Woman in the Fifth

spaces in the Tenth and pushing property prices way up. I promise you, eighteen months from now this cafe will be a chic restaurant or a boutique that sells expensive soaps. Within two years, the only Turks you will find around here will be the waiters.’

‘And what will you do?’ I asked.

‘Survive, comme d’habitude. Do you want to reply to this email?’

‘Yes,’ I said and reached for a pad by the computer and scribbled:

Dear Mrs Pafnuk

I have found what Adnan left behind. How would you me to transfer it to you?

Yours sincerely

I handed the note to Kamal.

‘How much money did you find?’ he asked.

‘How do you know it was money?’ I asked.

‘Do not worry. I will not come to your room tonight, and beat you over the head with a hammer and take it.’

‘That’s nice to know.’

‘So it was a large sum?’ ‘A good sum, yes.’

He looked at me with care.

‘You are an honorable man,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’

Two days later, there was a return email from Mrs Pafnuk. She asked me to send the ‘item’ by Western Union telegraphic exchange to their office in Ankara. ‘I will be visiting Adnan on Sunday and can collect it then.’

After translating her email, Kamal said, ‘There is a Western Union on the boulevard de la Villette, near the Belleville metro.’

‘I’ll head there right after this.’

‘Come on, tell me. How much money did you find?’

I hesitated.

‘OK, don’t tell me. I was just curious.’

‘Four grand,’ I said.

He whistled through his teeth.

‘You must be very rich to have decided to inform Adnan’s wife about all that cash—’

‘If I was rich,’ I said, cutting him off, ‘I would hardly be living in a chambre de bonne on the rue de Paradis.’

‘That is true,’ Kamal said. ‘Then you are evidently a fool.’

I smiled.

‘A complete fool,’ I said.

I returned to my room and crouched down by the sink and removed the tile and pulled out the plastic bag. Then I stuffed every pocket of my jeans and my leather jacket with the rolled-up money. I felt like a drug dealer. It was around 5 p.m. Night was falling, and I moved quickly through the streets, terrified that irony might strike me at any moment, in the form of the first mugger I’d encountered in Paris — a thug who would have hit the jackpot had he decided I was a suitable target this evening. But my luck held all the way to the boulevard de la Villette. At the little Western Union branch, the clerk behind the grille — an African woman with an impassive face and eyes that showed her suspicion — said nothing as I dug out roll after roll of banknotes. When she had counted them all, she informed me that the cost of sending four thousand euros to Ankara would be one hundred and ten euros — and did I want this sum deducted from the four grand?

I did want it deducted, but …

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay for that on top of the four thousand.’

After finishing the Western Union transfer, I returned to Kamal’s cafe and had him email Mrs Pafnuk with the reference number she required for collecting the money. When he finished sending this communique, he got up and went behind the bar and produced a bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch, and said, ‘Come on, we drink to your honesty and your stupidity.’

Over the next hour, we drained most of the bottle of Scotch. It had been a very long time since I had downed so much alcohol in one go — and it felt pretty damn good. Kamal told me he was born in Istanbul, but arrived in Paris three decades ago as a five-year-old. ‘My parents were legal immigrants, so there was no problem with the authorities. But being sent straight into a French school in Saint-Denis was a nightmare. I didn’t speak a word of the language. Happily, nor did half the other children at the school. Still, I caught on to French quickly — because I had no choice. And now … now I have a French passport.’

‘But are you French?’

‘I see myself as French. But the French still see me as an immigre. You are always an outsider here unless you are French. It’s not like London, where everyone is an outsider — the English included — so the city is a big stew. Here the French keep to the French, the North Africans to the North Africans, the Turks to the Turks. Tant pis. It doesn’t bother me. It is just how things are.’

He didn’t reveal too much information about himself. There was a wife, there were two young children, but he mentioned them in a passing sort of way, and when I asked their names, he steered off that subject immediately, turning it back to me, finding out what I did in the States, and discovering that my marriage had recently ended.

‘Who was the other woman?’ he asked.

‘That’s a long story.’

‘And where is she now?’

‘That’s another long story.’

‘You are being reticent.’

‘Like yourself.’

A small smile from Kamal. Then: ‘So what do you do now?’

‘I’m trying to be a writer.’

‘That pays?’

‘No way.’

‘So how do you live?’

‘With great care. Six weeks from now, my money will run out.’

‘And then?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Are you looking for work?’

‘I have no carte de sejour — and it’s very difficult for Americans to get work permits here.’

‘You could ask around at the various universities and colleges.’

No, I couldn’t — because that would mean them checking up on my background, and demanding references from the college where I taught for ten years. And once they found out what happened …

‘That would be difficult,’ I said.

‘I see,’ he said quietly, then reached for his cigarettes. ‘So you are in a bad place, yes?’

‘That’s one way of saying it.’

‘So … might you be interested in a job?’

‘Like I said, I’m illegal …’

‘That wouldn’t matter.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the job I’m proposing wouldn’t be legal, that’s why.’

Seven

THE ‘JOB’ WAS an easy one.