Ministry Protocol: Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences
Page 50
*****
Anne-Marie slipped into the shadows like it was a warm bed on a cool night. She was out of shape but bristling with determination. The air was brisk against her cheeks, and the exhilaration of her mission kept her moving.
When she’d been at the Folies Bergere earlier, she’d noticed convenient climbing niches in the bricks outside. She skittered up with a prowler’s grace, glad that she’d kept her hands from going soft. As part of her dedication to keeping Ministry training on her mind, she gave herself the same birthday gift every year: a midnight trip past the Louvre security to enjoy the works of art on her own. She used a different and more challenging entrance strategy every year, and she’d touched the Mona Lisa with bare hands more than anyone since Da Vinci himself.
At the top of the building, she pulled herself onto the roof of the Folies Bergere and skittered over to a cracked window. Wrenching it open, she squeezed through. It was an attic of the most depressing sort, with rows of small and dingy beds meant for servants.
Anne-Marie’s soft-soled boots whispered across the boards and down the stairs to the next level. The long hallway housed themed rooms decorated in glitzy excess. Perfume hung heavy in the air, and Anne-Marie held a handkerchief over her sensitive nose.
As she crept down the next staircase, the air warmed, and the sound of voices and music thumped through the cracked walls. The song ended to thunderous applause, and a woman’s voice boomed as if heard underwater. Anne-Marie stopped, one hand to the wall.
“Mes amis, are you ready to meet Madame Allemande’s Jewels of Paris?”
Whistles, stomps, and applause answered her.
Anne-Marie looked up and found a copper tube bolted to the ceiling, pointing down the dark hallway.
“Oh, la la! These girls need more of a welcome that that!”
The voice had definitely come from the tube, and Anne-Marie followed it as it snaked past red velvet curtains and disappeared into another wall beside a narrow door. She had the lock picked in moments, opening it silently onto a hall lit by green lanterns.
“The Folies Bergere is proud to present... the can-can!”
Anne-Marie hurried faster when she realised she didn’t just hear the echo of the pipes but the actual woman’s voice. Just ahead, a door was cracked, showing a thin line of light. Gun in hand, she pushed it open just enough to see inside.
The room was large, lit with gas-lamps and filled with ornate parlour furniture, bizarre statuary, and a low, annoying ticking sound. A strange hodgepodge of scents made Anne-Marie’s nose twitch: oil, metal, and expensive perfume. She slipped through the door and hid behind a sofa.
A thin woman in a taffeta gown of emerald green stood with her back to the room as she spoke into an amplifying box, the source of the copper pipe. She paused to peer through two holes at eye level in the wall, watching the cabaret on the other side. After another round of deafening applause, the woman turned and spoke to an empty corner.
“I see a new Englishman out there. Perhaps he’ll be the one to finally admit to murdering my poor darling Lizette. We know just what to do with him, don’t we? Come, Maurice. Come, Fabrice. Murderers must be punished, n’est-ce pas?” Her accent and the way she spat “Anglais” marked her as a native Parisian. Anne-Marie felt panic rise behind her corset as she thought about Joe in the crowd, unsuspecting.
Something large moved, some metal contraption that squealed and clanked and then... purred? Anne-Marie ducked around the sofa to see what sort of clockwork padded to the woman’s side, but a heavy weight landed on her back, shoving her flat. Her gun clattered to the ground, and she felt the bone-jarring weight of metal on her spine and arm as claws spread over her leather corset and wrapped around her shoulder. Pinned as she was, she couldn’t reach any of her weapons. Struggling to turn her head, she saw a blinking yellow eye and a demonic, gibbering face.
Footsteps rounded the sofa. Anne-Marie could barely see the woman looming over her, a metal creature at her side.
“Ah, the curious baker. Inject her, please, Maurice.”
Anne-Marie felt the cool pinch of a needle in her arm and struggled to turn over, to reach the knife in her corset, to do anything but lay there helpless like an idiot. She failed. Numbness spread quickly from her belly to her extremities as the injection took effect.
“You wish to know what happens to meddling Englishmen who enter my city unwanted? Who hurt my girls and refuse to pay my bills? Do you know which of those monsters murdered my poor daughter? If you are on the side of the English, you will meet their same fate.” She leaned close, sniffed deeply, and sneered. “Half English, at least. You stink of tea and broken promises. Come. My pets will show you the most beautiful views in Paris.” Her grin was skeletal, mad, her wrinkled lips painted red. “Starting with the tunnels in the catacombs.”
Just before her eyes fluttered shut, Anne-Marie remembered her tracker ring and managed to push it with her clumsy thumb.
“If I’m in trouble, will it alert you?” she had asked Joe.
“If you push it, I’ll know.”
But how long would it take for Joe to receive the signal? How long?