by Lavie Tidhar
‘They’re published here, aren’t they?’ he said into the girl’s silence. ‘In Paris.’ Her eyes were studying him, he realised. They were deep and dark like empty wells. ‘Yes…’ the girl said again. She looked away from him. The bartender arrived with their drinks, but the girl pushed hers away. ‘I think I’m solid enough,’ she said, to no one in particular. Joe looked at her figure and had to agree. Still he waited.
Perhaps it was his silence that made her pause and at last turn to him again. She was already in the process of getting off the bar-stool. ‘Are you one of them?’ she said. He didn’t know what she meant, but he said, ‘No.’ The girl stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, hard. ‘They want to find him too,’ she said. ‘They should leave Papa D alone.’
‘Who’s Papa D?’
The girl shook her head. ‘I better go,’ she said. She gave him a smile. She was turned in profile to him, had already dismissed him. ‘Wait,’ Joe said. ‘Please. I need to know.’
‘Why?’ the girl said. And turned fully to him then. ‘Why?’ she said again, looking into his eyes as if searching for something there, but not finding it. She shrugged, and it was a tired, weary gesture, and shook her head, and then she was gone, and the door to the bar closed softly behind her.
— hollow cells in a honey bee hive —
Algiers, the white city, Alger-la-Blanche, rises from the Mediterranean sea like a mirage. Its white buildings lie bleached in the sun like whalebones. Walking along the sea front, one can encounter both the Grand Mosque and the Casino. Albert Camus attended the lycée and later the university here. On the eleventh of December two bombs exploded, ten minutes apart, one in the Aknoun district and one in the Hydra neighbourhood.
Both were car bombs. Both contained eight hundred kilograms of explosives. The second bomb exploded on Émile Payen Street at 09:52, between the United Nations headquarters and that of the UNHCR — the UN High Commission for Refugees.
The UNHCR sat in a modest building, white with blue awnings over the windows facing the road. There was a flag above the door, a small courtyard, a notice-board outside. The building had a capacity for a staff of twelve. The UN as a whole had a total of one hundred and sixteen Algerian employees and eighteen internationals. The explosion levelled the building and tore through the UN headquarters opposite, stripping the walls and burying people under the rubble. The death toll included seventeen UN personnel, amongst them Algerians, a Dane, a Filipino and a Senegalese. A policeman guarding the office was also killed, as well as a DHL agent inside the UN building. Five other people, living close to the office, also died in the blast. Forty UN personnel were injured, some severely. The man driving the bomb truck was the first to die.
Many of the survivors remained behind, helping to clear the rubble, searching for people buried inside. They included the United Nations’ office cleaner, who was several months pregnant.
Twenty-two minutes earlier at 09:30, across town, the first car bomb exploded near the Supreme Constitutional Court. The building, done in a Moorish style, had been built by a Chinese construction company. As the walls disappeared, offices were revealed inside like the hollow cells in a honey bee hive. A bus passing by, packed with students on their way to lessons at the Ben Aknoun University, bore the full force of the explosion: it reduced its passengers into a thing resembling crushed pupae.
one of us
———
That evening Joe sat alone in a darkened cinema hall and watched the light playing on the screen, dust motes dancing in the path of the projected beam. It was an old film from the thirties, in black and white, and there were few people in the cinema. Joe sat in the back and had a whole row to himself, and an uninterrupted view. Above his head the beam of light from the projector travelled in a steady stream, resolving itself into old images as it hit the distant screen. The story seemed to be about a group of sideshow freaks. His mind felt dirty and soggy, like a cigarette butt stubbed into water. He still couldn’t sleep. He had stayed at the bar until the sunlight faded outside and street lamps began to come alive. He’d ordered the meal of the day, which was a stew with beans and fatty meat and carrots, served with bread. When the bartender brought over his plate he said, ‘You’re looking for the Greek?’
The food smelled good and it made Joe’s stomach rumble. Briefly he thought about the woman he had met at the airport. On-board meal, that’s all I can taste now, she had said. He grimaced. He lifted up his spoon, thought of the bartender’s question. The man was watching him patiently. He had a bald head and a pug nose and hair on the back on his hands. His eyes were a clear, calm blue. ‘I don’t know,’ Joe said. ‘Am I?’
The man shrugged. ‘No business of mine,’ he said affably. ‘Enjoy your meal.’
Joe ate. The bartender went back to polishing glasses. When Joe was finished the bartender returned and removed his plate. ‘Wait,’ Joe said.
‘Yes?’
‘Do you know who I’m looking for?’
The man shrugged. ‘Who are we all looking for?’ he said, with just the hint of a smile on his face. Joe said, ‘I need to know.’
‘We serve drinks and stew,’ the bartender said. ‘Everything else’s extra.’ He wandered off, carrying Joe’s plate.
Joe smiled; then he carefully inserted a twenty franc note under his by-now empty glass. When the bartender returned his eyes didn’t miss the note; and with a slight nod he went to refill Joe’s glass, putting a measure of whisky in and a new ice cube. The note had disappeared. ‘One for yourself?’ Joe said. The bartender shook his head. ‘I never drink,’ he said.
‘More for the rest of us,’ Joe said. The bartender smiled. ‘Sure,’ he said. He pulled up a chair and sat on the other side of the counter. Joe said, ‘Talk,’ and it made the bartender smile wider. ‘You didn’t sleep with her?’ the bartender said. ‘The girl that brought you here?’
‘Why would I — ? No,’ Joe said. The bartender nodded. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘She’s not all there, you know,’ he said, as if imparting a great secret. ‘Which can make it interesting, if you follow my meaning. At least, I think it would. Fuzzy around the edges, that girl. Especially if she’s not drinking.’ He shrugged again. ‘Not that there’s much chance of that.’
‘The Greek,’ Joe said, ignoring him with some effort. ‘Papa D. Who is he?’
‘Ah, so you are looking for him,’ the bartender said. ‘I thought as much. Didn’t mean to pry, mind, but I can’t help overhearing things.’
‘Sure,’ Joe said. ‘You can’t.’
The bartender gave him a long look, then seemed to decide to let it drop. ‘Not sure what I can tell you,’ he said at last. ‘The girls call him Papa D. His name’s Papadopoulos. Not sure what his first name is, if he even has one. Strange little man. Tubby. Book publisher, if you can call the things he publishes books. Half-Greek, half-Armenian, half-fuck-knows-what. Papa D.’
Joe lit a cigarette. The bartender fell silent, seemingly exhausted with the effort of producing such a concise biography. His math, Joe thought, was a bit off. He blew out smoke and said, in carefully-bored tones, the voice of a man checking items against an inventory on a clipboard, ‘What is the name of his publishing company?’
‘Medusa,’ the bartender said. They locked eyes. The bartender’s said, Don’t fuck me around, boy. Joe smiled and shrugged in a good imitation of the man. ‘You ever see him around?’
‘I see a lot of things,’ the bartender said. Joe said, ‘See this?’ and extracted a second note. He had used the black credit card again at the airport upon landing, taking it into the branch of the Crédit Lyonnais and asking to withdraw money. To his surprise, they gave him the money.
The bartender took the note and looked at it critically. Joe pulled on the cigarette and when he looked back the money had disappeared. There was something terribly familiar about the situation for him: his job required him to pay people for information, but he wondered how often the bartender went through the same routine, and what sor
t of questions he was asked. He also wondered if anyone had been asking the same questions he had.
‘Fat and small, like I said,’ the bartender said. ‘Looks a bit like a mushroom — just as white, too. Don’t think he sees the sun much.’ He and Joe exchanged a glance. Neither of them was seeing much sun either, just then.
‘Know where he lives?’
The bartender shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Know where to find him?’
The bartender thought about it. ‘No,’ he said.
Joe waited. ‘He comes here some times,’ the bartender said at last, reluctantly. ‘If not here, the shops around, you know. The sex shops. They sell his books. Also, he likes to pick up the girls. Like your drinking friend there. But Papa D, he doesn’t usually have the money.’
‘Seen him recently?’
The bartender shook his head.
That was then. He pulled himself back to the present, the even soothing sound of the projector in the booth above falling over him like a blanket. It didn’t help. He thought there was something wrong with the film, black and white figures going through an alien ritual while he was frozen, on the wrong side of the screen. The other watchers seemed frozen in their seats, bent statues made of weathered stone.
On the screen, the sideshow people were having a party. A tall woman was marrying a midget. Around the table were a pair of conjoined twins; two girls with no arms; a legless man and an entirely limbless one; a dwarf with a head resembling that of a bird; a skeletal man; a figure who was a man on one side of the body, a woman on the other; the midgets; and others. They were shouting. The words echoed around the dark cinema hall. One of us, the sideshow people were crying. One of us. One of us. Joe tried to light a cigarette and found that his hand was shaking. He rose from his seat and walked hurriedly through the door at the back, through the narrow corridor, the silent, empty foyer, and into the night outside. The air felt humid, feverish, but not of the tropics: a city’s smell hung on it like limp laundry, a smell of pavement slabs and concrete blocks and cars and fumes and smoke and food and urine and spilled alcohol and spilled tears, it was a smell of many lives. He walked back through empty streets to his hotel and climbed up the silent flights of stairs and to his room; and sleep at last claimed him.
being a detective
———
Finding the fat man had not been easy. In the morning he woke early, and took his coffee standing up beside an outdoors kiosk, with Sacré Coeur towering overhead. He took the Métro to Boulevard Haussmann and was stationed outside the post office at number 102 when it opened.
Joe was the first customer.
He located the post box easily enough. The post office was an old, run-down establishment on the ground floor of 102. There were apartments above. Inside, the sound of traffic was strangely diminished, and the lighting, too, was dim, and the floor was stained concrete, and the spots on the floor and walls could have been old blood stains from the German war or they could have been spilled coffee — either way they weren’t telling. The woman guarding the boxes did not ask him for identification but he still made a show of jingling keys in his pocket and going confidently, as if merely to collect his morning post. There were rows upon rows of small wooden doors set in the walls, thousands of boxes: already the first customers of the day were coming in, each wrapped in their own private universe, each going to their own small address, and for a moment the feeling came to Joe of the weight of expectations there, the pressing body of letters waiting just behind the little locked doors, beyond the thin makeshift wooden walls and the metal grilles that separated the inside and outside of this outpost. He thought of wild mail, living freely behind those doors; of lost mail, like buried treasure, waiting to be unearthed in dark booby-trapped tombs; and of the mail that wasn’t there but was hoped for, the unreal mail that would never be written or delivered, but still hoped for every day, still expected against all hope: We made a mistake, your daughter is alive. Please accept our apology, your son has been found well and is on his way back home. And then he shook his head, because he was being fanciful, and he had located the box, and now all he had to do was wait for the man to come and collect his post, because one thing a publisher had to do every day, if nothing else that day, was check his mail. He was tempted to break the lock and look inside, but decided against it. There would be time later, but for now he needed only to watch, and wait: which was ninety-five percent of being a detective.
By noon he had seen no sign of a man fitting the description of Papadopoulos. At one o’clock he bought half a baguette with ham and cheese and a thin mayonnaise, and washed it down with two small black coffees. At half past one he had to go in search of a bathroom, which he at last found in a local brasserie, where they grudgingly let him use it. At two o’clock he thought he saw someone fitting the description and followed him for forty-five minutes through twists and turns and stops that seemed very promising, until the man at last went into a butcher’s shop on Rue de Londres with pig heads staring mournfully through the glass: the man turned the sign on the door from Closed to Open, put on a white apron, and went behind the counter.
Joe decided to call it a day. As he walked back, the great grey structure of the Gare St. Lazare rose above him, and he watched the dark railway lines spread out from the station like a spider bite, their paths crisscrossing and hatching, and the great metal beasts of burden trudged along them, fleeing across the earth. His footsteps led him to the back of the station. It seemed a wild wasteland that took him by surprise. Beyond the gate, at the back of the station, pools of standing water littered the ground, and amidst them, like a still landscape, were strewn abandoned objects, broken and unwanted, like sacrificial offerings to St. Lazare. Joe paused as his shoes squelched in the water, and watched a man leap from a floating wooden ladder, his reflection caught in the smooth surface of the water. He saw bicycle tires, and disused pipes, a wet newspaper, an army helmet, clothes pegs, a broken torch, an upturned beer crate, a pair of spectacles with the glass missing, a toy monkey with its eyes missing, something that looked like the inside of an electronic device of some sort, all wires and copper, lines in complicated patterns, a milk bottle, an empty packet of cigarettes, a floating ticket stub, for a train or a cinema, a broken pencil, white toilet paper strewn this way and that like bandages that had been torn away from a rising corpse. All that and, as his eyes wandered over the sea of debris, that geography of abandoned human lives, further away and to the left, disappearing behind a corner: polished black shoes.
‘Hey!’ Joe shouted. ‘Wait!’ And he ran, following the shoes, but as he turned the corner there was nobody there. Joe swore. Then he said, ‘Enough,’ and turned, and went to the St. Lazare Métro station. The clouds were amassing overhead, and as he descended the steps into the underworld of the train network, a fine rain began steadily to fall.
everybody comes from somewhere
——
He thought about a post office box that wasn’t being collected, and he thought about a man in black shoes, and he wondered who was watching whom, and why, and then he thought about the train station, the grey edifice rising out of the Parisian soil like a ghostly castle, and he thought about trains: he liked trains. They made him feel safe. He thought about rain, because just as he was descending down to the platform, he glanced up, and a ray of sunlight had come through the clouds behind the rain, and for a moment he thought he saw her, the girl who came to him for his help, and she was looking at him, and her eyes were clouded. He had blinked, and the world was grey again, the clouds joining overhead, and the girl had gone, and he had most likely imagined it. He pictured her face, but it was like rain falling down on his memory, obscuring her face behind the drops, and he wondered why the thought of her made him feel the way he did, and then he drank what remained in his glass and ordered another one, s’il vous plait, merci, and lit a cigarette and thought of nothing at all.
This was the third or fourth bar he’d tried, each one
dingier than the other, in each subsequent one the music quieter, the lights dimmer, the drinking more intense. There were women there, from Asia and Africa and Europe, a cosmopolitan blend who all wore the same exaggerated makeup, the same too-short skirts, the same look in their eyes that was at once an evaluation and a wariness and an invitation, and deeper than that, a great restless tiredness resembling fear, and the men who came to the bars returned that look with one of their own, a corresponding mix of hunger and reticence and unvarnished need and a little bit of shame: they were a dance, Joe thought, an intricate wavering pattern criss-crossing and hatching like the web of train lines outside St. Lazare, criss-crossing and hatching, but never quite meeting, and if they ever did it would be fatal. It was the third or fourth bar, he couldn’t now recall, and the only illumination was provided by fat candle-stubs scattered across the room, and couples were dancing to the tune of some slow, mournful African jazz. There were hairy hands on naked thighs, lips touching ears, whispered words, a groping in the half-light, fabric rubbing against fabric in the close-dance, and beyond that, sitting against the bar, the solitary figures waiting or still deciding or, like himself: the lonely ones who wanted only drink.
It was there that she found him, the girl of the day before, and she sat herself on a stool beside him and her skirt rode high up her thighs and she smoothed it with a practiced hand and shook her hair back and looked at him, not smiling, not speaking either, but companionable.
‘You shouldn’t be drinking alone,’ she said. He didn’t reply.
