In fact, I was so deep in my thoughts that I didn’t hear the woman when she arrived, even though she was wearing high heels and not trying to be furtive in the least. In fact, I only heard her at the end of a song, when she clapped loudly and slowly.
“Bra-vo!” she said in a theatrical voice and, might I add, in a tone that sounded slightly ironical.
Startled, I blinked at her. I must have been there longer than I’d thought, because the room had darkened. Outside, it was dusk now, and I hadn’t lit any of the lamps and spots above the bar. At first, all I saw of the visitor was a white face, a cloud of dark curls, the slash of dark red lips, a feminine silhouette in a narrow winter coat, and long white hands clapping in that obvious, somewhat rude way.
“Hello,” I said, getting up.
I didn’t know her, but maybe she was one of the artists, or a supplier could have sent her, I supposed.
“What can I do for you?”
I went to the bar and switched the lights on. The brass and bottles lit up under the series of high spots and warm lamps that hung from the ceiling. The amber liquors reflecting the glow seemed to come alive with a soft fire.
I turned around and recognized the visitor at last. It was the woman from the storage facility, that Dora something. Dora Vinok. She looked displeased.
“Can I do something for you?” I repeated, not having gotten any answer the first time.
She laughed.
“Aren’t you cute.”
I waited for her to explain herself. Instead, after the tiniest of hesitations, she slid behind the bar to help herself to one of our finest whiskies.
“Unh,” I protested, “the bar isn’t open yet. Are you a friend of the owner’s?”
If she wasn’t, I would charge her for her drink and send her on her way.
“I am,” Dora Vinok answered.
“Well, then, my question doesn’t change much. What can I do for you? Do you want me to relay a message, or are you looking for some information about something?”
She poured herself a very generous dose of liquor before coming back to my side of the bar. She hopped up on a stool and crossed her legs, setting her elbows on the counter in a graceful, feminine gesture, before turning her glass between her long white, plum-tipped fingers. She was wearing a dark pencil skirt or a dress under her coat, with sheer stockings and heels I’d have killed for.
“No, I’m just waiting for Tris,” she said dismissively. “You can pack your diminutive guitar and go now, if you want. Your services are no longer needed.”
She was just as rude as she’d been that other day, at that storage place in Moulins—Anubis. I gave her the most graceful grin I could muster and took my phone out of my pocket before punching in Tristan’s number.
“Just checking with the owner,” I explained to her, trying to keep my tone neutral.
She smiled, showing just the smallest hint of teeth. I hoped Tristan would pick up, and he did, after a couple of seconds.
“Victoire? Is everything okay?” This was the first time I’d called him. He’d given me his number, but “for emergencies only.”
“Hi, Tristan, I’m really sorry to bother you. I hope I didn’t wake you. There’s a Mrs. Vinok here for you, and I was just getting ready to leave.”
“Mrs. who?”
“Dora Vinok. Tall, elegant, dark-haired.”
“Would you mind patching me through?” He sounded surprised, but I couldn’t tell if it was a happy kind of surprise.
I went to the visitor and handed her my phone. She took it with extended fingers, as if disgusted by it.
“Tris, where are you? I’m at that new place of yours, waiting for you.” Her seductive smile was back on, and her voice was as velvety as I remembered, with a hint of grit. It was a really compelling voice. I would have loved to hear her sing. I didn’t get Tristan’s answer, only a few seconds’ worth of a low rumble.
“Well,” Dora Vinok said, “I was greeted by your employee. She was playing on her little instrument, smack dab in the middle of your bar,” she said, quite disparagingly.
Another silence.
“Well, all right.”
She gave me back my phone, and I went back to talking to Tristan.
“Victoire, can you just leave the place right now? I’m sorry Dora disturbed you. I had no idea she would be visiting tonight.”
“I’m so sorry. I was just struck by inspiration and paused for a second to catch my idea. I didn’t mean to get so carried away, forget about the time, and intrude on your private life.”
“No, no, no,” he protested, “it’s nothing like that. You can enjoy the space and the heat all you want. But maybe it would be wiser not to stay after dark. Dora…has her quirks.”
Although I wondered how he knew her, I didn’t understand the situation and wanted nothing to do with it. So I promised I would skedaddle, murmured my goodbyes, and hung up. I bent to pick up my ukulele from where I’d stored it on the floor, leaning against the bar. But when I got up again, I startled. Dora Vinok had left her seat, and she was standing right beside me.
So, I offered her another of my most disarming smiles.
“I’m sorry, please understand I had to check. It’s my job to watch over this place during the day, and I didn’t know you, well, not from here.”
“What did you call me?” she asked, ignoring my apologies completely.
“Dora Vinok?” Wasn’t that her name?
“You’ve seen me before?”
I frowned. “Well, duh. At the storage facility. Anubis. Where you sometimes work.” In fact, shouldn’t she be headed there right now?
She looked taken aback. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
And then she laughed.
I’d had enough of her for the evening and stepped away to get out of the bar. Except now, she wanted to talk.
“Yes, I remember now, we came across each other a couple of nights ago,” she said. “How did everything go with the boxes? Did you find them in good condition? Were you happy with their contents?”
“Very happy,” I lied, now desperate to go.
What was Tristan doing with that woman? He seemed like a good person, while there was something very fishy about her. Now, she was looking at me closely, in a way that made me squirm.
“Liar,” she laughed.
I tensed. “I beg your pardon?”
Was she calling me, basically her client, a liar?
“You haven’t opened the boxes,” she added in an accusatory tone. “You’re one of them, of the non-openers. The forever-keepers. The wimpy ones. I felt it right from the start. Some of you just don’t have the guts.”
Not knowing what was in the boxes, or what she was talking about, I could only stare at her for a second and then try to go around her. Yet she stopped me with an arm across my midriff.
“Please,” she said, “don’t go away. I’m sure you have a minute to spare. Come have a drink with me.”
“No, thanks, my mates are waiting for me right now.”
She laughed again. I could tell from her face she didn’t believe me. It was as if she could see through me.
“Come on,” she purred. “Five mere minutes, just for a nice little chat. I won’t bite, I promise.” She laughed again, a chilly sound.
“Just let me warn my friends I’m going to be late.”
I took out my phone once again and called Linus. This woman scared me. When he picked up, I told him the woman from Anubis was at the bar, and I was going to have a drink with her, and if I didn’t call him again in ten minutes, he should come and get me with the others.
I hung up. Dora was watching me with her eyebrows raised.
“I don’t believe you, either,” I said. “What’s with the secret identities? You really thought I wouldn’t recognize you from the other night? How naive are you?”
She narrowed her eyes but asked, civilly enough, “What can I get you to drink?”
I shrugged. “Same as you.”
She went behind the bar again, took out a glass for me, uncorked the bottle again, and filled it with a dash of whisky. She stayed there, standing behind the bar I loved so much, while I backed into a seat. Suddenly I was feeling very tired. But fine: I would just have that chat she wanted, find out what was wrong with her, and then hurry out of there.
I had my lucky ukulele with me. Nothing really serious could happen.
“So tell me more about yourself, Victoire Destel.”
What a stupid, lazy question, I thought. I wasn’t playing that game with her.
“Is there a lot of money in the self-storage business?” I asked instead.
“No,” she laughed. “In Moulins? Are you kidding me? Real estate is so low right now that nobody needs a spare room.”
“Nobody except people like me.” Clueless ex-Parisians.
“Exactly.”
“And how did you meet Tristan?”
“We’ve been together for a long, long time.”
“Together?”
Her face was transformed, made almost likable by a soft, melancholy grin. “On and off,” she admitted before taking a sip from her drink.
Oh. A jealous ex. That made sense.
“How did you meet him? Tris?” she, in turn, asked.
“He’s my employer,” I reminded her.
“Oh, so, did he come to you with a job proposal?”
“No. I came and asked him. Twice.”
I raised the glass to my lips while she cocked an eyebrow.
“Yeah. I thought so. Chasing talents would have been a very un-Tristan-like move indeed.”
I swallowed my mouthful of whisky and set my glass back on the gleaming wood.
“Listen, Dora, you seem to be mistaken about me. I am not in the least interested in your on-again, off-again boyfriend. I perform tasks for him, in exchange of which he gives me money so I don’t starve. It doesn’t go any further than that. I like this bar, so when I went looking for a job, it’s one of the first places where I stopped to inquire.”
She smiled but said nothing. So I asked another question.
“Why do you do it? The multiple identity thing?”
“Because it’s fun,” she lied. “You know, you really should open the boxes.”
“Why? What’s in them?”
“Find out for yourself.”
I heard noise at the door and turned back in my seat just when Tristan rushed in, looking annoyed.
“Tris! There he is,” Dora called happily. “I was just having a nice little chat with Victoire here.”
Tristan crossed the room and joined us at the bar. He looked ruffled and clearly unhappy, with dark hair all over the place and giant pillow marks on his right cheek. He was wearing dark pants and a black sweater, no coat. I wondered where he lived. It couldn’t have been far from here.
“Hi, Dora.”
She presented him her cheek, and he sighed before giving her a light kiss.
“You should really leave my employees alone,” he chastised her. “They’re not paid to endure your bullshit.”
Considering I was his only employee, that I knew of, I wondered why he used the plural.
“Sorry to intrude, again,” I said, hopping out of my seat to get going.
He didn’t even acknowledge me, and I fled.
9
I fiddled with the old and rusty garage lock, hesitant. The night was humid and starless. It had been raining again, probably while I was composing away at the bar. Anyway, there was a giant puddle right in front of our main door. Coming out again after greeting the others, I’d forgotten about it, stepped right into it, and now my left foot was soaked.
We hadn’t put up the shutters yet, and the lamps inside the house threw long rays onto the concrete courtyard. Everybody was home, so how could I feel so remote and alone? Linus was under some kind of deadline and still typing away at his computer in the main room, while Sam was taking a shower upstairs and Thom was busy calling his latest crush, a girl from the cooperative. I’d slipped outside, unsure of what to do with my five mysterious cardboard boxes.
The encounter at the bar had rattled me. I knew it was stupid, but I hadn’t enjoyed being called a “non-opener” or a “forever-keeper,” whatever the hell that meant. I hadn’t liked Dora Vinok much, and now, I felt angry that she’d managed to screw with me so easily. It was just a couple of old boxes, so why did the whole story bother me so much?
Yes, I had no recollection of putting them in storage. To the best of my knowledge, those weren’t really my boxes, and maybe I really ought to open them, just to sort things out. There had to be some kind of mistake; it was a coincidence. Somewhere around here, a Victoire Mestel or a Victor Dostel had stored their things and somehow Dora Vinok, being a lazy incompetent bitch, had matched their contract with my social security and phone numbers. Or maybe the boxes were full of drugs or stolen goods, and I’d need to do something about them. I should really open the damn things.
My phone rang in my back pocket, and I pulled it out, feeling grateful somehow for the diversion.
“Victoire, good.” It was Tristan, and he sounded relieved. “Sorry about earlier. You should have left when I told you to. My friend Dora is much too curious.”
“Unh. No problem.”
“She was surprised that you could see through her mask, and that’s why she was a little…uncivil.”
I didn’t object that he’d been just as unpolite, calling me “the help” in front of a stranger.
“So she’s like you? A multiple identities person?”
“About that. Can we maybe not make it a subject of discussion? Many of us are not as open-minded as I am, and they’re quite sensitive about the matter.”
He was talking as if there was a whole population of weirdos who liked to wear dysfunctional masks and I was on the verge of meeting them.
“Unh. Yeah, I guess. Although your mysterious reluctance to talk about it raises a lot of questions, if I can be really frank. What the hell is it all about?”
“No, just forget it. Please. It’ll be best for everyone, I can assure you.”
I sighed.
“Listen,” he went on. “I called to apologize, and also—Dora said you went to Anubis the other night? I didn’t know about that.”
“Well, why would you?”
“Right.”
“She called me,” I explained. “She said I had had a contract with her, and it had expired. She asked that I come and retrieve my things. Not knowing what else to do, I went to get them off her hands. Wait. You know about Anubis?”
“Yes,” he reluctantly confirmed.
“Are you in on this with Dora? What’s in the boxes, Tristan?”
“Not important. Forget about the boxes. You were doing just fine. You can keep them stored wherever they are…”
“They’re here. In the garage.”
“Well, just keep them there. Maybe secure the place; lock it up. And as for the boxes, you should just leave them be. Can you do that?”
Can you keep on being a wimpy non-opener, a forever-keeper?
“Tristan, what’s in the boxes?”
“Nothing of value, nothing of interest, nothing that will bring you luck or happiness or prosperity.”
“It’s not drugs, is it?”
He laughed. “What?”
“This is a serious question.”
“No. I can assure you it’s not drugs. I promise it’s nothing like that. I don’t know exactly what’s in them, but I can guarantee you’ll be better off forgetting all about them. You know the story about Pandora’s box? Well. Dora’s boxes are something like that.”
There was a long silence, then, as I considered the stark-raving-mad people in my existence.
“I’d rather you just left those boxes alone,” Tristan insisted. “Really. Please, believe me.”
I still didn’t know why, but I’d kept the boxes here for more than a week and had never missed them. True, if the choice was between listening to Dora or
to Tristan, I’d rather listen to him. But I didn’t trust him, either.
“All right,” I said, while thinking I’d better investigate the whole matter. “If it’s so important to you, I’ll just lock them up and forget about the whole thing.”
He seemed relieved. We said good night, and he hung up. I hesitated, fiddled with the lock again, until the front door opened and Linus called me.
“Vic, are you coming? We want to play now!”
I certainly had better things to do than preoccupy myself with weird but inept storage boxes.
“I’m coming,” I said, fully intending to come back later.
But I never did.
10
The song I’d written while I was at the Victory Bar was great. It was about a woman who’d forgotten her past and a man who came from a strange planet in a weird alternative future. The lyrics made no sense, but everyone in the band loved them anyway. And for some reason, Sam immediately came up with a great hook that then sent Thom into a trance, and he emerged out of it with something so stunningly simple, yet intricately poetic, that we were all instantly sold on it. We’d never put a song together so quickly.
“The country air is good for us!” Sam laughed.
I still suspected him to inhale more smoke than fresh air these days.
“See?” Linus smiled, while elbowing me in the ribs. “You say you can’t write and work at the same time, but it’s not true. This is our best piece yet.”
“Can we finish it for our first gig at your bar?” Thom worried. “Guys, we have to.”
It was “my” bar now.
We worked until midnight. After that session, I was so completely knackered that I went upstairs and fell onto my bed with all my clothes still on, only kicking off my shoes. My left foot was still wet from the puddle outside, and I hadn’t even remembered to take it off. Even realizing that, I fell asleep immediately.
Someone was shaking my shoulder and yelling into my ear.
“Victoire! Wake up! Wake up, NOW!”
“What? What time is it?” I gasped, sitting up.
I inhaled an acrid smell of smoke that made me cough. Linus was pulling on my arm frantically, and I got up to follow him, moving like a sleep-deprived robot. He was wearing pajama bottoms and nothing else, his hair completely crazy.
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