Guided Tours of Hell (19 page)

“Get this,” Leo said. “One of the hyperactive kids on the plane was eating a candy bar, a chocolate-covered mummy with red button candy eyes. And you know what the brand name of the candy was? Give up? Ready? ‘To Die For.’”

“To Die For?” Nina repeated.

“A chocolate mummy,” said Leo.

“You must be kidding,” Nina said. But she knew what it was like when you were thinking of something and the world conspired to inundate you with examples of what was already on your mind. Hadn’t Nina spent days grieving over Leo in a city populated solely by lovesick abandoned women?

Scrubbing the last gravy streaks off his plate with a thick chunk of crusty baguette, Leo seemed mostly recovered from his grief over the potatoes. He said:

“So I thought: Why not take it all the way? Why not do a piece for
Allo!
and call it ‘Paris Death Trip.’ We’ll go to the Catacombs. The cemeteries. Père Lachaise. Maybe buzz through the Cluny and look for some great medieval woodcut of Death in his hooded cloak mowing down the population with his giant scythe. I thought of someplace else. Just a minute. Right. We’ll check out the Conciergerie, the prison where Marie Antoinette spent her last night. There’s an established tradition of morbid cemetery tourism. Isn’t there a Mark Twain book where they go to Europe and after a while you realize: All they’re seeing is graveyards?”

A few tears still glistened in Leo’s brown eyes. Nina stared at him adoringly. “Paris Death Trip” was a great idea, exciting, a little subversive. Go to the Catacombs, skip the Louvre, head straight for the boneyards and the prison….

But was Leo serious about writing this for
Allo!
? Surely he must know that his loyal subscribers—retired schoolteachers and former middle managers from the New Jersey suburbs—had no desire to spend their precious time in Paris inspecting stacks of femurs, guillotine blades, graves, and crumbling headstones. Sooner or later, Leo would come to his senses and realize that “Paris Death Trip” was not for
Allo!
but was something he had to work out for himself, his own personal pilgrimage.

But for now, what did that matter? Nina was happy to tag along. To go anywhere, with Leo.

They would start tomorrow morning. They had work to do. Right now they were free to have dessert and coffee and pay the check and get their coats and walk to their hotel.

Their room was ready. They were directed across a courtyard and up two flights of narrow stairs to a door that admitted them into a courtesan’s bedroom from the 1920s or ’30s, everything painted or upholstered in silk of the palest robin’s-egg blue.

“This hotel used to be a monastery,” said Leo. “Until the Revolution. Then they made it into a bordello. A high-priced historic whorehouse. And now, inevitably, a hotel…”

On the wall above the bed was a reproduction of an Ingres, a woman with a gray satin dress slipping off her plump shoulders clear down to the hollow at the base of her spine. Nina scooted across the bed to get a closer look. She thought of the Rodin Museum, the statue of the bending woman, the smooth marble back she’d run her hand over when Madame Martin wasn’t looking.

“Something happened,” Nina said. “I went to the Rodin Museum.” She caught herself, too late. She hadn’t meant to tell him yet. Leo could get competitive if he thought you’d done something more interesting than he had: another wise reason for making sure to do everything with Leo.

“Excellent,” said Leo. “Maybe we’ll go this time.”

“They mistook me for someone else,” Nina said. “This old woman thought I was some…writer she was expecting. And she took me—she took whomever she thought I was—to a storage room and showed me their collection of Rodin’s erotic drawings.”

Leo said, “Are you telling me that some batty Frenchwoman thought you were someone else and took you on a free guided tour of Rodin’s erotic drawings?”

“That’s what happened,” Nina said.

“You lucky stiff,” said Leo. “Were they beautiful?”

“Really beautiful,” Nina said.

Leo was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Do you think your little old lady ever goes back there and jerks off?”

“Leo,” said Nina. “I don’t want to think about that.”

“Wouldn’t you, if you worked there? I know I certainly would.”

“I guess so,” Nina conceded. “I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Anyway, listen, Leo. Another thing the old woman told me. When Rodin was fucking his models in his studio, he used to put a sign on his door that said: Absent. Visiting Cathedrals.”

“Excellent,” said Leo. “Absent. Visiting Cathedrals. I love it.” And then, after a moment, “What were the drawings of?”

“Oh, you know,” Nina said. “You’ve seen them in books.”

“I know. I’ve seen them,” said Leo. “But I want you to tell me.”

Nina said, “There was one. A woman—”

“Wait,” said Leo. “Show me.”

A woman’s scream awoke them. They sat up, clutching each other, until they were awake enough to distinguish ecstasy from terror.

“Not again,” said Leo. “Wouldn’t you think that this exceeds the statistical probability? Every time we come to Paris we get to hear some lucky couple fucking each other’s brains out.”

Especially if you counted Nina’s neighbor at the Hotel Danton. Nina had almost forgotten that woman, who hadn’t made a peep after Leo arrived. Maybe it was the dead prostitute’s ghost, exorcised by Leo’s presence.

Tonight their next-door neighbor was very much alive and well. Their courtesan’s bedroom had a mirror on the wall across from the bed, and the woman’s cries—and the man’s low groans—seemed to seep through the mirror. Without Leo, the noises of sex had annoyed and depressed Nina, but with Leo she found them comforting, then amusing, then erotic.

Leo said, “I love this.”

The woman next door began to laugh.

“Someone’s having fun,” said Leo. “What do you think he’s doing to her?”

“What do
you
think?” said Nina.

Leo reached for her in the dark.

T
HESE CATACOMBS ARE BABIES
compared with the ones in Rome. These date from the eighteenth century when the cemeteries got so crowded that the stench…Well, there was public pressure to dig up the dead and start over. Some genius remembered these quarries that were mostly mined out. They dug up the bones and dumped them here. And when the Revolution got going, you can bet they were glad for the space. Come on. I think it’s this way.”

Self-assured and chatty, Leo grabbed Nina’s hand and waded into the traffic. He was unrecognizable as the wreck who’d wept into his fried potatoes. Well, who wouldn’t feel better after a whole night of making love, then breakfast (good coffee, fresh orange juice) in the pleasant hotel bar with its damask chairs and clear Plexiglas floor over an ancient stone foundation?

But now the entrance to the Catacombs was hiding from Nina and Leo, impishly shredding their patience until they were both nearly frantic. In their search, they made several scary runs across the traffic circle.

Finally Nina saw a long line of people waiting on the street.

“Could that be it?”

“I doubt it,” Leo said. “All those people lined up to see the Catacombs in November?”

But the map said the Catacombs were here. There was nothing else nearby that these tourists could have come to see. Sheepishly, Nina and Leo took their place at the end of the line. Nina felt a bit deflated because her happiness that morning was partly about going somewhere that only Leo would think of going.

At least the tourists weren’t all American. Most were German families with infants and school-age children.

“Am I hallucinating?” said Leo. “Or are these the kids from my flight? I don’t know if I’d take my kids here. With everything there is to see in Paris, I don’t think I’d take them to see a heap of rotting bones.”

“I wouldn’t either,” Nina said. “Though kids would probably love it.”

Closeness percolated up out of their shared conviction that children should be protected from this, even if they might enjoy it. It was as if they’d made a parental decision about their own children, though they’d never once mentioned the possibility of having children. This too was part of the etiquette. How could they talk about having a family if they weren’t allowed to admit that it mattered whether they traveled together or alone? Did Nina want to have children with Leo? She’d started taking birth control pills again, which must mean: not yet. She certainly couldn’t decide something like that standing on the sidewalk in line to get into the Catacombs. Though maybe this was the perfect place to make that sort of decision.

The elderly German couple in front of them wore matching safari suits. They opened their umbrellas, though it was only misty, not raining.

Leo said, “These Germans must think this is the French equivalent of Teutonic ancestor worship. The bones of the glorious warriors who died for the Fatherland. And the irony is, they’re right, though some of these bones died fighting the Gestapo. Do you think they have any idea that the Catacombs were the French Resistance headquarters during the Occupation?”

In Leo’s secret dream of himself he was a French Resistance hero, running urgent dispatches through the Catacombs and sewers, wearing his good leather jacket. It was a sweet dream for Leo to have, heroic and romantic.

Leo said, “Look, Nina. Everybody’s got flashlights.”

“They do?” Nina said quietly. “Aren’t the Catacombs lit?”

“I’m sure they are,” said Leo. “I’m sure if we needed flashlights I would have read about it somewhere.”

Two American tourists joined the line behind them, a matched pair of muscle-bound blond guys in baseball caps and hooded Syracuse University sweatshirts. They also carried flashlights.

“Hi there,” Nina said.

“Yo,” said the boys.

“What’s with the flashlights?” said Leo.

“It’s supposed to be pitch-dark down there,” said one.

“Creepy,” said the other.

“Way creepy,” agreed the first. “They say it really sucks if you’re the least bit claustrophobic.”

“Leo, we can come back here later!” Nina said. “Some other time! When we have flashlights!”

“Don’t be silly,” Leo said. “Don’t be ridiculous, Nina! Even the stingy French government will have sprung for lighting down there. This country has lawyers, like everywhere else. Nobody’s looking for litigation.”

Leo resumed his mini-disquisition on the history of the Catacombs that he’d started as they’d crossed and recrossed the place Denfert-Rochereau. But now his raspy monologue had a pizzicato rhythm as it looped around to include the subject of death and burial customs in general.

“Our culture is the most squeamish,” he said. “Tombstone toppling may be big at home, but grave robbing never caught on. Everywhere else, the graveyard is like a mall. The dead are underground commodities. Money in the bank. Though it takes a pretty smart cookie to successfully market the dead. Eva Perón did some heavy postmortem traveling. For centuries every monastery that needed quick cashola would dig up the local saint and sell off prime chunks of bone. In Greece they exhume their loved ones after ten years and bury them somewhere else. Apparently that’s getting harder, stickier, so to speak, because chemical food preservatives also keep bodies from rotting, and the relatives are finding some nasty new surprises.”

So Leo hadn’t recovered. He was still overwrought. And he and Nina were about to descend into claustrophobe hell.

The line moved very slowly.

Nina said, “How come they’re letting in only a few people at a time?”

“We’re better off not knowing,” said Leo.

“Spooky, dude,” said one of the Syracuse guys.

“Nasty,” said his friend.

Then suddenly everyone craned for a look at the woman at the ticket window, who was shouting at the younger woman collecting tickets at the turnstile. The younger woman yelled back, even louder. Stalled at the entrance, a tourist family looked on with rigid horrified grins.

“What’s the problem?” Nina said.

“I can’t hear,” said Leo. “Something about a lunch break. The idea is to make us even more impatient to get away from all this screeching and to be down below with the nice quiet dead.”

Nina stood on her toes to kiss Leo’s cheek. His face was damp and salty.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Nina said.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Leo.

Finally the young woman waved Nina and Leo through the gate. Nina’s smile was meant to convey that she had sided with
her
, no matter what. The ticket taker tossed her head so that the beads woven into her dozens of tiny braids clacked like a beaded curtain lightly disturbed by the breeze.

Leo marched in front of Nina with the headlong determination with which yesterday’s pedestrians had plowed through the rain. He made a quick turn and stopped short.

Nina came up beside him at the top of a staircase. They might have been standing on the edge of a cliff, that’s how steeply the stairs corkscrewed down the hollow, chilly stone stairwell. Nina could see down the steps for a couple of turns but no farther, so there was no way of telling how far down it went, though a blast of loamy air rushing up suggested it might be some distance.

Leo took a deep breath and plunged ahead. Nina followed him down. The stone steps were very narrow and steep, the spiral extremely tight, so in addition to climbing straight down they were turning in small circles.

Leo said, “I feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.”

“It’s like a mailing tube with steps,” Nina said. “Or an ancient parking garage.”

“It is an ancient parking garage.” Leo voice rose up.

“Leo, wait for me,” bleated Nina.

As they descended, the spiral seemed to constrict until they were spinning more rapidly, round and round. Nina was conscious of having to resist the magnetic pull that dares you to leap off bridges and out of skyscraper windows.

“I feel a little weird,” said Nina.

“How long does this go on, Nina?” Leo’s disembodied voice floated up the stairwell.

Why was Leo asking Nina? He was the one with the answers. Leo’s question—and his tremulous tone—heightened her dizzy unease.

“Forever and ever and ever,” Nina said.