Phantom (42 page)

Each time I was hounded from a flat, my next residence was in an area a little less elegant, a little less respectable, until I found myself once more on the edge of the city among the very poor. In consequence I had began to work. longer and longer hours at the Opera, dreading the moment when I should have to return to those dingy and dangerous streets.

"The Opera is my home," I observed with a flippancy that did not quite conceal the grim truth of my statement.

Garnier looked at me steadily and there was an odd sort of pity in his dark eyes.

"Not for much longer, I'm afraid," he said.

Nine years of self-restraint exploded in my head like a barrel of gunpowder; in a moment I had him by the throat and we had lurched dangerously close to the edge of the scaffolding.

"What are you talking about?" I snarled. "You gave me your word I should finish this work—you won't go back on it now and live, I promise you!"

I flung him to the plank flooring and there he remained a moment, tenderly fingering his neck.

"There's no need for such violent anger," he said quietly. "I assure you this has nothing whatsoever to do with me."

"What then?" I demanded rudely. "Explain yourself!"

He sighed and sat back upon his heels, brushing the white dust from his immaculate black trousers.

"I suppose you are
aware
that we're at war with Prussia?"

"Of course I'm aware of it, you idiot, who isn't?"

He gave a little shrug. "Sometimes I feel you are not quite in the same world as the rest of us. The talk is all over

Paris that the emperor surrendered at Sudan yesterday. The public fury at his failure is almost uncontainable. The boulevards are full of crowds shouting, 'Down with the Empire!' Can't you hear the roar outside? They say there will be another revolution in the next twenty-four hours."

"The emperor was a very sick man," I said grimly. "They had no business to send him out to war as they did when he could barely sit a horse."

Garnier glanced at me in surprise.

"You must be the only man in France who remembers that now. There's no compassion in the streets today."

"There never is," I said, and turned back to my work.

"Erik… there's something more."

"Yes?" I did not bother to look around.

"They say the German army is preparing to march on Paris. Do you know what a siege will mean?"

"A lot of children will starve," I said darkly. It was always the children who suffered—the children and the animals.

"Yes, yes," said Garnier with a touch of impatience, "but have you thought of what it will mean for us—for the Opera?"

I swung around in horror and again he spread his hands helplessly.

"It's a government building and will be requisitioned for the war effort. All work will automatically be suspended for an indefinite period. God knows when we will be able to work again or even if the building will survive the German shells. Erik, do you understand what I am saying?"

I understood.

I understood that men, rash, stupid, mindless men, were about to take my sacred trust away from me. Paris would be shelled by Bismarck's great German war machine and nine years of ceaseless labor might be ruined in as many seconds.

I picked up the mask and swung down from the scaffold in stony silence.

"Erik!" Garnier shouted in alarm, peering after me in the poor light of my lanterns. "Where are you going?"

"As far away from
men
as I can get!" I spat viciously.

There was only one way for me to go now, and that was down… down, down, down, into the bottomless dark reaches where no one went now, down the endless flights of stone stairs to the fifth basement and my secret place beyond the lake.

When the great stone closed behind me, shutting me in the cavernous expanse of the foundation's double casing, my single candle lit a moment of stunning revelation. I suddenly realized that I had spent my entire life searching for one place where I would feel at peace, somewhere to rest in safety from prying eyes.

Once I had known such a place. That first year I had spent in Giovanni's cellar, nestled snugly like a young animal in its nest, I had touched a security and happiness that I had been unable to find again, no matter where I wandered. As long as Giovanni was there above me, like God in His heaven, I knew that I was safe. Boys all over the world learn to call their fathers sir; it is a mark of respect which in no way denies affection. But in my heart he was always father, always… until the day that Luciana came and broke my life in little pieces…

I closed my mind against them. The pain was more than twenty-five years old, it was weak and contemptible to be unmanned by it yet again. They were both dead and gone, forget them… let them go!

And yet I found now that I was remembering that cellar with desperate yearning. Surely it would be possible to recapture that sense of well-being and contentment if only I could re-create the environment in which I had first experienced those alien and elusive feelings. If I made a nest of my own deep beneath the Parisian streets, no one need ever find me again; there would be no sniggering, no ugly shouts, no stones thrown and no knives drawn.

There would be…
no one
!

Yes… that was the true revelation! The sudden understanding that I no longer wanted anyone, that I was weary of struggling to exist in a world where I could never belong. I had spent the best part of forty years banging my head against the walls of reality till I was bloody and bemused by my failure. What a fool I had been, when the answer was here all the time.

A quiet dark place waited to embrace me. All I had to do was what any sensible spider would have done many years ago—scuttle inside to safety and stay there.

As I lit more candles and began to explore like an excited child, fantasies unwound in my head like a spool of golden thread.

My house would be of irregular shape, but it could spread as far as I wished in either direction, one room leading off another. In that moment of far-reaching vision I saw everything, every last tiny detail from the glorious pipe organ that would line the wall of my bedchamber, to the canopied open coffin where I intended to sleep.

There had to be a coffin, you see, because Garnier had been quite right—this place was my chosen tomb, a monument to my own insane genius. The Paris Opera was a pyramid in opulent disguise and I the pharaoh who would lie deep in its heart in the secret glory of my afterlife.

The dream faded, like a wilted candle, leaving me once more in nothing more than a dark, damp hole. But I had seen the ultimate vision. It was months, years, away from my grasp, and yet nothing, not even the might of the Prussian army, should stand in the way of its fulfillment.

The most fantastic house on this earth would be guarded by every device my magician's mind could conjure.

I would never sleep above the surface of the ground again.

If I had not made that decision when I did, I

would have been arrested in the first week of the siege, when spy mania swept the city.

Anyone who, in dress or manner, betrayed even the slightest difference from their fellowmen was denounced to the new republican authorities as a suspected traitor. The deaf and the dumb were hounded without mercy, and even a stammer was sufficient to justify the spiteful persecution of an angry mob. A score of infantrymen who had fled from the enemy at Courbevoie were paraded through the city with their hands tied behind their backs, bearing placards that invited honest folk to spit in their faces.

The hysteria passed, spirits lifted, and Paris settled back to enjoy the novelty of a siege that no one expected to last for long. Viewing the fortifications became a pleasant family outing on Sunday afternoons, and while the regiments drilled, the benches in the Champs-Elysees were full of gossiping citizens lolling in the sun. Guitars twanged, organs were ground, and merry-go-rounds were in full swing. People took opera glasses to study the Prussian batteries at Meudon, and the occasional puff of smoke from the gunboats was dismissed with lighthearted derision.

Everyone knew that Paris was invincible. With her en-ceinte wall, her ten-foot moat, and her lines of forts stretching over a circumference of forty miles, she presented a formidable front to any investing army. And the new government had not been idle. The catacombs had been sealed, elaborate barricades placed across the Seine, electrically fired land-mines laid in weak spots. Paris was ready to face the worst that Moltke's vast army was prepared to offer, and the papers predicted that the Prussians would soon be slinking home in humiliated defeat…

Four months later, when the shelling of civilian areas finally began, the city had already been crippled by a harsh winter of increasing deprivation. The temperature had plummeted twelve degrees below zero. Men froze to death on duty at the outposts, and with the city's stocks of firewood virtually exhausted, desperate men and women fought over trees, felled telegraph poles, and threatened to flay the National Guard which stood on duty outside a wood depot in the Rue des Belles-Feuilles.

With the Prussians installed at Versailles, Paris starved beneath a merciless iron-gray sky. The Left Bank of the city shuddered each night beneath a rain of shells which set the streets on fire. From the roof of the Opera House I saw columns of smoke rising in the still, cold air beyond the Seine. The Prussians were deliberately directing their fire at churches and hospitals, and as the batteries closed in around the city, any building flying the red cross of the Geneva Convention was automatically singled out as a target. The institute for the insane, the asylum for the blind, the hospital for young children… nothing was sacred anymore. I found it hard to believe that men could sink so low…

The Opera House had been requisitioned as an arsenal and a warehouse for vital food supplies, and I lived in perpetual terror of fire breaking out through someone's carelessness. One million liters of wine stood on the premises, and more than once I heard drunken carousing echoing through the building. The Prussian batteries were not yet close enough to shell the Right Bank, but a single carelessly dropped cigarette was all it would take to blow the Opera's powder magazine sky high. All the time that I worked alone on my secret house my heart was full of dread. I never left the premises unguarded except for the few hours it took me, once a fortnight, to make my way to Jules's rented house on the Left Bank, and there, in a dark, curtained room, pay the wages of men who would otherwise have starved for want of employment. All over the city builders had been turned off government sites for the duration of the siege; the Opera, the new Hotel-Dieu, the two thousand unfinished houses in the area of Haussmann's redevelopment…

I continued to pay the men in my employ without begrudging the few francs they might manage to earn elsewhere in the meantime. Food was rapidly becoming a prerogative of the rich, but no one who had worked for me at the Opera was permitted to starve. When prices soared beyond their means, I simply raised their due to the level of a living wage. I never looked at the men when they came into the room. I stood with my arms folded beneath my cloak and my face to the wall while they collected their envelopes in terrified silence and crept away. For the duration of my presence in the house, Madame Bernard and her little ones cowered out of sight in a bedroom. It was still possible to obtain morphine in return for an exorbitant sum and a great deal of patience; I always took care to pay Jules rather more than I owed him for this singular service and then leave without further delay. The ritual depressed me—made me long to get away from that atmosphere of suppressed fear. It was better to be alone.

By the seventeenth week of the siege Paris was on its knees. The butcher's stalls in the great central market were selling slaughtered cats decorated with paper frills and colored ribbons, and the rat market on the Place de l'Hotel de Ville was besieged with desperate customers. The animals in the zoo at the Bois had been slaughtered so that the restaurants might serve elephant to those with the means to pay for the delicacy.

Someone would most certainly have eaten Ayesha if I had not found her first…

I was wandering the streets aimlessly that night, listening with indifference to the shells whining overhead like the howling of a high wind in autumn. There was no one around. Everyone with any sense in this area was lying low in a cellar out of harm's way, but I no longer cared whether I was blown to pieces by a Prussian bomb. A telling little incident at the Bernard house had virtually dulled the last of my fading appetite for life.

All the men had gone. I had been settling up with Jules when there was a scream in the hallway and the sound of something tumbling heavily down the stairs.

Without thinking I ran out into the narrow, ill-lit passage just as Madame Bernard reached the bottom step and snatched up the small child who whimpered at my feet. Clutching the little girl against her breast, she began to back away up the stairs.

"Madame, that child is injured. Let me look at her."

"No…" she stammered, still edging backward up the stairs. "No, monsieur, you are mistaken… It was nothing, just a little tumble… two or three steps, that's all… that's all."

She was lying. The child had fallen down the full flight and now lay white and unprotesting in her arms. I started up the stairs and was frozen by the woman's shriek of fear.

"Stay away from her! Don't touch her!"

"Madame—"

"Why do you have to come here?" she spat, suddenly veering from terror to aggression. "Frightening the children—frightening everyone? Why don't you keep away?"

"
Annette
!" gasped Jules in horror. "Annette, for God's sake, be silent!"

"We don't need your cold charity," she continued doggedly from the landing, "we don't need your money. You won't buy my children as you have bought my husband! Go away, monsieur, go right away and don't come back. Do you hear me? Don't ever come back here again!"

She turned and ran onto the landing and almost at once a door slammed behind her on a roomful of crying children.