“The young people still have ears for good music,” he said. “The trouble is they don’t get a chance to hear it any more. Jazz is political music—always has been, always will be. That’s why some people would rather see it dead.”
“Maybe they’ll get their way,” Floyd said.
“Well, you’re always welcome here. I just wish I could afford to have you play more often.”
“We take what we’re given,” Floyd said.
“Are you available for the middle Saturday next month? We’ve just had a cancellation.”
“I think we can probably squeeze you in.”
“Greta?”
“No,” she said, lowering eyes already obscured behind the veil. “I don’t think I’ll be able to make it.”
“Pity. But Floyd and Custine always put on a good show… although perhaps you might consider hiring a temporary piano player?”
“We’ll think about it.” Floyd said.
“Just so long as you keep it nice and melodic, boys. And not so fast that the punters can’t tap a toe.” He eyed Custine warningly. “None of that difficult eight-beat stuff you keep sneaking in.”
“Maybe the young people want to hear something new for a change,” Custine said.
“They want something new, not something that sounds like a bull loose in a china shop.”
“We’ll behave ourselves,” Floyd assured him, patting Custine consolingly on the arm.
Michel set them up with drinks: beer for Greta and Custine, wine for Floyd, who needed a clear head for the drive back to Montparnasse. Leaning on the bar, occasionally breaking off to serve another customer, Michel fed them all the latest news on the local music scene: who was in, who was out, who was hot, who was not, who was sleeping with who. Floyd feigned a polite interest in it all. Although he didn’t much care for gossip, it was good to think about something other than the murder case and his own problems for a while. He noticed Custine and Greta starting to laugh more, which made him feel better, and before very long they were all enjoying the company and the music and Michel’s habit of keeping their glasses topped up. At eleven the band came on and stumbled through a dozen swing numbers, big-band productions stripped down for a four-piece, and while it wasn’t the worst thing Floyd had heard, it was a long way from being the best. It didn’t matter. He was with his friends, it was snug and smoky down in Le Perroquet, the greats seemed to be looking on benevolently from their photographs on the walls, and for a couple of hours all was right with the world.
Skellsgard and Auger stooped along a dark, low-ceilinged tunnel of rough-hewn rock, doing their best not to get too filthy in the process. They had eaten and made some further refinements to their outfits. Auger’s brand-new handbag bulged with maps and money, some of the latter counterfeit, some of it stolen. They had left the censor chamber via a heavily armoured metal door, accessing a dug-out passage that led off in either direction. Skellsgard had a torch, a fluted silver thing with a sliding switch, obviously manufactured in E2. Nervously she shone it up and down the shaft, as if half-expecting something, then set off to the right. She explained to Auger that excavation work in one direction had been abandoned as soon as the other end of the tunnel intersected an old works shaft put in by the Métro engineers.
“Did you tunnel all this out yourselves?” Auger asked.
“Most of it. It was easier after we hit the existing works shaft.”
“It must still have been back-breaking work.”
“It was, until we found we could get an air hose through the censor. We kept a compressor on our side, and then built a simple pneumatic drill that could be smuggled through as individual components. We reassembled it on this side and supplied it with air via the hose passing through the censor. That helped a bit, although the censor had a nasty habit of changing its mind now and then.”
“What about electricity? Can you run that through as well?”
“Yes,” Skellsgard said, “but we never managed to make anything work. Even a torch turned out to be too difficult to break down into simple components. The censor wouldn’t even let an incandescent bulb through in one piece. In the end we had to run gas through to light lamps, like nineteenth-century coal miners.”
“It must have been hell.”
“The only thing that kept us going was the rumble of the trains, which told us we were getting nearer to civilisation. None of the other exit points have any kind of artificial background noise. At least here we knew we only had a few dozen metres of earth to tunnel through before we hit the train tunnel.”
“I’m expected to dodge trains now?”
“Only in emergencies. We can trip the power by short-circuiting the electrified rails, but only for short periods. The station’s closed now, so the trains aren’t running.”
“Why? What time is it?”
“Four-thirty in the morning on a Friday in October.”
“I had no idea.”
“Don’t worry about it. No one ever does.”
Soon they came to a blockage in the tunneclass="underline" a tight-fitting wooden door of obvious age. Skellsgard shone her torch around the perimeter of the door until she found a concealed handle. She pulled it, groaning with effort. Just when it seemed as though nothing was going to move, the door hinged slowly back towards them.
Beyond was another dark tunnel, but this time their voices echoed differently. It was a much larger space and it smelled of sewerage, metallic dust and hot oil. Skellsgard’s torch gleamed off eight parallel lines of polished metal running along the floor, leading off to the left and right. There were two sets of parallel railway tracks, with two conductor rails for each running line.
Skellsgard set off to the right, keeping tight against the wall, with Auger following close behind.
“It’s not far to Cardinal Lemoine. Normally you’d be able to see the station lights from here.”
“I’m scared,” Auger said. “I’m not sure I can go through with this.”
“Scared is good. Scared is just the right attitude.”
The station was still dark when they climbed out of the tunnel on to its platform. Wherever Skellsgard’s torchbeam fell, Auger saw clean ceramic tiles in pale greens and yellows, period signs and advertisements in blocky capitals. Oddly, it didn’t feel particularly strange or unreal. She had already visited many buried Métro stations under the icebound Paris, and they had often survived more or less intact. It was easy to imagine that this was just another field trip into the city of ghosts.
Skellsgard showed her to a hiding place and crouched down beside her. “I know you can do this, Auger. Susan must have known it, too, or she wouldn’t have lined you up for it.”
“I suppose I should be grateful,” Auger said doubtfully. “If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be about to see any of this.”
“I hope you like it as much as she did. It was the horses Susan wanted to see.”
“Horses?”
“She’d always wanted to know what they were like—as living, breathing things, not some shambling, arthritic reconstruction.”
“Did she get her wish?”
“Yes,” Skellsgard said. “I think she did.”
The morning rush hour began on cue. From their hiding place—tucked into a gap between two electrical equipment lockers at one end of the platform—Auger watched as the ceiling lights stammered on. She heard the humming of generators powering up and somewhere the melancholy whistle of a lone worker. She heard a jangle of keys and a slamming of doors. A lull of ten or fifteen minutes followed and then she watched the early birds begin to assemble on the platform. The electric lighting washed out the colours like a faded photograph, but even taking that into consideration, she was struck by the drabness of the people: the autumnal browns, greys and greens of their clothes and accessories. Most of the commuters were men. Their faces were sallow, unhealthy-looking. No one was smiling or laughing, and almost no one was talking to anyone else.