“Then we’ll go up.”
Back through the ballroom, the library, the gaming room, the dining room, and up a flight of stairs. Another. And another. The blood is soaking into my clothes.
We hear shouts from below. Guards are inside. We reach the top floor, the garret rooms. Amadé lets go of me and I slump to the floor while he runs back and forth through rooms and hallways, looking for a connecting hallway, a secret door, a way out of Orléans’ apartments to those of his neighbors. And all the while, I can hear orders being yelled, and wood breaking.
Amadé comes back to me. “I can find nothing. No way out,” he says, panting. He bangs the heels of his hands against his forehead. Paces. Then lifts me to my feet again and drags me into the first room he can find. Alex’s room.
“We’re going out the window. Onto the roof. You’re good at roofs, are you not?”
“I can’t, Amadé. You go. Get out of here.”
But he’s not listening. He opens the window, and leans out. “Finally, a bit of luck,” he says. He pulls me after him, onto a narrow balcony that runs the entire length of the wing. It’s nothing more than a catwalk. I can see the courtyard below. We’ve traveled away from the street side of the palace, to the interior. I see people below, but they don’t see us. Not yet. Amadé crouches and makes me crouch, too, and I think the pain is going to kill me.
We walk along the balcony, past window after window, until we’ve traveled the entire length of the wing. There’s a corner, and then another wing with an identical run of garret windows. One of them is lit.
I swing my legs over the balcony’s railing, then jump across to the other side, gasping as I land. Amadé follows and we quickly climb over the railing and walk to the lit window. It’s open. Amadé goes inside. I follow him. A girl in nightclothes is washing her face in a basin. She sees us and screams. We run past her, out of the room, and down flight after flight of stairs until we find ourselves on the ground floor, in a jewelry shop.
The door is locked, but Amadé finds a key hanging on the wall close by. He jams the key in the lock and turns it and is about to open the door when he looks at me. Blood has stained the left side of my coat.
“Lean on me,” he says.
He lets us out, locks the door, slips the key into his pocket, then hurries me into the courtyard. More people have gathered there, drawn by the girl’s screams.
“The Green Man is there! Up there!” Amadé shouts, pointing above us. “He shot my friend! Now he’s murdering a girl! Help her! Somebody help her!”
People gasp and scream. They point at the lit window. Guards rush in from a passageway, ten or twelve of them, rifles at the ready.
“He’s murdering her!” a woman shouts. “Save her!”
“The Green Man!” a man yells. “Up there! Hurry!”
One of the guards tries the door to the jewelry shop. He bangs on it. Then signals to his men to kick it down. Amadé and I move through the crowd. “Make way! Make way!” Amadé shouts. “My friend needs a doctor!” We get through the passage where the guards entered and then we’re out of the Palais.
We walk east. He means to take me to his rooms and call for a woman who is good with wounds once we are there. But when we turn onto the Rue St-Honoré, we see that the street is full of guards.
“Amadé, we can’t go down there. Leave me here.”
“No! I won’t leave you on the streets!” He grabs my arm, starts walking back the way we came.
I shake him off. “I can’t anymore. I can’t.”
“Just a little farther. There is still one place I can take you,” he says. “One place they won’t look.”
“Where?”
“The catacombs. It’s a good place to hide.”
Yes, it is. And an even better place to die.
85
Back through the church.
Back through the crypt.
Back to the grave.
Amadé half drags, half carries me down the stone steps, through the tunnels, past the sad and silent dead.
We stumble on, with just the light of a lantern we stole from the church, down white stone halls, farther into the catacombs, deeper underground. Until finally he stops and eases me down, until I’m sitting on the ground, back against the wall. And he’s kneeling beside me.
“You have your light?” he asks me.
“Yeah.” It’s inside my boot. I take it out. I turn it on. The beam is so dim.
“I’ll come back with help. As soon as I’m able. The woman, she can fix you.”
I nod, but I don’t believe him. And neither does he.
“If they question you, say I had a pistol,” I tell him. “Say I held it to your back. That you broke free as soon as you could.”
“It will never work. They’ll throw me in prison.”
“It will work. It does work, Amadé. So do tritones and A minor. Don’t forget that. Jimmy Page needs you. The world won’t be the same without ‘Stairway.’ ” I lean forward, groaning with pain, and kiss his cheek. “Thank you,” I tell him, collapsing back against the wall.
He picks up his lantern, as if to go, then puts it down again.
“I wrote music today. Did you know that?” he says. “It was good. Better than anything I’ve ever done. It’s going to be a concerto. In A minor. I wrote it because of the fireworks. Because they gave light. And hope. Because they were impossible.”
“The Fireworks Concerto,” I whisper, smiling.
“Why did you do this thing?” he says brokenly. His eyes are bright with tears. “Why did you give your life for nothing? The boy will die. You said so yourself. Now you will, too. And likely myself as well. If the guards get hold of me, I am a dead man. And for what? What did you change? The light you made is snuffed out. Hope is trampled upon. This wretched world goes on, as stupid and brutal tomorrow as it was today.”
I know those words. Orléans said them to Alex and she wrote them down. In her last entry. With her last breath.
I’m tired, so tired. And weak. And everything’s fading. But suddenly I’m laughing. I can’t help it. Because I understand now. I know what Alex wanted to tell me. I know the answer. I know how her diary ends. Not with a smear of blood, not with death.
“Oh, dead man, you’re dead wrong,” I tell him. “The world goes on stupid and brutal, but I do not. Can’t you see? I do not.”
PARADISE
The Guide and I into that hidden road
Now entered, to return to the bright world;
And without care of having any rest
We mounted up, he first and I the second,
Till I beheld through a round aperture
Some of the beauteous things Heaven doth bear;
Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.
—DANTE
86
“Andi. Andi, wake up.”
I hear a voice. It’s far away.
“Come on, Andi, wake up.”
I want to, but I don’t know how.
“Come back. Please.”
I’m lying in the dark. I’m tired. My head hurts. A lot.
“Please, Andi. For me.”
I take a deep breath. And open my eyes.
“Virgil.”
“God, you had me scared.”
“Virgil, I was gone.”
“Yeah, I know you were.”
“No, really gone,” I say, in a raspy voice. “In the eighteenth century. In Paris. I … I was running. Trying to find you. But I couldn’t. And I fell. And some guys … they were at the beach … they helped me. And we came out in Paris, but not this Paris. Another one. From 1795.”
He looks really worried. He shines the light all around my face, then touches my head.
“Your forehead’s bleeding,” he says. “You must’ve knocked yourself out. You’ve been dreaming or hallucinating. Something.”
“I was there, Virgil. I was.”
“Uh-huh. Was the tin man with you?”
“It was real! I swear it was!” I say, a little
hysterically.
“All right, calm down. We’ve got to get out of Oz. The flying monkeys are still around and they’re not too fond of boys from the banlieues.” He tries to get me on my feet. “Can you stand?”
I try to. I try to sit up but it hurts too much. Virgil opens my jacket, then winces. There’s a gash across the lower part of my rib cage. It’s bleeding, too.
“Looks worse than it is,” he says. “Nothing’s punctured or broken, I think.”
Virgil shines his flashlight around. Rusted metal brackets are hanging off the wall. Pieces of bent and broken iron poke out jaggedly from the floor and ceiling.
“This is an old wiring conduit,” he says. “You’re lucky you only got cut, that you didn’t impale yourself. I didn’t even know this tunnel was here. It’s not on any map. Where’s your stuff?”
I look around. My bag’s on the ground next to me. My guitar’s just ahead of me. Virgil reaches for it. He swears as he picks it up.
“What is it?”
“There’s a well. Right here. A deep one. If you hadn’t fallen when you did … if you’d taken a few more steps—actually, just one more step.”
But I didn’t. I didn’t take that step.
I sit up all the way now and notice that Virgil doesn’t have anything with him except his flashlight.
“Where’s your stuff?” I ask him.
“With Jules, I hope. I found them—him and Khadija—right before the cops showed up. By the Rue d’Acheron. I think they got out.”
I remember the Rue d’Acheron. It’s a fair ways from the beach. He could have kept going once he was there. He could’ve gotten out, too.
“You came back,” I say.
“No.”
Guess that was only a dream, too.
“I never left. Come on now; get up.”
He helps me stand. Puts his arm around my waist. I put mine around his neck. I turn my head and take one last look at it—at the tunnel I nearly went down. It’s long and dark, and there’s no light at the end of it. For a second, the smell of cloves is strong and sharp. And then it’s gone.
“Let’s go,” Virgil says. “We’re out of here.”
The first few steps hurt. They’re hard. But I don’t look back.
87
We walk. For a long time. We can’t get out the way we came in because we’d need to go through the beach and the police are still there. We heard them. We saw the glow from their flashlights.
We walk through tunnels, past bones and power lines and pits, until we come out in the basement of an abandoned car factory. South of the Boulevard Périphérique. In Montrouge.
We climb a set of rusted metal stairs out of the basement to the factory floor. The place looks like something out of a slasher film. Broken machines loom darkly. Chains hang from the ceiling. Needles and butts and beer cans litter the floor. There’s a row of windows along one side, floor to ceiling, all broken and boarded up. Virgil finds a loose board. He crawls out, then helps me out, and we find ourselves by an old access road, full of cracks and potholes. A murky little stream, strewn with tires and shopping carts, runs beside it. We follow the road to the front of the factory.
The entrance is boarded up. There’s trash everywhere—chunks of concrete, a rusted refrigerator, an old TV, and the battered backseat of a car. I hobble over to it and sit down. Virgil sits next to me. I feel shaky, but the dizziness is gone. The fresh air is cold and feels good. In the distance, I can see the lights of Paris.
Virgil looks at his watch.
“What time is it?” I ask him.
“One o’clock,” he says, digging in his pockets. “Where the hell is my phone?”
One o’clock. What seemed like days was only about an hour. I don’t know what just happened to me. Was it real? Or not? Was it the Qwell? The knock to my head? The only thing I know for sure is that a few hours ago, I was at the Eiffel Tower, ready to take an elevator to the top. I wanted to kill myself because I couldn’t cope with my sadness. Can I now? I wish I knew.
“I’m afraid, Virgil,” I suddenly say.
He stops dialing and puts his phone down. I expect him to say, “Of what?” And then try to talk me out of it, to make me see that I’m being unreasonable. That’s what everyone else does.
Instead, he says, “Yeah, you’d be crazy not to be.” He gives me a sad smile. “I’m afraid, too. I’m afraid every night in my shit neighborhood. I’m afraid I’m going to get my ass kicked when I leave it and when I come back to it. I’m afraid I’m never going to make it with my music. I’m afraid I’m going to be driving a cab all my life. I’m afraid that after tonight, I’m never going to see you again.”
He redials. Gets on with one of his taxi-driving friends. He takes my hand and squeezes it while he’s talking. I’m scared to squeeze back, but I do. I look at the side of his face, listening as he tells the guy where we are, and yeah, it’s a long story, but his friend is hurt and needs to go to the hospital and can he come get us? He thanks the guy and ends the call.
We sit for a bit, holding hands. He starts singing, softly. He sings lines from a song we were playing earlier, “My Friends.”
“I heard a little girl
And what she said was something beautiful
To give your love no matter what
Is what she said”
I lift my face to the night sky.
It’s still dark.
But I can see the stars.
EPILOGUE
Winter, one year later
I’m in a hospital room. Sitting on a hospital bed. Playing tunes.
There’s a girl in the corner. She’s sitting on the floor with her back to me. Rocking.
I’ve been playing to her for almost two hours but she won’t respond. She just keeps rocking.
Her head scarf shifts a little and I can see the scars on her neck. They continue, those scars, all the way down her back. Her caseworker told me that.
She’s Muslim, this girl. Thirteen years old. She was attacked in a park outside her building. She was beaten and raped. This was two months ago. She’s barely spoken since. Or eaten. Or done much else except rock.
I come every Thursday evening because her caseworker says she likes music. “Play gentle songs,” she advised.
It’s almost time for me to go and once again, I’ve gotten nowhere. I stop playing. But she doesn’t stop rocking.
Suddenly, I have an idea. Enough of the gentle tunes. I’m going to try something different. “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” As I play, I hear it—the sadness in four notes—and she does, too, I think, because she stops rocking. She turns her head, then her body. And I can see her huge sad scared eyes.
I keep playing. All the way through. I wish I had my electric guitar here. And David Gilmour, too. But I don’t. So I do what I can.
I finish the song. The last few notes rise and fade. We sit there for a few minutes and then I ask her if she’d like me to come again next week. She nods. And it’s all I can do not to jump up and down on the bed.
I tell her goodbye, bundle up, and head out of the hospital, feeling like a million dollars. It’s dark outside. And cold. I’m late. I stayed longer than I was supposed to. There’s no time to go home and shower. And I’m hungry. Starving, actually. I hope Rémy has stew tonight.
I sling my guitar case over my shoulder, hop on my moped, and start the engine. I pull out of my parking space and join the flow of traffic headed to central Paris. I’m over by the Invalides and I’ve got to get all the way to the Rue Oberkampf.
The traffic’s bad. I get cut off by a truck, then almost get flattened by a limo. The moped was a graduation present from my parents.
My father is still in Cambridge. He has a new son now—Leroy. He spends a lot of time with the baby. More than he ever did with me and Truman. I guess I should be bitter about that but I’m not. He’s kind of fading for me. Like the final notes of a song. It’s sad, but it’s okay. It’s hard for us to be together. It always has been.
He’s very busy these days, mapping the baby’s genome. Maybe it’ll help him understand what makes this child tick. He never understood me. “DNA tells you all the secrets of life,” he used to say. Except for one—how to live it.
I merge onto the Pont Neuf, get honked at by a cab, then cross over the river. The Seine is beautiful tonight, with the streetlights sparkling on its dark waters.
My mother moved back to Paris. She sold the Brooklyn house and almost everything in it after she checked herself out of the hospital last January. After having finally painted every square inch of the walls in her hospital room. I got a call one day. It was her. “Can you come get me, Andi?” she said. “If I don’t leave this place now, I never will.”
She chucked her pills out the car window on the way home. I’d chucked mine, too. Weeks before. Then she asked if she could listen to music. I played her the only thing I had in the car—a new CD of Plaster Castle, one without so many effects. One that wasn’t a noisy mishmash.
When we got in the house, she put her arms around me and cried and said she was sorry for being so crazy. She said I was her iron band all along, didn’t I know that?
We share a flat now, she and I, a two-bedroom in Belleville. She’s getting better. She has her bad days but the iron bands are holding. She’s painting again—still lifes, no more portraits. Sometimes the new paintings have references to Truman in them, like a penknife that belonged to him, or a feather he once found, or his key—the one I used to wear around my neck. I don’t wear it anymore. I keep it in a box on our mantel and take it out to look at it every once in a while. Truman is part of the picture now, not the whole picture anymore. There’s room for other things in my mother’s life again. There’s room for me. Which is nice. Because I need her now. I’m really busy.
I graduated from St. Anselm’s—much to everyone’s surprise. Because of my thesis. Because of the premise—the whole musical DNA thing—and especially because of the ending, where I said that the composer Amadé Malherbeau was really Charles-Antoine, Comte d’Auvergne, and that his groundbreaking use of minor chords and dissonance came about because of the grief he felt over the death of his parents, the former Comte and Comtesse d’Auvergne, at the hands of the revolutionaries.