He negotiated the stairs down to the ground floor, nodded to the Algerian man behind the counter, and strolled outside. Hats were back in fashion, he noticed. He passed the card tout and his small crowd of hopefuls, and in a street stall further down the road bought a black, wide-brimmed hat and put it on at an angle.
‘Ooh, very nice, monsieur,’ the large African woman standing behind her crude makeshift table of colourful cloth said. ‘Very good for the ladies.’ Joe smiled and paid her. He needed a drink. He needed to eat, too, but mostly he needed a drink. He walked down the Boulevard de Rochechouart, towards Place Pigalle.
‘Hey, you want company?’ a voice said. She was leaning against the wall, one leg lightly crossing the other, flashing him a smile. She had bleached blonde hair and long brown legs and her skirt was very short. She had a nice smile, but it didn’t seem real, somehow. She looked strangely insubstantial standing there, like a mirage on a city street, shimmering in the hazy air. There was a faint but lingering smell of booze.
Joe shook his head.
‘You don’t like girls?’
He shrugged and walked past. Behind him the girl called, ‘You like boys? I can find you a boy. Or we can party all together, what do you say? What colour you like?’
There was something her voice, a way in which it caught as she spoke the last words, a falling intonation that caught him off-guard; there was something lonely in there, and hurting, and raw, and he turned around. ‘I like the colour of whisky when the ice-cube is just beginning to melt in the glass,’ he said. ‘When you hold up the glass to the light and watch the drink through the underside, and it’s like the sky after it’s stopped raining.’
The girl laughed. ‘I like the colour of it neat, myself.’
‘Where’s a good place to get a drink around here?’
‘From where I’m standing,’ the girl said, ‘everywhere’s a good place for a drink.’
a warm, safe place
——
They sat in companionable peace on two stools beside the wide wooden bar. They were somewhere in Pigalle. The girl drank her scotch neat. Joe had his with a single ice-cube. He felt that separated him from the drunks. Putting that ice-cube there meant you were merely enjoying a drink. The girl had downed two shot glasses as soon as they came in. Strangely, she looked more substantial now, the hazy aura dissipating: she looked solid and very real and very close. She caught him looking and smirked. ‘I have to keep drinking so I don’t fade away,’ she said and raised her glass in a silent toast. They drank. Joe signalled for two more drinks.
‘I’ve not seen you around before,’ the girl said. ‘Are you new?’
It was a strange question, but he merely said, ‘I only just got here.’ The girl nodded and seemed satisfied. ‘Hard at first, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘What a strange place.’
He looked at her again. Brown skin, long hair black at the roots. Large almond eyes looking at him soulfully. The girl hiccupped and burst into giggles. Joe smiled. He wondered where she was from. Her French was flawless. Algeria? Somewhere in North Africa, he decided.
The girl pulled a soft packet of Gauloises out of a hidden pocket and extracted a cigarette. ‘You want one?’
‘Sure.’
He lit both of their cigarettes with his Zippo. The girl arched her eyebrows and blew a smoke ring that hovered above the countertop. It was dark in the bar, and smoky. A fan turned lethargically over one end of the counter. There was no music.
‘It’s like a private space, isn’t it,’ the girl said. He wasn’t sure if she was speaking to him or to herself. ‘Sitting in here, it’s like – I once had a mouse. When I was a little girl. I used to carry it in my pocket. Sometimes it would stick its nose out and sniff the air, but mostly it liked to stay inside, and I used to imagine what it was like in there, warm and dark and safe. Sometimes I feel like that here. When I can afford to.’
‘A pocket universe,’ Joe said, and the girl laughed. ‘A pocket universe,’ she said. ‘That’s funny.’
They sat, and smoked, and drank, and the world was reduced to a warm, safe place, and Joe held up his glass and watched the colour change as the ice melted and the girl laughed again. It could have been noon outside, or midnight, or all the hours in between, but inside, time was a contained thing, captive and still.
Joe didn’t know what made him mention the books. There was method behind it: a feeling first, that the girl would know, but also logic: that a publisher who specialised in a certain type of book may be known, here, in the area around Place Pigalle, which made something of a specialization itself with that kind of fantasy. So he said, ‘You ever read the Vigilante books?’
The girl’s eyes were very alive. She nodded, slowly, and sighed out a lungful of blue smoke. ‘Yes…’ she said.
He signalled for two more drinks. The girl smiled and stroked his arm. He was feeling light-headed, a cloud of smoke suspended in heavy air. He waited. The fan wheezed lethargically in the corner of the bar, and Joe watched the smoke wafting above the counter-top.
‘They’re published here, aren’t they?’ he said into the girl’s silence. ‘In Paris.’ Her eyes were studying him, he realised. They were deep and dark like empty wells. ‘Yes…’ the girl said again. She looked away from him. The bartender arrived with their drinks, but the girl pushed hers away. ‘I think I’m solid enough,’ she said, to no one in particular. Joe looked at her figure and had to agree. Still he waited.
Perhaps it was his silence that made her pause and at last turn to him again. She was already in the process of getting off the bar-stool. ‘Are you one of them?’ she said. He didn’t know what she meant, but he said, ‘No.’ The girl stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, hard. ‘They want to find him too,’ she said. ‘They should leave Papa D alone.’
‘Who’s Papa D?’
The girl shook her head. ‘I better go,’ she said. She gave him a smile. She was turned in profile to him, had already dismissed him. ‘Wait,’ Joe said. ‘Please. I need to know.’
‘Why?’ the girl said. And turned fully to him then. ‘Why?’ she said again, looking into his eyes as if searching for something there, but not finding it. She shrugged, and it was a tired, weary gesture, and shook her head, and then she was gone, and the door to the bar closed softly behind her.
— hollow cells in a honey bee hive —
Algiers, the white city, Alger-la-Blanche, rises from the Mediterranean sea like a mirage. Its white buildings lie bleached in the sun like whalebones. Walking along the sea front, one can encounter both the Grand Mosque and the Casino. Albert Camus attended the lycée and later the university here. On the eleventh of December two bombs exploded, ten minutes apart, one in the Aknoun district and one in the Hydra neighbourhood.
Both were car bombs. Both contained eight hundred kilograms of explosives. The second bomb exploded on Émile Payen Street at 09:52, between the United Nations headquarters and that of the UNHCR – the UN High Commission for Refugees.
The UNHCR sat in a modest building, white with blue awnings over the windows facing the road. There was a flag above the door, a small courtyard, a notice-board outside. The building had a capacity for a staff of twelve. The UN as a whole had a total of one hundred and sixteen Algerian employees and eighteen internationals. The explosion levelled the building and tore through the UN headquarters opposite, stripping the walls and burying people under the rubble. The death toll included seventeen UN personnel, amongst them Algerians, a Dane, a Filipino and a Senegalese. A policeman guarding the office was also killed, as well as a DHL agent inside the UN building. Five other people, living close to the office, also died in the blast. Forty UN personnel were injured, some severely. The man driving the bomb truck was the first to die.
Many of the survivors remained behind, helping to clear the rubble, searching for people buried inside. They included the United Nations’ office cleaner, who was several months pregnant.