Immortal Muse (38 page)

She had smiled tight-lipped at that. “Nicolas must have felt they truly needed the prayers,” she said, and their waiter shrugged.

“Who knows?” he said. “Everything about the Flamels is mysterious, no?”

The dinner was as delightful as Dominique had advertised, and they lingered for a few hours. Afterward, in the cool evening, Camille had taken David's hand. “Come on,” she said. “Since you're on this Flamel kick . . .”

They walked south for a few blocks, toward the Seine, and onto a narrow street set with shops and taverns, crowded with throngs of people. She pointed at the street sign:
rue Nicolas Flamel
. “Stand there under the sign,” David told her, bringing up his camera. “I should get a shot of this.”

“No,” she told him firmly. “Take a picture of the sign if you want, but not with me.”

He looked at her strangely, but shrugged, lifting the camera and taking a quick snapshot. She took his arm again and they strolled down the lane, weaving through the clots of pedestrians and looking in the shop windows. As they walked, she felt her mood darkening again. “So, is it true what our waiter said, that Nicolas may not really have been an alchemist at all, that it was all just a rumor?” David asked her.

“He was rich,” Camille told him. “That much is certain. And he didn't get that way by selling books and working as a scrivener.”

“So you think he was actually able to transform lead into gold?”

“Transmute, not transform,” she told him. “And probably not gold. But mercury to silver . . .” Her shoulder lifted. “Maybe. Maybe he managed that much.”

“And the rest? All those legends that he and Perenelle have been seen long after they were supposed to have died?”

She shivered. The street seemed darker now and more shadowed, and the laughter of the people easing around them was hollow and mocking. “Sounds like a total fantasy to me,” she said.

David paused to take a picture down the street. He gave a small satisfied nod at the result, looking at the camera display. “Is that what you're looking for with all those chemicals you have?” he asked. “The secret of immortality? The chance to live forever?”

She didn't answer, instead responding with another question. “Would you want to live forever, David, if you had the chance?”

“I don't think most people in decent health really want to die,” he answered. “And I think that if you thought you were going to live forever, the knowledge would change you—change the way you act and the way you think. Maybe pretty drastically.”

“TANSTAAFL,” she said, pronouncing the letters as a single word:
tan-staff-ull.

“Huh?”

“It's an acronym. ‘There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.' Whatever advantage you gain, you have to pay for it in some way. If Nicolas and Perenelle managed to find the elixir they were looking for, then they're paying for it—and the bigger the payoff, the bigger the cost they're paying.”

David shrugged. “Still, I can see wanting that. Though maybe what you find out is that eternal life doesn't automatically hand you eternal happiness. And it wouldn't stop the people you love from dying around you.”

The remark brought her to a halt as the street dead-ended into another. “Yeah,” she said. “I'll buy that. Are you thinking of Helen?”

He nodded. “She and I . . . well, she always said she'd wanted to go to Paris, and I said I'd take her there one day. Now it's too late for her.” His lips pressed together, and Camille hugged him.

“It wasn't your fault,” she told him. She pointed to a street sign across the way on the cross street:
rue Perenelle
, it said. “Maybe having to live forever wasn't exactly a blessing for them, either.”

The night was suddenly full of ghosts again, rushing past her and whispering her names: all of them, the long succession of people she'd pretended to be. The ghosts tugged at her, hissing and warning her:
You can't stay here more than another day or two. Running has never been the solution. You still have to be the hunter; more than ever now that Nicolas knows your current identity. Leave David here, go back, and do whatever you must to end it.

She shook her head. “David, can we go back to the hotel? I'd like to be alone, just the two of us.”

 * * * 

She could hear David snoring in the
darkness, but she couldn't sleep, her thoughts all in turmoil. Nicolas lurked in her dreams. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand; the LEDs glared that it was 4:30 in the morning; 10:30 at night back in New York. She threw aside the covers and quietly dressed, then wrote a terse note that she left on her pillow:
Went for an early walk. Back soon. Love, Camille.

She left the room and rode the elevator down to the lobby, where a sleepy-looking attendant glanced at her from behind the desk. She slid him her room key but said nothing as she crossed the small lobby and went out the doors into early morning Paris. She walked quickly up the street toward the Seine.

Paris never sleeps: that was the saying, and it was generally true. Even now, in the predawn, there were people out along the main boulevards and traffic on the streets. Notre Dame was pinned in amber spotlights, gleaming against a night sky that was just beginning to lighten, while street lights plucked deep pools of illumination from the dark. Camille crossed the Quai de Montebello, walking past the shuttered booksellers' stalls, and taking the Pont au Double toward the Île. Halfway across the bridge, she stopped, leaning on the stone railing and staring down at the water of the Seine, shimmering with the reflected lights of the city.

This was the place she lived much of her long life. She wondered if this is where she would end it as well. All these centuries of being a muse for someone else—what had it gained her? All the centuries of inevitable loss, or moments of joy interrupted, of death and the decay of age.

At an all-night Internet cafe a few blocks from the hotel, she booked herself a plane flight out of Paris, leaving the following afternoon. This would be their last day together.

Maybe our last day together forever.
She shivered at the thought.

Not long after dawn, after making a few discreet enquiries, she found a dingy shop open in an alleyway on the Left Bank that would sell her a 9mm handgun and a full clip without worrying about the legalities. She put that in her purse; the weight made her feel slightly less paranoid.

She'd also considered that here in Paris, it would be easy for her to walk away from David, to walk away from Nicolas and the attention of prying detectives like Palento for Nicolas' murders. She could vanish again into the streets of the city she knew so well, take on another identity, and David would never be able to find her again. And Nicolas . . . well, she could find him again, and begin the hunt once more.

The problem with that strategy was that it was becoming more and more difficult to assume new identities. In a world laced together by the Internet, in a world where anyone could reach into distant databases, in a world where information had a potential shelf life of forever, where communication was quick and easy and documents more and more technologically difficult to fake, becoming someone else was a slower and far more expensive game.

In the beginning of her long life, when people rarely traveled more than a few miles from their home and communication was measured in months or weeks rather than minutes, all she'd needed to do was take an appropriate name and say that she was from some sufficiently distant town. She could create a background and lineage that suited her, and no one would particularly question it. Even up through the 19th century and through much of the 20th, claiming a distant home was safe and forging documents was relatively simple.

Not now. Now it was easy to be caught and exposed. Even a relatively trivial run-in with the authorities could lead to issues and awkward questions. She knew that from her interaction with Bob Walters and Detective Palento.

Worse, it was also becoming harder to escape through faking death as well—she suspected that an embalming would not only be agonizing, it might also truly kill her. Even if her body could somehow recover from that abuse, which she doubted, coming back from it would be a lingering and long torture. The modern world was no longer one from which an immortal like her could easily escape.

No matter how tired of the game she might be, it was a game she couldn't voluntarily quit without experiencing actual death. On the other hand, the modern world was one in which it seemed there were more ways for her to finally, truly, die. Cremation, embalming, an autopsy, electrocution, explosions and terrorist bombings . . . She wondered whether her body could survive any of those, whether she would have died like thousands of others if she'd been caught in the twin towers during the 9/11 attack.

There was no way to tell without experimentation. Those were experiments Nicolas might have made with others; they weren't ones she was willing to test herself.

I don't want to do that. I don't want to abandon David.

If the previous evening had told her nothing else, it had told her that she did love David, loved him as she had so very few in her life. His green heart: it contained that rare lapis thread that she'd thought she might never taste again. With him, maybe, she could find in herself her own genius once again, and move her own creative endeavors forward. He could be
her
muse as she was his. Could she give that up once more, as Nicolas had forced her to do before?

Only four or five times before had she encountered a green heart like his, in all the centuries. She could not even think of that. She would not.

She lifted her body up, leaning well over the rail and staring into the Seine as if she could find answers there in the dark, swirling water. She heard two people approaching the bridge, talking. She let herself fall back onto her feet again. She took a long breath. In the east, the sky was salmon-colored and cloudy. She walked over the bridge to the Île, then over to the Right Bank. She wandered, not caring where her footsteps took her, just letting her thoughts move her. The sun rose, lifting itself slowly into a cloud-strewn sky and doing little to allay the early morning chill. Camille found herself at the east end of the Jardin des Tuileries, near the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre. There were already quite a few people out in the park in the early morning. She found herself rousing from her reverie at the sight of a gray-haired and mustachioed old man, wearing a set of horn-rimmed glasses and seated on a chair under the trees near the Place du Carrousel. He was dressed in a beige sport coat and dark pants, his shoes polished as if for church.

A paper bag was on his lap between his legs, and he plunged both hands into the bag before lifting them skyward. A few moments later, dozens of sparrows were fluttering and dancing around his outspread hands, landing on them momentarily as they fed, then rising again in twin, animated clouds. The old man watched them, a tight-lipped smile on his face as the birds cavorted around his hands. When they left, descending to the grass around him, he put his hands back into the bag and the aerial dance began once more.

Camille watched, not even realizing she was staring, until the old man turned his head slightly toward her. “They dance beautifully, do they not?” he said to her in French.

“
Oui
, they do.”

“Would you like to try?” He held out the paper bag toward her.

“No,” she said automatically, but his smile only widened.

“Come. You'll enjoy it,” he said, and she found herself moving toward him as the birds scattered. “Bring that chair here,” he said pointing to one of the chairs nearby. She dragged it over alongside him. “I'm Etienne,” he said.

“Camille.”

“
Enchanté
, Camille,” he said. “You're a tourist?”

She shook her head. “I used to live here, once. But I live in New York City at the moment.”

“Ah.” He favored her with a small nod. “You speak French well, but not quite like a Parisian. I've never heard an accent exactly like yours. Now, you must be very quiet and very still. Put your hand in the bag; it's full of birdseed coated with just a little honey, so it sticks to your fingers . . .”

She gingerly placed her hands into the bag and pulled them out again. She could see bits of birdseed adhering to her skin. “Good,” the old man said. “Now, just hold your hands out and wait.”

She didn't have to wait long; first one sparrow fluttered around her fingers, then another, and finally the entire flock seemed to be in motion around her. She could feel the buffeting air from their wings, the occasional strike of them against her hands or arms, and their beaks plucking the seeds from her skin. Helplessly, she laughed. “It feels so strange,” she said. “And yet it's so delightful. So
alive
. Do you do this every day, Etienne?”

The old man was smiling with her. Now that she was close to him, she could see the way his jacket was worn, the edges and seams frayed from long use. There was, very faint, a green soul-heart inside him. She could feel its quiet radiance: simmering there, content. She wondered what he did to feed that creativity, or perhaps it was this daily performance in the park. “When the weather's good, I come here,” Etienne answered. “Charlene—my wife—always liked feeding the birds in the park. Ever since she died, I've been feeding the birds for her.”

“I'm sorry.”

“That's kind of you to say, but there's no need to be sorry. Charlene and I had a wonderful sixty years together, and we'll be together again, one day soon enough. Here, let me have more seed . . .” She handed him the bag, and he put his hands into the sticky birdseed, letting the sparrows flock around him once more. “You remind me a bit of our granddaughter,” he said as the sparrows fluttered around them. “She has Charlene's enjoyment for life, I think. That's what I remember most about Charlene: how she relished every day we had.”