I knew that part would be no problem. I can do “so what.” Looking in the mirror, I felt silly but more ready for Le Moulin D’Or than I had been an hour ago. I was going to ask what to expect at the club when Sashay glanced through the curtains and spotted Rudee’s taxi. “Our carriage is here, ma petite.”
Eleven
As we zoomed to the club, Rudee kept glancing back in the mirror with, I thought, a mixture of amazement and amusement. Sashay swept me though the backstage door, down a dark hallway behind the stage, to her dressing room. From inside the club I could hear the blah-blah of voices and the occasional too-loud laugh, mixed with the sound of some old song that everyone but me remembers. As Sashay did a few salad-tossing moves with my hair, she whispered some last minute instructions.
“They’ll be the ones on the balcony; you can’t miss them. It’s dark up there. Remember what Rudee said. Just listen and don’t try to talk to them. You’ll be subbing for Michelle the cigarette girl. If anyone asks, just say she’s sick.”
She must have read my expression as she looped a tray around my neck filled with every brand of cigarette on display. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to smoke to sell them. They’ll order from you all night.” Sashay kissed me on both cheeks and whispered, “Bonne chance. Meet me here after the show.”
I turned to push my way through the heavy curtains beside the stage, and for a moment, my courage faltered. What am I, a kid from Upper Mandeville, California, who isn’t old enough to drive, never mind smoke, doing here? Will I fool anyone? At that moment, the curtains parted and a small, elegantly-dressed waitress with a tray full of empty glasses almost knocked me over. “Oh, excusez-moi, go ahead, doll.” She smiled and held the curtain open into the club.
My mouth went dry, and my heart skipped a few beats. The murmurs I had heard backstage swelled to a sea of voices, clinking glasses, and couples laughing, accompanied by a creaky piano player. The room was washed in cool green and blue light. It was filled with little circular tables, attended by waitresses bearing exotic drinks of every colour in every shape of glass. Lights in the floor resembled lily pads, and the ceiling seemed to have stars embedded in it. I was transfixed by the mood of the place; it was like nothing I’d ever seen. My reverie was broken by a voice that sounded like a cough. “Mademoiselle, while we’re young, if you don’t mind.”
I followed the voice to a group of dimly lit tables set above and back from the main part of the club. I couldn’t see the face behind the voice, but I heard the snide laughter that followed as I tried to steady my legs and start the climb to the balcony. My hair fell in my eyes, but I hung on to my tray and remembered Sashay’s advice.
A single candle lit each table on the balcony, which was more like an alcove that overlooked the club. A group of five black coats and hats that I supposed had men in them were clustered around two of the three tables. The first thing that hit me through the dense cloud of smoke was the slightly swampy odour that hung in the air. That and the mirrored sunglasses. Two were wearing theirs; there were two pairs on the table, and the fifth had his hat pulled low enough to hide his features completely. “You want us to die of too much fresh air?” hissed the tallest of the group as the others laughed ugly, wheezing laughs. “What took you?”
Before I could answer, he grabbed a pack and some Moulin D’Or matches and tossed down a bill, waving me off like a mosquito. As I was about to make my escape, a bony hand grabbed my wrist. “Playing favourites, kid?” he almost whispered, then glancing at the selection, made his choice and looked me in the eyes. He had long, wispy silver hair beneath his hat and strangely smooth, bluish skin. A thin white scar snaked from his ear to the corner of his mouth. Minus the glasses, his eyes looked like what you see in the fireplace just before the fire goes out. I felt like my blood was slowing down in my veins from the cold chill that washed over me. “Where’s Michelle?”
“Uh,” I started to reply, but my tongue wouldn’t move.
However, they soon lost interest in me, and I left as quickly as I could to gather myself. I was back and forth between the balcony and the friendlier patrons on the lower levels all night until the music stopped and the stage lights dimmed for Sashay’s performance. I had turned toward the stage, excited to watch my new friend, when I heard a rasping voice from the balcony and saw a hand beckoning me back into the darkness. By now I was getting used to their cheesy comments and overall rudeness, but I was still on my guard as I made my way up the stairs. Suddenly I was pushed aside as a new group emerged onto the balcony from a doorway that I hadn’t seen before. Two more cookie-cutter trench coats and fedora hats brushed past on either side of a small, slender man with slicked-back hair in a perfectly tailored suit and silver cowboy boots. The others greeted him like a celebrity, and I was completely ignored as I stood off to one side of their gathering. The little man eased around the tables shaking hands and saying, “Yesss, ouiii.”
He stopped and addressed the group. “Kudos to the Shadows on Les Invalides. Dirty work and a clean job.”
They laughed their sooty laughs as a tall, thin one held out a chair for him. “Congratulations to you, Louche. Your plan worked to perfection, and the cross is safely at Shadowcorps. The black paint was a stroke, ha-ha, of brilliance.”
My body felt like it was frozen. I pulled Sashay’s scarf closer to my neck and had trouble focusing on anything else that was said.
“You part of the décor, or are you working tonight, bouffée?” The little man at the centre of this thug party waved me over, to the group’s general amusement. When he looked at me, I avoided his gaze, feeling like a specimen in biology class pinned to my place.
“Where’s Michelle?”
“Sick,” I mumbled, but it was my voice that sounded like it was on its last legs.
“What’s your name? Where are you from? Not from here, I’m guessing,” he hissed softly.
Mechanically I replied, “Mac. Upper Mandeville ... cigarettes?” I hoped to shift his attention to the tray that was shaking slightly in my hands. He ignored my question.
“Califorrrniaaa.…” He stretched out the word like a lizard sunning itself on our backyard patio. “What do you think of the lighter, brighter Paris? Remind you of home?” he asked with a smirk as he opened a fresh pack of cigarillos and reached for a match.
My brilliant reply went something like, “Um, ah, yes. I don’t know, I mean, yeah, I guess.”
“Well, lighten up, kid,” he sneered as he touched the match to the tip of his smoke, illuminating his face. I felt my arms go limp as I realized I was staring at Luc Fiat, the prefect of Paris. But how could that be? I was saved by a voice from below.
“Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, please give a warm welcome to ‘La Reine Des Rêves,’ Paris’s own Queen of Dreams, Sashay D’Or.”
As the crowd applauded, I hurried downstairs and into the safety of the little space beside the stage to catch my breath. Sashay swept past me, and she seemed in a dream herself as strange music slowly wove its way through the club. Rhythmic blue lights like waves washed over the quieted crowd as Sashay, well, sashayed onto the stage, one long-gloved hand extended as if it were leading her somewhere. The music rose and fell. She seemed to pull endless wisps of gauzy material from the folds of her outfit as she spun and floated back and forth across the stage. Every once in a while, she would dramatically throw a jewelled, gloved hand into the air, and a little column of golden smoke would rise like it had been charmed out of the stage, while from somewhere a cymbal would crash in response.
Maybe it was the waves of blue lights, but I found myself feeling like I was beside the ocean in California, with the distant sound of children playing and my mom laughing at something my dad was saying. The sand felt warm on my hands and feet, and in the haze I could make out tiny sailboats in the distance as I watched the patterns the seagulls made on the sand as they drifted overhead. A particularly loud wave crashed, and it turned into the sound of the audience applauding. I realized I
was still standing side-stage at the club. With a whiff of lavender, Sashay materialized and took my arm, leading me, in a fuzzy state of mind, to her dressing room.
“Mmm, I just had the coolest memories,” I started to tell her. She smiled at me as she removed the cigarette tray.
“I know, I’d love to see the coast of California some day.”
My head was still glowing from Sashay’s performance as little questions started to take flight like seagulls from my memory. She seemed to know what I was thinking. “Later, ma petite, let’s go. I don’t want to see anyone at the stage door. I’ll change at home, chez moi.”
She threw a coat on my shoulders, and the next thing I knew we were in the back seat of Rudee’s cab.
Twelve
The rain had stopped, but it had left the streets slick and shiny like new leather as the tires hissed down the grand boulevards. We didn’t seem to be returning to Sashay’s place in the Marais as we crossed the Pont Carrousel and drove through the archway past the Louvre. I sank back in the seat and listened vaguely to the usual exchange of jokes and recipes on Rudee’s cab radio. The cafes and bars were still buzzing, and the lights on the beautiful Opera Garnier gave it a storybook glow. We continued on through a seedier part of the city toward the giant train station, Gare St. Lazare. We stopped at the end of a short bridge overlooking the rows of darkened railway tracks, and Rudee switched off the taxi lights.
“It doesn’t look like much, but this is my first memory of Paris.”
Sashay gave me an “I’ve heard this before” look as he continued mysteriously, “Everything old is in the eye of the dog.”
I think Sashay coughed to hide a laugh, and we sat silently for a while. The night’s events were coming back in a rush to me; the delicious fog that Sashay’s show left had lifted. I tried to tell them everything I could recall about the “Shadows” and Louche, their leader. Rudee clenched his fists and gritted his teeth when I got to the part about Les Invalides.
“Snakethieves,” he spat out.
When I reached the part about recognizing Luc Fiat, Rudee stopped me. “You must be mistaken, Mac; Fiat works for the mayor’s office, and he is in charge of the campaign to polish up Paris.”
I tried to tell him that I really was sure, but I had to admit that I hadn’t been that close to Fiat on the day of the rally. When Sashay said, “It was very dark on the balcony, non?” I started to wonder myself what I had seen.
As Rudee switched on the headlights and eased back into the traffic, I asked about “Shadowcorps.” He glanced at Sashay in the mirror and said, “That’s the monstrous new building in Les Halles, isn’t it? The ugly-as-snot light-reflecting one?”
She wasn’t listening, instead looking out the window at the couples laughing arm in arm as they walked past the lights of the late night brasseries and bars.
Rudee caught my eye in the mirror and added, “I’d avoid that place like the flu, Mademoiselle Mac.”
We dropped Sashay off outside the scarf museum and returned to Rudee’s rooms at the Église Russe. “Hungry?” he asked, and without considering what that might bring, I said, “Yes, starving!”
He served himself a bowl of something pungent and steamy and made me a sandwich and a salad of some-thing called mâche, which was better than it sounded, with cherry tomatoes. Had food ever tasted this good before? He chopped a pear and placed it between us.
“So, you see a career for yourself as a cigarette girl, Mac?” He grinned at my look of disgust as I recalled the scene at the club and sniffed my hair and clothing. “Well, at least as a detective.” He seemed pleased with the evening’s efforts. “But that’s it for your little sniffer. I will call Magritte in the morning and let him know everything.”
To me it felt like a jigsaw puzzle in which we’d found a few pieces that fit together, but even the frame was scattered in bits.
I climbed the steps to my room and fell onto my bed. Maybe it was the fact that my hair was over my face and smelled like an ashtray that woke me up some hours later, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. I stared out the window at the now-quiet city and watched the light revolving around the Eiffel Tower, hoping it might lull me to sleep, but instead it was my thoughts that spun slowly. I pulled on my jacket. Maybe I’d just catch a little night air. Of course, I had a pretty good idea of where Les Halles was. I tiptoed past Rudee, snoring happily, his hands in his gloves resting on the blanket, keeping the music in.
Thirteen
The shops at Les Halles were long closed, but there were lots of stragglers on the streets in the area, some stumbling home from a long night of lifting glasses and emptying them, some looking for a quiet doorway to rest in until morning. This was a different Paris than the one I’d been shown so far, sadder and lonelier.
At night, with the lights out in the shops, the buildings looked the same, except for the old churches, dark and silent. I was about to give up, thinking what a crazy idea this was, wandering the city by myself at night, when a pair of truck headlights blinded me for a moment before turning down a narrow dead end street. If it hadn’t been for the lights of the truck reflecting off its shiny surface, I would have missed seeing the building altogether. Then I saw the sign in raised letters above the steel doors: SHADOWCORPS.
The building was like a shadow itself, seeming to have no real shape in the darkened street, just a presence, and not a very pleasant one. The back of the truck opened, and two men got out and began unloading long, heavy-looking identical crates. The doors of Shadowcorps opened, and three more men emerged, one barking orders at the others as they assembled a conveyer belt that led into the building. I tucked myself into a doorway and watched them work with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. As they finished emptying the truck, curiosity took over for the moment, and I inched down the wall beside the truck, hoping that they would be too busy and it would be too dark for them to notice me. Four of them struggled with the conveyer belt, trying to fold it up, and the one giving orders stepped away from the doors and snorted, “Can’t do anything right without me, can you, you bunch of lugs?”
As they groaned and tugged, I saw my chance and slipped unnoticed into the foyer of Shadowcorps. A vacant reception desk provided the only hiding place. I told my breath to hold steady as the three men rolled their cargo on huge dollies around a corner and out of sight. I didn’t dare look, but I heard elevator doors opening and closing and the sound of wheels and muffled voices, then nothing more. I waited for the silence to last a minute or so before quietly unfolding myself from behind the reception desk. My eyes slowly got used to the dark, cavernous lobby. It was completely empty — no plants, no directory, no signs telling you where to go, no chairs, no lamps, nothing. Even the reception desk was as naked as a landing strip. What kind of business went on here? And what was in those boxes?
My curiosity pulled me along to a set of elevator doors behind a wall that divided the entry area. The arrow above the gleaming silver doors pointed to minus five, and I stared at the dial, not understanding. With the exception of G for ground, all the floors were marked with a minus. The air seemed to blow around me like I was in a tunnel that went up and down, then it hit me — this building was completely and totally empty. I pushed the “down” button and waited, hoping that no one else was watching the arrow move at the same time as me.
I held my breath as the doors slid open, revealing what was more like a small room than a conventional elevator. I’m not sure what I would have done if someone had been there to greet me. I got in and pushed -5. The doors opened quietly onto a small hall. Nearby I could hear the sound of voices and activity and a lot of machinery in action. I peered around the corner into a vast warehouse-sized room with a low ceiling lit by tubes of bluish silver lights. Men in smocks, wearing goggles and holding blowtorches, were working on a piece of criss-crossed metal hundreds of feet long in sections of about thirty feet each. Was this what was being unloaded from the truck tonight?
At the far end of the room, a clu
ster of workers, also wearing goggles and heavy, padded gloves, were loading a giant hook into a huge fiery oven. I was so fascinated by this activity, I almost didn’t hear the elevator doors hissing open behind me. I looked around frantically for a hiding place and had to take what I could find. I jumped behind a large rack on wheels, hung with cables, torches, and other tools that didn’t look at all like the ones my grandfather kept in his garage. I crouched as low as my body would go. The crunch of three sets of footsteps stopped no more than a few feet from where I was hiding. Through the cables I could see only the bottom halves of their bodies, dressed in black, of course. It must be in season here. I spotted the shoes of the man in the middle of the little group. Actually, they weren’t shoes at all, but highly polished silver cowboy boots, a sight that was becoming all too common for my liking.
“Did you remember to feed the gargoyles, Phlegm?” wheezed a familiar voice that I recognized as belonging to the bony-handed Shadow from the club.
“Yeah, bones and all, Scar,” the other Shadow replied. “Looking good, Louche. Every construction crew in Paris would want to run this baby.”
A third voice I’d heard at the table of ghosts added, in his own special hiss, “Except we’ll be doing some deconstruction.” If a snake could laugh, I think I knew then what it would sound like.
They moved closer to the work in progress, and I heard Louche, or Luc as I was sure he was, saying, “Yesss ... ouiii” approvingly as he examined what I now understood was a giant crane. He stepped up onto a workbench, steadied by a couple of his henchmen. The blowtorches were lowered, and the buzz of machinery slowed as he smiled and gestured at the proceedings. “Well done, my friends. The Shadows always work late, n’est-ce pas?” A ripple of quiet laughter reverberated in the huge room. “And in a few days, we will have our very own Bastille Day celebrations!”
The Adventures of Mademoiselle Mac 2-Book Bundle Page 4
