Century Rain Part 29

"This is the bit that doesn't make sense," Floyd said. He antic.i.p.ated the record sticking on a particular phrase, timing the stamp of his foot against the floorboards to coax the needle into the next groove. He did it so expertly that the jump was barely audible. "Whether or not it would ever stand up in court, we have more than enough evidence that she was engaged in some kind of espionage activity. But what was she doing with the books and things? Where did they fit in?"

"Part of her cover story as a tourist?"

"Perhaps. But in that case, why not behave like a respectable tourist instead of some cultural magpie,

filling steamer trunk after steamer trunk with all that stuff?"

"Unless there was something vital buried in all that material," Custine said. "It's a pity we don't know what was in the suitcase."

"But we know what was left in her room, and there's every reason to believe she would have continued

shipping it out if she hadn't been distracted."

"And yet nothing we saw looked in any way to be worth the attention of a spy. Books, magazines, newspapers, records...all of which could have been obtained in the United States, with varying degrees of difficulty."

"There was something about them that mattered to her," Floyd said. "Here's another thing: 'silver rain.'"

"Silver rain?"

"Mean anything to you?"

"I can't say it does."

"Susan White made a point of underlining just those words on a postcard she never got round to

sending."

"Could mean anything. Could mean nothing at all," Custine said, shrugging.

"Sounds like a codeword to me-a codeword for something unpleasant."

"It would," Custine said, smiling at Floyd. "But that's because you've got spies on the brain."

"There's still the matter of the typewriter."

"Well, that's a funny thing. I've been thinking about the typewriter, and there may be more to it than

meets the eye. Do you remember Blanchard showing us the box it came in?"

"He said it was a German model," Floyd said.

"Yes. And when he showed us the box-and mentioned the name-it made me think of something. The

trouble is, I can't quite work out how the two are related."

"What did it make you think of?"

"A room in the Quai: a windowless cell in the section where the interrogations used to take place, lit by a single electric light. A cell with ceramic tiles on the walls-the kind you can clean easily. The problem is that I can't quite see why there'd be a typewriter in that sort of room."

"To take down minutes?"

"What went on in those rooms, Floyd, was very much not the kind of thing that made it into minutes."

"Then why the typewriter?"

"I don't know. Perhaps I'll remember later, when my mind's on something else."

They said no more as the Bechet record played out, and then for a long while they sat listening to the hiss and scratch of the needle in the run-out groove, as if hoping for a message in the scuffing noise, some whisper of a clue that would crack open the case. Nothing came.

Floyd stood up and pulled the needle from the record. They left the office and walked down the stairs, stepping around the telephone engineer who was still sitting there with the racing pages, waiting for his replacement part to crawl across Paris. They drove to Montparna.s.se, Custine waiting in the Mathis while Floyd fetched Greta.

She stepped out into the twilight air, thin and angular in black, like a sketch in Vogue. She wore a black fur stole and a black pillbox hat with a spotted veil, and when she stood under the lamplight she looked like a million dollars, until she was near him, and then she looked tired and sad and on the edge of something she couldn't face.

"Let's go eat," Floyd said gently. "And then let's go hear some real music."

They drove to a little Spanish restaurant Floyd knew on the quai Saint-Michel. He ordered a good bottle of champagne, a 1926 Veuve Clicquot, waving aside the others' objections that he couldn't possibly afford it. It was true, technically, but Custine had worked hard and Greta deserved a good night out, a chance to forget about Marguerite for a few hours. The food was as good as Floyd remembered, and even the roving guitarist, Greta had to admit, was not as atrocious as some she'd heard. While Floyd settled the bill, Greta and the guitarist talked about tunings and fingerings. The handsome young man in a black shirt offered Greta his guitar and she played a few tentative notes before shaking her head with an embarra.s.sed smile. The guitarist said something kind in return as he shrugged the guitar strap back over his shoulder. Floyd smiled, too: Greta had been holding back, not wanting to blow the kid away. He must have been new in town.

After the meal they drove to Le Perroquet Pourpre, a club on rue Dauphine. Only a few years ago there had been six or seven like it a row, but most of its neighbours were gone now, boarded up or turned into cheap bars with jukeboxes and flickering altarlike television sets in the corner. Le Perroquet was still clinging to business, and was one of the few places still willing to let Floyd and Custine on to the bill without Greta. The walls were covered with photographs of jazz men, from Jelly Roll and Satchmo, through Duke and Beiderbecke, Coleman Hawkins and Django. Some of them had even played on rue Dauphine. The owner, an amiable, bearded Breton called Michel, spotted the three of them entering and waved them over to the bar. He asked Greta how her tour was going and listened as she told a white lie about leaving the band for a few days while her aunt was unwell. Floyd asked Michel if business was satisfactory, and Michel offered his usual pessimistic shrug, which hadn't changed much in nineteen years.

"The young people still have ears for good music," he said. "The trouble is they don't get a chance to hear it any more. Jazz is political music-always has been, always will be. That's why some people would rather see it dead."

"Maybe they'll get their way," Floyd said.

"Well, you're always welcome here. I just wish I could afford to have you play more often."

"We take what we're given," Floyd said.

"Are you available for the middle Sat.u.r.day next month? We've just had a cancellation."

"I think we can probably squeeze you in."

"Greta?"

"No," she said, lowering eyes already obscured behind the veil. "I don't think I'll be able to make it."

"Pity. But Floyd and Custine always put on a good show...although perhaps you might consider hiring a temporary piano player?"

"We'll think about it." Floyd said.

"Just so long as you keep it nice and melodic, boys. And not so fast that the punters can't tap a toe." He eyed Custine warningly. "None of that difficult eight-beat stuff you keep sneaking in."

"Maybe the young people want to hear something new for a change," Custine said.

"They want something new, not something that sounds like a bull loose in a china shop."

"We'll behave ourselves," Floyd a.s.sured him, patting Custine consolingly on the arm.

Michel set them up with drinks: beer for Greta and Custine, wine for Floyd, who needed a clear head for the drive back to Montparna.s.se. Leaning on the bar, occasionally breaking off to serve another customer, Michel fed them all the latest news on the local music scene: who was in, who was out, who was hot, who was not, who was sleeping with who. Floyd feigned a polite interest in it all. Although he didn't much care for gossip, it was good to think about something other than the murder case and his own problems for a while. He noticed Custine and Greta starting to laugh more, which made him feel better, and before very long they were all enjoying the company and the music and Michel's habit of keeping their gla.s.ses topped up. At eleven the band came on and stumbled through a dozen swing numbers, big-band productions stripped down for a four-piece, and while it wasn't the worst thing Floyd had heard, it was a long way from being the best. It didn't matter. He was with his friends, it was snug and smoky down in Le Perroquet, the greats seemed to be looking on benevolently from their photographs on the walls, and for a couple of hours all was right with the world.

Skellsgard and Auger stooped along a dark, low-ceilinged tunnel of rough-hewn rock, doing their best not to get too filthy in the process. They had eaten and made some further refinements to their outfits. Auger's brand-new handbag bulged with maps and money, some of the latter counterfeit, some of it stolen. They had left the censor chamber via a heavily armoured metal door, accessing a dug-out pa.s.sage that led off in either direction. Skellsgard had a torch, a fluted silver thing with a sliding switch, obviously manufactured in E2. Nervously she shone it up and down the shaft, as if half-expecting something, then set off to the right. She explained to Auger that excavation work in one direction had been abandoned as soon as the other end of the tunnel intersected an old works shaft put in by the Metro engineers.

"Did you tunnel all this out yourselves?" Auger asked.

"Most of it. It was easier after we hit the existing works shaft."

"It must still have been back-breaking work."

"It was, until we found we could get an air hose through the censor. We kept a compressor on our side, and then built a simple pneumatic drill that could be smuggled through as individual components. We rea.s.sembled it on this side and supplied it with air via the hose pa.s.sing through the censor. That helped a bit, although the censor had a nasty habit of changing its mind now and then."

"What about electricity? Can you run that through as well?"

"Yes," Skellsgard said, "but we never managed to make anything work. Even a torch turned out to be too difficult to break down into simple components. The censor wouldn't even let an incandescent bulb through in one piece. In the end we had to run gas through to light lamps, like nineteenth-century coal miners."

"It must have been h.e.l.l."

"The only thing that kept us going was the rumble of the trains, which told us we were getting nearer to civilisation. None of the other exit points have any kind of artificial background noise. At least here we knew we only had a few dozen metres of earth to tunnel through before we hit the train tunnel."

"I'm expected to dodge trains now?"

"Only in emergencies. We can trip the power by short-circuiting the electrified rails, but only for short periods. The station's closed now, so the trains aren't running."

"Why? What time is it?"

"Four-thirty in the morning on a Friday in October."

"I had no idea."

"Don't worry about it. No one ever does."

Soon they came to a blockage in the tunnel: a tight-fitting wooden door of obvious age. Skellsgard shone

her torch around the perimeter of the door until she found a concealed handle. She pulled it, groaning with effort. Just when it seemed as though nothing was going to move, the door hinged slowly back towards them.

Beyond was another dark tunnel, but this time their voices echoed differently. It was a much larger s.p.a.ce and it smelled of sewerage, metallic dust and hot oil. Skellsgard's torch gleamed off eight parallel lines of polished metal running along the floor, leading off to the left and right. There were two sets of parallel railway tracks, with two conductor rails for each running line.

Skellsgard set off to the right, keeping tight against the wall, with Auger following close behind.

"It's not far to Cardinal Lemoine. Normally you'd be able to see the station lights from here."

"I'm scared," Auger said. "I'm not sure I can go through with this."

"Scared is good. Scared is just the right att.i.tude."

The station was still dark when they climbed out of the tunnel on to its platform. Wherever Skellsgard's

torchbeam fell, Auger saw clean ceramic tiles in pale greens and yellows, period signs and advertis.e.m.e.nts in blocky capitals. Oddly, it didn't feel particularly strange or unreal. She had already visited many buried Metro stations under the icebound Paris, and they had often survived more or less intact. It was easy to imagine that this was just another field trip into the city of ghosts.

Skellsgard showed her to a hiding place and crouched down beside her. "I know you can do this, Auger. Susan must have known it, too, or she wouldn't have lined you up for it."

"I suppose I should be grateful," Auger said doubtfully. "If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be about to see any of this."

"I hope you like it as much as she did. It was the horses Susan wanted to see."

"Horses?"

"She'd always wanted to know what they were like-as living, breathing things, not some shambling, arthritic reconstruction."

"Did she get her wish?"

"Yes," Skellsgard said. "I think she did."

The morning rush hour began on cue. From their hiding place-tucked into a gap between two electrical equipment lockers at one end of the platform-Auger watched as the ceiling lights stammered on. She heard the humming of generators powering up and somewhere the melancholy whistle of a lone worker. She heard a jangle of keys and a slamming of doors. A lull of ten or fifteen minutes followed and then she watched the early birds begin to a.s.semble on the platform. The electric lighting washed out the colours like a faded photograph, but even taking that into consideration, she was struck by the drabness of the people: the autumnal browns, greys and greens of their clothes and accessories. Most of the commuters were men. Their faces were sallow, unhealthy-looking. No one was smiling or laughing, and almost no one was talking to anyone else.

"They look like zombies," she said quietly.

"Cut them some slack," Skellsgard said. "It's five in the morning."

A train slid into the station with a tinny squeal of brakes. Doors opened and some of the pa.s.sengers got on while others disembarked.

"Now?"

Skellsgard put a hand on her shoulder. "Wait. The next train will have more people on it."