The Woman in the Fifth

Four

PARADISE.

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

When I emerged from the Chateau d’Eau metro, 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. Chateau d’Eau was dirty. There was rubbish everywhere. And grubby cafes. And shops that sold cheap synthetic wigs in garish colors like purple. And storefront telephone exchanges, advertising cheap long-distance rates to Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroun, Senegal 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 cafe 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 a 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 cafe — 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?’

‘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 …’

‘Evidemment. 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.