A big thankyou to everyone who is following this story and reviewing – you guys are wonderful! (Oh, and random fun fact for the day, with thanks to Mominator for reminding me to mention it: the boulevards in Paris were actually largely asphalted over by the 1860s. So there you are. Who says reading fanfic isn't educational? ;) )
Chapter 3 – La Lanterne
The heights of Montmartre were an improbable place to go shopping, but Erik was determined to get as far away as possible from the siren call of the Opéra tunnels, and this, one of the poorest areas on the outskirts of the city, was perfect. The streets were narrow and confused, the shops small, and he soon discovered that by keeping to the shadow of the walls, he could pass all but unremarked even in the busier areas. He had tied a rag over the right side of his head and cut a hole for his eye, but he had the strange sensation that in this motley crowd, he would have been near-invisible even should he have walked naked down the street. Once or twice a passerby did turn around to give him a curious look, but he made sure he kept his face averted and they soon lost interest in what they clearly thought was yet another impoverished drunk.
More disconcertingly, at one point a little beggar boy had latched on to his shirt-tails, with a grip like death. Even after Erik had turned his rag-covered misshapen face towards him and scowled, the boy had kept looking at him with silent, hungry eyes and would not budge. In the end Erik picked him up bodily and threw him over a fence. He heard the boy's yelped obscenity, but then, surprisingly, his gleeful laugh: he had landed in a carrot patch in somebody's vegetable garden.
Children had been rare at the Opéra, laughing ones doubly so. Erik thought this undeniably a point in its favour.
In trying to escape the mockery of that startling, happy laugh, he found himself at last inside a shop. It was little more than a hole in the wall: a wooden counter set back from the street, and deep floor-to-ceiling shelves lining the walls all three sides. Behind the counter sat a large, red-faced woman of indeterminate years and even more indeterminate hair colour, wearing a man's brown workshirt. She was loudly reading from the pocket-sized magazine in her hands, evidently for the benefit of somebody in the back of the store. La Lanterne, Erik read on the front cover.
"Got a customer, Jean!" she bellowed suddenly, and levelled an irritated stare at Erik. "Yes?"
"Bonjour, madame," he said coldly. He waited for the second it took her to notice his crudely improvised mask. "When you are satisfied that my head is indeed attached to the rest of my body, perhaps you would condescend to sell me a few necessary items?"
Too late, he realised that his polished, theatrically projected voice had surprised the woman far more than the covered part of his head had done.
"You'd best not be who I think you are," she said finally.
Erik felt himself go slowly numb. How stupid of him. How unbelievably stupid.
"Or," she went on, "I'll be forced to concede that the stuffed shirts at the Paris Journal have for once managed to print the truth. Though not about him – you – being dead, it appears."
Erik somehow managed a composed, supercilious smile.
"I regret, madame, that I have no idea whom you have taken me for. I do not believe we are acquainted; in fact I am quite certain that I have not had the honour of learning your name."
"Louise Gandon," she said grudgingly. "Look here, sir, let's not fuck around. If you're indeed the one all the papers were shrieking about last week, the disfigured lover of the little Swedish 'demoiselle from the Opéra, then you have nothing to fear from the likes of me. It's high time someone put in a few good kicks up the Empire's arse, and torching the Opéra is as good a place to start as any, merde – better than most!" She stabbed an emphatic finger at the magazine lying open on the counter.
"That's 900,000 francs a year that our beloved Emperor was doling out to it, the syphilitic sod, and I don't need to tell you what we could be doing with that money."
She tipped her chin in the direction of the street with an angry noise, as though the threadbare poverty of the crowd and the rundown buildings were somehow all the Opéra's fault.
"He thinks he can throw us a few bones, with his liberal this and liberal that, his Liberal Empire – pah! We're not blind, we see oppression when we feel it and we know what it's called, yes we do, and let me say this: you won't see me running to the gendarmes to tell them you're alive after all! You gave all those yawning hypocrites with their diamonds and sable furs a night to remember, and spared us the burden of paying for their shitty extravagance. All I have to say to you is, thank you. Thank you."
Through this entire performance, while Louise Gandon had been growing ever redder in the face and more agitated, Erik felt an inexorably growing desire to laugh madly, which he checked only with the greatest effort. Who could have thought it? The Phantom of the Opera, a fighter for the poor!
"You mistake me, madame. Those were not my reasons."
As though stepping down off her own private stage, Louise Gandon let out her breath and looked at him with a quiet, fierce conviction:
"I don't give a damn what you reasons were, sir. No doubt the papers had the right of it, and all you and the girl wanted was her name up in lights and a bigger share of the pie. But fact is, you did the rest of us a good turn all the same. A strike against the Empire is a strike for us."
"A man was killed," Erik said neutrally.
"Oh yes, the singer. P... P-Piano? Pudgy?" Louise Gandon waved a hand vaguely. "Must've been the chandelier. A shame, yes. But it was for the greater good in the end. The best cause."
"The cause, yes," he echoed. Her dismissive reaction made him suddenly dizzy, as though his carefully reconstructed reality was threatening to come apart. So was this how it was supposed to be done, then? One was supposed to murder, only for a cause?
Yet he could not see Christine saying the words this woman had just said so lightly; words that seemed to him a trap, like his chamber of mirrors. They promised a way out of his purgatory with their simple justification: he'd had his causes too, oh yes; he only had to accept this as truth, and he could have power once again. And this fragile reality he had somehow built around Christine's words, Christine's kiss, would be gone forever. The Phantom of the Opera... His hand flew to his face instinctively, expecting to feel the mask. He's here...
But his hand found only the rag.
"Is something the matter? You're shaking."
"No." His voice was hoarse. "Just..."
He collected himself and said almost calmly: "Perhaps it is hunger."
"Oh, you poor man!" She clicked her tongue, "Look at me, carrying on, while you're practically starving! Now, what is it you wanted?"
Certainly not your pity, Erik wanted to snarl. Instead, he stepped up to the counter and resumed the role of a man.
He cast a glance over the contents of the shelves behind her.
"Candles, madame," he said crisply, "if you would be so good. And matches, a set of compasses, pens, ink, lead and ink pencil, red chalk, white chalk, charcoal, an easel, three boxes of draughting paper, and," he looked down at himself. "Soap. A lot of soap."
And so, while Louise Gandon walked around collecting the things he had enumerated and anything else he could think of to add to the list, Erik contemplated this strange reality. He was standing in a store with the money Madame Giry had returned to him and this bizarre woman was serving him like any other customer, as though all this was perfectly natural and he had not spent a lifetime underground and a week hiding from a long-dispersed mob. He wondered how long it could possibly continue.
"So what do you do?" came Louise Gandon's voice from the depths of the store. She was standing high up on a ladder, counting out something from a high shelf.
"I beg your pardon?"
"For a living, I mean." She started down the ladder, carrying a box of candles. "You do work?"
Erik blinked. "I am... seeking employment as an architect, madame." He gestured at the growing pile of draughting implements on the counter. "My tools."
She gave him a probing look. "Then... you're not a singer?"
"No," Erik said flatly. "I am not."
"Aha!" Louise Gandon punched the air in triumph. "I knew the Journal couldn't be right more than once a year. So." She added the box to the pile. "That's the last of it. Where should I have it sent?"
"Sent?"
"Yes," she gave him a strange look. "Surely you don't mean to carry the lot?" The pile covered the better part of the counter. "I'll need an address. And a name for the bill."
"Erik," he said after a moment. He was strangely pleased by the sound of it uttered aloud.
Then he surprised himself by adding: "Erik Andersson. It's ... Swedish."
"Oh right. Like the girl. And the address?"
The address. Why had it not occurred to him before that he had to have somewhere to take all these things to? An address...
Louise Gandon gave him a look of unexpected understanding. "You too, huh? The landlords are bastards, no man is safe from their greed. Not even an architect!" She roared, "Jean!"
A middle-aged man with a shock of red hair and a pair of glasses clipped to his nose popped his head out from a back door. "What is it, Louise?" He held up his ink-stained hands. "I'm trying to work here."
"The sign can wait. This man has been kicked out of his home by another of those bleeding monsters. He's an architect."
Jean transferred his nearsighted eyes to Erik then back to Louise. "Looking to rent, is he?"
"I am," Erik said drily, unused to being the subject of a conversation carried out as though he was not there. "Perhaps you have somebody to recommend? A landlord?"
The rest of Jean appeared from around the door. "There's a man upstairs as just moved out." He pointed up, at the ceiling. "I could put you up. Place is small though, just one room."
"I have no family."
"Well and good, sir, but it's 80 francs a month. Fair price and it won't rise, I'm no big city landlord to bleed a man dry."
"That seems fair, monsieur."
"Well then, come on through." Jean lifted up part of the countertop to allow Erik to enter. "I'll show you around. Heard the latest about Bismarck?" he glanced over his shoulder as they headed for the back stairs.
At Erik's blank look, he threw up his hands. "Good Lord, man, have you been living under a rock? Louise! Give me that thing."
He caught the copy of La Lanterne which Louise tossed to him, and promptly pushed it into Erik's hands.
"Page twelve, sir: Bismarck's trap for France. In our day and age a man cannot afford the ignorance of an ostrich hiding with its head in the sand."
"No indeed," Erik said quietly, taking the magazine. "It seems I cannot."