Paris, Before You Die
Page 4
Only the appraising looks they gave one another after they rolled their suitcases to a stop before the check-in desk gave away the fact that they were strangers to one another.
“On the tour?” one of them asked the other.
“Yes. You too?”
“Yup.”
They faced the clerk, who was poised to be of service. “Bon jour, ladies, good morning.”
“Bon jour. We’re on the Carmichael Global Tour,” the one on his right told him. “Both of us, I guess. My name is Hannah Sorenson.”
“And I’m Marguerite Wilson,” the other one said in a slightly higher, softer voice. He smiled at her, then involuntarily gazed a moment longer, his own eye caught by the unusual color of the lady’s eyes, one green, the other half green and half blue. The effect was arresting, and in the split-second of that involuntary stare, he subtly flattered her.
“We’re not together, but I guess we’re rooming together,” Hannah said. “I got a notice that they’re pairing me up with you for the tour.”
“I got that too,” Marguerite said with a touch less enthusiasm, but so charming a smile it hardly mattered.
“You will be in 31,” the clerk told them. “That is up three floors. Not like in America. Up three floors from ‘ere,” he added, indicating the lobby.
“Good,” Hannah said. “I’m a dedicated stair-climber. It’ll help me work off the fois gras.”
“Me too,” Marguerite said, and they laughed. They were as lissome as dryads, and looked as if they dined on nectar and hummingbird’s tongues.
“But not the stairs, carrying the suitcases, eh?” the desk clerk said. “For that we have the elevator. Here are your key cards. We ask that you turn them in when you leave and retrieve them from the desk when you return.”
The ladies nodded, slightly puzzled but agreeable, and he conducted them to the door behind which the tiny elevator was waiting.
They fit into it like a pair of angels. Before the clerk closed the outer door so the elevator could be on its way, both women caught sight of a very tall, drop-dead handsome man entering the lobby with a lady. They had just the one quick glance before the door was closed.
“I wonder if he’s on the tour,” Hannah said, giving Marguerite something like a leer.
“Breathe, Hannah,” Marguerite said chummily. “It looks like he brought the little woman along. Whatever she is – wife, mistress, whatever – she looks like she’s up to the job of keeping him in line.”
“I didn’t get a good look at her. Damn. All the good ones are taken.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” Marguerite murmured, with more regret than humor.
* * * * *
“Is that the room where we’ll be having breakfast?” Eric Handler said after giving the desk clerk his name. “Mind if I have a quick look around? I’m in the restaurant business myself.”
“If you wish, monsieur.” The blank face of the desk clerk registered neither irritation nor indulgence as the man walked away instead of staying to complete the checking-in process. To the lady, he said, “You will be on the fourth floor. Four up from ‘ere, you understand,” he said, since these people were also from America.
“Yes, I understand,” Ashley Handler said before the young man could elaborate. She looked the forms over, and as she did, the clerk admired her covertly. She was slightly beyond the age where a cascade of chestnut curls seemed wise, but her face was angelic, and somehow the hair and the face went together. She seemed to belong in the background of a religious painting at the Louvre. After briefly scanning the forms, Ashley signed them and took the key card from the clerk, thanking him with a warm drawl. He acknowledged her smartly, and then she turned around to see where her husband had gotten to.
“Oh, isn’t this sweet,” she murmured as she approached the entrance to the breakfast room.
It was a prettily decorated little area with just enough room for about seven tables, one of them in the corner next to the doorway and two others beyond it on the right, a pair of tables for two on the left, and a few more going on across the back of the room.
Ashley was no fan of wallpaper, but the one chosen for this room impressed her. It was perfect. The thing about wallpaper, she thought, is that it always looks so dated, so frumpy. This was fresh. A repeating pattern of floral clusters, neither too large nor too small, neither too bright nor too faded, arranged regularly but not rigidly against a background of clear, pale green. The flowers gave the room cheerful color without popping off the walls.
For the rest, the room was wrapped tidily in a chair rail, and below that were painted stripes of dark green and chocolatey brown. On the floor was a pristine carpet in a medium brown with just a hint of purple. Ashley studied the effect for a moment: it was like a neatly gift-wrapped box.
“Pictures, I have to get pictures of this,” she thought to herself. “And maybe I’ll reconsider wallpaper.”
She started to get her cellphone out, but then, regretfully, shook her head and closed her purse again. Their catering kitchen, with its lunch-only dining room, was too polished up with chrome and tempered glass for any of this. High-boy chairs along a brushed nickel counter and an acid-washed concrete floor with aluminum-pipe chairs and tables along the front wall. And over there, behind and to the side of the serving counter, a kitchen without walls where food prep was done in full sight of the customers. Modern. Purpose-built. Undecorated except for the pans and stock pots, stacked above the cooktops, ready to go to work. It was Eric’s kitchen; it was masculine.
But she could dream, couldn’t she? She lifted the phone out again and took a few pictures. Then she began to walk through the room, wishing, wishing. Maybe, someday . . . .
Eric was standing at the far wall of the breakfast room waiting for her.
“Come on back here and see the kitchen,” he said, pointing to his right. “It’s through here. You won’t believe how tiny it is.”
“Later, Eric. I’m exhausted. Let’s at least go up to our room and splash our faces. You can come back down and bother the staff after that if you want to. I’m taking a nap.”
He gave her an abashed smile as he walked towards her, long-limbed and moving smoothly, the way he always did. He was a vigorous creature, and that walk of his had always stirred her with its suppressed power.
Few people thought of chefs as athletic, but most of them had never seen a chef at work. It took endurance. And running a commercial kitchen during peak times took superhuman endurance. Eyes everywhere, hands everywhere, shouting at everybody – when Eric was wrangling his staff in his kitchen during the midday rush, he was like a toreador in the bullring.
“Sorry,” he said as he got close and pecked her on the cheek. He made an obligatory gesture around. “Nice, huh?” he said. “I mean, really French, but nice French.”
“It’s gorgeous,” she said on the exhale.
“Yeah, well,” he said, immediately defensive. She was always trying to decorate things. “If you like frou-frou. I mean . . . wallpaper? Don’t forget, our business is totally different from this one.”
“I’m not making comparisons, Eric.”
He gave her a sharp, darting glance and then walked her back into the lobby, looking for their bags, which were still sitting before the front desk where he’d left them. The clerk was tactfully ignoring them. As they went for the bags, the clerk sprang into action and conducted them the six paces from the end of the front desk to the door of the elevator. Taking the handle, he pulled it open for them. It was hinged at the side, like any other door, and inside the shaft the gates of the elevator slid open automatically. He bowed them into the waiting car.
Once they were alone in the rising car, Eric said, “Wow,” looking around. “Small.”
Ashley pressed in against him and said, “This is Paris. You’re not in Texas anymore, cowboy. This ain’t no cattle car.”
He grinned, shot her a look, then looked around again. “No it ain’t.”
Chapter 10
“Thank you, Claude,” she said when he handed her the key card. She sounded delighted and a tiny bit surprised, as if he’d suddenly given her a corsage.
Audrey, standing next to her, was amused. Yes, the young fellow was wearing a nametag, but only Kat would have used his name as if they were old friends.
Claude went into his explanation about their room being on the first floor, which was one floor up from ‘ere and not ‘ere, and Kat listened and smiled encouragingly.
“Like England,” she concluded when he’d finished. The young man agreed, as if she’d spotted something obscure and deeply intellectual. “We’re going to the catacombs this morning,” she told Claude, and he took the information in with professional gravity. “We should probably take a cab, huh?”
He agreed. The catacombs were off in the 14th Arrondissement, a long walk for two ladies on a warm day in June. He offered to order transportation for them, and Kat thanked him prettily.
“We should be ready to go in half an hour or so,” she told him.
“We should?” Audrey asked, startled into speaking for the first time.
“It won’t take us long to unpack. If you want to change clothes and fix your face, it might take another ten minutes, but you look okay to me. Say, in forty minutes, Claude? Make it forty-five.”
“Make it an hour, Claude,” Audrey said, without Kat’s tone of delight.
He agreed that an hour would be sensible.
When they were alone in the elevator, Audrey started to protest, but quickly realized it would take less effort to cab it over to the catacombs than to argue with Kat about it. She’d managed to get some sleep on the airplane, and she knew that if she laid down for a lap now, she wouldn’t be getting up again for about ten hours. Best to just keep going.
“We won’t even have to wait in line,” Kat said. “I’ve got passes, but they’re only good for today. And after that, the tour is starting and we’ll be doing all that other stuff, so we gotta go now. Besides, with your psychic abilities, I’m surprised you’d even dream of passing up something like the catacombs.”
“If I had any sense,” Audrey said stiffly, “catacombs would be the last place on earth I’d let you drag me to.”
“I thought you people hung around in graveyards all the time.”
“‘You people?’”
“Now don’t be cranky, Audrey. We just got here.”
With that, Kat opened the door to their tiny room, and the next hour was a blur to Audrey.
* * * * *
“Seven million people, can you believe it?” Kat said as they moved through the murky underground tunnel, avoiding water seepage on the floor and trying to make out the occasional legends embedded in the walls.
Seven million people. Numbers like seven million were impossible to take in, especially when each skull, each femur, every tibia and fibula, had been up and walking at some vague point in the past. Every jaw had moved in speech, every eye socket had held a glistening eye. Every cranium had embraced the hopes and dreams of life.
Audrey grappled with it and then had to let it go. She couldn’t go there. She began to move forward between the walls of bones, trying not to listen to the bygone voices.
When she took a glance sideways, she looked straight into a face in the wall. Not a face, but a skull set so deliberately forward that it seemed to be staring at her. In a space that would have made a third eye, there was a neat, round bullet hole. She closed her internal ears against the sound of the shot.
Images came, and she tried to fill her mind with fog. Oh, God, this was a bad idea, coming here, but there was no going back now. To get to the exit, she had to go forward.
Fancy designs. They had made fancy designs with the bones of the dead. In one wall, there was the shape of a heart done in skulls. Like it was a joke. Near the end, there was a fountain-like sculpture. All bones and bones and bones.
Seven million people.
Audrey was very quiet, and her blank-eyed stare grew glassy. Kat, meanwhile, noticed a nice-looking Frenchman in a tight-fitting pair of jeans who seemed to have at least two ladies and several children with him. Kat liked the jeans. She pointed him out to Audrey with a little eyebrow lift, and Audrey rotated her head in his direction just as he looked over and realized they were staring at him. Audrey closed her eyes in embarrassment, so she never knew if Kat gave him that fingertip wave of hers, and she didn’t want to. She did notice, though, that after that the Frenchman seemed to be avoiding them.
Audrey had refused to change her clothes before they’d left the hotel. She had her daily outfits counted out and matched up, and she was not wearing something fresh and then running out of clothes on the last day. She’d washed her face and run her wet fingers through her short hair, and if that wasn’t good enough, too bad. She’d been in the same clothing for 16 hours straight and she probably looked it, but she didn’t smell, and beyond that, she didn’t care.
Kat had changed her little dress for a silvery silk top and mauve slim-fit pants, and for the expedition into the muddy tunnel, she was wearing backless sandals with 2-inch heels. Still, she was having less trouble walking than Audrey was, and she was as awake and chirpy as a canary in the morning.
“Are you getting anything yet?” Kat whispered as they approached the last stretch of the catacombs.
Audrey stared at her. “Anything like what?”
“You know – any spirit messages or voices or whatever it is you get?”
“I’m on vacation. The office is closed. The only message I’m getting down here is the one that reminds us how small and insignificant we are, and who wants to think about things like that when they’re on vacation?”
Kat frowned and told her not to be morbid.
“Are you kidding me? We’re in a catacomb. Of course I’m feeling morbid. Why did you bring me down here, anyway?”
With patience and superiority, Kat said, “I planned to go on this trip with Pearl, remember, but as long as it turned out to be you I thought, all the better, because you have such a connection with the dead and you’d enjoy it more.”
“Enjoy it?”
“But since you’re going to pretend you’re not even interested, we may as well just leave. Back in high school, you used to love giving séances and answering everybody’s questions, and,” she gestured vaguely with her slim hands but the words wouldn’t come. “And all that paranormal stuff,” she finished lamely.
“Need I point out that we are no longer in high school?”
“Well, one of us, at least, isn’t an old poop yet.”
“Oh, great, now she’s insulting me,” Audrey said to nobody in particular.
To cap it all off, she realized that the Frenchman in the awesome jeans had lined up just ahead of them at the exit and just happened to be in front of Kat for the climb up the stairs to the surface. Kat openly and avidly studied the action of his backside all the way up.
Outside in the real world again, Audrey tried to clear her head but the voices continued to murmur in waves until the one voice separated from the others and stayed with her after the others faded away and sank back into the catacombs.
Part 2
Chapter 1
The next afternoon, on Sunday, the whole tour group was to meet in the breakfast room for the first time, but a few of them had introduced themselves earlier, at breakfast.
Most notably, a man of about sixty had stopped by Twyla’s and Nettie’s table and asked if they were on the Carmichael Global Tour. When they said they were he sat right down, uninvited, and introduced himself.
“I’m Jack Bartlett, from San Diego. My pal Charley is going to be down here in a minute. He’s still in the can, upstairs. He’ll join us.” He dug into the breadbasket on the table and found a baguette.
“How nice,” Nettie
said, and if she was a bit frosty, Jack didn’t mind. “This is my niece, Twyla Staples, and I am Nettie Tucker.”
Something about Nettie’s name made Jack giggle, and she straightened ever so slightly.
Nettie had the seat facing the lobby, and when another sixtyish man came in she looked at him apprehensively, but Jack didn’t seem to know him. He was brown and lean and tall, but not too tall. About six feet or a little less, with brown eyes and a full head of brown hair with just a touch of gray at the temples. Nettie thought fleetingly of Sam Spade; he had that kind of weariness about him. As he passed their table, he gave them a hooded glance and said nothing, but Jack stopped him.
“On the tour, buddy? I’m Jack, this is Twyla, and that lovely lady is Miss Nettie.”
The new man had stopped politely and nodded, showing no particular interest. He murmured that he was Henry Dawson, paused for the minimum amount of time and then moved on to the back of the room, where the continental breakfast buffet was laid out just around the corner.
“What a nice-looking man,” Nettie said pointedly, looking directly at Jack’s paunch.
Jack became loud. “Oho! Do we have a holiday romance blossoming here?”
Twyla tried to swallow a smile, and Nettie lifted a fresh croissant from the breadbasket and took a ladylike bite, getting her mouth full so she wouldn’t say anything.
Jack’s friend Charley arrived ten minutes later, and Nettie thought he seemed like a very nice man.
* * * * *
Breakfast with Jack was the main reason that when the tour group officially met, Nettie led her niece into the room early and made straight for a table where another couple of ladies were already sitting. She didn’t know them, and she didn’t see Lauren yet, but she wasn’t taking any chances on having Jack sit right down with them again.