8
He had no intention of following the first Gestapo agent’s descent to the auditorium’s floor; his fingers gripped the fluted finials of the gilded column that rose beside Adam’s loge, and the muscles of his shoulders strained as he pulled himself and Adam up toward the topmost tier. A new chorus of screams and shrieks swept across the audience. Even Ninon Vallin cried out, whether in fear for a human life or rage at being upstaged, Michael couldn’t tell. He hoisted them up, grabbing whatever handholds he could find. His heart pounded and the blood roared through his veins, but his brain was cool; whatever the future held, it was to be decided very quickly.
And so it was. He heard the vicious crack! of a gunshot-a Luger being fired at an upward angle. He felt Adam’s body shudder and stiffen. The man’s arms, already tightly clamped around him, in an instant became as rigid as iron bars. Warm wetness trickled through the back of Michael’s hair and down his neck, drenching his suit jacket; he realized the bullet had just blown away a large portion of Adam’s skull, and the muscles of the corpse had frozen in the sudden paralysis of severed nerves. He clambered up the column, a dead man locked on his back and blood trickling over the finials. He pulled himself over the balcony of the uppermost loge as a second bullet flayed away a shower of gold paint four inches from his right elbow.
“Up the stairs!” he heard the Gestapo agent shout. “Hurry!”
The loge Michael found himself in was unoccupied. He spent a few seconds trying to unlock Adam’s fingers from where they were clenched together at his chest; he broke two of them like dry twigs, but the others resisted him. There was no time to fight a dead man’s grip. Michael staggered through the door into the crimson-carpeted hallway outside and faced a warren of lamplit corridors and staircases. “This way!” he heard a man shout, from somewhere to his left. Michael turned to the right and staggered down a corridor lined with paintings of medieval hunting scenes. The corpse hung to his back, its shoe tips dragging furrows in the carpet. Behind them, Michael realized, was also a trail of blood. He stopped to thrash against the body; but all he did was burn up priceless energy, and the corpse remained latched to him like a lifeless Siamese twin.
A shot rang out. Just over Michael’s shoulder, a lamp held by a statue of Diana exploded. He saw two soldiers coming after him, both armed with rifles. He tried to reach his Luger but couldn’t get to it because of the corpse’s grip. He turned and ran into another corridor, this one curving to the left. The voices of his pursuers shouted directions to each other, their Germanic snarls like the baying of hounds. Now the corpse’s one hundred and thirty pounds seemed an eternal weight. He forced himself on, the corpse leaving smears of blood in the halls of beauty.
An ascending staircase was ahead of him, cherubs with lyres mounted on its balustrades. Michael started toward it-and smelled the bitter scent of a stranger’s sweat. A German soldier with a pistol stepped from a shadowed archway on his left. “Your hands,” the soldier said. “Up.” He motioned with the gun.
In the second that the barrel was uptilted, Michael kicked him in the right kneecap and heard the bones break. The pistol fired, its bullet thunking into the ceiling. The German, his face twisted with pain, staggered against the wall but didn’t let go of the gun; he began to take aim, and Michael leaped at him as Adam dragged on his shoulders. He caught the German’s wrist. Again the gun fired, but the bullet passed Michael’s cheek and smashed something on the other side of the corridor. The German gouged at Michael’s eyes with hooked fingers and screamed, “I’ve got him! Help me! I’ve got him!”
Even with a broken knee, the soldier was strong. They fought in the hallway, grappling for the gun. The soldier struck Michael in the jaw with a blow that stunned him and made him see double for a few seconds, but he held on to the gun hand. Michael delivered a punch that hit the German in the mouth and knocked two teeth down his throat, strangling his screams for help. The German brought a knee up into Michael’s stomach, driving the breath out of him, and the corpse’s weight pulled Michael off balance. He fell backward, hitting the wall with a force that cracked Adam’s ruined skull against the marble. The soldier, balancing desperately on one leg, raised his Luger to shoot Michael at point-blank range.
Behind the German Michael saw a whirl of dark blue, like a tornado unfurling. A knife glittered with chandelier light. Its blade plunged down into the back of the soldier’s neck. The man choked and staggered, dropping his pistol to clutch his throat. Gaby wrenched at the knife, but it had gone in too deeply. She let it go, and the soldier made a terrible moaning noise and crashed face down.
Gaby blinked, stunned at the sight before her: Michael, his hair bloody and gore spattered over one side of his face, and clutched to his back an openmouthed corpse that had a pulpy mess where the right temple had been. Her stomach churned. She picked up the gun, her knife hand smeared with scarlet, as Michael found his balance again.
“Geissen!” a man shouted from down the corridor. “Where the hell are you?”
Gaby helped Michael try to unlock the corpse’s fingers, but they could hear the noise of more soldiers approaching. The only route available to them was the ascending staircase. They started up it, Michael’s legs beginning to cramp under Adam’s weight. The staircase curved and took them to a latched door. As Gaby threw back the latch and pulled the door open, the night wind of Paris rushed into their faces. They had reached the roof of the Opera House.
The tips of Adam’s polished black shoes scraped the tarred stones as Michael followed Gaby across the Opera’s huge roof. Gaby looked back and saw figures emerging from the doorway they’d come through. She knew there had to be other ways down, but how long would it take the Germans to cover all the exits? She hurried on, but had to wait for Michael; his strength was ebbing, his back beginning to bow. “Go on!” he snapped. “Don’t wait for me!”
She waited, her heart pounding, as she watched for the figures coming after them. When Michael had caught up with her again, she turned and started off. They neared the front of the roof, with the sprawling, glittering city spread around them in all directions. The massive statue of Apollo rose from the roof’s apex, and pigeons took flight as Michael and Gaby approached. Michael felt his legs weakening; he was holding Gaby back. He stopped, supporting himself and Adam’s weight against the base of Apollo. “Keep going,” he told Gaby when she paused again. “Find a way down.”
“I’m not leaving you,” she said, staring at him with her sapphire eyes.
“Don’t be a fool! This isn’t the time or place for argument.” He heard the men shouting back and forth to each other, coming closer. He got his hand into his coat-and touched not his own Luger, which was trapped in its holster, but the poisoned pocket watch. His fingers gripped it, but he couldn’t make himself bring it out. “Go!” he told her.
“I’m not leaving,” Gaby said. “I love you.”
“No, you don’t. You love the memory of a moment. You don’t know anything about me-and you wouldn’t want to.” He glanced at the figures, approaching cautiously about thirty yards away. They hadn’t yet seen him or Gaby underneath the statue. The pocket watch was ticking, and time was running out. “Don’t throw your life away,” he said. “Not for me. Not for anybody.”
She hesitated, and Michael could see the strain on her face. She glanced at the oncoming Germans, then back to Michael. Maybe she did only love the memory of a moment-but what was life, if not simply the memory of moments? He pulled the pocket watch free and popped it open. The cyanide capsule awaited his choice. “You’ve done what you can,” he told her. “Now go.” And he shook the capsule into his mouth. She saw his throat convulse as he swallowed the pill. He grimaced.
“Over here! Here they are!” one of the men shouted. A pistol fired, and the bullet knocked sparks off Apollo’s thigh. Michael Gallatin shivered and fell to his knees, with Adam’s weight atop him. He looked up at Gaby, his face sparkling with sweat.
She couldn’t stand to watch him die. Another shot was fired, and it zipped by close enough to unthaw her legs. She turned away from Michael Gallatin, tears streaming down her cheeks, and she ran. About fifty feet from where Michael lay dying, Gaby’s shoe hit the hand grip of a trapdoor. She pulled it open and looked down at a ladder. Then another glance toward Michael; the figures were surrounding him, victors of the hunt. It was all Gaby could do to keep from firing into their midst, but they’d surely shoot her to pieces. She went down the ladder, and the trapdoor closed over her head.
Six German soldiers and three Gestapo men stood around Michael. The man who’d blown Adam’s head open sneered. “Now we’ve got you, you bastard.”
