Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

Chapter 20

The entrance they’d come through was actually an abscess in the ground that narrowed to a tunnel through which only one person at a time could fit. Gabriel went first, with Sammi following directly behind him. He grabbed a flashlight from his rucksack and switched it on. The cave was dark, damp, and had a familiar smell of . . . yes, bat guano. “Watch your step,” he said. “It’s going to be slippery.”

“All right.”

“There are also supposed to be traps,” Gabriel said.

“Traps?”

“Three of them. According to the Alliance’s documents. Dreamed up by Napoleon himself and built to his specifications by his court engineer.”

“You’re not serious,” Sammi said.

“They seemed to be.”

He moved forward slowly. Where the flashlight’s beam landed, he saw insects scurry away, and he could feel some crunching underfoot as well. The tunnel continued, branching and forking into a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Gabriel pressed forward, taking the rightmost fork each time, just to make it easier to backtrack if it proved necessary. And it did—twice they reached dead ends and had to retrace their steps.

But eventually they reached a larger, open space, obviously man-made, that was about the size of a large bedroom. It had been carved from the stone of the hillside, the walls and ceiling shored up with vaults of rock. The noise of their footsteps echoed loudly even after they came to a stop.

“Strange,” Sammi said, and her voice reverberated: strange—strange—strange . . .

Gabriel heard a movement behind them, a swift scraping of stone against stone. He spun to face the entryway just in time to see it sealed up with a deafening thud as a stone slab slid into place from above. He ran up to it, searched along the base and sides for handholds, anything he might get a grip on and use to lift it. There weren’t any—and even if there had been, the slab must have weighed half a ton at the least.

“My god,” Sammi said, running up behind him, “did I do—” The echoes of her voice came back at her in a cacophonous crescendo, louder even than before they’d been sealed in, the repeated syllables crashing over one another. She covered her ears and let the end of her sentence remain unspoken.

Gabriel looked up as the echoes began to fade. He remembered another cave he’d been in, a cave of ice near the South Pole where the echoes of his party’s voices had shaken loose a rain of stalactites, razor sharp and deadly to the touch. At least there were no stalactites here.

But there was also no vent to the outside, as far as he could tell, and therefore no source of air. If they couldn’t find a way out of this room . . .

He clapped once and heard the concussive sound rebounding from wall to wall. Like being inside a drum.

“Look,” Sammi said very quietly, and she pointed at the far wall as the room picked up her whispered word and threw it back at her: look—look—look—look—look . . .

Gabriel shined the light where Sammi was pointing. On the wall, chiseled into the rock, was an inscription in French:

Lui seul avec la voix et la qualité d’un français pourrait entrer.

The wall itself appeared to be constructed from several rectangular blocks of stone similar to the one that had sealed off the entryway. Beyond the blocks would be . . . another passage? Only one with the voice and quality of a Frenchman may enter. Enter—not exit. Clearly this was the way they had to go. Gabriel pressed against the stones with his shoulder. He couldn’t budge them.

He leaned close to Sammi until his lips were pressed against her ear. “Any ideas?” he said in the tiniest voice he’d ever managed.

She shook her head.

Gabriel studied the stone wall more closely. He moved his fingers along the seam between the stones, tracing the outlines of each slab. There were no hidden levers or catches—not that he could find, anyway. There had to be another way to open it.

The voice of a Frenchman?

“Bonjour,” he said, with his mouth close to the wall.

And he heard something, a quiet scraping of metal deep inside the wall. He braced himself against the stone blocks again and shoved, hard, but nothing happened.

“Bonjour,” he said again, more loudly, and heard the echoes of his voice careen around him. Clearly, speaking was having an effect—but he had no idea what he needed to say. “Vous êtes un tres jolie mur . . . ouvrez, s’il vous plait . . .” He pushed against the stones as hard as he could, and though he could hear the internal mechanism moving within the wall, he might as well have been pushing against a mountain for all the good it did.

“You try,” he said to Sammi, and she did, speaking in French while he continued pushing—but if anything the mechanism seemed to respond even less to her voice than to his.

“It reacts to sound,” Gabriel said, having returned to Sammi’s side. He spoke quietly, but didn’t whisper. The danger now didn’t seem to be that their voices would trigger a bad outcome; the danger was that they would fail to trigger a good one. “My voice more than yours, and—” He paused for a second. “Français plus que l’Anglais.”

“French more than English,” she said, and sure enough, the scratching of metal within the wall was less pronounced. “How is it possible? This was built when, in 1800?”

“Something like that.”

“But it would require sophisticated technology—”

Gabriel shook his head. “Sounds are just vibrations—and each has its own distinct vibration. That’s how record players work, right? The record vibrates the needle differently to produce each sound. Why couldn’t someone in Napoleon’s time have built a reverse record player, where each sound uttered makes a needle vibrate a bit differently? If the mechanism were sensitive enough . . .”

“But in 1800?” she said, forgetting to speak quietly. They waited for the echoes of her voice to die down. “They didn’t even have record players then,” she whispered.

“They had music boxes,” Gabriel said. “And automata with bellows inside to make them sing. And wasn’t de Martinville already working on the phonautograph in Paris?” Gabriel had been asked to find one of the Frenchman’s original devices by the Louvre once—it consisted of a horn into which you spoke or sang and a cylinder turned by a crank that caused each sound that entered the horn to be uniquely transcribed by a stylus scratching against the wall of the cylinder . . .

“I think that was later,” Sammi said, “more like 1850.”

“Well, then someone else in France must have had the idea before him,” Gabriel said, “since it seems to be what we’re dealing with here.”

He walked up to the wall and tried speaking the same word—Ouvrez—in different pitches and at different volumes. The lower his voice, the more the mechanism seemed to activate. But the movement remained purely internal—none of his attempts made the stones shift so much as an inch.

What had de Martinville’s first phonautograph transcription been? A children’s song. But which one? Frere Jacques? No. He remembered. “Au clair de la lune,” he sang, “mon ami Pierrot . . .”

This time the stones of the wall did shift slightly, rising a fraction of an inch off the ground, as if somewhere inside the wall a counterweight was being lowered.

“More!” Sammi said, and she joined in as well. But even their two voices combined, and redoubled by the echoes, were not enough to get the stones more than an inch off the ground. Gabriel thought of trying to get his fingers in under the stones—there was just about enough room. But that would be a good way to lose a couple of fingers, and a lousy way to get the passage open. Maybe if they had something in their rucksacks that could act as a crowbar or a lever . . . ?

“That was better,” Sammi said, when their voices had died down and the stone blocks had settled once more. “They moved.”

“Not enough,” Gabriel said.

“No, but I think singing was right—we just need to figure out the right song.”

“And how are we going to do that? There are thousands of French songs. How are we supposed to know which one was Napoleon’s favor—” Gabriel fell silent, and the room fell silent a minute later.

“What is it?” Sammi said.

He answered her only with a confident smile. He put a finger to his lips, then cleared his throat and began to sing.

La victoire en chantant

Nous ouvre la barrière

Victory, singing, opens the barrier for us . . .

La Liberté guide nos pas

Ed du Nord au Midi

. . . Liberty guides our steps; and from North to South . . .

La trompette guerrière

A sonné l’heure des combats

The war trumpet has sounded the hour of battle. With an enormous wrenching sound, the two central stones in the wall were hauled upward, vanishing into the dark roof of the cavern. The stone blocking the entryway shot up as well, leaving them with a choice of exits.

But what sort of choice was it, really? Return to the scene of the gun battle empty handed?

And never know what lay beyond this room?

Gabriel gestured for Sammi to go through the opening while he continued to sing the Chant du Départ, Napoleon’s hand-picked replacement for the Marseillaise. It hadn’t caught on as the national anthem—but by god, he’d made it the anthem of his vault back on Corsica.

Gabriel eyed the stones warily as he passed under them, still singing, but they showed no sign of being about to come down again. Once he was on the other side, he stopped, and they stayed up—until, presumably, the next unfortunate soul came along and triggered the trap.

“How in the world did you come to know that song?” Sammi said. “I thought I was the historian.”

“A good magician never reveals his secrets,” Gabriel said, and led onward.