by Des Ekin
Chapter Sixteen
IT WASN’T just a plane trip to another city. It was a journey through a looking-glass to another dimension, a place where no one had heard of the murder in Claremoon Harbour, where there were no grim memories of a good woman’s death to blight every waking hour, and where people laughed and loved and slept peacefully at night undisturbed by dreams that slashed your sleep asunder like a knife scything through thin satin.
At least, that’s how it seemed to Tara as she stood near the beautiful Place du Tertre, high above the winding cobbled streets of Montmartre, and looked over the peaceful skyline of the City of Light. A realist would probably have argued the point with her – here, there were just as many good dreams and just as many nightmares as there were at home, no more, no less – but today she would not have listened.
She still didn’t know why she’d agreed to come to Paris, but once she’d taken the decision at five am, over a cup of strong black coffee brought to her room by her wide-awake and fully-dressed host, there was no going back. And no, there were no regrets.
The early morning flight from Dublin airport was packed with weary commercial reps, returning French tourists and the occasional canoodling couple looking forward to a romantic break. Tara and Andres ended up in different parts of the plane, Tara jammed in a centre-seat between two very fat businessmen and Andres enjoying the comparative luxury of an aisle seat three rows ahead, where he spent the entire flight chatting animatedly to a blonde woman with a shock of frizzy curls and the most ludicrously enormous earrings that Tara had ever seen. She looked like the sort of person who would lead the Conga dance at a Spanish holiday disco.
The flight would have been perfect, she told herself, but for the blonde’s irritatingly shrill laugh as she responded to Andres’s lively chat. The fact that she could hear the sound of their voices, but not the substance of their conversation, added to Tara’s irrational annoyance. From time to time, the woman would tilt her head towards Andres and fiddle with her ridiculous earrings as she burst into another teeth-gratingly shrill giggle.
Tara tried to concentrate on reading an article in the in-flight magazine, but her eyes kept wandering off the page. Of course, it was none of her concern whom Andres chose to talk to, but she thought he had better taste than to waste his time chatting up an obvious bimbo with an Essex-girl hairstyle and, to judge from that strident laugh, all the IQ of a mynah bird.
‘Did you enjoy the flight?’ she asked him as they disembarked.
‘Yes, very much. I met a very interesting lady,’ he said vaguely, looking around the airport for direction signs.
‘Did you? I didn’t notice. I’m afraid I dozed off for most of the journey.’
‘That was wise,’ he said. ‘I had planned to do the same thing myself. But it’s not every day that one meets a professor of Middle Eastern studies, and the opportunity was too good to miss.’ He waved across the room at the blonde, who peered over her bifocals and waved her leather briefcase in response.
With no luggage to reclaim, they sailed rapidly through immigration control and right past the crowded baggage hall.
‘Where do we go now?’ she asked. It had suddenly occurred to her that she’d absolutely no idea where they were headed.
‘We travel into the city,’ replied Andres. ‘We could hire a car or take a taxi, but at this time of day, Paris is little more than a slow-moving car park. We would spend the next ninety minutes breathing exhaust fumes and listening to drivers swearing at each other. Trains are faster, and, anyway, where we are going it is impossible to drive.’
He steered her towards a waiting shuttle marked ‘Roissybus’ which whisked them out of the airport towards the adjacent suburban rail station. They caught a train to the giant Gare du Nord in the centre of Paris. From there they switched to the underground and, changing only once at Barbes-Rochechouart, rode the shaking, rattling, exhilarating Métro to Place Pigalle.
The famous Pigalle red-light district looked tawdry in the fresh morning sunlight, like an ageing prostitute who has slept all night in her makeup. A workman in blue overalls was repairing a broken neon sign that said: SEX, SEX, SEX and trading complaints with an old woman who was sweeping up the detritus of the previous night, the residue of passion and frustration, from the pavement below.
They turned their back on yawning, scratching Pigalle and wandered just across the road to a smart, clean minibus labelled: ‘Montmartrobus’.
Andres checked a timetable and consulted his watch. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘It will leave in just a few moments. We’re early. If we had chosen to travel by road, by whatever means of transport, we would still be out somewhere around the Boulevard Périphérique, fighting our way through the commuter traffic. A nightmare.’
Tara hadn’t a clue about traffic flow in the French capital, but she nodded agreement all the same. She looked around her and smiled happily. She felt strangely at home in Paris; she always had. The fact that this journey had been so impulsively entered into, so unexpected, added to her feeling of lightness and freedom. She felt as freshly liberated, as unencumbered, as a backpacker who has just shaken off a heavy rucksack for the first time in days. Psychologically, she was as weightless as a moonwalker.
Even her mode of dress was, by sheer happy accident, just right for the time and the place. The black leather jacket, teamed with freshly-laundered light-blue Levis and the new white scoopneck T-shirt she’d bought at the airport that morning, made her fit perfectly among the rich Parisiennes for whom the leather-and-Levis look was sympa, cool, street-chic.
‘This is the only way to travel around Montmartre,’ announced Andres as he led her on to the minibus that the city of Paris provided for the convenience of the residents of the Mount of Martyrs.
She soon found out why as the little bus disappeared into the maze of ancient cobbled streets that corkscrewed up the steep hill, ducking and diving past lorries, cyclists and street traders, skilfully negotiating fiercely-angled bends at impossible gradients while as the same time swerving to avoid suicidal moped riders. When they got off near the Place du Tertre, she was disappointed that the rollercoaster ride had ended so soon.
Taking their time, they strolled through the Place du Tertre, brushing off the persistent street artists who kept badgering them for instant-portrait commissions.
‘They should be banned,’ growled Andres after getting rid of the latest hopeful painter with a volley of uncomplimentary French. ‘Every centimetre of this square is history. It used to be the very heart of the village of Montmartre, where the villagers used to gather to hear important announcements and watch public hangings. It has not changed all that much. Left alone, one could recreate it all in one’s imagination. But one is not left alone. These pests destroy the magic.’
Not quite, thought Tara as she watched the quick-draw artists perform miracles of draughtsmanship, and winked back at the white-painted mime artists who stood stock-still on the steps of ancient buildings pretending to be sculptures.
Andres didn’t even notice them. He glanced at his watch. ‘We’re still too early,’ he said with relief.
‘Too early for what, Andres? For God’s sake, stop being so mysterious.’
‘All in good time. How about coffee?’
She nodded enthusiastically. ‘You’ve just said the magic word.’
They chose a pavement table outside a café in the heart of the ancient square and ordered two large cafés from a waiter who had obviously taken a master’s degree in arrogance.
‘Locals call this hill La Butte. It used to be the bohemian centre of Paris,’ explained Andres, his arm encompassing the entire district in a sweeping gesture. ‘Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, all the great post-Impressionists, they all painted here. This is where Picasso, Braque and Gris invented modern art. And now it has come down to this – con artists who dupe the public with their ill-executed daubings.’
‘Funny, but I seem to recall that the critics used exactly the same language abo
ut the Impressionists when they first arrived on the scene,’ Tara teased as she sipped her coffee.
‘They had talent. These do not,’ he said, taking her seriously. ‘For instance, if you look at a painting by…’
He stopped in mid-sentence. A huge woman, her body almost as round and fat as a globe, had stopped in front of their table. Her skin was black – not just brown, but shiny black, like wet coal – and her eyes had a strange gleam as she offered Andres a single cellophane-wrapped rose from the bunch in her wicker basket.
‘Une rose pour votre femme, m’sieur?’ she asked, gesturing towards Tara.
‘Non. Non, merci.’
Tara was amused at Andres’s embarrassment. The woman had presumed they were man and wife.
The flower-seller refused to go away. Instead, she tried a new sales technique. This time she offered the rose to Tara and gestured towards Andres with a dazzling smile.
‘Madame? Une rose pour votre mari?’
Tara smiled back. ‘Monsieur n’est pas mon mari,’ she said. Andres was not her husband.
The black woman gave a clucking sound and shook her head. Her reply was too rapid for Tara to understand.
‘What was that?’ she asked Andres.
‘Nothing. Just the usual…what’s the phrase? The usual cowshit they give to tourists.’
‘Bullshit. We say bullshit.’ Tara wasn’t satisfied. ‘Tell me what she’s saying.’
Andres sighed. ‘She’s talking nonsense. She says we are plainly meant for each other. She probably says exactly the same thing to every couple she sees.’ He laughed off his embarrassment. ‘She’s offering to read our future in the Tarot cards for fifty francs.’
He shook his head violently and gestured at her to leave.
But the roly-poly black woman had already produced a pack of Tarot cards from beneath her floral marquee of a dress. She rapidly dealt out several cards, suddenly stopped, and laughed out loud.
Another stream of rapid-fire, colloquial French, this time directed at Tara. She couldn’t make out a word of it.
‘What’s she saying?’
‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ Andres was becoming extremely irritated. He produced a fifty franc note, thrust it at the woman, and ordered her to leave. She smiled, picked up the cards and began to walk away.
‘What did she say, Andres?’ Tara was intrigued.
‘I told you. Nothing. She is a crazy woman. She is half mad. She has gone. Forget her.’
The huge black woman winked at Tara, gave a high-pitched and curiously girlish laugh, and disappeared into the crowd.
‘Well, here we are,’ said Andres. ‘The Church of the Sacre Coeur.’
She was familiar with it, of course – she knew how this landmark church had been commissioned in the nineteenth century as an act of penitence for the bloodshed of the communard uprising, how its special white stone whitened rather than dulled with age, how its over-elaborate Gothic architecture made sensitive critics wince. But this was still the second most famous church in Paris, presiding over the wide city skyline like some sentimental Victorian guardian angel.
As she scanned the horizon for buildings she recognised, Andres checked his watch again. ‘Perfect,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Now all we have to do is wait.’
‘Wait for what?’
He ignored her and sat down on the steps. A brightly painted funicular railway car clattered up the steep hill and tipped out a cargo of excited schoolchildren.
Tara sat down beside him, closing her eyes and raising her face to the warm rays of the summer sun. She could sense that he was looking at her, studying her features.
‘The last time I was in Paris was with Manuela,’ he said.
She didn’t move or open her eyes.
‘Your wife?’
‘Yes. She loved Paris. She said it was her favourite city in the world.’
‘Mine, too.’
The schoolchildren formed a laughing, chattering crocodile and walked up the steps towards the church, their teacher desperately shushing them as they approached the main entrance.
‘Manuela,’ said Tara. ‘What a beautiful name. Was she Spanish?’
‘Mexican. I met her in the Baja California peninsula. She was a teacher. She taught a class just like that one. The same age.’
Tara kept her eyes closed and her face upraised to the sun. She didn’t want to press him.
He never talks about his wife.
‘We married within a few months. It was love at first seeing.’
‘At first sight.’
‘It was love at first sight. We travelled around the world together – to Cape Town, Frankfurt, Madrid.’ He paused. ‘Paris.’
The voice was neutral. No nostalgia, no pain, no emotion at all. It was almost as though he were describing a distant relative.
‘And to Estonia?’
There was a long, long silence.
‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘When The Singing Revolution succeeded, and I wanted to go home, she agreed unquestioningly to come with me.’
But all was not well in his country, he told Tara. ‘Before independence we were being terrorised and extorted by old men in grey suits. Now we were being terrorised and extorted by young men in tracksuits and designer running shoes. They hung around outside the nightclubs and hard-currency bars, talking into mobile phones, arranging drug shipments and smuggled consignments of stolen Mercedes. They called them the new mafia.’
He called over a vendor and bought two cans of Perrier. Then, slowly sipping the ice-cold springwater, he told her the whole story.
The couple had settled comfortably into their new life in Tallinn when Andres began writing a series of investigative articles about the new mafia – the extent of its activities, the scale of its corruption, the number of politicians it had in its pocket. As he probed deeper and deeper, the death threats had started coming.
‘It did not deter me,’ Andres was saying in a distant voice. ‘To me, the truth was above all else. The sacred truth must be told at all costs. I was too blind to see that they would not strike directly at me, but through Manuela.’
Tara took his hand and said nothing. She knew from his halting, rusted cadences that this was the first time he had told the story in a long, long time.
‘When it came, it came without any further warning,’ he said. ‘Manuela was driving her car, an old East German Trabant, to the office where I worked. When she reached the car park a long-haired young man in a red tracksuit walked up to her, calmly pulled out a .38 handgun, and fired three times into her head, just here,’ he tapped his temple. ‘She died instantly, of course.’
Tara was silent for a moment. ‘Andres, I can’t think of any words. I’m so, so sorry.’
He shrugged. ‘Five years ago, Tara. There is nothing to be gained from living in the past.’
‘So you had to leave your country a second time?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid I ran away, like some panic-stricken animal. I know I should have stayed and carried on my campaign, but by that time there were others who were following the same trail that I had started.’
He took a long drink of Perrier. ‘I was offered a job as international war correspondent by the editors at Magnus magazine,’ he explained. ‘So off I went, following the trail of holocausts from Asia to Latin America, from the Chechen hills to the streets of Sarajevo, from Armagh to Iraq. I always needed to get closer to the action than anyone else. Some of my fellow journalists said that I was foolhardy, others that I was courageous. They were both wrong. The truth was that I really wanted a bullet to end my life, just as it had done Manuela’s.’
‘But you survived.’
‘God protects fools.’ He drained the can. ‘With time, the pain began to ease. Perhaps one day it will disappear completely.’
He turned to face her for the first time. ‘You’re a good listener, Tara,’ he said. ‘It has been years since I have had a chance to talk about this to anyone.’
‘I’ll list
en any time,’ she said simply.
He hesitated. It was almost as though the effort of delivering his next words was causing him actual physical pain. ‘The worst thing I have to live with,’ he said at last, ‘is that it was all my fault. If I had been there, it would never have happened.’
Tara squeezed his hand. ‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’
He shook his head. ‘I had arranged to meet her in Rae-joko Plats half an hour beforehand. I didn’t turn up. If I had, Manuela might still be alive today.’
‘But I’m sure there was some good reason why you were delayed.’
He nodded, his dark eyes filled with pain. ‘There was a good reason. I was involved with another woman.’
Then, with a suddenness that startled her, he crumpled his empty can and rose sharply to his feet.
‘We’d better hurry,’ he said. ‘Or we shall be late for church.’
Tara and Andres took a pew near the centre of the basilica. As they waited for the service to begin, a group of white-clad novice nuns entered the church in single file and sat near the altar. Down in the body of the church, the families of these young girls glowed with quiet pride.
A choir of older sisters sang; their clear, pure voices swelled and swooped and resounded through the old building.
Then an old priest began the service. He spoke into a microphone that sent his words bouncing and echoing incoherently around the church. Words shattered, sentences broke up and repeated themselves. Tara, whose French was basic but functional, couldn’t understand a word and soon gave up trying.
Soon it was time for Holy Communion. The consecrated Hosts were handed to the eucharistic ministers, the lay helpers who took their places at the head of each aisle and dispensed the wafers to the patient lines of communicants. The priest himself gave communion to the nuns and the novices.
Andres and Tara remained seated. After a few moments of indecision, Andres nudged Tara and nodded his head discreetly at one of the eucharistic ministers – the one furthest away from them, at the far side of the church.