Woman in the Fifth

‘I suppose it doesn’t,’ he said.

A wave of tiredness hit me. I slumped against the pillows on the bed. Coutard took the hint and stood up.

‘The doctors say you will be discharged in a few days. What will you do then?’

‘Find a new place to live and try to finish my novel. That’s the only reason I was in the office that night, to retrieve the disk that I had left there …’

‘Yes, I had read that in the statement you gave Inspector Leclerc yesterday.’

‘Did he also tell you that if you had given me back my laptop, I wouldn’t have had to return there for the disk … ?’

Click. Click. Click.

‘The laptop was part of an ongoing investigation,’ he said. ‘Had you had a disk in your room …’

I did have a disk in my room. But she took it when she trashed the place. To panic me. To force me back to the office so she could lock me in and set fire to the place and leave me no option but to cry out for her help. Whereupon …

‘When can I get the laptop back?’ I asked.

‘In time.’

‘Might I, at least, get a copy of the novel transferred to a disk?’

‘In time.’

I shut my eyes. I said nothing.

‘We will, no doubt, be in touch,’ Coutard said. ‘We will naturally need your new address once you are discharged from here … so we will know where to contact you when the laptop is ready to be returned.’

And to know where to keep tabs on me.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘You’re a free man now,’ Coutard said.

I am not free.

They kept me in hospital for a further five days. Leclerc came by on the final day with a copy of a statement for me to sign — a reiteration of my story of how I had been locked into the office as the fire started, and how I had been in the employ of Monsieur Sezer who had always kept the nature of the activities in the building a secret from me.

‘This will lend weight to the accusation that he ordered Delik to destroy the building and yourself at the same time.’

They were also buying my story about not knowing what went on downstairs, while framing a man for a crime he didn’t commit. But isn’t that how all narratives are framed? We apportion blame to some, excuse others, and hope that the tidy package will end the story in a satisfactory way. If I now started talking about how the fire was all down to ‘her’, that would complicate the way they wanted the story to work — and it might lead to me being transferred to the nearest rubber room. Anyway, Delik was guilty of other things. We all are.

I signed the statement. As I handed it back, Leclerc said, ‘You must feel vindicated after what happened to the gentleman who orchestrated your problems in the States.’

So they had continued to track the Robson story. Then again, they were cops. And cops tracked anything that had to do with tracking you.

‘I orchestrated my problems,’ I said. ‘Whatever I feel about that man, I still pity him.’

‘You are more magnanimous than I would be, under the circumstances.’

Magnanimous. That word again. I wasn’t magnanimous. I was just aware of a third party controlling everything.

‘You seem to be on the mend,’ he said as he was leaving.

Nothing’s mended.

But they did give me my walking papers the next day. Using the phone directory the day before I had come across a great find: an actual one-star hotel in the Sixth. The guy on the desk sounded pleasant. Yes, they had a room available — seventy euros a night. ‘But you say you need it for three or four weeks? Then I can reduce it to sixty euros per night.’

I did some fast math. Four-twenty a week and another one-fifty in living expenses. I had just enough to fund the next month and a half.

And then? And then? How will you survive?

No idea.

The hotel was on the rue du Dragon. As I got out of the taxi with my suitcase, I scanned the street. Shoe shops everywhere. Expensive women in expensive clothes. Tidy pavements. Tourists. Businessmen in suits. Good restaurants. Money.

The hotel was agreeable in a fusty old-fashioned way. But it was clean, and the bed was hard, and the floor- to-ceiling windows let in considerable light, and the two men who ran the front desk remained professionally polite. I was also within walking distance of fifteen cinemas. But venturing out was not something I was interested in doing right now. The effects of smoke inhalation were still very much with me. I tried a shortish walk to the Odeon and a secondhand English-language bookshop on rue Monsieur-le-Prince. But after buying four paperbacks, I found the walk home to the hotel a strain — and I collapsed in bed for the rest of the day. The hospital had provided me with three small canisters of oxygen — each with a plastic mouthpiece attached to the top. The nurse in charge of me told me to administer four or five blasts of oxygen whenever shortness of breath arrived. By the end of my first day at the hotel, one of the cans was nearly empty. I could hardly sleep that first night — not just because of my irregular, painful breathing … but also because at five the next afternoon, I was due back at rue Linne.

Because I was still attached to a ventilator I had missed our rendezvous three days ago. I figured she understood that — and would excuse it. But as she was following my every move, she also knew I was mobile enough to have checked into this hotel. So I would be expected to show up at her place tomorrow without fail.

I stayed in bed all that day, tiredness still overwhelming me. I left the hotel at four forty. I walked to the taxi rank on the boulevard Saint-Germain. There was — miraculously for rush hour — a single taxi in line. I took it. I arrived at the rue Linne ten minutes later. I crossed into the Jardin des Plantes. I walked slowly, conscious of my breathing. My lungs still felt as if I had been a three-pack-a-day smoker for the last thirty years, but the breathlessness seemed a little less ominous today. I noticed the verdancy around me, the deep blue sky, the hint of heat in the air. Early summer had arrived. In fact it had probably arrived weeks ago — but my head was elsewhere.

Four fifty-five. I approached the door. Five p.m. I punched in the code. Click. I stepped inside, entering that big silence I now recognized as not being normal. The concierge was immobile in his lodge. I headed up the stairs. Not a sound from a single apartment. Until I knocked on her door. She opened it and said, ‘You should have been here three days ago.’

‘A fire delayed me,’ I said, stepping by her into the apartment.

‘Really?’ she said, following me in.

I grabbed her arm and pulled it up behind her back.

‘Don’t bullshit me. You know exactly what happened.’

‘Trying to hurt me now, Harry?’ she said, struggling against the arm. ‘Because you can’t. Pain doesn’t have any effect on me.’

I pushed her away.

‘Well, it does on me — and I nearly died.’

‘But you made a rapid enough recovery if you’re now able to push me around.’

‘Push you around? You follow me everywhere—’

‘You have no proof of that—’

‘—you trap me in a burning building. And then, having told me that I would be in a situation where I’d have no choice but to cry out for you and demand your help, I do find myself in a situation where I have no choice but to cry out and demand your help. And what happens?’

She smiled and lit a cigarette.

‘You have no proof of that.’

‘The cops said a woman phoned them.’

‘Maybe she did. And maybe you should have made more copies of this.’