The Woman in the Fifth (12 page)

'It sounds like the people downstairs worry about unwanted guests.'

'I will say this once more. What goes on downstairs does not concern you – and it will
never
concern you. Believe me, my friend, it is better that way.'

'And say the cops just happen to show up in the alley . . .'

'No problem,' he said, walking over to the door next to the toilet and unbolting it. 'This is never locked. If you see the cops on the screen, you exit here. There is a bolt – very strong – on the other side. It will buy you a few minutes' time, as the cops will have to break the door down. By the time they do that, you will be out of the building. The passage behind here leads down to a basement. There is another door there which leads to a passage into the adjoining building. When you come out of that building, you will be on the rue Martel. The cops will have no idea.'

'This is insane,' I heard myself say out loud.

'Then don't take the job.'

'Promise me that whatever is going on downstairs isn't so morally reprehensible . . .' I said.

'No one is being involuntarily harmed,' he said.

I paused, knowing I had to make a decision immediately.

'I will never have to directly meet anyone?' I asked.

'You come at midnight, you go at six. You sit in this room. You don't leave. You see the people who come here on the monitor. They don't see you. It is all very elegant.'

'OK,' I said, 'we have a deal.'

'Good,' Kamal said.

After taking me again through all the various numbers I had to press, and handing me the assorted keys, he said, 'There is just one thing. You must never come here before midnight, you must leave promptly at six. Unless you see the police on the monitor, you must never leave the room until six.'

'Otherwise I'll turn into a pumpkin?'

'Something like that, yes.
D'accord?
'

'
D'ac
.'

'So you are clear about everything?'

'Yes,' I lied. 'Everything is perfectly clear.'

N
OTHING HAPPENED THAT
first night. I set up my laptop. I forced myself to work – my eyes straining under the single naked lightbulb. I pushed myself into writing five hundred words. I turned up the radiator and discovered that it gave off no more heat. I drank the two litres of Evian. I peed several times in the toilet and was grateful that I didn't need a bowel movement, as I couldn't have handled standing up to do it. I read some of the Simenon novel – a dark, sparely written tale about a French actor getting over the breakup of his marriage by wandering through the night world of 1950s New York. Around four in the morning, I started to fade – and fell asleep sitting up at the desk. I jolted awake, terrified that I had missed something on the monitor. But the screen showed nothing bar the glare of a spotlight on a doorway – an image so grainy it almost seemed as if it was from another era, as if I was looking at the past tense just downstairs.

I read some more. I fought fatigue. I fought boredom. I drew up a list of what I'd buy this afternoon to fix the place up. I kept glancing at my watch, willing 6 a.m. to arrive. When it finally did, I unlocked the door. I turned off the light in the room. I closed the door behind me and locked it. I hit the light for the stairs. At the bottom of them, I stood for a moment, trying to hear any noises from the big steel door at the end of the ground-floor corridor. Nothing. I unlocked the front door. Outside it was still night – a touch of damp in the air, augmenting the chill that had crawled under my skin during those six hours in a badly heated concrete box. I locked the door, my head constantly turning sideways to scan the alleyway and see if anyone was waiting to hit me over the head with a club. But the alley was clear. I finished locking the door. I walked quickly into the street. No cops, no heavies in parkas and balaclava helmets, waiting to have a few words with me. The rue du Faubourg Poissonnière was empty. I turned left and kept moving until I came to a little
boulangerie
that was on the rue Montholon. This took me a few minutes past my own street, but I didn't care. I was hungry. I bought two
pains au chocolat
and a baguette at the
boulangerie
. I ate one of the croissants on the way back to my
chambre
. Once inside I took a very hot shower, trying to get some warmth back into my bones. Then I changed into a T-shirt and pajama bottom, and made myself a bowl of hot chocolate. It tasted wonderful. So too did the second
pain au chocolat
. I pulled the blinds closed. I set the alarm for 2 p.m. I was asleep within moments of crawling into bed.

I slept straight through. It was strange waking up in the early afternoon – and knowing that I wouldn't see bed again until after six the next morning. Still, I had things to do – so I was up and out the door in ten minutes. Much to my relief – because the paranoid part of me wondered if, indeed, I would get paid at all – an envelope was waiting for me at the Internet café. As agreed there were sixty-five euros inside it.

'Where's Kamal?' I asked the guy behind the counter – a quiet, sullen-looking man in his late twenties, with a big beard and the telltale bruise on his forehead of a devout Muslim who prostrated himself several times a day in the direction of Mecca.

'No idea,' he said.

'Please tell him I picked this up, and say thanks for me.'

I headed off to a paint shop on the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, and bought two large cans of off-white emulsion and a set of rollers and a paint pan and a tin of white gloss and a brush and a large bottle of white spirit. I would have preferred bringing all the decorating gear to 'my office', but I had to obey the 'No Arrival Before Midnight' rule. So I made two trips back to my room with the gear, then headed out back to the Cameroonian dude who had sold me all the bedding and kitchen stuff. Yes, he did have an electric radiator in stock – all mine for a knockdown price of thirty euros.

Getting all the paint stuff to my office that evening proved tricky. Before setting out, I made a pit stop by the alley at around eleven and discovered that, at the start of this laneway, there was a large crevice in a wall: currently filled with rubbish and animal droppings. Never mind – it was perfect for my needs. I returned with two cans of paint and some old newspapers. As I bent down to place the newspapers on the ground inside the crevice – I wanted to avoid getting rat shit on my stuff – the fecal smell became overwhelming. I shoved the two cans of paint in, and returned to my room to bring the next load of stuff over. It took a further run after that to have everything in place.

Then I sat in a bar on the rue de Paradis, nursing a beer and waiting for midnight to arrive. The bar was a dingy joint – all formica tables and a battered zinc counter, and a French-Turkish barmaid dressed in tight jeans, and a dude with serious tattoos also working the bar, and the jukebox playing crap French rock, and three morose guys hunched over a table, and some behemoth splayed on a barstool, drinking a milky substance that was obviously alcoholic (Pastis? Raki? Bailey's Irish Cream?) as he was smashed. He looked up when I approached the bar to order my beer – and that's when I saw it was Omar. It took him a moment or two for his eyes to register it was me. Then his rant started. First in English: 'Fucking American, fucking American, fucking American.' Then in French: '
Il apprécie pas comment je chie
.' ('He doesn't like the way I take a shit.') Then he pulled out a French passport and started waving it at me, yelling, 'Can't get me deported, asshole.' After that he started muttering to himself in Turkish, at which point I didn't know what the hell he was saying. Just as I was about to finish my beer and bolt from the place before Omar got more explosive, he put his head down on the bar – in mid-sentence – and passed out.

Without me asking for it, the barmaid brought over another beer.

'If he hates you, you must be all right.
C'est un gros lard
.'

I thanked her for the beer. I checked my watch: 11.53. I downed the
pression
in three gulps. I headed off.

At midnight precisely, I walked up the alleyway and unlocked the door. Then, in less than a minute, I made three fast trips to retrieve my hidden gear and bring it into the hallway. I bolted the door behind me. There was the same mechanical hum I'd heard yesterday emanating from the door at the end of the corridor. I ignored it and headed upstairs. A minute later, all the gear was in my office and the door locked. I was 'in' for the night. I plugged in the electric radiator. I turned on my radio to Paris Jazz. I checked the monitor. All clear in the alley. I opened the first can of paint. I went to work.

That night, nothing happened again – except that I managed to give the office two coats of paint. I did my 'job' as well – checking the monitor every few minutes to see if there was anyone lurking in the hallway. There wasn't. Before I knew it, my watch was reading 5.45 a.m. – and though it was clear that the second coat wouldn't sufficiently cover the chalky grey concrete walls, at least I knew that another night had passed.

I packed away all the gear. I washed the brushes in the sink. I left at 6 a.m. exactly. I took several deep gulps of Paris air as I walked down the still-dark street toward the
boulangerie
. My usual two
pains
. One eaten on the way home, the second with hot chocolate after a shower. Then – with the aid of Zopiclone – seven hours of void until the alarm woke me at two and a new day started.

That night, I finished painting the walls. I sanded down the woodwork. I left at six. The next night, I finished glossing all the woodwork. Again, there was no activity whatsoever on the monitor. At six that morning, I moved all the empty cans and paint gear out of the office and dumped the lot in the rubbish bins at the end of the alley. When I awoke that afternoon, I went straight over to the café to collect my wages. For the third day running, Mr Beard with the Prayer Bruise was behind the counter.

'Still no Kamal?' I asked.

'He goes away.'

'He didn't say anything to me about that.'

'Family problems.'

'Is there a number I could call him on?' I asked.

'Why you want to call him?'

'I liked him. We got on well. And if he's got some personal problems . . .'

'There is no number for him.'

The tone of voice was definitive. It also didn't encourage further questioning. So I picked up my pay envelope and said nothing, except, 'I want to buy a few more things for the office. Might you be able to get a message from me to the boss?'

'You tell me what you need.'

'A small refrigerator and an electric kettle. It's very hard to work in that room all night without coffee or hot water. I'd also like a rug. The concrete floor still gives off a bit of damp—'

'I tell him,' he said, cutting me off. Then he picked up a rag and started swabbing down the bar. Our conversation was over.

When I arrived at work that night, a fridge was awaiting me in a corner of the room. Though somewhat battered – with hints of rust on its hinges – it was still working. So too was the electric kettle positioned on top of it. It looked new. When I filled it with water, it boiled its contents in less than a minute. The only problem was, I didn't have any coffee or tea on hand. But, at least, I now knew that the man in charge was amenable to certain requests – even though there was still no rug.

But there was a change in my usual routine: a visitor in the alleyway. He arrived at 1.48 a.m. precisely. The phone rang on my desk, jolting me. I looked away from my Simenon novel and turned immediately to the monitor and saw a man of indiscriminate age (the grainy image made it hard to discern his features) standing outside. I was instantly nervous. I picked up the phone and said, '
Oui?
'

His voice was raspy, and French was not his first language. But he still said, '
Je voudrais voir Monsieur Monde
.'

I hit the 1-1 entrance code. Downstairs I heard the telltale click of the door opening, then the door being closed with a decisive thud. I pressed 2-2 to alert my 'neighbors' that they had a legitimate visitor. There were footsteps on the downstairs corridor. There was a knock on another door. The door opened and closed. Then there was silence.

I didn't see or hear him exit, even though I kept scanning the monitor. There were no other visitors. There were no sounds from down below. My shift ended. I went home.

A few days later, the carpet finally arrived at work – and I began to bring my laptop in every night, forcing myself back into the novel. As there was no other work to do but
this work
– my quota of words per night – I kept at it. Days would pass when no one would ring the bell, demanding admittance. Then there would be a night when four separate callers came to the door, all men of indeterminate age, all asking to see Monsieur Monde. I'd hit the button, the door would open and close, there would be footsteps, another door opening and closing, end of story.

A month passed. February gave way to March. There was an ever-early lightening of the evening sky; the days still cold, but brighter. Had I been in a normal state of mind, the thought would have struck me:
You have been working for over five weeks now without a day off.
But I was still operating on some sort of weird autopilot: work, sleep, pick up cash, movies, work. If I took a day off, I might fall out of routine . . . and if I fell out of routine, I might start to reflect about things. And if I started to reflect about things . . .

So I stuck to the routine. Day in, day out, nothing changed.

Until something unsettling happened. I was nursing a post-
cinémathèque
beer in the little bar on the rue de Paradis. I picked up a copy of
Le Parisien
that had been left on a table and started flicking through its contents. There, on the bottom right-hand corner of page 5, under the headline,
Body of Missing Man Found in Saint-Ouen
, was a photograph of someone named Kamal Fatel. Though the photo was grainy, there was no doubt that it was the same Kamal who ran the Internet café and found me my current job. The story was a short one:

The body of Kamal Fatel, 35, a resident of rue Carnot in Saint-Ouen, was found last night in an unused dumpster near the Périphérique. According to the police at the scene, the body, though badly decomposed, had been identified through dental records of the deceased. The Saint-Ouen medical examiner issued a statement saying that, due to the state of the cadaver, the exact time and cause of death had yet to be ascertained. According to Inspector Philippe Faure of the
commissariat de police
in Saint-Ouen, Fatel's wife, Kala, had thought her husband was traveling in Turkey to visit relatives there. Fatel, born in Turkey in 1972, had been resident in France since 1977 and had run an Internet café on the rue des Petites Écuries . . .