He was slick, I had to give him that. With a little shrug and a patronizing smile, he oozed confidence. “You know, Louise ... and by the way, I love what you’ve done with your hair, it’s so natural and windblown ... we Parisians are not so easily disheartened. The sun will come up tomorrow, hopefully, and we will carry on as we have always done. Yes, it’s true, the loss of these beautiful golden symbols does take some of the glow from our hearts, but isn’t that what electric lights are for?”
He chuckled greasily, and Louise seemed uncertain how to take this. Fiat went on, “But, seriousement, you know the smiles will be just as warm and the fireworks just as bright on Bastille Day, won’t they? So, lighten up!”
She seemed glad to let the interview conclude naturally on this odd note and thanked him before returning to a recap of the crime for what was undoubtedly the hundredth time that evening.
Fiat stood with a frozen smile as she wrapped up. Suddenly his eyes caught mine when the camera lights switched off. “You ... la petite ... where do I know you from?”
I know I should’ve just smiled sweetly, and the moment would have passed, but I just couldn’t. Instead I held his oily gaze and said, “Califorrrniiiaaa,” before quickly slipping back into the crowd. Before I disappeared, I did see his perfectly waxed expression fail and change to something darker. I didn’t want to stick around to see what came next. I heard Rudee calling my name over the hubbub of the crowd and the growing chorus of car horns, and we hurried to the cab.
“I have to take Sashay to the club. Do you want to come, or should I get Dizzy to take you back to the church?”
I said I’d rather go with him, and we said goodbye to Dizzy. Sashay was watching out of her window when we pulled up, and soon we were speeding toward St. Germain. They wouldn’t listen to my repeated requests to assist Michelle, the cigarette girl, and I didn’t mention my little confrontation with Luc or Louche at La Bastille. I had to beg to go in with Sashay and promise to stay behind the curtains while I was there.
I met Michelle. She thanked me for subbing for her and offered to pay me. I said no thanks, the experience was good enough for me. We chatted throughout the evening when she came backstage to refill her tray. It seemed that the Shadows were drinking and smoking even more than usual. Michelle thought they were celebrating something, maybe somebody’s birthday. I had other suspicions but kept them to myself. The lights dimmed for Sashay’s show, and the strange, hypnotic music began to seep into the club, along with the dry ice. I was finding a space where I could watch through the curtains when a voice whispered from the darkness, “Hey, gamine, you’re blocking the way, move back here.”
“Excuse me,” I said, and was moving toward the voice that I thought must belong to the club manager when a pair of bony hands clamped my shoulders, lifting me up like I was weightless, and carried me quickly down a darkened hallway. I suppose I should have yelled or at least tried to kick my way free, but I was totally caught by surprise and I didn’t want to destroy the mood at the start of Sashay’s show. And yes, I was scared to death.
Sixteen
Before I had time to exhale, never mind scream, I found myself between two billowing black coats, being slid into the back seat of a long, low car with darkly tinted windows. The seat was soft and cushiony. In the back of my mind, I recognized this as the part in those black-and-white movies my parents love, where the private eye gets taken for a ride and warned to keep his nose out of somebody’s business, or else, then he goes back to his office and completely ignores them. I waited for my warning from the bookends at my sides, but no one spoke, and not having anything to contribute, I sat in silence.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught glimpses of them in the dull light of passing street lamps. They both had wispy silver hair and oddly unlined faces with that ghostly bluish tint to the skin. One was the scarred shadow with the bony hands, the other no doubt his pal Phlegm. The coal-coloured eyes staring straight ahead were cold and fixed. The steady streams of cigarette smoke and the little evergreen tree hanging from the mirror failed to disguise the slight rotting smell that clung to these two. I couldn’t see the driver at all, just the shape of his shoulders and identical hat; he seemed to know where he was going. We moved smoothly along Boulevard St. Germain and across the Pont de la Concorde until we stopped just down the sidewalk from the giant “Roue De Paris” millennium Ferris wheel that lit up the square.
Once out of the car, they silently whisked me past a line-up that stretched in both directions from the ticket booths, right up to the platform where giddy Saturday night couples were piling into the waiting compartments. Someone entered from the other side of the car I was being led toward, and I climbed up and into the opposite seat as the doors were locked shut.
“There’s no smoking in here, Monsieur Fiat.” I attempted to reduce the tension for my own sake. He just stared at me until I wanted to take a shower.
“Yesss,” he finally said, “you are a child, aren’t you, after all.” Our car jerked once, twice, as we started our climb. “What you know, my little flea, does not concern me. Paris is a city where things are easily forgotten. Old love affairs, people, places ... and sometimes that is as it should be.”
He had a hazy expression as he looked over the city and down the length of the Champs Élysées. I flashed back to the rally where I had first seen him, and the moment seemed completely unreal.
“This used to be a beautiful city, you know, dark and beautiful. A city that respected its past. The little neighbourhoods, the narrow streets, the tiny houses huddled together; a place where you could discover passages that all but the rats had forgotten, lose yourself and hide your cares, not seeing the sun for days at a time.”
This was all sounding chillingly claustrophobic to me, but he was just warming up, I could see. “Now, some fool builds a Ferris wheel to look down on the spot where Marie Antoinette lost her head.”
He shot me a look that I think was designed to inspire terror. It worked. “One hundred and fifty years ago, the prefect of Paris, a man named Georges Haussmann, with the approval of that little worm Napoleon the Third, ripped this city apart. In a fever of demolition, they tore down all that held people’s lives together and sold off the pieces to the highest bidder. Pushing these big boulevards from one side of Paris to the other, they ripped the soul out of the city in the process.”
I wasn’t even tempted to mention how cool it was that you could see the Arc de Triomphe from so far away. “Does your family matter to you, little one?” He stared into me. My mouth went dry, and I wanted to be able to give the right answer at this point. We had reached the top of the Ferris wheel, and our little car was swinging back and forth in the night sky. It was a long way down.
He went on without a reply from me. “My great-great-grandfather was a lamplighter at the time, and they snuffed out his job like extinguishing a lamp, tore down his family’s home, and sold the pieces to scavengers who called themselves antique dealers. He died shortly after, selling postcards of the ‘nouveau Paris’ to tourists in Montmartre. My great-great-grandmother whispered his story in my ear as a child at her one hundred and twentieth birthday party. I vowed to avenge him, and she died happily a few minutes later trying to blow out the candles on her cake.”
I swallowed hard and clenched my teeth, pushing the picture of granny collapsing into the icing from my mind. A chilly breeze from the Seine blowing into my face helped me maintain my composure. Fiat continued his story as though I weren’t there.
“I grew to hate the light of day. I collected sunglasses, carried an umbrella to school on sunny days. I was always happiest at the end of the day, when my papa would return home and entertain me with shadow puppets of buzzards on my bedroom wall. My best memories are of him waking me up and taking me into the street during power failures to see the ‘true darkness,’ as he called it, ‘the shadow of