Woman in the Fifth

I said nothing. I just headed to the door.

‘Aren’t you waiting for Adnan?’ he asked.

‘Tell him I’ll be in touch.’

‘Lover’s tiff?’

That stopped me in my tracks. I wheeled around, my right hand raised. Brasseur took a step backwards. But then, like any bully who realized that his provocation wouldn’t result in instant retaliation, he looked at me with contempt.

‘With any luck, I will never see you again,’ I said.

‘Et moi non plus,’ he replied. The same to you.

I showed him my back and hit the street, where I ran straight into Adnan. It was hard to hide my surprise — and discomfort — in meeting him.

‘Didn’t Brasseur tell you I was coming?’ he asked.

‘I just decided to wait outside,’ I lied. ‘I couldn’t stand being in there anymore.’

Then I told him what had transpired in the room — after Brasseur had made his charming insinuations.

‘He thinks all Turks are pedes,’ he said, using French slang for homosexuals.

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ I said, also mentioning what he’d said about catching the homme a tout faire with the chef.

‘I know the chef — Omar. He lives in the same building as me. He is bad.’

And he quickly changed the subject, saying that Sezer — the manager of the building where he lived — would be expecting us within the hour. Then, taking the handle of my roll-bag (and refusing my protestations that I could wheel it along myself ), he guided us a sharp right up the rue Ribera.

‘Brasseur said he called you at your other job,’ I said as we headed toward the metro.

‘Yes, I do a six-hour shift every day at a clothes importer near to where I live.’

‘Six hours on top of the eight at the hotel? That’s insane.’

‘And necessary. All the money from the hotel job goes home to Turkey. The morning job …’

‘What time does it start?’

‘Seven thirty.’

‘But you only get off work here at one a.m. By the time you get home …’

‘It’s about a half-hour by bicycle. All the metros stop just before one. Anyway, I don’t need much sleep, so …’

He let the sentence die, hinting he didn’t want to keep talking about all this. Rue Ribera had a slight incline — and though it was one-lane wide and lined with apartment buildings, the morning sun still found a way of beaming down on this narrow thoroughfare. In the near distance, a father — fortyish, well dressed, well heeled — walked out of some venerable building with his teenage daughter. Unlike most adolescent girls she wasn’t in the midst of a vast, perpetual sulk. Rather, she laughed at something her dad said to her, and then made a comment which caused him to smile. The rapport between them was evident — and I could not help but feel a crippling sadness.

I stopped momentarily. Adnan glanced at the family scene, then back at me.

‘Are you all right?’

I shook my head.

We moved on to the avenue Mozart and the Jasmin metro station. We took the line headed toward Boulogne. When the train arrived, I saw Adnan quickly scanning the carriage — making certain it was free of officialdom — before guiding us on to it.

‘We change at Michel-Ange Molitor,’ Adnan said, ‘then again at Odeon. Our stop is Chateau d’Eau.’

It was just two stops to our first change point. We left the metro and followed the signs for Line 10, heading toward Gare d’Austerlitz. As we walked down a flight of stairs, I insisted on taking my bag from Adnan. We reached the bottom of the stairs, then followed a long corridor. At the end of it were two flics, checking papers. Adnan froze for a moment, then hissed, ‘Turn around.’

We executed a fast about-face. But as we headed back along the corridor, another two flics appeared. They couldn’t have been more than thirty yards in front of us. We both froze again. Did they see that?

‘Walk ahead of me,’ Adnan whispered. ‘And when they stop me, keep walking. You go to Chateau d’Eau, then to 38 rue de Paradis — that’s the address. You ask for Sezer …’

‘Stay alongside me,’ I whispered back, ‘and they probably won’t stop you.’

‘Go,’ he hissed. ‘38 rue de Paradis.’

He slowed down his gait. But when I tried to stay by him, he hissed again, ‘Allez rue de Paradis ! ‘

I started walking toward the flics, feeling the same sort of disquiet that comes over me on those rare instances when I have encountered the police or customs officers: an immediate sense that I must be guilty of something.

As I came into their direct line of vision, I could see the flics looking me over, their faces impassive while their eyes took in everything about my appearance. Five feet away from them, I expected the words, ‘Vos papiers, monsieur.’ But they remained silent as I passed by. I remounted the stairs, then stopped, loitering with intent as I waited in the futile hope that Adnan would follow right behind me. Five minutes passed, then ten. No Adnan. I decided to risk walking downstairs again. If the flics were there, I could plead that I was just a dumb American tourist who had lost his way. But when I reached the corridor again, it was empty.

There was a moment of awful realization: They’ve nabbed him … and it’s all your fault.

This was followed by another awful thought: What do I do now?

Allez rue de Paradis.

Go to Paradise.

Four

PARADISE.

But before I got there, I had to first pass through Africa.

When I emerged from the Chateau d’Eau metro, I was in another Paris. Gone were the big apartment buildings and their well-heeled residents in their expensive casual clothes, loading well-groomed children into their shiny SUVs. Chateau d’Eau was dirty. There was rubbish everywhere. And grubby cafes. And shops that sold cheap synthetic wigs in garish colors like purple. And storefront telephone exchanges, advertising cheap long-distance rates to Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroun, Senegal and the Central African Republic and Burkina Faso and …

I was the only white face in sight. Though the mercury was hovering just above the freezing mark, the boulevard was crowded, with a lot of cafe conversations spilling out on to the street, and people greeting passers- by as if they were in a small village, and merchants selling vegetables or exotic candy from carts. No one eyed me suspiciously. No one gave me a telltale look, saying I had wandered into the wrong corner of town. I was ignored. Even the elderly black man I stopped to ask for directions to the rue de Paradis seemed to look right through me — though he did point up a side street and uttered one phrase, ‘Vous tournez a droite au fond de la rue,’ before moving on.

The side street brought me out of Africa and into India. A row of curry houses, and video shops with Bollywood posters in their windows, and more telephone exchanges — only this time the rates were for Mumbai and Delhi and they were also advertised in Hindi. There were also a lot of cheap hotels; giving me a fast, grim alternative for a few nights if the chambre de bonne turned out to be beyond bad, or if this guy Sezer was a trickster and I had walked into some class of set-up.

I had to cross the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis — a scruffy food market with more cheap shops, brimming