The Woman in the Fifth (6 page)

I finished packing. I hoisted my bag and went downstairs. As I approached the reception desk, I noticed that Brasseur had changed into a fresh shirt, but that his tie was still dappled with juice stains. He said, 'I've decided I'm keeping the twenty euros to cover my dry-cleaning costs.'

I said nothing. I just headed to the door.

'Aren't you waiting for Adnan?' he asked.

'Tell him I'll be in touch.'

'Lover's tiff?'

That stopped me in my tracks. I wheeled around, my right hand raised. Brasseur took a step backwards. But then, like any bully who realized that his provocation wouldn't result in instant retaliation, he looked at me with contempt.

'With any luck, I will never see you again,' I said.

'
Et moi non plus
,' he replied. The same to you.

I showed him my back and hit the street, where I ran straight into Adnan. It was hard to hide my surprise – and discomfort – in meeting him.

'Didn't Brasseur tell you I was coming?' he asked.

'I just decided to wait outside,' I lied. 'I couldn't stand being in there anymore.'

Then I told him what had transpired in the room – after Brasseur had made his charming insinuations.

'He thinks all Turks are
pédés
,' he said, using French slang for homosexuals.

'That doesn't surprise me,' I said, also mentioning what he'd said about catching the
homme à tout faire
with the chef.

'I know the chef – Omar. He lives in the same building as me. He is bad.'

And he quickly changed the subject, saying that Sezer – the manager of the building where he lived – would be expecting us within the hour. Then, taking the handle of my roll-bag (and refusing my protestations that I could wheel it along myself ), he guided us a sharp right up the rue Ribera.

'Brasseur said he called you at your
other
job,' I said as we headed toward the
métro
.

'Yes, I do a six-hour shift every day at a clothes importer near to where I live.'

'Six hours on top of the eight at the hotel? That's insane.'

'And necessary. All the money from the hotel job goes home to Turkey. The morning job . . .'

'What time does it start?'

'Seven thirty.'

'But you only get off work here at one a.m. By the time you get home . . .'

'It's about a half-hour by bicycle. All the
métros
stop just before one. Anyway, I don't need much sleep, so . . .'

He let the sentence die, hinting he didn't want to keep talking about all this. Rue Ribera had a slight incline – and though it was one-lane wide and lined with apartment buildings, the morning sun still found a way of beaming down on this narrow thoroughfare. In the near distance, a father – fortyish, well dressed, well heeled – walked out of some venerable building with his teenage daughter. Unlike most adolescent girls she wasn't in the midst of a vast, perpetual sulk. Rather, she laughed at something her dad said to her, and then made a comment which caused him to smile. The rapport between them was evident – and I could not help but feel a crippling sadness.

I stopped momentarily. Adnan glanced at the family scene, then back at me.

'Are you all right?'

I shook my head.

We moved on to the avenue Mozart and the Jasmin
métro
station. We took the line headed toward Boulogne. When the train arrived, I saw Adnan quickly scanning the carriage – making certain it was free of officialdom – before guiding us on to it.

'We change at Michel-Ange Molitor,' Adnan said, 'then again at Odéon. Our stop is Château d'Eau.'

It was just two stops to our first change point. We left the
métro
and followed the signs for Line 10, heading toward Gare d'Austerlitz. As we walked down a flight of stairs, I insisted on taking my bag from Adnan. We reached the bottom of the stairs, then followed a long corridor. At the end of it were two
flics
, checking papers. Adnan froze for a moment, then hissed, 'Turn around.'

We executed a fast about-face. But as we headed back along the corridor, another two
flics
appeared. They couldn't have been more than thirty yards in front of us. We both froze again. Did they see that?

'Walk ahead of me,' Adnan whispered. 'And when they stop me, keep walking. You go to Château d'Eau, then to 38 rue de Paradis – that's the address. You ask for Sezer . . .'

'Stay alongside me,' I whispered back, 'and they probably won't stop you.'

'Go,' he hissed. '38 rue de Paradis.'

He slowed down his gait. But when I tried to stay by him, he hissed again, '
Allez rue de Paradis !
'

I started walking toward the
flics
, feeling the same sort of disquiet that comes over me on those rare instances when I have encountered the police or customs officers: an immediate sense that I must be guilty of something.

As I came into their direct line of vision, I could see the
flics
looking me over, their faces impassive while their eyes took in everything about my appearance. Five feet away from them, I expected the words, '
Vos papiers, monsieur
.' But they remained silent as I passed by. I remounted the stairs, then stopped, loitering with intent as I waited in the futile hope that Adnan would follow right behind me. Five minutes passed, then ten. No Adnan. I decided to risk walking downstairs again. If the
flics
were there, I could plead that I was just a dumb American tourist who had lost his way. But when I reached the corridor again, it was empty.

There was a moment of awful realization:
They've nabbed him . . . and it's all your fault.

This was followed by another awful thought:
What do I do now?

Allez rue de Paradis.

Go to Paradise.

P
ARADISE
.

But before I got there, I had to first pass through Africa.

When I emerged from the Château d'Eau
métro
, I was in another Paris. Gone were the big apartment buildings and their well-heeled residents in their expensive casual clothes, loading well-groomed children into their shiny SUVs. Château d'Eau was dirty. There was rubbish everywhere. And grubby cafés. And shops that sold cheap synthetic wigs in garish colors like purple. And storefront telephone exchanges, advertising cheap long-distance rates to Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroun, Sénégal and the Central African Republic and Burkina Faso and . . .

I was the only white face in sight. Though the mercury was hovering just above the freezing mark, the boulevard was crowded, with a lot of café conversations spilling out on to the street, and people greeting passers-by as if they were in a small village, and merchants selling vegetables or exotic candy from carts. No one eyed me suspiciously. No one gave me a telltale look, saying I had wandered into the wrong corner of town. I was ignored. Even the elderly black man I stopped to ask for directions to the rue de Paradis seemed to look right through me – though he did point up a side street and uttered one phrase, '
Vous tournez à droite au fond de la rue
,' before moving on.

The side street brought me out of Africa and into India. A row of curry houses, and video shops with Bollywood posters in their windows, and more telephone exchanges – only this time the rates were for Mumbai and Delhi and they were also advertised in Hindi. There were also a lot of cheap hotels; giving me a fast, grim alternative for a few nights if the
chambre de bonne
turned out to be beyond bad, or if this guy Sezer was a trickster and I had walked into some class of set-up.

I had to cross the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis – a scruffy food market with more cheap shops, brimming with huddled people, their heads down against the cold wind that had started to blow through the streets. I turned right, then took a sharp left into rue de Paradis. At first sight, it looked bland. It was long and narrow – a hodgepodge of characterless nineteenth-century architecture and the occasional modern block. At street level, it seemed dead on arrival – no visible signs of life; just some large wholesale outlets for china and kitchen equipment. Then I began to pass by a place marked
Kahve
. It was a large, faceless café – all fluorescent tubes and gray linoleum and the Istanbul Top Forty blaring on the loudspeaker systems. I peered inside. Men were huddled over tea and talking conspiratorially. A couple of late-morning drunks were asleep at the bar, and a low cloud of cigarette smoke hung over everything. The young, tough-guy bartender turned away from some soccer match on the television to look long and hard at me, wondering why I was loitering with intent outside this establishment. His hostile stare hinted that I should move on.

Which I did.

There were two more
kahves
on rue de Paradis. There were also a handful of Turkish restaurants and a couple of bars whose shutters were still pulled down at midday. I picked up my pace and stopped examining the street in detail. Instead, I started looking up to check numbers, noting the chipped paintwork on many of the buildings. Number 38 was particularly mangy – its facade blistered with chipped masonry and large yellow blotches, like the ingrained stains on a chain-smoker's teeth. The front door – a huge, towering object – was also in need of several coats of black gloss. I looked around for some sort of entryphone, but just saw a button marked
Porte
. I pressed it and heard a telltale click. I had to put my entire weight against it to push it open. I pulled my bag in after me and found myself in a narrow corridor of battered mailboxes and brimming trash cans and a couple of fuse boxes from which loose wires dangled. Up ahead was a courtyard. I walked into it. Off it were three stairways – marked with the letters A, B and C. The courtyard was a small dark rectangle, above which loomed four blocks of apartments. The walls here were as ragged as their exterior counterparts, only now adorned with laundry that draped from windows and makeshift clothes lines. The aroma of greasy cooking and rotting vegetables was omnipresent. So too was a sign that dominated the far side of the courtyard:
Sezer Confection
(Sezer Ready-to-Wear). There was a separate stairway below this sign. I had to ring a bell to gain admittance. No one answered, so I rang it again. When there was still no answer, I leaned on the bell for a good fifteen seconds. Finally I heard footsteps on the stairs. The door opened and a young tough – dressed in a faded denim jacket with an imitation fur collar – opened the door. His upper lip boasted a meager mustache and he had a cigarette plugged between his teeth. His face radiated annoyance.

'What you want?' he asked in bad French.

'I'm here to see Sezer.'

'He knows you?'

'Adnan told me—'

'Where is Adnan?' he asked, cutting me off.

'I'll explain that to Sezer.'

'You tell me.'

'I'd rather tell—'

'You tell me,' he said, his tone demonstrative.

'He was controlled by the
flics
,' I said.

He tensed.

'When was this?'

'Less than an hour ago.'

Silence. He looked over my shoulder, scanning the distant corridor. Did he think this was a set-up – and that I had brought 'company' with me?

'You wait here,' he said and slammed the door in my face.

I stood in the courtyard for the next five minutes, wondering if I should do the sensible thing and make a break for the street before he came back. But what kept me rooted to the spot was the realization that I owed it to Adnan to explain what happened – and to see if Sezer was the sort of connected guy who could pull strings and—

Oh sure. Just look at this back-street set-up. Do you really think the boss here is chummy with the sort of high-up people who will spring an illegal immigrant for him?

All right, what really kept me rooted to the spot was the realization,
Right now, I have nowhere else to go . . .
and I needed a cheap place to live.

The door was reopened by Mr Tough Guy. Again, he glanced over my shoulder to make certain the coast was clear before saying, 'OK, you come upstairs to the office.'

We mounted a narrow staircase. I pulled my suitcase behind me, its wheels landing with an ominous thud on each stair. I'd seen enough film noir to imagine what I was walking into – a dirty smoke-filled office, with a fat slob in a dirty T-shirt behind a cheap metal desk, a drool-sodden cigar in a corner of his mouth, a half-eaten sandwich (with visible teeth marks) in front of him, girlie calendars on the walls, and three lugs in cheap pinstripe suits propping up the background.

But the office that I entered bore no relation to any office I'd ever seen before. It was just a room with dirty white walls, scuffed linoleum, a table and chair. There was no other adornment, not even a telephone – bar the little Nokia positioned on the table at which a man sat. He wasn't the Mr Big that this clandestine build-up led me to expect. Rather, he was a rail-thin man in his fifties, wearing a plain black suit, a white shirt (buttoned at the collar), and small wire-rimmed glasses. His skin was Mediterranean olive and his head was virtually shaved. He looked like one of those secular Iranians who worked as a right-hand man to the Ayatollah, acted as the enforcing brain of the theocracy, and knew where all the infidel body parts had been buried.

As I was studying him, he was also assessing me – with a long cool stare that he held for a very long time. Finally: 'So you are the American?' he asked in French.

'Are you Sezer?'

'
Monsieur
Sezer,' he said, correcting me.

'
Mes excuses, Monsieur Sezer
.'

My tone was polite, deferential. He noted this with a small nod, then said, 'Adnan left his job to rescue you today.'

'I am aware of that. But I didn't ask him to come to the hotel. It was the desk clerk, a total creep, who—'

Monsieur Sezer put up his hand, signaling me to stop this guilty-conscience rant.

'I am just attempting to assemble the facts,' he said. 'Adnan left his morning job to come to the hotel to bring you here because you were in some sort of trouble with the management. Or, at least, that is what he told me before he left. Adnan was very fond of you – and was looking forward to having you down the corridor from him. Were you fond of him?'

A pause. The question was asked in a perfectly level, unthreatening way – even though its subtext was glaringly obvious.

'I was very sick in the hotel – and he was very kind to me.'

'By "very kind" do you mean . . . ?'

'I mean, he showed me remarkable kindness when I could hardly stand up.'

'What sort of "remarkable kindness"?'

'I didn't fuck him, OK?' I said.

Monsieur Sezer let that angry outburst reverberate in the room for a moment or two. Then a small smile flashed across his thin lips before disappearing again. He continued as if he hadn't heard that comment.

'And when you left the hotel today with Adnan . . .'

I took him through the entire story, including Adnan telling me to walk ahead of him when we got caught between the two pairs of
flics
. He listened in silence, then asked, 'You are married?'

'Separated.'

'And the reason you are in Paris . . . ?'

'I am on sabbatical from the college where I teach. A sabbatical is kind of a leave of absence—'

'I know what it is,' he said. 'They mustn't pay much at the college where you teach, if you are interested in renting a
chambre
.'

I could feel my cheeks flush. Was I such an obvious liar?

'My circumstances are a little tight at the moment.'

'Evidently,' he said.

'What I'm most worried about right now is Adnan,' I said.

A wave of his hand.

'Adnan is finished. He will be on a plane back to Turkey in three days maximum.
C'est foutu
.'

'Can't you do anything to help him?'

'No.'

Another silence.

'So, do you want his
chambre
?' he asked. 'It is nicer than the one I was going to show you.'

'Is the rent high?'

'It's four hundred and thirty a month.'

Thirty euros more than I had been quoted.

'I don't know,' I said. 'It's a little steep for me.'

'You really are in a bad place,' he said.

I gave him a guilty nod. He turned to the heavy who met me at the door and said something in Turkish. Mr Tough Guy gave him an equivocal shrug, then murmured a comment that made Monsieur Sezer's lips part into the thinnest and briefest of smiles.

'I have just asked Mahmoud here if he thinks you are on the run from the law. He said that you seemed too nervous to be a criminal. But I know that this "sabbatical" story is a fabrication – that you are talking rubbish – not that I really care.'

Another fast exchange in Turkish. Then: 'Mahmoud will take you to see the two
chambres
. I promise you that you will want Adnan's.'

Mahmoud nudged me and said, 'You leave bags here. We come back.'

I let go of the suitcase with wheels, but decided to keep the bag with my computer with me. Mahmoud muttered something in Turkish to Monsieur Sezer. He said, 'My associate wonders if you think all Turks are thieves?'