She’d set fire to the walls. We wouldn’t know it at first. We’d only see the glow from the opposite side of the chamber once it fully bloomed, once its irreversible reality had been set in motion. Da Vinci moved to the side to try see beyond the pile of furniture.
“Is that . . .?” he said.
“It’s . . .” yelled Hugo. “IT’S ON FIRE!”
We looked around, all three of us—the two men frantically advancing forward while I happened, just happened, to glance back in the other direction and see her, Katarina, already behind us. She was carrying one of the buckets from the stack of supplies—paint thinner, maybe—heaving a sloshing quantity onto the area we’d just passed through. Hugo saw that I noticed something, turned around, and immediately aimed his shotgun at her.
“There she is!” He pulled the trigger—bam—just a split second after I’d grabbed his muzzle, making him miss.
I’d shoved the barrel upward just as he fired. Katarina ran as da Vinci then chased her, both of them skirting the edge of the massive room in a footrace—her chance to flee toward the main tunnel while I kept my grip on Hugo’s gun, wrangling it with both of my hands fully committed to the act, squaring up with him, getting right up in his face. “Four minutes,” I said out loud, battling to gain ground and nearly overtaking him until he pushed me off, shoving me backward. He immediately spun around, trying to bludgeon me but missing because I’d traveled too far backward. He now had enough room between us to get a dominant grip on his weapon and aim it directly at me, point-blank, just as I swung up at him, having lunged forward, to punch him in the throat.
And I took him down with one hit.
I struck him so hard I felt his interior flesh crumple against my fist—larynx, cartilage, whatever was in there—crunching in a way you wouldn’t think possible. He never saw it coming—what’d been simmering in me for hours, years, decades, the pent-up rage of an undetonated man. Hugo’s head fell forward and his legs buckled.
With the flames from the furniture advancing, I had to duck to get to safety while his body caught fire behind me. I ran for the farthest tunnel, heading to where Katarina disappeared, running as hard as I could, unsure how I’d navigate the corners of da Vinci’s demented theater in total darkness, only to arrive and find it fully illuminated by flames and on the verge of collapse.
Still under construction, the gilded ceiling had been braced with wooden beams, which were now crumbling in the heat, falling over in a mangled monstrosity that blocked the main tunnel like a prison gate. I came to a halt at the edge of a passage, where, beyond this barrier, a path sloped up into the darkness. I pulled as hard as I could on the bars of the fallen scaffolding to get in there, not caring how hot the metal was, pulling with everything I had. Crouched. Holding it. Tugging at it. Straining. Crouching lower. Which was when da Vinci came hurtling from the shadowy depths of the tunnel, directly toward my face. He’d lunged at the barrier itself, apparently trying to break through to return to my side, ramming his head through the small gap between bars, gasping for air, colliding with my chin and knocking me on my back. He was different now—his clothes blackened and charred at the fringes—face sweaty and red. He was frantically trying to remove the obstacle between us. Trying. Desperately. Futilely. Quickly realizing his only hope would be to grab my shin and hold me with him, forcing me to assist him just to get myself free.
I didn’t struggle against it. I grabbed his shoulders and pulled him toward me as hard as I could so that his head, inch by inch, slowly moved farther through the narrow opening between bars, so that his trachea began to mash down on the crossbar farther and farther. I was pinning him with his own momentum. To asphyxiate him. To end him. A boy choking the drunken patriarch. He, of course, fully reversed his effort, understanding what I’d begun to do, while I kept pulling and pulling and pulling, shifting my legs to then leg press against the bars, using every part of what I had in me to choke him, gradually feeling his strength give way, his face growing woozy, until I finally felt his whole body cease to resist anything at all, and just as he was about to pass out completely, he was stolen from me.
Katarina. I never saw her coming. From the opposite side of the barrier, from his side, she’d crawled forth from the darkness like a fiend of the underworld to grab his torso and torque him away from me, pulling him backward until the bastard tumbled to their side of the cage.
She’d won.
She’d taken him from me.
“What’re you doing?!” I yelled.
She had her limp trophy. “The . . . stairs . . .”
“I had him. What’re you doing?!” I didn’t stay down on the ground. “Let’s lift the other end to get you out.” I got up and rushed to the other end of the scaffolding to move it. “You can slip through. C’mon.”
“The stairs . . .” she repeated, totally out of breath. “At the edge . . . You don’t have time. You go through the chamber door on the side of the stairs . . . and get to the surface.”
I pointed to the tunnel behind her. “That’s a dead end behind you. That leads to one of the bedrooms where there is no exit . . . built with no . . . no poss . . . no possible . . . way of . . .”
I saw the reality.
I saw it written within her. The flames were swelling. In a matter of seconds the fire would consume the entrance to her passageway, sealing it shut for good.
“I’m where I need to be,” she said.
“No.”
“You’re a good person, Adam.”
“No, no, no, I’M NOT LEAVING WITHOUT YOU!”
She pulled da Vinci backward, dragging him into the darkness.
I continued shouting for her to come with me but it was useless. She’d foreseen a choice like this long ago. I tugged on the bars, violently shaking them in a frenzy, yelling her name over and over, refusing to accept that she’d disappeared, then, maniacally determined to save her, I hurried out through the chamber door. If I could make it to street level fast enough, I could get to the outside wall of the bedroom she’d be in, wherever the hell it was, and crack its stupid, special window open. I raced through the burning wreckage, through the Armageddon, through the pieces falling down in flames to find one of the doors on the side of the grand staircase and barge through it, praying it led to whatever place they were calling The Swan. My new tunnel led me upward, east then north, forcing me to return west, then south to recover lost ground, wasting precious seconds I didn’t have. Arriving at the exit, I kicked and kicked and kicked at the metal door handle until the door broke open into a nondescript stairwell that fed into a random street. I sprinted up those steps out onto rue de Faubourg du Temple, heading to the massive public square known as Place de la République, the one place where I’d find The Swan. Right in the middle of the heart of Paris.
Bronze. Bold. The size of a city bus. It was a temporary piece of ancient-modern art erected next to the one permanent fixture out here, the statue of Marianne the Goddess of Liberty, who was unwittingly leading the charge for the massive bird behind her—da Vinci’s bird—turning her back on the outstretched wings that towered thirty feet over the swarms of people. And there were a lot of people.
I ran to the front of the base, where it was immersed in a large fountain, lined with one-way mirrors. This is where I had to attack.
“Break it!” I yelled to anyone within earshot.
I’d torn through the herds of tourists, shoving someone into the water just to get myself through the crowd. Nobody understood. I jumped over the rim of the fountain and into the basin, needing something, anything. The only tool around me was a skateboard, so I yanked it out of a kid’s hands and started to swing it at the mirrored walls with all my might, just utterly pounding the glass, wham, wham, wham, wham, one slam after another, trying to shatter the mirror, trying to get even a hint of a dent.
Nothing. It was bulletproof. People were watching me but I was aware of no one. I must’ve hit the mirror a hundred times before the police finally grabbed me—two roving officers—as I tried to tell them, “Dans l’intérior!” Pointing to the interior. “She’s inside! You understand? Girl! Inside! Girl! Elle est là!” Eliciting only their judgments of lunacy. They pulled me off the wall and forced me to my knees, forcing me down into the fountain water, so that all I would see in front of me was the three of us in the reflection, then they pushed me forward to subdue me, inadvertently pushing me closer to the glass, where I would see nothing but my own face as I called her name, feeling every possible emotion at once. Pain. Regret. Despair. Betrayal. Sorrow. Rage. Adoration. Pride. Shame. Love. Anger. “She’s in there!” I yelled. “You get it?!”
And, most of all, admiration.
“Katarina!”
She was admired.
“Arrête!” said the cop.
“She’s here.”
“ARRÊTE! CALME TOI!” They pulled me back from the glass, yelling at me to stop struggling, restraining the tantrum of a grown boy punching nothing but shadows.
At the other end of the statue, at the front end, the crowd had started to delight in the aria of the grand bird. A noise had begun. The noise. Da Vinci’s winged demon was starting to trumpet its song, with every pipe and tube now channeling what were da Vinci’s own screams. His alone. I could hear him crying out within the melodic distortion as various people around me smiled. As children giggled. As mothers pointed. It was sickly surreal. On even the most average day in Place de la République, you have street performers and food vendors and music and dancing and street soccer and couples kissing and old folks strolling—hundreds and hundreds of people representing every fragment of the population—and today those fragments were uniting to delight in the bellows of hell itself. Within days of this event, the coroner’s report would tell us that Morgan da Vinci died pressed up against the interior pane of a scalding-hot window within the breast of this statue, his face literally having melted off. It’d tell us that Katarina had held him there, that both of them were burned alive, that, based on my own statement, only a male voice was discernible, crying out in pain. Not a female’s. Not hers. Not hers. She didn’t surrender a single tear. Within thirty minutes of his demise, I’d find myself cuffed in front of my dear Detective Élodie Michel. The two patrolmen had summoned her from her office. I’d immediately tell her there was a fire below the entrance of Canal Saint-Martin and that within this fire she’d find exactly what I’d been trying to convince her of—that a number of associates of mine were involved in very bad behavior. I’d tell her how I’d spent the final hour prior to her arrival. I’d give her a minute by minute account: I was in the fountain, the crowd was applauding as The Swan trumpeted its final note, reverberating all the way to the edge of the statue of Marianne the Goddess of Liberty, delivering a crescendo that no one, not even the founding father himself, would’ve foreseen, and though I continued to search that mirror for any trace of our legendary friend, I saw only my own hand reaching for what was no longer there.