Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  For Julie

  1.

  It was a gray winter Sunday when I came to the bookstore.

  As had been my habit during that troubled time, I was out walking. There was never a specific destination, merely an accumulation of random turns and city blocks to numb the hours and distract from the problems at hand. It was surprisingly easy to forget oneself among the bustling markets and grand boulevards, the manicured parks and marble monuments.

  On this particular day, a thin drizzle had begun falling early in the afternoon. At first, it was barely enough to wet the wool of a sweater, let alone interrupt this serious business of walking. But later, toward dusk, the skies abruptly thundered and opened into a downpour. Shelter was needed, and from where I’d been caught near the cathedral of Notre Dame, the yellow-and-green shop sign could just be glimpsed on the other side of the river.

  By then, I’d been in Paris a month, long enough to hear vague rumors about the legendary bookstore. I’d been intrigued, of course, and had often meant to visit. Yet as I crossed the bridge, with the wind whipping at my pant legs and umbrellas sprouting around me, these rumors were far from mind. My only thought was to escape the storm and idle the rainy minutes away.

  Out in front of the store, a tour group bravely posed for one last round of photographs. They used thick guidebooks to shield their cameras and their teeth were clenched into chattering smiles. One woman glared from beneath the hood of a rain slicker as her husband twisted a complicated lens. “Hurry,” she urged. “Just hurry.”

  Through the fog of the shop’s main window, there could be seen a blur of warm light and moving bodies. To the left stood a narrow wooden door, its green paint wrinkled and chipped. With a faint creak, it swung open to reveal a modest delirium.

  A glittering chandelier hung from a cracked wooden ceiling beam, while in the corner an obese man squeezed rainwater from his turquoise muumuu. A horde of customers circled the desk, clamoring for the clerk’s attention in a loud mash of languages. And the books. The books were everywhere. They sagged from wooden shelves, spilled from cardboard boxes, teetered in tall piles on tables and chairs. Stretched along the windowsill and taking in this mad scene was a silky black cat. I swear it looked up at me and winked.

  There was a sudden spray of wind as the tour group pushed inside the store. I was bounced forward, past the crowded desk, then up two stone stairs painted with the words LIVE FOR HUMANITY and through into a large central room. Here, tables and shelves overflowed with more books, two doorways led deeper into the store, and a murky skylight was set overhead. Most unusual was what this skylight cast down upon: an iron-rimmed wishing well, where a man on bended knee was clawing out coins of high denomination. As I approached, he glared up at me and quickly shielded his bounty with a crooked arm.

  Giving this fellow wide berth, I entered a narrow passage and found myself surrounded by books written in what appeared to be Russian. A wrong turn took me down a dead end to a sink surrounded by stacks of yellowed nature magazines. There was a soapy razor lying on an issue featuring the jungles of Madagascar. A dab of foam added an unnatural spot to a reclining leopard.

  Backing up, I arrived at a wall of German novels, then, stumbling slightly, there was another turn and a loose pyramid of glossy-covered art books. To one side was a stained-glass alcove with a bare bulb flickering inside. A woman was crouched there, muttering in Italian and trying to decipher the book titles in this shaky light.

  Finally, after stepping through another doorway, I was back in the room with the wishing well. The man who plunged his hand in the coins had vanished, but now the tour group had surged ahead and laid claim to the space. Half-blinded by flashing cameras, I was jostled among wet shoulders as they herded past me and into the very labyrinth from which I’d just emerged.

  It was at this juncture that I decided a café would be a calmer harbor from the storm. Making a cautious retreat past the clerk and the winking black cat, I went back out the green door. The sting of rain made me pause to reconsider, and as I stood huddled in the doorway, I noticed a wooden bookcase drilled into the wall beside the store window. The paperbacks were damp and bloated, but they cost just twenty-five francs, a sum even I could afford in those desperate days. A copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man edged out at me. Guessing it would be an inexpensive way to swallow time, I ventured back inside.

  When it came my turn to be served, the young woman at the desk gave me a bright smile and folded open the cover of my book. With meticulous care, she stamped the title page with the crest of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. Then she invited me upstairs for tea.

  2.

  I used to be a crime reporter for a newspaper in a midsize Canadian city. We liked to say we had a population of a million people, but that figure included farming communities an hour’s drive from downtown. For me, a more relevant statistic was the murder rate. There were a steady fifteen or twenty a year, maybe twenty-five if things were particularly good, at least good from a crime reporter’s point of view.

  Mine was a foul profession. The object was to pry into the dark corners of life and drag out all that was vile and diseased for public contemplation: an infant girl raped with a flashlight, a toddler drowned in a backyard swimming pool while the baby-sitter napped, a young father crushed by a rowdy car of drunken teens. This was the daily routine, a steady stream of sorrow that gradually colored my vision of humanity and dulled my sense of compassion.

  As loathsome as it might have been, it was easy enough to justify the work: It’s a newspaper’s duty to keep abreast of police activity; reporting tragedy helps a community better understand death and human suffering; doing so in an honest fashion dispels the rumors and half-truths that inevitably surround such events. And those wretched evenings when I found myself on the doorstep of a tear-stained mother, urging her to give me the school photograph of her hours-dead son, I consoled myself with the notion that another mother might hug her child more tightly when she saw the dead boy’s picture in the newspaper the next day.

  The lie was put to these rationalizations whenever murder became a topic of discussion among the crime reporters in my city. Our success was measured by how often we reached the front page of the newspaper or led the evening telecast, and we agreed there wasn’t enough hometown crime drama for our liking. We dreamed of working someplace like Toronto, with fifty murders a year. One a week. Imagine that. Once, when a colleague had drunk enough beer to loosen his tongue, he complained bitterly that he’d been at an out-of-town wedding the weekend there were an unprecedented four gruesome murders. A pair of which had been performed with a claw hammer and left stalactites of brain on the ceiling. He couldn’t believe he’d missed the fun.

  At first, I en
joyed the job. The late nights at crime scenes, the treasure hunts for facts and photographs of the dead, the adrenaline of racing against deadline and competing against rival newspapers. It was a chance to muck about knee-deep in the festering side of the human soul. Everyone rubbernecks when they pass an accident; I had the dubious pleasure of standing a few feet from the scorched wrecks.

  But I also took to the work for personal reasons. I happened to have my own skeletons, which made me that much more eager to dig into the closets of others. Surrounding myself with darkness and misfortune made me feel almost normal.

  It was by the grace of an internship program that I got my start at the newspaper. I was in my early twenties and studying journalism at the local university. I’d arranged with the city editor to volunteer over the winter break, when regular newsroom staff took vacation days over the holidays and an eager body could fill important cracks. Sure enough, things quickly became interesting.

  On Christmas Eve, one of the paper’s senior crime reporters had been sent out to investigate an emergency broadcast that had come in over the police scanner. He called back to the office with two important bits of news. First, there were corpses. Four bodies had been discovered in an apparent case of murder-suicide. And second, this reporter was booked on a flight out of town that very evening so he could spend the holiday with his wife’s family. Somebody had to take his place, and after surveying the near-deserted newsroom, the editor gave a what-the-hell shrug and called me over.

  At the low-rent apartment building where the bodies had been found, I took the elevator up to the crime scene. When the doors opened, the molasses stink of decomposing flesh made me gag. At one end of the hall, reporters and television cameras gathered behind a string of yellow-and-black police tape. Beyond that tape, a uniformed officer guarded an apartment doorway veiled in protective plastic.

  My job was to wait by the police line until the lead detective came out to brief the press. Once the official details of the crime were collected, the crucial task was to discover the identity of the dead family before the rival newspaper did. It was a tabloid, the sort that featured celebrity gossip and photos of almost-naked women on page three, and it had long held the upper hand when it came to the grittier details of death.

  Shortly after I arrived, the doors to the elevator opened and out stepped a uniformed officer carrying bags of fast-food hamburgers. When he crossed the police line and peeled back the plastic so he could get inside the apartment, the wave of rotten air forced the reporters a collective step back. Two forensic technicians came out wearing sanitized bodysuits, hair nets, and surgical baggies on their shoes. The bottoms of those baggies were sticky with clumps of flesh. The techs stood there amid the stink and blood, calmly eating their fries and sipping their milk shakes.

  The lead detective eventually emerged, tugging a blue hospital mask from his mouth so he could speak. A man had used a shotgun to kill his wife and two young children before committing suicide. It was difficult to determine which child was which because their faces had been shattered by the high-gauge shells. Matters were made worse by the fact that the thermostat had been left on high and the bodies had been decomposing for at least ten days in the overheated apartment. Though police knew the name of the family, the information would not be released until the next of kin were notified. That was it, that was all, now go have a Merry Christmas.

  Nobody moved except two cameramen, who rushed back to their stations with the tape of the statement for the late news. The tabloid reporter approached the detective and began scribbling more notes. This same detective turned his back on me, saying he didn’t talk off-the-record with reporters he didn’t know. Lost, I called in to the paper.

  “No names?” I was told to push harder.

  I knocked on every apartment in the building, but this yielded nothing but an offer of a Christmas Eve gin from an elderly grandmother left lonely for the holiday. I called back to the office to try the reverse phone directory, but the family apparently had an unlisted number. I even asked the officer standing guard at the apartment for help, pleading that I was a helpless intern, but she shook her head at my presumption.

  As for what came next, I attribute it to my deep desire to impress the editor and my manic competitiveness that couldn’t cope with getting beaten on the story. Taking the elevator to the lobby, I found the row of cheap metal mailboxes. The box of the dead family bulged with uncollected mail. Car keys easily pop such a lock, and soon I had in my hands electricity bills, parking tickets, Christmas cards, the family’s name ten times over. The detective scowled when I told him I had the name of the dead; the night editor was greatly pleased. I neglected to tell either how this information had been obtained.

  It wasn’t the best Christmas ever, but the feat proved to the paper I had the makings of a journalist, and as a result, I was hired as a stringer, then as a summer replacement, and finally as a full-time reporter. The incident proved to me I was of suitable disposition for the job. As opposed to being sickened by the crime scene, I was intrigued. No further proof was needed than the mailbox. Along with the phone bills and junk mail, I had found a copy of a Victoria’s Secret lingerie catalog addressed to the dead woman. I took it home with me for my browsing pleasure.

  For five long years, I worked like this, the filth and pressure taking their twin tolls. Anytime I saw a middle-aged man with a young child, I wondered if he was a pedophile in the middle of an abduction. On slow news days, I found myself rooting for murder or at least a creatively violent bank robbery so I could worm my way onto the front page. The stress of competing against the tabloid slowly devoured me, and on one occasion I was suspended from work for throwing a chair in the office after getting scooped on the story of a baby girl abandoned in a car under the broiling August sun.

  In such a world, things can go bad quickly. My relationship with a good woman began to falter, then broke under the weight of my unhappiness. I couldn’t bear to talk to anyone but police officers or defense lawyers or crime reporters, people who worked with the same nightmares as I did. Rather predictably, I started to drink heavily, dousing myself in alcohol most every night.

  By the end, it was abundantly clear that I’d become affected by my work, seen too many crime scenes, crossed too many moral lines. There were obvious signs to get out. The drug police were taking an interest in my activities and threatening to press charges against me. I narrowly escaped being arrested for drunk driving. Then there was my shaming involvement in a scandal involving a heart surgeon and a street prostitute. But what truly inspired me to quit that job and that life was a late-night phone call.

  It was December 1999, just two weeks before the much-heralded new millennium. I was in my apartment, typing up the transcript of an interview and drinking my way through a six-pack of beer. My phone rang the late side of midnight and thinking it might be an invitation for last call at one of the neighborhood bars, I answered on the first ring.

  Instead, it was a thief I knew. In the past, I’d written of his exploits for the newspaper and he’d come to enjoy the celebrity the articles brought him. Sometimes, he would even add an extra detail to make the events more compelling. After several collaborations, we became uneasy friends, drinking the occasional pint together, trading gossip about the detectives, lawyers, and convicts who made up our world.

  As a personal favor, earlier that year he’d provided me with explicit details of a $150,000 safe job he’d orchestrated. It was for a book I was writing, and several days before this midnight phone call, that book had been published with some of the facts he’d specifically forbidden me to use, including, most unfortunately, his name. Even though I’d somehow convinced myself I hadn’t violated the spirit of our agreement, I was anxious for his reaction. It was pure fury.

  He was a man accustomed to violence, a man who’d done time in maximum security alongside murderers and Hells Angels, a man known for his brawling and rages. He’d once hinted at what would happen if I betrayed his confiden
ce: a baseball bat to my knees or some similar agony. He’d even boasted of how easy it would be to arrange, how little jail time a man faced for assault, the dozens of people he knew who were sadistic enough to slip on a ski mask and take care of the business for only a few hundred dollars.

  That December night, the punishment seemed destined to be worse. Swearing loudly into the phone, he let me know I had become the most despised of street creatures, a rat, the type who sold out friends to the police, or in my case, the reading public. Out of respect, he wouldn’t touch me himself. But there were others, he warned. His last words before hanging up were to watch my back.

  I panicked. In hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t a real death threat, perhaps I overreacted, but that night I was struck with sweaty terror. After dropping the phone to the ground, I quickly packed a bag of clothes and left for a friend’s house. In the course of the next week, I quit my job at the newspaper, moved out of my apartment, broke the lease on my car, gave away most of my belongings, and twitched nervously at each approaching footstep. Then, three days before New Year’s, I got on a plane for Paris and left it all behind.

  3.

  Paris was at its festive best that late December. A rivalry had developed between world capitals to see who could throw the best millennial party, and the city had taken to the competition with passion. Shop windows teemed with bottles of champagne and year 2000 novelty items; the Eiffel Tower had been mounted with sparkling lights and fireworks; the Champs-Elysées was lined with Ferris wheels that had been decorated by artists and sat cloaked beneath canvas until the fateful midnight struck. The lusty glow of optimism was everywhere.

  But beneath this glitter, there were murmurs of distress. The historic New Year’s Eve was also feared to be an ideal time for zealots and terrorists to burst forth. In the last days of 1999, there were already reports that several dozen men claiming to be Jesus had been expelled from Israel, a carload of explosives was seized at the Canadian-U.S. border, and bottled water and canned goods were being hoarded in preparation for an apocalypse. The world was in an uneasy state of alert, made worse by persistent worries that the Y2K computer bug would shut down telephone systems and knock airplanes from the sky. In Paris, the more conservative sorts were actually leaving the city for fear of riots, and one young woman I spoke with on the metro even tried to convince me to accompany her family on a retreat to the safer shores of Brittany.