Angel Hands (25 page)

She nodded and took his hand, allowing him to lead her across the room and to the...wall?

It seemed like he simply waved his hand, and a panel slid open to reveal a narrow passage.

"Dirty little voyeur," she whispered impishly as he pulled her into the passage, pausing only to push her up against the wall and kiss her soundly. "How many times?"

"Every night as you slept," he replied, grasping her hand and moving them along again. "But, never as you dressed. I pride myself on being a gentlemanly Opera Ghost."

She laughed silently and shook her head as she followed him through the walls.

32. Of Flames and Fires

Mireille followed Erik along narrow passages and up hidden flights of stairs. They paused on a landing, and she looked around in dismay at seeing no other corridor or steps.

"What now?" she asked desperately.

Erik tugged at a knot of rope, and a long, straight line of rope fell down from the darkness above.

"Up," he said simply.

"I can't climb that!"

"I can."

"Well?"

"You, my dear wife, will simply have to wrap your delicious little body around mine and hold on tight as I climb."

"Hmph! You don't have to be so smug about it," she grumbled as he hoisted her onto his back and she locked her arms around his throat and legs around his waist.

She pressed her face into his back to keep from sneezing from the sawdust stirred up by their ascent. It was incredible to witness how inhumanly strong he was as he pulled them up the rope with catlike grace. He barely seemed out of breath when he finally set his feet down on a small platform and helped her jump down from his back.

He gently moved her to one side, and then raised his arms above his head, probing the low ceiling. Mireille's jaw ached from being clenched so tightly, and her heart pounded as the absolute darkness weighed on her.

"Ah!" Erik whispered triumphantly.

There was a click, a creak, and then a rush of cold night air and moonlight. He nimbly jumped up through the trapdoor then reached down to pull her up. Mireille found they were standing on the roof of the opera house. From here, she could see the stone and tiles of the roofs of the buildings around them, and in the distance, the edge of the woods and the road.

"Well, what now?" she demanded, shivering. "Aside from your little trap door, the only other way off this roof is down the main stairwell, where there will undoubtedly be officers waiting for you."

"Nothing of the sort, my dear," he chuckled. "They are all busy looking in the cellars for the phantom who lived in the cellars of the Opéra de Paris. It's the case of the hidden letter in plain sight. No one would think to look for an opera ghost upon the roof."

"That still leaves us with the question of how do we get down?"

He shrugged. "That's easy enough. If we cross the three roofs to our left, the far building sits next to an alley." He bent down and grabbed the rope, beginning to coil it up in his arms. "Our way up will be our way down."

She huffed out an exasperated sigh at his being right, yet again. Then again, this was the sort of thing he had spent his life doing—learning to skulk in shadows, hide in plain sight, and effect miraculous escapes. It was natural for him to know about the alley and to have a trapdoor built into the roof.

Another thought struck her, leaving her colder than the night air.

"So, we reach the street," she said quietly. "Then what?"

He dropped the coil of rope and drew her into his arms. "Then, we will go wherever you want. Except, perhaps, Paris."

"They will not stop searching for you, and I'm sure they'll find something that will connect us to your bank account. From there, they can get a warrant and force the bank to surrender whatever current address they have for us and -"

He stopped her anxious flow of words with a kiss.

"Yes," he said presently, once she was sufficiently breathless. "They will find the bank account of Monsieur Erik de la Persie. Unfortunately, your husband is not nearly as rich as rumor would have it. With only two thousand francs in that account and no forwarding address, it will be a delightfully inaccessible dead end."

"But-"

"However, there are accounts in Brussels, Geneva, and Florence for various other...gentlemen...that have received unexpectedly large transfers in the past month."

"Oh."

"Oh, indeed." He kissed her again, and it was entirely too tempting to give in and stop worrying.

"
Sacre bleu
! I beg your pardon, monsieur and madame!"

She stifled a groan at Pierre's habit of impeccable timing. She turned to see him emerging from the trapdoor they had just come from, holding another rope. She turned a quizzical glance at Erik, who shrugged and said, "It's always good to have an extra rope on hand. I consider it a failsafe."

Failsafe...that was the thing. Mireille simply couldn't be sure that Erik and Pierre had collected every last thing that could possibly incriminate them. A reckless idea popped into her mind, and without hesitation, she decided it was damn brilliant.

"I'll tell you what's always good to have on hand," she said with a sly smile. "An arsonist."

Erik and Pierre stared at her.

"If I were an opera ghost who owned a theater and had the police crawling through it, here's what I would do," she said evenly. "I would burn the place down."

"What? Like right now? This very minute?" Pierre exclaimed.

Erik looked at her warily, drawing back slightly.

Mireille nodded. "Exactly. This very minute. Nothing like the smell of smoke to have them all running from the building with their tails between their legs, and nothing like fire to destroy evidence."

"You...y-you would burn the opera house?" Erik's voice shook.

"I wouldn't hesitate," she asserted. "Afterwards, I'd hire a discreet adjustor to assess the damage and file a claim with the owner's insurance company, eventually collecting a hefty reimbursement check—funneled, of course, through various holding companies and third party channels—and depositing it in a bank account in Brussels. Or Geneva. Or Florence."

"You would have me burn the opera house..." Erik whispered, his eyes wide.

She had to act swiftly to counteract the memories that were undoubtedly threatening to overwhelm her husband.

"Nonsense," she snapped, poking him on the chest. "You and I have some business with an alley three buildings over. I'm suggesting young Monsieur Buprès here be the one to indulge in a bit of arson." She turned to him. "You do know how, don't you?"

Pierre grinned and swept her an elaborate bow. "Of course I do! Well, I mean, it’s not that I make a regular habit of it or anything."

Mireille looked back to Erik, who had tears running down his face, but a smile on his lips. He seized her hand and kissed it.

"My clever little business manager," he murmured. Then, turning to Pierre, he added, "You know where to meet us, correct?"

"I'll be there before you, monsieur!" Pierre laughed before jumping back down through the trapdoor and disappearing into the darkness.

"All right, all right," Mireille said, relief flushing anger and worry from her veins as she pushed him toward the edge of the roof. "We don't have all night. Get a move on, Monsieur Opera Ghost."

"To think I would live to see the day when I was a henpecked husband," he mused as he helped her cross to the next building over.

"Don't lie," she taunted. "You like it."

"Indeed, I do, my dear...indeed, I do."

***

Thus, it was that for the second time in his life, Erik watched his opera house burn. But this time, the flames that licked the sky were nothing to the fire that blazed in his heart.

All the opera houses in the world could burn for all he cared. There was no longer any need for their shelter. He carried his home with him now, in his heart, and in the hand of his beautiful, brave, clever, cunning, kind wife—the only one he had ever truly wanted.

Mireille.

Epilogue

It took two years, but eventually, a check for the value of the insurance policy on the burned out Opéra de Versailles was deposited into the bank account of a M. Blancface of Brussels.

The money was then transferred to a holding company that owned, among other things, a boutique music publisher out of Vienna that specialized only in avant-garde composers. The holding company eventually paid dividends to its only investor, a M. Souterrain of Geneva.

M. Souterrain, in turn, invested the sum into a vineyard owned by a Signor Ammenda of Florence, who repaid the loan for his vineyard made by another holding company based out of Venice and run by a Signor Erico di Redenzione.

Signor di Redenzione was a rather retiring gentleman, who spent his days dabbling in music, but who also had a rather lucrative side business selling unique mask designs to the
Mascherari
of Venice. 

He lived quietly in a charming palazzo off a small canal. For companionship, he had his lively French wife, Mireille, and their adopted son, Pierre—or, Piero di Redenzione, as he preferred to be called now.

Signora di Redenzione involved herself rather actively in local historic preservation efforts and became known as something of a terror among the carpenters, gasworks men, masons, and other various laborers.

Back in Paris, Raymond Lefebre withdrew from the investigation of the Opera Ghost and resumed his work as artistic director of the Opéra de Paris with renewed fervor, hoping to lose his heartache in his work. Instead, he found himself losing his heart to Mademoiselle Solange, the gentle girl who had been Kristin de Chagnard's understudy.

With plenty of suspicions but no leads, the investigation into the identity of the Opera Ghost came to nothing, but eventually did provide fodder for a penny dreadful novel by one Gaston Leroux, who greatly exaggerated the ghost's deformities, but who foolishly used a name for the innocent soprano’s heroic lover that was a bit too similar to ‘de Chagnard’ and received one of Comte Philippe de Chagnard's special cease and desist letters.

Philippe de Chagnard married a young, pretty, rich young lady and was justly served out for being so shallow. Within six months, he found himself cuckolded on a regular basis, and as a laughing stock of Paris, had great difficulty in convincing any woman to console him in his loneliness. On the occasion he did pay for companionship, he came away with a curious itch that was to plague him for the rest of his life, along with jealousy of his little brother's perfect happiness.

Of Raoul and Kristin de Chagnard, there is little to record. Her voice, though forever hidden from the glories of the world, was all the sweeter for singing quietly to an audience of one who yawned and stuffed her little fist in her mouth. Getting that precious bundle of joy had involved doing things that had greatly surprised her. It is of note that Raoul did find that, in time, and with patience and a good deal of education, he was able to have in Kristin a placidly willing, though never fully enthusiastic, partner in adventures inspired by Eros.

Mireille and Erik, on the other hand, vied for new tricks and unexpected techniques when it came to the pleasures of the marital bed, which more often than not turned out to be a desk, or a settee, or on several memorable occasions, the dining table.

"The more I think of it," Mireille said, absently tracing her fingers along the planes of his chest, watching it rise and fall as he caught his breath. "The more I am convinced you cannot have learned all that simply from copying things you saw from the stagehands."

"Well, no..." he admitted hesitantly. "There are certain books one can acquire..."

Thus began a period of their marriage fondly known as 'The Miseducation of Mireille di Redenzione.'

Erik continually marveled at Mireille's fidelity to her vow never to ask to see his face. That is not to say that it did not happen. It did, several times, mostly as a result of rather boisterous and strenuous intimate activities.

The first time, he hadn't even realized it was gone until he caught the startled look in Mireille's eyes. Fear, anger, despair—all of it came crashing down on him, until he noticed she had closed her eyes and groped around the bed to grab his mask—which she was holding out to him.

Her reaction calmed him, and when on further occasions it happened, he was again soothed by the way she quickly startled but then closed her eyes and simply waited for him to restore the mask. Eventually, he realized that next to her love, the greatest gift he received from her was dignity, and he loved her all the more for it.

Their devotion to the arts of love was not without consequences. Twice, Piero had to hold Erik back from charging up the stairs as Mireille wailed wildly in the pains of childbirth. The first time, a son was born, a perfect babe, but far too early. The sight of that tiny body in its tiny coffin was one that Erik would never forget. Nor would Mireille find a day going by without thinking of how old her boy would have been.

The birth of their daughter Angelica did not heal their hearts—for one child cannot replace another—but, it enlarged their hearts and filled the new space with enough love and joy so that grief eventually found its proper place and was at peace.

Piero di Redenzione grew to put his natural deviousness, the tutelage of his sly adoptive father, and the cunning of his adoptive mother to good use. He became a diplomat, and, at a young age, was already making quite a name for himself.

Privately, he always believed that a large part of the credit for Signor and Signora di Redenzione's marital bliss was due to him. Feeling himself wise in the ways of love, he thought he had no need of angels or their hands to reveal his heart.

It wasn't until an angel slapped him that he realized just how wrong he was.