"I wouldn't want to be responsible for you falling ill," he muttered, eyes fixed on her plunging neckline now. "But as I said, before I can let you in, I'll need verification of... various... forms of... verification..."
Elsa started popping open several buttons on her sticky wet blouse. Cleavage suddenly appeared like a holy revelation.
The little man gasped and an involuntary smile appeared on his face.
"My name is Elsa. What's yours?" she asked, leaning in even closer.
The little man swallowed hard, his throat suddenly so dry it made him splutter. "Gaspard," he breathed.
"Gaspard! Such a strong name."
The little man grinned from ear to ear and his chest puffed out, just a little. "Do you think so? It means
wealthy man
."
"And are you? Wealthy, I mean?"
Gaspard shrugged. "Not really. But I like my job. It's peaceful and quiet and..."
"Lonely?"
Gaspard sighed and his chest deflated. "I suppose. Just a little."
"Don't you long for a little thrill? Just once in a while?"
Not one to own up to his boyhood dream of one day becoming a crime solver, Gaspard shook his head. "No. I get a lot of reading done." He held up a paperback thriller about age-old secrets hidden in the works of a Renaissance artist, now located in the most famous museum in Paris, as if to prove his point. Then, he stood and pointed to his holster. "Plus they let me carry a gun. In case of emergencies."
"Oh," Elsa said, her voice turning from sultry to sickly as her nervousness sank in again. "Perhaps I should be going then."
She turned, but Gaspard called after her before she could leave. "Wait! Please don't go!"
Elsa hesitated. She thought about the gun in Gaspard's holster. Then she thought about the Professor.
She turned and forced a smile onto her face.
Gaspard was looking at her with begging, hopeful eyes. "I have a secret little cellar hidden under the stairs. There's a beautiful bottle of 1969 Bordeaux just waiting for a special occasion." His pencil thin mustache curved upward in a little smile. "Will you share it with me?"
Elsa let out a nervous giggle, "Ha! But of course."
Gaspard smiled excitedly.
He quickly opened the door to his booth and released himself from his cage. Trembling nervously, he scuttled around the rim of Elsa's buxom form, squeezing past her as he headed down the corridor that led to the spiral stairs down which Elsa had descended only moments ago.
"Please don't go anywhere!" his voice echoed back to her. "I'll be back in just a moment."
"Where could I possibly go?" Elsa called back, watching as his little shadow disappeared down the corridor.
As soon as he was out of sight, sexy Elsa turned to panicked Elsa as she swiftly made her move.
"
Mein Gott
! What am I doing!" she babbled anxiously to herself as she tried the door handle labeled
Archives Entrée
. There was no getting past that padlock without a key.
Elsa raced into Gaspard's little booth and began rummaging through drawers. She emptied everything—paperclip boxes, loose change jars, crumpled used envelopes filled with receipts—until she finally found a key hidden in a box of old mints.
She jiggled it in the padlock.
It popped open.
The door gave a cranky groan and Elsa raced into the archives chamber before stopping dead in her tracks, her face suddenly besieged with fear. "Oh, my," was all she could manage.
The Professor my have told her
where
the little-known archives were located, but he failed to mention
how big
they were!
Suddenly, Elsa found herself standing in a massive stone cavern carved out beneath Notre Dame Cathedral, staring at row after row after row of endless shelves all stacked to a ceiling at least twenty feet high. Each shelf was crammed full of badly labeled archive boxes, half of them falling apart, their contents already spilled across the floor and collecting dust.
Elsa was not an overly religious woman, but she crossed herself nonetheless. She figured if she was in a house of God—or at least, underneath one—any assistance she could get right now would help.
She raced up to the nearest shelf and looked at the label on the first box she laid eyes on. It was difficult to read, but she managed to decipher the first letter.
A
. She pieced together the other letters on the scribbled label—
Avignon Cour
.
Quickly, she realized that the entire archive was alphabetized. And there was no denying, given the size of the chamber, that
Palais d'Automne
was a long, long way from here.
Elsa started running.
By the time she found the
P
s, she heard the creaky archive door groan open.
Gaspard's voice called out, sounding a little uncertain and betrayed. "Madame? You should not be in here!"
Elsa ignored him, her eyes desperately scanning the tower of boxes in front of her.
Suddenly, she saw one labeled
Palais d'Automne
several feet above her head, stacked high on dozens upon dozens of other
Palais
boxes. She stepped up onto the edge of a box, trying to climb the stack like a ladder, digging her toes into one tight gap after another, hoisting herself precariously up the side of the towering shelf.
She managed to hook her finger under the box she wanted.
It wouldn't budge.
"Elsa!" Gaspard's voice echoed loudly through the chamber, clearly angry now. "I cannot allow you to be in here without the proper authority! You need verification! And signatures!"
Elsa ignored him still, her fingers trying to inch the box out from above her head. It edged out a little... A little more... Then suddenly—
The box gave way.
Elsa's footing gave way.
She let out a shrill scream.
In a thunderous landslide, Elsa, along with four dozen boxes, came crashing to the ground.
At the same time, a short distance away, a bottle smashed against the floor and rich red wine spilled across the stones. Gaspard was no longer holding his Bordeaux, but was instead clutching the gun he had never used.
As Elsa pushed the broken boxes and mountains of paper off the top of her with a 'pish-posh!', the sound of running footsteps echoed closer and closer.
She panicked, pulling herself out of the wreckage before sifting frantically through the files surrounding her. Her hands rummaged desperately and found the now broken box labeled
Palais d'Automne
. She flicked through papers like a starving dog digging for a bone, looking for anything that remotely resembled an old blueprint.
The sound of running footsteps grew closer and closer.
Elsa looked up and saw Gaspard charging out of the darkness, his gun drawn.
"Freeze!" he shouted the moment he spotted her scratching through her mountain of paper—in what was undeniably the little Frenchman's best attempt at an American movie star accent.
Elsa gasped.
That's when she saw the blueprint.
The
Palais d'Automne
.
The cross-sectioned estate.
An underground tunnel system.
She snatched up the blueprint and scrunched it down her blouse, just as Gaspard fired off his first shot.
Elsa screamed.
The bullet missed by a mile, but slammed into another tower of boxes and caused a second archive avalanche.
Elsa jumped to her feet and leaped out of the way before being crushed by another landslide of centuries-old records.
A loud boom echoed through the chamber as the boxes exploded on the stone floor and random pages flew high into the air, covering Elsa's escape to God only knows where.
Running as fast as she could, Elsa steered aimlessly through the giant chamber, until suddenly—
—she reached the end of the Archives Department and realized she was as far from the entrance as she could possibly be. From here, getting past Gaspard was near to impossible. She would have to find another way out.
The far wall was lined with shelves and Elsa gasped in horror as all hope seemed lost. Suddenly, she remembered the Professor's words.
No church or monastery or palace in Europe was built without a tunnel system, everyone had an escape plan up their sleeve.
Desperately, Elsa began pushing on every shelf she could find. She shoved on boxes, she plucked file after file off the shelves and threw them in the air.
Suddenly, she stopped and stared.
Sitting on the shelf in front of her, amongst the dozens and dozens of badly labeled boxes, was a Bible. A fat, dusty old Bible.
A gunshot went off behind her.
Elsa ducked, and the ceiling light above her exploded in a shower of sparks.
She grabbed the Bible and pulled at it.
With a rumbling of stone, the shelf in front of which she was standing—in fact, the
floor
on which she was standing—began rotating ninety degrees, and a dark stone escape passage opened before her.
Another gunshot was enough to send Elsa sprinting down the mystery passage.
She couldn't see where she was going; she had no idea where the escape route was taking her. All she could hear was her own nervous panting and the sound of Gaspard's relentless footsteps racing after her.
Running blindly along the passage, Elsa shrieked when she suddenly charged headlong into a spiral staircase leading upward.
She picked herself up and began to climb—
—and climb—
—and climb!
Her feet didn't falter as she raced upward and upward, but she feared her heart would. Elsa's pulse had never pounded so hard and heavy in all her days.
The staircase eventually spat her out into a tower with more stairs, and in her panic Elsa kept climbing, unaware she was now heading all the way up the north bell tower of Notre Dame.
Windows came into view.
Lightning flashed.
Gaspard continued his chase upward and upward, and Elsa continued climbing higher and higher until she came face to face with the biggest bell she had ever seen in her life.
Thunder cracked across the Parisian night.
Another flare of lightning lit up the bell tower.
And the almighty Emmanuel—the thirteen-ton bell of Notre Dame—began to slowly tilt to one side.
Elsa's penny dropped.
She looked at her watch.
It was nine o'clock—sharp!
Emmanuel lifted to her full height, and then—
—the bell dropped in utter silence, swinging towards the most deafening noise on Earth.
Elsa covered her ears.
The bell
CLAAANGED!
It was a sound so loud, all of Paris heard it.
Elsa screamed and reeled, still holding her ringing ears as she stumbled backward and fell straight out of the tower window.
She screamed again as she plunged twenty feet from the tower window onto the sloping roof of the cathedral, landing so hard that several original thirteenth century tiles snapped loose and fell to their deaths below.
The rain was pummeling down more fiercely than ever.
Elsa felt herself begin to slide down the steep roof.
Her fingers tried to grab at anything they could snag, but there was nothing to hold.
She slid faster and faster down the slippery wet roof.
The tiles were like glass beneath her.
There was nothing to save her, nothing to stop her—
—until she slid straight over the edge of the cathedral's roof and her fingers miraculously hooked onto the guttering.
A high-pitched scream filled the night and competed with the clanging of the bells above, but somehow Elsa had saved herself—for the moment.
Precariously, she dangled from the edge of the guttering.
She screamed for help, but the only reply she got was a clap of thunder and a blinding blast of lightning.
Drenched and terrified, Elsa knew she had two choices: either pull herself up, or fall to her death. And although letting go of the guttering and saying goodbye to the world was probably the easier option at this stage, the thought of never stuffing another
blargenwurst
again was enough for her to muster the strength to pull herself back onto the roof—one determined breath after another, one hand over the other, one leg up at a time.
The bells continued to sweep and toll as Elsa strenuously hauled herself up onto the edge of the guttering. At that moment, the sound of gunfire continued.
One bullet ricocheted off the tiles.
Then another.
Elsa screamed again.
She glanced up and saw Gaspard now leaning out of a tower window, firing random shots into the thundering rain.
Elsa tried to scramble to her feet on the slippery, slanted roof.
"Stop! Stop! I thought you liked me! I thought you wanted to get me drunk and make love to me!"
Gaspard took another random shot through the deluge. "Love! War! To we French it's all the same!"
Elsa shrieked and began running across the slanted roof of Notre Dame, her back hunched and her arms covering her head from the gunfire. The bullets continued to snap tiles and ricochet off the roof. The bells continued to clang and boom through the night. They rocked her already shattered balance and Elsa couldn't help but howl, "The bells! The bells!"
Huddling beneath an umbrella on the other side of the Seine, a newlywed Japanese couple honeymooning in Paris heard the cry over the thunder and looked up. The young man let go of his umbrella. In the pouring rain he pointed in astonishment and fumbled desperately for his camera, choking in shock on the words, "
Hunchback
!
Hunchback
!"
Elsa reached the eastern end of the cathedral and saw the flying buttresses extending down from the roof in all directions, sloping toward the ground.
As the bullets continued to flip tiles from their resting place, Elsa desperately jumped through the rain, leaping from the rooftop and landing with a heavy thud on one of the flying buttresses. With a scream and a squeal and a grunt and a foul German curse she would never use in front of the Professor, she slid gracelessly down the slippery slope of the buttress. Then, like a champion sky-jumper, she flew rump-first off the end of the buttress, bounced off the lower roof of the cathedral and landed with a loud smack in a puddle on the ground.