The Woman in the Fifth (43 page)

They were also buying my story about not knowing what went on downstairs, while framing a man for a crime he didn't commit. But isn't that how all narratives are framed? We apportion blame to some, excuse others, and hope that the tidy package will end the story in a satisfactory way. If I now started talking about how the fire was all down to 'her', that would complicate the way they wanted the story to work – and it might lead to me being transferred to the nearest rubber room. Anyway, Delik was guilty of other things. We all are.

I signed the statement. As I handed it back, Leclerc said, 'You must feel vindicated after what happened to the gentleman who orchestrated your problems in the States.'

So they had continued to track the Robson story. Then again, they were cops. And cops tracked anything that had to do with tracking you.

'I orchestrated my problems,' I said. 'Whatever I feel about that man, I still pity him.'

'You are more magnanimous than I would be, under the circumstances.'

Magnanimous.
That word again. I wasn't magnanimous. I was just aware of a third party controlling everything.

'You seem to be on the mend,' he said as he was leaving.

Nothing's mended.

But they did give me my walking papers the next day. Using the phone directory the day before I had come across a great find: an actual one-star hotel in the Sixth. The guy on the desk sounded pleasant. Yes, they had a room available – seventy euros a night. 'But you say you need it for three or four weeks? Then I can reduce it to sixty euros per night.'

I did some fast math. Four-twenty a week and another one-fifty in living expenses. I had just enough to fund the next month and a half.

And then? And then? How will you survive?

No idea.

The hotel was on the rue du Dragon. As I got out of the taxi with my suitcase, I scanned the street. Shoe shops everywhere. Expensive women in expensive clothes. Tidy pavements. Tourists. Businessmen in suits. Good restaurants. Money.

The hotel was agreeable in a fusty old-fashioned way. But it was clean, and the bed was hard, and the floor-to-ceiling windows let in considerable light, and the two men who ran the front desk remained professionally polite. I was also within walking distance of fifteen cinemas. But venturing out was not something I was interested in doing right now. The effects of smoke inhalation were still very much with me. I tried a shortish walk to the Odéon and a secondhand English-language bookshop on rue Monsieur-le-Prince. But after buying four paperbacks, I found the walk home to the hotel a strain – and I collapsed in bed for the rest of the day. The hospital had provided me with three small canisters of oxygen – each with a plastic mouthpiece attached to the top. The nurse in charge of me told me to administer four or five blasts of oxygen whenever shortness of breath arrived. By the end of my first day at the hotel, one of the cans was nearly empty. I could hardly sleep that first night – not just because of my irregular, painful breathing . . . but also because at five the next afternoon, I was due back at rue Linné.

Because I was still attached to a ventilator I had missed our rendezvous three days ago. I figured she understood that – and would excuse it. But as she was following my every move, she also knew I was mobile enough to have checked into this hotel. So I would be expected to show up at her place tomorrow without fail.

I stayed in bed all that day, tiredness still overwhelming me. I left the hotel at four forty. I walked to the taxi rank on the boulevard Saint-Germain. There was – miraculously for rush hour – a single taxi in line. I took it. I arrived at the rue Linné ten minutes later. I crossed into the Jardin des Plantes. I walked slowly, conscious of my breathing. My lungs still felt as if I had been a three-pack-a-day smoker for the last thirty years, but the breathlessness seemed a little less ominous today. I noticed the verdancy around me, the deep blue sky, the hint of heat in the air. Early summer had arrived. In fact it had probably arrived weeks ago – but my head was elsewhere.

Four fifty-five. I approached the door. Five p.m. I punched in the code.
Click.
I stepped inside, entering that big silence I now recognized as not being normal. The concierge was immobile in his lodge. I headed up the stairs. Not a sound from a single apartment. Until I knocked on her door. She opened it and said, 'You should have been here three days ago.'

'A fire delayed me,' I said, stepping by her into the apartment.

'Really?' she said, following me in.

I grabbed her arm and pulled it up behind her back.

'Don't bullshit me. You know exactly what happened.'

'Trying to hurt me now, Harry?' she said, struggling against the arm. 'Because you can't. Pain doesn't have any effect on me.'

I pushed her away.

'Well, it does on me – and I nearly died.'

'But you made a rapid enough recovery if you're now able to push me around.'

'Push
you
around? You follow me everywhere—'

'You have no proof of that—'

'—you trap me in a burning building. And then, having told me that I would be in a situation where I'd have no choice but to cry out for you and demand your help, I
do
find myself in a situation where I have no choice but to cry out and demand your help. And what happens?'

She smiled and lit a cigarette.

'You have no proof of that.'

'The cops said a woman phoned them.'

'Maybe she did. And maybe you should have made more copies of this.'

She reached into the pocket of her robe and pulled out a black floppy disk.

'You stole that from my room . . .'

'It's just a floppy disk. One of many millions. And it doesn't have an identifying label on it. Who's to say that it's yours?'

'You knew that the only reason I went back to that hellhole of an office was to retrieve the disk of my novel because—'

'The cops impounded your computer after they raided that building?'

'There! That's my proof you've been following me—'

'But you still have no actual proof . . . except that you think that I started the fire near the ventilation shaft on the second floor of the building, and added half a bag of sulfur which I later hid in the Internet café to make certain that the entire business was pinned on that bastard Delik—'

'Stop playing with my head.'

She came toward me, opening her robe. She had nothing on underneath.

'But I like playing with your head,' she said, reaching for my pants. 'It's so easy.'

I tried to pull away, but she grabbed hold of my belt and forced my crotch against hers.

'If you think I'm going to fuck you—'

'I do think that,' she said, popping the buttons on my fly.

'I'm not interested,' I said, trying again to push her away.

She reached in and took hold of my now erect penis.

'Liar,' she said. 'And don't give me any crap about your scorched lungs.'

She grabbed the back of my head and shoved her tongue down my throat, then pushed my pants down. I threw her on to the bed. I was inside her immediately. She became violent, pulling my hair, biting into my neck. But I didn't resist, instead drilling into her with angry ferocity. I came fast. So did she. But as soon as it was over, I too felt something close to derangement. Standing up, I touched my neck and felt blood.

'Just think,' she said, reaching for her cigarettes. 'You've just fucked a dead woman who made you bleed.'

I pulled on my jeans.

'Going so soon?' she asked.

'What do you want from me?'

She laughed.

'What do I want from you?
Quel mélodrame,
Harry. You know what I want. Our little rendezvous every three days. Nothing more, nothing less. You come here at the specified time. We make love – or "fuck" if you prefer. We drink a little whisky. We talk a bit. You leave at eight,
comme d'habitude.
I don't care who you see or what you do when you are not here. Go where you want, sleep with who you want . . . as long as you
are
here at the times agreed. And in exchange for your visits – your fidelity to our rendezvous – I can promise you—'

'
What?
' I asked. 'Eternal life?'

'Oh, you will die . . . like everyone. That's something completely beyond my power. But one thing I can promise you is that, for the rest of your life, you will have someone watching your back at all times, smoothing the way for you. As I said last time, I cannot manipulate things to give you fame and fortune. Getting your novel published, for example . . .'

'Have you read it?'

'Well, I do have the disk . . .'

'But no computer.'

'I have access to any computer I want – as long as the person who owns it isn't using it at the time. Anyway, I read it. It's clear you have talent, Harry. Abundant talent. Your turn of phrase, your sense of place, your ability to describe a character's attributes and complexities. All very admirable. The problem – for me, anyway – is that you cannot simply tell the story and let us discover your cleverness. You have to remind us all the time how clever – and faux-poetic – you are . . .'

'Faux-poetic?'

'Don't take it so hard, Harry . . . but the narrative is swamped by this absurd lyricism, this need to over-explain, this terrible portentousness—'

'Everyone's a fucking critic, aren't they?'

'Are you talking about the inspector?'

'So you were there in the hospital room when he told me—'

'—that he had the first chapter of your novel translated? You have no proof that I was there, but—'

'Can I have the disk back?'

'By all means,' she said, reaching into the pocket of her robe and tossing it on the front of the bed. 'But honestly, you should either rework the entire narrative, cutting out all the posturing, the—'

'I don't want to hear anymore of this—'

'As you like . . .'

I picked up the disk.

'I'm never coming back here.'

A weary sigh as she sat up and closed her robe and reached for her cigarettes.

'Harry, why make trouble for yourself when I ask so little and offer so much?'

'Because you're insisting I be indentured to you for—'

'
Three hours twice a week!
You call that being "indentured"? Think of your current predicament. No job. No prospects. And what do you have saved from that awful night job? Twenty-eight hundred euros. All right, you'll eke out a few weeks in that one-star hotel on the rue du Dragon. But then . . . ?'

I put my face in my hands, as again I heard that voice in my head:
She is everywhere . . . she knows everything.

'I'm not coming back . . . and that is final.'

'Fool.'

'I don't care what you do to me.'

'Yes, you do. And yes, you will . . .'