Later that week, Erik sat facing Madame Giry in the ballet mistress's flat. They sat stone-faced across from each other at the kitchen table, the light low, their voices muted and expressionless.
Both were reminded dolefully of underground meetings in Persia when they would discuss the latest orders from the shah.
Only now the orders came from Paris's secret police.
Madame Giry arched a brow, the only sign of life in her still face. "Well?"
"I followed him home," Erik drawled in a careless tone of voice. "Very luxurious apartments." He plucked a grape from a bowl on the table and pretended to study it. "You were correct: he is a fussily image-obsessed little man."
Madame Giry added a humorless smirk to her arched brow as one of the few expressions she allowed herself now.
Yes, the Count was image-obsessed. That much she'd garnered from Natalie, the chorus dancer Giry cornered. Using the pretense of her usual rigid discipline, Giry interrogated Natalie about this Count. The dance mistress was well aware that the Count had paid the young dancer a minor interest.
Frightened into obedience, Natalie spilled all the details she knew about this Count: she of course didn't like him, he was so oily in manner and smelled too thick of cologne, his clothes almost laughably fashionable and flashy. No, no, Madame, Natalie had never gone home with him! He once invited her out to drinks at Le Chat Noir, where he usually met his dates or so she heard, but Natalie was an honest girl! She turned him down, she swore!
Giry gave the name of Le Chat Noir to Erik. Erik, adopting a false nose and whiskers (his hat hiding the rest of his disfigurements) waited hidden by a streetlight outside the establishment for three nights until a man who met the Count's description appeared. The gleaming, pale blue glass eye confirmed the man's identity.
Quiet and slippery as an eel, Erik followed him home by climbing in back of his carriage, his cloak wrapped tightly around him, making him one with the carriage and undetectable as the party sped by drunk city-dwellers. He crept to the windows outside the Count's town house after they arrived, and witnessed the Count's various fastidious nighttime activities: dusting everything he touched, winding his ornate gold pocket watch and studying it obsessively, curtly dispensing directions to his servants, and then disappearing upstairs to his bedchambers.
Erik couldn't watch for long or even attempt entering the house. He quickly noted that many of these alleged servants were instead hired guards, and that their surveillance of the estate took precedence over their other duties. He slipped away just before a tall, gaunt man with a face like a beaten in whiskey jug stepped out of the house to inspect the yard.
It appeared the only way to get into the Count's house was by invitation from this very Count.
Erik deemed him an unimpressive, wiry figure, but one with a crafty air that warned against underestimating him.
As Erik described him, half of Madame Giry's attention was devoted to taking in this information, and half devoted to thinking of ways to keep him as far away from Meg as possible. Little did she know Erik was thinking the same thing.
She also took this time to study Erik. She had served him all these years in the opera house at a distance; their meetings usually taking place in Box Five with him as nothing more than an invisible voice hovering somewhere above her. Otherwise, they communicated strictly through letter.
And so time sped by without them dealing face to face. So how had the years changed him?
He was grimmer now, less fantastical and melodramatic. His half-face was even paler, though the bone structure was stronger, more pronounced. He still put on the same lazy disinterest that he wore as another mask in Persia when he was a boy, to cover his overabundance of energy and ambition. Only now she sensed this mask of indifference covered his recent heartbreak and loss…and something else underlying that misery.
Something like…fear? Confusion? There was a watchful, hauntingly surprised look about his eyes and the twitch in his uncovered cheek. He was like a mourner in a darkened funeral parlor who stared at a black coffin so long that when a stray butterfly, bright and quick, fluttered into his line of sight from seemingly nowhere, he had no idea how to react to the contrast, how to adjust.
Madame Giry never before saw this particular confusion in Erik before, and knew not how to approach him with it.
Meg suddenly burst into the room. She was full of sunlight and life, radiant with too much animation for the pair huddling in the dark dreariness of the flat. As always, Meg's energy and vivacity hummed almost too loud for Erik to take in, and he started when she came forward with that brilliant smile on her face.
Meg flung her arms around her mother's neck, her face full of ecstatic satisfaction as she squeezed Madame Giry. "I did it! I got the part!" She released her mother and twirled around, clapping. "The cast list was just posted! I can't believe it, I can't! Well, I can. But still! I'm dancing in a Robard ballet! And I got it on my own!" She raised her chin proudly, her eyes sparkling.
So swept up was she that she failed to notice the wary looks on the two before her. The girl usually so sensitive to any change in the demeanor of those around her was too excited today to let anything else in.
Something indefinable leapt in Erik's chest as she suddenly darted a hand out to him. The green in her eyes was bright and those pupils focused happily on the former opera ghost. "Monsieur Erik! I must thank you and insist on your continued help! Come! I've received the whole score! We should practice!" Her dimples and her freckles were emphasized by the candlelight, as was the gleam in her laughing eyes. "Come!" She repeated. She grabbed his wrist, and barely controlled fury and fear coursed through his veins at the burning contact.
He was saved from dispensing an unnecessarily sharp rebuke by Madame Giry's dark voice. "You have done well, my Meg, but Erik and I are busy right now." Madame Giry gazed thoughtfully at the little hand clutching Erik's.
"Oh, Mother, certainly that can wait a half hour or so! I'm just so excited right now, I must get started at once. Please?" This small word was full of sincere appeal, reflected in her soft eyes and warm smile.
She made such a lovely picture. A deep breath on both their parts, then Madame Giry and Erik nodded once simultaneously. With one inscrutable glance at Giry behind him, Erik followed out the eager girl.
Giry was left alone in the flat. She massaged her temples, where a dull ache had formed. She strove to be as optimistic as her daughter. After all, Meg got the role all on her own, so maybe the young girl could be as in control of the whole operation as she imagined.
Yet Madame Giry had had too many experiences to the contrary for the thought to fully comfort her.
She laughed ruefully to herself. Once again she reflected that before she'd taken commands from the shah of Persia, and now a ragtag group of Parisian policemen. The setting changed, but the motives and dictates of her life did not.
True, she now had two masters to attend to instead of one shah: the police and the ballet. Any authority Andre and Firmin ever held over her diminished even more drastically with the recent revelation in the lair. The two dealt with her with barely suppressed fury and impotence at their own helpless position. Bound to secrecy by the government, they deeply resented this dance mistress getting away with pulling one over on them. But the resentment would often give way to mystified trepidation when they remembered her origin: that of a Persian spy.
They felt vaguely that this should put them in the superior position, since not only was she a dance mistress, but one from the Orient! But any thoughts of acting on their ingrained bigotry died out at the eternally steady composure in her expression and stance, and their realization her past as a spy probably lent her…certain advantages if they should dare talk down to her. They comforted themselves remembering that, after all, they'd shown every respect to the late Piangi, who had black blood on his Moroccan mother's side. So why not extend the same respect to Madame Giry, even if she was not a performer that needed mollifying?
Still, they bristled under their new restraints, and Giry sensed any camaraderie she might have once tentatively shared with the two men was now mostly gone.
And thus, her past continued to haunt her. The endless appetite of the elite government, their fixation on security, meant people with Anahid's skills were doomed to serving them.
She remembered Julien's words the night they fled with Erik, concerning the treatment of the disfigured boy in the Persian palace: "Don't think that's unique to the Persian court. I can easily see my fellow noble Frenchmen indulging in such exploitive behavior as well…"
How right his words proved. The secret police worked for the French court after all, doing their bidding just as the Persian secret police did Naser's.
Nobility, aristocracy, that was where the true corruption dwelt.
Madame Giry thought to herself that exploitation and perversion were not innate traits in any particular culture. They were symptomatic instead of the elite. As she grew older and more introspective, Anahid found herself agreeing more and more with her departed husband: the nobility was a corrosive, corrupting illness that festers in any culture that houses it.
Erik, too, was introspective as he played for Meg in his lair. He tried to focus only on the sheets of music in front of him, which truly was first-rate. Yet the harder he stared at the music, the more he felt her movements in front of his pipe organ, and invariably his eyes would swim to the dancing girl.
She listened intently to his comments and incorporated his critiques into her dance, but he noticed she also put more of herself into her gestures and expressions, adding a fiery and independent flair to Belle that he hadn't envisioned before.
Such a combination in his mind was unconventional for the role of a sad damsel, but…not unlikable.
It had been boredom that led him to Box Five the day of her audition. Simple boredom from months now of staying practically imprisoned in his lair.
This is what he had repeated like a mantra to himself as he watched her from the box, watched her enchant them all.
His eyes were locked on her now. Sometimes she would turn in a certain way, or fling her head back just so, red-blonde curls cascading down, that violent shudders would flood Erik's body.
What was happening to him?
Other times her sudden childlike smiles at his mildly encouraging words would remind him so strikingly of the little Meg of years before that the juxtaposition startled him. He'd see nothing but that moppet in toe shoes eagerly taking in her mother's words during lessons with the other children – starry-eyed, a little mischievous, adorable.
Little Meg entered the opera house at almost the same time Erik took control of the theater as Phantom. Thus, he had gotten to know his opera house at almost the same time she had, seen it through her eyes as well as his own. His promise to her mother bound him to her, yet he was well aware now that he had paid very little attention to the girl herself. She was just another bouncing, cute petite rat who shrieked louder and danced better than her compatriots, but he otherwise thought her not that different from the rest of them.
Yet when Meg felt awe at a new set design, he felt it too. When she gawked at the costumes with their close detail to time period, the young Phantom had gawked as well. They learned the theater together, never truly noticing the other.
Just as Carlotta had always been the talentless diva, Piangi the fat clown, Reyer the histrionic dictator, and Madame Giry his sometime confidant, Meg was just…Little Meg to him. She had her place same as everyone else. She had her role, her position to fill in his opera.
He was dimly aware of her growing sweetness, her budding role as leader in the ballet, both as dancer and guardian of the girls. Yet when he noted those traits of kindness and talent within her, he merely labeled them as evidence she was nothing more than an extension of her mother. Thus he saw those qualities as more of a credit to Anahid than Meg herself.
But now that he was so near her, and he could see up close how that adorable cherubic face now also held the alluring touches of womanhood, he was lost as to how to properly define her. When he recalled more clearly her behavior with Christine, and even with him, it slowly dawned on him that there was a deep, warm compassion within her that was…different somehow from Anahid's. Individual.
Meg was herself, not an extension of her mother or just another pretty face in the corps de ballet.
And as her happy eyes settled on his, and she smiled again, he realized she was willing to share who she was with him. As if they were…friends.
Cold sweat pricked the back of his hands as he played. His heart pounded and he felt more afraid than he had in years.
Little Meg was making him feel this way?
Christine! He inwardly pleaded. He prayed to her, his soul's guardian angel, who still stood at the forefront of his waking dreams. He prayed to her image, safely locked away in his heart, prayed to her for strength.
Christine.
And yet Meg danced on, apparently oblivious to the storm just brewing inside Monsieur Erik. A storm that was now merely a few dark clouds, and had as yet to fully rage.