"Non, I think it's mine! But... but I can't be sure!" he shouted back, and we both laughed for love of her. I parked the bike in the driveway of an apartment building a block away from the Palace. We walked on the other side of the road until we passed the building by half a block, studying it for signs of activity within. The facade of the Palace seemed intact and undamaged, although metal and wooden sheets on the windows, and planks nailed across the main door, hinted at the destruction the mob had wrought inside. We turned and walked back, passing the building again and searching for an entrance.
"If she's in there, and if her servants are bringing her food, they're not coming and going through that door."
"Yes, exactly my own thought," he agreed. "There must be another way inside."
We found a narrow lane that gave access to the rear of the buildings in the street. In contrast to the proud, clean, main street, the access lane was filthy. We stepped carefully between rank, scum-covered pools of black liquid, and skirted piles of oily, unidentifiable debris. I glanced at Didier, knowing from his wretched grimace that he was calculating how many drinks it would take to rid himself of the stench that filled his nostrils.
The walls and fences on either side of the lane were made of stone, brick, and cement, patched together over many decades, and swarming with a wormy writhe of plants, mosses, and creepers.
Counting back from the corner, building by building, we found the rear of the Palace and pressed on a short wooden gate, set into a high stone wall. The gate opened at the touch, and we stepped into a spacious rear courtyard that must've been a luxurious and beautiful retreat before the mob had attacked it. Heavy clay pots had been toppled and shattered, their burdens of earth and flowers spilled in muddy confusion. Garden furniture had been smashed to kindling. Even the paving tiles were cracked in many places, as if they'd been struck with hammers.
We found a blackened door that led into the house. It was unlocked, and swung inward with a rusty creak of complaint.
"You wait here." My tone allowed no possibility of protest. "Keep watch for me. If someone comes in through that gate, slow them up, or give me a signal."
"As you say," he sighed. "Don't be too long. I don't like it here. Bonne chance."
I stepped inside. The door swung shut behind me, and I wished that I'd thought to bring a torch. It was dark, and the floor was treacherously cluttered with broken dishes, pots, pans, and other vessels strewn amid the black lumps of furniture and fallen beams. I picked my way slowly through the ground-floor kitchen and on into a long corridor that led toward the front of the big house. I passed several rooms that were burned. In one of them, the fire had been so fierce that the floor was missing, and the charred bearers showed through the gaps like the ribs of some great animal's remains.
Near the front of the house I found the stairway that I'd taken, years before, when I'd come there with Karla to save Lisa Carter.
The Compton wallpaper, once so rich in colour and texture, was scorched and peeling from the blistered walls. The stairway itself was carbonised, its carpet scorched to stringy clumps of ash. I climbed up slowly, testing each step before pressing down with my full weight. One step collapsed beneath me when I was halfway to the top, and I scrambled upward more quickly to the landing on the first floor.
On the upper level I had to pause while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few moments I could make out the gaps in the floor, and I began to inch my way around them. The fire had incinerated some parts of the house, leaving holes and blackened stumps, while sparing other parts of the house altogether. Those pristine sections were so clean, and so precisely as I remembered them, that they heightened the eerie strangeness of the place. I felt as if I was moving between the past, before the fire, and the ruined present: as if my own memories were creating those grandiose, unconsumed zones in the house.
Some way along that wide passage on the upper level my foot plunged through a papery section of floor, and in my hard reaction I drove backward into the wall behind me. The wall itself collapsed and I found myself falling, in a clumsy stumble, flaying out with my hands to find something solid to cling to amid the crumbling rubble. I landed with a thump, much more quickly than I expected, and realised at once that I was inside one of Madame Zhou's secret corridors. The wall I'd fallen through appeared to be as solid as all the others, but it was merely a plywood screen papered over with her ubiquitous Compton pattern.
