Century Rain

TWELVE

Floyd continued his tour of the building in rue des Peupliers, knocking on doors and sometimes getting an answer. He worked methodically and patiently, turning on the charm when it was required. By the end of his enquiries, it was clear that at least two other tenants had seen the girl in the building, hanging around on the stairs. They couldn’t be specific about dates, but the sightings had all occurred within the last three or four weeks: consistent with there being a link to the White case. Once observed, the girl was not usually seen again by the same witness. Another tenant might have seen an odd child in the street outside, but he was insistent that this child had been a boy rather than a girl. Floyd and Custine had seen a strange girl leaving the Blanchard building the evening before, and Floyd had noticed what he thought was a different girl watching White’s window from outside earlier that day. Floyd still hadn’t spoken to the witness on the second floor, the one who had mentioned a child to Custine the night before.

Floyd had no idea what to make of it all. Strange little children hadn’t figured prominently in any of his previous investigations. Perhaps he was latching on to any anomaly in the hope that it might break open the case. Maybe if he visited any similar apartment building in the city and asked a similar set of questions he’d get a similar set of responses.

He was done by four. He walked back up to Susan White’s room and knocked on the door. His shirt was sticky around the collar. All that trudging up and down the stairs was making him sweat.

“You get anywhere, chief?” he asked Custine when he opened the door.

Custine let Floyd inside and closed the door. “No. There’ve been no further transmissions. I removed the back of the wireless again, thinking that one of my connections might have come loose, but all was well. The station is simply not on the air.”

“Maybe they’ve gone off the air for good.”

“Perhaps,” Custine said. “All the same, I shall try again tomorrow. Perhaps the transmissions only take place at a certain time of day.”

“You can’t spend the rest of your life up here.”

“One more day, that’s all.”

Floyd knelt down next to Custine. “Show me what you got before.”

“It’s incomplete.”

“I’d like to see it anyway.”

Custine removed a sheet of paper from the top of the wireless set on which he’d marked a sequence of dots and dashes in neat pencil. “You can see the pieces I missed,” he said. “Of course, there’s no guarantee that tomorrow’s transmission will be the same as today’s. But at least I’ll be ready for it tomorrow. I should be able to make an accurate transcription.”

“If you haven’t got anything by the middle of the day, we close this line of enquiry.”

“There is something going on here, whether you like it or not.”

“Maybe there is, but we can’t waste Blanchard’s money just sitting around waiting for a transmission that may never return. There are other leads that need to be followed up.”

“Generated by the material Greta examined?”

“That, and something else.” Quickly he told Custine about the paperwork in the tin and what Greta made of it. “There’s a Berlin connection: some kind of heavy-manufacturing contract and what looks like a sketch of a blueprint.”

“For what?”

“Haven’t figured that out yet, but whatever it is, there are three of them.”

“I hope you got more detail than that.”

“Three large aluminium castings,” Floyd said. “Big, solid spheres.”

“How big is big?”

“I might be misreading the sketch, but it looks to me as if these things are at least three metres in diameter.”

“Big,” Custine agreed.

“Looks like they’re meant to be suspended from something, like a kind of gallows. One sphere gets shipped to Paris, another to Milan, while the third stays in Berlin.”

“Perplexing,” Custine said, stroking his moustache. “What would this American girl have been doing involved with a contract like that?”

“Greta and I talked about that. We figured that maybe it wasn’t her contract at all, but one that she was taking an interest in for some reason.”

“Back to the spy theory, in other words.”

“Sorry,” Floyd said, “but all roads really do keep leading to Rome.”

“Where are you going to take things now? Did the box offer any other leads?”

“We have the address and telephone number of the metalworks in Berlin.”

“Have you called it yet?”

“No, but I plan on doing so as soon as I get back to the office.”

“Be careful, Floyd. If there is an espionage connection, poking your nose into things might not be your wisest move.”

“And what do you think you’ve been doing all afternoon?”

“That’s different,” Custine said dismissively. “All I’m doing is trying to intercept a wireless transmission.”

“And no one would be able to tell that you’re doing that?”

“Of course not,” Custine answered, but not with complete confidence. “Look, I’ll spend one more morning on this. Then I’ll put the wireless back exactly the way I found it and move on.”

“I’m just saying—”

“I know. And I understand. I think we’ve both convinced ourselves that there’s more to this than meets the eye, haven’t we?”

“I guess Blanchard was right all along,” Floyd said, standing and stretching his legs.

“Have you spoken to him again today?”

“Not yet, but I intend to. I figure I need to tell him that we’re at least making a kind of progress.”

“You mentioned another lead.”

Floyd shuffled his feet awkwardly. “Look, don’t think me a fool, but I’ve noticed that strange little girls keep showing up in this case. There was that girl we saw—”

“I know,” Custine said, waving his hand. “And the girl that the tenant on the second floor mentioned, and the girl you saw standing outside. Peripheral details, Floyd: no more than that.”

“How can you be certain?”

“I’m certain of nothing. But the one thing my years at the Quai taught me is that small children tend not to be prime suspects in murder cases.”

“Maybe this isn’t your usual homicide case,” Floyd said.

“Are you seriously proposing that a child murdered Susan White?”

“If she was standing by the balcony rail,” Floyd said, “it wouldn’t have taken much of a shove to send her over. You don’t need much strength for that.”

“If her position was that precarious to begin with, it’s entirely possible that she just lost her balance.”

“André, you know as well as I do that she was pushed.”

“I’m merely playing devil’s advocate, Floyd. Even if you can present a case to the Quai, the examining magistrate will still have to be convinced before the police will take matters further.” Custine took the paper upon which he had recorded the wireless transmissions and folded it twice before slipping it into his shirt pocket. “And there’s another problem with your child-as-murderer hypothesis.”

“Which is?”

“We know that whoever murdered Susan White sabotaged this wireless. Quite aside from the effort required to pull off the backing panel, they would also have needed the strength to drag the wireless away from the wall and then slide it back again.”

“You managed it on your own.”

“I had plenty of time,” Custine said. “There’s also the small detail that I am not a child. I can’t judge exactly how much effort was required, but I doubt that it was within the ability of a little girl.”

“Then she had an adult accomplice.”

“In which case,” Custine said patiently, “we may as well assume that the adult accomplice was the murderer.”

“I still think there’s something significant about these children.”

“Floyd, you know I have the utmost respect for you, but another valuable lesson I took away from my time at the Quai—back when solving crimes was its chief activity, rather than harassing enemies of the state—is that it is just as important to ignore certain details in a case as it is to follow up on others.”

“You’re saying I’m barking up the wrong tree?”

“The wrong tree, the wrong copse, perhaps even the wrong area of forestation entirely.”

“I’m reluctant to rule anything out.”

“Good: rule nothing out. But don’t be distracted by ridiculous theories, Floyd. Not when we already have concrete leads.”

Floyd sighed, a moment of clarity intruding upon his thoughts. Custine was right, of course. Now and then, Floyd had a habit of pursuing blatantly unlikely lines of enquiry. Sometimes—even if all they were investigating was a minor case of spousal infidelity—they led to a critical breakthrough. More often than not, however, he needed a gentle reminder from Custine to return to the orthodox approach, and more often than not Custine’s stolid, honed, scientific methods turned out to be exactly what the case required.

This, Floyd realised, was exactly one of those times.

“You’re right,” he said. “If only one of those strange kids had shown up, I guess I’d have thought nothing of it.”

“The central defect of the human mind,” Custine said, “is its unfortunate habit of seeing patterns where none exist. Of course, that is also its chief asset.”

“But sometimes a very dangerous one.”

Custine stood up, wiping his palms on his trousers. “Don’t feel bad about it, Floyd. It happens to the best of us. And there’s never any harm in asking questions.”

Custine gathered his tools, hat and coat and together they walked down two flights of stairs and knocked on Blanchard’s door. Floyd delivered a sanitised version of events: yes, it seemed likely to him that Susan White had been murdered; it even seemed likely to him that she had been something other than an innocent American tourist.

“A spy?” Blanchard asked.

“Too soon to say,” Floyd answered. “There are still leads we need to look into. But you’ll hear from us as soon as we have something concrete.”

“I spoke to one of the other tenants. It seems you have been asking questions about a little girl.”

“Just ruling out any possible witnesses,” Floyd said.

“What could a little girl possibly have to do with this?”

“Probably nothing at all,” Custine interjected, before Floyd was tempted to expound his unlikely theories to Blanchard.

“Very well,” Blanchard said, eyeing the two of them. “I must emphasize how important it is to me that you find Susan’s killer. I feel that she will not sleep soundly until the matter is resolved.”

He said it as if he meant Susan White, but he was looking at the photograph of his dead wife.

They drove back through thick Thursday-afternoon traffic, taking avenue de Choisy north to place d’Italie and then cutting through a darkening rat’s maze of side streets until they were on boulevard Raspail. Floyd turned the radio dial, searching for jazz, but all he got was traditional French accordion music. It was the new thing now. Traditional was in; jazz out. Chatelier himself had called jazz morally corrupting, as if the music itself was a kind of narcotic that had to be wiped from the streets.

Accordion music always made Floyd feel seasick. He turned off the wireless.

“There’s something I need to ask,” Custine said.

“Say it.”

“There’s a possibility we haven’t really discussed. It concerns the old man.”

“Go on.”

“Do you think it’s possible he killed her?”

Floyd thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “Makes no sense, André. If the police weren’t interested, why would he risk re-opening that can of worms?”

“Human nature being what it is, anything’s possible. What if he has a secret need to be discovered? Once the police abandoned their inquiry, he’d have had no choice but to call in private detectives.”

“All the evidence we’ve seen so far points away from Blanchard.”

“But we know he had access to her rooms. He’s the one person who has keys for every room. What if she did have a lover, and Blanchard found out about it?”

“Explain the wireless, or the smashed typewriter, or the box of papers.”

“Perhaps he’s playing some kind of double-bluff game with us, strewing our path with misleading clues while hoping we have the sense to see through them and—”

“Is this the way they teach you to think at the Quai?”

“I’m just saying that we shouldn’t exclude the possibility. He seems like a nice enough old gentleman, but the worst ones generally do.”

“I think you’ve been sitting in that room for too long, André.”

“Perhaps,” Custine said. “Still, a little suspicion never goes amiss in this line of work.”

Floyd turned the car on to boulevard Saint-Germain. “I agree that we can’t rule it out, all the other evidence notwithstanding. I’ll even admit that the thought had crossed my mind.”

“Well, then.”

“But I still don’t believe he killed her. That said, if you feel you need to explore the possibility… well, I’m sure you can nose around the problem without being too tactless. Ask him again about the police not taking up the case. Ask him if he knew of anyone who might have been jealous of the time he spent with the girl.”

“I’ll be the very model of discretion,” Custine said.

“You’d better be. If he loses his temper and throws us off the case, we’re going to have to start looking for new premises in a less salubrious part of town.”

“I didn’t think there was a less salubrious part of town.”

“My point exactly,” Floyd replied.

He parked the Mathis. Nothing new in his pigeonhole; no bills or mysterious letters from long-lost girlfriends. That, he supposed, had to count as a kind of good luck.

But the elevator had broken down again, jammed somewhere up on the fourth floor. The engineer from the elevator company was sitting on the lowest flight of stairs, smoking a cigarette and studying the racing pages. He was a small, shrewlike man with pomaded hair who always smelled of carbolic soap. He nodded at Floyd and Custine as they tramped past.

“Busy, Maurice?” Floyd asked.

“Waiting for a new part from head office, Monsieur Floyd.” He shrugged expressively. “With the traffic the way it is today, could be hours before they get here.”

“Don’t break a sweat,” Floyd said.

Maurice saluted them and went back to his newspaper.

Entering their office, Custine put away his tools, washed his face and hands and changed his shirt and then set about making tea. Floyd sat at his desk, pulled the telephone across and called the Paris operator to request an international call to Berlin. He gave her the number of Kaspar Metals, reading from the letter in the tin, and waited for the connection to be made.

After a while, the operator’s voice came back on again. “I’m sorry, monsieur. That number must be wrong.”

Floyd gave her the number again, but there had been no mistake. “You mean no one picks up the telephone?”

“No,” she said. “The line is totally dead.”

Floyd thanked her and returned the receiver to its cradle. One more dead lead, then. He drummed his fingers and then dialled Marguerite’s number in Montparnasse.

“Floyd,” Greta said, answering.

“How are things?”

“She’s resting.”

“Can I see you this evening?”

“I suppose so.”

“Easy on the enthusiasm, kid.”

She sighed. “I’m sorry, Floyd. It’s just that I may not be in the best of moods.”

“Then you could use some cheering up.”

“And you’re the man for the job, I take it?”

“Custine and I have been working hard on the case. I think we all need a treat tonight. How about I take the three of us out to dinner, and we finish off the evening in Le Perroquet Pourpre?”

“I suppose I can make it,” she said, not sounding at all sure of herself. “Sophie’s in tonight, studying, so I could ask her to look after Marguerite—”

“That’s the spirit. I’ll drive over in an hour. Spruce yourself up—we’re hitting the bright lights tonight.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said.

Custine and Floyd drank tea and discussed the case, making sure they’d shared all the essential observations, comparing notes on their interviews with the tenants. While they talked, a scratchy old Bluebird pressing of Sidney Bechet playing “Blues in Thirds” spun on Floyd’s phonograph.

“What we’re left with,” Custine concluded, “is an odd American woman who liked to mess around with wirelesses, assuming that she did that and not some previous tenant.”

“We’re left with a bit more than that,” Floyd said. “We know she had an odd interest in a manufacturing contract in Berlin. We know that when she died, her typewriter died with her. We know she had a habit of accumulating books and things.”

“Unusual observations collectively, but all perfectly explicable in and of themselves.”

“But taken together—”

“Not enough to make a convincing case that she was a spy.”

“What about the children?”

Custine gave Floyd a reproving look. “I was rather hoping you wouldn’t mention the children again.”

“I still never got to speak to the one tenant who had a really good look at the girl.”

“I’ll visit him again tomorrow, if it will make you happy. In the meantime, might I suggest that we restrict ourselves to firm leads?”

Floyd thought for a moment, his mind adrift on the rise and fall of Bechet’s saxophone. The disc was scratched and ancient, the music almost buried in a surf of hisses and clicks. He could have replaced it with a cheap bootleg tomorrow, and the sound would have been as clear and clean as a tin whistle. But it wouldn’t have been the right kind of clarity. The knockoff might have fooled ninety-nine people out of a hundred, but there was something raw and truthful engraved into this damaged old shellac, something that cut through the noise and thirty years like a clarion.

“The Berlin connection’s a dead end,” he said. “And we don’t know what she was doing with the books and magazines.”

“And records,” Custine reminded him. “Except, of course, that we have Monsieur Blanchard’s sighting of her entering Cardinal Lemoine Métro station with the loaded suitcase, and her subsequent reappearance with an empty one.”

“As if she’d exchanged the contents with another spy.”

“Precisely. But again, it’s circumstantial. She could just as easily have handed the contents to a shipping agent.”

“This is the bit that doesn’t make sense,” Floyd said. He anticipated the record sticking on a particular phrase, timing the stamp of his foot against the floorboards to coax the needle into the next groove. He did it so expertly that the jump was barely audible. “Whether or not it would ever stand up in court, we have more than enough evidence that she was engaged in some kind of espionage activity. But what was she doing with the books and things? Where did they fit in?”

“Part of her cover story as a tourist?”

“Perhaps. But in that case, why not behave like a respectable tourist instead of some cultural magpie, filling steamer trunk after steamer trunk with all that stuff?”

“Unless there was something vital buried in all that material,” Custine said. “It’s a pity we don’t know what was in the suitcase.”

“But we know what was left in her room, and there’s every reason to believe she would have continued shipping it out if she hadn’t been distracted.”

“And yet nothing we saw looked in any way to be worth the attention of a spy. Books, magazines, newspapers, records… all of which could have been obtained in the United States, with varying degrees of difficulty.”

“There was something about them that mattered to her,” Floyd said. “Here’s another thing: ‘silver rain.’ ”

“Silver rain?”

“Mean anything to you?”

“I can’t say it does.”

“Susan White made a point of underlining just those words on a postcard she never got round to sending.”

“Could mean anything. Could mean nothing at all,” Custine said, shrugging.

“Sounds like a codeword to me—a codeword for something unpleasant.”

“It would,” Custine said, smiling at Floyd. “But that’s because you’ve got spies on the brain.”

“There’s still the matter of the typewriter.”

“Well, that’s a funny thing. I’ve been thinking about the typewriter, and there may be more to it than meets the eye. Do you remember Blanchard showing us the box it came in?”

“He said it was a German model,” Floyd said.

“Yes. And when he showed us the box—and mentioned the name—it made me think of something. The trouble is, I can’t quite work out how the two are related.”

“What did it make you think of?”

“A room in the Quai: a windowless cell in the section where the interrogations used to take place, lit by a single electric light. A cell with ceramic tiles on the walls—the kind you can clean easily. The problem is that I can’t quite see why there’d be a typewriter in that sort of room.”

“To take down minutes?”

“What went on in those rooms, Floyd, was very much not the kind of thing that made it into minutes.”

“Then why the typewriter?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll remember later, when my mind’s on something else.”

They said no more as the Bechet record played out, and then for a long while they sat listening to the hiss and scratch of the needle in the run-out groove, as if hoping for a message in the scuffing noise, some whisper of a clue that would crack open the case. Nothing came.

Floyd stood up and pulled the needle from the record. They left the office and walked down the stairs, stepping around the telephone engineer who was still sitting there with the racing pages, waiting for his replacement part to crawl across Paris. They drove to Montparnasse, Custine waiting in the Mathis while Floyd fetched Greta.

She stepped out into the twilight air, thin and angular in black, like a sketch in Vogue. She wore a black fur stole and a black pillbox hat with a spotted veil, and when she stood under the lamplight she looked like a million dollars, until she was near him, and then she looked tired and sad and on the edge of something she couldn’t face.

“Let’s go eat,” Floyd said gently. “And then let’s go hear some real music.”

They drove to a little Spanish restaurant Floyd knew on the quai Saint-Michel. He ordered a good bottle of champagne, a 1926 Veuve Clicquot, waving aside the others’ objections that he couldn’t possibly afford it. It was true, technically, but Custine had worked hard and Greta deserved a good night out, a chance to forget about Marguerite for a few hours. The food was as good as Floyd remembered, and even the roving guitarist, Greta had to admit, was not as atrocious as some she’d heard. While Floyd settled the bill, Greta and the guitarist talked about tunings and fingerings. The handsome young man in a black shirt offered Greta his guitar and she played a few tentative notes before shaking her head with an embarrassed smile. The guitarist said something kind in return as he shrugged the guitar strap back over his shoulder. Floyd smiled, too: Greta had been holding back, not wanting to blow the kid away. He must have been new in town.

After the meal they drove to Le Perroquet Pourpre, a club on rue Dauphine. Only a few years ago there had been six or seven like it a row, but most of its neighbours were gone now, boarded up or turned into cheap bars with jukeboxes and flickering altarlike television sets in the corner. Le Perroquet was still clinging to business, and was one of the few places still willing to let Floyd and Custine on to the bill without Greta. The walls were covered with photographs of jazz men, from Jelly Roll and Satchmo, through Duke and Beiderbecke, Coleman Hawkins and Django. Some of them had even played on rue Dauphine. The owner, an amiable, bearded Breton called Michel, spotted the three of them entering and waved them over to the bar. He asked Greta how her tour was going and listened as she told a white lie about leaving the band for a few days while her aunt was unwell. Floyd asked Michel if business was satisfactory, and Michel offered his usual pessimistic shrug, which hadn’t changed much in nineteen years.

“The young people still have ears for good music,” he said. “The trouble is they don’t get a chance to hear it any more. Jazz is political music—always has been, always will be. That’s why some people would rather see it dead.”

“Maybe they’ll get their way,” Floyd said.

“Well, you’re always welcome here. I just wish I could afford to have you play more often.”

“We take what we’re given,” Floyd said.

“Are you available for the middle Saturday next month? We’ve just had a cancellation.”

“I think we can probably squeeze you in.”

“Greta?”

“No,” she said, lowering eyes already obscured behind the veil. “I don’t think I’ll be able to make it.”

“Pity. But Floyd and Custine always put on a good show… although perhaps you might consider hiring a temporary piano player?”

“We’ll think about it.” Floyd said.

“Just so long as you keep it nice and melodic, boys. And not so fast that the punters can’t tap a toe.” He eyed Custine warningly. “None of that difficult eight-beat stuff you keep sneaking in.”

“Maybe the young people want to hear something new for a change,” Custine said.

“They want something new, not something that sounds like a bull loose in a china shop.”

“We’ll behave ourselves,” Floyd assured him, patting Custine consolingly on the arm.

Michel set them up with drinks: beer for Greta and Custine, wine for Floyd, who needed a clear head for the drive back to Montparnasse. Leaning on the bar, occasionally breaking off to serve another customer, Michel fed them all the latest news on the local music scene: who was in, who was out, who was hot, who was not, who was sleeping with who. Floyd feigned a polite interest in it all. Although he didn’t much care for gossip, it was good to think about something other than the murder case and his own problems for a while. He noticed Custine and Greta starting to laugh more, which made him feel better, and before very long they were all enjoying the company and the music and Michel’s habit of keeping their glasses topped up. At eleven the band came on and stumbled through a dozen swing numbers, big-band productions stripped down for a four-piece, and while it wasn’t the worst thing Floyd had heard, it was a long way from being the best. It didn’t matter. He was with his friends, it was snug and smoky down in Le Perroquet, the greats seemed to be looking on benevolently from their photographs on the walls, and for a couple of hours all was right with the world.

Skellsgard and Auger stooped along a dark, low-ceilinged tunnel of rough-hewn rock, doing their best not to get too filthy in the process. They had eaten and made some further refinements to their outfits. Auger’s brand-new handbag bulged with maps and money, some of the latter counterfeit, some of it stolen. They had left the censor chamber via a heavily armoured metal door, accessing a dug-out passage that led off in either direction. Skellsgard had a torch, a fluted silver thing with a sliding switch, obviously manufactured in E2. Nervously she shone it up and down the shaft, as if half-expecting something, then set off to the right. She explained to Auger that excavation work in one direction had been abandoned as soon as the other end of the tunnel intersected an old works shaft put in by the Métro engineers.

“Did you tunnel all this out yourselves?” Auger asked.

“Most of it. It was easier after we hit the existing works shaft.”

“It must still have been back-breaking work.”

“It was, until we found we could get an air hose through the censor. We kept a compressor on our side, and then built a simple pneumatic drill that could be smuggled through as individual components. We reassembled it on this side and supplied it with air via the hose passing through the censor. That helped a bit, although the censor had a nasty habit of changing its mind now and then.”

“What about electricity? Can you run that through as well?”

“Yes,” Skellsgard said, “but we never managed to make anything work. Even a torch turned out to be too difficult to break down into simple components. The censor wouldn’t even let an incandescent bulb through in one piece. In the end we had to run gas through to light lamps, like nineteenth-century coal miners.”

“It must have been hell.”

“The only thing that kept us going was the rumble of the trains, which told us we were getting nearer to civilisation. None of the other exit points have any kind of artificial background noise. At least here we knew we only had a few dozen metres of earth to tunnel through before we hit the train tunnel.”

“I’m expected to dodge trains now?”

“Only in emergencies. We can trip the power by short-circuiting the electrified rails, but only for short periods. The station’s closed now, so the trains aren’t running.”

“Why? What time is it?”

“Four-thirty in the morning on a Friday in October.”

“I had no idea.”

“Don’t worry about it. No one ever does.”

Soon they came to a blockage in the tunnel: a tight-fitting wooden door of obvious age. Skellsgard shone her torch around the perimeter of the door until she found a concealed handle. She pulled it, groaning with effort. Just when it seemed as though nothing was going to move, the door hinged slowly back towards them.

Beyond was another dark tunnel, but this time their voices echoed differently. It was a much larger space and it smelled of sewerage, metallic dust and hot oil. Skellsgard’s torch gleamed off eight parallel lines of polished metal running along the floor, leading off to the left and right. There were two sets of parallel railway tracks, with two conductor rails for each running line.

Skellsgard set off to the right, keeping tight against the wall, with Auger following close behind.

“It’s not far to Cardinal Lemoine. Normally you’d be able to see the station lights from here.”

“I’m scared,” Auger said. “I’m not sure I can go through with this.”

“Scared is good. Scared is just the right attitude.”

The station was still dark when they climbed out of the tunnel on to its platform. Wherever Skellsgard’s torchbeam fell, Auger saw clean ceramic tiles in pale greens and yellows, period signs and advertisements in blocky capitals. Oddly, it didn’t feel particularly strange or unreal. She had already visited many buried Métro stations under the icebound Paris, and they had often survived more or less intact. It was easy to imagine that this was just another field trip into the city of ghosts.

Skellsgard showed her to a hiding place and crouched down beside her. “I know you can do this, Auger. Susan must have known it, too, or she wouldn’t have lined you up for it.”

“I suppose I should be grateful,” Auger said doubtfully. “If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be about to see any of this.”

“I hope you like it as much as she did. It was the horses Susan wanted to see.”

“Horses?”

“She’d always wanted to know what they were like—as living, breathing things, not some shambling, arthritic reconstruction.”

“Did she get her wish?”

“Yes,” Skellsgard said. “I think she did.”

The morning rush hour began on cue. From their hiding place—tucked into a gap between two electrical equipment lockers at one end of the platform—Auger watched as the ceiling lights stammered on. She heard the humming of generators powering up and somewhere the melancholy whistle of a lone worker. She heard a jangle of keys and a slamming of doors. A lull of ten or fifteen minutes followed and then she watched the early birds begin to assemble on the platform. The electric lighting washed out the colours like a faded photograph, but even taking that into consideration, she was struck by the drabness of the people: the autumnal browns, greys and greens of their clothes and accessories. Most of the commuters were men. Their faces were sallow, unhealthy-looking. No one was smiling or laughing, and almost no one was talking to anyone else.

“They look like zombies,” she said quietly.

“Cut them some slack,” Skellsgard said. “It’s five in the morning.”

A train slid into the station with a tinny squeal of brakes. Doors opened and some of the passengers got on while others disembarked.

“Now?”

Skellsgard put a hand on her shoulder. “Wait. The next train will have more people on it.”

“You’ve done this before, I take it?”

“I still get nervous.”

After a few minutes, another train arrived and Skellsgard eased them into the flow of exiting passengers. From being detached spectators, they were suddenly in the jostle of a human tide. The smell of the other people hit Auger: tobacco and cheap aftershave. It wasn’t a bad smell, but it instantly made everything more real. In her daydreams, she had often fantasised about drifting through the old city like a ghost, watching but not participating. Her imagination had always neglected to fill in the smell of the city, as if she was viewing things through a sheet of impermeable glass. Now there could be no doubt that she was fully present in the moment, and the shock of it was visceral.

She looked at the people around her, measuring herself against them. The clothes she had chosen now felt too sharp and ostentatious. She could not seem to find a natural walking rhythm or work out what to do with her hands. She kept clutching and then letting go of her handbag.

“Auger,” Skellsgard hissed, “stop fidgeting.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Just keep walking ahead and stop worrying. You’ll do fine.”

The flow of commuters took them up to the street, through a dreary succession of tiled corridors. Auger surrendered her ticket to an uninterested official and stepped into the steely light of early morning. Skellsgard steered them away from the Métro exit, out of the way of the other commuters. At this time of day, the streets were still relatively empty. Cars and taxis rumbled by occasionally. A white municipal truck pottered slowly along the other side of, the road, cleaning the kerbside with rotating brushes. On either side of the street, balconied buildings rose up three or four storeys. Lights had come on in some of the rooms and through the curtains and blinds, Auger made out the silhouettes of people preparing for the day.

“It all looks so real,” she observed.

“It is real. Get used to it. The moment you start thinking this is some kind of game, some kind of simulation, is the moment it’ll give you a bloody nose.”

“What now?”

“We calm you down. There’s a place around the corner that does all-night-coffee. You want one?”

“I want to crawl into a corner and suck my thumb.”

“You’ll get over it. Everyone does. Eventually.”

Skellsgard led her further from the Métro station. They walked down rue Monge and on to boulevard Saint-Germain. In the distance, overlapping neon signs formed a scribble of light. They passed a newspaper vendor: more newspapers than Auger had seen in her entire life were just sitting there, for the taking. They passed a narrow alley between two tenements in which a man was casually urinating, as if that was his job. A little further on, a heavily made-up woman stood, skirt hitched up to stockinged knee, in a shabby-looking hotel doorway. For an electric instant, the woman and Auger made eye-contact. Auger hesitated, some part of her wanting to reach out to the woman and interrogate her about how it felt to be a part of this living tableau. Skellsgard tugged her gently forwards, past a steamed-up basement window from which some kind of music, brassy and discordant, spilled out into the street.

“I know how you feel,” Skellsgard said. “You want to speak to them. You want to test them, find their limits. To know how human they really are and how much they really know.”

“You can’t blame me for being curious.”

“No, I can’t. But the less interaction you have with these people, the easier this whole thing will be. In fact, the less you think of them as people, the better.”

“Back there you told me off for saying they looked like zombies.”

“All I’m saying is you need to find a way to maintain a modicum of detachment.”

“Is that how Susan White felt?”

“No,” Skellsgard said. “Susan got too close. That was her big mistake.”

Skellsgard pushed open the doors of the all-night café. It stood in a row of crumbling Directoire-period buildings on boulevard Saint-Germain that hadn’t survived the Void Century.

“Sit here,” Skellsgard said, directing her to a seat next to the window. “I’ll deal with the coffee. You want milk in it?”

Auger nodded, feeling a weird dizziness. She looked around the room, taking in the other customers, measuring them against herself. Monochrome photographs lined the wall: faint Parisian scenes annotated in neat, inked script. Behind the counter, the staff—hair neatly oiled, shirts and aprons crisply white—fussed with gleaming, gurgling apparatus. At the table next to her, two elderly men in flat caps were debating something in the back pages of a newspaper. Beyond them, a middle-aged woman worked on her fingernails while she waited for her coffee to cool. Her white gloves lay crossed on the table before her.

Skellsgard returned with their drinks. “Getting any easier?”

“No.” But Auger took the coffee and cradled the hot metal mug in her hands. She kept her voice low, the two of them continuing to speak English. “Skellsgard, I need to know something. How much of this is definitely real?”

“We’ve been over that.”

“No, we haven’t. You talk as if it’s all real. It feels real enough. But do we really know for sure?”

“What brought this on? The censor?”

“Yes,” Auger said. “When we came through that screen, we lost any continuity with the real world. You treated it as if we were just passing through a curtain, but what if there was more to it than that? What if reality ended on the other side of the censor, and all this—everything we see around us—is exactly what you just assured me it isn’t: a kind of simulation?”

“Why does it matter?” The question was not as glib as it seemed. Skellsgard was watching her very carefully.

“If this is a simulation, then nothing we do inside here can have any possible consequence for the outside world. This whole city—this whole world, for that matter—might only be a representation inside some alien computer.”

“Quite a computer, if that’s the case.”

“But it would still mean that these people…” Auger lowered her voice even more. “These people wouldn’t be people. They’d just be interacting elements of some super-complex program. It wouldn’t matter what happened to them, because they’re just puppets.”

“Do you feel like a puppet?”

“How I feel is irrelevant. I’ve entered the program from the outside. What I don’t see is how you can be so certain we’re inside an ALS and not a computer-generated environment of some kind.”

“I told you we pushed a pneumatic air-hose through the censor.”

“That proves nothing. If the simulation is good, then it would have handled that detail as well.” Auger sipped at her coffee, flinching at the bitter taste of it before deciding that it wasn’t the worst she’d ever drunk. “All I’m asking is whether you’ve considered this possibility.”

Skellsgard stirred too much sugar into her coffee. “Of course we’ve considered it. But the hard truth is that we can’t know for sure. Not yet, and maybe not ever.”

“I don’t follow. If this is a computer-generated environment, then it must have limitations.”

“You’re thinking way too parochially, Auger. This environment doesn’t have to have any limits at all.”

“What about physics?” Auger picked up one of the cardboard coasters that were strewn on the table and held it between thumb and forefinger. “This feels real to me, but if I looked at it in a scanning tunnelling microscope or ran it through a mass spectrometer—what would I find?”

“Exactly what you’d expect, I guess. It would look just the way it should.”

“Because this environment is simulated right down to atomic granularity?”

“No,” Skellsgard said, “not necessarily. But if the machine running the environment is sufficiently clever, it can make your microscope or your spectrometer show you whatever it thinks you expect. Remember: any tools you might bring to bear on the problem are themselves part of the problem.”

Auger sat back in her seat. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“It’s pretty much academic anyway. There aren’t any scanning tunnelling microscopes just lying around here waiting to be picked up.”

“Then you’ve not performed such tests?”

“We’ve done what we can, given the very limited tools we’ve been able to put our hands on. And none of those tests have revealed anything other than the physics we’d expect.”

“But just because you can’t get your hands on those tools doesn’t mean they don’t exist somewhere.”

“Break into physics laboratories, you mean?”

“No, nothing that drastic. Just monitor their publications. This is the twentieth century, Skellsgard. It’s the century of Einstein and Heisenberg. Those men can’t be sleeping on the job, surely.”

“Well, there’s a problem with that. Fundamental science is nowhere near as advanced here as it was in our nineteen fifty-nine. Remember I told you there was no Second World War here, and therefore no computer revolution?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it had even greater effects than that. There was no Manhattan project, either. No one has the A-bomb here. Without the A-bomb, there’s been no need to develop a ballistic-missile programme. Without a ballistic-missile programme, there’s no space race. There are no huge government-funded science agencies.”

“But surely there’s still some scientific research and development going on.”

“In dribs and drabs. But it’s unfocused, underfunded, socially unpopular.”

Auger managed a half-smile. “No change there, then.”

“What I mean is, it’s almost as if…” But something made Skellsgard stop and shrug.

“Almost as if what?” Auger prompted.

“Well, I was going to say… it’s almost as if someone’s holding it back deliberately.”

“Who would stand to benefit from that?”

“Well,” Skellsgard said, “at a guess, anyone who didn’t want the people here to know what their world was really like.”