by Jeremy Bates
From ahead Pascal hollered “Ciel!” While I was trying to figure out what that meant—wham. I came to a standstill, dizzy, my ears ringing.
“You okay, boss?” Rob said. He’d turned back to look at me, his headlamp shining in my eyes.
I took off the helmet and touched a fiery spot high on my forehead. No blood, not yet. A tender bump throbbed.
“Will, what happened?” Danièle asked, slipping past Rob and stopping before me.
“I hit my head.”
She parted my hair. “There is no cut.”
“I’m okay.”
“I told you to watch out. Remember, I said the ceiling height—”
“I didn’t see Rob duck, so I didn’t either.”
“Yes, but he is much shorter than you.”
“I realize that now, Danièle, thanks.”
“I am sorry. I should have explained. Ciel means ‘sky’. We call it out when the ceiling juts down.”
“Got it,” I said.
After once more reassuring her that I was fine, that I didn’t need to rest, we continued on. When the tunnel widened enough to walk two abreast, I moved up beside Rob. He glanced sidelong at me and said, “You know what this place reminds me of?”
“What?”
“Vaginas.”
I smiled, sort of. What had I expected him to reference? Tom Sawyer’s spirit of adventure? Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth? Jonah and the Whale?
“I’m serious,” he added. “Everywhere I look I see one. This is vag land, nature porn. Tell me you don’t see it.”
“You have a point,” I said as I thought about all the metaphorical psychobabble regarding caves and wombs and Mama Nature and fertility. Also, I had to admit it wasn’t a stretch to imagine, if you were so inclined, the entrance to the catacombs that we’d passed through as vulvaesque, Pascal’s rest room as a uterus, and these tunnels as fallopian tubes.
Rob said, “Now I understand why Rascal spends all his time down here. What a perv.”
Ahead Pascal reached into a little gully in the wall, felt around, then kept going.
“What’s he looking for?” I asked.
“Dunno.” Rob called out in French. Pascal answered back. Rob laughed. “He said someone once had a stag party down here. They left a calling card in the wall with the date and directions. You find it, you’re invited. He wanted to see if there was anything new.”
“A stag party?” I said.
“Apparently all sorts of crazy stuff goes on down here. Cops found a movie theater once. Yeah, I shit you not—lights, sound system, projector, fully stocked bar. It was right under the Trocadéro, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, one of the most famous fucking landmarks in the world. There was a whole security setup too that included a motion detector that set off a recording of barking dogs to scare people away.”
I wasn’t sure if Rob was having me on or not, but I asked, “How was all this stuff powered? With batteries?”
“Electricity, boss. They siphoned it from underground power lines. And get this. A few days after the police discovered the place they came back with guys from Électricité de France, to shut it down. But they were too late. Someone had already unwired everything. Disappeared with all the electronics and booze. What used to be a cinema was a plain old rock chamber. The only thing left behind was a note that said, ‘Ne cherchez pas.’ Don’t search.”
“Don’t search for who? Cataphiles?”
“That’s what I figured. That’s what most people in the media figured. It was big news for a while. But Rascal says cataphiles don’t do stuff like that. They’re misfits mostly. They just go underground to hang out, party, explore.”
“So who made the cinema?”
He shrugged. “Nobody knows. Rascal talks about this big group with a hundred members or so, supposedly organized and wealthy, sort of like an old boys’ club. They use the catacombs, but only to get around Paris undetected. They have keys to everywhere in the city. They’ll hold poetry readings in the basement of the Paris Opera, or booze it up on the roof of the Parthenon, or whatever.”
I didn’t reply as I contemplated this. It sounded neat. It also sounded completely farfetched.
“You mentioned Danièle’s your in-law?” I said. “What, sister-in-law?”
“Yup. Dev and Danny Laurent. The Double Ds.”
“Why don’t you guys get along?”
“Me and Danny? You mean ’cause of the French jabs?” He shrugged. “It began with me and the wife. Dev makes fun of me all the time because I’m French Canadian. Calls me Queeb, Beaver Beater, Poutine. She’s actually the one who started the whole frog thing, calling me Frozen Frog. I call her shit back. That’s just us, our relationship. I found it funny how insulted Danny always got when she was around, so I started calling her Frenchy shit too. I don’t think she cares as much as she lets on. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You and Danny. What’s your deal?”
I glanced ahead at Danièle. She was speaking with Pascal, her voice flat and muted. Sound didn’t carry well down here. The soft silence was like being in an old library or root cellar or attic.
“We’re just friends,” I said.
“Come on, bro. She invited you to the catas. It’s always just her and Rascal. She even put up a stink about me coming tonight, and I’m fucking family. So what’s the word? You shagging her?”
The question caught me off guard, and invoked memories of Saturday morning. Waking in Danièle’s poverty-posh bedroom to the half-light creeping beneath the fuchsia blinds, the smell of the Kashmir Rose incense she’d burned the night before, the sensuous curve of her spine, from the nape of her neck to where her tailbone disappeared beneath the sheets…
Rob, I realized, was watching me closely.
He snorted. “Just friends, my ass.”
Chapter 12
ROB
So they really were fucking, Rob thought. Couldn’t say he was surprised. Like he’d told Will, Danny didn’t invite just anyone to the catas. Not only that, Danny’s been all over him since he arrived at the pub.
Once again Rob felt bad for Pascal. He could tell her flirting was eating the sad fuck up inside. At the same time, however, he was happy for Danny. After that prick Marcel, she deserved to be happy again.
Marcel.
His name alone pissed the fuck out of Rob. It wasn’t just his cheating. That was almost the norm over here. Men cheated. Women cheated. A coworker of Rob’s thought her long-term boyfriend was cheating on her, or at least thinking about doing it, so she cheated first, to beat him to the punch. And look at the guy running the country. He began an affair with a woman twenty years his junior during the presidential race. A few weeks after the story broke, he divorced his wife, the First Lady, and carried on with the sex kitten. You ask the average Parisian what they thought about it, you’ll probably get a shrug and a “C’est la vie.”
So it wasn’t the cheating. It was the way Marcel had treated Danny, bossing her around, keeping tabs on everything she did. Often when she went out he’d call her every ten minutes demanding to know what she was doing. But when he went out, he’d be off the radar until he returned at two or three in the morning. Danny would call Dev on these nights, balling her eyes out. Rob would usually be nearby with the girls, listening to Dev’s end of the conversation. He couldn’t get his head around why Danny stuck with the fucker. She was usually so strong, so independent. It was like she became a different person when she was around him. Yet no matter what Dev told Danny, she wouldn’t ditch him.
Then, a few months ago, Dev ran into Danny at Les Quatre Temps, a shopping mall at La Defense metro station. Danny had a dark bruise along the left side of her face. The makeup job would have fooled a stranger, but not Dev, and Dev got the entire lowdown from her.
Marcel did it. They got in a fight while she was cooking dinner the evening before. She didn’t want him to go out. He punched her and went anyway. And this wasn’t th
e first time this had happened. Once Danny got talking, she spilled the beans. He’d been beating her for almost as long as he’d known her. He usually hit her on the body, so she could cover up the evidence, and when he struck her face, he did it in such a way he rarely left a mark. Danny tried to tell Dev that Marcel only hit her when he was drinking. Her denial was mind-numbing. The guy smacked her up on a regular basis, and she was trying to protect him?
Rob got home from work late that day. The girls were sleeping in their bunk bed, and Danny was sleeping in the guest bedroom, surrounded by all her stuff she and Dev had collected from Marcel’s flat, where Danny had been living for the last year. Dev told him what happened and wanted to call the cops. That probably would have been the best thing to do, but in the moment he was seeing red and wouldn’t listen to reason.
Rob drove to Marcel’s apartment building in the 12th arrondissement and waited across the street in his car for two hours until the fucker returned sometime past midnight. Then he pushed his way into the lobby behind Marcel before the door locked and beat the Frenchman with a steel pipe to a whimpering, bloody pulp. He wasn’t proud of this, but he didn’t regret it either.
Danny stayed at the flat for a month until she found the studio she was in now. To Rob’s knowledge, she hadn’t seen anyone else since Marcel. Will was the first. And, fortunately, Will was proving to be an all right sort. Rob just hoped he treated Danny well.
For her sake.
And his own.
Chapter 13
While Rob and I had been talking, clear, still puddles had begun to appear on the ground here and there. Pascal, Danièle, and Rob stomped through any in their way, while I sidestepped or hopped over them the best I could. Gradually, after numerous twists and turns, the entire passageway became a mushy gray paste that sucked at the soles of my shoes.
Pascal and Danièle stopped again. I came to halt behind them and peered over their shoulders. The tunnel was flooded with glassy smooth water that stretched away far beyond the reach of our probing lights.
Pascal said something and shrugged. Danièle translated for me: “He says sometimes the water is here and sometimes it is not. It depends on the weather conditions aboveground. He thought it would be dry today. He is sorry.”
I looked at him. He didn’t appear sorry at all. He appeared indifferent and smug.
“When was the last time you were here?” I asked him.
He barely looked at me. “Last week.”
“And it was dry then?”
“No, it was like it is now.”
“And you thought it would be dry today?”
He shrugged. “It is difficult to know for certain.”
“We will backtrack,” Danièle stated. “There are many ways to go—”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s just water.” I dropped to my butt and took off my shoes, one after the other, then my socks.
Danièle frowned. “That is not a good idea, Will. What if there is glass in there? We do not know.”
“We’re not backtracking.”
I stuffed my shoes and socks into my backpack, rolled the cuffs of my pants up as far as they would go, Huck Finn style, and stood.
Pascal smirked at my bare legs and feet. Then he and Rob strolled breezily into the water, splashing and chatting. Danièle and I went next.
The water was ankle-deep and not as cold as I would have thought, maybe fifty degrees. This surprised me. I thought it would be colder, given it had never been touched by sunlight. Unlike the puddles we had passed earlier, it was an opaque gray. I couldn’t see the bottom.
At first I felt tentatively with my lead foot before exerting my full weight. But after a number of steps and no encounters with razor-sharp glass or daggered rocks, I gained confidence and proceeded more naturally.
“It is okay?” Danièle asked.
“No problem.”
“Make sure you do not trip.”
“I won’t.”
“Motherfucker!” Rob shouted from ahead. “Deep here. Over my boots.”
He was right. Soon the water was shin-high, then knee-high, wetting the tapered folds of my pants. It swirled around my legs like miso soup.
“How much farther?” Danièle called.
“Almost there,” Rob shouted back. Then: “Holy shit!”
The panic in his voice made me freeze mid-step.
“What is it?” I said.
“Something just brushed my leg!”
“Fuck off.”
“Swear to God! It was long and slimy.”
A chill shot down my spine as I thought of fanged eel-like creatures and poisonous snakes.
Rob was maybe thirty feet in front of us, little more than a silhouette. I couldn’t see Pascal.
“Arg!” Rob cried. “It touched me again!”
He began running, splashing madly.
“Go!” Danièle said, pushing me forward.
I took her hand and ran, or at least I tried to; it was more of a pigs-on-ice madcap dash. The water dragged at my legs, my helmet chafed the ceiling, the knuckles of my free hand skinned the wall. I kept waiting for a prehistoric monstrosity to latch onto my calf or snip off a toe.
Then the water was back to shin-level. Rob and Pascal were shouting, urging us on. My eyes darted between the frothing water and Danièle, my headlamp jerking every which way, until we stumbled onto the mushy ground. I keeled over, as if I’d been poleaxed in the gut. Danièle fell to her knees, a light patina of sweat on her forehead.
Rob and Pascal tittered like loons.
It clicked for me, then Danièle as well. Her eyes flared. “Ta Gueule!” she shouted, scrambling to her feet. She smashed into Rob, pounding him on the head with her fist. Pascal attempted to pull her away unsuccessfully.
I might have laughed at this absurd theater, but my feet were in too much pain. I’d stubbed my left big toe on a rock, and it was already swelling and bruising. I’d broken the same one a few years back in New York, catching it on a door frame, making me wonder if I’d re-broken it. I’d also sliced the pad of my right heel. I couldn’t tell how deep the cut was, but it was bleeding freely and stung like a son of a bitch.
Nevertheless, I hadn’t brought a first-aid kit, and I didn’t want to ask the others if they had one, so I pulled on my socks and shoes, then stood, wincing. Danièle had stopped her assault and was now chewing Rob and Pascal out.
“Loosen up, Danny,” Rob told her. He’d moved a safe distance away and was dumping water from his boots. “Can’t you take a joke?”
“You do not think! What if we fell and cracked our heads open?”
“Gimme a break.”
“It could happen!”
“And so could getting locked in a sauna and getting lobstered alive. Or rolling your ride-on mower and getting chewed like summer turf. Or walking past a construction site and—”
“Oh, shut up!”
“If you think like that—”
“Really, Rosbif. Shut your mouth. I do not want to hear your talk.”
“My talk?”
She was turning red.
“Allons-y,” Pascal said quietly, putting his arm around Rob’s waist and leading him down the passageway.
“I will kill him,” Danièle stated when they were gone.
“He’s not that bad,” I said.
“He is such a loser.”
“He’s sort of funny.”
She glared at me.
I held up my hands. “I said ‘sort of.’”
“Because you only have to see him for a few hours. You know, he is married to my sister? I have to know him my entire life.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“He told you?”
“In passing.”
“I will kill him,” she repeated, shaking her head. She picked up her backpack and shrugged it on. “We should go. We are almost there.”
I frowned. “Almost where?” We had been in the catacombs less than an hour. Based on what I’d been told, there was n
o way we could be anywhere near the video camera with the mysterious footage.
Before I could ask for clarification, however, Danièle started away, leaving me to bring up the rear.
Chapter 14
Our destination, it turned out, was called La Plage—the Beach—a vast series of connecting galleries and caverns with sand-packed floors, from which I gathered the area had gotten its name. Almost every inch of available wall space was covered with the omnipresent graffiti, but also impressive murals. They depicted everything from Egyptian gods to magic mushrooms to surrealist Max Ernst-like portraits. One large rectangular support pillar had been transformed into SpongeBob SquarePants. Some of the paint smelled fresh.
We wandered from room to room, no one saying much, our headlamps sweeping the way before us. In the ghostly silence I saw countless cigarette butts, makeshift chandeliers sitting on rock-cum-tables, crushed beer cans, and strange metal rods and hooks protruding from the ceiling. These, I imagined, had at one time accommodated power cables.
My eyes kept returning to the murals. They were multigenerational, built up over decades, the new painted over the old in an ongoing cycle. The sheer amount, the variety, was incredible.
I stopped in front of an especially striking painting of a six-foot-tall naked woman that reminded me of the Statue of Liberty. It was clearly old, one of the few works of art that had stood the test of time without being vandalized or replaced.
Rob appeared next to me. “Nice tits,” he said approvingly.
Danièle joined us and said, “She is famous for cataphiles because—how should I say this? She represents all of us. Can you understand, Will?”
