RAOUL
10.
I arrived at the Giry house at a little after midnight. My brother did not try to hinder me from pursuing my suspicions. He was too broken by his own loss. When the managers made their misguided attempt to bring me to reason, offering a dose of laudanum and a carriage ride to my own bed, my brother poured himself another brandy, leaned across the bar and said, ‘I hope that you never have cause to test this, gentlemen, but believe me when I say that sometimes tilting at windmills can be the best balm for grief.’
His face was pouched beneath the eyes, his large nose red and clogged with tears; he looked so much older that I was suddenly struck by the resemblance he bore to our ancient father. He said, ‘Give him the address; let him speak to the women. At worst, he will question them and learn nothing. At best he will thrash them with his words when what they tell him brings the sad truth home. Either way, he will heal all the faster.’ Philippe shot the whole contents of the glass down his throat, sank into his chair and said in a quiet voice, ‘God knows that I wish I had someone to scream at right now, someone to blame. As it stands, I cannot even truthfully slander myself.’
He buried his face in his hands.
Monsieur Andre opened a drawer in his desk, rifled through file cards. He copied down the address he found in a hand that shook and spattered the scrap he wrote upon with black drops of ink that resembled burnt gunpowder.
Few carriages remained outside the theatre. This was unsurprising considering the wreckage of the night. I passed the slow moving, exhausted groups of hospital wagons that, at this late hour, carried only the dead. A few firemen sat on the steps of the entrance sipping from a shared brown bottle, one child, splendidly dressed and as yet unclaimed by his surviving relatives, wept into his hands beneath the cart which bore the tank of water which finally extinguished the flames.
I clenched my jaws and walked even faster, considering the mind that could justify such waste. He did it all for the sake of pillage and capture. My will resolved itself. I owed a service to the world; I would track and slay the man who did this, even if I found that I had been mistaken about the identity of the headless corpse, even if Christine had died beneath the rubble. Someone, after all, had planted the bombs and planned the detonations. Someone had hanged the heavy baritone and taken the head off of an innocent girl, leaving her nameless.
And if, in the end, I found my love alive but ruined I resolved to swallow my disgust without ever showing her that I resented her for being spoiled. I would marry her in spite of it, if she still breathed, no matter what followed I would bring her home.
This was one promise I kept. I never knew that foulness could come wearing more than one form. I did not know that promises could be kept and broken all at once.
The neighbourhood that the Girys haunted was rough, there were prostitutes about, beer halls, and no cabbies, but it was not nearly as decrepit as I’d expected. The shops were all filled with merchandise; no windows were broken. The houses were small, but most had been recently painted. Rubbish was in barrels, not scattered on the streets, and not even the few urchins I saw were picking through the bins for meals.
The slate steps for number 227 had been recently swept, the pot planted with daisies was watered, well-tended. Even in my rage, this residence was nothing like the one I would have imagined for the dwelling of a former convict.
I knew that, if my plan were to go forward, I could not reveal my conjectures to the women. I must approach this conversation as though I were honestly appealing to them for information, not accusing them of participating in the plot.
I found myself staring into the open face of a flower, suddenly supremely exhausted, focusing my energy on that golden glow as though I could fortify my soul with a fragment of beauty. I knocked on the door. Waited a moment hearing nothing but silence. I knocked again, harder.
After a few seconds I heard the clatter of feet rushing to the door.
‘Who is it?’ A rough girl’s voice, a slight lisp, ‘Don’t you know it’s after midnight?’
Little Meg. It had to be. So much for her supposed twisted ankle.
I answered in my most commanding tone, ‘Madame, it is the Vis Comte de Changy. Open the door. I will speak to your mother.’
I heard the metallic clank of a drawn lock, the door drew open a few inches and the girl’s dark, puckered face peered out. She examined me a moment, observed the street behind me, and drew the door closed long enough to unfasten the security chain. It must have been mounted fairly high on the beam, because the motion was accompanied with a series of acrobatic grunts and the sound of long-nailed fingers scrabbling on wood.
When she opened it again her face was flushed, she smiled at me through closed lips and stood aside for me to pass her, entering the hallway.
‘It is a little late for visitors,’ she said, leading me to the parlour to wait for her mother to make herself presentable. The girl was wearing a loose, flowered dress that flowed down to her ankles, her hands held tight together inside the deep pockets that pouched out the front of her pinafore. It was strange to see this tiny dancer dressed for sleep and not the stage. She looked so reduced, seen outside of her context.
‘We can wait for her in here.’ Keeping her hands where they were, she backed into the lip of the scrappy yellow sofa and hopped on to it, sliding her small bottom back onto the cushions in a motion that was obscene because it was so childish. ‘Is this about the fire, then?’
I took the seat she offered, a rickety armchair that had obviously been rather a fine one, not so very long ago. ‘You’ve heard about the fire then? You were very lucky to miss it.’
Her face snapped closed like a purse. ‘I was unwell.’
I leaned forward into the stink of her breath. ‘Then how did you come to hear of it?’
The girl was opening her ungodly mouth, ready to reply, when her mother answered for her. I had not heard her approach.
‘La Carlotta was sitting in the audience when it happened.’ The older woman was standing in the doorway, fully dressed in her usual shabby black. ‘She had not yet recovered her voice, but wished to see the show. About an hour ago she sent a boy with a note. Didn’t you wonder why we answered the door at this late hour? We were upstairs, in great turmoil, only just beginning to undress again for sleep.’
The woman was tough; her hard face never flickered into smile or gained a softer expression. She sat on the couch besides her small daughter.
‘Forgive me, Madame, if I say that seems uncommonly kind of her. I have never known a Diva to show such consideration for a box manager.’
The woman laid a gnarled hand on Little Meg’s wildflower patterned knee. ‘You have not yet offered tea to our visitor.’
The girl looked up at her, her expression blank. ‘It is very late, Mother.’
I interjected, glad for a chance to get rid of the girl. She was very like a terrier. I addressed the mother. ‘Tea would be lovely.’
She flicked her ringless finger towards the door. ‘Go.’
The girl slid forward off of the sofa, her hands still hidden I wondered how she was planning to bear out the tray with her fingers shoved into her pockets.
The old woman sat silently for a few seconds, examining me. Finally she came to her decision and signalled with a smile that she was ready to talk.
‘I am certain you know by now that I was a prostitute. Do not look so shocked, I hear all of the gossip.’
I closed my mouth.
She continued, ‘You also know that I was jailed for the offence, sentenced to a year or the payment of a large fine. I served three months before my darling daughter bought me out by selling her hair and teeth, her only physical beauties.’ She sighed, ‘Such a pity that only one of those gifts could ever come back to her.’
She smiled sadly at the sour memory of love, ‘Have you never wondered, monsieur, how a woman like me could be trusted to gain a respectable position?’
In truth I had, and this was all very interesting, but I could not, for the life of me, see how it was connected to the matter at hand. When I told her so, she laughed, saying that I needed to learn how to listen.
She continued, ‘After my release I went back to work – this was, you recall, five years ago, near the end of the siege, but the war was still raging.
‘I was destitute. My daughter had begun ratting for the city ballet but there was little money in it. She earned a roof with her dancing, and when she was still a child, still growing, she learned to supplement her income by taking men into her bed.’ Her face clouded then. ‘It was very hard to watch. Thankfully, my luck changed soon. One of my regulars was the head architect of the Opera House, Monsieur Garnier, a brilliant gentleman who, though living in severely reduced circumstances and grieving himself over the abandonment of his building and the sudden death of his son, nevertheless found room for me in his heart. I became his mistress.’
She smiled at the recollection, a lip twitch in memory of happiness long spent, ‘He would have married me, I am sure, but for my history and the fact that my first husband, Monsieur Giry, probably remains alive somewhere, though I have not heard from him since my Little Meg was an infant at the breast.
‘As for my dear Charles, he died of consumption shortly after construction began again. It was lucky for me that he had many friends who respected him enough to leave aside their disgust at my past and offer me a job which paid enough in tips to allow my daughter and I to maintain our hold on the architect’s house.’
She stood, ready to show me to the door. ‘I trust that you are satisfied that neither my daughter nor myself would wreck the last visible structure that our saviour left upon the earth?’
I remained where I sat, unwilling to be ushered from her house. ‘Madame, I never suspected that your fingers set those bombs beneath the stage, but…’
‘Bombs?’ She darted forward like a serpent, taking hold of my arm. ‘There were bombs? My friend said fires only.’
I disengaged her fingers, ‘Yes, Madame. Bombs. Dynamite. There was a tremendous explosion. Many were killed.’ I rose now, sensing that it would be wise to intimidate her with a display of my masculine advantages of strength and height, ‘There was also an abduction. My fiancée, Miss Daaé, was taken by the man who set this destruction in motion. He planned it all, as a means of capturing her.’
Her eyes grew wide, terribly frightened. She spoke one word, ‘Erik?’ Then fell silent.
Now I took hold of her, my hands on her shoulders. ‘Erik? Is that the name of the fiend?’ I was shaking her, without intending to. Her head lolled loosely on the stem of her throat. ‘Her life, her innocent life is at stake, woman! You must tell me what you know.’
And that was when the girl, the loyal daughter, appeared in the doorway. She dropped the tray she was carrying and I turned to look at her, shocked at the sound of fracturing crockery.
‘Let go of my mother!’ She shrieked at me, plunging her hands into her pockets.
I found that I could not loosen my grip on the old woman’s throat. I watched the tea mingle with the teapot shards and seeped into the floorboards, spreading like dark urine across the floor.
Madame Giry gasped in my hands, ‘Please!’
I ignored her, of course, much to my sorrow. The woman was obviously in deep shock and yet I shook her, striking her once or twice across the cheekbones, shouting, ‘You must tell me who did this! I know that you know!’
Little Meg shouted at me once more, ‘Stop! You are killing her!’ and then she shot me through my centre. I heard the bullet enter before I felt any of the pain from it. I dropped the old woman and, I remember, she fell to a faint on the floor. I turned to Little Meg as I collapsed, the edges of the room darkening around me. I think that I was going to ask her a question. I noticed that she had torn the pocket of her dress when she pulled out the gun.
I woke up several days later, in the hospital. I had been found bleeding in the gutter, robbed of my money and my watch, a few short blocks from my house. The nursing nuns told me that it was very lucky that whoever had shot me had used faulty bullets. The shells had fractured as the gun fired. I was filled with shrapnel that I would carry for the rest of my life, but none of my organs had been punctured.
It took me nearly three weeks to recover. My brother visited often, but told me nothing about either the Girys or Christine, other than to let me know that the body that they took for hers, the headless mystery, had been given to the Countess who buried it next to the grave of the girl’s violinist father in Brittany.
As for myself, I had almost accepted the loss of her, I had wept out my grief in an ocean of bandages brought by the nuns. It was not until I returned to the house of my brother that anyone thought to give me the letter that would change my life.
11.
I was unpacking the bags that Philippe had brought to comfort me in the hospital, shelving my favourite volumes of art reproductions and hanging my morning jacket on the handle of the wardrobe to be taken away and washed.
I had to stop and massage the sealed scar besides my navel, the site where most of the lead shards sliced their way into my belly. That damned girl. I do not know what held me from reporting her to the police to be properly tried.
No that is a lie. I knew, I know. It was pity for the mother.
When I first woke from the surgery I felt such a surge of wrath at her, the likes of which I had never experienced before. The nursing nuns were very frightened at the violence of my incoherent shouting. Thinking that I was experiencing heart failure or succumbing to stress-induced brain fever they fetched the surgeon who spoon-fed me morphine until I slept beyond the boundaries of rage, grief, or physical agony.
When I woke I was considerably calmer. I had dreamed about her, you see. Madame Giry. I saw her sitting in that filthy cell, trapped and weeping, while the only person left in the world who loved her mutilated herself to effect a rescue.
I knew that I had succumbed to violence against the dancer’s mother, and that my actions were inexcusable. It must have been very frightening for Little Meg when she found us. The girl, it seemed, was protecting her still. It was almost as though their roles had been reversed; the mother was in the keeping of the daughter.
So I let them go. I told the police that I remembered nothing of the night of the fire, and bent my will to my recovery.
This was the first time that I had ever thought about a whore, about the misfortunes that could drag a woman to such sin. I have never forgotten it, and to this day I do not regret protecting them.
I sat down on my bed, thrusting the thick curtains aside and fingering my belly. I had just resolved to take another swallow of laudanum and fall into a grief-dissolving dream, (a habit that I have lately resumed) when there was a knock on my door.
‘Come!’ I ordered.
A servant entered, a new girl that I had never seen before. Apparently the woman she replaced had been there that night, in the pit-audience. She never emerged.
This girl, a thin twelve-year-old in a too-large dress and a cap that slid over her eyes, curtsied once and handed me a thick letter. ‘This came for you, sir. While you were in hospital.’
I had nothing to tip her, so I thanked her with a smile and she fled, disappointed, flouncing her skirts. I could hear her muttering against me in the hallway.
I examined the envelope. It was made from a single sheet of paper that had been folded and glued. It was cheap foolscap made from badly processed pulp, flecks of wood were visible in the grain. There was no postal mark, it must have been delivered in person. My name, scrawled across the front in an uncertain hand, was the only identifying feature.
I sliced it open with my fingernail, unwilling to wait long enough to search my desk for my penknife or a letter-opener.
I found two folded sheets of that same cheap paper. They were scrawled all over, front and back, with words that were so tightly packed that they were just barely legible.
Dear Monsieur Changy,
I would like to apologise for the actions of my daughter, and for our treatment of you after your unfortunate accident. When Meg saw the way you handled me she was severely disturbed. You see, she has no malice in her, but rather she acted out of pure love for her mother.
My mind flashed back to the note I found in Christine’s chambers. The love letter sealed with the lyre of Orpheus.
…demanding extortionate payment in return for protection against misfortune against the scenery and cast.
I finished the letter, thought a moment, adjusting the pillows behind my head. I sent the servant for my brother.
After he had finished reading, the disbelief draining from his face along with his blood, he was white with rage and as angry as I was. He agreed to my plan almost immediately. It took the rest of the evening to seek and hire enough armed men to go after the monster. We did not wish to involve the police in order that we might spare Christine the scandal and Madame Giry another cycle of the year in jail. In the end we managed it. It was fortunate that the city was filled with unemployed soldiers itching for work. We set the time of our attack for early the next evening, after the repair work had concluded for the day and the workers had departed.
My brother contacted the managers as a courtesy. They gave their blessing, free reign of the theatre and access to tools, but they did not wish participate in the actual rescue, though they hoped that I would find my fiancée alive, well, and still fit for marriage.
Philippe at first tried to dissuade me from joining the raid, citing my injury, but he recognised that, like him, I was burning with vengeance.
‘I must be the one to rescue Christine.’ I told him, raising my body from my bed. ‘She will be my bride yet!’
He nodded once, bitterly smiling, and left me to rest.
It took me longer than usual to fall asleep. In the end I resorted again to the laudanum. I slept well, and woke late. By mid-afternoon I was more than ready to begin.
12.
We had some difficulty, at first, locating the entrance to the monster’s lair. The wall seemed to be constructed from a solid sheet of marble, impeccably smooth to the touch. We had only Madame Giry’s vague instructions to begin our search and I admit that (being young) I was easily frustrated. I paced the corridor, stalking back and forth across the tiles, while the former soldiers slumped against the walls gossiping and shooting dice.
It was Philippe’s idea to apply method to the search. Beginning directly outside of the door marked ‘Managers: Firmin & Andre’ my brother laid his ear to the wall and knocked, listening for the echo of reverberation. He repeated this every few feet until he stopped short, halfway down the corridor. He looked up, excitedly whistled; a shrill, high pitch that drew me to his side in a flurry. ‘Raoul, lay your head here.’
I did as he said and I heard the echo of his knocks for myself. Straightening again, my hand on the handle of my revolver, I said, ‘To be sure, it is hollow, but it looks exactly like the rest of the wall. How can we be certain that there is a passage?’
My brother smiled and guided my hand to a nearly imperceptible crack, straight as a knife-edge, that ran vertically from floor to ceiling. It was invisible to the eye, or nearly, but my touch recorded it. He said, ‘There is another exactly like it two and a half feet over. Doesn’t that sound right for a doorway?’
I returned his grin and together we began pressing and prying at the doorway until my fingers caught on a catch, a secret lever, made to look like a flaw in the marble. When I pressed this irregular protrusion the wall slid outward an inch and a half, revealing the doorway. I hooked my hands inside the blackness and pulled.
There was no stairway. There was no corridor.
All I saw was lathe and plaster, a dead-end!
I cried out in frustration, a sound which drew the soldiers from their game and caused my brother to place his restraining arm around my shoulders. I shook him off and struck the wall, belting out my rage at it until the dust flew and my sweat and saliva flowed. I was weeping without realising it, unconsciously pawing the tears from my eyes with the backs of my fists until I sank to the floor, exhausted.
The soldiers were staring at me; eight pairs of eyes convinced that I was mad. Only my brother failed to look at me. He was examining the wall that I had attacked, wiping away flecks of blood and shattered splinters to reveal a hole that opened like an eye into the kingdom of death.
‘Ah, my clever friend, now we have you!’ He picked up one of the axes we had brought and struck at the lathes. Instead of the struggle we expected, the whole wall fell forward, a door-sized plug that shattered to splinters on the stairs. The soldiers raised their voices, cheering, shouldering their guns and adjusting their knives in their belts. My brother came to me where I was sitting and offered me his hand, ‘Come on, Raoul. Let’s go and rescue your bride.’
With lit torches in hand, we plunged into the dark. It did not escape my notice that the stairs were nearly exactly the same, in materials and composition, as the grand entrance of the Opera House; albeit on a smaller scale. They were like fingers on the same hand, all of a piece. This building really was the product of a single mind – and it did not belong to Charles Garnier.
Our torchlight danced on the walls. As we descended past the typical basement brick, sinking into the bedrock, the corridor opened out until by the time the staircase ended we found ourselves inside a vast, black cavern. It was very like a cave, a natural formation. Our torches were not bright enough to light the walls, so we walked amidst a wealth of shadow. Somewhere out of sight we heard the sound of water dripping. After what felt like an hour, but must have really been only a few minutes, we came to a wall that opened up into three doors that hung with an inch or so of open space above the earth-strewn floor.
I paused for a moment, holding up my hand. ‘We need to make a decision. A monster is in here, somewhere. We need to know which way to go.’ This was like one of the fairy tales Christine’s father told us when we were still children. A monster, a princess, a castle underground. I knew that I was being tested. I hoped so much to pass.
One of our men, a rough-looking fellow with an eye-patch and a ragged vest, said, ‘The floor is pretty muddy. We had better look for tracks.’
After a few minutes he found some, a single set of man-sized prints leading into the centre doorway. I moved to open it, but he hesitated, holding on to my arm. He scratched his stubbled chin and said, ‘Now wait a minute, sonny.’ He flinched, ‘I mean “Sir”. You say this fella’s pretty smart?’
I nodded.
He continued, ‘Well, this patch of earth has tracks in it, sure enough, nice clear ones leading you on, almost like an invitation.’
My brother came and faced him, ‘What are you saying, Jacques?’
He smiled, revealing two chipped front teeth stained brown by tobacco, ‘Well, you said he brought a lady with him, right? Well it stands to reason that, unless he was carrying her (and the prints aren’t sunk in deep enough for that) he must have led her by the hand. So we should be seeing two sets of prints. One walking, one set being dragged. And there aren’t any here.’
I opened my mouth to speak my frustration. Before I could say anything another soldier, this one short, dark haired, and very broad, gave a whistle and called us over to the door on the left. When we got there he smiled and held his torch as close as he could to the earthen floor. It had been swept. The short man had a bass voice. He said, ‘It looks like someone’s been covering his tracks.’
However intelligent our quarry, he’d had little experience with hunters.
We opened the door.
It was only much later that I learned how lucky we were. Christine told me afterwards that the middle path was armed with buried explosives, so that an ill-placed foot would lead to an instant, or a very painful death.
This path was long, circuitous, rather like the circuit of a nautilus; we wound round the Opera House several times in our journey to the centre, but our work was made easier by the fact that fiend had only swept up to the door, beyond it the two pairs of tracks were bright in the torchlight; his long and firm, moving at a rapid pace, hers, small and fine, with the occasional scuff-mark where she had tripped or been dragged. There were many doors, many off-shooting hallways, but we took none of them, trusting that the path we pursued would lead us to her.
Most of the rooms we passed through were unfinished, composed of stone walls and floored with dirt, but the circular route we followed was leading us directly under the Opera House and the closer we came to the centre the more civilised the rooms. They sprouted plaster walls and floor tiles, scattered bits of furniture and other evidences of inhabitation so that, by the time we came to the room with the well, we had almost begin to relax.
This was a plunge back into darkness, a reversion to the stone and earth we encountered when we first left the staircase. The stench was abhorrent, fish left out too long in sunlight, rotten flesh. I gagged, choked back my vomit. The source of the odour was soon apparent. The floor was stacked with bodies, three skeletons that the water had rotted lay in a row along the floor. A fresher corpse was collapsed in the corner, his neck encircled by a rotting noose. Beside this was the much fresher head of a woman with long blonde hair, the eyes sunken in. The rest of her was buried in a bone yard in Brittany.
I nudged Philippe when I saw that. He nodded, held his hand up for silence, gesturing with the other one to a door across the room.
There was the faint sound of voices. I crept towards the entrance, the others trailing behind me. The portal was refined, polished mahogany, incongruous to the room. I lay my ear against it, listening. I heard her voice! She was alive!
I beckoned the others forward, listening as hard as I could. I was unable to make out exactly what she said, the wood was too thick and she was speaking too quietly. But I heard the fiend as clearly as though he were speaking by my shoulder.
‘They will be here any minute.’ I recognised the powerful voice of Christine’s mysterious tutor! ‘I must be ready for them.’
She said something then, softly, so softly. She must have been weak. The monster might have been starving her.
‘No. We would have heard the explosions. They must have found the safe path. The very devil must be giving them luck! But the angels themselves are on our side, my dear, I have…’
I’d heard enough. I pulled back from the doorway, looked to my men. My brother smiled at me, clapped his hand on my back. I treasure that look. It was the last one we had.
We opened the door and walked into a room as bright as daylight. In the centre, beside an enormous, obscene bed, the monster stood with his hand on my lady.