Twenty Two
In which Oscar is recurringly stunned and Félix wants a hammer.
Twenty Two
"Oh god, what did Oscar do?"
Portia was a shrewd judge of character and an excellent interpreter of body language; if there was trouble to be got into, it would undoubtedly be Oscar, and not Félix, who found it out. Félix, who was smoking a rare cigarette on the front steps of the church -- his church -- gave her a tired smile.
"You stayed in London last night," he said.
"Yeah, Luc had a few beers and I don't like driving on the wrong side of the road, which we didn't think about until he'd had a few beers, so then I had a few beers and we got a room in town," she said. "I just came from the hotel, I had to pick up some clothes."
Félix acknowledged Luc, who was parking his newly-purchased pickup, with a wave; Luc waved back, took what looked like a bag of groceries out of the front seat, lifted a ladder from the truck-bed, and trooped towards the back of the building.
"I like him," Félix said. "I like a man who can carry a ladder all on his own."
"What did Oscar do?" Portia asked, taking the cigarette out of Félix's fingers and putting it out in the dirt, grinding it down with her shoe heel.
"Why does he have to have done anything?"
"Oh my god, he murdered someone. He murdered someone and wants to bury the body in the church."
"He didn't murder anyone, he just..." Félix tapped another cigarette out of a box, and Portia took the box away. "...he got a little lippy with the priest."
"Lippy?" Portia asked.
"Smart."
"Smart like knows what 'syncretic' means smart?"
"What?"
"Combining two cultural traditions or views into one, usually through a process of imperialistic appropriation by a dominant culture," Portia said promptly.
"He told a priest he wasn't a Catholic and didn't care what the Catholic church thought," Félix said, looking vaguely worried.
"God, I keep telling him not to tell the truth," she said, taking Félix's lighter before he could light the cigarette in his mouth. He tucked the cigarette in his pocket.
"He had a good point."
"He always has good points. He just needs to learn to shut the hell up."
"He's a very quiet worker."
Portia sighed. "All right, so, the local priest is pissed off at us. Is this a big deal?"
"It is to me. Oscar isn't the first reason he's angry, Oscar's just the loudest." Félix ducked into the moldering entryway of the church, and leaned in the doorway to the nave, where the technicians were still hard at work, directed by Oscar. "He didn't take kindly to the idea of turning the church into a -- "
" -- mansion? Oscar told me," she said. "I'm all for it."
"There may be trouble," Félix sighed. "The church may try to buy the building back, though I wouldn't sell; title's already been transferred so they can't void the deal. I'm more worried about a worker's strike."
"They're not the mafia, Félix."
"No, but this is a Catholic town, isn't it?" Félix asked. "No Anglican church I could see, no Protestant churches at all. Local workmen are Catholic, and it would be foolish to import non-locals. These things have a way of haunting a project. I've seen it happen with my parents' projects before."
Portia watched Oscar. "If you scrap this it'll break his heart."
"And mine," Félix said. Portia glanced at him. He was also watching Oscar. "When did the two become so completely intertwined?"
***
Félix turned out to be right.
The first Sunday they spent in town, Luc went to the Catholic service with his head held high and in his workman's Sunday best. No one spoke to him, but then again, he was a stranger and no one had any reason to speak to him.
On Monday he found that every workman in the town had full labour schedules. Just like Félix had predicted.
"We need some time to work out the renovations anyhow," Oscar said, as the four of them sat at a table in the crossing, below the huge floating dome, eating lunch Luc had fetched from town. "It's not as though any actual construction could start for a couple of weeks, not until I figure out how it's going to be done. And we've got to ship in supplies and fittings -- really, by the time we actually need a large labour pool, they should have come around."
"I don't know," Félix shook his head. "There are things we could be doing now."
"Unbricking the window," Luc agreed, ticking them off on his fingers. "Taking up the carpet in the entryway; getting rid of the mounting-brackets for the pews and resurfacing that area of the floor with new stones. Lots of cleaning. New windows installed. Landscaping."
"What are you thinking for the rose window, crowbars? Sledgehammers?" Oscar asked, around a bite of sandwich.
"Chemicals," Luc answered. "I know a few that dissolve mortar harmlessly, and it's very old mortar to begin with. I've been testing them."
"That's brick by brick though, isn't it?" Oscar asked. Luc nodded.
"Have to, if you want to save the window."
Félix, Portia, and Oscar all froze.
"Save the window?" Félix asked.
"Well, yes," Luc replied calmly. "I broke one or two pieces just getting enough brick out to see it, but then -- "
"The window's still there?" Oscar demanded.
"Yeah -- there's a layer of brick outside and one inside, and the window inbetween. It's a little strange, I think," Luc said.
"Why would they brick up a perfectly good window?" Portia asked.
"Probably to protect it from the same fate as the rest of 'em." Luc shrugged. "If you want to take the window out, we might as well use sledgehammers, though I can think of one or two people who'd be interested in owning it -- "
"No, no," Félix said. "By all means, we want to save it. The whole thing intact?"
"As far as I can tell, except for the two panes I broke. I had a look down into it with a few electric lights. I can't tell what it'll look like when it's opened up, though."
"You know, if we dissolved the mortar around the edges and hooked the whole thing up to the pickup..." Oscar said, thoughtfully. "I mean it'd make one hell of a crash, but we could probably pull the whole outer brick section down at once."
"Demolition!" Portia said, excited.
"Let's not do that on the interior wall," Oscar murmured.
"Take the fender off the pickup, if we're not careful," Luc cautioned.
"Backhoe!" Portia exclaimed. Unholy glee lit her face.
"If we were careful," Luc continued, "It could be done. It would be very efficient. We simply swab the edges, make sure they're loose enough not to pull out the wall with it, and apply steady force."
"I'm going to buy a video camera," Portia announced.
"How soon can it be done?" Félix asked.
"Without labour, I won't do it on my own," Luc said firmly.
"We could do it, the three of us."
"DIBS ON DRIVING THE TRUCK!" Portia shouted. The echoes rang off the dome and set several birds fluttering for safety. Luc gave her a tolerant, affectionate smile.
"Brick by brick, I could bring the inside wall down today," Luc mused. "If I had help spraying the solvent."
"Me!" Portia insisted. Félix grinned at Oscar.
"I have drafting to do, now that the plans are finished," Oscar said, shrugging. "I was going to go back to the hotel -- the laptop only has five hours of battery life before it needs a recharge, and the car charger takes forever."
"I'll come with you," Félix said. "I think I ought to show my face in town a bit, try to smile at people."
"Yeah, smiling'll work," Portia said, with a sigh, and began gathering up the lunch rubbish.
Soon after Luc purchased a truck on Félix's tab, for the purposes of transport, Oscar had done likewise, except his was actually a second-hand, two-seater Ford Ka he'd found in London. Even Félix, no matter how hard he tried, could not look cool anywhere in the vincinity of it. And he tried hard; he was leaning on it, waiting for Oscar, when the architect emerged from a last-minute conference with Luc about the wisdom of de-bricking the inside of the window. Luc seemed confident, though, and so Oscar left him and Portia unpacking spray bottles and chemical cans on the altar platform.
"Ready?" Félix asked, going for the James Dean lean and looking, next to the Ka, as though he required hip surgery.
"Yeah, and I had a thought about -- " Oscar stopped and patted his pockets. "Keys."
"Forgot them?"
"Just be a minute," Oscar promised, ducking back inside. He squelched across the rotting carpet, which looked to be of the Perpetually Wet sort, and out into the nave before he realised Luc and Portia had vanished.
Slowly, and with a rising sense of doom, he collected the keys from the lunch table. There weren't that many places they could have gone; the spray bottles were filled, and the ladders were waiting. In fact...
He walked back past the lunch table, moving parallel to the altar until he could see past it. Then he left. Quietly.
Outside, Félix was trying a Dukes of Hazzard style pose on the bumper, but he kept falling off.
"Find your keys?" he asked.
"Portia and Luc," Oscar answered.
"Yes?"
"Not to sound high-school about this, but they're doing it."
"I wondered how long it would take," Félix said with a grin. "Come on then, let's get going. You should tell them, then we could stop paying for two hotel rooms."
"They're doing it."
"Not right now, right?"
"No, right now they're just groping each other behind the altar."
Félix laughed. "Young love! Or in Luc's case, pushing-middle-age love."
"You aren't at all concerned by this?"
Félix raised an eyebrow. "Should I be?"
"It's Portia! And Luc!"
"And?"
"And they're doing it!"
"Oscar, they're not your parents."
Oscar gave Félix a Look as he climbed into the car.
"Honestly," Félix said. "You were aware that Portia has sex. You must be. She talks about it constantly."
"Yeah, but it's -- "
"Well, I can't say I'm not a little worried for Luc, but perhaps he'll be a calming influence on her. She can dress him!" Félix said happily. "Can you imagine Luc in a proper suit?"
"Not without a hammer in his hand," Oscar said. "He always has a hammer."
"Rather a good idea, when you think about it. There are lots of times I've wished I had a hammer."
Oscar turned onto the road that would take them through town, and was mainly silent for the rest of the drive, as Félix turned the subject to his plans for the church, and for returning to France to reassure his parents that he wasn't doing precisely what he was doing. Félix followed him up the stairs and into his hotel room, and sat on the bed while Oscar turned on the laptop.
"I told you they were survivors," he said finally, while Oscar began clicking away at the drafting program. "You should listen to me, Oscar, I know whereof I speak."
"Sorry, it's just a little startling, walking in on two people I know who are suddenly -- "
" -- doing it, yes. You're not jealous, are you?"
"Jealous?"
"Well, you and Portia always joke about this sort of thing," Félix observed. Oscar looked up from the screen to find the younger man watching him, intently. "Are you jealous of Luc?"
"Can you imagine Portia and I? We'd kill each other."
"That's not an answer, Oscar."
Oscar rotated the digital model of the church, and idly lifted off the dome. "There were rumours, when we went back to New York after the fire. People saw that things were different, I don't know, Portia should have gone and gotten her own job."
"Oh?"
"She could have. She had more than enough experience. Would have been paid more."
Félix rose and went to the little bathroom counter, picking up two glasses and filling them halfway from the flask in his pocket. "Why did she stay, then?"
"Dunno."
"Not at all?"
Oscar shrugged, and dropped the dome back onto the church as he accepted one of the glasses. "Could be she was afraid she couldn't get another job. Could be she wanted to make sure I wouldn't do anything stupid. Which I did, so that plan didn't work that well."
"What did you do that was so stupid?"
"Quit my job, came back to Paris, freeloaded off you for half a year?"
Félix frowned.
"Oh," Oscar said. "That wasn't a shot at you, Félix. Sorry."
"Do you believe you burnt down the hotel?" Félix asked, abruptly. After a moment, Oscar shook his head.
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"It was a wiring failure, that's all."
"Your fault?"
Oscar fell silent, gathering his thoughts.
"Was the hotel your fault, Oscar?"
"I saw the ghosts," Oscar said finally. "Luc wouldn't have put up the ghost light if I hadn't seen the ghosts, and it wouldn't have shorted and set the building on fire."
"Did she fight you? The hotel?"
"No, never once...she was happy we were there. Wouldn't you be? All shiny new plate-glass windows and marble and chrome, nice new pipes, a chandelier, all the sheets off the furniture...."
"She knew how to go with class," Félix mused. He refilled his glass, then Oscar's when he held it out. "To the hotel."
"To the hotel," Oscar agreed, wincing as the alcohol burned down his throat.
"Don't forget, Oscar. You have a job to do here. You have a future." Félix tapped the computer screen. Oscar grinned.
"Yeah, I know," he said quietly.
***
"GO!"
Luc's shout, from behind a makeshift sandbag bunker, earned a thumbs-up from Portia; she eased the pickup-truck into gear, and obeyed the laws of physics by creeping the truck forward at two or three miles an hour. Slowly, the chains bolted into the bricks became taut; the truck's motor revved, and the wheels spun in place.
"STOP!" Luc shouted, and Portia obediently shifted into reverse, easing off a little. "All right, back a few feet...again!"
For the second time, the truck inched forward, pulling steadily rather than suddenly, and there was the sound of brick grating on stone. After a few seconds of wheel-spinning, Portia voluntarily stopped and reversed for a second time. Luc crept cautiously up to the outside wall of the church, keeping well back, and peered at it.
"One more!" he shouted to Portia. "On my mark."
"I want to gun it!" Portia said, sulkily.
"You want to rip the rear fender off my truck?"
"Point taken."
Luc ran back behind the bunker, and shouted "GO!" for the third time. The truck moved forward a little faster, under Portia's growingly impatient guidance, and the grating grew louder. Then there was a creak, and a terrible, weighty silence as the entire, vaguely round wall of brick leaned forward. It seemed to hang there, tilted above the ground, while Luc held his breath and Portia turned around in the truck cab to see it.
"Holy god," Luc breathed, as the mass of red brick and crumbling mortar gained speed. Dust, birds, and one or two small mammals flew outward and the shockwave from the crash knocked Luc to the ground. He heard the truck motor switch off, somewhere, and Portia whooping with glee.
"That was awesome!" she shouted. "Did the tape get it?"
Luc glanced at the tripod propped up by sandbags, off to his right.
"I think so!" he shouted back. "Let's see how it looks from inside!"
Portia nodded and ran to help him up, unlocking the camera from its tripod as they went. The debris cloud rolled over them, and Luc pressed his handkerchief to his mouth while Portia pulled her shirt up over hers; when they emerged, they were both coated in a light dusting of what used to be mortar.
Inside, Félix and Oscar had been watching as the brick was pulled away, waiting for the revelation of how the window would look when light could get through it. When Portia and Luc reached them, they were still staring.
Oscar licked his lips. "Look at the -- "
" -- colour," Portia breathed, the camera hanging at her hip, forgotten.
The rose window, catching the afternoon sunlight, cast a skewed pattern over the dome's floor, the altar and part of the nave; the stained glass radiated out from a knot of ironwork in the centre, forming concentric patterns around three giant panels on which religious scenes were painted. It was the smaller, blank pieces that drew their attention, however. Deep green at the centre, radiating out into a bright, blinding sunny yellow and then orange, they held shades Oscar had never seen in any stained-glass window before, even in his architecture textbooks. At the very top, where Luc's hammer had been incautious, two broken panes let in pale, pure sunlight.
"Why would anyone brick it up?" Félix asked, in a hushed voice. "Why would they leave it here?"
"You do find treasures in the strangest places, Félix," Oscar answered.
***
Well, clearly we're not going to make fifty thousand by deadline, but we're surprisingly okay with that, and besides aren't part of the official NaNo anyway. We did clear 35,000 -- the final count after this chapter is 37,300 or thereabouts -- and we will be continuing work, so don't defriend just yet! :D
Twenty Two
"Oh god, what did Oscar do?"
Portia was a shrewd judge of character and an excellent interpreter of body language; if there was trouble to be got into, it would undoubtedly be Oscar, and not Félix, who found it out. Félix, who was smoking a rare cigarette on the front steps of the church -- his church -- gave her a tired smile.
"You stayed in London last night," he said.
"Yeah, Luc had a few beers and I don't like driving on the wrong side of the road, which we didn't think about until he'd had a few beers, so then I had a few beers and we got a room in town," she said. "I just came from the hotel, I had to pick up some clothes."
Félix acknowledged Luc, who was parking his newly-purchased pickup, with a wave; Luc waved back, took what looked like a bag of groceries out of the front seat, lifted a ladder from the truck-bed, and trooped towards the back of the building.
"I like him," Félix said. "I like a man who can carry a ladder all on his own."
"What did Oscar do?" Portia asked, taking the cigarette out of Félix's fingers and putting it out in the dirt, grinding it down with her shoe heel.
"Why does he have to have done anything?"
"Oh my god, he murdered someone. He murdered someone and wants to bury the body in the church."
"He didn't murder anyone, he just..." Félix tapped another cigarette out of a box, and Portia took the box away. "...he got a little lippy with the priest."
"Lippy?" Portia asked.
"Smart."
"Smart like knows what 'syncretic' means smart?"
"What?"
"Combining two cultural traditions or views into one, usually through a process of imperialistic appropriation by a dominant culture," Portia said promptly.
"He told a priest he wasn't a Catholic and didn't care what the Catholic church thought," Félix said, looking vaguely worried.
"God, I keep telling him not to tell the truth," she said, taking Félix's lighter before he could light the cigarette in his mouth. He tucked the cigarette in his pocket.
"He had a good point."
"He always has good points. He just needs to learn to shut the hell up."
"He's a very quiet worker."
Portia sighed. "All right, so, the local priest is pissed off at us. Is this a big deal?"
"It is to me. Oscar isn't the first reason he's angry, Oscar's just the loudest." Félix ducked into the moldering entryway of the church, and leaned in the doorway to the nave, where the technicians were still hard at work, directed by Oscar. "He didn't take kindly to the idea of turning the church into a -- "
" -- mansion? Oscar told me," she said. "I'm all for it."
"There may be trouble," Félix sighed. "The church may try to buy the building back, though I wouldn't sell; title's already been transferred so they can't void the deal. I'm more worried about a worker's strike."
"They're not the mafia, Félix."
"No, but this is a Catholic town, isn't it?" Félix asked. "No Anglican church I could see, no Protestant churches at all. Local workmen are Catholic, and it would be foolish to import non-locals. These things have a way of haunting a project. I've seen it happen with my parents' projects before."
Portia watched Oscar. "If you scrap this it'll break his heart."
"And mine," Félix said. Portia glanced at him. He was also watching Oscar. "When did the two become so completely intertwined?"
***
Félix turned out to be right.
The first Sunday they spent in town, Luc went to the Catholic service with his head held high and in his workman's Sunday best. No one spoke to him, but then again, he was a stranger and no one had any reason to speak to him.
On Monday he found that every workman in the town had full labour schedules. Just like Félix had predicted.
"We need some time to work out the renovations anyhow," Oscar said, as the four of them sat at a table in the crossing, below the huge floating dome, eating lunch Luc had fetched from town. "It's not as though any actual construction could start for a couple of weeks, not until I figure out how it's going to be done. And we've got to ship in supplies and fittings -- really, by the time we actually need a large labour pool, they should have come around."
"I don't know," Félix shook his head. "There are things we could be doing now."
"Unbricking the window," Luc agreed, ticking them off on his fingers. "Taking up the carpet in the entryway; getting rid of the mounting-brackets for the pews and resurfacing that area of the floor with new stones. Lots of cleaning. New windows installed. Landscaping."
"What are you thinking for the rose window, crowbars? Sledgehammers?" Oscar asked, around a bite of sandwich.
"Chemicals," Luc answered. "I know a few that dissolve mortar harmlessly, and it's very old mortar to begin with. I've been testing them."
"That's brick by brick though, isn't it?" Oscar asked. Luc nodded.
"Have to, if you want to save the window."
Félix, Portia, and Oscar all froze.
"Save the window?" Félix asked.
"Well, yes," Luc replied calmly. "I broke one or two pieces just getting enough brick out to see it, but then -- "
"The window's still there?" Oscar demanded.
"Yeah -- there's a layer of brick outside and one inside, and the window inbetween. It's a little strange, I think," Luc said.
"Why would they brick up a perfectly good window?" Portia asked.
"Probably to protect it from the same fate as the rest of 'em." Luc shrugged. "If you want to take the window out, we might as well use sledgehammers, though I can think of one or two people who'd be interested in owning it -- "
"No, no," Félix said. "By all means, we want to save it. The whole thing intact?"
"As far as I can tell, except for the two panes I broke. I had a look down into it with a few electric lights. I can't tell what it'll look like when it's opened up, though."
"You know, if we dissolved the mortar around the edges and hooked the whole thing up to the pickup..." Oscar said, thoughtfully. "I mean it'd make one hell of a crash, but we could probably pull the whole outer brick section down at once."
"Demolition!" Portia said, excited.
"Let's not do that on the interior wall," Oscar murmured.
"Take the fender off the pickup, if we're not careful," Luc cautioned.
"Backhoe!" Portia exclaimed. Unholy glee lit her face.
"If we were careful," Luc continued, "It could be done. It would be very efficient. We simply swab the edges, make sure they're loose enough not to pull out the wall with it, and apply steady force."
"I'm going to buy a video camera," Portia announced.
"How soon can it be done?" Félix asked.
"Without labour, I won't do it on my own," Luc said firmly.
"We could do it, the three of us."
"DIBS ON DRIVING THE TRUCK!" Portia shouted. The echoes rang off the dome and set several birds fluttering for safety. Luc gave her a tolerant, affectionate smile.
"Brick by brick, I could bring the inside wall down today," Luc mused. "If I had help spraying the solvent."
"Me!" Portia insisted. Félix grinned at Oscar.
"I have drafting to do, now that the plans are finished," Oscar said, shrugging. "I was going to go back to the hotel -- the laptop only has five hours of battery life before it needs a recharge, and the car charger takes forever."
"I'll come with you," Félix said. "I think I ought to show my face in town a bit, try to smile at people."
"Yeah, smiling'll work," Portia said, with a sigh, and began gathering up the lunch rubbish.
Soon after Luc purchased a truck on Félix's tab, for the purposes of transport, Oscar had done likewise, except his was actually a second-hand, two-seater Ford Ka he'd found in London. Even Félix, no matter how hard he tried, could not look cool anywhere in the vincinity of it. And he tried hard; he was leaning on it, waiting for Oscar, when the architect emerged from a last-minute conference with Luc about the wisdom of de-bricking the inside of the window. Luc seemed confident, though, and so Oscar left him and Portia unpacking spray bottles and chemical cans on the altar platform.
"Ready?" Félix asked, going for the James Dean lean and looking, next to the Ka, as though he required hip surgery.
"Yeah, and I had a thought about -- " Oscar stopped and patted his pockets. "Keys."
"Forgot them?"
"Just be a minute," Oscar promised, ducking back inside. He squelched across the rotting carpet, which looked to be of the Perpetually Wet sort, and out into the nave before he realised Luc and Portia had vanished.
Slowly, and with a rising sense of doom, he collected the keys from the lunch table. There weren't that many places they could have gone; the spray bottles were filled, and the ladders were waiting. In fact...
He walked back past the lunch table, moving parallel to the altar until he could see past it. Then he left. Quietly.
Outside, Félix was trying a Dukes of Hazzard style pose on the bumper, but he kept falling off.
"Find your keys?" he asked.
"Portia and Luc," Oscar answered.
"Yes?"
"Not to sound high-school about this, but they're doing it."
"I wondered how long it would take," Félix said with a grin. "Come on then, let's get going. You should tell them, then we could stop paying for two hotel rooms."
"They're doing it."
"Not right now, right?"
"No, right now they're just groping each other behind the altar."
Félix laughed. "Young love! Or in Luc's case, pushing-middle-age love."
"You aren't at all concerned by this?"
Félix raised an eyebrow. "Should I be?"
"It's Portia! And Luc!"
"And?"
"And they're doing it!"
"Oscar, they're not your parents."
Oscar gave Félix a Look as he climbed into the car.
"Honestly," Félix said. "You were aware that Portia has sex. You must be. She talks about it constantly."
"Yeah, but it's -- "
"Well, I can't say I'm not a little worried for Luc, but perhaps he'll be a calming influence on her. She can dress him!" Félix said happily. "Can you imagine Luc in a proper suit?"
"Not without a hammer in his hand," Oscar said. "He always has a hammer."
"Rather a good idea, when you think about it. There are lots of times I've wished I had a hammer."
Oscar turned onto the road that would take them through town, and was mainly silent for the rest of the drive, as Félix turned the subject to his plans for the church, and for returning to France to reassure his parents that he wasn't doing precisely what he was doing. Félix followed him up the stairs and into his hotel room, and sat on the bed while Oscar turned on the laptop.
"I told you they were survivors," he said finally, while Oscar began clicking away at the drafting program. "You should listen to me, Oscar, I know whereof I speak."
"Sorry, it's just a little startling, walking in on two people I know who are suddenly -- "
" -- doing it, yes. You're not jealous, are you?"
"Jealous?"
"Well, you and Portia always joke about this sort of thing," Félix observed. Oscar looked up from the screen to find the younger man watching him, intently. "Are you jealous of Luc?"
"Can you imagine Portia and I? We'd kill each other."
"That's not an answer, Oscar."
Oscar rotated the digital model of the church, and idly lifted off the dome. "There were rumours, when we went back to New York after the fire. People saw that things were different, I don't know, Portia should have gone and gotten her own job."
"Oh?"
"She could have. She had more than enough experience. Would have been paid more."
Félix rose and went to the little bathroom counter, picking up two glasses and filling them halfway from the flask in his pocket. "Why did she stay, then?"
"Dunno."
"Not at all?"
Oscar shrugged, and dropped the dome back onto the church as he accepted one of the glasses. "Could be she was afraid she couldn't get another job. Could be she wanted to make sure I wouldn't do anything stupid. Which I did, so that plan didn't work that well."
"What did you do that was so stupid?"
"Quit my job, came back to Paris, freeloaded off you for half a year?"
Félix frowned.
"Oh," Oscar said. "That wasn't a shot at you, Félix. Sorry."
"Do you believe you burnt down the hotel?" Félix asked, abruptly. After a moment, Oscar shook his head.
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"It was a wiring failure, that's all."
"Your fault?"
Oscar fell silent, gathering his thoughts.
"Was the hotel your fault, Oscar?"
"I saw the ghosts," Oscar said finally. "Luc wouldn't have put up the ghost light if I hadn't seen the ghosts, and it wouldn't have shorted and set the building on fire."
"Did she fight you? The hotel?"
"No, never once...she was happy we were there. Wouldn't you be? All shiny new plate-glass windows and marble and chrome, nice new pipes, a chandelier, all the sheets off the furniture...."
"She knew how to go with class," Félix mused. He refilled his glass, then Oscar's when he held it out. "To the hotel."
"To the hotel," Oscar agreed, wincing as the alcohol burned down his throat.
"Don't forget, Oscar. You have a job to do here. You have a future." Félix tapped the computer screen. Oscar grinned.
"Yeah, I know," he said quietly.
***
"GO!"
Luc's shout, from behind a makeshift sandbag bunker, earned a thumbs-up from Portia; she eased the pickup-truck into gear, and obeyed the laws of physics by creeping the truck forward at two or three miles an hour. Slowly, the chains bolted into the bricks became taut; the truck's motor revved, and the wheels spun in place.
"STOP!" Luc shouted, and Portia obediently shifted into reverse, easing off a little. "All right, back a few feet...again!"
For the second time, the truck inched forward, pulling steadily rather than suddenly, and there was the sound of brick grating on stone. After a few seconds of wheel-spinning, Portia voluntarily stopped and reversed for a second time. Luc crept cautiously up to the outside wall of the church, keeping well back, and peered at it.
"One more!" he shouted to Portia. "On my mark."
"I want to gun it!" Portia said, sulkily.
"You want to rip the rear fender off my truck?"
"Point taken."
Luc ran back behind the bunker, and shouted "GO!" for the third time. The truck moved forward a little faster, under Portia's growingly impatient guidance, and the grating grew louder. Then there was a creak, and a terrible, weighty silence as the entire, vaguely round wall of brick leaned forward. It seemed to hang there, tilted above the ground, while Luc held his breath and Portia turned around in the truck cab to see it.
"Holy god," Luc breathed, as the mass of red brick and crumbling mortar gained speed. Dust, birds, and one or two small mammals flew outward and the shockwave from the crash knocked Luc to the ground. He heard the truck motor switch off, somewhere, and Portia whooping with glee.
"That was awesome!" she shouted. "Did the tape get it?"
Luc glanced at the tripod propped up by sandbags, off to his right.
"I think so!" he shouted back. "Let's see how it looks from inside!"
Portia nodded and ran to help him up, unlocking the camera from its tripod as they went. The debris cloud rolled over them, and Luc pressed his handkerchief to his mouth while Portia pulled her shirt up over hers; when they emerged, they were both coated in a light dusting of what used to be mortar.
Inside, Félix and Oscar had been watching as the brick was pulled away, waiting for the revelation of how the window would look when light could get through it. When Portia and Luc reached them, they were still staring.
Oscar licked his lips. "Look at the -- "
" -- colour," Portia breathed, the camera hanging at her hip, forgotten.
The rose window, catching the afternoon sunlight, cast a skewed pattern over the dome's floor, the altar and part of the nave; the stained glass radiated out from a knot of ironwork in the centre, forming concentric patterns around three giant panels on which religious scenes were painted. It was the smaller, blank pieces that drew their attention, however. Deep green at the centre, radiating out into a bright, blinding sunny yellow and then orange, they held shades Oscar had never seen in any stained-glass window before, even in his architecture textbooks. At the very top, where Luc's hammer had been incautious, two broken panes let in pale, pure sunlight.
"Why would anyone brick it up?" Félix asked, in a hushed voice. "Why would they leave it here?"
"You do find treasures in the strangest places, Félix," Oscar answered.
***
Well, clearly we're not going to make fifty thousand by deadline, but we're surprisingly okay with that, and besides aren't part of the official NaNo anyway. We did clear 35,000 -- the final count after this chapter is 37,300 or thereabouts -- and we will be continuing work, so don't defriend just yet! :D