subterranean world?
Franck was watching him with mild amusement. ‘You should visit the ossuary sometime.’
‘Ossuary?’
Raffin said, ‘In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Paris authorities started clearing city-centre cemeteries which had become a health hazard. They allocated about eleven thousand square meters of the
catacombes
out at Denfert as a dumping ground for the bones. There are something like six million people stacked up in those tunnels, floor to ceiling. The bones and skulls are arranged in macabre patterns.’ He chuckled. ‘I suppose the men who transferred them from the cemeteries had reason enough to find ways of amusing themselves.’
It occurred to Enzo that there was irony in the discovery of a single skull in tunnels which concealed six million.
‘Anyway,’ Raffin said, ‘this isn’t what we came to see, is it?’
‘No.’ Franck turned and led them back along the gallery and through a rabbit warren of tunnels. They passed street names beautifully carved into blocks of stone corresponding to the names of the streets above— BOULEVARD VINCENT, RUE ALBERT BAYET —and surrounded by the scratched and spray-painted graffiti of a less elegant generation.
They carried on until they reached a stone marked ROUTE DE PARIS à CHOISY CôTé EST , and they turned left into a narrower transverse tunnel that took them to the other side of the street overhead.
‘We’re under the Avenue Choisy here,’ Franck said. ‘Right below Chinatown.’
On the other side, a marker stone was inscribed ROUTE DE PARIS à CHOISY CôTé OUEST . But here, the way was blocked. The roof and part of the wall had caved in, piles of stone and rubble and earth preventing their further progress.
‘Well, this is it.’ Franck turned around and his lamp nearly blinded them. ‘For what it’s worth.’ Both Enzo and Raffin raised their hands to shade their eyes. ‘The Inspection Général des Carrières send surveyors down regularly to check below the sites of possible new building. No point in throwing up skyscrapers if they’re just going to fall down again. It was a surveyor who came across this tunnel collapse. It seems the tin trunk had somehow been concealed in the wall, bricked into a recess. If the roof hadn’t come down it would still have been there.’
***
The world above ground was a burned-out white, blinding and hot. Enzo’s eyes adjusted quickly, but he knew that it would take the sun longer to warm through to the chill deep in his bones. The Place d’Italie was jammed with traffic and late afternoon shoppers. White flags emblazoned with red Chinese characters fluttered on either side of lamp posts around the small park which created a roundabout for the traffic, and Enzo noticed for the first time that half the population seemed to be oriental. Ethnic Chinese from French Indochina. He looked down the length of Avenue Choisy and saw the red lanterns and flashing neon characters delineating Chinatown and wondered just where exactly they had been below ground.
Franck had gone to find detective Thomas from the Quai des Orfèvres. Raffin was still brushing the dirt from his trousers. ‘What now?’
‘I want to talk to the pathologist.’
Raffin checked his watch and shook his head. ‘Then you’ll have to go on your own. I still have to earn a living—and I’m going to have to change out of these clothes.’
IV.
It was only four stops on the métro from Place d’Italie to the Quai de la Rapée in the neighbouring twelfth
arrondissement
. Enzo sat gloomily in the crowded carriage, sunlight streaming through windows as the train rattled beneath the girdered arch that spanned the Seine. With all these bodies pressed around him, the heat was stifling. He looked down to his left and saw the square redbrick building that housed the Institut Médico Légal on the west bank of the river. The bodies stored there, in tiered drawers, would be kept at a somewhat cooler temperature.
Enzo was
Franck was watching him with mild amusement. ‘You should visit the ossuary sometime.’
‘Ossuary?’
Raffin said, ‘In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Paris authorities started clearing city-centre cemeteries which had become a health hazard. They allocated about eleven thousand square meters of the
catacombes
out at Denfert as a dumping ground for the bones. There are something like six million people stacked up in those tunnels, floor to ceiling. The bones and skulls are arranged in macabre patterns.’ He chuckled. ‘I suppose the men who transferred them from the cemeteries had reason enough to find ways of amusing themselves.’
It occurred to Enzo that there was irony in the discovery of a single skull in tunnels which concealed six million.
‘Anyway,’ Raffin said, ‘this isn’t what we came to see, is it?’
‘No.’ Franck turned and led them back along the gallery and through a rabbit warren of tunnels. They passed street names beautifully carved into blocks of stone corresponding to the names of the streets above— BOULEVARD VINCENT, RUE ALBERT BAYET —and surrounded by the scratched and spray-painted graffiti of a less elegant generation.
They carried on until they reached a stone marked ROUTE DE PARIS à CHOISY CôTé EST , and they turned left into a narrower transverse tunnel that took them to the other side of the street overhead.
‘We’re under the Avenue Choisy here,’ Franck said. ‘Right below Chinatown.’
On the other side, a marker stone was inscribed ROUTE DE PARIS à CHOISY CôTé OUEST . But here, the way was blocked. The roof and part of the wall had caved in, piles of stone and rubble and earth preventing their further progress.
‘Well, this is it.’ Franck turned around and his lamp nearly blinded them. ‘For what it’s worth.’ Both Enzo and Raffin raised their hands to shade their eyes. ‘The Inspection Général des Carrières send surveyors down regularly to check below the sites of possible new building. No point in throwing up skyscrapers if they’re just going to fall down again. It was a surveyor who came across this tunnel collapse. It seems the tin trunk had somehow been concealed in the wall, bricked into a recess. If the roof hadn’t come down it would still have been there.’
***
The world above ground was a burned-out white, blinding and hot. Enzo’s eyes adjusted quickly, but he knew that it would take the sun longer to warm through to the chill deep in his bones. The Place d’Italie was jammed with traffic and late afternoon shoppers. White flags emblazoned with red Chinese characters fluttered on either side of lamp posts around the small park which created a roundabout for the traffic, and Enzo noticed for the first time that half the population seemed to be oriental. Ethnic Chinese from French Indochina. He looked down the length of Avenue Choisy and saw the red lanterns and flashing neon characters delineating Chinatown and wondered just where exactly they had been below ground.
Franck had gone to find detective Thomas from the Quai des Orfèvres. Raffin was still brushing the dirt from his trousers. ‘What now?’
‘I want to talk to the pathologist.’
Raffin checked his watch and shook his head. ‘Then you’ll have to go on your own. I still have to earn a living—and I’m going to have to change out of these clothes.’
IV.
It was only four stops on the métro from Place d’Italie to the Quai de la Rapée in the neighbouring twelfth
arrondissement
. Enzo sat gloomily in the crowded carriage, sunlight streaming through windows as the train rattled beneath the girdered arch that spanned the Seine. With all these bodies pressed around him, the heat was stifling. He looked down to his left and saw the square redbrick building that housed the Institut Médico Légal on the west bank of the river. The bodies stored there, in tiered drawers, would be kept at a somewhat cooler temperature.
Enzo was
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