Paris in the Dark

by Robert Olen Butler

  German food. Made tolerable in Paris because it was, strictly speaking, Alsatian.

  After we sat, I with my back to the mirror on the wall and he across from me at the small table, we two men devised one more lie between us on this day. That we were full of regret was a given. That we understood the risks of the secret service. That we understood the hard political realities of this world. The lie was that we were not as saddened, as unsettled, as we actually were.

  So before we said what we knew we must, Trask lifted his menu a little. “From the banks of the Rhine.”

  I said, “Did I miss something in you I should’ve seen? A sense of irony?”

  “I keep it hidden,” he said.

  “Bismarck annexed Alsace for its superior sauerkraut,” I said.

  “Not ironic, really,” he said. “You and I aren’t gunning for Germans.”

  “No we aren’t,” I said, though it was barely audible.

  “We’re gunning for our own.” Trask’s tone could hammer a horseshoe.

  The waiter was beside us. We ordered the cervelas, the wurst, though these were made in France or Switzerland; and the sauerkraut, transformed in Paris long ago into choucroute.

  With that done and with a demi of beer in front of each of us, which tasted like good German beer, we drank for a time, and then the food came, and we ate.

  All of this in carefully nurtured silence.

  We each ordered another half-liter of beer, and it wasn’t until those demi glasses were before us that Trask said, “I liked that boy.”

  “I did too.”

  “One of them cut his throat.”

  “Cyrus,” I said.

  I thought of his Abercrombie sheath knife, left behind in their room. Lacey brought it for him in his Gladstone.

  I told Trask about the note I’d gotten just after he’d dropped me off at the hotel. Just the facts of it. Flatly.

  “Bad luck,” Trask said.

  That I hadn’t been there for the note before we had to take up the surveillance.

  “Bad luck,” I said.

  He said, without hesitating, “I still have some muscle at the embassy. We slipped into the hideout. An hour ago.”

  He should have come and gotten me. I kept quiet.

  “It was still as you said.”

  I didn’t answer.

  He picked up on my silence.

  “It was a snap decision,” he said.

  I wondered if he’d admit to the real reason.

  I still didn’t help him out.

  “We expected it to be as you said.”

  He took a drink of beer. Leaned back a little in his chair. As if that was all he’d offer.

  I said it for him. “You liked the boy.”

  Trask showed me nothing. Not in his eyes. Nowhere on his face. Not with his shoulders. But he said, “It was a hasty decision.”

  The decision to go in without knowing they were both there. “I understand,” I said. You were grieving furiously.

  He said, “Tomorrow we can only stand and wait.”

  “They also serve,” I said.

  “Written by a blind man,” Trask said.

  He knew his Milton. He knew how little we presently had to go on.

  “I hope they try tomorrow,” he said.

  “I’m afraid if they do, it will be somewhere else.”

  Trask nodded.

  I said, “While we wait at the one place we know to look, they’ve got the rest of the city. Carnage on the very day will be good enough for them.”

  “And that can be anywhere,” he said.

  I had nothing to add to that. I thought to simply drink my beer and was surprised to see it hanging in the air before me. I’d lifted it along the way but I couldn’t recall when.

  I put it down.

  I finally asked, “Where did you find Sam?”

  “On the Saint-Denis Canal.”

  The canal ran through The Zone. After we fulfilled our obligation to Fortier in the morning and covered the best bomb target in Paris, we needed to search among Cyrus’s oppressed.

  “He was in the backseat.”

  I returned my mind to Trask. The backseat.

  “On the floor,” he said.

  I didn’t quite get it, since they cut his throat. “He seemed a tough guy,” I said.

  “One of them slugged him from behind. Knocked him out. They cut his throat sometime after he was on the floor.”

  With that fact laid out between us, we both tried to steel ourselves again. But I saw the struggle in Trask. I felt it in myself too. I said, “Did you know him for long?”

  And Trask said, “He was my nephew.”

  Then we simply drank.

  Rather slowly. Drank enough. Though not so very much, given the circumstances, but we were neither of us that sort of man.

  What we did do was say nothing more.

  30

  I entered my room, closed the door with meticulous care, and I sat down on the side of the bed in the dark.

  It was nearly ten o’clock.

  I would make the short walk to the Hôtel Lutetia on my own in the morning.

  But sitting now, slumped a little, my palms splayed on my knees, I found one thing on my mind. I wanted to go to Louise.

  I’d been wordless long enough tonight.

  I’d understood the hard realities for long enough.

  But I did not move.

  I would sleep and gather my strength and stand with the tough old Frenchman on the barricades for whatever hard reality he understood about his job and about his countrymen and their war, and then I would go to the other side of the Thiers Wall and try to hunt down a couple of my fellow Americans in order to kill them. Only then would I go to Louise. And I thought: Only then, my darling. But certainly then.

  So I slept.

  And I woke.

  I shaved.

  I looked at the scar on my face.

  To my courier bag I added an extra magazine of cartridges for the Luger and one for the Mauser at the small of my back.

  I went out.

  The day was almost mild, as it was when this all began, the night of Cyrus’s first bomb.

  I strode toward the Hôtel Lutetia and did not slow down till I approached Raspail. The time was just past nine o’clock. The meeting would begin in less than an hour.

  The saw-horse barricade began at this near end of the hotel. I showed my letter to the gendarme and went through.

  The barricade swept outward from the lower edge of the hotel to block off Raspail all along the building’s length and took the turn up ahead at the crossing of Rue de Sèvres to cordon that street to the Lutetia’s farthest end. The opposite sidewalk, however, was open and people were already gathering there. Every half-dozen yards a gendarme stood at the edge of the near sidewalk facing the people who were taking up positions at the barricade across from them, the street itself becoming No-Man’s Land.

  Up ahead I saw Trask and Fortier together on the sidewalk directly before the hotel entrance. They were smoking, not quite shoulder to shoulder and turned very slightly away from each other, looking in opposite directions, like a couple of brothers having just quarreled at a family reunion.

  Fortier was slightly angled in my direction. He didn’t see me. As I drew near, I figured out from his face, his eyes, what he and Trask were actually doing. They were intently watching the people across the street.

  All three of us were in for a bad few hours. Trask was right. This was what we were reduced to doing. Standing and blindly waiting. Watching for something we had little chance of seeing, much less preventing. I still thought our anarchists were far away, off in one of a countless number of possible unsuspecting public places in Paris, poised to strike. Even if they intended to make a splash in the vicinity of the conference, they could just let the crowd gather over a hundred-yard stretch on two streets and then elbow their way in anywhere at the back, set a satchel down, elbow back out, and walk away.

  Trask and I were t
he only ones who knew the threat wasn’t an anonymous German agent. I alone among us knew what they looked like.

  We had no photographs of our two anarchists. I did have an image of Parsons’s vaguely similar uncle. Possibly useful door-to-door in The Zone, but worthless in a crowd hunt. And if Parsons and Lacey planned to strike somewhere else today, the French simply knowing the threat was from two Americans would have done no good anyway.

  I let these thoughts go.

  It wasn’t my decision to make, to turn them into Germans.

  I was close enough now to Fortier for him to see movement. He glanced and took a step to greet me. We shook hands.

  I said, “We should at least be watching from the rear of the crowd, don’t you think?”

  “Yes of course,” he said. “Patrol behind the lines. You are free to do that. Monsieur Trask and I are here for show.”

  Monsieur Trask himself was now a physical presence in our conversation. All this, however, had been in French. I said to him, “We think I should patrol the back of the crowd as best I can.”

  “And you and I should have breakfast tomorrow,” Trask said.

  We looked at each other a moment. His eyes were red and faintly puffy. “Are you okay?” I said.

  “Not till it’s done,” he said.

  I turned to Fortier. “You thought yesterday that this German might be clever again, as he was in stealing the ambulance.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you letting any vehicles inside the barricade from this time on?”

  Fortier said, “In less than an hour President Poincaré will arrive for the sake of the front page of tomorrow’s Excelsior. But it is a fact no one has known until this morning’s newspaper. In the night, every street for a hundred meters beyond our hotel perimeter has been forbidden for any vehicle.”

  “His carriage will come through alone?”

  “Preceded by his mounted guard and followed by a wagonload of troops for his defense.”

  “More show?” I said.

  “But of course,” Fortier said.

  “He will come from the Élysées Palace?”

  “Yes.”

  “Along Boulevard Saint-Germain?”

  “And then Boulevard Raspail, from the north.”

  “A better place for me to patrol,” I said.

  Fortier put a hand on my arm. “A good thought,” he said. “Better than here.”

  I left the perimeter at the point where I came in, and I began to circle the growing crowd, which was becoming substantial opposite the hotel’s front entrance and gathering two and three deep elsewhere up Raspail and across the intersection and along the Rue de Sèvres. I understood why the crowd was growing. The big conference. Joffre and the British general. And now the president arriving.

  I hustled on past the turn of the crowd into Sèvres and north on Raspail. People were flowing this way. The citizens of Paris. Photo fodder for the Excelsior. Vehicles were prohibited a block beyond the hotel’s perimeter, but the crowd was not. The authorities, anxious for the show, thought it was enough to have troops and saw-horses and to let the populace accumulate to gawk from afar at the war leadership at work.

  Cyrus was resourceful. No doubt. How precisely could all the gendarmes have been briefed? The same impulse to censor the newspapers would make the authorities stupid about how much they told their foot-soldier gendarmes. Did the gendarmerie even explicitly understand that they were looking for a bomber? If they did, these men would go off to their wives and buddies and help widely confirm the inevitable current rumors of sabotage bombings in the city. They would help stoke the fear and discontent of the home front.

  The gendarmerie knew nothing. I was striding along now with a courier bag over my shoulder. A roll of half a dozen sticks of dynamite with a cap and fuse could easily be stuffed inside. No one was stopping me.

  And so I strode on, glancing into the doorways and scanning the overlooking windows as I passed by, not really expecting to see Parsons or Lacey lurking or looking, but feeling that I myself, in my role as a spy, was as stymied as the troops and the press in this so-called Great War.

  And then, up ahead, I saw the president’s guard on chestnut light-cavalry horses, high-stepping this way. Half a dozen chasseurs—the “hunters” of the French army, trained for rapid action—in dress red pants and blue coats with gold-brush epaulets and gold helmets crested with horse-tail manes. And behind them, the president’s coach pulled by a massive white horse with a docked tail. And behind the president, the open transport cart full of troops and rifles.

  I turned to face the street.

  But though my eyes were open, I was no longer seeing anything.

  Because of a sound. A sound I’d stopped really noticing, as it was so common in this part of the Left Bank where I lived, where I ate and drank, where I slept, where I’d heard a bomb and saw its work and followed an anarchist and searched an empty hideout. I’d heard this sound so often it no longer registered on me.

  But now it did. Amplified in this little parade.

  The sound of the iron-shod hooves of six chestnut horses and the iron-rimmed wheels of a presidential carriage and the iron hooves and the iron wheels of a squad of gendarmes in a wagon. The prancing tramp and the lumbering roll of metal on cobble.

  And beneath the iron-on-stone sound was an associated sound. A hollow sound, a deep, cavernous, resonating hollowness welling up from below the street.

  And I understood.

  I understood that hollow sound and I understood all the churches around us. Long ago, these churches were built with quarried limestone. And long after that, their cemeteries were systematically emptied. Emptied into that same vast rock quarry. A quarry that made the earth beneath my feet, beneath much of this city, a maze of tunnels.

  The Catacombs.

  And I thought of a thing that had been odd but I’d let it pass, explained it away. A manhole in the cobbles of a small, very private courtyard before a house that was surprisingly empty.

  I turned around and faced south.

  And I began to run.

  Toward the Hôtel Lutetia where the president of France was heading and would enter and where he would join the allied generals for the beginning of their conference. The Hôtel Lutetia, which sat, it now occurred to me, over the Catacombs.

  I circled the crowd and beat it down d’Assas and it wasn’t until I’d turned into Vaugirard and was approaching the Carmelite church that I thought of the alternative. Dashing into the Hôtel Lutetia and clearing the joint. But I realized who I was by instinct. A chasseur.

  A hunter.

  31

  Though that was a notion of myself that I knew was about to be tested, as I put my hand on the crowbar I found leaning with the other tools against the wall bordering the courtyard in Rue Jean-Bart, and I stepped to the manhole. I slipped the tip of the crowbar into the notch on the cover. I lifted the metal disk and swung it away and looked down the dead dark hole leading into the Catacombs.

  As a kid playing a game I’d put myself in a box. As an adult, I found I had a whole shelf of boxes that I was jumping in and out of. Spy and newsman and lover and fatherless son and son with a mother of a certain sort and mentor to a doomed young man. And this country and my country and the whole goddamn world had put themselves in boxes and me along with them. Every box tight and dark and you could kick at the sides and they would not yield.

  But there was only one way out that I could see. Out of all of them. And that was at my feet. Down into this tight dark space that at least you could walk around in and at least you had the company of the legions of the dead and at least there were a couple of killers at the other end that you could shoot dead.

  Notion confirmed.

  I was a fucking hunter.

  And I went in.

  Down the step irons, down ten feet, twenty, thirty, and the dark surrounded me now in the tight, vertical tunnel of this entryway, and I gripped the irons with my hands and felt fast with one foot and gro
ped downward with the other and held fast on that step and groped on, doing this over and over, making it all rigorously precise, and down I went.

  I looked up only twice at the circle of blue sky. Blue and bright and inexorably diminishing. I thought: This is how death comes, dying in your bed. The light bound in a circle, contracting upon itself, growing smaller and smaller, moment to moment. I knew these were dangerous thoughts for me. And so I thought this: Cyrus Parsons and James Barrington Lacey won’t die like that. For them it will be far more abrupt.

  And I was fine.

  I sensed, at my back, the downward tunnel suddenly gaping open, and my foot stretched downward and there was no iron step but stone surface.

  I was standing now. The light from above was faintly still with me, but I did not look up. I was here now. I knew my eyes needed to adjust. I turned. And I had to pause in order to plan, to anticipate, to prepare.

  I’d entered a passageway that went both to the left and to the right. My back was against the steps, which were on the street side of the entryway. So my back was turned to the west. The hotel was north. I would go left.

  I held a breath. Let it out slow.

  It was all about the hunt.

  And then the larger challenge suddenly rushed over me. Time was very limited. I took out my Waltham. Nine-forty-five. The conference would officially commence in fifteen minutes. From that moment on, the blast could happen anytime. The straight path from this spot to the hotel was perhaps five hundred yards. But the passage was unlikely to be straight.

  And the problem that had been gnawing like a rat in the center of my chest lifted its face and stared me in the eyes. How was I going to dash off and find the bomb in the rat’s maze that lay before me? How would I choose a direction when I confronted the first fork in the path? And the next and the next.

  But it struck me: Parsons and Lacey had to find their way as well. Their way in. And they had to mark their way out. I didn’t have to find my own way. They found it for me. I simply had to recognize and follow the return trail they left for themselves.

  Though now I felt confident the path would be open to me, and though I was keenly aware of my ticking Waltham, I still held myself in check. There were other issues I needed to work quickly through before plunging into the dark.