“Two gentlemen?”
“Yes, one plus one.”
“You pronounce the ‘t’ when you say it?”
Dassoukine looks at me, dumbstruck.
“I’m telling you about the fiasco of the century and the only thing you’re worried about is whether you say ‘two gentlemen’ or ‘two gennelmen’?”
“Apologies.”
“So, two gen-TUHL-men. The first one is a waiter who asks me politely if I might lend him a hand, he has to change a tablecloth, I don’t know why. Possessing, like all servers from Brussels, only two arms, he hands me his tray, full of petits fours, for the time it takes him to carry out the operation he’s determined to accomplish. It’s then that another guy (the second one I mentioned), a tall string bean, clumsy but perfectly well-bred, hits me with his elbow, while I balance the tray on my open palm, as if I had never done anything else in my life — me, the grandson of a kaid and the son of a prime minister.”
“No one’s denying that.”
“Except for the second guy, who, after apologizing for having (nearly) knocked over my tray — why am I saying ‘my’ tray, it’s mad how we adapt to degradation — babbling in multilingual apologies — I detect some Hungarian in his English accent and some Latvian in his fumbled French; so, after babbling a number of apologies as if he had surprised Sissi naked in a back alley, what does he do?”
“What does he do?”
“Well, he picks up a mini-toast from my tray and thanks me while bowing slightly.”
“Indeed a polite man, then, albeit Hungarian.”
“That’s not the problem, idiot! He thanked me as if I were a waiter.”
“There are no dishonorable jobs.”
“In the absolute sense, no. Perhaps. But come on, I’m in Brussels to buy two hundred million pounds of wheat!”
“Inflation.”
“Around ten o’clock, after savoring the dishes prepared by some of the best chefs — might as well — and after wearing out my tongue appreciating wines that I didn’t even know existed, I decide to go back to my room. Brussels is going through a heat wave: it’s still 102 degrees outside. Unable to sleep in such heat, I read the Mémoires of the Belgian king. And because I’m not crazy about air conditioning, I turn it off, like the peasant I am, opting to open the big window instead. My room is on the second floor…”
“Do I need every detail?”
“…but here the floors are high, so it was really the third floor. Just after midnight, I turn out the lights and contemplate wheat and wheat farms. That’s me: professional down to the muslin. Not long after, half asleep, I hear the window bang and the curtains move, like in those horror movies that that can’t even scare a cat. I say to myself that the long-awaited storm has finally arrived—Levez-vous vite, orages désirés… — and that the atmosphere will cool down. I nestle into my bed and dream of haystacks. A few minutes later, I’m woken up again, this time by the sounds of metal. Clang! Clang! What’s going on now? I open my eyes and, stupefied, I see a hand hanging from the window railing! I sit up bellowing (What is that racket?) and jump out of bed. The hand disappears. This is bad. Should I lean out the window and risk finding myself face to face with Dracula or Peter Lorre? I’m brave — you know me — but I have my limits. So I call reception. The operator picks up right away — we are, after all, in a nice hotel — I inform him in two words of the incident, he asks me if it’s room service that I’m trying to reach, I add some details, he tells me that, yes, they have fries, I tell him about the wandering hand, he replies mayonnaise, I start over, enunciating my words; after a stunned silence, the man gets a hold of himself and tells me he’ll call the police right away.
“After replacing the receiver, I go to look out the window anyway, armed with the Financial Times rolled up into a bat, in case the salmon color should frighten away the zombies. I see nothing, no one in this serene, Belgian night. My room looks out onto the Etterbeek, there are some bushes, but I search far and wide; the cat burglar has disappeared. Roughly speaking, there’s a good thirty feet between my bedroom window and the ground. The wall is made of brick, there’s no gutter, nothing for a person to hang on to. There’s a little ledge under my window, but it’s narrow. And even then you still have to get there, and somehow stay there.”
“Thorough report.”
“The police arrive rapidly and get to work. There are four of them, debonair but industrious. They survey the surroundings of the hotel with flashlights, they smoke out some cats, drive out three spiders, cry out in bruxellois, but they don’t find anything human. They leave, taking down my statement. According to them, it must have been like in a circus act: three or four men climb on one another’s shoulders, the one on top reaches the window, enters the room, and grabs any objects of value. Then they disappear into the neighboring thickets — beautiful thickets, by the way, I recommend them, look up the Parc Léopold. I think to myself that I dodged a bullet, given that my laptop was on the shelf right by the window. All the secrets of the Kingdom — ours, not Belgium’s — will remain secret. I go back to sleep, pretty perplexed.”
“And the metal noises?”
“Forgotten! I had more important things to do than wonder about the whisper of the world. The next morning: toilet, shower, shave, after-shave — the ritual of a minister on a mission. I start to get dressed and then, stupor and shudders, as a local author once said: no more trousers! Nada, niente! I had left them folded, flat on the suitcase, close to the window. And at that hour, they were conspicuously absent! In a flash, I understand everything: the thief had taken my trousers, in which I had left a pile of change. And it was these coins, falling out of the pockets, that had woken me up!”
“Voilà, mystery solved.”
“One hell of a lucky break, I said to myself in petto. Normally, I empty the pockets of my trousers before folding them at night. But that night, for whatever reason, I hadn’t. The noise woke me up and the thief left without my computer, which holds the plans for the nuclear missiles stashed under the Place Jemaa el Fna in Marrakech. However, I had also left some bills in the pockets, and so I’m out 320 euros. Bah, money isn’t everything…The problem — or should I say the tragedy?…the catastrophe? — is that I don’t have any other trousers. For the two-day trip, I had brought only the saroual I was wearing. Why complicate things? Two shirts, yes, but only one pair of pants: I’m not Patino the Tin King, or an English lord. So, nix pairs of trousers and Europe awaits me at nine o’clock sharp. I go down to the reception in my pajamas. The manager is there, impeccably dressed. He is already up-to-date on my misadventure. Alas, he tells me, all the stores are still closed at this morning hour. Brow furrowed, he thinks through a few different possibilities. He could go to his house and bring me one of his pairs of trousers, or he could ask the employees, but these suggestions, born of Belgian goodwill, come crashing down when faced with this irrefutable reality: I am taller than all these Samaritans. I would look like a half-drowned Nixon! Standing in the hotel lobby, we look at each other, sheepish, and the seconds pass.