She scaled the stairs in one extended effort, emerging at the top of the butte where the great white dome of the new basilica asserted its squatter’s rights. “Mon Dieu,” she whispered, catching her breath. “They’ll never finish that beast.” Skirting west around the wooden scaffolding that flanked the church’s base, she was reminded again how easily they could have provided food for every soup kitchen on the butte for a decade for what one shiny dome must have cost to build. But even Yvette knew the real reason monuments were built was to outshine and outlast the bodies of the men who built them.
She walked one street over, remembering to avoid the busy square at the heart of the hilltop village where the smell of the vendor’s fried potatoes would drive her mad with hunger. As she did, a couple strolled in her direction, the heels of the woman’s ankle boots clicking against the sidewalk. Yvette lifted the velvet drapery over her head and shrank back under the overhanging branches of a chestnut tree to let them pass before she walked on. The man donned a top hat and frock coat. The woman wore a black straw hat with a large red flower pinned to the brim. When the woman spoke, her hands played with her black feather boa, punctuating her drunken words with a flounce of her wrist. It was like watching a ghost from her past life walk by.
She waited for the couple to duck into a street where the café chatter was beginning to bloom. Once their laughter trailed off, she continued down the lane on the left where it quietly angled toward the backside of the butte. The streetlamps were farther apart here, and the people moved differently than the bustling, proud city below. No grand parades, no contrived pivots on high heels to show off the fashionable cut of a dress. The men were drab in their corduroy jackets and scuffed boots and the women almost shrunken under their petite hats and thin shawls. No automobiles, no bicyclettes, no clattering omnibuses. Only the steady one-two rhythm of slow horses being led over worn cobblestones.
She was close now. As the lane dropped, she could make out the amber glow of the gaslit globe above the door that illuminated the cabaret’s hand-painted sign. LE RÊVE. Skulking along a line of trees, she made a move to step out of the dark when a shiver like cat’s claws needling her spine stopped her in her tracks. Beneath the halo of light appeared a man in profile. He wore a three-piece suit in gray flannel and a derby hat with a distinct dent in the top. He leaned back against the wall and took a bored puff of smoke from a cigar as he bent one leg up to prop the sole of his shoe against the building. Definitely with the Covenants Regulation Bureau. So, les flics were still watching for her. Which meant there’d likely be a pair of agents inside as well, sitting at the back tables where the stage lights didn’t reach the men’s faces.
She retreated a step to consider her options. It was still too early for the bread-and-butter cabaret crowd—the absinthe drinkers, cocaine sniffers, and spell-fetish types who returned as often as three or four nights a week. The building wouldn’t be bustling with their manic energy for hours yet. Even if she could slip past the stiff at the door, she’d have to cross in front of the stage to get to the apartments upstairs. Yvette would be spotted in a flash among the well-behaved early arrivals quietly sipping their warm-up glasses of champagne. She could wait it out until the crowd was drunk and rowdy enough to create a distraction, but by then Tante would have her hands full watching the movement of money and girls, making sure everything was flowing in the right direction.
Merde. After a month of watching the old place and waiting for les flics to give up, tonight she thought she might actually be desperate enough to act no matter the danger. She was so hungry, so tired of trying to find a safe place to sleep. And even more, the stolen wish was churning like a dervish inside her, desperate to be fulfilled. She’d fought it for weeks, afraid of the risk, afraid of the answers she might find, but something had changed. She’d felt the quiver in her blood when she woke up that morning, separate from the usual faintness she felt from eating only vegetable peels and gristle out of rubbish bins.
Yvette had no family, but she had Tante, her only tenuous tie to her long-absent mother. That was why the police were still watching the cabaret a month after her escape. They’d assumed, correctly it turned out, that she’d swim home like a spawning salmon returning upriver. Though “home” was a loose term, the drive to breach the cabaret’s walls and cross the threshold was turning into a compulsion she couldn’t ignore. But how to get inside without les mouches swarming all over her?
Yvette backtracked until she came to the narrow lane around the corner from Le Rêve. “One house, two house painted blue, three house, four house, say adieu,” she whispered as she walked past the two-story boardinghouses, remembering her old chant for getting in and out of the cabaret unnoticed as a young girl.
And there it was. The Perezes’ place, built on a wonky slant to accommodate the steep incline it sat on. There, tucked between the walls of house number three and house number four sat a narrow corridor leading to a hidden courtyard. It was where the women hung their laundry to dry during the day. In the old days, drunks needing a place to piss at night sometimes staggered in, too, hence the locked gate. Yvette watched the upstairs windows for movement. When no one stirred, she put her palm over the lock and whispered her burglar’s spell. After aiming a little spit at the hinge, the gate opened, squeaking no louder than the rise and fall of a carousel horse in the Jardin des Fleurs.
With one hand pressed against the bricks to guide her, she passed through the darkened corridor to where the rear apartments of Le Rêve overlooked the courtyard. A prickle on her neck made her turn and look up. A faint light, like a match held to a cigarette, glowed in one of the windows, but it quickly went out again. What if it was one of les mouches buzzing around the back? She held still, ears and eyes tuned to any movement. When no one came out to investigate or raise the alarm, she turned her attention to the window of her old room, one story up. The once convenient ladder was gone, but there was a wooden wheelbarrow leaning against the building she might stand on. She could drag it across the yard, but the scraping of metal would make a hell of a noise, and the only stealth spell she knew wasn’t worth the effort. Never buy a spell off the back of a wagon, she thought, even if it does come wrapped in a fancy decorated tin covered in testimonials.
Preoccupied by her dilemma, Yvette almost didn’t notice the prowler who had joined her in the shadows. The black cat that had ignored her earlier tiptoed through the corridor, flicked his tail, then walked to the opposite end of the courtyard. There, stacked in the corner, sat a tower of vegetable crates still ripe with the smell of cabbage and turnips.
Ah, merci.
She threw off the velvet curtain and, as quietly as she could, stacked two crates under the window. The long skirt and blouse would be a hindrance. Not made for climbing, those. But on the streets, you couldn’t afford to throw anything away. She kicked off her clumsy shoes and shimmied out of the stolen skirt and blouse until she stood in the harlequin leotard she’d been wearing when she arrived in the city. It hadn’t fared well from the grime of the gutters, but it was made for performing just the sort of acrobatics a climb like this required. And, as she’d learned from working the carnival, so was her body. She put her stockinged foot atop the bottom crate and tested her weight on it. It held, so she scrambled onto the ledge of the first floor. The cat curled up in her discarded velvet, preening his paws, unimpressed.