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She slaps him.
“You mind me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We go down a long side corridor to an unmarked door. Doolittle tries the handle. It doesn’t open.
“Trouble, Mama,” he says.
“Allow me,” says Vidocq, and gently pushes the boy out of the way. He takes a leather wrap from his pocket and opens it to reveal a set of delicate tools. Brigitte and Traven hold lights over his head and he takes a couple of them and picks the lock.
Hattie coughs and says, “A good man to have around.”
“You should hear him sing karaoke.”
Hattie turns to the group.
“This wasn’t always locked. Guess the Shoggots are even worse about folks wandering into their territory. You sure you want to do this?”
“We have no choice,” says Delon.
Hattie looks at me.
“What kind of secrets can a dead man have that you need so much?”
“I’m hoping he knows where I left my car keys.”
She shakes her head.
“There’s no helping some people.”
A click echoes off the walls and the door opens a few inches.
“Et voilà,” says Vidocq.
“Voilà yourself,” says Delon. “Look at this.”
On the other side of the door, twisted wire cables are bolted to both sides of the wall and the base of the doorjamb. They stretch away from us into the gloom, and it takes me a second to figure out why. There’s stars above but nothing below the door except a wide rocky chasm. Sometime in the last few years this section of roof collapsed, taking several levels of floor with it. I point my flashlight down, but I can’t see the bottom. The cables form a V-shaped bridge. Two tightly spaced cables are the bottom of the V with a single waist-high cable on each side to form the top. Rickety isn’t the word for the thing. I look at Hattie.
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
She crosses her arms.
“You want to go? This is the way.”
Delon has stepped back a few feet from the door. He’s looking down the hall.
“I’m guessing this isn’t on your map.”
“Nothing even like it.”
“Perfect.”
Hattie smiles.
“We can go forward or we can go back, but either way I keep Nehebkau’s Tears and the Gihon salt.”
“Then we keep going,” I say. I turn to the others. “Agreed?”
