Woman in the Fifth

with huddled people, their heads down against the cold wind that had started to blow through the streets. I turned right, then took a sharp left into rue de Paradis. At first sight, it looked bland. It was long and narrow — a hodgepodge of characterless nineteenth-century architecture and the occasional modern block. At street level, it seemed dead on arrival — no visible signs of life; just some large wholesale outlets for china and kitchen equipment. Then I began to pass by a place marked Kahve. It was a large, faceless cafe — all fluorescent tubes and gray linoleum and the Istanbul Top Forty blaring on the loudspeaker systems. I peered inside. Men were huddled over tea and talking conspiratorially. A couple of late-morning drunks were asleep at the bar, and a low cloud of cigarette smoke hung over everything. The young, tough-guy bartender turned away from some soccer match on the television to look long and hard at me, wondering why I was loitering with intent outside this establishment. His hostile stare hinted that I should move on.

Which I did.

There were two more kahves on rue de Paradis. There were also a handful of Turkish restaurants and a couple of bars whose shutters were still pulled down at midday. I picked up my pace and stopped examining the street in detail. Instead, I started looking up to check numbers, noting the chipped paintwork on many of the buildings. Number 38 was particularly mangy — its facade blistered with chipped masonry and large yellow blotches, like the ingrained stains on a chain-smoker’s teeth. The front door — a huge, towering object — was also in need of several coats of black gloss. I looked around for some sort of entryphone, but just saw a button marked Porte. I pressed it and heard a telltale click. I had to put my entire weight against it to push it open. I pulled my bag in after me and found myself in a narrow corridor of battered mailboxes and brimming trash cans and a couple of fuse boxes from which loose wires dangled. Up ahead was a courtyard. I walked into it. Off it were three stairways — marked with the letters A, B and C. The courtyard was a small dark rectangle, above which loomed four blocks of apartments. The walls here were as ragged as their exterior counterparts, only now adorned with laundry that draped from windows and makeshift clothes lines. The aroma of greasy cooking and rotting vegetables was omnipresent. So too was a sign that dominated the far side of the courtyard: Sezer Confection (Sezer Ready-to-Wear). There was a separate stairway below this sign. I had to ring a bell to gain admittance. No one answered, so I rang it again. When there was still no answer, I leaned on the bell for a good fifteen seconds. Finally I heard footsteps on the stairs. The door opened and a young tough — dressed in a faded denim jacket with an imitation fur collar — opened the door. His upper lip boasted a meager mustache and he had a cigarette plugged between his teeth. His face radiated annoyance.

‘What you want?’ he asked in bad French.

‘I’m here to see Sezer.’

‘He knows you?’

‘Adnan told me—’

‘Where is Adnan?’ he asked, cutting me off.

‘I’ll explain that to Sezer.’

‘You tell me.’

‘I’d rather tell—’

‘You tell me,’ he said, his tone demonstrative.

‘He was controlled by the flics,’ I said.

He tensed.

‘When was this?’

‘Less than an hour ago.’

Silence. He looked over my shoulder, scanning the distant corridor. Did he think this was a set-up — and that I had brought ‘company’ with me?

‘You wait here,’ he said and slammed the door in my face.

I stood in the courtyard for the next five minutes, wondering if I should do the sensible thing and make a break for the street before he came back. But what kept me rooted to the spot was the realization that I owed it to Adnan to explain what happened — and to see if Sezer was the sort of connected guy who could pull strings and—

Oh sure. Just look at this back-street set-up. Do you really think the boss here is chummy with the sort of high-up people who will spring an illegal immigrant for him?

All right, what really kept me rooted to the spot was the realization, Right now, I have nowhere else to go … and I needed a cheap place to live.

The door was reopened by Mr Tough Guy. Again, he glanced over my shoulder to make certain the coast was clear before saying, ‘OK, you come upstairs to the office.’

We mounted a narrow staircase. I pulled my suitcase behind me, its wheels landing with an ominous thud on each stair. I’d seen enough film noir to imagine what I was walking into — a dirty smoke-filled office, with a fat slob in a dirty T-shirt behind a cheap metal desk, a drool-sodden cigar in a corner of his mouth, a half-eaten sandwich (with visible teeth marks) in front of him, girlie calendars on the walls, and three lugs in cheap pinstripe suits propping up the background.

But the office that I entered bore no relation to any office I’d ever seen before. It was just a room with dirty white walls, scuffed linoleum, a table and chair. There was no other adornment, not even a telephone — bar the little Nokia positioned on the table at which a man sat. He wasn’t the Mr Big that this clandestine build-up led me to expect. Rather, he was a rail-thin man in his fifties, wearing a plain black suit, a white shirt (buttoned at the collar), and small wire-rimmed glasses. His skin was Mediterranean olive and his head was virtually shaved. He looked like one of those secular Iranians who worked as a right-hand man to the Ayatollah, acted as the enforcing brain of the theocracy, and knew where all the infidel body parts had been buried.

As I was studying him, he was also assessing me — with a long cool stare that he held for a very long time. Finally: ‘So you are the American?’ he asked in French.

‘Are you Sezer?’

‘Monsieur Sezer,’ he said, correcting me.

‘Mes excuses, Monsieur Sezer.’

My tone was polite, deferential. He noted this with a small nod, then said, ‘Adnan left his job to rescue you today.’

‘I am aware of that. But I didn’t ask him to come to the hotel. It was the desk clerk, a total creep, who —’

Monsieur Sezer put up his hand, signaling me to stop this guilty-conscience rant.

‘I am just attempting to assemble the facts,’ he said. ‘Adnan left his morning job to come to the hotel to bring you here because you were in some sort of trouble with the management. Or, at least, that is what he told me before he left. Adnan was very fond of you — and was looking forward to having you down the corridor from him. Were you fond of him?’

A pause. The question was asked in a perfectly level, unthreatening way — even though its subtext was glaringly obvious.

‘I was very sick in the hotel — and he was very kind to me.’

‘By “very kind” do you mean … ?’

‘I mean, he showed me remarkable kindness when I could hardly stand up.’

‘What sort of “remarkable kindness”?’

‘I didn’t fuck him, OK?’ I said.

Monsieur Sezer let that angry outburst reverberate in the room for a moment or two. Then a small smile flashed across his thin lips before disappearing again. He continued as if he hadn’t heard that comment.

‘And when you left the hotel today with Adnan …’

I took him through the entire story, including Adnan telling me to walk ahead of him when we got caught between the two pairs of flics. He listened in silence, then asked, ‘You are married?’

‘Separated.’

‘And the reason you are in Paris … ?’

‘I am on sabbatical from the college where I teach. A sabbatical is kind of a leave of absence—’

‘I know what it is,’ he said. ‘They mustn’t pay much at the college where you teach, if you are interested in renting a chambre.’

I could feel my cheeks flush. Was I such an obvious liar?