New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  But he was distracted from such gloomy reverie when he noticed that Blanche had stopped short again and was staring at the nearby door to the stairway that led up to the dome—it, too, was slightly ajar.

  Thomas’s suspicions were heightened, but nevertheless they pressed on, the staircase proving less steep than he had expected, and open to the moonlight. It landed them above the chapel, where still another staircase awaited them, its wooden steps creaking so loudly that they had to advance on tiptoe. The effort seemed to make it all the harder for Blanche. Every few yards, she had to stop and lean against the wall, trying to breathe in deeply, her eyes glinting and a smile on her face that scared Thomas more than it reassured him. They were not yet halfway to the dome.

  After reaching another platform at the top of the chapel, they had to move along a stretch of slightly sloping flagstones that circled the apse at a vertiginous height. Through the windows and the scaffolding outside they could see the north of Paris, and Thomas searched the sky for the Black Aurora, but he saw no sign of it.

  They moved on to what Thomas prayed for Blanche’s sake would be the last staircase. Spiralling and narrower, it took them outside the construction area into the night air again until, amidst cranes and hoists, they picked their way across stone steps that imitated tiles and past scaffolding that gently squeaked in the cold air, and finally reached the archways that surrounded the dome.

  But it was too late.

  Peering out from behind a half-finished statue, they saw d’Ussonville standing on the scaffolding, surrounded by six or seven Wolves, who most likely had waited in the dark for him to show up. The leader of the pack was Swell-in-the-Sack, whose bearing no disguise could conceal. But by the weak light of the Sleeper’s Leclanché, fallen at his feet, they could see that it was a standoff: d’Ussonville, held at gunpoint by Swell-in-the-Sack, had opened his coat to reveal that his chest was wrapped in dynamite—the Wolf-man would die too if he shot d’Ussonville, and God only knew what would happen to the Dome. Time seemed to stand still.

  “Look down,” Blanche whispered.

  On the outer layer of scaffolding below them, living shadows were swarming, shadows that looked human but with what seemed to be polished beaks glinting in the dim moonlight. The figures were incredibly swift, and silent. But what were they—friend or foe? Thomas wondered desperately.

  He turned back to Blanche, but she was gone—hopping from scaffold to scaffold, heading for the platform to join her besieged uncle.

  “No!” Thomas started to cry out—but d’Ussonville shouted it first.

  As did someone else—from the shadows charged Yronwoode, his pistol in his hand and his sword in his claw, with Amédée de Bramentombes just behind him, a ragpicker’s crook in his hand. Thomas leapt after Blanche, but she’d already landed on the platform, brandishing the wax cylinder like a weapon.

  “Leave him alone!” she shouted between short breaths. “I have the proof of your conspiracy!”

  Swell-in-the-Sack turned towards her and shot her point-blank in the chest, flooring her on the spot. Bramentombes, who had outflanked Swell-in-the-Sack a second too late, tackled him with a vicious scream of despair that froze Thomas’s blood as much as the sight of Blanche falling. The Wolf and Blanche’s father rolled over the edge of the platform and plummeted down, crashing through the scaffolding below and off stone ledges and statues, their screams resounding off the walls of the basilica as they fell.

  With his single working hand, Thomas turned and gripped the throat of the nearest Wolf, choking him with all his might, while out of the corner of his eye he saw Yronwoode toss his gun to d’Ussonville and then turn to brandish his sword. But during the distraction, Thomas’s opponent kneed him in the ribs and he tumbled backwards to the platform. The Wolf quickly leapt on top of him with his knife raised for the kill—only to have half his mask ripped off by a bullet. It was the Wolf-man’s turn to fall back on the platform, his legs writhing, then, merely, twitching on the boards. Thomas scrambled back to his feet, turned to d’Ussonville to thank or help him, and saw the Sleeper taking aim at another Wolf rushing at Yronwoode from the rear. D’Ussonville shot him, and the Wolf tumbled over the edge of the scaffold into the blackness.

  Thomas could reach Blanche now, and he leaned over her, trying to use his hand to stop her spurting wound. But her eyes had rolled up and her mouth was gasping for air like never before, dribbling foamy and bloody saliva.

  “It … hurts …” she groaned.

  Thomas, his eyes brimming, abruptly drew out the morphine syringe. His mind had fastened onto one idea: he would give her the full dosage, so that she wouldn’t suffer and could die in peace. And as he searched for a vein in her arms, raven-masked men were suddenly climbing the scaffolding all around him, like a dream or a nightmare. He heard gunfire, screams, bodies crashing to the floor, but it seemed to Thomas that it was all happening far, far away. He was focussed on finding the vein in Blanche’s arm … but when he finally did, he realized that she was already dead. And with one quick movement and no further thought, he stabbed the needle into his own chest, pressing the plunger all the way down.

  Within seconds he had melted onto his back, his eyes fixed on the night sky, which now seemed to be bursting with blackness. The Aurora, he suddenly remembered. But then the morphine hit his brain, the night sky became dazzling, and the open top of the dome was gradually covered with gold. He became more and more numb, his limbs one after the other freezing and turning to bronze … then his chest, then his head … New Venice, he whispered, vaguely remembering what his final thoughts must be … But the last thing he saw was not his city: it was Blanche looming above him, a skeleton enveloped in a black cape over a transparent muslin robe, her face intact and mischievous under her black beret. Inside her naked ribs, he could see her little heart glowing red.

  At the foot of the Sacré-Cœur, a temporary chapel had been built to house Françoise Marguerite, also known as the Savoyarde: a three-yard high, two-ton jewel of a bell with a lace of inscriptions. It had been carried up Montmartre to the cathedral in a torchlight procession a fortnight before.

  Hébert, trussed to his wheelchair, sat before it, surrounded by the Ravens—and faced by d’Ussonville, who wore an expression of fearsome determination. Hébert had been caught when, his men fallen or fled, he had tried to wheel himself away in the snowy mud. His last defender, a colossus with a merlin, was now lying a few yards away, both of his eyes put out: the mark of the Ravens.

  “You’re going to pay dearly for this!” d’Ussonville told him through gritted teeth, waving an arm at the three bodies laid out nearby: the broken, absurdly dislocated remains of Amédée; the white shape of his daughter, so small in her winter clothes; the corpse of a gallant foreigner with his arm in a sling.

  “I just wanted to save the Sacré-Cœur—to save France!” the crippled druid insisted.

  D’Ussonville would have none of it. “As if you cared about France,” he spit out. “You wanted to kill me. And you did kill people who were very dear to me! I never intended to blow up the Sacré-Cœur—I only wanted to steal this goddamn bell.” A wry smile curled his lips. “At least now I’ve found a better use for it.”

  With a nod, he ordered the Ravens to seize Hébert’s wheelchair and roll it under the bell.

  “What—what are you doing?” Hébert shouted. “I wasn’t the only one—”

  “Don’t worry about your friends,” the Sleeper replied, brandishing the wax cylinder at Hébert as the Ravens gagged him. “I have here something that should keep Papus and his associates out of my way for a while. You should worry about yourself—I’m giving you a chance to cleanse your soul of your sins. In three weeks’ time, this bell will be blessed and installed in its chapel. Perhaps a bit of this blessing will reach you.”

  At another nod of d’Ussonville’s head, the Ravens laid hands on the pulleys and began to lower the bell until Hébert’s wheelchair and his muffled shouts were swallowed in its enormous bronze
maw.

  “Three weeks to think about your mistakes, Hébert! Just three little weeks …”

  But Hébert was not to be heard from again.

  D’Ussonville took his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, although nobody had seen him shed a single tear. He straightened himself and turned towards Yronwoode, whose half-human expression was always hard to read.

  “How did you come to be here, sir?”

  “We followed your niece as soon as she left home. I was afraid that you’d got into trouble, and I thought that perhaps she could lead me to you. Her father … insisted on coming with me.”

  “It is most unfortunate,” d’Ussonville said. There was nothing accusatory in his tone, and his sigh spoke of weary acceptance. “I had promised the bell to Lord Savnock. He’ll be angry,” he said, as if to himself, while the Ravens began to silently drift off, one by one.

  “Who are these men?” Yronwoode asked, as he watched the bird-headed fighters slipping off.

  “Oh—the Ravens. They’re Lord Savnock’s private guard. He was kind enough to lend them to me. He sometimes calls them his Little Scavengers. I hardly know more than that.” He stared off, lost in thought. But then something occurred to him and he turned to Yronwoode once more. “By the way, Major,” he said, “… are you looking for a job?”

  VII

  The First Death of Gabriel d’Allier

  Gabriel had always thought that every man died alone, and that he would, too, if only to prove himself a man.

  He thought his choice of a high place was also telling: a church steeple without a church, and bristling with flamboyant Gothic ornaments, St. Jacques-de-la-Boucherie towered over its own square, lonely, brooding, vaguely malevolent. If Gabriel had been asked to choose a spot that would be quintessentially Parisian, he would have chosen this tower. It was not the most ancient, nor the most famous, nor the highest monument, but, stubborn—it had somehow survived when its church had been burned down during the Revolution, after all—and self-contained, it remained charged with history and vibrant with some sort of louche magic. It was not even especially authentic—like the city itself, it was a crazy motley of ruined parts and fancy restorations. That it had also been founded by a guild of butchers was only a small touch of irony in the present circumstances.

  There was another reason the location struck him as apropos—it was only a few demented, desperate steps from where Gérard de Nerval had hanged himself. Brentford’s asinine pun on the Place de la République had suddenly brought it to mind. Don’t wait for me tonight, the night is black and white, the poet had written a few hours before his death; Gabriel thought that it prettily summed up his situation. When in doubt, do what they do in books, was one of Gabriel’s secret mottos and—that rarest of things—a principle that he actually lived by.

  Stoically, he decided to ignore the fact that the lining of his overcoat had been torn by the railings he had just climbed: God is in the details, he told himself, although he hoped he wasn’t about to meet God. Crossing the square that—he recalled—doubled as a mass grave of Communards, he hurried up the few steps that led to the tower’s first platform, where he found a statue of the mystic mathematical wizard Blaise Pascal, mistakenly placed here to commemorate his experiments on the void. Gabriel muttered, “I’ll show you an experiment on the void, you hysterical old stoup-frog,” as he passed, and then found himself facing a wooden door—nothing that his ever-trusty helping spirit couldn’t open. He simply tapped on the lock with the small Polar Kangaroo on the knob of his cane. The effigy shone like the candle stuck in these shriveled, pickled “hands of glory” that superstitious burglars cut from the corpses of hanged men and carry around in the belief that will they break any lock. The door squeaked open on a narrow staircase that spiralled up into the dark.

  Many steps and another lock or two later, Gabriel reached the top platform, which he found occupied by a puny wooden weather station sitting on a web of beams and chicken wire covering the platform. He chuckled at this derisory effort to complicate his plans. But the laughter caught in his throat when he thought he saw, just to the north, a starless zone floating in the night sky that could only have been … the Black Aurora.

  “Ah, your vehicle awaits,” he muttered to himself.

  Opening his coat, he unspooled a long, tasseled curtain cord he’d stolen from the hotel and wrapped around his chest, and set about knotting it into a noose. Noose-making was an art he’d mastered as a suicidal adolescent, or even before that, for one of his first memories was of trying to strangle himself with shoelaces when he was no older than three or four. When he thought about it now, those attempts seemed less about dying than about locating the emergency exits. Now, however, it was the real deal, and he was even more flustered that it was proving tricky with half-frozen fingers, and for a nervous while Gabriel thought he wouldn’t finish before the Black Aurora closed.

  By the time he finished he was feeling even more pressed for time, and he struggled, lugging the cord towards the ledge, almost stumbling at every step, like a clumsy tightrope walker. And that was nothing: finally managing to reach the statues at the ledge, he realized that he had left his cane near the weather station. This suicide business was starting to get a little too bothersome.

  So back he went, sighing and swearing as he moved over the beams with a care that even he found curious in a man about to die. But thank God, or thank Sson, the aurora was still visible when he was, finally, back at the ledge and ready.

  The statue that he chose to anchor the cord around was, of course, the Winged Lion of Saint Mark.

  “See, he’s got wings,” Gabriel said, speaking to Kiggertarpoq, a habit he had developed lately. “They should have made you with wings. You’re in sore need of some, if you want my opinion. Of course, there isn’t an animal in the world that wouldn’t look better with wings. I certainly would.” But all he got from the kangaroo was a subdued glow.

  With a sigh he passed the tasseled noose around his neck and sat cautiously on the narrow ledge, the city lavished at his feet. Someone had not yet written, but would soon, that “Paris looked like a brain or the sex of a woman.” Gabriel suspected that this sentence said more about French writers than about Paris, but he still felt happy to remember it.

  After carefully placing the cane at his side, he couldn’t resist taking a Liberty Cap out of his coat pocket. He lit it and sat there for a while, idly watching the wisps of smoke dissipating and the embers flying off into the cold midnight air. Puff after puff, the cigarette gave a hazy sheen to the lights of the city below, filling every lamplight with bright fire … It sharpened the angles of the buildings and deepened the avenues into velvet ravines … It made the city so real that it looked unreal. Even the distant Sacré-Cœur, half-built as it was, shone like the silk shade of an electric light …

  For a while, Gabriel didn’t want to leave—either the ledge or Paris. But he had to, didn’t he? He thought of Brentford, of the Colonel, of Thomas; he tried to dispel images of their deaths and wondered instead whether they were already home.

  He crushed out what was left of the cigarette on the stone ledge.

  “Now,” he said, rising to stand on unsteady legs and clutching his Kiggertarpoq cane. He looked for something to say, but found his mind a blank.

  He leaned over the void, and the vertigo he felt quickly turned to something else: his body refused to die. It clung to life like a miserable leech.

  “Come on,” Gabriel encouraged it. “Don’t be such an ass.”

  It wasn’t death, he tried to convince himself, just switching bodies, a little out-of-body experience, as he now seemed to have on a daily basis. Nothing to be afraid of, really—though all he had to prove it was the word of a wizard. His body didn’t accept it as easily as his New Venetian mind, leaving him disappointed in himself: he had always thought that the will to live wasn’t his strong point, judging by his appetite for sleep, lethargy, and losses of consciousness. But now every cell in the streets of his veins
protested and threatened to riot, and he sat, a coward king, in the ivory tower of his skull.

  “I’m not even listening,” he said to himself. Holding his breath and closing his eyes, he bullied his spirit to let the tip of his shoe glide off the ledge.

  Then he looked again and almost fainted.

  But as he struggled with his willpower the city suddenly changed. It lost its muted, hazy glow and instead throbbed and hummed like a loud motor. It smelled of petrol and filth, and his throat felt as if he had smoked ten cigarettes at once. People were moving along the sidewalks in ugly clothes, talking loudly, waving outrageously, as if they had forgotten how to move normally. Gabriel wondered what sort of hell he had found himself in—this seemed even more barbaric than the Paris he had known during his stay as part of the Press Gang. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them found himself, with relief, back in 1895. So this was what staying meant? He’d rather be in New Venice.

  He took a deep breath, and let the other shoe glide closer to the edge, feeling a knot in his stomach like he was a kid on a diving board.

  His heart was beating fast, pumping blood into his brain, which was full of fleeting, half-lit and whirling images—his life spun out in meaningless and vapourous flashes, just as he had lived it. But one thing remained meaningful for him, and that was New Venice. You could take the boy out of the pole, but not the pole out of the boy. Whether he’d been aware of it or not, he had inhaled it with every breath, known it with every step, sung it with every word, built it in every dream. He was but a cutout from its backdrop and he had no doubt now that his soul would fly directly back to where it belonged.