The Lucifer Gospel (20 page)

“He’ll move ahead each time we stop, maybe a couple of cars each time. That gives us three stops before he’s on top of us.”

“Where’s that?”

“Where did we get on?”

“Some place called St.-Mandé de something or other.”

“Where does that leave us?”

Finn checked the map over the door.

“Reuilly-Diderot.”

“Is it a main stop, a what do you call it, a correspondence stop?”

“No.”

“What’s the next one of those?”

“Nation,” she answered. “Two stops.”

“Be ready to get off there. We have to lose him.”

“Where did that knife come from?”

“Your friend Simpson gave it to me in the car when you were asleep. Nasty little thing, a front-loading switchblade, state of the art. Made in Italy. He said he had two.”

“Who were they?”

“Not Interpol, that’s for sure. The guy was speaking Arabic and the other guy swore at him.”

“I heard.”

They came into the next station—Porte de Vincennes. A few people trickled on and off. The horn sounded and the train moved off again.

“Head for the doors,” said Hilts. They got to their feet and stood in front of the right-hand doors.

“L’autre cote,”
instructed an old man in a raincoat and a dark blue beret. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette directly under a sign stenciled on the window that read DEFENSE DE FUMEUR.

“What?” said Hilts.

“Other side,” Finn translated. “I know that much French. I think he means the platform is on the other side.” She smiled at the old man. “Merci,” she said.

“Parle a mon cul, ma tete est malade,”
the old man answered, making a sour face.

“What did he say?” asked Hilts.

“Nothing very nice, I don’t think,” Finn answered. The train thundered into the station. It was much more modern than the previous ones and had half a dozen different tunnel exits. They chose the closest, cutting through the throng of arrivals and departures.

“Where are we going?”

Finn checked the line. “Etoile.”

“What’s that?”

“The Arc de Triomphe.”

“Where we started.”

“Approximately.”

Hilts looked back over Finn’s shoulder, searching the crowd spilling out onto the platform.

“See him?”

“Not yet.”

The horn sounded as a train came into the station. Behind them the pneumatic doors began to close. The train screeched to a halt and the doors of the cars slid open. Hundreds of people swarmed past them.

“There!” Finn spotted the man with the beard and the tinted glasses pushing his way onto the platform. Someone yelled at him, cursing, but he ignored it. Hilts grabbed Finn by the elbow and thrust her forward into the nearest car. He followed, watching over his shoulder. The doors slid closed, leaving the bearded man on the platform. As the train pulled out, leaving him behind, Hilts saw him lift a cell phone to his ear.

“He’s making a call. Bringing up reinforcements. Shit!”

“We can’t stay on the train for very long,” said Finn. “He could have people waiting for us ahead.” She looked up at the map above the doors. If the man with the beard was quick enough and smart enough he’d realize that he could even get ahead of them by going one more stop on the Number One line—Bastille—then double back on them using the secondary Number Five line that ran between Bastille and the southern stations. The Paris Metro was incredibly complex, and after more than a hundred years of development there wasn’t a building in the city that wasn’t within five hundred yards of a subway stop.

At the very least there would be someone waiting for them at Montparnasse-Beinvenue, the next big corresponding stop, with half a dozen lines crossing each other. They pulled into the station at Place d’Italie and then moved out again. At least he hadn’t been quick enough to get someone in place there. According to the map they had only two chances before the next big stop. It was going to be either Denfert-Rochereau or Raspail. She didn’t know anything about either place, but both were close to Montparnasse, once the center of bohemian life in Paris, but now not much more than a slightly down-at-the-heels tourist area full of cafés advertising themselves as Lenin’s Favorite Restaurant or Hemingway’s Bar.

“Next stop then,” Hilts said. Once again they moved toward the doors. The train slowed then came to a squealing halt. They got out of the car and headed down the crowded platform. As the train pulled out Finn glanced across to the opposite side of the tracks and saw the startled look of a man on the other side—the same man who had pushed Finn and Hilts into the car outside the Canadian embassy. He stared for a moment, open-mouthed, then sprinted for the exit.

“They’re on to us!”

Finn and Hilts ran to the nearest exit, then climbed up the long flight of stairs, ignoring the parallel escalators. They reached the upper lobby and crossed it, rushing out of the big station. They pushed through one of the three arched entrance doors, breathing hard. Without stopping they ran out into the street, dodging traffic, and made it to the circular plaza in the center, mounted with a huge bronze statue of yet another man on a horse. Once upon a time Paris must have been a wonderful place to own a foundry, Finn thought.

“Which way?” she said.

“Doesn’t matter. We have to lose him. Run!”

He took her hand and pelted into the street. A car screeched to a halt next to a taxi stand. A Mercedes, this one blue. The man with the rottweiler jumped out, minus the dog. Behind them the man on the platform was dodging through traffic, crossing the street toward them. They swerved, reaching the sidewalk, and ran headlong up a short flight of steps and through a pair of tall black doors, open against the summer heat.

A man in a uniform sat on a stool beside a turnstile set up in the middle of a large, dark, marble-floored room. He looked bored. A sign on the turnstile read: E10. Ten euros. Hilts jammed his hand into his pocket, pulled out a few crumpled notes and shoved them into the attendant’s hand. They rushed through the turnstile, and Finn looked back over her shoulder to see if the men were following. So far there was no sign of them. She turned again. In front of them was nothing but the circular entrance to a staircase in the floor.

“What is this place?” Hilts asked, staring at the dark spiral of stairs at his feet. “Is this some kind of sewer tour?”

Finn knew. She’d read about it in a guidebook the last time she was in Paris. Not the sewers.

This was the entrance to the Paris Catacombs, home to the dead of centuries, millions of them, hidden deep beneath the streets of the old city.

As a city Paris has been in existence for more than two thousand years. It began as a small village on the Ile de Paris, where Notre Dame Cathedral now stands, then spread out on both sides of the Seine, north, south, east, and west. Like any rapidly expanding urban center, Paris had two major problems, both of which caused terrible and sometimes fatal health problems: garbage and dead bodies. Both brought disease on their ragged coattails. By the Middle Ages the garbage crisis caught up with Paris in the form of the Black Death—bubonic plague. A little while later the dead bodies caught up with Napoleon as he tried to create his vision of the city and kept tripping over putrid corpses in overflowing cemeteries from one side of Paris to the other. For a millennium or more the thousand or so churches in the city had each maintained its own cemetery, but as Napoleon renovated, the graveyards kept on getting in the way of his version of town planning. Paris, like Washington, D.C., after it—both designed by the same man, Pierre L’Enfant—was built on a swamp. Bodies weren’t so much buried as floated in a sea of muck. Napoleon, dictator, emperor, and practical man that he was, decided that every cemetery was to be emptied and the remains transferred to the old Roman limestone workings on what was then the edge of the city. As the redevelopment of the city continued the plan was put into effect. The newly dead were interred in three main burial grounds, Père Lachaise, the best known, which holds the remains of famous people as diverse as Jim Morrison of the Doors and Frederic Chopin, while the other two, Montparnasse and Montmartre, got the leftovers. The bones of seven million others were gathered up and taken to the limestone quarries to be hidden away two hundred feet below the surface. Over time, limestone quarries and boneyards combined covered more than a hundred and fifty miles of galleries on both sides of the Seine, with secret exits and entrances through sewers, manholes, and old buildings across half the city. The Nazis used some of them as communications bunkers and air raid shelters. At the same time, the Paris Resistance used other sections of the same network for meetings and to store weapons. According to history, the two factions never once ran into each other. The one squad of SS sent down to rout out the freedom fighters vanished without a trace.

Finn and Hilts headed down the stairway. The temperature began to drop almost immediately, the summer heat turning to a clammy, naturally air-conditioned coolness that made Finn shiver. They kept on moving down the narrow, shallow steps, deeper and deeper. Small bulbs hanging from a frayed cable wrapped around the stone core of the staircase lit their way. Finn began to count the steps to take her mind off the steadily increasing sense of claustrophobia. They hit bottom at 234. She could hear footsteps echoing behind them but she had no idea if it was their pursuers or just a bunch of tourists who’d paid their ten euros. A marker on the wall informed them that they were seventy meters below ground—230 feet. A line of dim bulbs ran away into the distance. There was no other way to go except back up the stairs and into the clutches of the men chasing after them. The floor beneath their feet crunched wetly. Damp gravel. The walls and ceiling of the stone-lined tunnel were dripping.
A hell of a place to die,
Finn thought.

A hundred yards farther on the tunnel began to widen and she felt her claustrophobia lessen slightly. Suddenly the tunnel emptied out into a broad and well-lit vestibule. The ceiling, sweating coldly, was still no more than a yard above their heads. The vestibule was oblong, with a pair of Egyptian-style obelisks carved into the rock on either side of a gaping doorway. The obelisks were white with rectangular inserts of black. Above the doorway, carved into the stone, was a message and a warning, written in Latin. Finn translated the words aloud:

“Stop! You are about to enter the Empire of the Dead.”

“Lovely,” muttered Hilts. They stepped between the obelisks and went through the dark doorway into a vision from the depths of a cave-cool hell.

Stretching away in all directions, lit only by the pale clear bulbs that hung from the ceiling, stacked like cordwood and piled head-high in ornate rows twenty feet thick, were piles of human bones. Yellow, damp, old—it was layer upon layer of thighbones, pelvic bones, arms, legs, collar-bones and spinal vertebra, tens of thousands of skulls, eye sockets leering blindly jaws and teeth locked together into perpetual smiles by the dripping lime from above, all sense of humanity fled like the inner workings of a mass murderer’s most passionate dreams of bony carnage, an enormous mass of bone that was slowly, as secretions fell, becoming a single, monumental and monstrous fossil. The damp air was filled with a sweet-sick musty odor of old age, and the only sound was the muffled whispers of their rasping breaths.

“My God,” said Finn, awe-stricken. She took Hilts’s hand and squeezed it hard.

“There’s probably other people up ahead. Come on,” he said. Together they moved down the corridor of bones, peering ahead through the deadly gloom. Every fifty feet or so along the loose-floored passage they could see side tunnels blocked by wrought-iron barriers. It was clear that major sections had been blocked off to keep people from wandering through the entire place, becoming lost forever. They passed a wheelbarrow with a shovel laid across a load of assorted bones; clearly the gigantic ossuary was still in use.

Hilts stopped. “Wait,” he said. He turned and listened. At first there was only silence, and then they both heard it: a soft, rodentlike scuffle, like rats on a barn floor. Running feet on gravel. “They’re coming!” He looked around wildly, then picked up the shovel on the wheelbarrow. He hefted it. No match for a gun, that was sure enough. Finn spotted a side passage on the opposite side of the main corridor. The wrought-iron gate was hanging off its simple hinge.

“In there!” she said. Hilts nodded. They moved across to the other side of the passage and squeezed through the opening. The sounds of their pursuers were getting dangerously close. Hilts turned and lifted the narrow gate, dropping the rusty pins back into their sockets with a loud scraping sound that made him wince.

“No!” Finn exclaimed with a groan.

“What?”

“Look!” She pointed through the grating. There on the floor of the tunnel, ten feet away, was a brand-new passport, the gold-stamped Canadian crest gleaming proudly in the sullen light from the dim bulbs overhead.

“Which one is it?” Hilts said. Finn reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out the passport she’d picked up no more than an hour before.

“Idiot!” groaned Hilts, chiding himself.

“What do we do?” asked Finn.

“Hope they don’t notice,” said Hilts. He pulled Finn back into the shadows. The sound of footsteps was very clear now. Finn was suddenly aware of the impenetrable darkness behind them, and her imagination was more than capable of visualizing what that ghastly blackness held. Miles of corridors, millions of skulls, twice as many sightless eyes staring into eternity.

The footsteps slowed. Finn saw shadows cast off their pursuer by the thin light overhead. The footsteps stopped dead. One person. He’d seen the passport and was trying to figure out what it meant. The figure stepped forward into his own shadow. It was the bearded man from the car; he’d managed to switch back and meet with his companion from the opposite platform at Denfert-Rochereau. He had a gun in his hand, a very modern-looking automatic made from some sort of flat black composite polymer. There was a fat sausage-shaped thing attached to the barrel. A silencer, she guessed. He wasn’t going to draw any attention to himself. As he bent to pick up the passport, the gate pin settled into its socket with a small clanking sound and the moldy old bones finally proved too much for Hilts. He sneezed.