The Paris Key (16 page)

A
lone in Philippe's house, Genevieve felt as she had when she was a kid: like a trespasser. But Philippe had given her leave, so she snooped around, fascinated at this peek into another time.

Up the broad sweep of stairs, she found five large bedrooms on the second floor—in France, they called it the
first
floor, she reminded herself—and on the third, a row of small, cell-like chambers, which could have been storage closets, or perhaps servants' quarters. Only two small beds remained, old iron frames with shallow mattresses, which were still, oddly, made up: linens in faded shades of green and yellow. There were cardboard moving boxes here and there, assorted lamps and side tables, small area rugs, and a few scattered papers, but by and large the sense was of a fine house right after the war, abandoned and looted.

Three of the doors (paneled, made of heavy oak) were bereft of their plates and knobs, displaying bare circles cut into the wood. Genevieve checked Dave's schema and found three brass door fittings (locks, knobs, plates) that had been labeled and tagged as belonging to this floor. Each was packaged in a separate plastic bag, with little notes written in Dave's all-caps handwriting. It was typical in fine old homes for the nicer parts of the house to be decorated with expensive crystal, ornate metal, or carved wood knobs, while in the servants' quarters and work areas the fittings were made of less expensive brass.

She took the first apparatus out of the bag, placed the kneepad before the door, and started to fit it into the hole, screwing in the baseplate.

Her hands shook.

She was no locksmith. Yes, she had shown great promise when she'd learned the basics of locks at her uncle's knee. And yes, she had continued to practice, spreading out newspapers on a card table and taking apart old mechanisms or picking padlocks, driving Jason crazy with her “incessant need to fiddle with locks” in the evenings when he just wanted to relax and watch TV. And yes, she installed and fixed locks for people as a volunteer with an Oakland-based group that worked on old homes for the elderly.

But none of that made her a qualified locksmith. What if she screwed something up? What if she ruined one of the D'Artavel family heirloom locks?

“Treat the lock with respect, Genevieve, but do not let it defeat you.”

She let out a long breath, hushed the voice of doubt in her mind, concentrated on her work, and persevered. Upon finishing with the first doorknob, she tested it thoroughly: did the device latch properly? Did the lock engage? And, most important, did the keys work easily?

Yes.
She felt a sense of pride; she had done it.

She hung the old key off the knob by a loop of scratchy twine, as her uncle always had, and moved on to the next lock.

Genevieve imagined the clanking of the key ring at the housekeeper's waist as she moved about the house, busily attending to the business of her employers, the other servants under her thumb. In grand old homes such as this one, the housekeeper and the head of the household (usually the patriarch) would each have had a copy of the skeleton key, allowing them access to each room. Back in the day, maids and grooms were not granted the right of privacy from their employers. That was a modern invention.

She wondered why Philippe would want the locks cleaned and repaired and replaced, even while ignoring the plumbing and electricity. Was it a whim of an elderly, ever-so-slightly addled mind? Or was he simply determined to have the house whole again, to be sure all the original parts were brought back and to see her uncle's job through to completion? Maybe he had the notion of restoring it to what he remembered from growing up here as a boy.

Plumbing and electricity were relatively recent inventions, after all; these locks might have preceded such modern conveniences by centuries.

Genevieve was methodical, almost meditative, as she proceeded room by room.
A locksmith can't rush the work.
There was no point to it—if you lost your patience and hurried, you had to go back and start from the beginning. She didn't know how much time had passed (she needed to get a watch!), but she must have been working upstairs for almost two hours by the time she finished, polished the knobs and plates to a dull brass sheen, and checked the dossier for what was next.

There were several doors that needed work on the second floor: each bedroom, and closets within each bedroom. But she didn't have enough time to finish them all today. She descended to the main floor so she would be sure to hear Philippe when he came back in.

Typically there were fewer lockable spaces on the main floor, as there were fewer private areas. She checked her uncle's notes again: the library, the front guest room, the pantry. She found the cleaned and repaired antique locks for those three rooms in her bag.

Leaving everything on the dining room table, Genevieve looked around and got her bearings.

The library was small but still packed with a quantity of beautiful little volumes that made her wish she could read French easily. Oak shelves reached up to the ten-foot ceilings, and two tall windows provided a mellow light. A cracked leather chair and ottoman sat beside a desk covered with papers and dust. The floor was studded with stacks of very old, very yellow newspapers and crumbling magazines.

As she stepped out of the library, Genevieve noticed an intriguing little door off the hallway, tucked under a steep stair. It was small and very old. The wood was full of tiny wormholes and was slightly warped, the knob and lock plate very old brass, unlike the finer crystal knobs on the rest of the doors on this level.

She checked her uncle's schema, but this door was not included in the dossier.

The lock was a simple double-acting tumbler lock. The metal had corroded over the years, making the mechanisms stiff.
“Sometimes the soft brass wears down on antique locks; warm it with a hair dryer.”
Even easier: Her uncle's bag included a small can of WD-40. A good application of the lubricant, and she was able to work the pick and the guide.

She could feel the pins falling into place. It wasn't that hard. There was no way her uncle would not have been able to open this door if he'd tried. But then . . . Philippe had said that some of the doors weren't worth opening. Perhaps “some doors aren't worth opening” was a polite way of telling her to mind her own business and stick to the original plan regarding which locks were to be serviced.

Still. If there's one thing a locksmith hates, it's a locked door.

Not that Genevieve was a locksmith, but (reflecting on her work upstairs with a little thrill of satisfaction) she was getting pretty darned close.

And Philippe had invited her to look around, to make herself at home. Most likely this was just some forgotten little closet: full of dusty old linens or outdated vacuum cleaner parts or expired canned goods.

Just as the lock was opening (that magic moment of release) Genevieve remembered her dreams. She hesitated, overcome with a quick, heady rush of fear. Wordless, primordial.
“Some things behind the doors are not meant to be seen.”

“Will you let yourself be defeated by a silly lock?”

G
enevieve reached up, wrapped her hand around the knob. Pulled.

The door creaked loudly, protesting.

Beyond the opening was a long, dark, dank staircase.

Leading to a basement, most likely. It was probably nothing more sinister than Philippe's
cave
—pronounced
khawv
. She had learned during her teenage sojourn in Paris: Anyone with enough space, even the humblest Parisian, kept his or her own wine cellar. Dave used to have a small one in a cool interior closet; someone (probably Catharine) had already cleared it out, replacing the old bottles with new cleaning supplies.

But whatever this was, it had been long abandoned. Genevieve would bet that the door hadn't been opened in many years.

In her uncle's bag was a heavy-duty head-mounted flashlight. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail and pulled the device over her skull, adjusting it to a smaller size. Genevieve felt silly, like a kid dressing up as a miner for Halloween, but this way she could carry the locksmith bag in one hand and keep the other free to hold on to handrails or grapple with the stone walls . . . or fight off ghosts or vampires.

Whatever she might face in the sooty dark that lay below. It felt reassuring to have at least one hand free.

To the left was a switch—not a flipper but a little round disc. She twisted it. A light came on, illuminating the upper staircase. Dim and thready, as though having a hard time making it through the dank air. She was amazed (and grateful) it worked at all. It was an unadorned, old-fashioned bulb, with a visible filament. She prayed that it didn't pop.

The stairway was narrow, enclosed by walls made of gray stones and fat, tan-colored bricks. Thick cobwebs were strewn along the walls and hung from the stone ceiling.

Genevieve descended. She took her time, making sure of her footholds. She kept her free hand on the stone wall for balance, but there was no rail, and the steps were steep. The air was stale: must and moisture in equal measure.

How long had it been since anyone had been down here? Years? Decades, maybe?

These stones felt different than the rest of the house. Ancient. Just how old
was
this building?

The overhead light barely reached to the base of the stairs. She twisted her head around to shine the flashlight this way and that. It revealed a dark hallway, nothing more. She paused, hoping her eyes would adjust to the shadows.

Finally, carefully, and with a sigh of relief, she set foot on level ground.

Something slapped her in the face.

She squeaked and flailed, imagining spiders. But it was only a chain. Heart pounding, she pulled it. Another feeble bulb came on, this one lending its glow to the distant stretches of the hallway, which continued about twenty feet, then took a sharp right. The stones in the low ceiling formed an upside-down U.

From an American's vantage point it was hard to believe homes this old even remained standing. In California buildings were lucky to survive fifty years, much less centuries, before being torn down to make way for something new, or being tumbled due to earthquakes or shoddy building materials. But this . . . to what had these walls borne witness over the years?

Several openings and doorways led off the hallway. Pipes and wires ran exposed along the walls.

Slowly she made her way forward, torn between fear and reverence. All of her senses felt heightened with the dread of the unknown: of spiders and rats and ghosts and wildly reclusive French serial killers.

But also reverence for the history before her eyes. The cellar must have served as storage and perhaps as workshops for generations of D'Artavels. Could it have been used during the war? It wasn't much of a stretch to imagine hiding whole families down here, or young men and women with heads bent low over a barrel used as a table, plotting sabotage against the Germans.

The first doorway was open: The perimeter held racks and a few wooden cages and appeared to have been the storage room for wine. Here again, the ceiling formed an arch, this time a low, broad one. Wine
caves
made a positive out of dank underground places.
“The mold is good for the bottles,”
she remembered Dave telling her, as he pulled from the rack a dusty bottle covered in a thin layer of gunk. He had wiped it off with his big, roughened hands, apparently uncaring of the grime, to show the label: a pen-and-ink drawing of an old castle.
“We humans may not like it, but it's good for the bottles to look like this.”

Philippe's wine racks were virtually empty; only half a dozen bottles remained. She felt a little thrill as she pulled one out, blew off the dust and cobwebs.
Aloxe-Corton; Domaine Gaston & Pierre Ravaut
, from Bourgogne, 1959. She should bring one up to show him. Perhaps Philippe had valuable wine down here that he'd forgotten about for the past fifty years. But then . . . more likely it was very interesting, very historic vinegar.

The next chamber was full of rotting wooden boxes and old metal chairs, a couple of cots, picture frames, plus a window frame with two broken panes. A box of Christmas ornaments: She picked one up, wondering how much this would fetch in a vintage store in San Francisco—a pretty penny, no doubt. Glittery glass balls and little candles made of ceramic, with tiny lightbulbs for flames.

There were a rusted child's bicycle, iron rods, chairs, a brass bedstead. Even a surfboard in one corner—so surely someone had used this storage space relatively recently. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust and grunge.

Where did it come from, this grime? Did the old stone walls settle, sending a gentle mist of mortar sifting down over the years? Did the footfalls of those overhead dislodge minuscule bits of brick and stone, lathe and plaster? Did rats scamper over boxes, leaving behind trails of dirt? The spiderwebs were so thick they were fluffy veils, furred with dust.

She peeked into another room: a utility sink, a long stone counter. A few old mismatched dishes, buckets, an ancient mop. In the corner, a strange contraption of tubes and glass receptacles that looked suspiciously like a still. Perhaps Philippe's grandfather spent time down here, cooking up the kind of botanical extract so common in France: this
apéritif
made from a special herb that grows only in the Italian Alps; this
digestif
from a mixture of flowers that grow only in Provence; this tincture made with holy water from Lourdes. Probably with a little more poking around she would find the cupboard of homemade concoctions, all in dusty bottles labeled by hand in that scrolly, loopy kind of writing they taught in the French schools.

In the floor of the utility room, half-hidden by a wooden box, was a large, ornate grate. Probably this room was built on the same principal as the shower in Dave and Pasquale's house: simply mop and send the water down the central drain.

Still, the metal on the grate was so ornamental Genevieve crouched down and bent her head to focus the flashlight on the metal, trying to discern the design: Art Nouveau–inspired swoops, elongated lilies, and stylized reeds. This was so typical of a long-ago time, when even the simplest bit of utilitarian metal was carved and molded, meant to be beautiful even though it would remain underfoot, providing humble service in a basement utility room.

She was pushing herself up when she noticed something odd.

Beyond the grate was not the opening she expected; instead, it dropped down about a foot, and there it stopped, blocked by a piece of wood. Genevieve took the gear off her head and pointed the beam of the flashlight beyond the grate, trying to make it out.

It was a piece of wood with hinges on one side. Like a trapdoor. A trapdoor equipped with an elaborate antique lock.

Genevieve couldn't be sure . . . but it looked like one of her uncle's special locks. She looked closer . . .

“Genevieve, es-tu la?”