The Forgotten Dead

by Tove Alsterdal

  The thick wall-to-wall carpet swallowed most of the conversations at the other tables. If Patrick had come here to eavesdrop, he couldn’t have heard very much.

  ‘I’ve heard that a lot of politicians eat at this restaurant,’ I ventured, speaking to a waiter wearing a red jacket who presented me with a sculpted pear sorbet for dessert. By that time I was so full that I would have preferred to go out and stick two fingers down my throat. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d eaten, but there were lots of courses with long names in French. ‘Is it customary for them to give interviews here?’

  ‘We have many loyal guests,’ he said and then slunk off with a faint smile.

  The elite. That was what Olivier at the hotel had said.

  I let my gaze slide over the tables against the walls. One suit jacket after another, greying hair, bald heads. The only women in the restaurant were two Japanese diners who were enthusiastically photographing every new course set before them.

  I almost choked on a piece of poached pear when the older man from the day before came over to my table.

  ‘Welcome. I hope you enjoyed the food. Is this your first time here?’ he said, patting his stomach.

  He didn’t seem to recognize me, but of course I’d put on quite a lot of make-up. My dress was tight-fitting and could pass for elegant, and I’d bought a cheap silver necklace with gemstones that had to be fake. It was the perfect accessory for my décolletage. I managed a delighted smile.

  ‘Yes, it’s my first time here, but a colleague recommended your restaurant. An American journalist who was here two weeks ago.’

  ‘How nice.’

  His plump, red face didn’t change expression. I had an urge to call him monsieur. That same tightly knotted necktie, and the tensed folds of his double chins. And suddenly I saw him in all the waiters moving about the room, in the strict hierarchy and polite fawning over the customers. The smiles I’d seen would change into something else when he got home and loosened his collar.

  At that moment my cell rang. Everyone turned to look at me. I reached under the table and fumbled with my phone to switch it off. The call was from Benji. Only then did I remember that he’d phoned the day before, while I was sitting in a stranger’s car. I’d completely forgotten to call him back.

  ‘Would you care to take the chocolates home with you?’ asked the first waiter after I’d had a cup of coffee, but left the truffles untouched.

  I nodded.

  ‘I’m going to tell Dan Brown about this place so he can put it in the next book he writes. Then a lot more Americans will be coming here to eat.’

  My last attempt, but it prompted only a strained smile in reply.

  ‘But I heard that you had some trouble with an American journalist a couple of weeks ago. Patrick Cornwall. What exactly happened?’

  ‘We have many nice guests from America.’

  ‘But apparently he’s no longer welcome here. Did he disturb the other customers?’

  ‘You’ll have to talk to the head waiter about that.’

  I was convinced that he and the other staff members knew what had happened. Scandalous gossip would spread quickly through any workplace, but here in the dining room no one was going to say a word.

  When I picked up my new coat from the cloakroom, the woman with the pageboy hairstyle discreetly handed me a little bag containing four chocolate truffles.

  While Google searched for hits after I’d entered the words ‘fire’, ‘hotel’, and ‘Paris’, I watched endless streams of tourists moving past. The traffic was stopped in all eight lanes. I’d found an Internet café on the Champs-Élysées and then waited in line for twenty minutes for an over-priced computer station with a view of the boulevard.

  A long list of headlines appeared on the screen. Most of them were from French-language newspapers, but a lot had also been published on English news sites.

  17 DEAD IN HOTEL FIRE IN PARIS

  At least seventeen people died last night in a hotel fire in Paris.

  Many of the guests staying at the budget Hôtel Royal in Saint-Ouen in the northern part of Paris were African immigrants. According to the radio station France Info, four children were among the victims. Identification of the dead was made more difficult by the fact that the immigrants had probably entered the country illegally. More people were staying in the seven-storey building, but the police have not been able to interview any survivors.

  ‘There was only one stairway. The hotel was a death trap,’ says fire chief Jean-Marie Gilbert.

  According to the police, there is evidence that the fire may have been arson.

  The blaze broke out just before midnight on Friday. More than twenty fire engines were called to the scene. Work was still going on early this morning.

  In a later article, any suspicion of arson was dismissed. According to the police, the fire was caused by faulty electrical wiring, or possibly by negligence on the part of the hotel guests. However, the hotel owner would be cited for a lack of safety measures. He was also unable to provide credible accounts for the hotel’s operating expenses.

  It was not the first time something like this had happened. I clicked on other links.

  Some years ago, twenty-four people had died in a fire at a budget hotel in north-eastern Paris. Most of the victims were African immigrants who had been given lodging there by social services. In August of the same year, nine children died in a dilapidated building.

  ‘To get a rental agreement, you have to have papers,’ said one of the immigrants named Said. He didn’t want to give his last name to the reporter. ‘Without papers you have to turn to the black market, and those landlords don’t hesitate to offer housing that is falling apart and dangerous. No one with the rights of a citizen would dream of setting foot in a place like that.’

  The government authorities had devoted a great deal of energy to evicting residents from dilapidated buildings. For instance, they’d discovered seventy immigrants living in an abandoned printing factory. With only one working toilet to share.

  I went back to Google and clicked on other related links, typing in variations on my search words: hotel fire Paris immigrant illegal undocumented Europe.

  I imagined myself racing along behind Patrick as I jumped from one page to the next, as if I might catch a glimpse of his back as he moved on to the next site.

  There were at least 400,000 undocumented immigrants in Paris alone. Up to eight million in all of Western Europe, and the flood of refugees increased at the same time as entry policies were getting stricter. By now the European border control stretched all the way down to Senegal and Mauritania. The Mediterranean was patrolled with boats and radar, and fences were being erected along the borders to the east. But new refugees and immigrants were still arriving on overloaded boats, on trains and long-distance trucks. And via airports, using phoney passports. Most borrowed money to pay the scandalous prices for their passage, while others were smuggled in and sold to the sex industry. Growing numbers were being exploited in what amounted to slavery.

  I leaned back, trying to ease the muscles in my shoulders. Slavery was a word that kept cropping up. In Patrick’s notebook, and in my conversation with the hotel desk clerk.

  I typed the word in the search box and got a whole new series of hits.

  There I found the Chinese who had collected cockles in a bay outside Liverpool. The story that Richard Evans had told me. Twenty-one people drowned when the tide came in. The survivors reported that they were paid seven euros for a full basket of cockles, but the gang master took most of their wages as rent for a cramped basement room and as repayment for the amount they owed for their travel to England. This incident had taken place several years earlier, and it had become the subject of a documentary film. Nothing new, in other words. I kept clicking on other articles, skimming the text.

  In Tuscany, Italy, thousands of Chinese worked in secret textile factories. Made in Italy, said a little Chinese girl, proudly holding up a garment. The cheap clothing was
sent on to be sold in street markets and tourist spots all over Europe. Their wages consisted of food and a place to sleep in the factory. The workers had accumulated debts as high as 20,000 euros, the amount required to pay off the snakeheads who had arranged their travel to Europe.

  Great, I thought. A slave trade in which the slaves paid for their own travel. No wonder Patrick wanted to investigate the topic.

  I glanced at articles about children who had disappeared from Romania and were then made to work as thieves in London, Paris, and Stockholm, or take dangerous construction jobs, or do nightshift cleaning. And girls who were sold as household slaves.

  Then something caught my eye. My pulse quickened. I could hear a pounding in my eardrums.

  It was a story about a fifteen-year-old girl from Togo who had been held as a slave by two families in Paris, until the neighbours finally reported what was going on. The court had sentenced the families to pay the girl a salary retroactively. A total of 30,000 euros for four years of slave labour, seven days a week, fifteen hours a day. That amounted to barely one euro per hour.

  The attorney who represented the girl was named Sarah Rachid. I knew I’d seen that name before, printed in neat handwriting in Patrick’s notebook.

  ‘It’s good that she’s receiving restitution,’ said Sarah Rachid. ‘But there are many more like her, and most of them we’ll never manage to reach.’

  I got eleven hits on her name, and almost all of them had to do with the girl from Togo. One article mentioned the name of the firm where Rachid worked. On the firm’s website I found an email address. I wrote to say that I had some questions regarding Patrick Cornwall, and I signed the email Alena Sarkanova without giving any further explanation.

  My time on the Internet café computer was about to expire, so I went over to the cashier and paid for another hour. I also bought a Coke. My stomach was feeling a little lighter. I’d felt like an overstuffed goose when I left the Taillevent restaurant.

  The case of the girl from Togo was three years old, so it couldn’t be the centrepiece of Patrick’s article.

  I sat down in front of the screen again and massaged my temples.

  Somewhere in all this, Patrick had found his story. A thread he’d unravelled to find something bigger, something that hadn’t yet been told. A fresh perspective, a unique viewpoint, Richard Evans had said. The investigative report of the year, Patrick himself had mumbled on the phone, slurring his words.

  I thought about the exclamation marks in his notebook, and all the numbers. The price of a slave.

  There were more slaves in the world than ever, in spite of the fact that all nations had passed laws to ban slave labour. Actually, the price had never been as low as it was now, just $90 on average. It was even possible to get a good slave from Mali for only $40. The amounts corroborated Patrick’s notes.

  In the 1880s, during the transatlantic slave trade to America, a slave cost $1,000. In today’s currency, that was equal to $38,000, which meant that now 4,000 slaves could be bought for the price of only one back then. And that was the period regarded as the darkest era in human history.

  I scrolled down until I found an explanation for the other numbers in Patrick’s examples.

  The figure 30 million was an estimate of the number of slaves in the world today. He had compared this figure to the 12 million slaves transported across the Atlantic — and that was over a period of 300 years. In the 1800s, slavery was completely legal; now it was part of the black market, a criminal operation. But it did exist, and the authorities didn’t seem to be doing much to stop it.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and again pictured the pages of Patrick’s notebook. I remembered seeing the words ‘The boats!’

  I added ‘boats’ to some variants of the previous search words and new articles appeared on the screen. There seemed to be an endless list, but I had several hours to waste, so I decided to take my time and go through them properly.

  During the past few years tens of thousands of migrants had died at sea between Africa and Europe. Refugees or people in search of work. Recently, eleven people were found dead in a rubber boat off the Canary Islands. Apparently they had died from dehydration. A fishing boat had capsized off the coast of Libya, and at least 300 people were thought to have drowned. And 240 migrants were rescued from a sinking boat near the Italian island of Lampedusa. There were no passenger lists, but the survivors estimated that between fifty and seventy people had disappeared into the sea. One man mentioned a heavily pregnant woman who had fallen overboard right before his eyes. A related article reported that female migrants were often pregnant. Either they deliberately got pregnant because that would increase their chances of being allowed to stay in Europe, or else they were raped on the way.

  Or maybe they left because they were pregnant, I thought. To make a better life for their child.

  I clicked on another related document. A Swedish tourist had found the body of an African migrant on a beach in Tarifa in southern Spain. In an interview the girl said how awful it had been to see a dead body. He had looked almost alive in the water. He had a tattoo, but he was completely naked, and this was on a beach where people went swimming and surfing. It was such a shock! The girl’s father was also interviewed, and he was upset that something like this could happen. They hadn’t been given any information or assistance from the travel agency. A few days later more bodies were found outside Cádiz, not far away. The Spanish police thought it had to do with a capsized rubber dinghy. In the narrow straits between Morocco and Spain the waves could reach several metres in height.

  I swallowed hard. The nausea was back. I’d Googled the word ‘pregnancy’ in the morning and read that it often helped to eat a small snack, like a carrot or a dry roll. Even though I was still feeling very full, I got up to buy two almond biscuits. It occurred to me that I’d ignored Benji’s phone calls for two days in a row. I tapped in his number as I kept scrolling through more articles, looking for yet another name to turn up.

  ‘Ally!’ he exclaimed. ‘Finally. How’s it going? How are you? How’s Paris?’

  ‘Good,’ I lied.

  ‘Have you found—’

  ‘How was opening night?’ I interrupted him, feeling foolishly touched to hear his voice.

  ‘What’s going on? You sound strange. Are you sure you’re OK?’

  His concern made my throat tighten. Don’t ask me about Patrick, I silently pleaded. Don’t say a word about any of this.

  ‘A slight cold, that’s all,’ I told him. ‘But Paris is amazing. What did the newspapers say?’

  It was like a rejuvenating shot in the arm to hear him babbling. Life was continuing over there. It was only me who was absent. The reviews in almost all the important New York papers had been great, Benji chirped. They talked about a new creative depth that was classic and yet reached beyond all conventions. Except for one critic who claimed the dance performance had murdered the narrative soul of Chekhov’s drama. And at the after-party a drunken Leia had latched onto Duncan, whose interest by that time had shifted to the girl who played Masha.

  ‘And so we come to the eternal question of which profession enjoys the most sex in relation to the amount of work put in,’ Benji went on. ‘Should you be a choreographer, or a singer, or should you become the leader of some sort of cult?’

  I didn’t hear the rest. A new article had appeared on the screen in front of me, and the text was eating at me like a corrosive acid.

  ‘Hey, listen, I’ll call you later,’ I said, and ended the conversation.

  I was reading about yet another boatload of immigrants who had reached the Canary Islands. On board were thirteen men and a woman who was dying. The woman had brought her infant, whom she was nursing. When the food and drinking water ran out, and the promised three days at sea turned into five, and six, and then a week, the men had turned to her, the only source of food on board. They had sucked the milk out of her body until there was nothing left of her. Like a limp hide, she was carri
ed ashore by the Red Cross and declared dead in a hospital in Los Cristianos.

  I logged out and turned off the computer, but the text lingered on the screen until the humming ceased and it finally went blank.

  Twelve of the survivors had said that the infant was dead when it was tossed overboard. The thirteenth claimed it was alive.

  The pimply young man was among the last to come out of the restaurant, along with one of the others who’d worn a beige shirt. Now they were dressed in their own clothes, and I would hardly have recognized them if I’d met them in town.

  They walked down the hill and turned left onto avenue Friedland. I got up from the park bench where I’d been sitting, from which there was a good view of the entrance to the restaurant. The Arc de Triomphe gleamed up ahead as I followed them at a safe distance, heading towards the Champs-Élysées.

  If only I could get the pimple-faced boy alone, I was sure I could get him to talk. Swiftly I crossed the street so as not to lose them in the crowds. I saw them disappear down an escalator into the subway.

  People were swarming all around me. Everybody else can do this, I thought. They take the Métro every day.

  I stepped onto the escalator, taking big breaths through both my mouth and nose, trying not to panic.

  Only people with no imagination took the subway, in my opinion. Only those who couldn’t picture what happens when the lights go out, the alarm sounds, and thousands of people try to get out of the tunnels at the same time.

  The ceiling rose into a vault over my head. There were orange mosaic tiles on the walls, and advertising posters. People passed by me, but I saw only a green jacket and ash-blond hair that curled slightly on the back of his neck. He was walking about twenty metres ahead of me. More tunnels, white tiles. The city is perforated by underground passageways, I thought. The whole place is going to fall right in on itself.