilts swore and the line of green light turned down the second side passage and blazed into Finn’s eyes. She didn’t even pause to think. She took one step forward, totally blinded, and straight-armed the skull at a point two feet above the searching beam of the laser, holding the bulbous cranium like a boxing glove on the end of her hand. There was a hard cracking sound as the skull connected, then fell apart on her fist. She heard a sighing hiss like air going out of a tire and the laser light wavered, then spun down as the bearded man dropped to the floor of the passage. The beam illuminated the mess Finn had made of his face. He was unconscious, his nose broken and his lip gashed. The left side of his chin also seemed a little out of place.

  “Glass jaw,” commented Hilts. He bent down and retrieved his passport from the man’s pocket. He picked up the gun, slid out the clip, then threw the weapon into the deeper darkness behind him.

  “Strong left jab,” answered Finn. She picked up the two bloody pieces of the skull and examined them.

  “I wonder who you hit him with?” said Hilts.

  “We’ll never know,” she replied. She gently placed the two pieces of the skull back on the stack of bones.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Hilts.

  They made their way back to the main corridor and ran down it. Ten minutes later they reached another portal and the passageway began to slope upward, the walls bare limestone now instead of bones. Another ten minutes brought them to a second spiral staircase, where a woman sat behind a desk selling postcards and slide sets and a second uniformed guard sat with a sour expression on his face. Finn and Hilts climbed the long flight of stone steps and reached a small, plaster-walled room with a single push-bar door. They pushed and stepped out into blinding sunlight. Finn felt a swift wash of relief, as though she’d been granted a reprieve.

  “He’ll be coming to by now if he hasn’t already,” Hilts warned. Squinting, Finn looked at their surroundings. They were on an unnamed backstreet somewhere. The wall behind them was whitewashed stone covered with peeling old graffiti. The tag on the wall read “Bad Idea.” Finn couldn’t have agreed more.

  “Where to? she asked.

  “Well, thanks to you we both have passports again, so maybe we should use them,” offered Hilts. “I’m beginning to think we’ve worn out our welcome in Europe.”

  “Simpson said DeVaux’s last port of call was Nassau.”

  “I can’t think of a nicer hideout. The Bahamas it is.”

  28

  In any other country Nassau International Airport would have been a bus station. Low ceilings, fake wood paneling on the walls, cracked floor tiles, and cheap yellow plastic seats in the waiting room. Sometimes, if the Tourist Office is in the mood, a grouchy steel band will be banging away in one corner surrounded by cardboard cut-out palm trees and homemade Christmas tinsel.

  U.S. customs preclearance for people on the way out means that lines sometimes trail outside the building and into the parking lot. Most of the time neither the air conditioning nor the conveyor belt work. The airport personnel don’t work at all unless they have to. The security checks are about as lax as the ones you get at Ouagadougou Airport in Burkina Faso. There is only one set of toilets and one cafeteria-style restaurant, and only one shop, called Nature’s Gift, which sells only soap. This is the place where people from the United States come to catch a flight to Havana. Once this was the gateway to Paradise.

  This Eden, however, like any other, was prone to corruption. The snake in this garden was organized crime, and the apple from the tree of knowledge looked suspiciously like cocaine and marijuana going in one direction and bales of hundred-dollar bills going in the other, after spinning around in electronic Laundromats with names that sounded like banks but weren’t. One way or the other six hundred and fifty metric tons of cocaine and ten times that much marijuana flowed through the islands of the Bahamas every year. The cash would fill a hundred freight cars. Cockroaches in the Bahamas have wings, lizards are everywhere, and the roads are full of potholes. When the Disney cruise ships dock in Nassau they play the first four bars of “When You Wish Upon a Star” on their horns so loudly you can hear it on the other side of New Providence Island.

  On the other hand, the sand is blindingly white, the sea is the color of emeralds, and the sky is like sapphires. Swimming is like paddling around in a giant hot tub full of tropical fish. The people are polite and genuinely friendly, it rains for an hour or so every day just when you’re getting a little too hot, and they don’t put white people in jail, if the Fox Hill Penitentiary is any indication. Public transportation is cheap, fun, and frequent and the food is wonderful.

&nbs
p; Finn and Hilts managed to catch a shuttle from Paris to London and then a nonstop flight from there to New Providence. Thirteen hours and ten minutes after climbing out of the Paris Catacombs they were climbing into a cab at the airport in Nassau. The sun beat down like a hammer, and the cab was without air conditioning. Swain amp; the Citations were doing “Duke of Earl” on the stereo.

  The driver introduced himself as Sidney Poitier. He looked just about the right age for it, his eyebrows and the stubble on his chin stark white against his dark skin. He was wearing round, tortoiseshell glasses that looked old enough to really be made from tortoiseshell. The eyes behind the lenses were watery with age and desperate experience beyond imagining. They were also bright with humor and intelligence. Uncle Remus driving a taxi. What Richard Pryor might have been like at seventy, Finn thought.

  “Is that really your name or just something for the tourists?” Hilts asked, surprised.

  “My name before his. I believe I’m a year or two older. Poitier’s nothing special on the islands for a name. Sidney neither. He from Cat Island, as I recall. My old dead mother say he was a bad one so they send him to Miami to get good. That a laugh, General: the word ‘good’ and the word ’Miami’ like oil and water; no mixing them up. I say to people, my name’s Sidney Poitier, and they say, Guess who’s comin’ to dinner, but it sure as shit ain’t this Sidney eatin’ at the Royal Bahamian in the damn heat of the night. Which say, you goin’ anyplace in particular or you just want me to drive you around, General?”

  “A hotel,” said Finn. She’d slept well enough on the long flight but she definitely needed a shower.