Though Luc had said our tragic twelfth-century lovers had died in their sixties, Peter Abelard did not look like an old man.
The famous scholar strolling towards us had to be somewhere in his early thirties, fuelling my budding suspicion that the dead here didn't necessarily assume the appearance of their final year alive, but rather an image of themselves they held dear. Abelard's curly hair and short beard were a striking red colour and he wore the type of round glasses I was never too surprised to see perched on a teacher's nose. Though his gait never seemed as threatening as Friedrich's, his swagger taught me he was used to coasting on a wave of intellectual superiority, the four students flanking and following him only adding to his authoritative air.
"Shit, dude," Luc muttered. "Abelard's kind of hot."
I choked on my own spit. "He's wearing a tacky Hawaiian shirt of all things," I pointed out. Abelard had evidently done away with the habit of wearing monastic clothing and pursued a new fashion style. If it could be called style in the first place.
"Hey, I'm not here to be the fashion police." Luc shrugged with nonchalance. "So do you think he's castrated in the afterlife, too, or..."
"Luc."
"I'm just curious!"
"About the man's genitals!"
"Don't tell me you've never been curious about a man's genitals–"
Abelard cleared his throat as he came to a halt in front of us. "I can hear you, gentlemen. And I won't dignify your question with an answer."
Inbetween meeting the famous-and-quite-possibly-dangerous Peter Abelard and trying not to think about Luc's genitals, I wasn't sure what to say. "I'm sorry I called your shirt tacky, Mr. Abelard. The yellow palm trees actually complement the blue quite well," was what I finally came up with.
"That's Professor Abelard to you." Though my words wouldn't win any eloquency awards, Abelard seemed to approve of them, glancing lovingly at his shirt. "But apology accepted, young man. I find this style rather refreshing, though my wife has yet to see its charm. Heloise is still the most brilliant woman I've had the honour of meeting, but I fear her intelligence may not extend to knowledge on what's considered fashionable in this day and age."
I wouldn't debate him on the matter, though I had a feeling Heloise might not be above composing a strongly-worded letter in response to it. I didn't dare pull my gaze away from Abelard, but I could see his students spring into action from the corner of my eye: the ones who'd flanked their mentor moved between tables to the opposite side of the room, the ones lagging behind taking their places. They moved as if they knew what to do, even though Abelard hadn't produced any gesture or indication he'd given them an order.
Perhaps there wasn't even any need for that.
"So awesome to meet you, Professor," Luc greeted him with amicable ease. "We were hoping to see you, actually. Do you teach classes at the Sorbonne? Because Nick and I are still looking for activities that may give some meaning to the long afterlives ahead of us, and a bit of soul-searching in an interesting class could be good for our intellectual development."
Luc had learned from our encounter with the librarian; his effort to maintain the facade we weren't alive came out smooth as could be. Unfortunately, I was afraid we were past the point of fooling Peter Abelard, whose influence extended so far he had a little student militia at his beck and call. In a flash, my thoughts drifted to Béatrice and Friedrich. I hadn't bothered to consider where they took that class they met in or who taught it, but could it have been here at the Sorbonne, with Abelard or his wife for an instructor?
The more I mulled it over, the likelier it became that the both of them were students of Abelard as well. Students with varying degrees of loyalty.
"Of course I teach classes here. Why would I not teach at the finest educational institute in Paris?" Abelard scoffed, indignant. "You take me for a fool, gentlemen. I'm flattered by your interest in my insights, but give up the charade. I know Béatrice has left her post and I know what the librarian relayed to me. Neither of you is dead."
I wanted to deny it, but Abelard didn't look angry just yet, and I wasn't about to change that. As I'd thought, he already knew too much. Sometimes I hated being right. "What difference does it make?" I asked, fearing the answer. "What do you want with us?"
Abelard's expression softened; his tone lost its arrogant edge, which he replaced with something I'd almost call fatherly reassurance. "I'd simply like to speak with you for a while, as would Heloise. My wife is not here right now, but if you'd follow me to my office, we could talk there while enjoying a drink. It will not have to take long. I promise you shall return to the Père-Lachaise gateway before you know it."
I couldn't do anything but stare, unsure what to make of that promise. Abelard's wish sounded innocent enough, but the vagueness of his statements caused me concern. If only he'd say what he wanted to discuss, I'd have a better idea of what to do. "What do you want to talk about, then?"
"The wonders and woes of living in the twenty-first century. The joys of being alive." Abelard's expression took on a dreamy quality. "Oh, the things I could do if only I lived... See continents I never knew existed in my own time with my beloved... Let my afterlife's work dazzle audiences and take that glorious world by storm..."
"Your... afterlife's work?"
"A dissertation on the role of religion in politics throughout the world and across centuries. Two-thousand pages and counting."
Luc's eyes bulged out of their sockets as he let out a pained please. I felt for him, though the dissertation itself sounded interesting enough.
But Abelard's intellectual ideas had little to do with whatever he really had in store for us.
Béatrice's words still resounded in my head. Do not trust Abelard, and trust Heloise even less. It wasn't right. If the couple indeed only wanted to talk, why would Béatrice have deemed warning us necessary? And if our spirit guide had been one of Abelard and Heloise's students for who-knows-how-long, she knew the professor and his motives much better than we ever could.
"Can Luc and I deliberate on this for a moment, just the two of us?" I tried, working hard to not look too suspicious. "We need to discuss if a detour like that fits into our itinerary. Surely you see the value in discussing such important matters?"
Abelard's left eye twitched, as if this development frustrated him, but he nodded, if only to preserve the benevolent self-image he'd been trying to project. He took a few steps back, motioning for the two students next to him to do the same. "I do. Please, take all the time you need."
Luc leaned closer to me until he was at a distance I would've quite enjoyed closing if the timing hadn't been so awful. His voice was a whisper. "I hope we're not seriously considering going to No-Penis Pete's office, are we?"
I bit back an awkward guffaw. "Get a grip, man, you're obsessed with his bits."
"Shush. Are we?"
"We aren't if it's up to me," I assured him, gaze darting around the reading room. Abelard and his students had positioned themselves alarmingly well. The placement of the rows of long tables in the middle of the room ensured we could only move around those to return to the exit; Abelard and the first two goons blocked the path in front of us, while the other two formed a nice human wall on the other side. If we wanted to escape, we'd have to break past them, but if they got hold of just one of us, we'd be done for.
Luc noticed the same thing. "Only one way out, the way I see it," he said, "and that's over the tables. How good were you at obstacle courses in PE?"
"Obstacle courses?"
"Okay, doesn't matter, just do what I do. Now!"
Before I'd even had a chance to blink, Luc jumped up on the table closest to us, much to the surprise and horror of Abelard, his students, the unsuspecting readers in the room, and me.
But an element of surprise was good. We could use it to our advantage. My body jolted into action, following Luc's example with significantly less fluidity, leg slamming into a reading lamp in the process. I scrambled to my feet on the table, whereas Luc had taken an impressive leap forward to the next table in line, which stood just close enough to ours for us to be able to make the jump. As long as we made no missteps or other errors, at least.
"I had a parkour phase!" Luc yelled with enthusiasm, causing even more confusion in the room; I could see the reading spirits turn to look in his direction with bafflement and irritation, one or two people packing up and readying themselves to leave.
"I didn't!" I shouted back, but I couldn't hesitate and waste our escape chance. Letting adrenaline propel me forward, I made the jump, too, succeeding by a narrow margin; if Luc hadn't grabbed my arm to steady me on my feet, I would've lost my balance and fallen to the floor.
Abelard and his students caught on: the professor barked an order in French I was inclined to translate as get them. The student taskforce got moving, but we already had a headstart. With one more table jump, we were far enough past them to get our feet back on the ground in the proper path. Luc and I sprinted away with our assailants on our heels, running as fast, if not faster, than we had when we'd feared the night guard at Père-Lachaise might catch us.
"We need to shake them off," Luc hissed at me as we raced out of the room and thundered down the stairs, curt, not wasting words as to save his breath. "Where to?"
I scrambled to think of a place, any place, where we could go, where we'd be safe from these people on a short-term basis, but struggled to find one. I'd been in Paris for all of three days; these students had lived there long enough to be buried in the city's most famous cemetery. There was no way they didn't know the Latin Quarter intimately, and with how much I needed to think of where to place my feet, a threatening female student breathing down my neck, I couldn't come up with anything solid.
Luc had never put the medieval history book back, still clutching it under his arm. With a grunt, he turned around and chucked it at the legs of one of the male students. It tripped him up and I darted to the side while the guy rolled down the last part of the stairs, taking the woman who'd come dangerously close to grabbing me down in his fall.
"Nick, where to?" Luc repeated as we rushed out through the turnstiles, the librarian from before looking up in annoyance before shrugging us off and diving back into her book. God, if only that were me.
But I'd become a plans guy, apparently. So all I could do was come up with a plan.
I was thinking about the subway, wondering if we could escape by catching a train and letting it take us away, when a better idea hit me. I remembered the conversation Luc had had with the protesters, as well as a piece of advice my mother had offered me before I left on my trip. She'd been to Paris herself a couple times and liked to believe she knew its inhabitants as well as a psychiatrist knows her patients.
Always steer clear of demonstrations and protests, Dom, she'd said. If there's anything Parisians have always loved, it's periodically trying to burn their city down. Demonstrations escalate, and before you know it, you're swallowed by the masses. Don't take that kind of risk. Never get involved.
Excellent advice. But our salvation would lie in ignoring it.
"The Place du Panthéon," I told Luc breathlessly, smiling through my increasing exhaustion. "We're going to get lost in a crowd."