'Are you visiting someone, monsieur?'
'Madame L'Herbert.'
That reassured her. I excused myself and headed up the stairs. When I reached L'Herbert's apartment, I rang the bell. No answer. I rang it again, holding it down a long time. From inside, I heard L'Herbert shouting, 'All right, all right, I'm coming.' After a minute, the door opened. She was in a long silk bathrobe. Her face was covered in some black substance – a makeup mask – which she was attempting to rub off with a handful of tissues.
'Who are you?' she asked.
'My name is Harry Ricks and I was at your salon a couple of months ago.'
'You were?' she said, staring at my unkempt state.
'I met somebody here – a woman named Margit Kadar . . .'
'And you came by to get her phone number? Hon, we're not a dating service. Now if you'll excuse me . . .'
I put my foot in the door as she tried to close it.
'I just need to ask you—'
'How'd you get in here?'
I told her.
'Well, the salon's on Sunday night, and you know the rules: you have to call up and reserve your place. Coming by like this, unannounced . . .'
'You have to help me. Please.'
She looked me over with care.
'You're American, right?'
'You don't remember me?'
'We have fifty to one hundred people every week, so, no, I don't remember everyone. Something wrong, hon? You look like you've been sleeping in the park.'
'Margit Kadar. The name doesn't ring a bell?' She shook her head.
'You sure?' I asked, then described her. Again L'Herbert shook her head.
'Why is this so important? You in love or something?'
'I just need to verify that she was here the night I was here.'
'Well, if you met her here, then she was here.'
'Please, could you get your assistant to check your records?'
'He's out right now. If you phone him in about two hours—'
'I don't have two hours. Don't you have a database or something where you could look her up?'
She stared down at my foot in her door.
'You're not going to go away until I do this, are you?'
'No, I'm not.'
'If you agree to let me shut the door, I'll see if I can help you.'
'You will come back?'
'Fear not,' she said with an ironic smile. ''Cause if I don't, y'all are going stand here, beating on my door till I do come back. Am I right, hon?'
'Absolutely.'
'Back in a jiffy.'
I removed my foot. She closed the door. I sat down on the stairs and rubbed my eyes, and tried to get that image of Margit's apartment under dust out of my brain. I failed. No doubt the concierge had called the cops by now. No doubt they were probably searching for me. If they couldn't pin two murders on me, they could still have me arrested for assault and general lunacy. By the end of the day I could be locked up in some madhouse, awaiting deportation back home. Imagine what will happen if word gets out that I was thrown out for insisting that I was romantically involved with a dead woman. Then again, compared with the scandal which had engulfed Robson . . .
But it wasn't just Robson. It was also Omar – because I'd mentioned to her how I despised his toilet habits. And then there was Yanna's husband: '. . . now you know why I hate any man who hits a woman in the face.'
Then: 'You are going to have to kill Yanna's husband.'
But surely she didn't take it on herself to beat him with a baseball bat . . . any more than she ran over that desk clerk at Le Sélect. But again, I had told her of the harm these people had done – or were threatening to do – to me. And then . . .
'Brasseur was a deeply unpleasant man,' I informed Inspector Coutard during my first interrogation.
To which he said, 'So we have learned from anyone who worked with him. Nonetheless, it is also intriguing to note that – just as you had a little war with Monsieur Omar and he was found dead on his beloved toilet – so you also had a little war with Monsieur Brasseur and he was struck down by a car . . .'
There was a pattern. I talk about someone who has done me wrong, she responds with . . .
No, that's so way off-beam . . .
But her being dead is just a little off-beam too.
I don't get it . . .
There's only one way of 'getting' it. Show up for your rendezvous with her today at five.
The apartment door opened. Lorraine came out. The remnants of her black makeup mask had gone. She was now holding a printout and a small card.
'OK, hon. I checked our guest list for the night you were there, and as you'll see . . .'
She handed me the page.
'. . . you're on the guest list, but Margit Kadar isn't. I ran her name through our system – which only goes back ten years. Nothing. Then I checked our Rolodex, where we always kept the names of anyone who had ever come to the salons prior to 1995. And guess what I found . . . ?'
She handed me the Rolodex card. On it was written Zoltan and Margit Kadar, their address on the rue Linné and a date: May 4, 1980 . . . just a few weeks before the accident.
'So she did come to the salon?' I asked.
'Once – with her husband . . . but I don't remember much about them. Hell, how could I, considering the amount of human traffic that comes through here every week. She and her husband never came back. So they were filed away as "One-Offers".'
'And there's absolutely no way she could have snuck in here on the night I came?'
'None at all. We're pretty strict on security for the salon. You don't get past this door unless you're on the list. And we certainly don't like it when people show up unannounced. But let me ask you something, hon. If you think you met her here, and I have proof that you didn't . . . well, what sort of conclusion do you expect me to draw from that?'
'Thank you for your time,' I said and headed quickly down the stairs.
Outside there were no taxis. Rain was falling. I ran down the boulevard Saint-Michel to the Line 4 métro. I hopped on, my clothes now sodden with the rain. I started to shiver – the same sort of feverish shakes that had hit me on my first day in Paris. As always, no one was speaking in the métro, and the passengers in my carriage were avoiding eye contact. But several of them stole glances at this derelict man with wet, grimy clothes and several days' growth of beard and sunken eyes and chattering teeth.
At Château d'Eau I got off the métro and went back out into the rain. By the time I reached the Internet café, the febrile shakes had escalated into a sense of total depletion. Mr Beard looked me over with cold anger as I walked in. Without saying anything, he went to the front door and locked it.
'You didn't go to work last night.'
'That's because I was a guest of the police in one of their better cells.'
'You told the cops . . .'
'Nothing.'
'Why did they arrest you?'
'I was under suspicion . . .'
'For the murder of Omar . . . ?'
'Yes,' I said, deciding it was best not to mention anything about Yanna's husband.
'Did they also tell you about the man whose wife you fucked?'
'They did.'
'And did you tell them it was Monsieur Sezer and Mahmoud who did it?'
'Of course not.'
'They've arrested them . . . but they've let you go. Why?'
'I'm not the cops, but the cops generally don't arrest people unless they have evidence—'
'You planted the evidence—'
'You're crazy.'
'We know it was you—'
'Why would I—'
'Because you killed Omar and Monsieur Attani, that is why, and then you put the weapons—'
'My fingerprints weren't on the weapons. Mahmoud's were—'
'Ah, so the cops did tell you they arrested Mr Sezer and Mahmoud.'
'If I allegedly "planted" the weapons, then why were Mahmoud's fingerprints on them?'
/> 'You could have left them somewhere obvious in Mr Sezer's office. Mahmoud might have picked them up to hide them—'
'Mahmoud would have seen the blood on them and thrown them out. But maybe Mahmoud isn't the cleverest guy to have walked the face of the earth. Maybe, having killed Omar and Attani on the orders of Sezer, he simply threw the weapons into some back room, some attic, not thinking that the cops would—'
'The weapons were found below the sink in Mahmoud's room. They were placed there, the police were called—'
'And I was in police custody at the time—'
'You could still have put them there. Did you also tell them about where you worked?'
'Absolutely not.'
'Liar. They raided the building last night, pulled everything apart. Fortunately, after the arrests of Monsieur Sezer and Mahmoud, we had a little time to clear out—'
'Were you making snuff movies and bombs there?'
'Stop asking questions. You are in enough trouble right now—'
'Trouble for what? I kept my mouth shut. I showed up every night at midnight. I never asked questions. I never interfered—'
'But you saw—'
'I saw nothing.'
'Liar.'
'Think what you like. I didn't send the cops to you, I played by the rules you set.'
Pause. He stared at me for a very long time. Then: 'You go back to work tonight.'
'But what is there to guard?'
'That is not your business.'
'Surely the cops are treating downstairs as a crime scene. Surely they'll have men guarding the place.'
'The cops are no longer there. They have finished all their "tests". They are gone.'
'Did you pay them off or something?'
'They are gone. And you must return to your work tonight.'
I knew that if I now said, 'No damn way,' I wouldn't be allowed off the premises. I also knew that if I did show up for work tonight, I might not ever walk out of there alive. The fever was now making me shiver. I clutched myself tightly.
'You sick?' he asked.
'Didn't get much sleep in the cell . . .'
'Go home, get some rest, be at work on time tonight.'
Then he opened the door and motioned for me to leave.
On the way back to my room, I thought, They are going to kill me. They just want to do it in an enclosed environment where they can make me disappear with minimal detection. There was only one thing to do: flee.
But before I did that, I had to go see Margit at the agreed hour of five. I had to convince myself I hadn't gone completely crazy. I had to know the truth.
I also needed to lie down for a couple of hours, before this fever overwhelmed me. I would take a nap, then pack a bag, then arrive at the rue Linné, then run to the Gare du Nord and get the last Eurostar out to London. God knows what I would do there once I arrived, but at least it would be away from all this. That's all that mattered to me now: disappearing from view.
But when I reached my room, I found the door half-open, the lock dangling from its hinges, everything trashed. Shelves had been ripped from the walls, drawers pulled out, their contents dumped. All my clothes had been rifled through, many of them torn. The bed had been overturned, the sheets and duvet ripped apart, the mattress split down the middle. I stood in the doorway, stunned. Then I was immediately on my knees by the sink. Everything in the cabinet had been pulled out, but whoever rampaged through my room didn't notice the loose linoleum covering the floor. Pulling it up, I reached into the same hole that Adnan once used as a safe and found the money I had been storing was still there. I pulled out the plastic Jiffy bags in which I had placed twenty euros a day from my wages. I quickly counted the three separate wads. Twenty-eight hundred euros – the total savings from all my nights of work.
My relief was enormous. But there was a possible stumbling block from my newly hatched escape plan: the backup disk for my novel. I kept it hidden in a paperback copy of Graham Greene's This Gun for Hire. Scouring the debris on the floor, I found the book and rifled through its pages. The disk was gone.
Don't panic . . . don't panic . . . it has to be here somewhere.
But I did panic. I rummaged again through all the debris, getting more frantic as I couldn't find it. I must have spent the better part of a half-hour combing every corner of the room, my anxiety growing as it dawned on me that the disk had been taken.
But why take the disk and nothing else? It wasn't as if it contained secret codes or some revelation that would overturn the foundations of all Judeo-Christian faith. It was just a backup copy of my novel – insignificant to anyone but myself.
The thief – having found nothing of value here – probably pocketed it as a way of saying 'Fuck You' for not leaving anything for him to steal.
Or maybe it was Sezer's henchmen. They knew I was writing something in my 'office' at night. Maybe they decided to really stick it to you by lifting the only backup copy of the novel you had.
But it wasn't my only copy . . . as I had hidden another disk in a crevice above the 'emergency exit' in my office. To retrieve it, however, would mean returning to that building . . . and I knew that was impossible now. The ransacking of my room – and Mr Beard's menacing belief that I had set up Sezer and his stooge to take the fall for those murders – heightened my belief that the only thing to do was disappear. But with my laptop still impounded by the cops, I was in a quandary. If I left Paris now, I would be doing so without a copy of the novel I had worked on for the past four months. Though the police might send on my laptop computer at some future date, they also might decide to hang on to it. Which would leave me with nothing to show for all those midnight-to-dawn stints in that claustrophobic room. I had nothing else in my life right now but that novel. I couldn't . . . wouldn't . . . leave Paris without it.
The fever was spreading. Every joint in my body pained me. But I couldn't afford to give in to exhaustion. The longer I stayed in Paris, the more chance I would have of ending up like my room: broken into pieces. Time was of the essence. They could be coming for me any minute.
I scrambled through the debris. I found my suitcase. Amid the torn clothes, I discovered a pair of jeans, a shirt, underwear and socks that had not been shredded. I reached into the shower stall and grabbed soap and shampoo and a toothbrush and toothpaste from the medicine cabinet. My portable radio – though badly dented by having been tossed from my bedside table – still worked. Along with everything else I'd rounded up, I dumped it into the suitcase, stuffed the cash and my passport into my jacket pocket, and slammed the broken door on my chambre de bonne, thinking, I'm never coming back here again.
Out in the street, I scanned the rue de Paradis to see if anyone was on the lookout for me. It seemed clear. I wheeled my bag down to the faubourg Saint-Martin. Five minutes and several turns later, I walked into the commissariat de police. I asked to see Inspector Coutard. The man on the desk told me he was out of the building. I asked to see Inspector Leclerc. A phone call was made. I was told to take a seat. Leclerc came downstairs ten minutes later. He nodded hello and immediately noticed my suitcase.
The Woman In The Fifth Page 33
