Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

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.

Chapter 21

The new tunnel they were in looked much the same as the one that had led into the echo chamber. With flashlights in hand, Gabriel and Sammi ducked their heads and walked along in single file. The passage twisted and turned and at one point became so constricted that they had to crawl through on their hands and knees. They emerged on the edge of a chasm, the lip wide enough to stand on but not much more than that. Past this ledge, the ground dropped away as if cut by a knife, and there was no indication that there was another ledge anywhere on the far side. Across didn’t seem to be an option—only down.