The Paris Key Read online

  “That’s beautiful,” she says. “I love Hugo’s writing.”

  Thibeaux takes the empty wine bottle into the restaurant and starts arguing with Pablo, probably trying to get him to donate yet another bottle. Michelle and Cyril are talking, heads bent, deep in conversation.

  Angela looks up to find Xabi’s eyes on her.

  “I think you must go,” he says. “A lover of Victor Hugo cannot come two times to Paris and not visit the gargoyles, high and low.”

  “High and low?”

  “There are gargoyles below the ground, as well.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You do not know the catacombs?”

  She shakes her head.

  Again, Xabi looks at her for a long time. What is he thinking? Never before has she wished so fervently to be able to read someone’s mind. Does he despise her and her American ways? Or . . . is it something more? Does he find her as fascinating as she does him? Is he interested in her . . . and if so, does she want him to be?

  She dressed for him this morning, she reminds herself. Angela is nothing if not honest with herself; never play coy—tell the truth. She had wanted him to notice her, to cast his intense eyes over her body, slowly, taking her in. The intensity that burns in those eyes promises secrets in the dark; it hints at a kind of connection she hasn’t known for too long.

  It promises breath.

  The jarring, terrible truth is that when she spends time with Xabi her lungs are full of air, oxygen soaring through her, making her feel alive and aware and awake.

  She and Jim used to make fun of a song on the radio, singing it to each other in falsettos reminiscent of having sucked on helium: “Love is like oxygen: you get too much, you get too high, not enough and you’re gonna die.”

  Angela has been dying, and now she is high. Perhaps too high.

  This is ridiculous. She has to get ahold of herself. She is a wife and mother. Her thumb plays with her wedding ring in a nervous habit, spinning it around on her finger. Is it her imagination, or is it looser than it used to be? Has she somehow been losing weight, even while indulging in thick hot chocolate and creamy cheeses and Pasquale’s irresistibly rich sauces? Probably she has; she is so distracted that for the first time in her life she keeps forgetting to eat.

  She is like an adolescent girl with her first crush.

  What she needs to do, right this second, is to pack her bags and book a flight back home. Back to the farm, to her husband who needs her—at least needs her help with the animals and the harvest—and back to the warm, sticky hands of her son.

  Tricky Nicky, who told her on the phone just last night that she should have fun because he and Daddy had everything under control.

  Nick is such a mini-Jim. She loves him for that. She loves him for that, and yet it drives the spike further into her heart. Because just as when she talked to Jim, when she spoke to her son (flesh of her flesh, as she gripped the phone and cried with longing and yearning and a mother’s love), she absolutely could not breathe a single deep breath.

  What is wrong with her? She is a terrible person.

  “Could you take me to the catacombs?” she hears herself ask Xabier.

  He stills. He sits there across the table, absolutely still. And yet his brain is moving a mile a minute; she can tell by that penetrating look in his eye. How can he possibly be so still and yet so riveting? Rather than blending into the background—the way Jim did—he demands all her attention, like a teacher she’d had in eighth grade who used to lower his voice, rather than raising it, thereby quelling the students, who quieted to hear what he was saying. Xabi had the same gift: He somehow demanded attention, even while remaining silent and unspeaking. Especially while silent and unspeaking.

  “On one condition,” he finally says. “I will not take you to l’empire de la mort, the tourist catacombs. You can take a tour for that. I will take you to the real catacombs.”

  Thibeaux—emerging from the restaurant with another bottle of wine held triumphantly over his head—hoots and says something in rapid French.

  “All right,” Angela says. Another hoot from Thibeaux, another unintelligible sentence, and shakes of the head from Michelle and Cyril. “Let’s go.”

  “They say people risk leaving their souls down there, in the souterrain,” warns Michelle, shaking her head. “There are ghosts.”

  “But the American is not afraid. Are you?” Xabier asks with a tiny half smile.

  “No,” says Angela, breathless, yet high on oxygen. “I am not afraid.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Despite the espresso, Genevieve was ready for a nap by the time she and Philippe walked the three blocks to his house. His cane tap-tap-tapped on the sidewalk as they made their way slowly but surely down the street, he stopping to greet neighbors and joke with children as they passed.

  But her drowsiness fled when they stopped in front of a three-story stone building on the corner.

  “This is your house?”

  The building took up the entire corner, and she would have guessed it held several apartments, not a single home. It was historic and lovely, but upon second look she saw signs of neglect: window frames were sagging; the paint had chipped off of the trim. A corbel had detached from the eaves. The filigreed balconies decorating the windows showed rust and corrosion.

  “Yes, it is quite beautiful. It was quite beautiful. . . . I am very sorry to say that I have not had the money or the . . . how would you say, the heart?” he patted his chest. “I have not had the courage to make the repairs it needs.”

  He used an old-fashioned skeleton key to open the main lock, inserting it into an antique lock plate. It was decorated with scrollwork and a lion’s head, reminiscent of the brass cap on his cane.

  “I was so happy when Dave restored this lock for me. It is so lovely, I think. But he says it is not secure enough—I suppose I must stay safe from rascals like him and you! So then he gave me this one, the modern, electronic one.”

  The electronic keyless entry looked almost ludicrous next to such a historic door and key. But there was no denying that they were much more secure against people with picking skills than the antique models.

  Philippe said the code out loud while he put it in: “One-nine-four-four—the year Paris is liberated,” he said with a wink. “Now you can enter anytime you want—if you are like your uncle, you can open this old lock easy, even without a key, and then enter the code and voilà!”

  They stepped inside the foyer.

  It had a strange, dry-yet-dank smell. What was it about vacant houses? Even when full of furniture, they gave off a stale, unused feeling. Unbidden, Genevieve’s mind flashed on the photos she had seen in Killian’s apartment: it was the scent of abandonment.

  “You don’t live here?”

  Philippe shook his head. “No. I live with my daughter, in the Levallois-Perret. It is near her work and the children’s school. My grandson is autistique. Special needs. This place . . . we have many problems with plumbing and electricity. Very expensive. Too much, to open all the walls and . . .” He trailed off, gesturing at exposed wires running down one wall, water stains on the ceiling, a chunk of plaster that had fallen from a decorative medallion over the door. “It is beautiful but maybe it is too much for the modern world, eh? Comme moi, like me, it is a relic from another time.”

  “But it’s such a beautiful home.” And in Paris? Genevieve didn’t know the details, but she was pretty sure Paris was like New York or San Francisco in this regard: A historic home right downtown would be worth a fortune, no matter its state of repair.

  “Right now, we get the locks done and maybe after, my children figure out the rest. It will take much time and energy. I will be gone soon anyway.”

  Their voices seemed to echo off the bare wooden floors. The house appeared scavenged: There were discolored squares on the w
all where paintings had once hung; grooves in a carpet where a chair used to sit; an upholstered chair by a table, without its mate on the other side. There were crystal chandeliers strewn with cobwebs; a broom rested against what looked like a Louis XIV credenza. Her eyes immediately searched out the interior doorknobs—cut crystal—and those exposed to sunlight were turning various shades of lavender. Uncle Dave had taught her the color was the result of manganese in the glass, which dated the crystal to before 1920.

  “When the sunlight hits these knobs over time, it brings out the color of flowers. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, don’t you think, Genevieve?”

  There were also plentiful signs of incomplete packing: cardboard boxes and stacks of newspapers, as though someone had begun the process but had gotten distracted before making much progress.

  Philippe made his way to a huge dining room table, larger and finer than the one in Dave and Pasquale’s house. That one was sturdy and blocky, made for a farm family; this one was elegant, with claw feet holding balls, and was topped with a once-shiny lacquer. There were no matching chairs.

  Philippe started digging through one of three cardboard boxes atop the table.

  “I want to show you. . . . Yes, yes, it is here, voilà!” He pulled out a large photo album, laid it on the table, and splayed it open. “Here, it is a photo of your mother, Angela. You see? You look very much like her.”

  “My mother?” Genevieve put down an old book on the history of Paris (leather bound, marbleized endpapers) she was inspecting and joined him at the table. “I didn’t realize you knew her.”

  “Of course! Back then, when she came, she was helping my wife to organize these photos. Even then we did not live here, can you imagine? Even then we had started to move out, and still we have not finished!” Philippe laughed. He had a way of announcing things as though he himself were astonished by what he was saying. As though pleasantly surprised by life as a whole. It was not hard to imagine him and Dave as fast friends.

  “Look how young we were! And here, this is my beautiful wife, Delphine.”

  It was a group of six, seated at a long table in what looked like an old brick wine cellar.

  “We are here to a cabaret. Aux Trois Mailletz, in the Latin Quarter. Oh, such a time we had.” He laughed. “You know, here in Paris, they play music and sing all the night. There is no closing time like in your city. That night we go there, the music is playing, the people are singing . . . we order wine and do not come home until the sun comes up!”

  Uncle Dave must have been in his fifties, still dapper, his goatee salt-and-pepper. Beside him sat a smiling Pasquale, her hair up in a stylish coif, a silk scarf at her neck; she had always had the easy elegance so many Frenchwomen seemed to inherit at birth. Philippe sat with them, a bit older, already gray, with a lovely woman beaming at his side. Then there was Genevieve’s mother, Angela, in a blue-and-yellow scarf Genevieve thought she recognized from Pasquale’s bedroom. Sitting beside Angela was a striking, dark-haired, light-eyed man. All but the young man were smiling.

  “Who’s that?” Genevieve asked.

  “Who?”

  “The handsome man, here.”

  “Xabier.”

  At her questioning look, he added with a laugh, “With an X.”

  “Who was Xabier?”

  There was a slight pause, then a small shrug. “A friend. To make the couples even. Boy, girl, boy, girl.”

  An awfully good-looking friend, Genevieve thought. But then, as Mary had pointed out, she’d only just suffered her first migraine and she had two eligible bachelors—two men, at least—knocking on her door. She supposed this was one of those things France is famous for, like pain au chocolat and museums and cafés.

  “Okay! Now I leave you to your work,” Philippe said. “I am going now to play chess, in the Jardin des Tuileries. I am too old for petanque, but my head, I can still use it. My friend comes with his car, so I wait for him outside.”

  “Good for you. So, I’ll just replace all the locks Dave took out? Do you know if he had gotten to everything, or do you want me to double-check . . . ?”

  She brought out Dave’s notes and his schema for the house and laid them on the table. Clearly she didn’t have enough locks in her bag to fit all the doors in a house this enormous.

  Philippe laughed and waved his wrinkled hand in the air between them. “You look around, work on whatever you find. Do not be shy—enjoy! To Dave, this was like a child’s fantasy, all these locks. Although there are a few doors that might not be worth opening.”

  He looped a scarf around his neck—a black-and-white herringbone pattern in soft-looking wool—grabbed his cane, and turned toward the front entry.

  On the way out, he turned back and said, “Genevieve? Perhaps not all the doors need to be opened. But . . . I will leave that to you.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Alone in Philippe’s house, Genevieve felt as she had when she was a kid: like a trespasser. But Philippe had given her leave, so she snooped around, fascinated at this peek into another time.

  Up the broad sweep of stairs, she found five large bedrooms on the second floor—in France, they called it the first floor, she reminded herself—and on the third, a row of small, cell-like chambers, which could have been storage closets, or perhaps servants’ quarters. Only two small beds remained, old iron frames with shallow mattresses, which were still, oddly, made up: linens in faded shades of green and yellow. There were cardboard moving boxes here and there, assorted lamps and side tables, small area rugs, and a few scattered papers, but by and large the sense was of a fine house right after the war, abandoned and looted.

  Three of the doors (paneled, made of heavy oak) were bereft of their plates and knobs, displaying bare circles cut into the wood. Genevieve checked Dave’s schema and found three brass door fittings (locks, knobs, plates) that had been labeled and tagged as belonging to this floor. Each was packaged in a separate plastic bag, with little notes written in Dave’s all-caps handwriting. It was typical in fine old homes for the nicer parts of the house to be decorated with expensive crystal, ornate metal, or carved wood knobs, while in the servants’ quarters and work areas the fittings were made of less expensive brass.

  She took the first apparatus out of the bag, placed the kneepad before the door, and started to fit it into the hole, screwing in the baseplate.

  Her hands shook.

  She was no locksmith. Yes, she had shown great promise when she’d learned the basics of locks at her uncle’s knee. And yes, she had continued to practice, spreading out newspapers on a card table and taking apart old mechanisms or picking padlocks, driving Jason crazy with her “incessant need to fiddle with locks” in the evenings when he just wanted to relax and watch TV. And yes, she installed and fixed locks for people as a volunteer with an Oakland-based group that worked on old homes for the elderly.

  But none of that made her a qualified locksmith. What if she screwed something up? What if she ruined one of the D’Artavel family heirloom locks?

  “Treat the lock with respect, Genevieve, but do not let it defeat you.”

  She let out a long breath, hushed the voice of doubt in her mind, concentrated on her work, and persevered. Upon finishing with the first doorknob, she tested it thoroughly: did the device latch properly? Did the lock engage? And, most important, did the keys work easily?

  Yes. She felt a sense of pride; she had done it.

  She hung the old key off the knob by a loop of scratchy twine, as her uncle always had, and moved on to the next lock.

  Genevieve imagined the clanking of the key ring at the housekeeper’s waist as she moved about the house, busily attending to the business of her employers, the other servants under her thumb. In grand old homes such as this one, the housekeeper and the head of the household (usually the patriarch) would each have had a copy of the skeleton key, allowing them access
to each room. Back in the day, maids and grooms were not granted the right of privacy from their employers. That was a modern invention.

  She wondered why Philippe would want the locks cleaned and repaired and replaced, even while ignoring the plumbing and electricity. Was it a whim of an elderly, ever-so-slightly addled mind? Or was he simply determined to have the house whole again, to be sure all the original parts were brought back and to see her uncle’s job through to completion? Maybe he had the notion of restoring it to what he remembered from growing up here as a boy.

  Plumbing and electricity were relatively recent inventions, after all; these locks might have preceded such modern conveniences by centuries.

  Genevieve was methodical, almost meditative, as she proceeded room by room. A locksmith can’t rush the work. There was no point to it—if you lost your patience and hurried, you had to go back and start from the beginning. She didn’t know how much time had passed (she needed to get a watch!), but she must have been working upstairs for almost two hours by the time she finished, polished the knobs and plates to a dull brass sheen, and checked the dossier for what was next.

  There were several doors that needed work on the second floor: each bedroom, and closets within each bedroom. But she didn’t have enough time to finish them all today. She descended to the main floor so she would be sure to hear Philippe when he came back in.

  Typically there were fewer lockable spaces on the main floor, as there were fewer private areas. She checked her uncle’s notes again: the library, the front guest room, the pantry. She found the cleaned and repaired antique locks for those three rooms in her bag.

  Leaving everything on the dining room table, Genevieve looked around and got her bearings.

  The library was small but still packed with a quantity of beautiful little volumes that made her wish she could read French easily. Oak shelves reached up to the ten-foot ceilings, and two tall windows provided a mellow light. A cracked leather chair and ottoman sat beside a desk covered with papers and dust. The floor was studded with stacks of very old, very yellow newspapers and crumbling magazines.