The Paris Deadline (32 page)

     Root stopped ahead of me. His black coat, I thought, fit him like a shadow. He pointed his flashlight beam at a wooden post
and called my name, and I had a sudden vision of Jacques de Vaucanson deep in the bowels of the earth, in a limestone cave, his torches dancing in the darkness like Root's flashlight, but giving off a sulfurous, blasphemous smell. The king approached him, weaving and stumbling. They stood together grinning like a pair of alligators. I saw a gigantic figure of glass and metal—

     "Toby."

     I wrenched my mind back from the eighteenth century.

     "This is it," Root said. "Font-de-Pré."

     I bent down to touch a whitewashed wooden post. There had been a chain looped around it, going to another post a few yards off, but this post was leaning badly and the chain was in the mud as if wheels had gone over it. I could barely read the official metal plaque attached to it with a piece of wire: "Fermé." Buried in mud was another plaque: "Chasse Interdite. Pierres Tombantes." No hunting allowed. Falling rocks.

     "Tire ruts," Root said, and played his flashlight beam up and down a churned-up gully just beyond the posts. "Two or three sets of them. One goes over in that direction." He pointed the flashlight beam toward a black mass of vegetation where two swampy, half-frozen ruts disappeared into the darkness. His beam snagged for an instant on something that might have been metallic, then the wind bunched the branches and leaves into a shaggy wet ball and whatever it was disappeared.

     "The main ones follow some kind of old trail up to the cliffs." Root brought the flashlight back around to the right.

     "If you stay close here by the road," I said, "you can signal Armus when he comes."

     "While you do what?"

     I didn't answer because I didn't know. I clicked my flashlight off and started to move up the gully, into the knee-high bushes and muddy weeds that once upon a time would have been part of a pré, a meadow. Close by on my left, I could hear, over the snap and flutter of the wind, the hiss of a stream curling off through
the weeds like a snake. And beyond that, I could hear the deeper, angrier rush of a waterfall cascading down the cliffs.

     Floods everywhere, she had said.

     Where was the car that had made the ruts?

     No big, heavy steel-bodied Renault, I thought, could drive very far through the mud and tangle of the field, let alone get through the dense line of forest that began just yards ahead.

     I felt my way between the tire ruts. Each time I stopped I could see the cliffs hovering over the trees, an unbreaking wave of high, gray stone, Frozen Time, Calcified Time.

     I had been wrong in Paris about Solresol, I thought, and wrong about how long it would take somebody to drive from Neuchâtel to Saint-Bonnet, and now I was probably wrong about the car too. I had almost reached the trees at the bottom of the waterfall before my flashlight picked it up, a brief glimmering of blue paint on a fender, almost as dark as Root's coat.

     There was nobody in it, nothing. The back tires had sunk six inches down into the mud. I risked one quick burst of light on the empty front seat and crept around the front of the car toward the sound of falling water.

     Saulnay's limp, I guessed. They would have driven as close as they could to the entrance of the cave because of Saulnay's limp. Could Elsie have jumped free in the darkness and run for help? I remembered Johannes's Webley pistol and jammed the flashlight in my coat pocket and followed a muddy track uphill.

     Sixty feet from the car, the ground began trembling under my feet from the waterfall, and I could see why nobody came to Font-de-Pré.

     In front of me was a jagged pile of boulders and splintered rocks at least twice my height. This had to be where the deep earth tremor had shaken the cliffs. The rocks were long, flat, stacked, and angled in all directions. The waterfall burst like a rocket out of a break in them far up the side of the cliff. The rocks and boulders beneath it groaned and creaked in the violent rush
of the water, as if they were about to tumble and fall again, and against the silver gray clouds of the western sky they made a black silhouette like the knuckles of a fist.

     Closer to me, not twenty feet away, a maze of tall crevices and cracks led inward and down, under the wet, slippery rocks, toward a thin black fissure.

     I crouched and started to move forward again on bent knees, then stopped completely. Duckwalking, I thought, and told myself that if I bit my tongue I wouldn't laugh and I wouldn't cry and I wouldn't have to go down in the dark.

     There were old boards by my feet, another chain, another warning plaque upside down in the mud—"Danger de Mort. Pierres Tombantes." My pulse was beating like a tom-tom. My hands were gritty and wet. I took a deep breath and braced myself on a ledge.

     A light came on in the rocks.

     For a long moment I stayed precisely where I was, motionless, not even breathing. Voices drifted out of the cave, over the roar of the water.

     I could go in as long as there was light, I thought. I could go into a cave or a tunnel as long as I could stand up and see. Anybody could do that much.

     I reached the edge of the last boulder and started to squeeze myself into the crevice. It was not much wider than a man's shoulders, not much wider than a coat hanger. The waterfall was just above my head to the left, whipping the air back and forth with spray. The rock surface here was rubbed slick by time and water, smooth to the touch like skin. I could still hear the voices moving away in the cave. The light inside made a wavering white crescent across the stone. I turned to one side and forced myself five steps deeper. It was like crawling into a bone.

     I took three more steps and the light went out.

E
LSIE'S VOICE CAME LOUD AND CLEAR
, not a hundred feet away.

     She was around a corner, well inside the cave, and she was telling somebody not to be a fool, but I couldn't hear more than that. I couldn't think about that. Even in the darkness, my eyes were closed as hard I could close them. I was as rigid as a stone. I was an automaton, immobile, without a key to turn and make me move. My face was drenched with sweat and with spray from the waterfall. My wrists were crossed against my face, a sign of weeping.

     There were stages in panic, I knew. Paralysis, stupor, then the letting go. I had scratched my cheek against something sharp in the crevice and a trickle of blood was running down my jaw. Slowly, slowly, I wiped it away and lowered my wrists. A thousand French soldiers a day had died in the war, a thousand a day for four years, many of them buried or drowned in the mud when their shelters and dugouts collapsed on their heads. I thought about my name, Keats, which had always haunted me, the English poet in
love with easeful death. When he was dying in Rome, I had read, he spat arterial blood into his hands, wet rags of tissue like Eric the Minor's lungs. A Bleeding Man. I bleed, therefore I am.

     "You are," said Henri Saulnay, next to my ear, "just in time, Mr. Keats." And I sighed like a dead man and opened my eyes.

     He had a gun, of course, probably the same little automatic he had threatened me with on the rue du Dragon. I felt it prodding my ribs, but my eyes were fixed on the flashlight he carried in his other hand, the bandaged one. It made a brilliant cone of light at my feet, yellow at the edges. The light twitched softly from side to side like a cat's tail.

     "That way," he said in French. "You first."

     The cave sloped downward at almost thirty degrees. As best I could tell in the darkness we were in an antechamber directly below the waterfall. As I shuffled forward I could hear the rocks grinding and scraping just above us, but the roof in the antechamber was high, ten feet high at least, and I didn't have to stoop. Step by step I started to breathe again. My shoes kicked bits of junk and detritus on the floor, loose pebbles.

     Elsie must have been much farther away than I had imagined, because we kept on descending, turning through narrow passages whose ceilings dropped lower and lower. The passages were incredibly confusing. Once a strong downward draft of cold air passed across my face, and I tried to steady my head and remember elementary science—cold air sank, cold air sank as the night came on. Cold air sinks, warm air rises. To pull the air down into the cave with that much force, I thought, there had to be another opening somewhere, a back entrance, or a hollow under the waterfall.

     "Stop right there," Saulnay said.

     Behind me the flashlight beam played on my shoes and the chalky white floor. Saulnay adjusted an unseen piece of equipment.

     I closed my eyes and tried to remember what Root had written in the
Trib
about the geology of the caves. The cliffs were limestone, of course, grayish-white and black, an extremely porous
sedimentary rock. On top of the cliffs, two or three hundred feet above us, would be a layer of soil, but under that soil it would be limestone, limestone all the way down. The groundwater on top would leach down through the soil over the ages, and its acid would eat away the calcite in limestone, dissolving it and washing it away in waterfalls and boring out innumerable caves and tunnels. The result was a great plateau of rock riddled with holes.

     In cold, wet weather, Root had written, it is as unstable as a house of cards.

     Saulnay prodded me with the pistol again and we turned left at a corner that was marked by a grid of pink stalagmites rising out of the floor.

     "That was the third left, Mr. Keats, if you were counting. Gauche, gauche, droit, gauche, as our little wooden friend in Neuchâtel wrote. There were two passages off to the right that I don't think you even saw. I notice your hands are shaking. It's a pity about your tremor. You're going to turn right precisely where my light is pointing and then stand as still as you can."

     He touched my sleeve and I turned where he said and Elsie Short sprang up in the light like a jack-in-the-box and started toward me.

     "Toby!"

     I didn't stand still. I jumped forward and somebody knocked me sideways into the hard wall of the cave, and I went down on my knees and rolled through water. When I straightened again, I could see Johannes's big shoulders behind a flashlight beam and Elsie's green waterproof coat, and next to her, as the cone of light rose, Vincent Armus's white face.

     "Keats," he said softly and extended his hands slightly like a martyr to show that they were bound at the wrists by a cord.

     We were in a chamber next to a rushing underground stream. I felt the cold air moving across my face again, even colder now because I was soaking wet. I could hear the stream hissing, banging rhythmically against a loose rock. The floor was damp.
The chamber itself I thought was concave, like the bottom of an upside-down bowl, but that was hard to know for sure, since the only light came from the flashlights Saulnay and Johannes carried, and from a single kerosene lantern resting ten feet away on the ground.

     "Keats," Armus said again.

     When the flashlight moved away, the lantern on the ground gave him the effect of nightmarish deformity. Its light reached just to his chin, so that his eyes and the top of his head disappeared as he shifted his weight. He looked bizarrely incomplete.

     "I didn't go to Craponne," he murmured, "I wanted to get to the cave first. I didn't think you would come. I hid my car off in the bushes, by the road. What I wanted—"

     And he said something else that I couldn't hear, but I had already lost interest in Vincent Armus, and so, apparently, had Saulnay. He pushed Armus roughly to one side and played his flashlight up and down the cave wall on my right.

     "Get over there, Mr. Keats, next to the girl, but keep an arm's length distance from her."

     "My friend is going to be here with the police," I said, "any minute."

     He didn't bother to reply. I didn't blame him. It had sounded feeble enough, even to me. I heard scraping noises in the shadows, the clink of metal on metal, and one by one I began to sort out other images. Water running down the cave wall. Elsie's blonde hair, her feet in the same brown shoes she had been wearing the first day in Paris. Armus's hands, bound very tight with thin rope. And on the opposite wall, as if it were flying straight out of the black rock and into my face, the fierce white wings and big eyes of a cartoonish-like owl.

     I jerked my head back. Saulnay must have been watching. I heard him chuckle and saw him move to the other side of the lantern.

     "Very good, Mr. Keats, you recover a little underground, in
your natural habitat. Mole meets Owl. That's one of the drawings they find in these caves sometimes. There's another over here—"

     He waved his beam up and down. "This." A man's handprint materialized on the wall as if it had just soaked through the stone. Its fingers were spread wide and outlined in red and white. They seemed to be gripping a stone protuberance on the wall, the way you would grip a ball.

     "That would be the artist's own hand, no doubt," Saulnay said. "He was signing his painting." Saulnay moved somewhere else in the chamber, and I half turned to follow him. As my eyes adjusted more and more to the darkness, the old skills crept back. I caught flashes of color, spots of movement here and there. I could have been a fish in one of Armus's tanks, floating in the dark like a dot.

     "Or perhaps," Saulnay said, "this is the hand of our own Jacques de Vaucanson, because we know for a fact that he was here, in this very cave, this very space. Perhaps he left his signature for us, the way ordinary tourists write their names on the walls at Peche Merle."

     I felt Elsie's fingers touch my right hand, and I shifted an infinitesimal distance closer to her.

     Even as I moved, I heard the waterfall shift a little too, above the sound of the stream, and I felt its vibrations grow stronger through the porous limestone. Out of nowhere Saulnay's hard Roman profile appeared on my left.