Douglas Kennedy - Woman in the Fifth

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?

‘My circumstances are a little tight at the moment.’

‘Evidently,’ he said.

‘What I’m most worried about right now is Adnan,’ I said.

A wave of his hand.

‘Adnan is finished. He will be on a plane back to Turkey in three days maximum. C’est foutu .’

‘Can’t you do anything to help him?’

‘No.’

Another silence.

‘So, do you want his chambre ?’ he asked. ‘It is nicer than the one I was going to show you.’

‘Is the rent high?’

‘It’s four hundred and thirty a month.’

Thirty euros more than I had been quoted.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s a little steep for me.’

‘You really are in a bad place,’ he said.

I gave him a guilty nod. He turned to the heavy who met me at the door and said something in Turkish. Mr Tough Guy gave him an equivocal shrug, then murmured a comment that made Monsieur Sezer’s lips part into the thinnest and briefest of smiles.

‘I have just asked Mahmoud here if he thinks you are on the run from the law. He said that you seemed too nervous to be a criminal. But I know that this “sabbatical” story is a fabrication — that you are talking rubbish — not that I really care.’

Another fast exchange in Turkish. Then: ‘Mahmoud will take you to see the two chambres . I promise you that you will want Adnan’s.’

Mahmoud nudged me and said, ‘You leave bags here. We come back.’

I let go of the suitcase with wheels, but decided to keep the bag with my computer with me. Mahmoud muttered something in Turkish to Monsieur Sezer. He said, ‘My associate wonders if you think all Turks are thieves?’

‘I trust nobody,’ I said.

I followed Mr Tough Guy down the stairs and across the courtyard to a door marked Escalier B . He punched in a code on a panel of buttons outside the door. There was the telltale click, he pushed the door open, then we headed up the stairs. They were narrow and wooden and spiral. The walls in the stairwell had been painted shit brown and were in an urgent need of a washing-down. But it was the smells that really got me: a noxious combination of bad cooking and blocked drains. The stairs were badly worn down. We kept heading upward, the climb steep. At the fourth floor, we stopped. There were two metal doors there. Mahmoud dug out a large bunch of keys and opened the door directly in front of us. We walked into a room which gave new meaning to the word ‘dismal’. It was tiny — with yellowing linoleum, a single bed. There was stained floral wallpaper, peeling and blistered. The length of the place was ten feet maximum. It was a cell, suitable for the suicidal.

Mr Tough Guy was impassive during the minute or so I looked around. When I said, ‘Can I see Adnan’s place, please?’ he just nodded for me to follow him. We walked up a flight of stairs. There were another two metal doors on this landing and a small wooden one. Mr Tough Guy opened the door directly in front of us. Size-wise, Adnan’s chambre was no bigger than the dump downstairs. But he’d tried to make it habitable. There was the same grim linoleum, but covered by a worn Turkish carpet. The floral wallpaper had been painted over in a neutral beige — a crude job, as hints of the previous leafy design still poked through the cheap emulsion. The bed was also narrow, but had been covered with a colored blanket. There was a cheap generic boom box and a tiny television. There was a hotplate and a sink and a tiny fridge — all old. There was a baby-blue shower curtain. I pulled it aside to discover a raised platform with a drain (clogged with hairs) and a rubber hose with a plastic shower head.

‘Where’s the toilet?’ I asked.

‘Hallway,’ he said.

There was a clothes rail in one corner, on which hung a black suit, three shirts and three pairs of pants. The only decoration on the walls were three snapshots: a young woman in a headscarf, her face serious, drawn; an elderly man and woman in a formal pose, serious and drawn; and Adnan holding a child with curly black hair, around two years old, on his knee. Though Adnan also looked grave in this photograph, his face seemed around two decades younger than it did now … even though this snapshot must have been taken only four years ago. The last time he saw his son.

Staring at these photos provoked another sharp stab of guilt. It was such a sad, small room — and his only refuge from a city in which he was always living undercover and in fear. Mr Tough Guy must have been reading my mind, as he said, ‘Adnan goes back to Turkey now — and he goes to prison for a long time.’

‘What did he do that made him flee the country?’

He shrugged and said nothing except, ‘You take the room?’