The Paris Key by Juliet Blackwell

Author:Juliet Blackwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-seven

Angela, 1983

The entrance to the catacombs is through an abandoned train tunnel. They have to hop a fence, negotiate a steep slope, and walk down weed-strewn old railroad tracks.

Xabi moves aside a metal plate, like a manhole cover, in the side of the tunnel wall.

The opening doesn’t look much bigger than a cat door.

“That’s . . . the entrance?” Angela asks.

“You are not afraid, remember?” he says.

Xabi has brought a pack and he shows her the contents: a compass and a hand-drawn map of the catacombs. Flashlights (the kind you put on your head, as well as carry in your hand). Extra batteries. Water and snacks. It seems strangely nurturing of him to have come so prepared, almost Boy Scouty. Perhaps there is an equivalent group in the Basque country, Angela thinks, trying to imagine a juvenile version of the man in front of her, a scarf around his neck. Wondering how to say “always prepared” in Euskara.

The only scarf she can imagine him wearing is red, with a white outfit and a beret, ready to run with the bulls of Pamplona. That is a Basque city, she knows, having seen a documentary on the famous annual escapade. It seems fitting, now that she looks at him with that in mind. She imagines him turning and fixing a bull with an icy stare if it dared try to run him down or skewer him with its horns.

“People have been lost down there,” said Pasquale when Angela asked her about les souterrains, the underground. “Lost, and perhaps someone later finds their bones. Or they are simply gone, never to be seen again.”

They built on the natural caves. The Romans were here two thousand years ago, and they mined the limestone to build their buildings. But to these have been added, over the centuries, waterways and sewers and basements and storage units and even underground factories.

“You see how it is separated naturally? This little place here?” Xabi points out a tiny crevice in the stone, his hands for once not covered in chalk dust. Now she sees they are deeply tanned, with long, tapered, calloused fingers.

“Here, they put the piece of wood, comme ça. The air is moist—you feel it? As the wood gets more moisture, it gets bigger, and over time the split, she gets much bigger. Then the workers can get in and cut, and pull out the big piece of stone. You see? The mining created so many caves, hundreds of kilometers of unmapped caves. And then people used the caves for many things. When there were too many people in Paris and they realized the dead people caused a problem, they moved the bodies here.”

“Here?”

“Ne bouge pas,” he says. “Don’t move.” He seems to be listening, standing near the small hole in the wall about four feet off the ground. All Angela can see within is darkness.

“Allons-y,” he says, looking back over his shoulder with a grin. She has never before seen him smile, and the sight makes her forget for a moment.

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