Chapter 22
Five Weeks Ago
It took us a couple of days to find the part of the catacombs where Le Bec’s scent was strongest. We would have gone faster if it hadn’t been for the cat-holes.
We both wanted so badly to avoid them that we wasted time trying to find ways around them, ignoring the fact that they were there because there was no other way around.
And once through, we always felt too shredded to continue immediately.
We needed a couple of hours huddled silently together to recharge.
But Le Bec’s scent pulled us onward. We followed its faint tendrils—the metallic whiff of blood, the chemical-sweet smell of spray paint—hoping for a freshening that would lead us to him.
Finally, we entered a heavily tagged corridor, and Noor turned to me, her nose twitching.
I smelled it, too. His scent was stronger there.
Not fresh, but it filled the corridor, telling us he’d come here many times.
It intensified near the doorway of a squat the size of my living room.
It looked like a subterranean apartment rather than the usual bare, dirty shelter of necessity.
Dressed stone blocks formed the walls, as professional a job as any building I’d seen aboveground.
A smooth mortar joint tied the masonry into the raw stone ceiling.
The opening we’d come through was framed in wood, and a door hung on it.
I swung it closed, and it latched with a neat little snick.
A rumpled sleeping bag lay on a stone bench along one side of the room.
On the opposite wall, a handsome bookcase in dark wood sat next to a matching cabinet.
The bookcase held black sketchbooks numbered sequentially in red on the spines.
Noor pulled one of them out—number thirty-three.
She flipped through it as I looked over her shoulder.
It was filled with drawings in black marker, recording everything Le Bec saw, from a street crammed with cars to the group of us crowded together at Le Shopping.
I recognized Nick, Martine, and Youssef, looking animated.
I was there, too, looking as overwhelmed as I remembered feeling, and Noor sat beside me, watchful and wary.
I didn’t like how vulnerable he’d made me look.
“I hate what a good artist he is,” Noor murmured.
“Look at that. He captures everyone—their essence—in just a few lines.” She replaced the sketchbook and opened the cabinet, which was filled with spray paint, masks, and gloves.
“I think there are lots of good artists,” I said, watching her go through the cabinet, “who haven’t killed people.”
She stopped, then turned around and looked at me. “It is difficult to understand how he can be such a good artist and yet such a terrible person.”
“I think that’s a false equivalence. Great artist doesn’t equal great person.”
“But the way he captures people—their essence, their humanity—how can he be so sensitive to that, so capable of making one feel what his subjects are feeling, and nevertheless be a monster? His work is truly excellent. I admire it, and because I do, I also feel that in a certain sense I approve of the monster who makes it. I do not like feeling like this.”
How did you reconcile bad people who did good things?
I hated Cole because that night on the bus, as he gave me one last squeeze before he got up and went back to his seat, I realized that to him I wasn’t a person.
I was a thing. Yet I used the skills he’d taught me all the time.
He was good at research and argumentation, and it felt self-defeating not to take lessons where I found them, even if assault had been the price I paid for them.
Still, in the back of my head there was always his voice whispering that I wouldn’t be anything without him.
His casual dismissal of my humanity and my intelligence was like a fire in a coal seam.
It might smolder for years before it broke into the open and exploded into flames.
“I knew this guy,” I said. “He…hurt me. It wasn’t the worst thing he could have done, but it wasn’t good.
Until then, I’d liked him. Learned stuff from him.
So when he did what he did, maybe I felt like—like it wasn’t okay, but on the other hand, I did owe him something for spending time and effort on me.
I hate thinking about him every time I use something he taught me.
I hate feeling like he made me pay for what I learned when I didn’t even know there was a cost for it.
There shouldn’t have been.” I grimaced. “I’m not saying this right.
I don’t really know how to live with skills I only have because a bad person taught them to me. ”
She gave me an ironic half smile. “Yes. Me too. That is the problem.” She turned back to the cabinet, which looked expensive. Not like some IKEA thing he could bring down in pieces and assemble here. It looked like something that would need movers. “Perhaps I should steal some of his equipment.”
I did a conspiratorial half shrug, my left shoulder rising halfway to my ear. “I mean, I wouldn’t call the cops if you did.” She smiled and stuck her head back into the cabinet. I turned my attention to a tall wing-back chair on a heavily patterned Persian rug in the center of the room.
“Tosh,” she said. I turned back to see her holding up a hunting knife.
I grimaced. “Why would a vampire need a hunting knife?”
“I do not want even to think about the possibilities.” She shivered, replaced it, and continued rummaging.
I sat down on the chair. Oversized and regal-looking, it had eggplant-colored velvet upholstery, gold-embellished tufting, and a back so tall it almost met the low ceiling.
The gilded arms were gouged, though, and buttons were missing from the tufting.
The stained upholstery was ripped and bald in spots.
I wondered how he’d gotten the chair down here.
It would have taken a lot of work. But then, the whole room was a lot of work.
Aside from the improbable furniture, its walls and ceiling were covered in drawings of pigeons.
They blanketed the limestone so densely that initially I’d thought they were some kind of enormous abstract doodle.
It was only after I was sitting in Le Bec’s chair, staring idly at the wall near the doorway, that I started to pick individual images out of the snarl of wings, beaks, and feathers.
I had the same sensation I had the first week I was in Paris: a barrage of people doing things both mundane and spectacular, but so quickly and so constantly that all I could process was a face here, a gesture there.
The room was a microcosm of Paris, a Paris of pigeons.
They rode the Métro, played on their phones, staged a screaming sidewalk argument, kissed on a park bench, filled a canvas tote in an open-air market, hurried down the street clutching a briefcase.
It looked like Le Bec just kept drawing on top of older drawings, so that in some sections I could pick out only a wing or a beak.
He tucked tiny illustrations wherever there was a centimeter of free space, creating a restless, itchy-scratchy avian mass.
The walls seethed so hard I had to stare at the carpet to avoid feeling seasick.
“Noor, did you notice the walls?” I said.
She tucked a box of supplies into her pack and looked up, running her gaze slowly over the drawings.
I could see her shoulders hunch up. “You feel it, too, right?” I asked.
“I’m not just making it up that it’s super amazing and super creepy at the same time? ”
She shook her head. “You are not making it up.”
I got up from the chair and joined her. “It’s like he thinks he’s a king,” I mused. “Look at that chair; it’s a throne.”
“King of the vampires,” she said sarcastically.
“This is why the police haven’t found him. He disappears down here.”
“We found him, though.” She smiled a grim little smile.
“We did, didn’t we?”
“We tracked him through the dark without any resources but ourselves.”
“We’re kind of badass.”
She nodded briskly. “Of course we are.” She undid the stakes from her pack and handed me one.
I made a couple of test thrusts into the air, feeling silly.
“Is there a method we follow for this?” she asked, trying to find the best grip on hers.
“We will need to conserve his blood, yes? So how do we do it?”
“Madame Dupuy said be sure to stab him in the heart.” I showed her where to find the heart, running my fingers over the left side of my rib cage until I felt its steady thump.
Noor frowned. “It is not a large target, and it is well protected.”
“Yeah. Maybe one of us can distract him while the other one stakes him?”
“Or we knock him out first. That will make the staking easier.”
We looked for something that we could use as a club, but there was nothing. She reached into the cabinet, pulled out a can of spray paint, and tossed it to me. “Spray it in his eyes. It is not as good as knocking him out, but it will put him at a disadvantage.”
I pointed to the sleeping bag. “Then toss this over his head. If one of us holds him, the other can stake him.”