Thank you for the reviews, guys! This chapter is a tad on the short side, sorry, but it's the most logical place to break it and I'll try to hurry along with the next update.
A quick response to Ianthe's question about why Mme Giry acts as she does at the supper: I think you have to remember that she doesn't know everything we know. ;-) The supper is as much a gamble to her as it is to everyone else; she doesn't know how Erik feels about his past.
Chapter 20 – Invasion
"This way, citoyens, and mind you close the door." Louise ushered the last of the stragglers through the back door and into the store-room, where a space had been cleared for an emergency meeting. Those already present shuffled aside to make room for the newcomers, moving the crates and soap-boxes that served as rows of makeshift chairs.
Erik remained where he was, leaning casually against the stack of boxes lining the back wall. Every one of the newcomers walked right past him unaware, though some were near enough to all but tread on his shoes. Erik felt a rush of nostalgia: it had been too long since he had been a ghost. He had forgotten how enjoyable it could be. Neither Jean nor Louise had mentioned this meeting to him, let alone invited him along: evidently they did not deem him trustworthy enough to be informed of the things taking place right under his nose. It was a pity really, Erik reflected, because had they invited him, he would certainly have refused to attend, having little interest in their griping against the Emperor – but they had not asked him, and consequently had irritated him into deciding to stay. At any rate, it was proving more entertaining than wandering the dead streets of inner Paris, where people asked one another over and over again: "Is it true about the invasion? Are we done for?"
There was not a hint of that sheep-like despair here. The day was Sunday and so the shop was shut, but in the dimly lit store-room the atmosphere was one of concern and brisk action, as if the milliners and post-clerks gathered here thought themselves a Parliament.
The door to the main area of the shop was opened briefly, admitting Jean. His unruly red hair had been smoothed down and for once there were no ink stains on his hands.
"Quiet as the tomb out there," he said, coming over to stand at the front of the room. He clipped on his spectacles to survey those who were present, his nearsighted eyes skimming over Erik, unseeing. There were perhaps ten or twelve men gathered, most with the look of local shopkeepers or minor clerks, and a couple of women in patched frocks and kerchiefs. Some of them Erik recognised as neighbours, others he had never seen before.
"Good to see you all here, and at such short notice," Jean began. "I'll get straight to it, then. The Montmartre committee is meeting tonight, and we need to be firm on where we stand on the situation. As of this morning, the invasion of Alsace-Lorraine is an open secret. What all of us have been saying for weeks is finally out in the open: the army is a mess, the commanders are worse than useless – the Prussians are on the move, and I believe we're all of a mind that the Empire cannot last much longer."
This produced a chorus of agreement.
"Unfortunately," Jean continued over them, "for the moment Ollivier's holding firm in the Assembly. Worse still, we are now officially under martial law."
"They can't shut down the committees!" protested one of the women, while others insisted that Paris would not stand for this, and that the time was ripe for the Emperor to abdicate and give way to the will of the people. Others insisted that the people must take what is rightfully theirs, Emperor or not.
"Order!" Jean snapped, and the meeting subsided. "Have a care, citoyens, before the police come sniffing round. What is clear is that we need to move, and move quickly. The Jacobins in Ménilmontant are talking of removing Ollivier."
"They're always on about removing someone or other," grumbled a man in the front row. "Bloody useless, I say. The Assembly's a beast with two hundred heads – and Ollivier's not the worst of the lot. The bastard sold out the Republican cause, but we touch him and next it'll be de Gramont or some other moron at the reins."
"I agree," Jean said. "It's not the Assembly we want but the Tuileries. The Emperor's a sick man and all the way in Châlons besides; he wouldn't dare show his nose in Paris, not now. But if the Empress abdicates we've got ourselves a republic right there, simple as that."
"Pah," sneered a woman in a red kerchief, "You think they'll just let us walk into the palace? An audience with the Empress, what? They've the right notion in La Vilette; the place has been rumbling since before dawn and mind if the shit doesn't start flying by sundown! We should join with them, is what we should do."
"Aye, and soon!" Louise agreed, from her seat near the door. "There's a damn lot of us, and they know it down in Paris. You think they're not afraid, in their pretty cafés, sipping coffee while our boys are being bled alive by the Prussians? You don't see them sending their own fat sons to the war, do you now? No, they got money to buy a replacement should their kid get drafted; a thousand francs is no skin off their backs! It's our boys out there fighting their damned war, citoyens, and while Ollivier's lot dilly-dally with politicking, there's more of ours dying. So we join with La Vilette now, others will see the way of it, never fear – we'll have Ménilmontant at least, and the rest will follow."
"A revolution, now?" Jean shook his head. "Impossible; it'd be chaos. We need a plan—"
This caused another uproar; people spoke over each other with apparent disregard for the prospect of the police bursting in. Jean was calling, "Order! Order!" without much success, while Louise and the others bickered over the possibility of a revolution. Some were of the opinion that the police would crush them before they got a chance; others thought that they could sweep through Paris if they got the numbers, while Jean as a few others counselled caution in replacing the government until a plan could be formed for a new one.
One voice stood out over the general din; the woman in the red kerchief, pink in the face, continued to insist that rising up together with the workers was the only solution.
"If a massacre's what they need to listen to us, then we'll give them one!"
Quick as thought, Erik stepped away from the pile of boxes behind him, releasing his hold on the one he had deliberately loosened before the meeting had started. The structure wobbled and pitched, but by the time it started toppling, Erik was already at the top of the stair landing. From there, he watched boxes thumping and thudding to the floor one after another, raising clouds of thick, choking dust. Candles rolled and cakes of soap went whizzing over the floorboards while people yelped and cursed, leaping out of the way and sneezing in all the dust.
Erik retreated upstairs to his room and locked the door. He could still hear their muffled curses as they tried to clean up and keep quiet about it, blaming one another for getting too rowdy – yet this small revenge for Jean and Louise's distrust did not please him as it should have. The anger did not go away but only built, seething.
He yanked a clean sheet of paper from the stack on his shelf and clipped it to the drawing board. Gritting his teeth, he threw pencil lines like darts against white paper, drawing a floor-plan but picturing before him the faces of Jean, Louise, Madame Giry: all those who had abandoned him. Christine.
He slashed a line through the sketch, took a fresh sheet of paper, and started again.
o o o
The cab stopped several blocks before the Moulin de la Galette.
"That's as far as I take you for a franc, mam'zelle," the cab driver said, dismounting. He opened the door for Christine to get out. "You want to go further, I'm charging triple. For the risk, see. It's not safe around here with the reds buzzing about the war. I show them a nice clean cab like this when they're all fired up – it's a red rag to a bull." He half-grinned at his own pun. "And if you want my advice, you'd be staying home too. Not a time to be wandering about after dark."
Christine gathered up her skirts and stepped down onto the pavement.
"Thank you," she said, smiling to hide her annoyance. No cab driver had ever dared lecture her when she had travelled with Raoul, let alone set her down half a mile from where she had asked to go, and demanded triple payment to go further. Still, she had no more money to pay him and there was no choice; she did not come this far to turn back. She would walk.
"Watch the gendarmes don't pick you up, mam'zelle. Martial law, see – you'll be in jail before you know it if you so much as breathe wrong, never mind that you're but a little thing."
"Is it this way then, monsieur?" Christine asked, ignoring his unsought-for admonitions.
The cab driver scratched his clean-shaven chin thoughtfully. "Walk up this street, and then turn left at the cabaret on the corner and straight on until you come to the square. It's a little street on your right."
Christine thanked him and set off. It was not yet completely dark, but she had never been in this part of Montmartre before, having previously come only as far as the cemetery, and so she tried to pay attention to the landmarks in case she got lost and was forced to retrace her steps. The cabaret on the corner was the only well-lit building she could see; it was a small, crowded bar where men sat drinking. Most of the windows in the smaller houses that lined the narrow, winding street were curtained, although every now and again a patch of yellow light from an opened window coloured the cobbles. There was no sign of the 'reds' or the gendarmes. Nevertheless, Christine quickened her pace, keeping to the shadows. She had to admit it was unnerving to be out alone in this unfamiliar place, and the cab-driver's insistence that it was dangerous had made her jumpy.
A few catcalls followed her as she passed the cabaret. Christine winced at the flush of fear and kept walking, head down. Without a doubt it would have been safer to stay home this evening: to sit in the parlour and play draughts and talk with Meg while they waited for Madame Giry to return from her night job. And all the while she would have been gnawing her lips bloody, wondering whether Erik had indeed left Paris again, whether he was – in danger. A preposterous thought. The Phantom, in danger... Yet Christine could not put it from her mind.
It frightened her, this gaping uncertainty left behind from the supper with Monsieur Erik Andersson. She kept going over small, meaningless fragments of the evening as if she could find the answers there: in a memory of Erik's hand closed over his fork, or his elbow pressed into the armrest of the chair, or the sharp delineation of bandage and skin when he had raised his face to her from the piano, silencing the music... Who was he? Where was he? She dreamed of the night when she had seen him on the balcony, of his hands and his mouth and of reaching for him in the dark, of danger and blood. Christine wondered what he was doing. What he had meant by his music. Whether he even thought of her in his perfect new life, or regretted anything at all.
It was unthinkable that he could have vanished from Paris and taken all the answers with him; unthinkable that he could be hurt or die by some stray bullet and leave her with this uncertainty for the rest of her days. The faultlessly polite thank-you note he had sent after the supper had bothered her endlessly with the possibility of answers, until Christine could no longer resist. She needed to know. The address she had copied from the envelope could prove to be false, but then his entire story about architecture and the Belgian border could itself be a lie, and Christine had never felt so felt fed up with all the tangles and half-truths. If it was a lie, at least she would know that much.
She turned right at the deserted square, where a few ragged, empty-faced beggars huddled beside an abandoned market cart, and started up the street. It had to be the right place, Christine mused, looking around. The houses were old but not run-down; most had shops on the ground floor and three or four levels of apartments above that. The shops were all closed, as it was a Sunday and late besides, but many of the apartment windows were bright, and Christine felt a moment's elation when she saw she was at the right number.
It was here; 15, rue Fontenelle.
The elation froze in her throat. Christine stood looking up at the building. It was no different from the others around it, but it seemed bigger, filling her view. The storefront was barred and the window above it was black and quiet. On the third floor, there was a light.
As if playing a game with herself, Christine thought: it is the second floor, the dark one. He is not there. He has gone from Paris.
Or it is the wrong building, and he never lived here at all.
Or the third floor. And he is home.
A noise on the other side of the street startled her; Christine was halfway up the alley beside the store before she realised it was just a cat. She stopped against the wall, catching her breath, trying not to panic. The alley opened into a tiny courtyard behind the house. The back door would be there, and perhaps a sign listing the names of the occupants of each floor, like in some of the older buildings that had no concierge. Then, Christine decided, she would have her answer.
She went into the courtyard.
There was a shed of some sort built up against the brick wall. Christine walked around it, and found the back door. She could see no list of names or any other sign: just a blank door before her, wide enough for crates and other deliveries for the store. Christine looked at it, wondering what to do. She put her hand out, to touch the wood.
The door was open.
o o o
Erik heard the back door creaking. At first he thought it was Louise and Jean returning from their meeting, but the sound was oddly hesitant. Erik put down his pencil. The door continued to open, and somebody stepped inside, but he could hear neither the clomping of Louise's boots on the stairs nor the mutter of their usual conversation. Whoever it was was trying to be very quiet.
The door from the back room to the shop itself was locked; Erik listened for the scrape of a lockpick, but there was nothing. No sounds of boxes being moved, either. Not a thief then. Either a particularly stupid gendarme who believed that Jean and Louise kept their papers in the store-room... Or the gendarmes were after somebody else.
Erik looked down at the floor-plan he had drawn, then at his pencils, compasses, a slide rule, pages of calculations... It was not much of a life, but it belonged to him now. He had nothing else, but this – this was his. They could not have it.
He reached up and put out the lamp. Easing the door open soundlessly, he stepped out into the stairwell.
Three steps down, he put one hand over the banister, and jumped.