I was about to stand up and save them the bother of clubbing me to the ground when suddenly the man with the missing ear and the eyepatch jumped to his feet and ran for it. In no time, the policemen had overwhelmed him and were dragging him out of the bar.
‘Dame Fate fears that we cannot take a hint,’ said Frant. ‘The interlude is over. We must now, finally, flee.’
‘Flee where?’ I said, as we sloped out into the darkening evening outside. ‘Your contact is gone and we must be all over the news by now.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ said Frant. ‘In a couple of days’ time, my friend will be out on the street again and we can pick up where we left off. The trail will have gone cold, the institute will simply write off the missing copy of the documents just as any museum would a theft, and life will go on as before. We simply need to hole up for a while.’
This was the most optimistic version of events possible. For all Frant knew, his friend might now be a police informer. And even if the institute did decide to claim the insurance on the Von Fremdenplatz and put the theft down to experience, I doubted that Monsieur Derringer would be forgetting Frant’s assault on him in a hurry. But I had no other plan apart from turning myself in, and, while this was still the most sensible option, it would prevent me from calling this CCLF place and finally establishing the whereabouts of the girl.
‘Hole up?’ I said. ‘We don’t have anywhere to hole up. They’ll be watching the hotels and the pensions, and I doubt you want to sleep in a bus station. Are you saying you have friends here?’
Frant looked offended for a moment. ‘I have friends everywhere,’ he said, ‘just not ones I can stay with.’
I bet, I thought.
‘Well, I don’t know anyone in Paris,’ I said. ‘I guess it’s the bus station or nothing.’
And then it hit me. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. I guess the mental distance between the abstract idea of what I knew and the reality of our situation had been too great to make the jump. I visualised a piece of paper. A letterhead in the form of a fat-headed lion, with an address underneath.
Madame Ferber’s address.
‘Oh my God,’ I said. ‘I do know someone in Paris.’
‘What?’ said Frant, with a rare eagerness. ‘Who? Why didn’t you say so before?’
‘I don’t really know them,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’ve never met them. We’ve just spoken on the phone.’
‘That is not ideal,’ said Frant. ‘Then again, given your bizarre character, perhaps it is to our advantage. In any case, we have nowhere else to go.’
He buttoned up his coat and pulled his hat down until its brim sheltered his eyebrows. He looked both ridiculous and deranged. He was ridiculous and deranged.
‘Off we go, then,’ he said.
I hesitated. I realised that I was in a great deal of danger, and more than anything else in the world what I needed right now was a safe haven, somewhere I could gather my thoughts and plan my next move. On the other hand, I was lumbered with Euros Frant, a man who was dangerous and unreliable, as well as ridiculous and deranged. Madame Ferber, moreover, was a recluse and an artist, a person who valued her privacy almost as much as she valued her talent. I couldn’t just turn up at Madame Ferber’s with this nutcase in tow. It wasn’t as though she had given me her address and said, ‘Please drop by any time you find yourself in Paris, especially if you have a nutcase in tow.’ I wouldn’t even know her address if I hadn’t accidentally memorised it during what I was sure was an illegal document search at Walker-Hebborn’s office.
All in all, it was entirely clear that this was a terrible idea and I should abandon it at once and find a fresh alternative. So it was a surprise when I heard myself saying, ‘Let me telephone ahead first.’
‘There isn’t time,’ said Frant. ‘The police may be upon us at any moment.’
‘We can’t just turn up,’ I said. ‘And besides, she may be out.’
‘She?’ said Frant. He looked pleased, in an unpleasant way. ‘The enigmatic translator has a lady friend, does he? Or perhaps he is merely carrying a torch for an unattainable femme fatale.’ He paused. ‘Another unattainable femme fatale, I should say.’
Not for the first time, I wondered why I hadn’t just taken the bust from Frant’s hands in that room at the institute and battered him to death with it.
‘She is one of Walker-Hebborn’s authors,’ I said. ‘We were supposed to be meeting soon.’
‘Riveting,’ said Frant. ‘I am entranced by your rustic monologue. Can we get a move on, please? If that’s not too much trouble.’
Again and again the white porcelain bust came down on Frant’s forehead in my mind.
‘I need a map,’ I said.
* * *
Frant leaned against a wall, smoking a French cigarette, while I tried to work out from his free hotel map where Madame Ferber lived. I hadn’t known that he was a smoker, but then I hadn’t known that he was a violent maniac either, so it wasn’t a huge surprise. Finally I located Madame Ferber’s street, and was relieved to discover that it wasn’t very far from where we were.
‘We can walk it in half an hour,’ I said to Frant.
He rolled his eyes, as if somehow I was responsible for our destination not being two metres away, and dropped his cigarette on the ground, where it fizzled out in a small
puddle.
‘Tell me,’ said Frant as we walked on, ‘this female acquaintance of yours, the so-called authoress … what is her name?’
‘You can’t guess?’ I said.
‘I take very little interest in the muddy wheels of commerce,’ said Frant. ‘Fame and celebrity are nothing compared to the broad sweep of history.’
‘Yes, but she’s a fellow Walker-Hebborn writer,’ I said, boldly putting Frant and his absurd scribbling into the same boat as one of the most successful writers of our time. ‘I translate her, so she’s obviously foreign. She’s a woman, and she lives in this part of Paris so she’s successful. Surely those facts would narrow it down a bit?’
‘I have no interest in puzzles,’ said Frant, a man who had devoted his entire life to writing books in pretend languages and had come to Paris to unlock the secrets of a made-up book. ‘Please just tell me who it is.’
I stopped, exasperated. ‘Madame Ferber,’ I said.
Frant looked blank.
‘A.J.L. Ferber,’ I said.
Frant looked, if anything, blanker.
‘She Walked Among Men?’ I said. ‘Society’s Elephant? Piquant Morning?’
Frant shook his head.
‘I can’t believe you haven’t heard of her,’ I said. ‘She’s enormously successful. There Is No Mountain was made into a film. It did pretty well.’
‘I don’t go to the cinema,’ Frant said, which I must admit didn’t surprise me. Frant looked like someone who’d be upset if he found out about the talkies.
We walked on. I was struck by a thought.
‘When we do meet Madame Ferber,’ I said, ‘it might be a good idea if you don’t mention that you haven’t heard of any of her books.’
* * *
‘You said half an hour,’ complained Frant.
‘It’s this map,’ I said. ‘The scale is all wrong. This street looks quite short on the map, but it’s not.’
The street, which occupied a couple of centimetres on the map, was in reality very long. Block after identical block of apartments stretched out ahead of us, each one a tribute to some imaginationless architect of the early 1900s. I found myself longing for a nice modern steel and glass office block to break the monotony of our journey.
Suddenly Frant stopped. He looked agitated.
‘Are you all right?’ I said, more out of form than concern.
‘Yes!’ he suddenly shouted. ‘I’m fine! Just a stone in my shoe.’
‘Maybe you ought to take it off then,’ I said.
Frant looked at me, and turned away to fiddle with his shoe, which was latticed with enou
gh laces to satisfy a Belgian seamstress. I walked away from him, just to have some space as the Americans say, and then I saw her.
It was the girl from the bar. And she was here. I hadn’t seen her since that night. She looked different to when she’d been in the bar but it was definitely her. That night, she’d been tense, aloof, almost mysterious. And, even though the first time I’d met her she had been surrounded by the allure of low lights and mirrors, and now I was facing her, my heart was pounding like industry. Funny, I thought, all this time I had wanted to see her again, and now here she was. It was the most banal of thoughts, but it was also the most thrilling.
Now she did meet my eye, with a haunted gaze. She was still beautiful, but she was also – and this might have been the night light or it might have been my mind’s eye – no longer ethereal. Every inch of her face seemed filled with emotion – and not the poetic emotions of a foreign film, but the harsh, real emotions of someone who has lived life and that life has gone awry.
Standing in the shadows of an alleyway, the girl from the bar – who might or might not be Carrie – looked at me as though she had done something badly wrong. I had no idea what that might be. If anything, I was the guilty party. I’d gone through her private possessions, I’d withheld information and evidence from the police that might have been used to find her, and I’d fled the country on a mission which, though designed to help, had been a waste of time and effort.
But here she was now, in a Paris alleyway, looking straight at me. I turned to Frant, who had finally done up his shoelaces.
‘It’s her,’ I said.
‘Who’s her when she’s at home?’ Frant said.
‘The girl you were just staring at,’ I said. Frant shrugged, as if to say that he was always staring at girls. The girl was still there, hesitant in a doorway. ‘The girl from the bar. The girl whose disappearance brought me here.’
‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ Frant said, standing up. ‘Hey, miss! We need to talk to you! My friend is accused of your murder!’
The girl looked at Frant, and then at me, as if to say, ‘Is this true?’
I looked back and nodded. Still nobody moved.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ said Frant, and strode towards the girl.
In a moment she was gone. Frant ran to the alley, but he was too late. She had vanished completely.
‘How vexing,’ said Frant. ‘I wonder why she didn’t want to talk to us.’
‘Is that what you wonder?’ I said icily. ‘You don’t wonder why she’s in Paris, or why she should turn up now? You don’t wonder how she’s suddenly come back to life, or evaded her so-called captors?’
‘I did consider all those things,’ said Frant, ‘but found them less relevant. Nevertheless, you should be of good cheer.’
‘Why?’ I said. I may have sounded bitter.
‘Because now that this girl has re-emerged, you are freed from any charge of murder or kidnap,’ said Frant. ‘Once it is established that she has been seen, unharmed, unmarked and alive, all will be well.’
‘And how do we establish that?’ I said. ‘Nobody will take our word for it. Perhaps you should have taken a photograph.’
‘I don’t have a camera,’ said Frant.
‘On your phone – never mind,’ I said. I didn’t want to have to explain mobile phones to Frant. I didn’t want to have to explain anything to Frant. I just wanted to get away from here.
‘She has been seen by us,’ said Frant. ‘Therefore she has been seen by others. You are in the clear.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘as soon as we convince the famously liberal French police that you brained a man through pure chance and we accidentally stole rare documents.’
‘These things happen,’ said Frant. ‘As I said, once we are in a safe haven, we can plan our next move.’
‘I don’t want to plan our next move,’ I said. ‘I want to look for the girl.’
‘The girl can wait,’ said Frant, ‘And stop sulking. We need to get off the streets.’
A lone police car cruised by. Was it my imagination that its occupants were peering unusually keenly at passers-by through their sunglasses?
‘Now,’ said Frant.
* * *
After some false starts, we finally discovered the door to Madame Ferber’s apartment. There appeared to be no doorbell, and it took us another few minutes of searching before we located a grimy plate of buzzers set into the wall. The names next to each buzzer had been erased over time and there was no way of telling which apartment was which.
‘Count them,’ Frant said. ‘Assume that the bottom basement is one, and work your way up.’
‘I was just about to,’ I said. Madame Ferber lived in Apartment 57, and I ran my fingers up the plate to the fifth buzzer.
I was about to press it when I hesitated.
‘Ring her, damn it,’ said Frant with unusual fervour.
‘I was just thinking,’ I said. ‘Is this the wisest course of action?’
‘It is the only course of action,’ said Frant. ‘We have nowhere else to go.’
‘We could try the British Embassy,’ I said. ‘We could call my publisher.’
‘You could call your mother,’ Frant said rudely. ‘It would be just as effective.’
He pushed me out of the way and rang the buzzer. There was silence.
‘She’s out,’ I said. I turned to go, and just then a familiar voice came from the intercom.
‘Oui?’ said Madame Ferber.
‘It’s me,’ I said, ‘your translator. Jacky.’
There was a long pause. Then the door buzzed open.
I looked at Frant. ‘If this goes wrong,’ I said, ‘it’s your fault.’
‘I take full responsibility,’ Frant said, and pushed the door.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Inside the apartment block, there was no sign of dirt or untidiness. The lobby was an immense affair, with green-veined marble steps and bronze banisters leading away from a charming hallway decorated with low tables and artificial flowers in tall ruby glass vases. To one side was an old-fashioned lift, all metal grilles and carpeted floor. Frant headed for this without a glance around.
‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘We don’t have much time.’
‘I thought this was your safe haven,’ I said.
‘We’re not in it yet,’ Frant said, and rattled the lift doors open.
I followed him into the lift as he jabbed at the fifth-floor button. Nothing happened.
‘You have to close the doors by hand,’ I said, and pulled them shut.
Frant glowered at me and jabbed at the button again. Now the lift began, clanking, to go up. It took a long time. At each floor, it stopped and we had to help an elderly lady or enormous man wrench open the doors so they could inch their way into the lift, and then clash the doors shut again before we could proceed. All this sent Frant into a fury of teeth-grinding and sweaty-eyebrowed tension, and I could see that he was on the edge of his nerves. Obviously the long day’s travails were starting to get to him. I can’t say this distressed me greatly. I felt it was his turn to do a bit of suffering.
At last the lift reached the fifth floor. Frant tore open the doors like a strongman ripping a telephone directory asunder and burst onto the landing. I followed a moment later, and we found ourselves standing right outside Apartment 57.
There was no name by the door, but then what was I expecting? A big sign saying ‘A.J.L. FERBER, RECLUSIVE AUTHOR, LIVES HERE’? I knocked on the thick wood door. After a few seconds of silence, I knocked again. This time I heard a tiny sound, as of a sliver of metal being pulled back. I suspected that Madame Ferber was at the spy-hole. Frant must have thought the same as he stood to one side, presumably to avoid being seen. This was wise, I felt, as the sight of Euros Frant, fedora, eyebrows and all, through the fish-eye prism of a spy-hole, would alarm even the most imperturbable of people. Especially now he was muttering, ‘Come on, come on, come on,’ in an agitated undertone.
Suddenly the door opened and a woman appeared.
‘Madame Ferber,’ I was about to say, when I stopped. The woman at the door was young, pretty and dressed in a manner that, I presumed, was stylish but not fashionable. While I do not mean to imply any disrespect to A.J.L. Ferber, I very much doubted that this was her.
‘I am Camilla Carr,’ said the young woman. ‘How may I help you?’
‘We’ve come to see Madame Ferber,’ said Frant loudly.
I elbowed him aside and told Camilla my name. ‘I’m Madame Ferber’s translator,’ I said. ‘I am more than sorry that we have been compelled to disturb you, but we had no
choice.’
‘Madame Ferber is not here,’ said Camilla. ‘If you are able to return tomorrow, perhaps we could make an appointment to see her?’
‘We need to see her now, dammit,’ said Frant, who was becoming more and more aggressive.
‘I’m sorry about my friend,’ I said. ‘We will return tomorrow.’
‘Thank you,’ said Camilla, and was about to close the door when a voice said, ‘Wait. Let them in.’
Camilla stood aside without even a shrug and I walked in after her. Frant was about to follow, but I frowned and motioned for him to stay put. In his current state he was like an overexcited puppy. To my surprise, he nodded energetically and indicated that he was happy where he was.
The apartment’s entrance hall was lit only by heavily shrouded lamps. There was a Persian rug on the dark wooden floor, and a small mahogany chair that looked hefty despite its size. Beside the chair stood a woman. She was wearing a long, almost purple dress, a tangle of gold and pearl necklaces, and flat shoes that did little to disguise her unusual height. Her face, which right now looked pretty stern, was handsome in the way the Edwardians used it of women; she had a strong chin, a Roman nose and very dark brown eyes. Her hair was completely white, and braided.
The Mule Page 18
