What She Saw

by Gerard Stembridge

  At Richelieu-Drouot, the poor girl stops warbling and goes around the car looking for reward for her efforts. Of course everyone ignores her, which inevitably prompts Lana to dig into her pocket and offer whatever change is left from Nathan’s fifty-euro bill. Almost immediately she regrets it. What if she needs to buy another metro ticket or use a public phone? But Karaoke Girl has already gone to the next car, not that Lana would have ever asked for a refund. Stupid, Lana. Stupid! As the train leaves Grands Boulevards she can’t bear sitting anymore and gets up to hover near the doors even though there’s one more stop before hers.

  When she emerges from the station at Strasbourg–St.-Denis the day has shifted decisively from afternoon to evening and a gorgeous low sun is directly in her eyes. Lana tries to orient herself as Brian would: if she can see the setting sun then she’s facing west, right? And she’s on rue St.-Denis, right? So the question is, is rue d’Aboukir to the north or south? Oh, forget it.

  When she finds it, what’s most obvious—and disconcerting—are the bright lines of little fashion shops stretching out along both sides of the street. Many have eager names in brash colors and fonts: Exaltation, M. Elégance, Miss Papillon, Mille et une Soirées, and colorfully dressed mannequins pout from every spot-lit shop front. Disoriented and hungry though she’d been last night, Lana would certainly not have missed this 360-degree rag trade smorgasbord. She walks on quickly, desperate for the rainbow of teasingly feminine shop fronts to give way to something drabber and grubbier, which, memory assures her, is how the area around Guillaume and Pauline’s apartment building looked.

  Is rue d’Aboukir the longest street in Paris? Lana quickens her pace until she’s more or less power-walking. At the rue du Louvre intersection, she sees that the block ahead has more of the shabby anonymity she recalls from last night. The purple doors have to be there somewhere, unless she’s missed them already. Then, a flash of something recognizable: on her left is the beginning of a pedestrian street, and farther down, an awning that looks familiar. She hurries closer to make sure. Yes, unmistakable: Bistro Le Tambour, where she’d wolfed down the very welcome beef bourguignon. Now it’s easy to retrace those late-night steps and cross rue du Louvre. Within a minute she is standing outside the famous purple doors, which look just as battered and peeling as she’d recalled. Yes! Her mind had not been playing tricks on her.

  Of course, she doesn’t know the code and cannot call Guillaume. How mind-bendingly dumb had she been to give away her last coins to the hopeless karaoke singer?

  Lana is set to combust. The frustration of another uncertain wait like the one last night outside Nathan’s is just too much to bear. Of course someone would open those god-awful doors to exit or enter; of course she would get inside and reconnect with Guillaume and Pauline again. Eventually. But doesn’t she deserve something to go her way? Shouldn’t Guillaume or Pauline or even Odette pop out for a baguette and suddenly appear on the street? Instead it feels like the recurring anxiety nightmare she’s had for many years is being brought to dismal life: in this nightmare there was always travel, and always just when the end point, the breakthrough, seemed close enough to touch, in whatever room or corridor or vehicle she was trapped in, she would come up against that final locked door and there would be no key, or a key that refused to turn, or a handle that rattled but would never open the door. And Lana would remain a prisoner.

  She finds herself pounding recklessly at the purple doors, then hurrying across the street and staring up, praying for a glimpse of someone, ideally someone on the fifth floor who will see her flailing arms and recognize her desperate face. Not that she gives a damn at this point, but it’s probably fortunate that the street is empty, so there’s no one to witness this lunatic mime, except for one guy back at the intersection. But he’s talking on his cell and paying no attention, not even looking her way.

  His cell? Maybe, just maybe he’ll let her use it. It’s worth asking. She runs toward him. Close-up the guy is surprisingly ripped, broad-shouldered with a seriously chiseled face under his cap. When he sees her approach he immediately ends his call and starts to walk away quickly. Jesus! How wild-eyed does she look to make him so keen to avoid her? But she can’t lose this opportunity.

  “Please! Oh s’il vous plaît! Aidez-moi, Monsieur! Your cell, your phone!” What do they call a cell phone? “Monsieur, excusez-moi. Je veux téléphoner . . .” Then she remembers. Portable. Por-ta-bleu. “Portable, votre portable. S’il vous plaît. Pour une minute seulement.”

  Astonishingly, Muscle-boy halts. Lana slows, keeping a little distance in case she spooks him again. She points at the cell still in his hand.

  “I . . . me. May I use, ah utiliser votre portable pour une minute. C’est un urgence.”

  The guy still seems very uncertain about handing over his precious phone. Lana pulls Guillaume’s card from her pocket and shows it to him.

  “This ah . . . Cet nombre. Peut-être vous—” The French verb to dial fails her. She mimes with her index finger. “Dial . . . pour moi.” Then she remembers the verb to call. “Appeller . . . appeller. Je suis perdue. Je cherche un apartment ici, rue d’Aboukir.”

  She waves an arm to indicate the building behind down the street. Muscle-boy steps closer to check out the number and holds out his free hand to take the card. He dials. As soon as someone answers, silently he hands over his cell.

  “Hello, is that Guillaume?”

  “Lana. Lana, where are you? I am calling you at the hotel for you since very early.”

  “Sorry, I know.”

  “What is happening with you?”

  “I can’t delay, Guillaume. This isn’t my phone.”

  “What? What is this phone, you are talking?”

  “Just someone on the street. Listen, I’m here. I’m on rue d’Aboukir.”

  “You are here?”

  “Yes, but I can’t get inside the building.”

  “Ah. You want the code? I will come down.”

  “Yes, the code please.”

  “Hash 7918.”

  “Hash 7918. Great. Wonderful.”

  A miracle had happened. It was all going to work out.

  “I am surprised that you are able to find us again.”

  “I’ll tell you the whole story as soon as—I gotta go Guillaume, or I’ll forget the code. Hash 7918, right?”

  “I will come down for you.”

  Lana clicks off and hands Muscle-boy his cell.

  “Merci beaucoup, Monsieur. Je suis désolée, mais je n’avais pas d’argent. Pas d’argent.”

  “De rien, Madame.”

  He walks away as if still anxious to put some distance between them; a strange nervous fish. Lana is keying in the code when the door opens and Guillaume sticks his head out. He checks up and down the street before wrapping her in a big hug and kisses.

  “You find us again. You are extraordinary.”

  “Tell me about Claude. What’s happened to him?”

  Guillaume’s face assumes cartoon sadness.

  “It is so terrible. He is ah . . . en soins intensif.”

  “Intensive care?”

  “Yes. His brain, it is a problem—”

  “Oh Jesus no!”

  “It may be okay, we do not know. Odette is waiting at the hospital.”

  “She’s recovered then?”

  It seemed to take a second or two for Guillaume to understand the question.

  “Oh. Yes. Well . . . she cares about her brother, you know.”

  “Of course. And you know who did it?”

  “You want evidence? We have no evidence—”

  “What I mean is, how it happened, was he attacked in the street—?”

  “No, in his little apartment. Someone came to him. Nothing was stolen. Of course I know who did this, but maybe you don’t believe me.”

  “No. I think I do.”

  It really feels like she should hurry to the hospital, but Lana knows this would serve no purpose apart from making herself feel
better. More useful now to do what she came to do. In the apartment, Pauline is waiting to indulge in some big-time kissing and shrieking and babbling. Guillaume translates.

  “Pauline, she is saying she knew you will come. She understands you because you are like her. You must be alone in the first moment to consider a problem from every side, but when you make a decision, you are determined.”

  “Well, she’s right. I’ve made a decision. And now I’m even more certain I’m doing the right thing.”

  “Lana, do you mean you want to tell your story?”

  “Yes, I do. But I must ask you something first. I’m a little afraid. Can I stay with you until Monday, when I can go to the embassy to deal with my passport situation?”

  Guillaume’s reaction is reassuring.

  “But of course, of course, Lana. We will take care of you until you leave Paris, leave France. There is no question.”

  Though he pretends to be in no hurry to do the interview and asks if Lana would prefer to relax a little first, have a coffee, eat perhaps, it’s obvious that his anticipation is high to boiling over, so she tells him she just wants to take a shower and then get started.

  She’s never faced a camera before apart from those few weeks of renewal after she returned from Paris with news of her pregnancy, when—hauntingly—Brian had filmed her incessantly with his camera phone. Every other moment he recorded her doing the most ordinary things, filling the dishwasher, or reading a book. And always at some point he’d tilt the lens down and step closer to her growing belly. Had Brian destroyed all that footage? They’d never spoken about it, but she hoped so.

  Pauline dries and fixes Lana’s hair. When she looks at herself in the mirror, instead she sees a flash of Claude’s beautiful face, bloodied. She says a firm no to the offer of startlingly scarlet lip gloss. She thinks of Fournier in makeup before that TV debate Guillaume had shown her. No doubt he had joked and flirted and gazed confidently at himself in the mirror, knowing he was going to be THE MAN tonight, that he would just kill it at this debate; maybe even lavish his attentions on the prettiest crew girl afterward. The twin images, a split screen in her mind, propel her rage: his face, tanned and pampered, and Claude’s, pulped and bloodied. She will most definitely not behave herself.

  The green on the wall behind her is so lurid that Lana can’t help asking why Guillaume had chosen that color. He explains that the fond vert allows him to put background images on it later in editing.

  “We are lucky there is no green in your clothes. If there was, the images would show there too.”

  “So, you can put, say, a giant image of Fournier stark naked behind me.”

  “Yes, perfect, if we had such an image.”

  He grins and opens a panel at the side of the camera and slips in a slim card.

  “The memory card, right?”

  “Very good. The most important item.”

  “Is that the same as the old roll of film?”

  He slides it out and brings it to Lana.

  “Exactly. There is no longer film for me, not even tape or disks, just this little card. Your interview will be on this, then I transfer to my computer. In minutes I can start to edit.”

  In the face of such nerdish enthusiasm, Lana does her best to look solemnly impressed. Guillaume slides the card into the side of the camera again. While he fiddles with the lighting, Lana becomes aware of Pauline in the dark corner of the room sitting on the bed. For once she is still and so seems a more powerful, watchful presence. Finally, Guillaume checks his shot and almost whispers.

  “Okay, quiet everyone. You ready, Lana?”

  She nods. It’s disconcerting how suddenly it’s happening. Everything she witnessed will no longer be just in her head; a visible, spoken record will exist.

  “First, please say who you are and why you come in Paris.”

  When that is done he asks her to explain how it happened that she was in the private elevator for the Suite Imperial of the Chevalier Hotel.

  “I know this will seem silly, because it was silly. Basically just foolish . . . well, nosiness I guess. Curiosity. You know how, in any hotel you assume that the elevators are for every guest to use. And that’s how people meet people, going up and down. Sometimes you get to know them through, you know, seeing them in the elevator. So it was a thing, you know, that in the Chevalier there was this, like, special super-exclusive elevator tucked away in a little corner. Anyway, what happened was, I just happened to be passing near it when the doors opened and this guy, this man got out. So you know, I just couldn’t, like, resist having a little look-see. I suppose I wanted to find out, you know, was it totally different from the other elevator, the one for us plain folk? But look, honestly? I really have no excuse, no good reason to be there except just plain old nosiness—very innocent and very dumb.”

  “So you did not know who was staying in the Suite Imperial?”

  “Absolutely not. No idea. Obviously I knew it had to be someone very wealthy and I guessed it could be some celebrity. But that really wasn’t on my mind when I stepped into the elevator. It really was just, you know, just, seeing what it was like. And then when the doors started to close, I couldn’t figure out how to stop them aaand . . . it was going up.”

  Guillaume smiles and gives her a thumbs-up.

  “Okay, now, when the elevator comes to the Suite Imperial, there was a shock when the doors opened, yes?”

  There it is, the heart of the matter. It feels very different from telling Nathan the story on his couch last night. Guillaume’s eyes are fixed on the monitor, the eye of the camera is fixed on her, the lights feel warm, Pauline’s shape is at the corner of her eye. The words Lana speaks now will be her exact words recorded and replayed, heard exactly as she is saying them at this moment, in this mood. They will forever be her version of this scene.

  For some reason the most insistent voice in her head right now is Fournier’s, asking in measured tones how Lana would behave if she discovered a stranger filming her private life with a hidden camera. It would be so easy now, with barely any exaggeration, to describe a rampant man-goat, intent on havoc, and to paint, via Guillaume’s helpful prods, a revolting portrait of sagging, crude, repulsive nakedness in contrast to the innocence of youth, clear-skinned and fully clothed. That had certainly been Lana’s intention as well as being her genuine feeling about what she had witnessed, more or less. Knowing there are other factors, such as the hidden camera in the hands of the perceived victim, doesn’t negate that perception: what Lana saw was what she saw. That it’s not the whole story is a given. She was just witness to part of it and is reporting that part with reasonable accuracy.

  But now, with the camera in front of her, she becomes more aware of how it will ingest every word and the viewing audience will gorge on every detail. Should she say he “held her” or he “gripped her”? Should his eyes be “determined” or did they “blaze”? Was Lana herself merely “shocked” or was she “unnerved” or “terrified”? Was Fournier no more than a man enjoying high-spirited private pleasures along with other consenting adults, or was it a revolting spectacle of wrinkled lust and patriarchal power? That Lana’s eyewitness account might be too carefully calibrated and hesitatingly expressed is clear from Guillaume’s increasingly regular intrusions.

  “Had you ever witnessed such a scene before?”

  “Was it clear to you that the young woman was desperate to escape?”

  “How violent were his efforts to stop her?”

  “You said you were shocked. Were you frightened?”

  Gradually Lana relaxes and, in her replies, gives Guillaume more of what he wants, realizing it’s what she wants, too; Fournier as a baboonish granddad, still trying to reenact his fossilized, male, 1960s notion of sexual equality, while at the same time assuming his natural right to special privileges. Not surprisingly it is the French who have the perfect phrase for this, coined long before the sixties: droit de seigneur; socialist intellectual by day, naked rutting aristocr
at by night. No. There’s no way Fournier should be let off the hook.

  “And you did not know who this person was?”

  “Absolutely not. All I saw was some naked old man.”

  Guillaume’s grin gleams at her from the darkness behind the camera. He’s clearly delighted with the interview so far.

  “What did you think should happen? Did you feel, this is a private matter, it is none of my business?”

  “I certainly didn’t think it was none of my business. But I worried that, even though I didn’t know who the man was, he had to be someone wealthy and therefore with influence. So I wasn’t sure if any complaint I made would be listened to.”

  “Complaint. What do you mean?”

  “Well, to be honest, at that moment I thought the police should be called. It seemed to me—I don’t know French law—but it seemed to me that this might be a case of violent assault.”

  “Would you say, rape?”

  “No, I could not be certain about that. . . . No.”

  “The man you saw that night. Do you know now who he is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you name him?”

  She thinks, why not? Say it for the camera, honey.

  “Yes. Jean-Luc Fournier.”

  BY 4 P.M. FERDIE HAD LEARNED THREE NEW THINGS. ONE: IT WAS POSSIBLE to have ham-hock hands and a stomach so protruding that it sank into the steering wheel and yet handle a BMW with the precision of a watchmaker. Two: Ferdie liked being chauffeured. For fifteen years he thought he had the better end of an arrangement where he had the pleasure of driving top-range cars while getting paid for it. It had never occurred to him that lounging in the back being driven everywhere could be anything other than unremittingly frustrating. Not that Ferdie sat in the back today. Instead he stretched his legs in the front passenger seat. Three: Detective work was more tedious than he’d imagined. The problem was not the inevitable hanging around, which he was used to doing, but in situations where he could read a magazine, listen to the radio, look at his phone, step out and have a smoke, and generally amuse himself; not stare fixedly at a building fifty meters away, conscious all the time of remaining unnoticed, afraid to glance away for fear of missing an important moment.