“That’s insane.”
“Putting things right for another person isn’t insane.”
“It is when you resort to violent means to do it.”
“But look how everything is gradually working out for you. Robson is in jail. So too is Sezer and his nasty henchman . . . and you know they were both gunning for you. Omar tried to blackmail you. He’s been eliminated. Yanna’s husband didn’t deserve a further day of life on this earth. So I cannot really see how you can complain. Because, in time, things will come even more right for you.”
I stood up.
“Do you really think I’m going to buy into this madness?”
“You have already done so, Harry. You’ve been complicit in this from the start.”
“You mean, because I visualized you—the invisible woman—whereas others never did?”
“But why did you see me? Because you needed to. Just as you needed me to settle all the scores you so wanted resolved.”
“So you follow me everywhere, is that it?”
“Perhaps.”
“But why me?”
“What an absurd question. We are involved.”
“You call this an involvement? For you, it was an afternoon fuck twice a week, nothing more.”
“And for you, it was . . .?”
“The one thing I had in my life that I looked forward to.”
“Don’t you think I also looked forward to it? We didn’t just fuck in this room, Harry—and you know it. We talked. We told each other our stories. We found some comfort in that. I certainly grew to like it . . . and to need it. I mightn’t have always shown it. I might have discouraged you from getting closer . . . but you still did. You needed me—this—as much as I did you.”
“Well, if you think I’m going to keep coming back here, slipping into this little twilight zone you’ve set up here—”
“You can’t leave now,” she said, her voice quiet, flat.
“Yes, I can . . . and I will. Because this is now dead. As dead as you.”
“No, it’s not. Now that you know about me . . . now that you come into this place with me twice a week . . . now that I am the person who watches your back . . . this is not ending.”
“Fuck you,” I said, walking toward the door.
“A stupid response, Harry. But, I suppose, understandable. You will need time to accept—”
“I am accepting nothing. Got that? Nothing. You’re never seeing me again.”
“Yes, I am. And you’ll want to see me . . . or, at least, call out to me at some moment when you’re in a situation from which you can’t extricate yourself.”
“Don’t count on that. Stay away from me.”
“No, Harry . . . the real question here is: Can you stay away from me?”
“That won’t be hard to do,” I said and walked fast toward the door.
“See you in three days,” she said as the door closed behind me.
I raced downstairs. Once I had crossed the courtyard I stopped for a moment outside the concierge’s lodge. He was still sitting there, comatose to the world. I reached the main door. I hit the button to release the lock. This time it opened with a telltale click. I stepped out into the street. Automotive sounds filled my ears as cars drove by. I looked both ways. There were pedestrians on the rue Linné. The old guy in the corner shop was sitting behind his small counter, looking bored. Life was, per usual, going on around me. I returned to the front door of Margit’s apartment. Less than a minute had evaporated since I had crossed back into the quotidian world. I punched in the code. I stepped back inside the courtyard. I turned toward the concierge’s lodge. He was no longer in an inanimate state. On the contrary, as soon as he saw me he was on his feet, grabbing a large two-by-four by his desk, then stepping just outside the lodge and brandishing this club.
“You again? I told you to stay away. You go. Now.”
I did as requested, hightailing it back out into the street. I walked quickly toward the Jussieu metro station. Halfway there I got a bad case of the shakes. Is she with me right now? Does she shadow my every move?
I ducked into a café. I bought a double whisky. Even when added to all the other Scotch that Margit had poured into me, it still did little to dampen down my anxiety, my growing belief that I had lost all reason. I put my fingers to my nose, the same fingers that Margit had pushed into herself. Her smell was still there. I touched the bandage on my hand. She’s dead . . . and she bandaged that hand. I ordered another whisky. Think, think. No, don’t think. Just run. Go back to the hotel. Get your bag. Hop a cab to the Gare du Nord. Buy a ticket on the last train out tonight to London. But what about the novel? Fuck the novel. Run.
And then what? Without the novel I have nothing to show for my time here . . . nothing to do when I get to England. At least if I have the disk I can pick up the narrative again. I can give the day some shape by punching out my quota of words. I can tell myself, You are trying to accomplish something. So go back to the office and get the disk. There’s now nothing to fear. The place has been raided. Sezer and Mr. Tough Guy are locked up in some commissariat de police, and the cops are no longer interested in the place. Get the disk. You’ll be in and out of there in less than a minute. Then make a beeline for the Gare du Nord and slam the door on this entire deranged episode . . .
By the time I had left the café I had decided that a better strategy would be to go back to the office in the middle of the night . . . preferably right before dawn. If anyone was lying in wait for me—doubtful, but I was still paranoid—they would most likely give up an all-night stakeout by six. More important, I could sleep until five thirty—sleep now being a major need.
I forced myself out of the café and took the metro to the Gare du Nord, where I booked a ticket on the 7:35 Eurostar to London the next morning. I paid cash. As I counted out the notes, I again wondered if she was watching me buy the ticket. I jumped Line 4 back to Château d’Eau and walked into one of the many long-distance phone shops that lined the boulevard de Sébastopol. The place I entered looked like a fly-by-night operation—and was crowded with men trying to get through to relatives in Yaounde and Dakar and Benin and other West African cities. I bought a phone card and took my place at a crude plywood booth and made a call I was dreading, but couldn’t avoid. I checked my watch: 8:05 PM in Paris . . . 2:05 PM in Ohio. Susan answered on the second ring.
“Hi there,” I said.
“Harry?” she asked quietly.
“That’s right. How are you doing?”
“How am I doing? Terribly, that’s how. But you must know that already, otherwise why would you be calling after all this time.”
The angry tone was the one she always used with me during the final years of our marriage—when I never seemed to be able to do anything right, and when she seemed to have so completely fallen out of love with me.
“The only reason I haven’t called is because you barred me from—”
“I know, I know. Rub it in, why don’t you. Especially in light of—”
“Susan, I just called to see how you were. That’s all.”
A pause. I could hear her stifling a sob.
“He hanged himself this morning.”
Oh fuck.
“Robson killed himself?” I said.
“His name was Gardner—and yes, he hanged himself with a bedsheet in his cell early this morning. I just found out. Some asshole reporter from Fox News who called me and asked me for a comment. Can you imagine that?”
I said nothing. She continued, “Over the past week, I have lost everything. Everything. My job, my career. Now that it’s been revealed I was fucking the dean of the faculty, no one’s going to be hiring me in a hurry. Then there’s the little discovery that Gardner had a thing for naked seven-year-old girls and boys. I just can’t tell you how horrible it was to . . .”
Another stifled sob.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
“Stop trying to sound magnanimous . . . when I
know you must be gloating now that your nemesis . . .”
She broke off, crying. I said, “Susan, I want to talk to Megan.”
“Megan’s very upset right now. The news about Gardner’s crime . . . it was everywhere. All the kids at her school . . . well, you know how horrible children can be.”
“Will you tell her I want to speak to her?”
“All right.”
“Please ask her to send me an email if she wants me to phone her back. And if you need money or anything . . .”
“Are you still in Paris?”
“That’s right.”
“Working?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Then how can you have money?”
“I did have a job . . . nothing much . . . but I’ve saved a bit. So if things get tight . . .”
“I can’t deal with this . . . you . . . right now.”
Then, “I will tell Megan you called.”
The line went dead.
You’ve just overheard all that, haven’t you? You must be very proud of your handiwork. Another dead man to add to the tally of my adversaries you’ve rubbed out. And you expect me to be pleased . . . when all I can really feel is sheer overriding guilt.
Stop, stop. You need sleep. Deep restorative sleep. Take pills. Take whisky. Take whatever you can. Just get back to the hotel and hide under the blankets until day breaks and you can flee everything.
So I returned to my grim room in the Normandie. I repacked my bag. I set the alarm on my portable radio for 5:15 AM. I took pills, I climbed into the damp, saggy bed. I clutched the pillow against me. I kept hearing Margit say, “You can’t leave now.”
You know, don’t you? I’m abandoning you come morning and there’s nothing you can do to stop me getting on that train. Spook me all you want. Follow me spectrally to London. I’m still leaving. This is over.
The pills did their stuff. I conked out. When the radio snapped on seven hours later, I jumped up, certain that she was in the room with me. Did that mean she inhabited my unconscious as I slept? She watched me sleep, didn’t she? Just as she was standing nearby as I sat in that plywood cubicle, overhearing my conversation with Susan. And now she was plotting to get Susan and . . .
It’s morning. You’ve slept. The train leaves in just over two hours. Go get the disk. Go to the station. Vanish. And this will vanish with you. “Faith is the antithesis of proof.” She told you that as a way of playing with your head. The cut on your hand? You cut your hand, acting out this delusional fantasy. The concierge is right: you’ve lost it. Get the disk. Get the train. Find a sympathetic doctor. Get some pharmaceuticals to end this phantasmagoria in which you’ve been living. Get back to Planet Earth.
I stood in the tiny shower and turned my face up toward the enervated spray of water. I dressed quickly and was out the front door by five forty. The streets were empty, though a few stallholders in the market on the Faubourg Saint-Denis were taking deliveries from assorted vans. I turned up the rue des Petites Écuries, rolling my suitcase behind me, stealing a quick glance at the shuttered Internet café. Au revoir, Mr. Beard . . . and fuck you too. I reached my former place of work. I stopped at the top of the alleyway and peered down. Light was just breaking in the sky, casting a gray-blue tint on its cracked cobbles. No one could be seen lurking in the shadows. I turned back to the street. Empty, deserted, even devoid of cars. I checked onlooking windows. All shuttered or curtained. No one peering out at me. The coast was clear.
OK, here we go. Start counting and promise yourself by the time you reach sixty you’ll have come and gone.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, four-one . . .
I reached the front door and looked up and saw that the video camera had been prized off its bracket. Probably taken by the cops as evidence.
I had my key at the ready. I opened the door.
. . . nine-one-thousand, ten-one-thousand, eleven-one-thousand . . .
Inside, the corridor was empty, some police tape hanging limply in front of the steel door at the far end; a door now open. But I didn’t stop to inspect what was in this once-forbidden zone. I left my bag by the front door and dashed up the stairs, second key at the ready. I unlocked the door.
. . . seventeen-one-thousand, eighteen-one-thousand, nineteen-one-thousand, twenty-one-thousand . . .
My desk had been turned upside down, the emergency door pried open . . . the escape route that I never had to use. The cops had also pulled up much of the linoleum, but they hadn’t seen the small crevice above the emergency exit where I had secreted the disk.
. . . twenty-three-one-thousand, twenty-four-one-thousand, twenty-five-one-thousand . . .
I crossed the room and reached up into the crevice. My fingers touched the disk, but they now couldn’t gain purchase around it. Shit. Shit. Shit. I tried to pry a finger to one side of the disk in an attempt to push it forward, then started digging at it with my key.
But just as I started to edge it forward, something happened.
There was a large bang behind me as the office door slammed. And this was immediately followed by the sound of the lock being turned twice.
I dashed across the room and started yanking on the door handle. It wouldn’t give. I inserted my key and attempted to turn the lock. It wouldn’t budge. When I tried to pull the key out and start again, it remained frozen within the lock. I yanked and yanked on the key, jiggling it madly from side to side. It wouldn’t give. I kicked the door, two, three, four times. It wouldn’t give . . . it wouldn’t fucking give . . .
Then I heard another sound. A loud whoosh—followed by an explosion of hot air from the one ventilator shaft in the room. But this wasn’t just an overcharged blast from the heating system—as the air that blew out quickly turned into a gray toxic cloud. Within seconds, the room was fogged in, a sulfuric stench enveloping me, singeing my eyes, my lips, my nose, my lungs. I clawed my way through the cloud to the emergency exit. It was already starting to fill up with smoke, but after about ten steps I hit a pocket of fresher air. The corridor was so narrow I kept hitting my elbows off its sides as I ran toward its end.
But when I reached it, I didn’t run into a door that would lead me to some sort of freedom. I just hit a wall. A flat brick wall, against which I crashed. I fell down, stunned. The smoke billowed into the tunnel. All fresh air vanished. I began to choke, to gag, to spew blood through my nose. The cloud thickened. My lungs now felt scorched. I pitched over onto the dirt floor. I continued to gag, to vomit. And I screamed, “Margit! . . . Margit! . . . Margit!”
Nothing happened . . . except that breathing became impossible.
“Margit! . . . Margit! . . . Margit!”
My voice was stifled now, my vision fading. And somewhere within all the vaporous confusion, there was one pervading thought: So this is what death is . . . a slow choke to black.
“Margit! . . . Margit! . . . Mar . . .”
My voice was fading. I coughed, I sputtered, I heaved. I should have panicked because death was near. Instead, I began to surrender to asphyxiation. The panic was replaced by a weird calmness: a sense that dying—even in such appalling circumstances—was the most natural of progressions. You’re here. You’re not. And everything beyond this smoke-filled room simply continues on.
But the moment I accepted that death was nothing strange, the strangest thing happened.
The door burst open and a fireman dashed in. He was wearing a gas mask and carrying a spare in his hand. He grabbed me and slung the mask over my face. As the rush of oxygen hit, he said two words, “Lucky man.”
TWENTY
I SPENT THE NEXT five days in the hospital. My condition—I learned later—was initially listed as “serious, but stable.” No burns, but I had suffered severe smoke inhalation and there were worries about the lasting effect on my lungs. My eyes had also been badly singed by the toxic fumes. For the first forty-eight hours they were covered with saline compresses until the inflammation died down. I was a
lso attached to a respirator until the pulmonary specialist ordered a further set of X-rays on me and then decided that, though they had received a scorching, the damage to my lungs would be repaired in time.
“But don’t even think about getting on a plane for the next six months,” he told me. “Any change in cabin pressure could seriously damage the entire pulmonary system, with fatal consequences. You will simply have to stay put for a while, and consider yourself fortunate to have survived such an incident.”
Everyone who attended me in the hospital told me how fortunate I was. The police too. Even Coutard—who came by to see me once I was taken off the respirator. As became quickly apparent, his reasons for seeing me had little to do with inquiring after my health.
“Providence was with you,” he said, pulling up a chair next to my bed. “The fireman who rescued you told me that if he had arrived three minutes after he did, you would have definitely died.”
“Lucky me, then.”
“It’s not uncommon to feel depressed after such a close escape. But I’m certain the doctors here can give you something for that as well.”
“I’m fine, under the circumstances.”
“We’ve charged someone with the arson and attempted murder. I think you know him: a Monsieur Delik, who works at the Internet café on the rue des Petites Écuries?”
“A guy with a beard and a less-than-sunny disposition?”
“The very gentleman. We have reason to believe that he attempted to burn down the building on the order of Monsieur Sezer—who, as you may remember, is still in custody for ordering the murder of Monsieur Attani over a bad debt. Sezer was your landlord and your employer . . . though he never let on that he was the boss behind that charming establishment where you played night watchman. Delik ran the Internet café after his predecessor, Monsieur Kamal Fatel, was found murdered on the Périphérique. Monsieur Delik has confessed to killing Monsieur Fatel over a dispute about a kilo of heroin that seems to have gone astray while in Fatel’s possession. Delik was promised half-ownership of the café if he would eliminate Fatel, whom Sezer thought was also trying to muscle in on several of his enterprises.
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2 Page 64
