The man pulls the newspaper down, away from his face. “It’s nothing to pour two drinks when I am already pouring one,” he says.
“No, not the cognac-”
“I know what you meant.”
Emile reaches for the snifter and sips. It’s lukewarm. How long have I been playing? he thinks.
“I’m here every night. Come when you like and play. Or not. Just come for Courvoisier if you prefer.”
“I’m… I don’t play well enough to do this piano justice.”
“It is not always about technique-but it’s always about heart. What more can we do? Your playing is suggestive of Monk’s style. I saw him once. It was amazing the way he would get up in the middle of a song and do that little dance of his, around in a circle beside the piano. Completely absorbed in the music.”
Emile finishes his cognac and begins to put his hand into his pocket. He wants to pay for the drink, at least.
“Stop. I own this place,” the man says, his voice flattened out and matter-of-fact. “I can buy drink for whomever I please. Besides, you gave me this beautifully broken music of yours.”
The next day, he goes down to the beach at two in the afternoon, when most sane people are out of the sun. He swims two hundred strokes exactly, straight out into the gulf, then turns around and swims back to shore. He does not remember making a conscious decision to choose the number two hundred. It just seemed like the right number.
On the morning of the fifth day, he opens the door. “Oh, hello,” he says. “I desperately need coffee.”
The concierge is a short, efficient man with a very smooth complexion and he smells like cigarettes. He flips open his cell phone, says something very quickly, ending with Emile’s room number.
“I have some news,” the concierge says, and then pauses.
He takes Emile’s money without blinking. “I believe your missing man was in a bar near here, a few months back,” he says. “A place called the Pom-Pom. It’s a gay bar, you know? Several of the patrons of this bar showed interest in your man-if you know what I mean. But it seems he only wanted to talk.”
“Are you sure it was him?”
“We are quite certain. I don’t think he belonged there, though, if you catch my meaning. He kept looking around-said he was worried about the Inquisition. The patrons of this bar thought he meant the police.”
“Do you know where he went? Did he say anything about where he was going?”
“Apart from his nervousness, he did not appear to be confused. He did say he was a sailor and that he would be going to sea. Eventually, he went home with someone.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Nobody in this bar has a name.”
The concierge opens the door and Emile hands him a couple more folded bills.
Emile’s mind is racing. What was this guy doing in a gay bar? Did he actually get picked up?
Emile is back in Paris for a few days to catch up on paperwork, to put a few of his simpler cases to bed, to recharge. He puts his book down on the bed. The apartment misses his wife. He misses her. It’s been two years, and he still carries the hole created by her absense. In the kitchen, he pours boiling water over a tea bag in a mug. I’m alone, Emile thinks. Get used to it. So is my strange man of great interest. He’s somewhere in Spain.
Emile crawls into bed-places his tea next to his laptop on the bedside table. He knows exactly what he would say to this man. He would tell him that no matter how far he runs, or how much he drinks, or how badly he wants a new beginning, his life is always with him. There is no separation from your own shadow. Emile sniffs, smiles. This is the culmination of his wisdom after two years of therapy.
He imagines this man living alone somewhere in the mountains, perhaps in the Basque region, on the French side, in a small village where he works as a laborer. He disappears into the mountains on weekends-comes back with fish. He is known in the town only as the
Emile sits up in bed. He has a sudden shadow-memory, an image of his ex-wife beside him in the bed. Like when a cat dies and you think you see the cat moving from room to room, or sitting at the door waiting to be let out in the morning. The ghost cat exists only as a hazy afterburn in your retina. But, of course, she is not there. She’s in Guadeloupe with her sister. She’s out of his life. Has taken her leave. Moved on. This half memory is enough to shock him fully awake. It’s eerily quiet, a muffled lull-the street sounds pulled back. Even Paris can be becalmed. Emile listens. The clock in the kitchen has the loudest tick he’s ever heard. Water is running somewhere in the building.
He wishes the man well. He hopes he is able to successfully escape any horrors that chase him in the night. If he is alive. If. He’s been off the grid for a long time.
Consuela searches the words Hafiz, Columbus, fifteenth century, Persian, chess, professor, and teacher. Hafiz because of his knowledge of the poet, his poems, and his comment about reading them in Persian. Columbus and fifteenth century for the obvious reasons. Chess because she suspects he’s very, very good-much better than he pretends. And, finally, teacher and professor because he lectures-he seems like a teacher. It’s a guess, but a guess is all she has. On the thirty-fourth page of her search she finds an oblique reference to Mehmet Nusret, the birth name of Turkish humorist and author Aziz Nesin, who died in 1995. He had apparently championed free speech, especially when it came to the right to openly criticize Islam.
On a whim, she adds this name to a new search, with the words April and March. Columbus came to the institute in April, but nobody knows where he was before that. These are more calculated suppositions. Consuela is sitting at her computer with a glass of chardonnay on the desk beside the screen. After almost two hours, her search is still fruitless. She forgoes the glass and drinks out of the bottle.
Columbus times his journal entries so Consuela is not working when he writes. This morning he finds a corner of the upper deck, far from the small fountain that does not function-spouts no water, only fills with leaves and rainwater. He can imagine what it would have been like, where the water would have flowed-the mist, the spray- what it would have felt like to have the luxury of that mist on a hot day.
Row after row of desks. These desks are tiered. They rise up and away from the center of this picture. The lights are slightly dimmed. There are people-they are probably students. They’re all looking at a focal point at the front of this room. Many of the students are typing into their laptop computers. Most of them have laptops. Many of these students are smiling. A few are laughing. As if the person teaching the class has just said something funny. There is no way to determine what kind of class this is. Most of the students are female.
He pans the front row for clues. All women in the front row. On the far right a young woman is looking down. She’s holding a cell phone in her lap-slightly under her laptop, which sits on the little desk-probably texting someone. Or reading a text message.
Analog to digital. That’s what’s happening in this classroom. A human being-the analog bit-will offer up
