The Woman In The Fifth Read online

  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 a
nd 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.

  Five

  LATE 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.