Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [38]
“Because I’m on the phone, Mom!”
“Fooling around with your friends again! Who is that?”
“Ahmadinejad.”
“Oh, my goodness! What is he saying?”
“That he wants to see Jeezy at the Beacon tonight. Putin’s going, too. He scalped a ticket from Kim Jong Il. All tha gangstas are going.”
“Don’t be so fresh, young man!”
“Gotta go,” he says to me. “Enemy forces have dropped a Momshell.”
“Fall back, soldier. Over and out.
“April 1795,” I say to myself as I hang up.
I run my hand over the leather cover of the diary, thinking about the girl who wrote it, and how she’d hoped to get it out of Paris. That didn’t happen, because here it is, more than two centuries later, still in Paris.
What about her, though—Alexandrine? What happened to her?
Didn’t G say the guitar was found in the catacombs? She must’ve put it there. It sounds like she was on the run. Maybe she hid it in the catacombs for safekeeping and then couldn’t get back to get it. Or maybe something bad happened and she died down there. And the case stayed hidden underground until the cave-in, and the guy who found it never tried to open the false bottom because who expects a false bottom in a guitar case? And anyway, he didn’t have the key.
But I do. Somehow I have it. How did that key get from eighteenth-century Paris to twenty-first-century Brooklyn?
Did she escape to New York instead of London? With the key in her coat pocket? And it somehow ended up in a box of junk at a flea market? Or maybe Truman’s key isn’t her key at all. Maybe it’s just some old generic key that opens instrument cases. That seems a lot more likely.
Either way, I don’t think the hidden compartment has been opened for a long time. I don’t think the diary and the miniature would still be in it if it had been. I don’t think it’s been opened since Alexandrine herself locked it and ran. Or locked it and died.
Not until now.
Not until me.
I tuck the clipping back into the diary and keep reading.
20
22 April 1795
It was luck that brought me to him. Or so I once thought.
It was a Sunday in April. Years ago. In 1789. Robespierre outlawed Sundays. And 1789, too. But I go by the old calendar, not the new.
It was before. Before the people of Paris pulled down a prison, a palace, a king.
My family was at home in the damp, miserable room we shared. My grandmother was stirring a soup. Rabbit, she said, but no one believed her. Too many cats had gone missing.
We came home—my father, my uncle, and I—without our trunks and boxes.
Where are the puppets? my mother asked.
We were giving a show, my father told her, about the revolution in America. We were set upon by the guard. They called the show seditious. They trampled the puppets, toppled the theater, and set fire to all.
My God, we are ruined! my mother cried. How am I to feed these children? What will we do? Tell me!
We’ll make new puppets, my uncle said.
So the guard can trample them, too? my mother asked.
We’ll make farting puppets, my uncle said, and our fortune. He turned to my father and said, Paris wants farts and farces, not high ideals, Theo. You must do this.
I must do this. I must do that. I am your puppet, René, my father grumbled.
He was a playwright once, my father, and the rest of us his players. His plays were tragic and sad, like the man himself, but the theaters refused them, for they spoke of liberty and an end to kings. Because he could not stage his plays in theaters, he staged them in the streets, and three times the censors arrested him. The third time, they banned him from performing ever again. So he made puppets and had them say the words he could not.
Papa will do it, won’t he? my sister Bette said to our mother. I’m so hungry!
We were all hungry, all thin, for the harvest had been poor and the winter long. We saw bodies in the street every morning, blue and stiff. Men, women, little children. Dead of hunger and cold. Carried off to the morgue like planks.
Only Bette was not thin. How she stayed plump in the midst of