He didn’t bother to check.
Outside in the hall, which was really just a landing not one metre wide, a man and a woman trudged up the staircase, breathing hard between snatches of conversation. Footfalls passed by the door and the couple worked their way up to the next
étage.
The couple’s desultory remarks diminished. A door opened and then closed. Silence returned to the hotel. Out of the little window adjacent to the bed, several floors down via an airshaft, along the narrow alley to its mouth, a feeble klaxon marked the slow progress of a police Peugeot threading through traffic on the boulevard Clichy. On the way to some place else.
No, Akhmed thought. I cannot blame this man for my life.
He took a bird bath at the sink and soaped his split knuckles. It felt good. Then he gathered Bruce’s effects and decamped.
That felt good, too. Akhmed had pulled off a bigger job than normal, and felt like thereby he’d improved on his circumstances. Which he had. Bruce’s wallet, cellphone, watch, the opal ring, the credit cards, but especially the passport, brought Akhmed some thirty-five hundred euros.
He took the money and went home to his mother for a while.
It felt good, when he considered how this largesse had come about; which, soon enough, was never.
* * * *
It took six weeks for the bruises to revert through purple, blue and yellow to the natural sallowness of Bruce’s skin, better than two months for the two broken ribs to heal and for his piss to stop going pink except every once in a while, and even longer for the lousy French dentist to grind the posts and take the mould and design and build and fit and finally install a bridge for the two lower front teeth that had been knocked out. The guy didn’t even wear latex gloves, for chrissakes, while he had his hands in Bruce’s mouth, and he reeked of cigarettes. What the hell, Bruce wryly reflected, maybe it had become his destiny to have to pay for any kind of dirty behaviour, getting old isn’t for sissies, and the dentist had to take his hands out so Bruce could laugh without choking on mirth.
No matter the time, however, for it took him the better part of three months to gather up a new passport and replacement credit cards – forget the keys to the French couple’s apartment, which for some reason Akhmed had stolen too, even though he had no idea where Bruce lived. You think you can pay two bucks for a lousy key in Paris, like you can in the States? Forget it, mon vieux. It turns out that a French key, some of the designs of which are hundreds of years old, can easily cost a hundred euros. Some have to be hand-forged, for chrissakes. Losing your keys in Paris is a very big deal, very expensive. Dealing with a Parisian locksmith is very much like dealing with a hairdresser: they’re artists!
But that inconvenience, too, passed, and in the course of these things Bruce learned a lot about the French language, the French people, Paris, bureaucracy, and keys. He learned that a kidney is
un rein.
He learned that there are as many French words for keys as there are Eskimo words for ice. He already knew that a civil servant is called a
fonctionnaire
, but he discovered that, whereas such a beast is held in almost universal contempt, the true example of it is a proud creature, able to perform miracles on a whim. Not only that, but many of them are queer, they have parties and disposable income and houses in the country and, moreover, some of them know Paris like, surprise surprise, like Bruce knows lower Manhattan, inside and out.
In other words, by the time four or five months had passed, a whole new world had opened up. And before Bruce knew it, it was nearly time for him to go back to New York.
He had learned a lot in his stay in Paris. He retained a certain satisfaction. He had begun to run with a tonier crowd, too, much like the various crowds he’d occasionally run with in New York, which consisted for the most part of
boursiers
, for example, men who worked in the stock exchange; and bankers, other government officials, real estate agents, and so forth. Professionals.
But what he hadn’t learned always lingered in the back of his mind. The polite doings of his new friends could be amusing. They enjoyed a cocktail and could talk – boy, could they talk. They knew wine and France and food. They knew contemporary culture, they knew a great deal about America, they knew a great deal about the long, complicated history of France.
Bruce noticed that his new friends smoothly, adroitly, and almost certainly avoided topics like Vietnam, Algiers, Congo, the Middle East, and the hegemony of American consumerism. Finally, one night, one man among them who, though not uncivilised, nurtured some obvious antipathy towards him, drank enough to express loudly and clearly and in so many words that the reason nobody talked to Bruce about certain topics was that Americans don’t know fuck-all about the rest of the world, and for the very simplest of reasons, which is that Americans don’t care fuck-all about the rest of the world, because they only care about themselves, and, pay attention, forty per cent of American high-school students can’t find their own fucking country on a fucking globe.
Bruce took umbrage. He suddenly found himself in the very uncomfortable position of defending not only himself, but his patrimony. Which was ridiculous. Why was it ridiculous? Because, in fact, as his arguments unravelled, his antagonist – hesitant at first, for he didn’t want to make a scene, but, sensing that Bruce’s entire political acts consisted of little more than know-nothing bluster – proved himself devastatingly correct. Bruce didn’t know anything about the rest of the world. He supposed he’d allowed himself to lose track of the names of the President of Israel, for example, not to mention that of the leader of the Palestinians, forget Syria, even though the titular head of Syria had been there his entire adult life, and never mind the name of a single other so-called foreign leader. Bruce kept his head to the extent that he managed not to blurt out that he’d stopped voting ages ago, mainly so he would never be called for jury duty, but the fact of it stuck in the forefront of his mind and stayed there, hindering his wit to the extent that he could name no more than two out of three personalities prominent upon the political landscape of France itself, not even a woman conspicuous among French leaders friendly to the idiotic foreign policies of the United States, despite the great cost to her domestic popularity.
Finally, as much as the average French fairy with a drink in his hand appreciates a good political debate, the atmosphere at the party began to sag under the imbalance of the argument.
Cela suffit, Alain. Alors
, the man’s friends began to say to him, back off, let’s have a drink. And yeah, Bruce found himself saying, in English, I didn’t come here to talk about politics, I came here to get laid.
A silence fell over the room. Bruce realised, too late, what he already well knew, that not only did damn near everybody in the room speak more English than he spoke French, but he had just lost the argument all over again.
Bonne chance!
somebody observed, not too quietly, and a few too many people laughed a little too loudly and altogether genuinely.
No loss, Bruce told himself, struggling for composure, in the lift down to the street, alone except for a little lady in a sweater with a dog likewise, I never liked any of those besuited fucks anyway.
* * * *
Though it was the last week of his scheduled tenure, Bruce paid but little mind to the details of his departure. The plane reservation had been secured at the beginning of the trip. Physically, he’d left but little impression on the apartment. He hadn’t burned five sticks of wood from the quintal.
Increasingly, however, as the day approached, something nagged at him. He knew what it was. He’d been putting it off, why or how or when he hadn’t bothered or been able to discern, but suddenly, with three days to go, his mind was made up.
He went to the ATM in the little triangular place and withdrew five hundred euros.
He took a late supper – it was long past dark – in the deserted bistro opposite the teller machine, drinking an entire carafe of Cotes du Rhone with his
pommes frites
and
steak pavé,
and only varied the routine by calling for a pricey
bas armagnac
with his coffee afterwards.
Vogue Homme
, an element of his habitude, remained face down beyond his place setting, unpursued.
At half past midnight he headed up the rue de la Tour d’Auvergne. And did Bruce notice the five-gallon wooden molar hanging, brown roots and all, barely two metres above the sidewalk, marking a long-shuttered bar called La Dent Creuse, The Hollow Tooth, the French equivalent, as goes capacity for drink, of the hollow wooden leg? He did not. Just up the block, at rue des Martyrs, he took a right. All the shops were closed. Traffic was light.
At Pigalle, things were different. The never-moving neon wings of the Moulin Rouge loomed scarlet over a thronging abundance of tourists of sex and otherwise, as well as hustlers and pickpockets and every sort of prostitute and dope dealer, as well as people like himself, on the way to some place else, more or less.
He took the alley past the hotel, up to the deadend street. At the foot of the steps, which lead up to the rue des Abbesses, he took a left. The shadows were there. They rippled on the cobbles. The sound of high heels receded down the curve at the far end of the street. It had been nearly five months.
Akhmed was there.
So was Bruce.
They each had something, one for the other.
LA SHAMPOUINEUSE by JEROME CHARYN
1.
He lived in a honeycomb, a prison with wallpaper and a panoramic view. He could have climbed right into the graves of Maupassant and Maria Montez from his balcony window. But Calvin Morse wasn’t supposed to climb. He wasn’t supposed to walk or fly or leave his honeycomb. He was an accountant on the lam from federal prosecutors and a little gang of mob bankers and lawyers.
Until last week he worked for a factory that made faucets – faucets of silvered chrome – that went into every building put up by Joshua Lightning’s own construction company. Lightning & Lightning was a kind of corporate octopus, but Calvin had been the full-time accountant for its largest affiliate, Lightning Faucets & Chrome. How could he have guessed that the ingenious way he cooked Joshua’s books would be copied by Lightning & Lightning’s other accountants, and that federal prosecutors would consider him the brains behind the whole octopus?
If he hadn’t gone to Columbia with Josh, roomed with him for three years, he would have been disposed of, dumped into a truck, and become part of lower Manhattan’s landfill. But Josh had pleaded Cal’s case with the mob bankers, had convinced them that he could hide Cal, keep him out of harm’s way. Josh would have preferred that he disappear into Bolivia or Brazil, where gringo prosecutors would never find him, but Paris had always been Cal’s dreamland, ever since he read Baudelaire and Maupassant at Columbia.
He’d gone to work for Josh’s dad right out of college, had to attend accounting school at night, and slave for Lightning Faucets & Chrome – he’d been married and divorced, had one daughter at Amherst and a second daughter at Yale, and all his vacations up until now had been packaged retreats that Lightning & Lightning put together and paid for: the Bahamas, Cape Cod, the Hemingway country of Key West.
Cal had five million in a retirement account, held at Lightning & Lightning’s own private bank, but he was having a crisis long before federal prosecutors swooped down on Lightning’s books, which were almost like fairy tales with elaborate fictional plots. He couldn’t bear his accumulations of money. His daughters went to Joshua for their tuition, not to Cal. He’d always been absent, even while he was at Faucets & Chrome. He was a walking, talking filament of fire, a hot wire that could create or swallow up a whole column of numbers and categories – he was like a musical instrument that had learned to play itself. In fact, his only pleasure had come from his manoeuvrings with a sea of lines on a ledger book. He’d never been in love, and his connection to his daughters was so ambiguous and remote that it too was at the point of disappearing.
But there was a touch of eccentricity to Cal – his passion for Paris, a city he had only seen once in a mad weekend whirl when he accompanied Joshua to a convention of faucet makers at some
palais
in the middle of nowhere – he’d barely had time for a pilgrimage to Baudelaire’s grave, a hike in Montparnasse, a visit to the Dingo, where Hemingway had first met Scott Fitzgerald. Yet that weekend had sculpted Cal, defined him in some essential way – and his dream, or delirium, was to escape Lightning Faucets and live in that city of desire he knew so little about.
And now he hid in a luxurious apartment with a bird’s-eye view of Maupassant. He hadn’t realised that his flat on the rue Boulard would be just another tomb. Joshua had commanded him never to venture into the street – not even after midnight. All his meals were prepared by the concierge, a Portuguese woman who also dusted the apartment and did his laundry. He had 180 channels he could watch on a plasma screen that covered an entire wall. A call girl visited him on Tuesdays, a ravishing
métisse
with green eyes and mocha skin. Her name was Mélodie. She was a
figurante
at some theatre company in the provinces, could recite Molièere and Shakespeare, and talk to Cal about books until he was blue in the face. The sexual splendour she offered was beyond the realm of what he might have imagined, and yet something gnawed at him. Mélodie could deliver all the mechanics of love, even camaraderie and companionship, but it felt like the dress rehearsal for a play that Cal would never be in.
He had a suspicion that Mélodie might be spying on him, and he wondered if she was Joshua’s own mulatto mistress. She knew things about Cal she ought not to have known, that he was a fanatic about fantasy baseball, had used his command of statistics to invent his own baseball league, where Babe Ruth could bat against Sandy Koufax, and Joe DiMaggio could duel with Willie Mays in centrefield – Cal’s artistic trick was to merge time and space in his fantasy league, as if the whole history of baseball could collapse into one titanic season. He’d ‘cooked’ baseball with the same imaginative leap in which he’d cooked Lightning’s books.