Chapel Noir (43 page)

“I doubt we shall find anything so convenient as a door,” I said.

“I would hate to have to take you two through the kitchen to the wine cellar. You would not fool a gnat.”

“You mean Elizabeth would not,” I said.

“
I
am unbelievable?” she answered. “You cannot even act drunk.” Our raised walking sticks were about to cross like swords, until Irene stepped in between them, and us.

“If you are coming to fisticuffs in the street, please do it in male voices at least.”

Irene glanced up at the first-floor level around us to make sure that no shutters or windows had opened.

“Now.” She jerked our hats down on our heads and restored our walking sticks to an upright position at our suited sides. “What I seek will look more like a workman’s hole than a door, I have concluded. Look for a niche a rat could disappear into.”

A rat! The idea was not appetizing.

Elizabeth bent to survey the grilled windows below street level.

“Kitchens and sculleries,” I told her.

“Perhaps not all.”

So we continued down the deserted street, now crouching instead of lurching, all the better to peer into darkened arches of half windows sunk into the foundation of the buildings.

I heard a rasp of metal, and turned to find Irene kneeling in the filthy gutter. I did not care for her “walking-out” clothes in masculine form, but even they did not deserve what prostration in a gutter of Paris would do to them.

“This cellar is unoccupied,” she whispered when we came to her assistance. “Help me with this grille. It is old, rusted, and, best of all, loose.”

We applied gloves to metal mesh, then removed our gloves for a better grip. Together we tugged and grunted like dray-wagon drivers. Behind our mufflers and under our hats, threads of perspiration ran unseen. The itching had become torture.

Still, I could feel the grille within my fists wiggle, then jerk, and finally pull loose so abruptly we all fell back on our heels.

We sat and gasped for a while. I must say that I knew the satisfaction that only achieving the impossible imparts.

“Now we must lift the grille out of the way,” Irene said at last.

Elizabeth groaned softly, but we all grabbed on to an edge again and thereafter wrestled the piece as large as a fire screen to rest against the stone foundation.

Finished at last, we gazed into the featureless hole we had bared.

Large as it was, it did not promise a dignified entry even for those wearing trousers.

Irene leaped down into the shallow well surrounding it. “I shall go first. I have the pistol. Who will come next?”

“I!” Elizabeth trumped me.

“I don’t know how far below the floor is,” Irene cautioned, even as she folded herself in the most astoundingly limber way and disappeared through an opening the size of a painting frame.

We heard a thud, an “oof,” and a “Hurry!”

Elizabeth shrugged, exchanged a glance with me, and started to go feetfirst through the gap. This proved to be a mistake. She was soon clinging to the well edge, her upper half visible and her nether regions apparently flailing for purchase.

“Oh!” Her eyes grew round and she gazed into mine as if she were drowning. With a great jerk, her hands gave way, and she had been swallowed by the dark hole below.

I hardly thought going facefirst would work any better, but by now I was the lone person left on the street. I heard the click of something approaching and turned in panic.

A lean, mangy dog had paused in trotting past to regard me with hungry yellow eyes.

I jumped down into the well, then crouched against the hole, wondering if I could back into it and thus keep my eyes on the devil dog watching me as if ready to chase a rat into a hole.

I managed to wiggle my posterior somewhat over the waiting gulf, while keeping my hands and feet attached to terra firma.

Now I was wedged width-wise in the hole with no way of advancing or retreating! The dog could chew upon my face and hands at its leisure.

I managed to push a foot over the abyss, but the sense of unanchored suspension nearly made me swoon.

“Nell!” Irene’s voice urged from below.

The mongrel began to growl, showing great yellow teeth.

I hunched a shoulder, getting partway through before sticking again.

By now my midsection was folded so upon itself that I could hardly take breath, much less scream for aid.

I was caught fast in the opening, hopelessly jammed. My walking stick was wedged sideways in the well, useless.

Someone seized my loose ankle and pulled. I gritted my teeth shut against a shout of objection. My shoe was pulling off my foot despite the sturdy laces.

The dog edged nearer. I could feel its hot breath on my face. I could also smell it. The huge muzzle pushed toward me. I shut my eyes. A large wet, warm, tongue swabbed my features from north to south, what was visible of them anyway.

My scream of revulsion was cut off when both my ankles were jerked sharply downward, and I popped through the aperture like a cork pried from a bottle neck. My stick whacked the opening as it followed me through.

It was small comfort to be standing upright only because my companions bracketed me, to be facing utter dark, and to have a slimy, wet face that reeked of garbage.

“There was a dog,” I managed to pant out.

“Poor Nell,” Irene said. “There is always a dog.” She dragged me deeper into the dark, then suddenly there came a sharp scratching sound . . . had the fiendish dog—? But no, my friend had merely drawn a lucifer over the striking edge of its box. A will-o’-the-wisp of light danced against the darkness, and then a small stub of candle she also produced took flame and we could see each other again at last.

“All right?” Irene asked.

When we nodded, she immediately turned to let the feeble light play over the room we had entered. A cellar, empty, with a few broken sticks of wood on the floor and not much else.

“Good,” Irene said. “Let us go deeper.”

I followed, thrusting my walking stick ahead of me in the dark like the blind men one saw on the streets occasionally. The rhythmic tap of its tip on the hard-packed earth and stone was comforting in an inanimate way. I soon heard the echo of Elizabeth’s cane as she emulated me, and smiled.

“Will anyone hear us?” I whispered suddenly.

“My hope is that only the dead will,” Irene responded cheerfully from ahead.

I could just glimpse her figure edged by a thin halo of candlelight.

A draft at my ankles told me our course angled downward, as the catacomb near the Eiffel Tower had.

I knew that this was a good sign for Irene, though it was most upsetting to me. Delving into dark places should be done by miners. Still, I would rather be part of this adventure than left sleeping at the hotel, which is what I fear would have happened had I not awakened ready to join the expedition.

“Do you smell anything?” Irene asked.

“Must,” I said. “Dust. Dirt. Damp. Rats and cats.”

“Candle wax,” Elizabeth said, “but you are carrying it. And the scent of some liquor, not wine.”

“Obviously,” I complained. “I have not spent enough time in brothels, where spirits and candles are plentiful and one may develop a ‘nose’ for the bouquet of corruption.”

“Don’t mention ‘corruption,’ Nell,” Irene advised me sardonically from ahead. “That is what I most sincerely hope we find scant evidence of at the end of this passage.”

“Scant?”

“Well, no traces at all would not do our investigation any good.”

I believe that I stopped moving. At least Miss Elizabeth crashed into me from behind, ramming my ribs with her walking stick.

I mewed protest, all the sound I dared make under the circumstances. I would not be the one to bring the gendarmes down on us!

“Feel the fresh, wet air!” Irene sounded like a passenger on a fly-boat on the Seine, one of those large double-decked steamers that ferried sightseers and travelers up and down the river’s crooked length.

“We near the sewers,” I predicted under my breath.

Apparently my comment was not as beneath my breath as I had intended, for Elizabeth rhapsodized the key word after me.

“Sewers. Of course.”

Irene led on, foregoing comment.

In an instant the shaft had widened into a cavern, and she stopped, her small candle casting enough light to show the limits of the place.

The stench was an overwhelming bouillabaisse with an underlying most unpleasant fishy odor. Among the unhappy blend my nose recognized blood, sweat, and urine, the worst that one might encounter in scenes of animal husbandry in the country and in the most debased slums of the city.

The “fresh” air of the sewers hung like a fetid blanket over the scene, intensifying the conjoined reeks as toilet water will vivify a sachet of dried rose petals. Only this was the odor of rot.

I squinted at the uneven walls, hoping to see no neat piles of bones, hoping to avoid the vision of any rag piles on the floor.

And I was rewarded on both counts! Unaccountably, I felt a sense of disappointment. If there was nothing, whatever notion of Irene’s had brought us here was worthless.

Another lucifer was struck with that peculiar scraping sound that is so oddly animal-like. I suppose it reminds me of rat claws within the walls.

Irene now held two lit candle stubs, and held one out to us.

Elizabeth rushed to claim it.

Now a double light danced off the dimpled stone walls. I was surprised to see odd letters and symbols scribed here and there in charcoal. Such unlettered scrawls! One looked like a “P” with an “X” through it. Another resembled a backwards “R.” Most of the marks were nonsensical wavy lines.

“A beggars’ refuge, do you think?” Elizabeth asked Irene.

Irene was already advancing on the dark like a duelist, her candle held at arm’s length. Parts of the walls were quite bare of anything other than moss and mold, but a swipe of her light revealed something more as a dustcloth will unveil a scratch in the mahogany.

This scrawl was long and wavering, at waist height, and it seemed etched in blood, not char.

Irene went close to inspect it, with Elizabeth and I close behind merely for the comfort of company.

Such was the drawing’s length that she ordered Elizabeth to use her candle to trace it to the other end. Elizabeth only stopped five feet away.

“Les juives . . .”
Irene whispered in perfect French. “. . .
sont des gens.”

She straightened from bending to read the roughly drawn letters.

“Mon dieu!”
The written words seemed to have marooned her in the French language.
“C’est—”
She bent to read again, walking along crouched toward Elizabeth.
“que l’on ne bldmera,”
she muttered. Then,
“pas pour rien,”
she finished intoning with the solemnity of a religious celebrant as she stood alongside Elizabeth. Perhaps the candle gave me the unlikely religious impression, for Irene was not given to ritual or invoking the Godhead in any language.

“Do you know what this is? What this means?” she asked in an awed hush.

“No,” I admitted. “Tell us.”

“There was always something foreign about the phrasing,” she went on more to herself than us. “And the haste in erasing it—”

The soft grating sound of a step in the passage behind us stopped her like a falling guillotine. I glimpsed her hand thrusting into her jacket pocket as she hissed, “Douse the candles.”

Elizabeth pinched her flame out with her fingertips. I blew mine out an instant later.

I had also glimpsed a shadow in the passage.

The broad swath of an unshuttered lantern splashed into the cavern like a barrel of spilled water, suddenly touching parts of all of us.

The figure that held it was stooped like Quasimodo and wore smudged workman’s clothing. He was not much above a beggar, from my one glimpse, and the stubble on his face below the usual peaked cap made him look a debased sort indeed. Perhaps we had been discovered by one of the occasional residents of this pest hole.

Irene cocked the pistol.

What a cold, sinister sound that was, yet it did not shake our unwholesome visitor, who stood teetering on the rubble at the passage end.

He reached into his own pocket, half-torn from its mooring on the baggy denim.

Irene lifted the pistol higher, following his gesture.

From that poor excuse of a pocket he pulled a small clay pipe. He began to spout something French about
chiens
and
fumering
. Perhaps he was saying that he would like to have smoked dog for dinner. I have no idea!

Suddenly Irene shrugged in that Gallic manner she had so mastered and stepped back to permit the man entry into our . . . pit.

But he stayed where he stood, lighting the pipe with a lucifer and then sucking on the dreadful thing until the bowl glowed cheerful as an ember. A smoky scent slowly masked the dreadful odors steaming around us.

“Most unpleasant for ladies,” said Sherlock Holmes, “but then I see you are attired as lads. A wise precaution.”

“You!” said Elizabeth, as indignant as only the young can be. “You were the one who waited outside our hotel and then followed us here.”

“If I were watching you, you would not see me. And I would not station myself so obviously near your windows as to be visible. No. I was your coachman. That is a far more practical method. Why follow when one can lead?”

Irene unleashed an impressive arpeggio of laughter. “You were taking quite a chance. Why on earth gamble that we would go out?”

“Because you have been out at hours and in places where ladies of good reputation would never go. And because I saw that the arrest of James Kelly would not satisfy Pinkerton extraordinary Irene Adler.”

“Former Pinkerton,” she corrected him. “The only ‘Pink’ we have here is—” She glanced at Elizabeth, who even in the lamplight could be seen to blush a fiery red.

Was Irene hinting to Sherlock Holmes that Elizabeth was the Pinkerton agent now, or did Irene truly not know that she was? Or was Elizabeth not a Pinkerton as I had suspected? While I began to question who I really was the conversation continued without me.