Douglas Kennedy - Woman in the Fifth

‘This is insane,’ I heard myself say out loud.

‘Then don’t take the job.’

‘Promise me that whatever is going on downstairs isn’t so morally reprehensible …’ I said.

‘No one is being involuntarily harmed,’ he said.

I paused, knowing I had to make a decision immediately.

‘I will never have to directly meet anyone?’ I asked.

‘You come at midnight, you go at six. You sit in this room. You don’t leave. You see the people who come here on the monitor. They don’t see you. It is all very elegant.’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘we have a deal.’

‘Good,’ Kamal said.

After taking me again through all the various numbers I had to press, and handing me the assorted keys, he said, ‘There is just one thing. You must never come here before midnight, you must leave promptly at six. Unless you see the police on the monitor, you must never leave the room until six.’

‘Otherwise I’ll turn into a pumpkin?’

‘Something like that, yes. D’accord? ‘

‘ D’ac .’

‘So you are clear about everything?’

‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Everything is perfectly clear.’

NOTHING HAPPENED THAT first night. I set up my laptop. I forced myself to work — my eyes straining under the single naked lightbulb. I pushed myself into writing five hundred words. I turned up the radiator and discovered that it gave off no more heat. I drank the two litres of Evian. I peed several times in the toilet and was grateful that I didn’t need a bowel movement, as I couldn’t have handled standing up to do it. I read some of the Simenon novel — a dark, sparely written tale about a French actor getting over the breakup of his marriage by wandering through the night world of 1950s New York. Around four in the morning, I started to fade — and fell asleep sitting up at the desk. I jolted awake, terrified that I had missed something on the monitor. But the screen showed nothing bar the glare of a spotlight on a doorway — an image so grainy it almost seemed as if it was from another era, as if I was looking at the past tense just downstairs.

I read some more. I fought fatigue. I fought boredom. I drew up a list of what I’d buy this afternoon to fix the place up. I kept glancing at my watch, willing 6 a.m. to arrive. When it finally did, I unlocked the door. I turned off the light in the room. I closed the door behind me and locked it. I hit the light for the stairs. At the bottom of them, I stood for a moment, trying to hear any noises from the big steel door at the end of the ground-floor corridor. Nothing. I unlocked the front door. Outside it was still night — a touch of damp in the air, augmenting the chill that had crawled under my skin during those six hours in a badly heated concrete box. I locked the door, my head constantly turning sideways to scan the alleyway and see if anyone was waiting to hit me over the head with a club. But the alley was clear. I finished locking the door. I walked quickly into the street. No cops, no heavies in parkas and balaclava helmets, waiting to have a few words with me. The rue du Faubourg Poissonniere was empty. I turned left and kept moving until I came to a little boulangerie that was on the rue Montholon. This took me a few minutes past my own street, but I didn’t care. I was hungry. I bought two pains au chocolat and a baguette at the boulangerie . I ate one of the croissants on the way back to my chambre . Once inside I took a very hot shower, trying to get some warmth back into my bones. Then I changed into a T-shirt and pajama bottom, and made myself a bowl of hot chocolate. It tasted wonderful. So too did the second pain au chocolat . I pulled the blinds closed. I set the alarm for 2 p.m. I was asleep within moments of crawling into bed.

I slept straight through. It was strange waking up in the early afternoon — and knowing that I wouldn’t see bed again until after six the next morning. Still, I had things to do — so I was up and out the door in ten minutes. Much to my relief — because the paranoid part of me wondered if, indeed, I would get paid at all — an envelope was waiting for me at the Internet cafe. As agreed there were sixty-five euros inside it.

‘Where’s Kamal?’ I asked the guy behind the counter — a quiet, sullen-looking man in his late twenties, with a big beard and the telltale bruise on his forehead of a devout Muslim who prostrated himself several times a day in the direction of Mecca.

‘No idea,’ he said.

‘Please tell him I picked this up, and say thanks for me.’

I headed off to a paint shop on the rue du Faubourg Poissonniere, and bought two large cans of off-white emulsion and a set of rollers and a paint pan and a tin of white gloss and a brush and a large bottle of white spirit. I would have preferred bringing all the decorating gear to ‘my office’, but I had to obey the ‘No Arrival Before Midnight’ rule. So I made two trips back to my room with the gear, then headed out back to the Cameroonian dude who had sold me all the bedding and kitchen stuff. Yes, he did have an electric radiator in stock — all mine for a knockdown price of thirty euros.

Getting all the paint stuff to my office that evening proved tricky. Before setting out, I made a pit stop by the alley at around eleven and discovered that, at the start of this laneway, there was a large crevice in a wall: currently filled with rubbish and animal droppings. Never mind — it was perfect for my needs. I returned with two cans of paint and some old newspapers. As I bent down to place the newspapers on the ground inside the crevice — I wanted to avoid getting rat shit on my stuff — the fecal smell became overwhelming. I shoved the two cans of paint in, and returned to my room to bring the next load of stuff over. It took a further run after that to have everything in place.

Then I sat in a bar on the rue de Paradis, nursing a beer and waiting for midnight to arrive. The bar was a dingy joint — all formica tables and a battered zinc counter, and a French-Turkish barmaid dressed in tight jeans, and a dude with serious tattoos also working the bar, and the jukebox playing crap French rock, and three morose guys hunched over a table, and some behemoth splayed on a barstool, drinking a milky substance that was obviously alcoholic (Pastis? Raki? Bailey’s Irish Cream?) as he was smashed. He looked up when I approached the bar to order my beer — and that’s when I saw it was Omar. It took him a moment or two for his eyes to register it was me. Then his rant started. First in English: ‘Fucking American, fucking American, fucking American.’ Then in French: ‘ Il apprecie pas comment je chie .’ (‘He doesn’t like the way I take a shit.’) Then he pulled out a French passport and started waving it at me, yelling, ‘Can’t get me deported, asshole.’ After that he started muttering to himself in Turkish, at which point I didn’t know what the hell he was saying. Just as I was about to finish my beer and bolt from the place before Omar got more explosive, he put his head down on the bar — in mid-sentence — and passed out.

Without me asking for it, the barmaid brought over another beer.

‘If he hates you, you must be all right. C’est un gros lard .’

I thanked her for the beer. I checked my watch: 11.53. I downed the pression in three gulps. I headed off.

At midnight precisely, I walked up the alleyway and unlocked the door. Then, in less than a minute, I made three fast trips to retrieve my hidden gear and bring it into the hallway. I bolted the door behind me. There was the same mechanical hum I’d heard yesterday emanating from the door at the end of the corridor. I ignored it and headed upstairs. A minute later, all the gear was in my office and the door locked. I was ‘in’ for the night. I plugged in the electric radiator. I turned on my radio to Paris Jazz. I checked the monitor. All clear in the alley. I opened the first can of paint. I went to work.