Get Off At Babylon

by Marvin H. Albert

  I hung up on him. My hunch had been correct. They’d gone to Paris. That had to mean they’d gotten some kind of lead on Odile Garnier there. And they had been up there following it for almost two days.

  I dropped in more coins, phoned Fritz Donhoff, and told him to clamp a watch on Tony Callega’s apartment. “If they come out before I get there, I want them tailed. Two men, two cars—in case they split up.”

  I drove to the Cote d’Azur airport and got on the next flight to Paris.

  Chapter 18

  Fritz Donhoff was waiting for me inside the terminal at Orly Airport. A big, heavy man with meticulously brushed silver hair and a large, baggy-eyed face. Dressed as always with a dignified old-world elegance. He had bad news.

  “Tony Callega and Boyan Traikov. They left the apartment before I could stake it out. I phoned—no answer.”

  “Merde.”

  Fritz remained unruffled. “I have a man watching the apartment. If either of them returns, he’ll let us know immediately.”

  “They might not come back. If it was my call that made them leave that suddenly, they shifted someplace else. Have you been able to get Traikov’s address?”

  “He’s cagey about that. Seems he has more than one residence in Paris. Nobody’s at the one I know about. But,” Fritz added as we left the terminal building, “a couple new items came my way shortly after your call from Cannes.” The evening sky outside was obscured by a low canopy of clouds. I was dressed too lightly for the chill breeze that blew as we walked toward the parking area.

  “First of all,” Fritz said, “there is a rumor going around certain Paris circles. Concerning Didier Sabarly. His organization was expecting a shipment of uncut heroin that didn’t arrive. Hijacked somewhere along the line. Three million dollars’ worth.”

  I took a slow breath. “Three million—uncut, that would fit in a knapsack.”

  “It would explain why Bruno Ravic tried so violently to escape the police,” he acknowledged judiciously. “A violence not justified by the small amount of heroin found afterward in his apartment. Unless he had much more there—and thought it was still there. But the girl would have to be insane to steal something like that.”

  “Or desperate.”

  Fritz turned his handsome, aging face to give me a questioning look. “You have some new evidence indicating Odile Garnier is an addict?”

  “Not evidence,” I admitted, “but it’s a strong possibility.” I told Fritz about Tony Callega’s habit of getting girls zonked on dope before pushing them to his friends. And about him apparently passing Odile on to Bruno Ravic.

  “She was a special case for Tony,” I said. “A couple years ago he made a pass at her, and her father warned him off the rough way. And he’s been seeing her since. It would fit what I know of his character to deliberately get her hooked on heroin, as a vicious way of getting even.”

  “That is not a strong possibility,” Fritz admonished me, like a wise old teacher dealing with a bright but over-hasty student. It was one of the roles he fell into now and then. I usually humored him, because he had stored up a lot of wisdom over his seven decades. “It is merely an assumption.”

  “It assumes Bruno worked for Fulvio Callega,” I agreed. “And that Fulvio Callega is the supplier of that shipment Didier Sabarly was expecting. We may not have hard proof of that, but it does fit the circumstances.”

  “You are also assuming that Odile Garnier knew Bruno had just gotten that new shipment for delivery to Sabarly. And that she is an addict.”

  “She can’t sell that much heroin,” I pointed out. “The kind of people who buy that quantity would inform Sabarly. She can’t be dumb enough to think otherwise. So if she didn’t take it to sell, she took it to use.”

  “Which is only a little less stupid.”

  “You mix addiction with desperation, and it doesn’t add up to playing it safe,” I said. “She saw her chance to get a lifetime supply—and grabbed it.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.” Fritz spoke with a heavy, deliberate calm. I’d never seen him anything but calm and deliberate, in any situation. “Because if you’re right, her lifetime is likely to become extremely short.”

  “If I’m right, that might not bother her much.” I was remembering what Andre Marchine had once told me. For an addict, the concept of a lifetime means the hours between your last fix and your next one. Any life beyond that becomes unreal, and difficult to regard as important.

  Fritz unlocked his car and got in behind the wheel. As I slid in beside him he said, “We’ll stop at your apartment so you can get into something warmer.”

  “I appreciate the thought.”

  He smiled and patted my knee with a fatherly fondness. “I have to take care of you, my boy.”

  Since my real father had died before I was born, Fritz was as close to one as I would ever know. “You said you had a couple of new items,” I reminded him as he drove out of Orly and onto the highway to Paris. “Sabarly’s missing shipment is one.”

  “The other is a young woman named Karine Vidal. She belongs to a club of weekend troglodytes. The Catacomb Crawlers, they call themselves.”

  I didn’t let my spirits lift too much. Fritz would have mentioned it immediately, if it was a hot lead. I was right.

  “She doesn’t know our Odile Garnier,” Fritz told me. “But she does recognize the close-up of the boy who was in the other picture with Odile. Karine has seen him several times when her group was playing its underground games. She doesn’t know his name or anything else about him—nor does any other member or her club. But she is certain the boy in the photograph is the one they ran into.”

  It wasn’t much. But it was the first thing we’d gotten that just might put us on Odile’s recent trail. “If he’s an undercity explorer,” I said, “somebody else down there is bound to know more about him.”

  Fritz nodded. “And this is Friday, the night most of them play their underground games.” He spared me a bland smile. “That is another reason I’m glad you’re here—in addition to my usual pleasure in seeing you at any time. I wouldn’t relish being the one who has to spend the night crawling through the intestines of Paris.”

  * * * *

  Karine Vidal and I took the Métro to Babylon.

  She’d agreed with my interpretation of the postcard Odile Garnier had received, and added a thought of her own:

  “I never heard of anything in that exact area. So somebody must have discovered a new underground complex. And if it’s new, they may still be exploring it, even if the card was sent last month.”

  I’d offered to pay for her help, but she’d said no to that. She had a good job in the insurance business. That was her work, this was her pleasure. She was with me because the idea of helping an American private eye turned her on. Fritz had stressed the American part of that, because it made me exotic to her. Karine Vidal obviously dug the exotic.

  She was in her mid-twenties, tall and large-boned, with a plump, freckled face and a small, cautious smile. There was nothing else cautious about her appearance that Friday night. She hadn’t been able to meet me until after nine because she’d had to devote a few hours to converting herself from a conservative young businesswoman into an outrageous punk. Weekends were her time to howl.

  Like many punks, Karine Vidal was too shy to act outrageous. Her escapes into the alternate life-style were concentrated on looking the part.

  She wore tight pink stretch pants, black motorcycle boots glistening with sequins, and a short blouson of fun fur dyed purple with gold streaks. The belt and bracelets were thick leather studded with nail heads. Her fair hair stuck out from her skull in waxed points. Her eyebrows were tinted yellow, her lipstick was fire-engine red, her nails were varnished black. Her earrings were small chain links from which dangled miniature handcuffs. The shoulder bag she carried was glossy blue plastic.

 
; The other passengers on the Métro train were too busy looking at her to pay any attention to me. I’d put on a crew neck pullover and heavy-duty denim slacks, with a lightly padded field jacket. I was wearing sensible shoes with ribbed rubber soles and a corduroy cap, in case the heavy night clouds meant business. Very square, next to Karine Vidal.

  She didn’t mind that. I was her secret. Nobody else knew I was Sam Spade.

  My field jacket was one size too large for me. Large enough to prevent any telltale bulge giving away the holstered gun under my left arm. It wasn’t my Riviera H&K. Wearing a concealed gun without a permit to carry was always a risk—but one sometimes justified by circumstances. Nothing would have justified the additional risk of trying to carry one through airport controls. The gun in my shoulder holster Friday night was the one I kept hidden in my Paris apartment. A compact model Beretta 92SB, with fourteen 9mm cartridges snugly stacked in its magazine.

  I didn’t expect to run into characters like Traikov and Maurice searching underneath Paris. But it was possible. And an eventual encounter with the opposition was more than possible. I was looking for Odile’s friends—and Tony Callega might already know who some of them were.

  The Babylon Métro station has two exits. When we came up from the train we tried the nearest one first.

  It surfaced at the intersection of Boulevard Raspail and Rue de Sèvres. Karine stopped and looked around. The Banque de France was on the other side of the intersection, across from the Lutetia, the Left Bank’s best hotel. The corner nearest to us held the Babylon Bar. But those didn’t interest Karine. She was studying the sidewalks.

  “Nothing here,” she announced. “When somebody finds a new way down they usually leave some kind of sign for others to follow. Let’s try the other exit.”

  We went back down the steps, through the station, and up the stairway at the other end. That brought us into the open on the short, narrow Rue Velpeau, across from one side of the Bon Marché, a department store that spreads over three blocks. Karine pointed at the sidewalk. “There it is.” It was a small emblem done with fluorescent orange paint: a circle with an arrow through it.

  She led the way, going where the arrow pointed. After thirty steps we found another little circle-and-arrow. It was beside a stairwell to an underground public parking garage. “This is the way down,” she said, “but there must be another way out.” She nodded at a sign announcing that the garage was locked between 11:30 at night and 6:30 in the morning. “It’s after midnight you get the most activity under the city. But nobody wants to get trapped down there until morning.”

  We descended the stairwell. It ended at the fifth level down. The parking spaces, silent and ill-lit, held few cars at that hour. Karine got the flashlight out of her shoulder bag, and we reconnoitered the fifth level. We didn’t have far to look. Half of the concrete floor had been ripped up. A ladder led down to where a sixth parking level was being excavated.

  We used the ladder, and Karine swung her flashlight beam around. It steadied on a side wall of rough stone where the excavation had broken into one end of a low tunnel.

  Parisians often come upon finds like that while digging their cellars deeper. Below the surface, the city is honeycombed with miles of forgotten passages and caverns. The remains of burial catacombs. Ancient quarries. Crypts of long-demolished churches. Old secret tunnels and sealed-up storage places. Abandoned aqueduct sections. Access routes dug by the workers who built the Métro and drainage systems. Maintenance shafts for the city’s gas, electric, and telephone lines. Plus myriad other tunnels and chambers whose purpose no one any longer remembers.

  “That must be it,” Karine said as she crouched and shone her flashlight into the low tunnel. Her small smile was a touch self-conscious as she added, “What we call a Trou Noir.”

  A Black Hole—the way into an alternate universe.

  I crawled in after her.

  Chapter 19

  It wasn’t a long crawl. The tunnel ran straight for about fifteen feet, and then we were out the other end.

  We stood up in what appeared to have been the bottom section of an underground military bunker. Perhaps an emergency command shelter built between the World Wars. Floor, walls, and ceilings of reinforced concrete. All that remained were several partitions and some small holes in the floor where latrines had been.

  There were also some communications cables, dangling on one wall next to rusting metal rungs that had led up to a shaft above. The shaft was now sealed off with a thick sheet of steel. In the opposite wall was a doorway. It, too, had been closed up, with an iron door. But someone had broken its lock, and the door now hung open.

  We went through it into a dark passage that had been cut long ago through the chalky stone on which the city was built. The passage was high enough for us to walk upright, wide enough for us to advance side by side. I had expected a certain amount of sewage smell, but there was none. The air was damp but clean, with just a faint tang from the calcium contents of the stone around us. We walked for what I judged to be the equivalent of a city block, and then I was stopped by what sounded like an approaching hurricane.

  “Métro train,” Karine Vidal told me.

  It went past, the noise reverberating through the thickness of the intervening stone. Inside the passage it was impossible to tell if the train was to our right or left or above. After it was gone the silence once more became as solid as the darkness pierced by Karine’s flashlight beam.

  We reached a fork in the passage. Taking the right fork first, we came after a few minutes to a dead end. It had been blocked there with stones and cement. Somebody had been at work on the blockage with a chisel but hadn’t broken through. We retraced our steps and tried the other passage.

  Wandering around the labyrinth under Paris—except with a guided tour of a small section of the catacombs or sewers—is forbidden by law. It’s one of those laws the French ignore—including the police, who have only two men assigned to check the thousands of subterranean corridors. The cops had come to regard people like Karine Vidal as useful sources of information about what goes on down there. I knew of two arms caches and a dead body that would never have been found otherwise.

  Karine and I had been following the second passageway for perhaps two blocks when I heard a peculiar whispering sound. It echoed softly from somewhere ahead. I couldn’t identify it.

  The passage made a sharp turn and then opened into a vault enclosing a large pool. In the beam of the flashlight its surface reflected like a rippled black mirror. Around the water’s edge a natural flooring of rough rock supported heavy, crumbling arches built of small blocks of trimmed stone. These in turn supported a low domed roof. It was part of a subterranean reservoir of the Middle Ages.

  The sound I’d heard was the water. It was in slow, swirling motion pushed by some underwater source on one side and flowing under the rock flooring on the other side.

  We went around the water to an arched stone doorway. On either side of it someone had recently stenciled life-sized nude silhouettes in white. Male on one side, female on the other, posed in the movements of a dance.

  The doorway led into a narrow corridor with coursed rubble walls and a barrel-vault ceiling. Karine led the way with her flashlight. After about another block we sighted flashlight beams coming toward us within the confines of the corridor.

  There were three people, in their thirties: two men and a woman, dressed alike in lumber jackets, dungarees, and work boots. They were lugging scuba gear with them. One of the men had a wet suit draped over his shoulder. The woman carried flippers and a face mask. The second man had air tanks strapped on his back. They intended to explore the depths of the reservoir and search for its outlet.

  “It’s very deep,” the woman told us. “It could lead someplace interesting nobody has found before.”

  All three were doctors, just come off duty in Laennec Hospital, which was di
rectly above us at that point. It was their second time down there. They’d learned about this complex from a group of young people who had found their way out via a telephone maintenance manhole that surfaced in a courtyard behind the hospital’s emergency building.

  I had eight copies of Odile’s snapshot with me, and eight more of the boy. I showed one of each to the doctors. They didn’t remember having met either Odile or the boy.

  “But we have more people joining us later,” one of the men told me. “One of them might know these kids.”

  “Especially Henri Gelfand,” the woman added, “if these two are underground enthusiasts. Gelfand has been a troglo for years.”

  I left them a copy of each picture, with Fritz Donhoff’s phone number jotted on the back of one. Fritz was acting as home base for this operation.

  Karine and I went on to the end of the corridor. Thick telephone cables and gas pipes crossed the bottom of the manhole the doctors had told us about. Iron rungs led upward. We climbed out, surfacing to find ourselves surrounded by dozens of dark buildings that belonged to Laennec Hospital’s block-long complex.

  “What I want to try next,” I told Karine as we started walking the five blocks back toward Babylon station, “are the places the regulars go into most.”

  “That’s your best chance,” Karine agreed. “We could start with the old quarry below Rue St. Jacques. And after that the catacombs near Denfert-Rochereau. They’re two of the most popular.”

  The Friday night traffic had thinned out by that hour. I caught a cab cruising past the Métro station and had it take us to the garage where I kept the Renault 5 I used in Paris. With Karine giving directions, I drove to Rue St. Jacques and parked near a manhole we used to find our way into the first of the underground gathering places she’d suggested.

  I met some odd people in both places. And a lot who weren’t so odd. Just people. Looking for a way to add a little mystery and adventure to lives that were otherwise too routine. I figured it was a better way than giving up on the world entirely and shooting poison in your veins to forget it existed.