Rooftoppers

Giving up and going home, Anastasia and Safi accompany Gérard back to Notre Dame, while Matteo shows Sophie a shortcut back to her hotel. One of the rooftops on the way piques her curiosity, and Matteo tells her that it’s the police headquarters, the building she has visited twice with Charles. Remembering that the top floor holds the police’s archives, Sophie asks to peek in the window. This can only be accomplished by Matteo holding her by her ankles and arduously lowering her over the side of the building. Through the window, she sees a vast room lined with hundreds of filing cabinets. The cabinets appear locked, which perturbs Sophie, until Matteo tells her that locks can always be picked. However, they must do this some other night: It’s almost dawn. Back in her hotel room, she looks up the word for a flock of starlings: “a murmuration.”

Sophie wakes up to the worried-looking face of Charles, who says that he came in to check on her at 11 o’clock the previous night and found her gone. Sophie refuses to tell him where she went but argues that it’s okay because no one could have seen her. She didn’t tell him beforehand because she was afraid he’d stop her. Charles denies that he would but admits that he’s not quite sure: “Love is unpredictable” (243). Hesitantly, Sophie asks him why, if her mother is alive, she didn’t come looking for her. Charles says that the shipwreck was widely reported by the officials to have had no female survivors and that adults generally believe what they are told, however dull or ugly. They have lost the ability to believe in the “extraordinary.”

That night, Sophie leaves a note for Charles saying that she’s going to the police headquarters and will be back before dawn. She does not mention that she’ll be entering through an upper-story window. When she reaches the headquarters’ rooftop, she finds Matteo waiting for her, along with Gérard, Anastasia, and Safi, all of whom will keep watch. Showing no fear, Matteo lowers himself onto a windowsill from a drainpipe and jimmies the window latch with his knife, slightly cutting himself on the sash. Guiding her feet, he helps Sophie down to the sill and through the window. Due to his dread of enclosed spaces, he refuses to enter the building himself. With Matteo translating for her, Sophie finds the files for assurance (insurance), and Matteo coaches her on how to pick the lock with a hairpin. After much frustration, Sophia hits the rhythm she needs to jimmy the five pins of the lock.

In a file marked divers (miscellaneous), she finds what she’s looking for: passenger lists, handwritten letters, and even photographs, all pertaining to the Queen Mary. Heart racing, she finds Charles’s name on the passenger manifest and then a photograph of the ship’s band. Her spirits collapse, however, when she sees that the band’s cellist is a man, complete with mustache. A list on the back of the photograph identifies him as George Greene, of 12, appartement G, Rue de l’Espoir. His youthful good looks make no impression on Sophie until a voice pipes up behind her, saying that the man in the photo looks a great deal like Sophie. The voice is Safi, who has spoken to her for the first time. Startled, Sophie gives the photo a closer look and realizes that George is wearing a woman’s shirt, with the buttons on the left. His shoes, Safi notes, are laced like a woman’s. As for his mustache, it looks painted on: “I don’t think that’s a man […] It’s just a very clever woman” (255), Sophie says.

As Sophie stares, wide-eyed, at the photo, voices erupt from the rooftop. Matteo, shouting that it’s the police, tries to flee. Sophie holds him still, recognizing Charles’s voice: “Would you mind coming back up? […] [Y]ou are, metaphorically, scaring the hell out of me” (256-57). Returning the file to the cabinet, she clambers back onto the roof, the photo clenched in her teeth. Charles, who says that he was almost killed by an over-zealous Anastasia, holds Sophie’s cello; he brought it over the rooftops in case she needed it. Sophie tells him that she hasn’t found her mother but shows him the address on the photo. Unfortunately, Matteo tells her that Rue de l’Espoir is deep in garier territory. Fearfully, Anastasia adds that the gariers carry knives, but Sophie is undaunted. The purpose of love, she realizes, might not be to make you feel “special” but brave. Sensing her mother’s living presence in the city, Sophia feels courageous as never before. Charles tries to get her to walk to the address, but she refuses, afraid of being caught, so close to her goal, by the police. Finally, Charles agrees to meet her at Rue de l’Espoir. Hitching the cello on his back, he slides down the drainpipe. Anastasia, Safi, and Gérard all vow to accompany Sophie over the roofs to her destiny. Scowling at Matteo’s hesitancy, Anastasia tells him, “You don’t have to come, […] But if you’re coming, let’s go” (260).

As they near the station, Matteo smells “twice-burnt” tobacco and tenses with fear. Before they can take another step, the gariers—six tall, pale boys with cruel, arrogant faces—slip noiselessly out of the shadows. In seconds, two have surrounded Anastasia, and the other four have closed around Gérard. For weapons, they hold jagged lengths of iron piping. Gérard pushes Sophie behind a chimney, telling her to stay there and, if she sees Safi, keep her from fighting. Then, pulling a sharp pigeon’s bone from his pocket, he leaps at the two gariers surrounding Anastasia. As he slashes at one of them, Anastasia fights the other with her nails and teeth. Matteo picks up a loose chimney pot and throws it at a garier attacking Anastasia, and Gérard joins the fight, using his long, whiplike legs to slash the gariers with a piece of flint held between his toes. When Gérard slips and falls, Sophie saves him by kicking a garier in the crotch. Then, when another garier comes at Anastasia with a knife, Sophie hits him with a slate tile. When a furious boy runs at Sophie, Safi darts out of the shadows and breaks his nose with a vicious punch. Soon, there remains only one garier, who advances on a flustered Matteo with a piece of pipe; Safi pulls a stone from her pocket and hits him soundly in the temple. Lying dazed on his back, he sees the three girls loom over him, triumphant; the dark-haired one hisses, “Do not mess with a mother-hunter. Do not mess with rooftoppers. […] Do not underestimate children. Do not underestimate girls” (266). Once the boy finds his feet, he flees over the rooftops.

Charles, waiting in the deserted Rue de l’Espoir outside the apartment block, hears a whistle from above. Carrying the cello on his back, he climbs up the drainpipe to join Sophie and the rooftoppers on the building’s roof. Gérard and Anastasia explain that the neighborhood is largely empty due to outbreaks of cholera; as a result, the gariers have made it one of their stomping grounds. To lure Sophie’s mother out, all six of them shout her name—“Vivienne!”—but no answer comes. Then, Charles hands Sophie the cello and urges her to play the Requiem. At first, she refuses, but at the urging of the rooftoppers, who tell her that music sometimes works as “magic,” she finally puts her bow to the strings. After a clumsy start, she slowly gains confidence as the others cheer her on to play faster and louder. Finally, she has to stop, her arm aching, but the music, mysteriously, goes on.

As Charles notes that echoes don’t “change key,” Matteo, realizing the truth, gives Sophie a gentle shove toward the northeast, the source of the cello music. Rapturously, she sprints over the rooftops until she comes to a gap between buildings much too wide for her to leap. In a panic, she spins to face the others, who have followed, and Charles orders her to “curl into a ball.” At the count of three, Charles hurls her over the gap, followed by Matteo and then by Charles. Sophie runs on toward the music but hears Matteo gasp: His sprained leg collapses under him, and he starts to slide down the peaked rooftop. Within seconds, Charles saves him by pulling him to safety with his umbrella.

Sophie runs on but begins to lose the direction of the music; suddenly, above the cello, she hears a woman’s voice singing in French. As she crests a sloping roof, she sees a woman sitting on an upturned box on the next rooftop. Her back is turned to Sophie, and she is playing a cello. Even in the darkness, Sophie can see that her hair is the “color of lightning” (274).

Frozen with excitement and fear, Sophie obeys Charles’s urging to jump across. Landing rough, she cuts her knee on a tile but ignores the pain. The woman, deeply immersed in her playing and singing, does not notice Sophie until she lays a finger on her arm and says, “I’m mother-hunting. I think you may be the thing I’m looking for” (276). In the moonlight, the woman’s features seem like a mirror of her own except rich with experience, as if she’s been around the world many times. Charles, from the opposite rooftop, sees Vivienne cry out and then drop her cello and embrace her long-lost daughter. In each other’s arms, the two of them spin around and around, “until they [look] less like two strangers and more like one single laughing body” (277). Charles, with tears running down his face, sinks down beside Matteo, not daring to interrupt this magical moment. Though the cello lies by itself on the rooftop, music still seems to be playing, fast and beautiful, at “double time.”