Phantom (43 page)

I came slowly back down the stairs to where Jules was waiting with both hands clutched against his thin chest.

"Monsieur," he whispered helplessly, "monsieur—I beg you to forgive my wife's outburst. She is not in her right senses. She meant no offense. She—"

I silenced him with a look and tossed two hundred francs onto the shabby hall table.

"Get that child to a doctor quickly," I said coldly, and walked out of his house.

My heart was like a lump of lead dragging heavy in my breast as I made my way back through the squalid, snow-laden streets. On the bank of the Seine, as I paused to study the ice floes that were blocking the river, I heard a prostitute hail a passing soldier.

"Monsieur… I will take you to my room in exchange for a piece of bread."

The man paused and spoke, but I could not hear his reply; presently they moved on together in the direction of the Rue de Grenelle.

Staring out across the frozen river, I wondered briefly just how hungry a woman would have to be to accept bread from my hand in return for her services. I'd never dared to approach a prostitute; I'd never been able to face the humiliation of having my money refused. The memory of that little slave girl in Persia still burned in my mind.

Something pulled at the hem of my cloak; and as I

turned, thinking to find the elegant cashmere snagged on the remains of a paling, I found that I, too, had been accosted by a lady desperate for food.

A very little lady…

There, on the pavement, almost indistinguishable against the dirty snow, a cream kitten sat with the claws of her chocolate-colored paws entangled in the material.

With a cry of disbelieving delight I swept her up off the snow and examined her beneath the yellowish light of a gas lamp. She was caked with filth but her breed was as unmistakable as it was inconceivable. There were no Siamese cats in Europe, and yet I held one in my hands, a rare and precious jewel dropped from heaven into the landscape of hell.

Of course I knew she could not possibly have dropped from heaven. Some enterprising French traveler had evidently succeeded in smuggling a breeding female from the palace at Bangkok, knowing that the Empress Eugenie would be prepared to pay handsomely for such a unique animal. Everywhere rich ladies would be clamoring for a similar novelty; no doubt the man had expected to make a fortune.

But the empress had fled and the rich were now eating their fine-blooded racehorses. No one was interested in acquiring another mouth—only in that little extra something for the cooking pot. Dead cats had become a fashionable substitute for flowers and sweets as a gift for a sick friend; boiled cat, served with pistachio nuts and olives, had become a delicacy for connoisseurs. I could well imagine the horrible end which had overtaken the mother and the rest of her litter.

But this little creature was born to survive; I could see it in the irrepressible impishness of her crossed blue eyes. Fate, which favors some against the longest odds, had brought her soliciting to a man who would have died of hunger before he separated her from her lovely pelt. Tucking her safely beneath my cloak, I hurried through the streets with fresh purpose in my step.

Ayesha changed my life. Over fifteen thousand kilos of salted horsemeat had been stored at the Opera, and supplies were not yet entirely exhausted. I could not bring myself to consume horseflesh, but I stole for Ayesha and stayed out of the room while she ate to control my revulsion. There were plenty of rats in the cellars, and within a few weeks she had lost the scragginess of starvation and grown sleek and contented. She followed me around the secret house like a puppy and sat beside me while I worked. I could not wait for the day when she would be big enough to wear that Persian collar. To see her strutting in its stolen magnificence would be a pleasure beyond imagination. She was my amusement, my joy, the chosen companion of my solitude. If there had been no horsemeat and rats, she would have eaten human flesh; I would have killed, if necessary, to feed my precious, precious little lady…

Nineteen weeks into the siege the beleaguered government capitulated and an awesome, resentful silence descended like a shroud around the city. The German troops marched down the Champs-Elysees, and in their wake the poor, who had borne the brunt of all the hardships, were summarily required by a reactionary assembly to pay all debts and rents, postponed for the duration of the siege, within forty-eight hours. Plunged into bankruptcy, incensed by the immediate suppression of six newspapers, the lower classes rose in fury and a new revolution rocked the city. The government fled to Versailles, the Commune of Paris was declared, and as the screaming mobs took to the streets the real horrors began.

No longer was the madness of destruction confined to the Left Bank. The Opera was seized by the National Guard and the red flag of the Commune, which now flew from the roof, made the building a perfect target for the Republican forces. More bombs screamed down on the battered city, but now they were French shells, the shells of civil war. Soldiers swarmed all over the barricaded Opera House and there was vicious fighting in the streets outside. I had become a prisoner in my own home; to all intents and purposes I was under house arrest, for I knew that if I showed myself, I would be shot on sight as a spy.

Down into the cellars came the citizen generals with their pistols and their ridiculous red sashes, their cigarettes glowing in the darkness like tiny embers as they supervised the incarceration of political prisoners. The perfect silence was punctuated by their crude oaths and raucous laughter… I hated these cruel intruders shepherding their victims down to the Communard dungeon below the fifth cellar. I hated them all, National Guardsmen and Republicans alike—fools… ignorant fools! How dared they violate my sanctuary with their filthy, destructive war! How dared they imprison me like this!

Five weeks it lasted, but it seemed like five years, before the Communards fell to the Republican forces in a savage barrage of hell's flames, massacring hostages and setting fire to state monuments as they abandoned their positions. In their wake the Hotel de Ville and the Palace of the Tuileries were left in black smoldering ruins. Once more the streets of Paris were burning.

Since the Opera had been used as a field hospital for Communard troops, it had so far escaped this relentless arson; but one evening, at the height of the crisis, I was driven from the house on the lake by a terrible presentiment of doom. Careless of discovery, I began to comb the vaults like a demented bloodhound, and there in the third cellar I found a member of the National Guard laying the fuses that would connect with a dozen barrels of gunpowder.

"Are you acting upon orders from your commanding officer?" I demanded stonily.

The man spun round in alarm, drew his pistol upon me, and took aim.

"Are you acting upon orders?" I repeated with grim insistence. "Have you been told to do this?"

"No." He laughed suddenly, his eyes wide and staring with a blind lust that was immediately recognizable to me. "This place has been forgotten by the generals, but not by me—not by me. I'm going to blow the filthy imperialist abomination off the face of the earth… but I'll settle with you first, my interfering friend—"

The Punjab lasso silenced him before he got the chance to pull the trigger, and I dragged his body out into the street when darkness fell, leaving it with others likewise abandoned.

Then I went back for the gunpowder.

Patiently I ferried the barrels across the lake and stored them in my own cellar with a strange, secret pleasure.

I had sunk my life and my livelihood in this splendid monument; nursed it from puling infancy and caressed its beautiful stone and marble body like a fond lover. The National Academy of Music was mine, and I reserved exclusive rights to its destruction. If the day ever came when this precious edifice should be razed to a pile of dust and rubble, it would be my hand that lit the fuse. Mine alone.

Those tense uneasy weeks of intrusion and unforgivable violation showed me the ruthless measures I must now take to secure my retreat from the rest of mankind. To my original design I added a torture chamber, an exact replica of the hexagonal mirrored chamber I had once built for the khanum. It was nothing more or less than a simple mantrap; no interfering busybody who found his way in would ever find his way out again except through suicide. Sited beneath the substage area, with a trapdoor affording access to the third cellar, it was also a useful shortcut back to my house. There were more than six thousand steps in the

Opera and most of them led down; a shortcut would not come amiss under such conditions.

Beneath the subterranean waters I laid the cable which permitted a simple electric bell to give ample warning of intruders on the lake.

And so my labyrinth was wired for death, a vast web encircling the minotaur's secret lair.

Let foolish, unsuspecting men step with care in the maze of my creation.

All roads did not lead to Rome!

Within a month of the Communards' surrender omnibuses and fiacres were plying the streets again and prostitutes were soliciting once more on the Boulevard des Italiens; it was as though the horrors had never been. And yet Paris was altered forever, hardened and embittered beyond measure by the taste of defeat. The death throes of a proud city would never be forgiven and hatred of the Germans was buried deep.

Work continued on the Opera amid all the inevitable delays and hostilities that were the aftermath of war and revolution, with Garnier desperately fighting to complete a building which was now viewed with the utmost suspicion by the new government as an imperialist monument. By the time he had struggled through to reach the theater's inaugural night, I had already been many years snugly installed in the bowels of the fifth cellar.

The house in Boscherville had been sold, and at dead of night Jules and I had ferried my mother's furniture across the subterranean lake. He had asked no questions of me, as usual, merely obeyed my instructions implicitly; but I saw the fear on his face when he found himself inside my unique apartment; I saw the sick, terrified certainty dawning in his eyes that he would never be permitted to leave this place alive.

When the last stick of furniture was in place, he stood in my bedchamber staring hopelessly at the magnificent open coffin on its raised dais, the black mourning candles, and the funereal tapestries.

"You're going to kill me now, aren't you, monsieur?" he said dully. "You're going to kill me because I know too much."

I turned to look at his craven figure with sudden pity. He had been a man when I first met him, young and eager, ready to go out and leave his mark upon the world. Twenty years of being worked like a marionette by the strings of my vocal cords had sapped all his initiative away and reduced him to the mindless cipher I saw then. I had deprived him of independence and initiative to the point where he was quite incapable of surviving alone in a hard world. In many ways it would have been a kindness to have finished him that night… but I knew I could not do it.

"Come here," I said.

He came slowly, with a dragging step… head bent, resigned and unresisting; my throat tightened at the sight of his painful apathy.

"If you ever speak of this place to anyone I shall kill you," I continued calmly. "Betray my secret and I will hunt you down wherever you may flee. There is no place on this earth where you will be safe from my hand. But swear to keep silent and I will raise your family in all the comfort you could ever have wished."

He lifted his head uncertainly.

"I—I don't understand, monsieur," he stammered. "What are you asking of me?"

"If I am to live here in perfect peace I shall require an agent in the outside world. You know my habits and my requirements by now. An hour before dawn on the first

Sunday of every month you will take a cab to the Rue Scribe and wait for me there. Whatever I need in my solitude you shall bring to me. In return for that service I shall pay you a salary of ten thousand francs a month."

His mouth dropped open beneath its straggling moustache.

"Ten thousand!" he gasped. "Ten
thousand
?"

I shrugged. "It is admittedly an exorbitant amount to pay in return for a little shopping. But you have nine children to educate, and if one of them doesn't take the Grand Prix de Rome I shall want to know the reason why. Of course, that does not mean you are to discourage any scientific interests they may display—medicine, for instance, is a very worthy calling. And surely," I continued softly, looking past him to the beautiful pipe organ which now filled one entire wall, "surely
one
of them will prove musical…"

He was stunned, entirely incapable of making any coherent reply. That ludicrous sum finally convinced him, as no empty threat could have done, that he was dealing with a dangerous madman whose whims could never safely be ignored. The fact that I had no idea how I was going to honor this pledge indefinitely was quite immaterial. I would find a way.

Before we parted on the bank of the lake, he hesitated for a moment, looking at me with an odd expression that I could not quite place.

"What will you do in this terrible solitude?" he demanded suddenly. "How will you fill the bleak and empty days?"

I gazed into the darkness of the great vaulted chamber, unaccountably disturbed by the question.

"I shall fill my days with music and scientific research," I murmured.

"But you will be alone, monsieur," he persisted, "quite alone down here."

"I have always been alone," I said.

And leaving him standing on the bank with his lantern, I stepped once more into the little boat and rowed back across the lake.

On the second of January, 1875, I was examining the eight counterweights of the auditorium chandelier for safety when Garnier appeared at my side. He looked both furious and deeply upset as he handed me a letter.

"Look at this!" he muttered. "Tell me if it's not the final straw!"

The letter was from de Cumont, of the Ministry of Fine Arts, informing Garnier that six seats had been reserved for his party on the inaugural evening in the
deuxieme loge
, "against the sum of one hundred and twenty francs."