Paris: The Novel

it’s disabled.”
    The cables were thick, though. He could only just get the big cutters around them. He checked to see that the cables were well greased. They were. That would make the job easier and quieter. But it was still going to be hard work. Taking one of the two cable cutters, he showed them all how to cut through a cable.
    “It’s just like scissors or wire cutters,” he explained, “but you have to work at it. The cable is spun from a lot of wire strands. But it’s big. Very big. So you’ll just have to keep on working and cutting until you can take a final bite at the central core. Be patient. Take turns.”
    It took him ten minutes to get through the first cable, while they all watched. After that, he kept Michel with him and sent Georges the steeplejack and his mate across to the eastern leg, while he and Michel worked on the rest of the cables. “After you’ve finished,” he told Georges, “go up the stairs to the second floor. We’ll meet up there.”
    They had just started on the third cable when a low hoot from Jacquôt above them warned that the policeman was approaching. Thomas motioned Michel to press himself against the girders by the track. They kept very still. He hoped that Georges had heard the signal too.
    The policeman passed under the tower. They waited. He disappeared from view. A low whistle from Jacquôt signaled the all clear.
    When they were done, he and Michel clambered across into the stairwell. Thomas gave Michel the cable cutter to carry, and they started up the stairs.
    It was a long climb. At the first platform, Thomas rested a little. Then they continued on up toward the second platform. Halfway up this section, Thomas had to rest again. His legs were aching and he felt a little short of breath. He saw Michel looking at him nervously.
    “How’s your head for heights?” he suddenly asked the younger man.
    “Fine.”
    “Good. It’ll need to be,” he added gruffly. That made him feel better.
    When they got up to the second platform, they had to wait only a couple of minutes for Georges and his mate to appear.
    “All done,” Georges said with a nod. “No problem.”
    “This is where it gets more interesting,” Thomas told them.
    The elevator system in the top section of the tower was quite different.There were two passenger elevators, linked by cables over the usual pulley wheels up above the third platform, so that they hung, counterbalancing each other. That reduced the amount of extra power needed to raise and lower them. A pair of hydraulic rams under the elevators provided power, raising each car halfway up the ascent. The passengers then got out, walked across a gangway, and entered the other car for the final ride to the top. It was an efficient system, making use of gravity to do much of the work.
    There was a little service elevator as well. Georges quickly climbed on top of it and cut the cables. Then he and Thomas had a quick conference.
    “I want to make sure they can’t repair this without replacing the entire length of the cables,” Thomas told him. “So I’m going up to the gangplank halfway up. I don’t want to cut right through the cables, or they’ll fall down two hundred feet and make a hell of a noise. But I’m going to weaken them. It’ll be easier for me to fray them if they’re tense. So can you cut almost through the cables on top of the car at this level, but don’t make the final cut until I’ve finished up above?”
    “Understood. No problem,” Georges replied.
    To reach the highest level they had to mount a narrow spiral staircase. It was hard to carry the long-armed cable cutters for two hundred feet up the metal stairs’ thirty-inch spiral. But eventually Thomas and Michel came out onto the gangway. Looking up, through the soaring girders, they could see the dark square of the topmost platform two hundred feet above them.
    They walked across to the closed elevator doors, behind which lay the empty shaft. Two hundred feet below them they could just hear the faint scraping sound of Georges working on the cables above the elevator car.
    “We’ve got to climb into the shaft,” said Thomas quietly. They had plenty of light from the moon up there, but it took them a couple of minutes to work out the best way of climbing over the caging that fenced in the gangway. Once over that, they had to ease their way carefully along a girder until they came to the edge of the big open drop of the shaft. The car cables hung in