The Adventures of Mademoiselle Mac 2-Book Bundle (5 page)

The rain had stopped, but it had left the streets slick and shiny like new leather as the tires hissed down the grand boulevards. We didn't seem to be returning to Sashay's place in the Marais as we crossed the Pont Carrousel and drove through the archway past the Louvre. I sank back in the seat and listened vaguely to the usual exchange of jokes and recipes on Rudee's cab radio. The cafes and bars were still buzzing, and the lights on the beautiful Opera Garnier gave it a storybook glow. We continued on through a seedier part of the city toward the giant train station, Gare St. Lazare. We stopped at the end of a short bridge overlooking the rows of darkened railway tracks, and Rudee switched off the taxi lights.

“It doesn't look like much, but this is my first memory of Paris.”

Sashay gave me an “I've heard this before” look as he continued mysteriously, “Everything old is in the eye of the dog.”

I think Sashay coughed to hide a laugh, and we sat silently for a while. The night's events were coming back in a rush to me; the delicious fog that Sashay's show left had lifted. I tried to tell them everything I could recall about the “Shadows” and Louche, their leader. Rudee clenched his fists and gritted his teeth when I got to the part about Les Invalides.

“Snakethieves,” he spat out.

When I reached the part about recognizing Luc Fiat, Rudee stopped me. “You must be mistaken, Mac; Fiat works for the mayor's office, and he is in charge of the campaign to polish up Paris.”

I tried to tell him that I really
was
sure, but I had to admit that I hadn't been that close to Fiat on the day of the rally. When Sashay said, “It was very dark on the balcony,
non
?” I started to wonder myself what I had seen.

As Rudee switched on the headlights and eased back into the traffic, I asked about “Shadowcorps.” He glanced at Sashay in the mirror and said, “That's the monstrous new building in Les Halles, isn't it? The ugly-as-snot light-reflecting one?”

She wasn't listening, instead looking out the window at the couples laughing arm in arm as they walked past the lights of the late night brasseries and bars.

Rudee caught my eye in the mirror and added, “I'd avoid that place like the flu, Mademoiselle Mac.”

We dropped Sashay off outside the scarf museum and returned to Rudee's rooms at the Église Russe. “Hungry?” he asked, and without considering what that might bring, I said, “Yes, starving!”

He served himself a bowl of something pungent and steamy and made me a sandwich and a salad of some-thing called
m
â
che
, which was better than it sounded, with cherry tomatoes. Had food ever tasted this good before? He chopped a pear and placed it between us.

“So, you see a career for yourself as a cigarette girl, Mac?” He grinned at my look of disgust as I recalled the scene at the club and sniffed my hair and clothing. “Well, at least as a detective.” He seemed pleased with the evening's efforts. “But that's it for your little sniffer. I will call Magritte in the morning and let him know everything.”

To me it felt like a jigsaw puzzle in which we'd found a few pieces that fit together, but even the frame was scattered in bits.

I climbed the steps to my room and fell onto my bed. Maybe it was the fact that my hair was over my face and smelled like an ashtray that woke me up some hours later, but I couldn't get back to sleep. I stared out the window at the now-quiet city and watched the light revolving around the Eiffel Tower, hoping it might lull me to sleep, but instead it was my thoughts that spun slowly. I pulled on my jacket. Maybe I'd just catch a little night air. Of course, I had a pretty good idea of where Les Halles was. I tiptoed past Rudee, snoring happily, his hands in his gloves resting on the blanket, keeping the music in.

The shops at Les Halles were long closed, but there were lots of stragglers on the streets in the area, some stumbling home from a long night of lifting glasses and emptying them, some looking for a quiet doorway to rest in until morning. This was a different Paris than the one I'd been shown so far, sadder and lonelier.

At night, with the lights out in the shops, the buildings looked the same, except for the old churches, dark and silent. I was about to give up, thinking what a crazy idea this was, wandering the city by myself at night, when a pair of truck headlights blinded me for a moment before turning down a narrow dead end street. If it hadn't been for the lights of the truck reflecting off its shiny surface, I would have missed seeing the building altogether. Then I saw the sign in raised letters above the steel doors:
SHADOWCORPS
.

The building was like a shadow itself, seeming to have no real shape in the darkened street, just a presence, and not a very pleasant one. The back of the truck opened, and two men got out and began unloading long, heavy-looking identical crates. The doors of Shadowcorps opened, and three more men emerged, one barking orders at the others as they assembled a conveyer belt that led into the building. I tucked myself into a doorway and watched them work with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. As they finished emptying the truck, curiosity took over for the moment, and I inched down the wall beside the truck, hoping that they would be too busy and it would be too dark for them to notice me. Four of them struggled with the conveyer belt, trying to fold it up, and the one giving orders stepped away from the doors and snorted, “Can't do anything right without me, can you, you bunch of lugs?”

As they groaned and tugged, I saw my chance and slipped unnoticed into the foyer of Shadowcorps. A vacant reception desk provided the only hiding place. I told my breath to hold steady as the three men rolled their cargo on huge dollies around a corner and out of sight. I didn't dare look, but I heard elevator doors opening and closing and the sound of wheels and muffled voices, then nothing more. I waited for the silence to last a minute or so before quietly unfolding myself from behind the reception desk. My eyes slowly got used to the dark, cavernous lobby. It was completely empty — no plants, no directory, no signs telling you where to go, no chairs, no lamps, nothing. Even the reception desk was as naked as a landing strip. What kind of business went on here? And what was in those boxes?

My curiosity pulled me along to a set of elevator doors behind a wall that divided the entry area. The arrow above the gleaming silver doors pointed to minus five, and I stared at the dial, not understanding. With the exception of
G
for ground, all the floors were marked with a minus. The air seemed to blow around me like I was in a tunnel that went up and down, then it hit me — this building was completely and totally empty. I pushed the “down” button and waited, hoping that no one else was watching the arrow move at the same time as me.

I held my breath as the doors slid open, revealing what was more like a small room than a conventional elevator. I'm not sure what I would have done if someone had been there to greet me. I got in and pushed
-5
. The doors opened quietly onto a small hall. Nearby I could hear the sound of voices and activity and a lot of machinery in action. I peered around the corner into a vast warehouse-sized room with a low ceiling lit by tubes of bluish silver lights. Men in smocks, wearing goggles and holding blowtorches, were working on a piece of criss-crossed metal hundreds of feet long in sections of about thirty feet each. Was this what was being unloaded from the truck tonight?

At the far end of the room, a cluster of workers, also wearing goggles and heavy, padded gloves, were loading a giant hook into a huge fiery oven. I was so fascinated by this activity, I almost didn't hear the elevator doors hissing open behind me. I looked around frantically for a hiding place and had to take what I could find. I jumped behind a large rack on wheels, hung with cables, torches, and other tools that didn't look at all like the ones my grandfather kept in his garage. I crouched as low as my body would go. The crunch of three sets of footsteps stopped no more than a few feet from where I was hiding. Through the cables I could see only the bottom halves of their bodies, dressed in black, of course. It must be in season here. I spotted the shoes of the man in the middle of the little group. Actually, they weren't shoes at all, but highly polished silver cowboy boots, a sight that was becoming all too common for my liking.

“Did you remember to feed the gargoyles, Phlegm?” wheezed a familiar voice that I recognized as belonging to the bony-handed Shadow from the club.

“Yeah, bones and all, Scar,” the other Shadow replied. “Looking good, Louche. Every construction crew in Paris would want to run this baby.”

A third voice I'd heard at the table of ghosts added, in his own special hiss, “Except we'll be doing some deconstruction.” If a snake could laugh, I think I knew then what it would sound like.

They moved closer to the work in progress, and I heard Louche, or Luc as I was sure he was, saying, “Yesss ... ouiii” approvingly as he examined what I now understood was a giant crane. He stepped up onto a workbench, steadied by a couple of his henchmen. The blowtorches were lowered, and the buzz of machinery slowed as he smiled and gestured at the proceedings. “Well done, my friends. The Shadows always work late,
n'est-ce pas
?” A ripple of quiet laughter reverberated in the huge room. “And in a few days, we will have our very own Bastille Day celebrations!”

My curiosity was disappearing, and my desire to be above ground was getting stronger by the second. I moved slowly along a darkened wall in the flickering bluish light toward a doorway that I hoped would get me out of there quickly. The workers applauded Fiat's words, providing the distraction I needed.

I stepped into an ancient passageway of large stones with puddles of blackish water pooling at my feet. One hallway led to another just like it, then another. Pipes twisted like ropes were attached to the walls, and the passages rose and dipped as I made my way through them to who knew where. The sounds of work became a dull throb in the distance. Even if I could find my way back, I knew it would be the wrong choice. That bad taste in the back of the throat called fear was making its way into my mouth. I was concentrating hard on not having it turn to panic when my shoulder bumped against a metal ladder. Feet dripping, I hauled myself up to the lowest rung and began climbing. I looked up into complete blackness, but it seemed to hold more hope than what was below.

After what must have been ten minutes of climbing, during which I did not slip once, nor think of how high I must have been, I saw light. I banged my head against something cold and hard and peered through metal bars onto a street. I realized I was looking through a sewer grate. Anyone larger would have been facing the return trip on the ladder, but not me. I tucked my hair into my hood and squeezed and pushed and wriggled until I was standing on a dark street, covered in things that should have been going down a drain, with wet feet and no idea where I was. A lone car sat at a taxi stand on the corner. I almost cried when I saw the exhaust pipes shaped like trombones. When I threw open the back door and fell in, I must have looked like a creature crawling out of a swamp.

Dizzy turned and looked at me from under his porkpie hat. “Where'll it be,
mademoiselle
? The Russian church?”

The street and the church were dark when Dizzy dropped me off back at Rudee's. He hadn't asked me a thing, and I don't think I would've had the energy to tell him anyway.

“The Hacks are rehearsing tomorrow. Maybe I'll see you there.”

I thanked him and climbed past a snoring Rudee into the safety of my room. With my smoky hair and clothing smelling of the sewer, I was seriously beginning to compete with Rudee's stove for odour champion of Paris.

I woke with a start as rain rattled the windows of the turret. The wind cracked and snapped like sheets flapping in the storm, but I felt oddly comforted by the sound and fell back to sleep right away. I dreamed about surveying Paris from the sky sitting on a giant hook that swung gently in the wind, until I was dropped down a chimney that turned into an endless tunnel, out of which I landed hard on the ground.

“You alright, Mac?” Rudee called out. He must have heard me tumble from my bed.

“Yeah, I'm okay, Rudee,” I answered groggily as I entered his room. He looked up a little sheepishly from burying his face in a bunch of flowers that he was putting in a tin can.

“From Sashay,” he grinned, “to thank me for my little gift. She is the cream of the cat parade, no?”

Hard to disagree
, I thought. I tried to wash last night off me in the tiny bathroom and thought about what to tell Rudee. I didn't have much of a chance, since he tapped on the door. “Hacks practice time. You coming?”

I didn't want to spend any time without friends, so I threw on some clothes and chased Rudee, who was carrying an armload of sheet music and a shopping bag to the cab. As he pulled out of the lane, he eyed me in the rear view mirror. “You slept late,
ma petite
. Storm keep you awake?”

I could tell he was checking out the bruised-looking circles under my eyes. I really wanted to tell him about last night's excursion to Les Halles and Shadowcorps, but he was acting so protective toward me that I felt guilty. He also seemed less morose than usual, even perky, as he chattered away like a magpie between rude gestures at anyone who risked sharing the road with us. “Last practice before the Bastille Day party.” Mention of the national celebration made me shudder, thinking of last night. “What did you think of Sashay's dance, Mac? You know she is famous for taking the audience around the calendar to their childhood days when she performs. That's why they call her the ‘Queen of Dreams.'”

I knew what he meant as I recalled my own reverie at the club.

“Bah, they won't let me in there. Not that Sashay wants me dangling around anyway. Blag's family owns the club, so I'm banned, and of course he can go whenever he wants.”

Madeleine cut in on a burst of static. “
Bonjour,
all my low rollers,
ça va
? Just a reminder to all of you that the Bastille Day party at
CAFTA
features our very own Hacks starting after the fireworks ... if there's room on the stage for all that talent.”

Rudee positively glowed at this announcement.

“Free blue, white, and red earplugs at the door!” Madeleine cackled, and it sounded like more static.

Rudee laughed and waved at the radio. “We'll show them. They'll be dancing their shoes away.”

The practice was in a room above
CAFTA
that, as my dad would say, looked like a tornado had passed through it. Instruments, amplifiers, speakers, microphones, music stands, coffee cups, pastry wrappers, coats, and sheet music were scattered randomly. On the walls were posters of bands I'd never heard of like The Stereo Types, The Uncalled Four, and Colour Me CooCoo. I was sure I wasn't missing much.

“It's Mademoiselle Mac. She's back,” said Mink Maynard from behind his drums.

Dizzy said “Hi” and gave me a knowing wink.

After a round of secret handshakes, Rudee introduced me to the brothers Maurice and Henri Rocquette on stand-up bass and banjo. They bowed and smiled, showing perfect teeth beneath tiny moustaches. Henri, the younger, had slicked-back grey hair, while Maurice, the older, had a shiny black dome that glistened like motor oil and featured a little hint of grey. Rudee handed out set lists and sheet music and from a shopping bag produced a collection of matching Hawaiian berets. “Part of the ‘Lighten Up' campaign. What do you think?”

He tossed a beret to me, but I couldn't bring myself to try it on. Since there were no extra chairs, I curled up on a mound of coats and watched the Hacks storm through their repertoire. They seemed to forget I was there as the laughter got louder. They took turns playing solos, and the best ones were greeted with “bravos” from the others. The endings of the songs were ragged at first, sounding at times like someone dropping an armload of dishes. Gradually they got better as they went along, then they were on to the next tune, Mink coolly counting each song in by clicking his sticks together over his head and calling out, “One two, you know what to do.” The song list included all their favourites, geared to keeping a party going, and there were a couple of heated moments while a sequence was arrived at.

“Nonono ... ‘Grasse Matinee' can't follow ‘Kiss My Sister.' They're in the same key!”

“Well, what about ‘Gâteaux To Go,' then ‘Stinkbomb Serenade?”

“Are you crazy? They'll be throwing things at us.” And so on.

It all culminated with an almost unrecognizable version of the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” a very difficult song to disguise. My mind wandered as a long jam rambled on into the afternoon. Rudee and Dizzy were standing over me smiling when I came to as the others packed up their instruments. “I thought you California girls were partypoppers,” said Rudee.

“Music for dreams ... so it seems,” called Mink from behind his hi-hat.

“Nice to meet you, Henri, Maurice,” I said.

“
Enchanté
,” they replied as they headed for the stairs carrying their instruments.

“Hey, Rudee, let's grab a bite at Le Losange,” said Dizzy. “I'm tired of the food at
CAFTA
, and we'll be seeing plenty of it at the party.”

“Sounds good, Diz,” said Rudee, who was polishing the chrome of his organ stand.

“Mac, you want to ride in style for a change?” asked Dizzy.

I looked at Rudee, who grinned. “Go bohemian, little one, you'll appreciate the higherlife after that.”

As we walked toward the cab, Dizzy put his pork pie back on and tossed the Hawaiian beret into the trash. “Lighten up,
mon derriere
,” he chortled.

The engine sputtered and coughed as he looked over at me. “Not that it's any of my business what you were up to in Les Halles in the middle of the night, Mac, but I figured we'd at least better have our stories straight. Rudee's my best friend, and he really cares about you. Since you arrived in Paris, he feels responsible for you.”

I felt terrible knowing how last night's outing would affect my friend and protector. We wound our way up the hill to Montmartre. Dizzy pointed out an impossibly narrow brick building shaped like a lookout tower and identified it as Madeleine's office before stopping in front of the Sacre Coeur church.

“Dizzy, I know it was stupid, but I had to find out what I could. You know Paris is getting darker, not lighter, and I think I know who's behind it. Did Rudee tell you about what I overheard at the club?”

He nodded, and I went on to tell him the story of my late night visit to Shadowcorps. His eyes widened, and he pursed his lips. “Whew, this is serious stuff. Let's go. Rudee will be waiting; he has to know.” I didn't like it, but I knew he was right.

Le Losange was a vaguely diamond-shaped brasserie on a busy corner. Rudee was already in a red vinyl booth by the window and waved us over. We all settled in and gave our orders to a waiter in a red apron that touched the tops of his shoes. He had an if-you-want-to-be-so-foolish tone as he noted our requests. I asked for ketchup on my green beans to see if smoke would come out of his ears, but he just ignored me.

I could only delay the inevitable for so long. Rudee told us through mouthfuls of oozing crêpe that he'd been to see Inspector Magritte about the domed church theft and told him about what I'd overheard at the Moulin D'Or. Apparently Magritte had a large map of Paris on his wall with pictures of the church from all angles, and a magnet of the missing cross that he moved around the map and some spaghetti-like scribbles.

“He took notes,” Rudee related, “and seemed genuinely concerned. I could tell his hat was elsewhere, though, because he was distracted by a leak in the ceiling of his office that had just extinguished his pipe. When I left, he had opened his umbrella and was drawing more noodles on his map.”

All of this just made me impatient, and with Dizzy's encouragement, I told Rudee about my visit to Shadowcorps. His expression went from surprise to shock to horror. “You climbed a ladder for five storeys and squeezed through a grate in the gutter in Les Halles?”

At this point his face was in his hands, and he seemed to be mumbling a prayer in some weird language. He looked up at me and put on his most serious expression. “Mac, I'm not going to go behind the back burner with you on this one.”

I couldn't help it, and neither could Dizzy. We both erupted in laughter at once. Dizzy, unfortunately, had a mouthful of
tarte tatin
which wound up decorating the red vinyl beside Rudee.

“What?” Rudee asked indignantly, but I could see that he was trying not to smile. “Go ahead and laugh your heads till Thursday. I'm just glad Dizzy was at that cab stand.”

A television set over the bar was showing pictures of the golden-topped monument in Place De La Bastille as we left the restaurant. It all seemed like preparation for the national holiday, until someone at the bar said in a shocked voice, “
Mon Dieu, non
!”

We stopped and turned in time to see the windblown reporter, mike in hand, breathlessly recounting the daring theft of the statue from the top of the column. She referred to “Another outlandish crime against the state and all that Parisians hold sacred. We ask not only ‘why' was this beautiful work stolen, but ‘how.'”

The camera pulled back to show the size of the square and the crush of cars swirling around it. In the background of the shot, I couldn't help but notice the ominous silhouette of a construction crane.