The Woman in the Fifth (7 page)

'I trust nobody,' I said.

I followed Mr Tough Guy down the stairs and across the courtyard to a door marked
Escalier B
. He punched in a code on a panel of buttons outside the door. There was the telltale click, he pushed the door open, then we headed up the stairs. They were narrow and wooden and spiral. The walls in the stairwell had been painted shit brown and were in an urgent need of a washing-down. But it was the smells that really got me: a noxious combination of bad cooking and blocked drains. The stairs were badly worn down. We kept heading upward, the climb steep. At the fourth floor, we stopped. There were two metal doors there. Mahmoud dug out a large bunch of keys and opened the door directly in front of us. We walked into a room which gave new meaning to the word 'dismal'. It was tiny – with yellowing linoleum, a single bed. There was stained floral wallpaper, peeling and blistered. The length of the place was ten feet maximum. It was a cell, suitable for the suicidal.

Mr Tough Guy was impassive during the minute or so I looked around. When I said, 'Can I see Adnan's place, please?' he just nodded for me to follow him. We walked up a flight of stairs. There were another two metal doors on this landing and a small wooden one. Mr Tough Guy opened the door directly in front of us. Size-wise, Adnan's
chambre
was no bigger than the dump downstairs. But he'd tried to make it habitable. There was the same grim linoleum, but covered by a worn Turkish carpet. The floral wallpaper had been painted over in a neutral beige – a crude job, as hints of the previous leafy design still poked through the cheap emulsion. The bed was also narrow, but had been covered with a colored blanket. There was a cheap generic boom box and a tiny television. There was a hotplate and a sink and a tiny fridge – all old. There was a baby-blue shower curtain. I pulled it aside to discover a raised platform with a drain (clogged with hairs) and a rubber hose with a plastic shower head.

'Where's the toilet?' I asked.

'Hallway,' he said.

There was a clothes rail in one corner, on which hung a black suit, three shirts and three pairs of pants. The only decoration on the walls were three snapshots: a young woman in a headscarf, her face serious, drawn; an elderly man and woman in a formal pose, serious and drawn; and Adnan holding a child with curly black hair, around two years old, on his knee. Though Adnan also looked grave in this photograph, his face seemed around two decades younger than it did now . . . even though this snapshot must have been taken only four years ago. The last time he saw his son.

Staring at these photos provoked another sharp stab of guilt. It was such a sad, small room – and his only refuge from a city in which he was always living undercover and in fear. Mr Tough Guy must have been reading my mind, as he said, 'Adnan goes back to Turkey now – and he goes to prison for a long time.'

'What did he do that made him flee the country?'

He shrugged and said nothing except, 'You take the room?'

'Let me talk to your boss,' I said.

Back in his office, Monsieur Sezer was still sitting at his bare desk, staring out the window. Mr Tough Guy stayed by the door, and lit a cigarette.

'You take Adnan's room?' Monsieur Sezer asked me.

'For three hundred and seventy-five euros a month.'

He shook his head.

'That's all I can afford.'

He shook his head again.

'The other room is a dump,' I said.

'That is why Adnan's room costs more.'

'It's not much better.'

'But it is still
better
.'

'Three eighty.'

'No.'

'It's the best I can—'

'Four hundred,' he said, cutting me off. 'And if you pay three months in advance, I won't charge you four weeks' deposit.'

Three months in that room? One part of me thought,
This is further proof that you've hit bottom.
The other part thought,
You deserve no better.
And then there was a more realistic voice which said,
It's cheap, it's habitable, you have no choice, take it.

'OK – four hundred,' I said.

'When can you give me the money?'

'I'll go to a bank now.'

'OK, go to the bank.'

I found one on the boulevard Strasbourg. Twelve hundred euros cost me fifteen hundred dollars. My net worth was now down to two thousand bucks.

I returned to
Sezer Confection
. My bag was no longer by the desk. Monsieur Sezer registered my silent concern.

'The suitcase is in Adnan's room,' he said.

'Glad to hear it.'

'You think we would be interested in your shabby clothes?'

'So you searched the bag?'

A shrug.

'You have the money?' he asked.

I handed it over. He counted it slowly.

'Can I have a receipt?'

'No.'

'But how do I prove that I have paid the rent?'

'Do not worry.'

'I do worry . . .'

'
Évidemment
. You can go to the room now. Here is the key,' he said, pushing it toward me. 'The door code is A542. You write that down. You need my associate to show you the way back to the room?'

'No thanks.'

'You have problems, you know where to find me. And we know where to find you.'

I left. I walked down the steps. I crossed the courtyard. I entered
Escalier B
. I remounted the stairs. I came to the fourth landing. I opened the door facing me. The
chambre de bonne
had been stripped bare. Along with all of Adnan's personal effects, they had also taken the sheets, the blankets, the shower curtain, the rug, the cheap electronic goods.

I felt my fists tighten. I wanted to run down the stairs and back into Monsieur Sezer's office and demand at least three hundred euros back to cover the cost of everything I would now have to buy to make the place habitable. But I knew he would just shrug and say,
Tant pis
. Tough shit.

Anyway, I knew that if I went back and made a scene, I'd be considered trouble. And right now, what I needed to do was vanish from view.

So I slammed the door behind me. Within five minutes I had unpacked. I sat down on the dirty mattress, the fever creeping back up on me again. I looked around. I thought,
Welcome to the end of the road.

L
ATE THAT NIGHT
, Omar took a shit.

How did I know this intimate detail – and the identity of the gentleman moving his bowels? It didn't take much in the way of deductive reasoning. My bed faced the wall adjoining the crapper. Omar was my neighbor – something I knew already from Adnan, but which I rediscovered when he banged on my door just after midnight. I'd not met him before – but had already been briefed on his job as the chef at the Sélect, and how (according to Brasseur) he'd been caught in flagrante with the hotel's handyman. I asked who was at the door before unlocking it.

'
Votre voisin
,' he said in very basic French.

I opened the door a few inches. A behemoth stood before me, his face seeping sweat, his breath a toxic cocktail of stale cigarettes and burped alcohol. Omar was big in every way – well over six feet tall and around three hundred pounds. He had a walrus mustache and thin strands of black hair dangling around an otherwise bald head. He was drunk and just a little scary.

'It's kind of late,' I said.

'I want television,' he said.

'I don't have a television.'

'Adnan has television.'

'Adnan is gone.'

'I know, I know. Your fault.'

'They took his television,' I said.

'Who took?'

'Monsieur Sezer.'

'He can't take.
My
television. Adnan borrow it.'

'You'll have to talk with Monsieur Sezer.'

'You let me in,' he said.

I immediately wedged my foot against the door.

'The television isn't here.'

'You lie to me.'

He started to put his weight against the door. I got my knee up against it.

'I am not lying.'

'You let me in.'

He gave the door a push. I had never come up against a three-hundred-pound guy before. I pulled my knee out of the way just in time. He came spilling into the room. For a moment he seemed disorientated – in that way that a drunk suddenly can't remember where he is and why he has just slammed up against a hotplate. Then the penny dropped. He scanned the room for the television, but his disorientation quickly returned.

'This not same room,' he said.

'It is.'

'You change everything.'

That wasn't exactly the truth – though I had made a few necessary design modifications since moving in that afternoon. The stained mattress which sagged in five places had been thrown out and replaced by a new one, bought in a shop on the Faubourg Saint-Denis. The shop owner was a Cameroonian. His place specialized in bargain-priced household stuff, so when he heard that I needed some basics for my
chambre
, he took charge of me. I came away with the mattress (cheap, but sturdy), a pillow, a set of light blue no-iron sheets, a duvet, a dark blue shower curtain, two lampshades, a neutral cream window blind (to replace the left-behind drape), some basic kitchen stuff, and (the best find of all) a small plain pine desk and a cane chair. The total price for all this was three hundred euros. It was a major dent in my remaining funds, but the guy even threw in a can of wood stain for the desk and got his assistant to load up everything in the shop's battered old white van and deliver it to my place on the rue de Paradis.

After everything arrived, I spent the rest of the afternoon putting my room together. The outside toilet was another matter. It was an old crapper – with a fractured black plastic seat – located in a tiny closet, with unpainted walls and a bare lightbulb strung overhead. The bowl was caked with fecal matter, the seat crisscrossed with dried urine stains. It was impossible to stay more than a minute inside this cell without wanting to retch. So I hit the street, finding a hardware shop further down the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière. Within five minutes I had brought a toilet seat, a toilet brush and an industrial bleach
super fort
which the guy in the shop assured me would not just burn away all the residue stains, but would also remove two layers of epidermis if it came in contact with any exposed skin. So he insisted that I spend an extra two euros on a pair of rubber gloves as well.

Half an hour later, not only was a new seat installed, but the nuclear-powered bleach had also done its chemical magic. The bowl was virtually white again. Then I scoured down the toilet floor. After that was finished, I dashed out again to the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière and found an electronics shop. After a bit of haggling, the owner agreed to part with an old-model Sony boom box for fifty euros. I also picked up a baguette, some ham and cheese, and a litre of cheap red wine, and returned home. I hung the lampshades in my room and the toilet. Then, for the rest of the evening, I cleaned every inch of the
chambre de bonne
, while blaring the local jazz station on my newly acquired stereo. Halfway through my purge of every bit of grime from the room, I wondered,
Aren't you just being a little manic?
But I pushed aside such self-reflection and kept cleaning. By midnight the place was spotless, my laptop was set up on the desk, and I was making lists of things I still needed to buy. I felt my forehead. The fever was still there, but seemed low-lying. I took a shower – the hot water sputtering out in weak bursts. I dried off, I climbed into the narrow bed. I passed out.

Until Omar started taking a shit, and then banged on my door and came spilling into the room.

'You change everything,' he said, looking around.

'You know, it's kind of late.'

'This nice now,' he said.

'Thank you.'

'You sell my television to buy all this?'

'Like I told you, Omar, Monsieur Sezer has the television.'

'How you know my name?' he demanded, suddenly fixing me with a drunk/paranoid stare.

'Adnan told me—'

'You turn Adnan over to the police—'

'That's not what happened,' I said, trying to stay calm.

'You want his room, you call the police, they catch him in the
métro
. And then you sell
my
television.'

He shouted this last line, then looked bemused – as if he was a spectator at this event, suddenly surprised to hear himself yelling.

'Look,' I said, trying to sound even-tempered, reasonable. 'I was a hotel guest just until this morning. As you must have heard, I was sick for the past week. I didn't even know where Adnan lived until he told me about a
chambre de bonne
down the corridor from his own—'

'So that's when you decide to take it from him.'

'My name's Harry, by the way,' I said, hoping this change of conversational tack might throw him. He ignored my extended hand.

'Sezer has television?' he asked.

'That's what I said.'

'I kill Sezer.'

He burped. Loudly. He fished out a cigarette and lit it. I silently groaned. I hate cigarette smoke. But it didn't strike me as the right moment to ask him not to light up in my little room. He took a half-drag on his cigarette, the smoke leaking out of his nostrils.

'You American?' he asked.

'That's right.'

'So fuck you.'

He smiled as he said this – a crapulous smile, his eyes gauging my reaction. I remained impassive.

'Adnan a dead man. When they send him back to Turkey, he dies . . . in prison. Four years ago, he kills a man. A man who fucks his wife. Then he finds out the man does not fuck his wife. But the man still dead. Bad. Very bad. That's why he come to Paris.'

Adnan – a killer on the run? It didn't seem possible. But, then again, nothing about this set-up seemed possible . . . and yet, it was the reality into which I had slipped.

The cigarette fell from Omar's lips on to my just-cleaned floor. He ground it out with his shoe. Then, with another loud, aromatic burp, he abruptly left, reeling into his adjoining room. Immediately, my housekeeping instincts took over. I opened the window to air out the smoke. I picked up the cigarette butt and used kitchen paper to clean up the flattened ash on the linoleum. Then I went outside to use the toilet and found Omar's large unflushed turd greeting me in the bowl.

I pulled the chain – and felt myself tensing up into a serious rage. But I forced myself to pee and get back into my room before the rage transformed into something dangerous. When I was inside, I turned on the stereo and boomed jazz – in the angry hope that it might disturb Omar. But there were no bangs on the wall, no shouts of 'Turn that crap down'. There were just the edgy dissonances of Ornette Coleman, penetrating the Parisian night. Eventually, his grating riffs became too much for me, and I snapped off the radio and sat in the half-darkness of my room. I stared out at all the minor scenic adjustments I had made . . . and considered the energy I'd expended to try to set up house in a place which could never be anything more than a grungy cell. That's when I started to cry. I had wept here and there over the past few weeks. But this was different. This was pure grief . . . for what I had lost, for what I had been reduced to. For a good fifteen minutes, I couldn't stop the deluge. I lay prostrate on the bed, clutching on to a pillow, as all the accumulated anger and anguish came flooding out. When I finally subsided, I felt drained and wrung out . . . but not purged. This kind of grief doesn't go away after a good cry . . . as much as I wished it would.

Still, the cessation of my sobs did force me to pull off my T-shirt and jockey shorts and stand under the sputtering shower head for a few minutes, towel myself down, then drop a Zopiclone and finally surrender to chemical sleep.

I didn't wake up until noon, my head fogged in, my mouth dry. When I went outside to use the toilet, I found the seat crisscrossed with urine. Omar, in true dog style, had marked his territory.

After brushing my teeth in the kitchen sink, I dressed, scooped up several invoices from yesteday and went downstairs and rang the bell for
Sezer Confection
. Mr Tough Guy answered the door, the usual scowl on his face.

'I want to speak with your boss,' I said.

The door shut. Two minutes later it opened again. He motioned for me to follow him.
Comme d'habitude
, Sezer was sitting at the table, the cellphone on the desk, his gaze never leaving the window as I walked in.

'Tell me,' he said.

'I replaced the seat and hung up a lampshade in the toilet on my floor.'

'Congratulations.'

'The seat, the brush and the lampshade cost me nineteen euros.'

'You expect reimbursement?'

'Yes,' I said, putting the receipts on his desk. He looked at them, gathered them together, then crumpled them up into a ball and tossed it on to the floor.

'I don't think so,' he said.

'The toilet seat was broken, there was a bare lightbulb—'

'No other tenants complained.'

'Omar, that pig, would happily eat out of the toilet . . .'

'You do not like your neighbor?'

'I don't like the fact that he woke me in the middle of last night, demanding his television, which you took away.'

'No, I didn't.'

'All right, Joe Smoothie here took it away.'