The Missing Sister Page 20

  I run a finger along one of the empty shelves and trace a thick line in the dust, like a scene from an old wood-cleaner commercial. A sewer entrance lies near hidden by a grate, but the space is otherwise empty. Loïc elaborates on the mortuary practices of the crypt. I keep hoping he’ll drop in something relevant to my search; instead, he switches to tidbits about The Da Vinci Code. Apparently, a sister tour is offered at the Church of Saint-Sulpice. Fabulous.

  Divine Research. God’s studies. Angelic academia.

  The crowd ambles forward like bored cattle exiting the atrium. Chang and I meet at the front. “Did you find what you were looking for?” Chang asks.

  “What do you mean?” I lead us down a side street back toward the river. More taxis tend to idle that way.

  “Well, I always go to church—any church—mosque, temple, public park, wherever God plants before me when She knows I need help. Especially when I’m feeling lost or confused. Seemed a little odd to me that you went down to the crypts instead of a pew, but to each her own.”

  Thinking back on the dusty shelves I touched, and the anecdotes Loïc tossed out, I’m not sure I gained anything. “Probably should have chosen a back row.”

  Chang shoots me a shy smile. “Hey, we have another two days until you go, right? We could always come back. Have to fill that time with something.”

  We return to the apartment building, and Chang follows me all the way upstairs. I unlock the door and step inside. Chang surveys the space from the doorway. Without a word, she sets about righting furniture and organizing half-full crates. Replacing the bed frame and mattress against the wall takes some doing, but together we make it happen. Chang scans the items at her feet—clothing, untaped boxes, stacks of papers—then rubs her arms. Like she’s trying to get warm. Slowly, she turns reddened eyes to me. I sit perched on the twin bed, legs tucked underneath like I’m ten years old again. The solid white comforter is soft, worn in a few places, and a cigarette ring has singed a square of fabric. Chang asks me something, but all I can think right now is how Angela would never smoke. But maybe Paris Angela would. “Sorry, what?”

  “I said you’re doing really good, Shayna. This isn’t easy, and I see you doing the best that you can here.” Chang steps across a box to the bed and gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Angela gave me permission to enter her apartment if I ever felt it was necessary. So now I’m going to give you the same: Come downstairs whenever you need anything, all right?”

  I nod, because my throat is clenched tight.

  Chang smiles. “Good girl.” Then she shuts the door behind her.

  Music pulses from a string of venues while patrons navigate the sidewalks to the beat. Revelers pack the Marais quarter. Men and women hug in the shadows, men with men gyrate against cars, and mini outfits peacock in the streets. My black dress with matching heels might as well be a parka. A wizened man in all white carries a bucket of roses from couple to couple. Groups laugh, dance, and mingle outside while the bars and clubs are only beginning to fill.

  A hulking woman stands outside a fluorescent entryway. Impressive forearms cross beneath a muscled bosom. She nods as I approach, not so much as glancing at my purse for ID. I pass beneath the flashing, neon sign for the club—DANSE LA NUIT—each word illuminating individually in sequence—the club whose flyer Angela wrote my to-dos on. When I called the number on the back this morning, the line went straight to voice mail. Did Angela mean for me to end up here tonight with Hugo, one of the resident deejays, or was I supposed to be here Tuesday night when she slipped the leaflet under Nour’s mat, making me days late for an appointment I didn’t know existed? Anxiety sears my blood as I step inside, and I look over my shoulder to see whether Jean-Luc or anyone is behind me.

  Techno music bumps on the speaker system while rainbow-colored strobe lights form a disco pattern on the black-painted floor. People huddle in twos and threes. Two bars flank the dance floor on opposite sides, and I head to the closest one next to the entrance. The bartender smirks at my request—Diet Coke with lime. Ignoring him, I raise the plastic to my lips, craving something sugary.

  A deejay spins from a booth in the center of the floor behind the protection of a plexiglass case; grinding dancers press against the panels. Song lyrics strike with the pounding rhythm, and my chest aches unwillingly along to each verse. The deep questions the singer asks—Will we be admirable or will we be detestable?—seem to hang in the air made smoky by dry ice and cigarettes. A woman throws back her head, cackling with laughter along the far wall—everyone with her joins in, including Hugo.

  He looks much like he did in Nour’s apartment—all smiles, wearing a fashionably unbuttoned dress shirt with a smart blazer—but somehow more aloof, aware that people are looking at him here in his element, as a deejay. His gaze lifts and peers into the semidarkness directly at me. I duck behind a pair of broad shoulders. Sipping my diet soda, I move to a wall, putting a dozen bodies between us, and farther into the shadows. I didn’t come here for another chaperone.

  All pairings—ages, races, and genders—slink in the crowd together to a mysterious melody. Black walls are empty save for the purple beams projecting upward from fluorescent lamps on the floor. Where would Angela be? Would she hide here? What does she want me to find?

  “Shayna?” Hugo stands before me, a plastic cup with clear liquid in hand. Vodka, probably. Or rum, on the rocks. Good choice.

  He says something else, then breaks into a grin; I can’t hear him so close to the speakers, and he gestures away from the dance floor. We move into a hallway beside the restrooms. My eardrums throb with the volume change while I take the opportunity to scan these walls for more of our secret language. Two unisex bathroom doors line up adjacent to an unmarked door. I take another step down the hall when the door opens. A young man emerges, donning an apron. A barback.

  “Shayna?” Hugo waves a hand in front of my face. “Good to see you again, chérie.” Full lips pout at the end of each word, mirroring his mild accent. He kisses me hello on both cheeks.

  “You, too. I didn’t mean to take you from your friends.”

  Hugo smiles. “No worries. Nour said you had questions about Parisian history. I love that stuff.”

  I peer behind him, back into the growing mass of bodies, then eye his cup. The dry scent of vodka tingles my nostrils. “Actually, I had some questions about the layout.”

  He leans against a framed photo of a couple dancing. “I know Paris better than anyone. Above and belowground.”

  A shiver skips along my back despite the venue’s raging body heat. “You mean the catacombs? I’ve already been there.”

  “If you want the boring, sterile tour, then you have it available Monday through Friday. There are entrances that offer more interesting scenery, though not as pretty as the main one. Sorry—am I going on a tantric?”

  Two excited girls flounce past and give Hugo a flirtatious giggle. He wrinkles his nose at me, and we share our own laugh. “No, I’m interested,” I reply, understanding he meant tangent. “How do these entrances differ from Denfert Rochereau?”

  Hugo casts his eyes to the side. “In the unofficial doors, you don’t have the fancy stairwell with railing that takes you one hundred steps underground. You have to earn the catacombs, ma belle. There is one good entrance left on this side of the city that hasn’t been shut down by police.”

  The reminder of so many steps beneath fresh air and daylight constricts my chest. My pulse races, but I muster a smile. “I almost puked on that staircase. Don’t know if I could do anything else less luxurious.”

  “Suit yourself, chérie. But Impasse de Valmy is full of history, if that is your goal.” He smiles, then turns back to the dance floor. “Shall we?”

  We talk about (shout about) Nour above rap music mashed up with a house beat. I learn he’s known her since they were seven, during their parents’ tenure as part of the Muslim Association of Paris. Bodies crowd into the area, bumping against me when someone calls to Hugo. A girl sh
rieks with laughter to my right. A stranger’s sweat slimes across my cheek in a YMCA move to the love ballad playing, and the scene tilts away from me. I steady myself on a random elbow and focus on the ceiling’s lattice of flashing lights to calm my breathing in the suddenly cramped space. In out. In out. The neon filters provide enough visual clarity to find Hugo and say goodbye. He cozies up to a cute boy with glitter across each cheekbone, probably the bare minimum age to enter the club (eighteen). We do the kisses on each cheek, then the boy reclaims him. Purple nails claw Hugo’s pants pockets.

  As I pick my way to the front entrance from this side of the club, I have a view into the deejay’s booth. Her fingers dance across the dials of an electronic board, turning settings up and down, before she preps the next track on the tablet she holds in her small arms. Neon makeup, like war paint, accentuates big eyes, high cheekbones, and makes bright-green lips pop. Asymmetrical black hair sways beneath giant headphones. She pops her head up from her board and waves to someone in the crowd. She must be five feet tall.

  “Hugo? Hugo!” I turn back and grab his shoulder. “Who is that woman?”

  “The deejay? That’s DJ Chyn-noisette. A legend! She’s been spinning since the eighties, on actual turntables. Owns a ton of property in Paris, worth a billion dollars. I met her in the tunnels once!”

  Hugo spins back to his dance partner, leaving me to gape openmouthed at Madame Chang. She leads the crowd in punching the air to a slowed-down remixed version of the Will we be admirable will we be detestable song I heard earlier, masterfully bringing the energy down low only to turn up the bass and speed and make everyone jump and dance with more excitement than before. Without Coke-bottle glasses, she looks thirty.

  “Chyn-noisette est trop vielle!” Hugo’s friend lurches forward to slur French in my ear, only the music fades at that moment and his shout knocks me backward. The yellow bandanna he wears glows in the black-light strobe flickering across his pale cheeks. I can’t tell if he means she’s old as in aged, or old as in boring, irrelevant news. Either way, I glance at Chang to see if she heard; she adopts a stiff smile, scrolling down the screen of her tablet. Hugo playfully pushes the younger guy and says something I don’t understand; he shakes his head, then repeats, “Legend. Le-gend,” drawing out the word in English. A rocket ship noise kicks off the next song, and the debate is forgotten. I cast another eye at the booth, and Chang is already shaking her fist, revving up the crowd.

  I exit the club, feeling more bewildered than when I entered. Fresh air fills my lungs, expelling the smoke and tension from inside.

  The sidewalks are sparse around two in the morning, everyone finally inside a bar or club. Cool night air is a relief from the daytime’s fumes. I raise my gaze to the starry sky, searching for constellations familiar to me at home, when an airplane passes overhead.

  For a moment, my internal reprimand—that I didn’t learn anything useful from Hugo, from the flyer Angela left me, and all I’ll have to show for my efforts in the morning is a slight hangover from the sugar—falls quiet. I watch the airplane pass over Paris with nothing more, no thoughts, disappointments, expectations—just observing a massive steel machine that could drop out of the air at any moment and rain disaster on every last unsuspecting fool, unaware of how good they have it on this block. Then the plane travels behind a cloud and out of sight.

  I wait a good minute in front of the club on the sidewalk, but the plane doesn’t reappear.

  I step into the road in the direction of Angela’s apartment. Darkness extends beyond the corner ahead, and I scan the block for pockets to avoid. With no cabs in sight, and the discovery of Chang’s deejaying and Hugo’s insight behind me, I focus simply on placing one foot in front of the other. Before the next red, blinking light falls out of the sky.

  Chapter 27

  The nightlife disappears and the street opens into a wide, flat square. A sign affixed along the side of a building reads RUE MOUFFETARD. People I recognize from the row of clubs lie passed out on the few available benches. The sight of them is reassuring; if they feel safe enough to pass out in this communal plaza, I shouldn’t feel like someone has been following me the past ten minutes. And yet, I do.

  Cobblestone magnifies the echo of high heels and clinking glass. I resist the urge to look over my shoulder again. The sound of footsteps overlapping my own began around the curve in the street, where the bars were no longer visible and the next set of businesses was closed. No taxis seemed to be running, despite this being a sort of rush hour, near closing time and along a frequented bar block. I kept walking, picking up my pace and telling myself I was being paranoid, when Valentin’s words of caution resurfaced: Murders are impersonal. Perpetrators abducting men and women arbitrarily. Stay inside.

  One bench is being half used by a slumbering man, and I sit down to bide my time—there’s got to be a taxi at some point. Another couple stumbles from down the road, heading toward me, along with a single man behind them.

  “Shayna?” Someone grips my shoulder, and I whirl to face a shaggy fringe of hair.

  “Jean-Luc.”

  He steps back with his palms up, like he did that first day in the stairwell. Big green eyes look brown in the yellow wash of the streetlamps, larger than I remember. His hair is disheveled, looking much like an assailant’s should. Fear spikes through me as I twist round searching for a friend, an exit, a weapon, without alerting him: I know what you did.

  “Good to see you.” Jean-Luc leans forward, but I stumble away, using the flat stone bench to maintain my distance. Confusion draws his face in the shadows. “Shayna, I’ve been trying to get ahold of you, but you haven’t gotten your phone back. Did something else happen?”

  His easy cadence of English stings, both tempting in that it sounds like home and safety, and painful because I know it’s a violent lie. The spoiled cherry to this week’s horrors, a reminder that he was calm, polite, helpful when I was taciturn, in order to finish the job. Jean-Luc has been targeting me since I arrived, the way he targeted Angela. Since he was unable to keep her, he must want me to replace her. Sweat breaks across my chest in the high-neck dress.

  “No, nothing else. I’ve just been soul-searching, alone. Excuse me.” I step away, toward the main road, wishing I had worn flats or sneakers instead of Angela’s stilettos, but he jumps into my path.

  His features tense like he’s caught me cheating. “Shayna, I don’t believe you.” He steps toward me, glancing at the man sleeping on the bench. “I was at a bar down the street and saw you leave. I saw someone else start following you.”

  Despite the warm temperature, a chill ripples across my skin. Were those the footsteps I kept hearing, or were they Jean-Luc’s? Or is he lying to get me to trust him again? Were they the fake cop’s? Are they working together?

  A sphere of headlights grows in the crooked road. Panic riles me, closing my throat, and I take another step away from him. “I’m fine. Thank you for your help this week, Jean-Luc.”

  People still drinking and stumbling around us snicker, mocking my English with thick French accents. “Zahnk yeu, Jean-Luc!”

  As the headlights near, I thrust out my hand, and a taxi rolls to a stop beside us. I climb into the back seat.

  “Shayna. If you need anything, you know where I live,” Jean-Luc says through the open window. He raises a single palm. “And I know where you live.”

  My thumb pushes down the door lock. “Montmartre, s’il vous plaît,” I say to the driver. The front seat is dark, so I can’t tell if he heard or understands my accent until the car pulls forward. We veer left toward the river. I count to five before I let myself look behind. Jean-Luc is in the same spot. It could be simple coincidence that he saw me leaving, or he could have been following me since I ducked out of Danse La Nuit. Since the baggage carousel at Charles de Gaulle airport.

  The driver asks me something in French I don’t grasp. I’m shaking my head when a high-pitched wail reaches us. Loud, fast, rocking toward us from the main
causeway of the river. A police car speeds past, narrowly missing our cab. Valentin. Could that be him?

  “Follow that car, s’il vous plaît.”

  The driver looks at me in the rearview mirror. “De . . . quoi?”

  “My sister . . .” I lift a hand to my head. The throbbing I felt inside the club returns. My cheeks flush as an uncomfortable warmth spreads down my chest.

  “Everything okay?” he asks in French. Streetlamps blur along the riverside boulevard. Turning my gaze to him aggravates the growing vertigo. Darkness flits across his concerned expression, and I mumble that I’m fine, mal de tête. Headache.

  “Please follow that car. My sister is missing; she needs my help. Please. Help me look for her.” My vision turns hazy. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation burrow into my temples. My dress seems too thick, too hot, even though the driver wears a jacket.

  “Your address,” the driver attempts. “Miss, where you live?” Something about his voice in English is familiar, but I can’t place it.

  I mumble what I think is the street in Montmartre. Offer the closest metro stop to better orient the driver. The car pitches right. The leather seat is cool on my cheek. Brightness glares through my eyelids. Someone touches my shoulder. “Angèle. Nous sommes arrivés.”

  “What?” My eyes fly open, and I find Mathieu, the bordel tour guide, holding open the door. I scramble out of the car, but he grabs me by the shoulders.