The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense (32 page)

The silence was absolute and overpowering. Other than hearing Griffin breathing and their footsteps, there was no sound. Jac wasn’t sure she’d ever been anywhere as quiet. But it wasn’t peaceful. The world above them might have come to a standstill and ended, and they wouldn’t know.

After about a hundred yards, they reached two ancient rock steps leading up to a small landing where the ceiling suddenly soared to at least ten feet high. Then another two steps leading down to a continuation of the last tunnel. This one as narrow as the last, but filled with water that looked as if it would reach the middle of her calf. Higher than her boots.

“You game?” Griffin asked.

The water was cold. Her boots squished in the mud. Her jeans wicked up the water and after only a few feet, Jac’s pants were wet to just below the knee. At the end was an archway. Griffin shined his helmet light on the lintel, illuminating handwriting on the wall.

Faded. Hand lettered. It looked as if it had been there for at least fifty years.

“What does it say?” he asked.

As she translated, she read out loud. “The right path is often the most difficult.”

“I wonder if Robbie could have written that and doctored it to look old. Is it his handwriting?”

“No . . . but . . .” She pictured the bottles of essences in the workshop.

“It could be my grandfather’s.”

“So far there haven’t been any offshoots—we’re on a direct path from the inside of your family maze. So if your grandfather did bring Robbie down here, this is the route they took. You okay to keep going?”

“I’m fine.”

“Was your grandfather ever decorated?”

“Decorated?”

“After the war, did the French government honor him?”

“If they did, I never heard about it. He didn’t talk much about his wartime experiences. Other than a few stories he told us about hiding people in these tunnels.”

“So you didn’t realize he was a hero?”

There was a subtext to Griffin’s question, but she didn’t understand it.

“My grandmother used to tell us that he was. But he didn’t like her to mention it. Why?”

“You’re always looking for heroes. I wondered if you knew you grew up with one.”

For a moment, she had a glimmer of understanding: this was something important, but now wasn’t the time to try to figure it out. Ahead of them was an incline. Five steps leading up into a tunnel with a ceiling so low they were forced to crawl on their hands and knees. Luckily they had gloves, or the floor would have ripped the flesh from their palms. After eight feet, the tunnel ended—not with steps but with a stone chute.

“Where does it go?” Jac heard the quaver in her voice.

“There’s no way to know.”

“We can’t go down there.”

“There’s no other option.”

For the first time since Marcher had called her in New York, Jac cursed Robbie.

“Let me go first,” Griffin said as he climbed into the hole.

“I thought that was a foregone conclusion.”

“It’s a little tunnel . . .” His voice was getting fainter as he crawled in deeper. “And then a slide.”

Jac heard a splash.

“Are you all right?” she called.

His voice came from somewhere far away. It was the first time they’d been this far apart since coming underground.

“It’s water up to my thighs. But perfectly clear. Very cold. Fresh. There must be springs under here.”

Jac wanted to stop. To tell Griffin that she couldn’t do this. This newest challenge was testing her sanity.

“It’s a two-foot slide, then a drop of about three feet. I’m standing right here at the bottom.”

Jac climbed inside. Looked at the edge of the opening: eighteen inches. This was as close as she could get. She was going to have to work at this one. She took a deep breath. Inhaled the stale, damp air. Focused on the smells. Mold. Stone dust. Dirt.

She was almost at the edge of the opening.

Crawled another inch. Took another breath. Another inch. She imagined Robbie in here two days ago. What had he been doing for the forty-eight hours? Worked his way through these tunnels and somehow gotten to Nantes? Concocted the elaborate ruse with his shoes and wallet and then made his way back? All to make the police believe he was dead? All to protect the pottery shards? Or was she wrong? Maybe an animal had disturbed the pebbles. Gotten dirt on the needle. Maybe it was wishful thinking that the dirt smelled like the Fragrance of Loyalty. She’d been wrong about it all. Convinced Griffin.

“Forget it! Let’s go back!” she called out. “Robbie’s not here.”

“You can do it, Jac. I’m right here waiting for you. I’ve never known anyone more determined that you. What was it you used to say: ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ Right?”

She was a little girl. On the beach in Cannes with her grandmother and Robbie. The turquoise water shimmered and invited her in, but when it lapped her toes, it was too cold. Robbie was already in—swimming and howling with pleasure. Her grandmother watched Jac.

“Just run in. Don’t stop to think about it. Plunge fast. The pain of it will be over in a moment, and then your body temperature will adjust. You have to be brave,
ma chérie,
” her grandmother said
.
“It’s only cold water—what’s the worst that can happen?”

Be brave, ma chérie,
Jac said to herself.
What’s the worst that can happen?

Jac propelled herself down the smooth stone chute. As she landed, her right ankle went out from under her, and she tripped.

Griffin reached out and helped her catch her balance.

“You okay?”

She nodded, not wanting him to hear the fear in her voice.

He put his hand up to her face, brushed away some dark curls that had escaped her barrette. “Really, are you okay? You’re doing great. Like you’ve been doing it for years. Your brother knows how to take care of himself. You both do, Jac. You’re survivors.”

Ten yards into this tunnel was a set of five steps leading up to a dry landing. From there Jac and Griffin looked into a stone cathedral, majestically carved from the quarry itself. The vaulted ceiling soared up almost twenty feet. Where windows would be were hollowed-out openings looking into more stone.

Black stenciled letters on the wall spelled out:
Rue de Sèvres 1811.

The night before, she had read an article on the internet explaining that the underground was marked with street signs to designate the areas above. Not just so the workers didn’t get lost but also so they were able to orient themselves. It prevented panic, the writer said. And seeing one now, Jac understood why. It was oddly reassuring. Even though she couldn’t burrow up a hundred feet through rock, knowing where she was had a calming effect.

On the wall to her right was more graffiti: men’s names written in white paint and dated 1789 through 1799. On the left wall was more, with dates that continued into the early 1800s. There was a mural of a devil being followed by a mass of people in black robes. A chalk drawing of a guillotine. There were symbols and sayings in an old-fashioned typeface that appeared to have been created with the smoke from a lantern or candle. Other phrases were painted more recently with green and blue Day-Glo paint.

And three archways.

Finally they had arrived at a crossroads.

Jac walked over to each and sniffed the air. Took it deep into her. Tried to find some remnant of her fragrance. But there was nothing.

“Robbie had to have left us some kind of clue,” Griffin said. He examined the areas around the openings. There was nothing on the one on the left or the right. But words were etched into the lintel of the middle archway. Not something Robbie could have done—this had taken time and looked as if it had been there for hundreds of years:

Arête! De l’autre bord de la vie est la mort.

Jac translated: “‘Beware. On the other edge of life is death.’ Knowing my brother,” she theorized, “we can go this way. I can hear him laughing at how perfect the clue would be.”

“Look.” Griffin pointed to one of the columns supporting the middle arch.

In dark charcoal was the drawing of a crescent moon with a star inside of it.

Without hesitating, they walked through that archway and entered the next chamber.

The walls were uneven. Made of rocks. Yellowed. Wet.

Beside her she heard Griffin gasp.

She was about to ask him what he’d seen when she realized it for herself.

Everything she was looking at was made of bones. Bone walls. Shelves of bones. Brackets of bones. Altars of bones. Bone beams and arches. Even crosses made of bones. Not bleached white and purified, but decayed with dirt. Damp. Hundreds of bones. No. Thousands of bones. Skulls. Femurs. Pelvis bones. Bones stacked one on top of the other in perfect symmetry. Rounded ends out. Creating designs. Architectural details.

They’d entered the consecrated cemetery. The repository for the overcrowded cemeteries aboveground. They were now in the city of the dead.

“It’s so strange, isn’t it?” Jac remarked as she walked around the room, mesmerized. “They’re not people. Not at first. Are they? It’s just all a design.”

Interspersed with the bones were cracked tombstones. Most were from the seventeen hundreds. The detritus of aboveground cemeteries had been deposited here with the calcified remains they’d once identified.

“I’ve spent so much time in tombs . . . but there’s one thing I never get used to. So many silenced people whose names we will never know,” Griffin said.

“When I was little,” said Jac, “I used to go with my grandmother when she went to tend to her family’s cemetery plots. She brought bouquets of fresh flowers or wintergreen to her parents once a month. And a single stem to a baby she’d had that lived for only a week. One day I realized there were no tombstones from before 1860. She explained all the bodies buried before that had been emptied into the catacombs.” Jac faced the long dead, the rows and rows of bones. The more she looked, the more she saw. A bullet hole in one of the skulls. A large crack in another. A smashed cranium. “Emptied them here.”

Somewhere in the distance, water dripped. Slowly. Methodically.

Jac imagined she heard the name of the woman from her hallucination in their rhythm: Ma-rie—Ma-rie—Ma-rie.

And then another noise.

Jac couldn’t be sure which direction it came from. It seemed as if it was above them. Or around them.

She looked at Griffin. She started to ask him what it was—but he put his finger to his lips.

There it was again. Louder this time. It was more than pebbles spilling. It sounded like bones falling. Or rocks collapsing.

Forty

12:49 P.M.

Valentine didn’t hurry. William was on duty in the car. She was on a break. Trying to walk off the emotional cacophony playing in her head.

She stopped in a small grocery store. Bought two apples and two bananas. A liter of bottled water. And cigarettes—her indulgence.

Back on the street, she listened to the street noises and snatches of conversation. Tried to notice the rest of the world going by; to pretend, for a few minutes, that she wasn’t wound up and anxious. Wasn’t worried about failure. Didn’t miss François. That she believed she could take on this herculean task of running the mission herself. A mission that had become personal.

In the reflections in the store windows she passed, Valentine checked to see if anyone was following her. She didn’t expect there to be. But she always watched.

A few people inside glanced back idly at her. Some with mild curiosity. They didn’t see her. Not really. It was her look that caught their eyes. Diverted them from noticing her identifying features.

The uniform, cultivated over the years, was calculated to be just slutty enough so that the people who looked twice didn’t see past the outfit: shoulder-length, thick black hair. Bangs. Oversize black sunglasses that hid half her face. At night she substituted an oversize pair of tinted glasses even though she had 20/20 vision. Skintight blue jeans. Leather boots up to her knees. A white or black T-shirt. Never a bra, so there was typically a suggestion of nipples. Depending on the weather, either one of two old worn leather jackets: a fawn-colored blazer she’d appropriated from François’s closet years before, with double pockets inside and out; or a thrift-shop black bomber with a dozen pockets. She always had to have her hands free. Around her waist, she wore a belt. Halfway back, her knife hung off it. Invisible under the jacket, she felt it. And there was a gun tucked into the right boot.

She punched in the code and went through the door. William was where she’d left him. Sitting inside the parked car.

“Anything happen while I was gone?” she asked.

“Music. Kitchen noises. Dead fucking nothing.”

Earlier that morning, Valentine and William had followed the Citröen to the café. While Griffin and Jac were eating, Valentine had managed to attach a GPS device to the underside of their car. It had been routine, simple: she went to a bakery and bought some croissants, then walked down the street where they’d parked the Citröen. Just as she passed the car, she pretended to trip, dropping the bag. While she bent over to pick it up, she reached out and voila—it was done.

But the damn device had only helped them track the car to a parking lot used by a complex of stores. Too many stores. There had been no way to tell which one they’d gone into or what they’d bought.

No way to watch all the doorways and create a diversion and abduct Jac L’Etoile. They were going to have to find another opportunity.

Back on Rue des Saints-Pères, she and William had watched them get out of the car. Griffin carrying a suitcase. The two of them accompanied by another man. From the scraps of conversation they were able to hear with the directional mike in the following half hour they were able to pick up his name—Malachai—and a few words suggesting Jac and Griffin were going to make another effort to find Robbie. But no one had left the house or the boutique.