Douglas Kennedy - Woman in the Fifth

‘Let me talk to your boss,’ I said.

Back in his office, Monsieur Sezer was still sitting at his bare desk, staring out the window. Mr Tough Guy stayed by the door, and lit a cigarette.

‘You take Adnan’s room?’ Monsieur Sezer asked me.

‘For three hundred and seventy-five euros a month.’

He shook his head.

‘That’s all I can afford.’

He shook his head again.

‘The other room is a dump,’ I said.

‘That is why Adnan’s room costs more.’

‘It’s not much better.’

‘But it is still better .’

‘Three eighty.’

‘No.’

‘It’s the best I can—’

‘Four hundred,’ he said, cutting me off. ‘And if you pay three months in advance, I won’t charge you four weeks’ deposit.’

Three months in that room? One part of me thought, This is further proof that you’ve hit bottom. The other part thought, You deserve no better. And then there was a more realistic voice which said, It’s cheap, it’s habitable, you have no choice, take it.

‘OK — four hundred,’ I said.

‘When can you give me the money?’

‘I’ll go to a bank now.’

‘OK, go to the bank.’

I found one on the boulevard Strasbourg. Twelve hundred euros cost me fifteen hundred dollars. My net worth was now down to two thousand bucks.

I returned to Sezer Confection . My bag was no longer by the desk. Monsieur Sezer registered my silent concern.

‘The suitcase is in Adnan’s room,’ he said.

‘Glad to hear it.’

‘You think we would be interested in your shabby clothes?’

‘So you searched the bag?’

A shrug.

‘You have the money?’ he asked.

I handed it over. He counted it slowly.

‘Can I have a receipt?’

‘No.’

‘But how do I prove that I have paid the rent?’

‘Do not worry.’

‘I do worry …’

‘ Evidemment . You can go to the room now. Here is the key,’ he said, pushing it toward me. ‘The door code is A542. You write that down. You need my associate to show you the way back to the room?’

‘No thanks.’

‘You have problems, you know where to find me. And we know where to find you.’

I left. I walked down the steps. I crossed the courtyard. I entered Escalier B . I remounted the stairs. I came to the fourth landing. I opened the door facing me. The chambre de bonne had been stripped bare. Along with all of Adnan’s personal effects, they had also taken the sheets, the blankets, the shower curtain, the rug, the cheap electronic goods.

I felt my fists tighten. I wanted to run down the stairs and back into Monsieur Sezer’s office and demand at least three hundred euros back to cover the cost of everything I would now have to buy to make the place habitable. But I knew he would just shrug and say, Tant pis . Tough shit.

Anyway, I knew that if I went back and made a scene, I’d be considered trouble. And right now, what I needed to do was vanish from view.

So I slammed the door behind me. Within five minutes I had unpacked. I sat down on the dirty mattress, the fever creeping back up on me again. I looked around. I thought, Welcome to the end of the road.

LATE THAT NIGHT, Omar took a shit.

How did I know this intimate detail — and the identity of the gentleman moving his bowels? It didn’t take much in the way of deductive reasoning. My bed faced the wall adjoining the crapper. Omar was my neighbor — something I knew already from Adnan, but which I rediscovered when he banged on my door just after midnight. I’d not met him before — but had already been briefed on his job as the chef at the Select, and how (according to Brasseur) he’d been caught in flagrante with the hotel’s handyman. I asked who was at the door before unlocking it.

‘ Votre voisin ,’ he said in very basic French.

I opened the door a few inches. A behemoth stood before me, his face seeping sweat, his breath a toxic cocktail of stale cigarettes and burped alcohol. Omar was big in every way — well over six feet tall and around three hundred pounds. He had a walrus mustache and thin strands of black hair dangling around an otherwise bald head. He was drunk and just a little scary.

‘It’s kind of late,’ I said.

‘I want television,’ he said.

‘I don’t have a television.’

‘Adnan has television.’

‘Adnan is gone.’

‘I know, I know. Your fault.’

‘They took his television,’ I said.

‘Who took?’

‘Monsieur Sezer.’

‘He can’t take. My television. Adnan borrow it.’

‘You’ll have to talk with Monsieur Sezer.’

‘You let me in,’ he said.

I immediately wedged my foot against the door.

‘The television isn’t here.’

‘You lie to me.’

He started to put his weight against the door. I got my knee up against it.

‘I am not lying.’

‘You let me in.’

He gave the door a push. I had never come up against a three-hundred-pound guy before. I pulled my knee out of the way just in time. He came spilling into the room. For a moment he seemed disorientated — in that way that a drunk suddenly can’t remember where he is and why he has just slammed up against a hotplate. Then the penny dropped. He scanned the room for the television, but his disorientation quickly returned.

‘This not same room,’ he said.

‘It is.’

‘You change everything.’

That wasn’t exactly the truth — though I had made a few necessary design modifications since moving in that afternoon. The stained mattress which sagged in five places had been thrown out and replaced by a new one, bought in a shop on the Faubourg Saint-Denis. The shop owner was a Cameroonian. His place specialized in bargain-priced household stuff, so when he heard that I needed some basics for my chambre , he took charge of me. I came away with the mattress (cheap, but sturdy), a pillow, a set of light blue no-iron sheets, a duvet, a dark blue shower curtain, two lampshades, a neutral cream window blind (to replace the left-behind drape), some basic kitchen stuff, and (the best find of all) a small plain pine desk and a cane chair. The total price for all this was three hundred euros. It was a major dent in my remaining funds, but the guy even threw in a can of wood stain for the desk and got his assistant to load up everything in the shop’s battered old white van and deliver it to my place on the rue de Paradis.

After everything arrived, I spent the rest of the afternoon putting my room together. The outside toilet was another matter. It was an old crapper — with a fractured black plastic seat — located in a tiny closet, with unpainted walls and a bare lightbulb strung overhead. The bowl was caked with fecal matter, the seat crisscrossed with dried urine stains. It was impossible to stay more than a minute inside this cell without wanting to retch. So I hit the street, finding a hardware shop further down the rue du Faubourg Poissonniere. Within five minutes I had brought a toilet seat, a toilet brush and an industrial bleach super fort which the guy in the shop assured me would not just burn away all the residue stains, but would also remove two layers of epidermis if it came in contact with any exposed skin. So he insisted that I spend an extra two euros on a pair of rubber gloves as well.

Half an hour later, not only was a new seat installed, but the nuclear-powered bleach had also done its chemical magic. The bowl was virtually white again. Then I scoured down the toilet floor. After that was finished, I dashed out again to the rue du Faubourg Poissonniere and found an electronics shop. After a bit of haggling, the owner agreed to part with an old-model Sony boom box for fifty euros. I also picked up a baguette, some ham and cheese, and a litre of cheap red wine, and returned home. I hung the lampshades in my room and the toilet. Then, for the rest of the evening, I cleaned every inch of the chambre de bonne , while blaring the local jazz station on my newly acquired stereo. Halfway through my purge of every bit of grime from the room, I wondered, Aren’t you just being a little manic? But I pushed aside such self-reflection and kept cleaning. By midnight the place was spotless, my laptop was set up on the desk, and I was making lists of things I still needed to buy. I felt my forehead. The fever was still there, but seemed low-lying. I took a shower — the hot water sputtering out in weak bursts. I dried off, I climbed into the narrow bed. I passed out.