There was a considerable lag at the other end, as if Marianne were reaching over to turn something off — coffee pot, word processor, stereo. Scully saw Billie picking at the crust around the lid of the mustard pot.
‘What… what a surprise,’ breathed Marianne.
‘Listen, I’m sorry to call out of the blue but I was wondering if I could drop by for a second.’
‘N-no, it’s not possible,’ she murmured. ‘You understand, I have my work —’
‘Yes, of course, but listen —’
The line went dead. He rang back. Engaged. He flopped back into his seat. Shit — what was all that about? He was not exactly Marianne’s cup of tea, he knew, but they’d always been civil. She was flustered, really put out. And hostile.
He gulped at his coffee.
‘You don’t look good,’ said Billie.
‘Speak for yourself-Jesus.’
‘Don’t say that!’
A coat flapping down the stairs. A hooded coat. A blur, but not a ghost, someone real. I showed up and someone saw me. Jennifer, or someone else. Someone acting for her, maybe. To make sure I would come, to see that I was in town. Dominique? No, she was too decent. She would have talked to us. And she never struck me as that tall, that light on the loafers. But Marianne. Marianne doesn’t fancy me. She wouldn’t have qualms about giving me some stick. In fact, she’d probably enjoy it. Was everyone in on this? Why send a message and not show? Were they playing with him?
Billie licked sweat from her upper lip.
All those people you read about. The bloke who goes out for a packet of fags never to be seen again. Families whose kids go missing. People who live in limbo for years, always expecting the phone to ring, a door to open, a face to appear in a television crowd. Every mail bringing an absurd hope. And all the time really waiting, begging for the coup de grâce, the last swing of the axe to put them out of their misery. Horribly grateful to have the mangled, molested bodies of their loved ones finally uncovered in some vacant lot so that they can give up the poisonous hoping and be free.
Was that how it would be? A life of waiting by the phone? No. He didn’t care what it took. He’d find out for himself. He wouldn’t sit back and go quietly. Bollocks to that. In his soul he’d stepped beyond some mark he didn’t understand. Here, quietly, in a crappy café with a lukewarm chocolate in front of him. No, he was too tired, too scared and pissed off to go quietly.
Forty
SCULLY LEANT INTO THE IRON wind on the Rue Mahler and felt it ride up under his eyelids and whistle in his molars. He skated with Billie across the cobbles and shouldered his way past the sumptuous grey door into the frozen calm of Marianne’s courtyard.
Lights burned up on the third floor. Scully’s heart beat painfully. He felt the metal of the wind in him.
‘Take no prisoners,’ he muttered.
Billie quaked and said nothing.
In the entry hall which smelled of mail and polish he jabbed the intercom button hard enough to feel bone through the numbness. His twenty-five-franc mittens were stiff and damp.
‘Oui, allo?’
‘Me again.’
Nothing. Just static. A blizzard from that little speaker box. He looked at his boots, felt the chill of the wind still in his spine, saw Billie’s feverish eyes and livid cheeks.
‘It’s cold down here, Marianne. And I’ve brought Billie.’
It was a long ugly few seconds before the access door clicked open. He took Billie’s mittened hand and they went up silently in the elevator. It was familiar, that little red box. He remembered coming down in it with Jennifer a couple of times, both of them four sheets to the wind and giggling like kids.
Up on her floor Marianne had the door open. Her thick auburn hair was free and she wore little lace-up shoes and a black woollen suit. She fixed him with a firm smile.
‘Scully, you look —’
‘Terrible, I know.’
She presented her cheeks to him in the ritual manner and touched Billie’s head gravely and then the three of them stood awkwardly in the hallway.
‘We’re house-trained, Marianne. It’s safe enough to let us in.’
She hesitated a moment and turned on her heel. Scully followed across the lustrous timber floor into the kingdom of steam heat and hired help. Marianne’s two fat Persians loped away to hide. The apartment smelled of polish and of the oil of the puce abstracts that hung huge on the white walls. Scully couldn’t help but run his hand across the painted surface of the plaster as he went. His first job in Paris, this place. It was perfect. He worked like a pig on it and took a pittance, setting the tone for the rest of his time here. Still, they were friends, Jennifer’s new friends, and he was eager to please.
But sometimes he wondered if the cheapness of his bill hadn’t caused its own problems. Marianne had been more friendly to him first up — effusive, even. But after the paint job she cooled off. For a few weeks he tried to think of anything he could have done wrong. The job was excellent, but had he spilt primer on something, scratched the floor somehow, pissed on the toilet seat? There was nothing — not even a Rainbow Warrior joke. It was the size of his bill. She wasn’t insulted — Scully always let her know that he knew she and Jean-Louis were loaded — but it was as though she felt he expected something in return. A fresh guardedness lay across the top of her Parisian diffidence. She saw him as a loser, he thought. Not just a tradesman but a cut-rate one at that. Europe — it was hair raising.
‘I’ll have coffee and Billie’ll take a hot chocolate,’ he said brightly. ‘She’s a bit sick. You remember Marianne don’t you, Billie.’
Billie nodded. Marianne stood beneath the big casement windows, mouth contracting on its smile. She was all diagonals — nose, hips, breast, lips — and not at all like Jean-Louis who was more the fulsome type with the lines of a nineteen-forties automobile. Jean-Louis was easier to like, softer in nature as well as in shape.
Not that he’d instantly disliked Marianne. She was smart and funny and seemed genuinely interested in Jennifer, even read her work and showed it around. She worked for a chic magazine and knew people. Her friends were amusing yuppies, handsome, curious and unlike people they’d known before. It felt like a lark to Scully, knowing these people. Jean-Louis had a romantic European fascination for wild places and people. He defended France’s right to test nuclear bombs in the Pacific and yet turned purple at the thought of roo-tail soup. Scully liked to shock him and his friends with redneck stories told against himself and his country. Chlamydia in koalas, the glories of the cane toad. The wonders of the aluminium roo-bar. For a while he felt almost exotic at Marianne’s parties, but it wore off in the end, playing the part of the Ignoble Savage. He kept up a kind of affable relationship with Jean-Louis, without any intimacy, and a diplomatic air of deferral to Marianne for Jennifer’s sake. The parties became a bore. Scully loitered at the bookshelves picking through art books, most of the time, and they left him to it. When Dominique came he relaxed a little more and joined in. And the wine was a consolation. He wouldn’t be drinking that stuff back in the borrowed apartment.
‘I’ll put the kettle on, will I?’
‘Scully, I am busy.’
‘Too busy for a cup of coffee?’
She sighed and went ahead into the white kitchen and he noticed her limp.
‘Hurt your leg?’
‘It’s nothing. I was sitting on it. It will give me bad veins.’
‘Nearly broke my own leg today.’
‘Things are not going well for you. You look wild, Scully.’
‘Oh, I am wild.’