Chapter 8: Humiliation!
The Sûreté entered the Opera with much pomp and circumstance early the next morning. Alice directed the men through the winding corridors to the set piece from Le Roi de Lahore. She had approached her father the night before, explained what she had found out in the library and confessed that she had descended into a torture chamber exactly like the one described in a treatise. The commissioner hardly believed her, but she insisted, and it was unethical not to follow a lead—no matter how fanciful it sounded.
Muscling their way past a gaping crowd of performers and stagehands, the Sûreté followed Alice and the commissioner down a set of stairs. Following them was Armand Moncharmin, nearly hanging on the tails of the last man in formation. He shuffled and shoved his way down the middle of two rows of policemen, all the while invoking his managerial position and the manners of gentlemen and the rights of Frenchmen. He didn't reach the front of the line until they were in the third cellar, which smelled of mold and rotting paper.
"Monsieur, you must tell me what you are about!" he shouted at the commissioner's back.
Mifroid turned. "Monsieur," he answered while Moncharmin caught his breath, "I believe we've found your ghost's hiding place. My daughter discovered a secret trap door in the floor of this chamber which leads to his residence."
"To his residence? And when did I give Mademoiselle permission to explore our cellars?"
A threatening look from Mifroid had him reconsidering his tone.
To Moncharmin's surprise, the lady herself replied. "The trap door opens by a pin, beside the set piece for Le Roi de Lahore…" She skirted around to the back of a set.
Moncharmin and Mifroid followed her to the palace steps. Her slender finger pointed confidently to the floor beside a pile of lumber, but her face held a look of despair and disbelief. The pin—and the trap door—were not there.
"Where is it, Mademoiselle?" Moncharmin asked.
She withdrew her pointing finger and allowed her arm to drop. "It's a very small device and difficult to see. Finding it will take some time." She gathered her skirts and crouched low to the ground, her eyes passing slowly over the dusty floor.
The men, all of them, stood awkwardly while she searched. Sometimes she gave a cry of triumph, then realized that she had only found a small pebble instead of a pin, or a crack in the wall instead of the square outline of a trapdoor.
She felt her face grow hot. "Have your stagehands moved this piece recently, Monsieur? Is this exactly where it stood during the performance of Don Juan Triumphant?"
Her innocent voice, naming the infamous paramour, echoed across the silent cellar.
"No, Mademoiselle, our stagehands don't intrude in places where they know they shouldn't be! We haven't shown Le Roi de Lahore or any of these other operas in here for a long time. Everything is where it has always been."
Still crouching on the floor, Alice allowed her eyes to wander along the ground far away from the assembly. The room was quite large, and she could not be absolutely sure that no one had moved the set. She stood and brushed her hands together to wipe the dust from them. She was a spectacle—dirt had crusted on her fingers, and some dust had even smeared across her cheek. The skirts of her pale dress were now yellow from the floor's filth. In this state she looked at her father and confessed, "We will have to search the entire room."
Moncharmin cursed loudly in the echoing chamber.
Mifroid felt fortunate to have brought so many officers. Everyone searched the cellar, collecting dirt in their hands in their efforts to uncover clues to the trapdoor. Even Moncharmin assisted the search against his better judgment. Alice flitted about the cellar attending to the calls of the officers: one of them found a pin—no, it was only a lose nail. Another found an opening—it was only a long crack in the wall's mortar. Finally Moncharmin allowed them to move the set pieces and even the pile of lumber, but under each set was only bare floor, without even any loose dirt. It was as Moncharmin had said, none of the sets had been moved in a long time.
The Opera manager finally exploded. "Mademoiselle, there is no trapdoor here!"
"Please, Monsieur, if we just look a little longer—"
"I've had enough! Get out of my Opera, all of you!"
"It must be here! I saw it myself!" Curly strands of her chestnut hair had come loose from her chignon and fell into her wide-eyed face. Her clothes were a mess. She looked deranged.
Mifroid cleared his throat. "Alice, you've only been dreaming about the Persian's stories! We've searched all morning. I've put the entire corps at your disposal, and you've wasted our time looking for a girlish fantasy! It's disgraceful!"
She turned to Moncharmin, who was herding the officers out of the cellar. "It was the ghost—he removed the trapdoor. You know better than any of us what powers he has! The trapdoor is gone now, but it was here before! Believe me!"
Indeed, he knew what this Phantom could do. He remembered his recent misadventure with Richard and the envelope conundrum. It could well be as she said, that a trapdoor was here before that now isn't there. In the Paris Opera, it would be perfectly natural for a trapdoor to disappear without even leaving behind a hole.
But she had trespassed, interfered, and had even involved the police. "Get out, all of you, and don't return, or by God I'll have you all sacked!"
Ashamed and defeated, Alice followed the police out of the Opera. When she fell into step with her father, he directly began scolding her as if she were a young child. She was already so embarrassed that she merely watched her feet as he explained the difference between reality and make-believe.
Then she had an idea. "Papa, I know you don't believe me, but when I went beneath the trap door I brought a lantern with me, and I left it inside the sewer gate on our Rue Scribe. If it's there, then you know I speak the truth. At least let us see if it's there."
Mifroid decided to oblige her. Perhaps, once she saw that nothing was in the sewer, she would realize the whole adventure had been a dream. She was desperate to find something to make her story real.
The lantern, of course, was not there.
Nothing at all was behind the sewer gate, which looked like any other dark sewer, except that this gate had an unusual key hole in one side. Mifroid insisted that the lock assists the city in cleaning the drain after unusually rainy seasons. "It would have been too much of a coincidence, Alice, if the ghost's labyrinth led almost to our front door."
She had to admit that her nocturnal escapade now sounded very far-fetched. How could she have successfully broken into the Opera at night and opened all of those puzzling trap doors in one evening? She had nothing at all to prove she had been beneath the opera—at least if she had taken a small item from the ghost's house, she would have something to show that she had been somewhere. It was also possible that the Persian had confirmed what she had seen only so that it would merit his own story. Now even she began to think that her adventure had been only a dream.
Alice needed solitude, so she excused herself that afternoon and stole away to the Church of Saint Louis d'Antin, not far from her Rue Scribe. Her seminary had inculcated a firm faith, and she often came to the d'Antin for reflection. Kneeling alone at last among the silent pews, she hid her face in her hands and finally allowed her emotions to overtake her.
In her mind, she replayed the embarrassing events at the Opera again and again. She had been humiliated in front of the Sûreté while searching in the dirt for her missing trapdoor. She winced as she remembered Moncharmin's scowl. Worse, her father believed that the trapdoor was only a dream, and he had admitted his regret for having trusted that a woman could be taught a man's profession. Thus the commissioner, who had become the joke of the Sûreté, recovered his social repute once he promised the officers that his daughter would be henceforth forbidden from practicing policework. He refused to train her or even to discuss his assignments. Her investigation of the opera ghost was entirely terminated. Captain Lefevre, who had voiced his opinion of the matter while at the Place Denfert-Rochereau, was particularly pleased to be rid of the girl. But it was the loss of her father's favor that staggered her most of all. The look of disappointment on his face earlier that morning still seared her eyes like inescapable smoke.
A sigh escaped her lips as the first hopeless tear trembled along her cheek. Her father had been her shelter from society's critical eye. She had badly wanted to be accepted and to make her father proud. The chance to find the murderer of the hanged man—and solve the mystery of the opera ghost—had been her opportunity. Indeed, she had proven her proficiency when she discovered the name of the murder weapon, starting her investigation with only the rope's material. But her overconfidence had cost her dearly. Consoled by marble effigies of sympathetic saints and illuminated by the tranquil glow of candlelight flickering in sacred votives, she quietly mourned her losses.
As the candles melted and their light slowly dimmed, her thoughts returned to the night of her exploration beneath the trapdoor. Had she only imagined the house beneath the cellars of the Opera? No—she had no doubt that her journey had been real, although it had seemed other-worldly. In particular, entering the organ room had felt like crossing the threshold of Hell. What disturbing inclination would possess a man to live beneath the earth, and with such ghastly décor? Moreover, what had seduced him to create a chamber for torture, and why construct a replica in Paris? The most chilling aspect of the mystery was the genius of the chamber's design, and the technology of the trap doors that had barricaded his lair. Although she was persuaded to agree with the Persian that the man's artistry deserved admiration, but these innovations were beautiful pictures of death. What had induced this behavior from a man of such extraordinary intelligence? Alice couldn't leave these questions unanswered.
If she could prove to the commissioner that the oddities beneath the Opera existed, perhaps she could convince him to accept her assistance on the case. But with the disappearance of the trapdoor, she had no access to that underworld in order to get her proof. Was there another way in? She had already tried to break the lock on the Rue Scribe gate. It was like no lock she had ever encountered and was probably made of iron. Could there be another secret entrance inside the Opera? Certainly she would not be welcomed back there, and the managers would never allow her to search for more trapdoors.
Was there a way through the catacombs?
Alice swept her gaze around the chapel, having forgotten where she was. The candelabra on the walls cast disturbing shadows on the Grecian pillars behind the altar. She stood and passed her palms over her face like someone awakening from sleep. She realized that she should leave, if she were to return home before sunset. Her mind now alert, she knelt and made the sign of the cross before making her exit at the back of the chapel, her hollow footsteps resounding from the lonely pews.
Outside, the golden afternoon had frosted, and Alice's breath passed from her lips in a ghostly vapor. Wind carried the fallen leaves, which collected in crispy ochre piles on the stone steps of the church. Alice was all but oblivious to the weather and only hugged her arms for warmth as her thoughts returned to the abode of the opera ghost.
She could search the catacombs.
Her unconscious steps took the path homeward while she considered her plan. The catacombs were labyrinthine passages beneath the city, some of which had been filled with the decaying bodies of the dead. Plagues and starvation had engorged Paris' cemeteries before the revolution, and the caverns under the earth had presented an expedient final resting place for the disinterred. According to her father, one of these tunnels took a winding path far underground beneath the Seine, and perhaps from there she could enter the ghost's subterranean lair.
But she risked losing direction underground without tools for her exploration: a compass, and materials to record the paths she took. A lantern to light the perpetual darkness of the grave. Perhaps the Bibliothèque would have copies of the plates that mapped the twisting passages. Lost in thought as she excitedly strategized, Alice was bewildered to find that her feet had already taken her to her front door.