The Paris Key

by Juliet Blackwell

  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 Most likely this was just some forgotten little closet: full of dusty old linens or outdated vacuum cleaner parts or expired canned goods.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?”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Genevieve 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?”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “Genevieve?”

  Genevieve emerged from the room and hurried down the little hall to see Philippe standing in the square of light at the top of the basement stairs.

  “Yes, yes, I’m here,” she called as she climbed the stairs.

  “What are you doing down there?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, no, is okay. But this door has been locked many years. I am surprised . . . for a long time no one has gone there. I think there is nothing but trash there.”

  Genevieve closed the door behind her. “There are a few bottles of wine—would you like me to bring them up, see if they’re worth anything?”

  For a moment Philippe remained silent, his gaze fixed on the old wood of the door. He had a faraway, unfocused look in his eyes that reminded Genevieve too much of her tante Pasquale. Philippe’s mind seemed so sharp most of the time, but if he’d been old enough to fight when the city was liberated seventy years ago . . .

  “That door hasn’t been opened for a very long time. We used it during the war, but . . .” He shrugged. “We lost the key.”

  Used it for what? she wondered. Clearly the cellar had been used after that—the wine was dated 1959. But Philippe didn’t volunteer any more information, and something in his eyes stopped her from asking.

  “Do you want me to make sure you have a key that works?”

  He stared at the door for another moment, then shrugged and smiled, back to his old self. “We decide later. Right now, you must stop working; it is time for apero.”

  “Apero? Qu’est-ce que c’est?” What is apero? she asked.

  “It is . . . snack before dinner.”

  Genevieve was still full from lunch. And she had indulged in a flaky, buttery croissant for breakfast this morning, feeling almost virtuous for not having a pain au chocolat. And now she was supposed to eat a snack before dinner? So much for her nebulous plan to lose weight while in Paris.

  She followed Philippe into the kitchen. He started opening plastic bags he’d carried in with him, placing things in small bowls and plates. Cheese puffs, crackers, blanched almonds glistening with olive oil and studded with rosemary. He cut thin slices from a hard salami that had a tag stamped with the silhouette of a tusked boar.

  “This is very good, saucisson de sanglier,” said Philippe. “Wild pig sausage. You see, they put the picture on so you know of what you are eating: rabbit, deer, duck.”

  “I should tell my brother. He makes sausages like this—he could start the tradition in California.”

  Philippe held out a shallow bowl of cheese puffs, his eyes lighting up. “You try these. So good! C’est à mourir.”

  Americans were enthralled by the cheese and wine when they came to Paris; perhaps the French were swayed by fried cheese puffs.

  He shook the bowl as though to entice her further. Genevieve took a cheese puff and crunched on it. Philippe watched her closely, thin white eyebrows arched in anticipation.

  She made a yummy face and nodded. “Mmm.”

  “What do I tell you? Delicious, are they not?” He brought three glasses to the counter, then poured a deep red wine into two of them. “The doctor, she tells me Bordeaux is good for the health. This is why I am so old, I think!”

  “But still handsome.”

  He laughed heartily, slapping the counter. Then he gathered up the wineglasses and headed to the dining room.

  “Please, Genevieve, to bring the plates to the dining table, and two chairs from the kitchen so we sit down.”

  “Of course,” she said as she gathered the plates, balancing two on her forearm as she’d done in her old waitressing days. “So, speaking of wine, would you like me to bring the old bottles up from the cave?”

  “Later, maybe. Next time you go down. Probably they are no good, but it would be an interesting experiment to see.”

  “Yes, I wondered about that,” Genevieve said, returning to the kitchen for the chairs, old metal with plastic-covered cushions. “So, you haven’t been down there since the war?”

  “Oh, of course.” He waved a hand in the air. “But not for a long time. I leave it to the rats. And, how do you say, to the fantômes?”

  “A . . . ghost?”

  “Oui. And the ghosts.”

  “You think there are ghosts down there?”

  “Mais oui. Always there are ghosts. Perhaps you are not old enough to know this. We carry the ghosts around with us.” He tapped his chest, over his heart. “We are the ones who cause the ghosts, you see? The memories of the past. That cave—we used it during the war. War causes many ghosts.”

  “What did you use it for?”

  He crunched on a cheese puff. Pondered. Took his time. “To hide the people.”

  Genevieve’s heart fluttered slightly even thinking of someone hiding down there. “I thought you said you weren’t a hero. Hiding people in your basement sounds heroic to me.”

  He shrugged, sipped his wine. Remained mute.

  “There is a little trapdoor under a grate in the utility room,” Genevieve said. “It looks like it has one of my uncle’s locks on it.”

  “Yes, it had an old lock before that was too easy to open. Dave changed it for me. But you don’t need to worry about that. There is nothing to open in the cave. But tell me, Genevieve, do you know about les souterrains?”

  “The catacombs? I’ve heard of them. There are thousands of bones, right? My uncle refused to take me to see them when I was here before. I guess he thought it would be too scary.”

  “Not thousands of bones—millions. Paris is a very old city, with a lot of bones! The graveyards were emptied in the eighteenth century, and the bones moved to the souterrains. L’empire de la mort, the empire of the dead, they call it. But there are many kilometers of tunnels down below our feet, many more than just the rooms of bones. But most tunnels are closed to the public. Interdits, forbidden.”

  “What were they used for?”

  “First they were made by accident, by bringing out the stone. The limestone which you see now in all the old buildings of Paris—like this one! After, some were used to bring the water around the city, or to take the bad water away. . . .”

  “Like sewers?”

  “Exactly. Sewers and othe
r things—who knows? But there are hundreds of kilometers of tunnels. We were lucky for this because we use them in the résistance, to get around the city secretly. But also the Nazis found parts of the tunnels and used them as bomb shelters, and to move around also. You can see there are still things written in German on the walls, even some old Nazi toilets down there!”

  “I had no idea.”

  “But people get lost, you know; if you don’t know your way around you can get lost or hurt yourself.” He held up a shaky finger and wagged it slightly, as though in warning. “People have disappeared, never to be seen again. Many in the résistance, they knew the tunnels well. But still . . . sometimes they are in a tunnel right next to the soldiers but they don’t know! One day, I was not there, merci à Dieu, but their paths crossed! Imagine! Just imagine what surprise they feel!”

  “What happened?”

  His laughter faded. He shrugged, ate another cheese puff. “Two of our friends were killed; we were lucky it was not more. But the soldiers turned and ran away. It was because of the surprise the Nazis feel, ils avaient peur. They have . . . they are afraid. Afraid of the ghosts.”

  “Ghosts again?”

  “Not one. Many, many ghosts in the tunnels, I think. The tourists, they are scared to think the catacombs are full of the bones, millions of bones. Maybe there are ghosts there, too, but the ghosts I am thinking of are more recent.”

  A shadow passed over his eyes. On such a smiley countenance it was startling to see sudden sadness descend. It reminded her of Dave whenever she spoke about her mother.

  The melancholy mood didn’t last long. The doorbell sounded, a series of graceful chimes.

  Philippe pushed himself up with his cane with surprising speed.