‘All about,’ she said, imitating him. Her hand grasped his on the counter; her fingers were long and brown and strong where they held him. He faced her. He wondered if the bleached blonde hair was a wig. She had very full lips. They seemed soft, but her eyes were hard. ‘Everybody comes from somewhere,’ she said.
He turned from her and looked away, at the swaying drunken couples and the solitary drinkers slouched on the bar. Candle-light flickered in an unseen, unfelt breeze. There was nothing beyond the windows. He spoke very quietly then, his lips barely moving, speaking to no one but the emptiness of this compressed world, and it was as if he didn’t even know that he was speaking. ‘Then where do we come from?’ he said. He turned to her, but she was not looking at him any more. She too was looking away. ‘And where do we go?’
She was crying. Her face was turned away from him; her glass was empty. Her hands were withdrawn, closing her off from him; they were a screen to shelter her.
They didn’t speak. When she took away her hands her makeup had run, but she seemed not to notice, or care. She said, ‘Is that why you are looking for him? You think he could lead you? Where? Forward or…or back?’
He didn’t know what she meant and he didn’t reply, but he offered her a cigarette and she accepted and he lit it for her, and one for himself, and signalled for a drink, the actions reduced to ritual between them, something established, a pattern worked out. There was comfort in ritual. ‘I need to find Papadopoulos,’ he said, and then, looking at her face as he spoke – ‘Papa D.’
The girl, flatly: ‘I haven’t seen him.’
‘No,’ Joe agreed. ‘I haven’t seen him either. But you must know where he stays? Did you ever go back with him to his place?’
He had some hope as he was saying the words but the girl merely shook her head and looked tired. She said, ‘I don’t know where he lives. If he can afford a girl he never goes far. There are cheap rooms. I don’t know where he lives.’
‘Would you tell me if you knew?’
The girl shook her head again. When she looked at him he felt trapped: he could not move away. The large brown eyes examined him, stripping him down without emotion, looking inside, a doctor checking for tell-tale signs of a terminal disease. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why should I? He never did us any harm. And he cares, Joe. He cares. Life isn’t a pulp novel, Joe, and death isn’t either.’ And she got up and threw her head back and downed the drink, the last drink, and put down the glass on the counter and walked away, and he watched her, and it was another ritual established, another pattern followed, agreed upon, comforting. They both needed comfort, not of sex or even drink but of a reason, any reason, and in the absence of that there were only empty rituals. And the door closed behind her and the couples danced, seeking warmth in each other’s bodies, and the slow recorded jazz played on, and the smoke from Joe’s cigarette formed Lazarus castles in the air, grey and insubstantial, and he thought, I never told her my name.
into Monceau
——
The next morning he was stationed at the post office again but this time he wasn’t watching for the man. He was only watching the post box. Joe was a tourist. He was buying stamps. He engaged a teller in a long conversation on first day covers; he chose and replaced postcards; he spoke terrible French, but was determined to make use of it for conversation; when he couldn’t make himself understood, he resorted to speaking loudly and slowly in English; he wrote out long messages to absent friends, scribbling them on postcards, leaning on the counter, saying to everyone how beautiful he thought the city was; in short, he made himself a nuisance of the kind that was happy, it was clear to everyone in sight, to remain at the place all day.
It was lucky for all concerned that the boy came a mere one hour and fifteen minutes after the post office opened.
Joe had almost missed him. The boy had brown hair and dark skin and he was small and he went unremarked through the adults who came to check their mail. He carried a small brown bag on a strap on his shoulder. Joe had hardly paid him attention, the small, shy figure passing through the cavernous hall of waiting boxes, going to one end of a row of boxes –
There.
For just a moment, there was post in the boy’s hands. Envelopes. A small package. A couple of single-sheet flyers. And then they were gone into the small brown bag and the boy turned to leave. No one could have seen him.
And, to the relief of the employees of the Avenue Hausmann branch of La Poste, the annoying tourist with the bad French and Parisian manners had suddenly lost interest in the display of pre-independence Algerian stamps he had been giving so much noisy attention to in the past quarter of an hour, and with only a brief merci had finally and rather unexpectedly left the premises.
Joe was relieved, too. Focusing attention on himself came hard to him, almost as a physical exertion, an actual sense of discomfort, as if to draw these people’s attention was to bodily grab them, and do so while moving through a viscous, gelatinous liquid that was resisting and restricting his movements. It was a strange feeling, and it left him, as he in turn finally left, light-headed and a little disoriented. As he walked down the wide avenue it seemed unreal to him, the cars moving along seeming like translucent crawling beetles, and the trees were hands, raised into the sky with fists that opened and closed, and as he looked at them he could see their veins, a map of blood vessels traversing the stump of a hand. He tried to shake the feeling away. He needed sugar, he thought. He felt like a man who had given blood: he needed coffee, a slice of cake, and he would be fine. Instead he lit a cigarette and coughed, and kept his eyes on the boy and his distance from him, and worried about who else might be following.
For it occurred to him that he was not alone. There had been someone – perhaps several someones – watching him in Vientiane, and in Paris too he got echoes of them, nothing concrete, nothing established, but little echoes coming back a little off, a tone of voice, the way an answer had been phrased – too smoothly, too quickly, as if the person being questioned had had occasion to formulate the answer before. There could have been someone else on the same trail, they could even be using Joe – it was a possibility he didn’t like to contemplate, but there it was, and so he worried, and smoked, and followed the boy at a distance, and at the same time watched for a tail, but he could see no one following, and it occurred to him how ridiculous he was being, and yet –
They had shot at him. And perhaps it was merely a warning shot, but they were watching him, he had to go on the assumption that they were, whoever they were, whatever they wanted – and it occurred to him that, sooner or later, he would have to find out. The boy meanwhile was walking along with no care in the world, an anonymous, small brown boy, turning away from Avenue Hausmann, going north, Joe following, the road becoming narrower and quieter, and when he looked in the reflection of shop windows he could still see nothing and no one behind. It was a hot day. The cigarette had scorched his fingers and he had dropped it and now he was sweating, and still the boy was going ahead with the mail meant for someone else, until at last he had crossed a road and disappeared into a green grassy space, and Joe paused: it was the back of the Parc Monceau.
He hesitated before going in, and he didn’t know why. He had never been there before, and yet it felt as if he had. The knowledge of a memory, rather than the memory itself, nagged at him. He knew the park, without quite knowing how or why he knew it.
He walked down the tree-lined Avenue Ruysdaël, and into Monceau.
fabriques
——
It was a small green place, a little self-contained bubble of a world inside, and yet away from, the city proper. On a bench in the grass an elderly man sat, slowly eating a sandwich. The man seemed entirely occupied with the laborious process of eating. He brought the baguette to his mouth and took a bite from it, nibbling the sides so that they were equal, then brought the baguette down again to the off-white napkin spread on his knees, and chewed. He chewed with great concentration, all teeth involved in the process, while his hands held the partially-eaten baguette over his knees and his eyes stared into space, grey bushy eyebrows moving up and down with the rhythm of his eating. At last the man swallowed, waited, allowed the food to travel before lifting the sandwich again and repeating the process.