“Who’s the boss?”
“That information is of no interest to you.”
“OK,” I said. “When do I start?”
“Tonight, if that works for you.”
“Fine.”
“Be here at eleven thirty PM and I’ll bring you over to the place.”
“Is it far from here?”
“No.”
“How will I get paid?”
“There will be an envelope waiting for you here every day after one PM. You’ll get off work at six AM, so you can pick up your wages when you wake up. By the way, the boss said that you only need work six days, but if you want the seventh day—”
“I want the seventh day.”
“Done.”
“Can I bring my laptop and books to work?”
“And a radio and anything else to keep you occupied. Trust me, there won’t be much to do.”
When I left Kamal, I walked down to the Faubourg Saint-Martin and dropped thirty euros on a small transistor radio. I returned to my room. I opened a can of soup and cut up some cheese and a few slices of bread, and ate a simple dinner while listening to a concert of Berg and Beethoven on France Musique. Then I made myself a pot of coffee and drank it all. It was going to be a long night.
When I arrived back at the Internet café, I was carrying a small day pack containing my laptop, my radio, a pad and a pen, and a copy of a Simenon novel, Trois chambres à Manhattan, which I was reading in French. Kamal was closing up the place as I entered. He reached behind the bar and dug out two large bottles of Evian.
“You’ll need these for the night ahead,” he said.
He walked among the computers, making certain they were all shut down. Then he turned off all the lights. We stepped outside. He rolled down the large steel shutter, dug out his keys, sealed them with a formidable padlock, and motioned for me to follow him down the rue des Petites Écuries.
“We don’t have far to walk,” he said.
At the end of the street, we turned into the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière. We crossed it and passed a showroom for some line of men’s fashions. I knew this small stretch of street well, as it was right around the corner from where I lived. I’d bought a sandwich once from the local greasy souvlaki bar (and lived to eat again). I’d even treated myself to the set seven-euro dinner at the little traiteur asiatique next door. But I hadn’t noticed the tiny doorway just beyond this four-table joint—a doorway that was set back off the street by around ten feet. The alley leading to the door was so narrow that a man with a forty-inch waistline would have had trouble negotiating it. There was a steel door at the end of it. There was a small camera above the door and a spotlight trained on the area below the doorway. There was a keypad with a speakerphone beside it. Kamal punched in six numbers. As he did so, he told me, “The code is one six three two two six. Memorize it, but don’t write it down.”
“Why don’t you want me to write it down?”
“Because I don’t want you to write it down. 1–6–3–2–2–6. You got that?”
I repeated it out loud, then said it a second time, just to make certain that it had adhered to my brain.
“Good,” he said as the door clicked open. We entered a hallway lit by a single naked lightbulb. The walls were unpainted concrete. Ditto the floor. There was a stairway in front of us. Around twelve feet away there was another steel door. Behind it I could hear the low hum of . . . was it something mechanical? . . . machinery, perhaps? . . . and the occasional raised voice? But the sound was muffled. As I strained to hear it, Kamal put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Up the stairs.”
The staircase led to another steel door. This was opened by two keys. Kamal had to put his weight on the door to finish the job and gain us access to a small room. Like the hallway, it had unpainted concrete walls. It was ten by ten, furnished with a beat-up metal desk, a straight-back chair, and nothing else. A closed-circuit television monitor sat on one corner of the desk. It was broadcasting a grainy image of the doorway outside. By the monitor was a speaker and a keypad. There were two doorways off this room. One was opened, showing the interior of an old-fashioned stand-up French toilet. You had to face front and squat as you took a dump. The toilet was also unpainted and seemed to lack a light. The other door was wooden and locked with a sliding bolt. There were no windows in the room—and the one radiator wasn’t throwing off much in the way of heat.
“You expect me to work here?” I asked.
“That is up to you.”
“This place is a shit hole—a cold shit hole with no light.”
“The radiator can be turned up higher.”
“I’ll need some sort of other heat.”
“OK, you can buy an electrical heater for the room—”
“And a desk lamp.”
“Fine. Will you start tonight?”
I looked around, thinking, He’s looking for a deadbeat to do a deadbeat’s job—and he’s sized you up as the perfect candidate.
“All right, I’ll start tonight—but I want some cash to buy paint and stuff tomorrow.”
“If you want to paint the place, you will have to do it during your work hours.”
“Fine by me. But doesn’t anyone use the room by day? Don’t you have a sentry for the morning hours?”
“That is no concern of yours,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a substantial wad of cash. He peeled off three fifty-euro notes and handed them to me.
“This should be sufficient for the paint, the brushes, the heater, the lamp. But provide receipts, please. The boss is finicky about expenses.”
Kamal lit up a cigarette, then said, “So here is how the job works. You arrive here every night at midnight. You let yourself in. Once inside this room, you bolt the door behind you and padlock it shut. Then you sit down and do whatever you want to do for the next six hours, always keeping an eye on the monitor. If you see anyone in the alley who is loitering, you press the number 2–2 on the keypad. This will send a signal to someone that there is an unwanted stranger outside. They will take care of the problem. If a visitor approaches the doorway, he will ring a button which will sound up here on the desk speaker. You press 1–1 on the keypad and say one word, “Oui?” If he is legitimate, he will answer, “I am here to see Monsieur Monde.” Once you have received this answer, you press the ENTER button on the keypad, which will activate the door. You then press 2–3 on the keypad, which will inform the people downstairs that a legitimate visitor is on his way to them.”
“And what will ‘the people downstairs’ do?”
“They will ‘greet’ this legitimate visitor. Now if the person who rings the door doesn’t say, ‘I am here to see Monsieur Monde,’ you press 2–4 on the keypad. This will send a signal that there is an unwanted presence in the alley. Once again, the people downstairs will take care of the problem.”
“It sounds like the people downstairs worry about unwanted guests.”
“I will say this once more. What goes on downstairs does not concern you—and it will never concern you. Believe me, my friend, it is better that way.”
“And say the cops just happen to show up in the alley . . .”
“No problem,” he said, walking over to the door next to the toilet and unbolting it. “This is never locked. If you see the cops on the screen, you exit here. There is a bolt—very strong—on the other side. It will buy you a few minutes’ time, as the cops will have to break the door down. By the time they do that, you will be out of the building. The passage behind here leads down to a basement. There is another door there which leads to a passage into the adjoining building. When you come out of that building, you will be on the rue Martel. The cops will have no idea.”
“This is insane,” I heard myself say out loud.
“Then don’t take the job.”
“Promise me that whatever is going on downstairs isn’t so morally reprehensible . . .” I said.
“No one is being involuntarily harmed,” he said.
I paused, knowing I had to make a decision immediately.
“I will never have to directly meet anyone?” I asked.
“You come at midnight, you go at six. You sit in this room. You don’t leave. You see the people who come here on the monitor. They don’t see you. It is all very elegant.”
“OK,” I said, “we have a deal.”
“Good,” Kamal said.
After taking me again through all the various numbers I had to press, and handing me the assorted keys, he said, “There is just one thing. You must never come here before midnight, you must leave promptly at six. Unless you see the police on the monitor, you must never leave the room until six.”
“Otherwise I’ll turn into a pumpkin?”
“Something like that, yes. D’accord?”
“D’ac.”
“So you are clear about everything?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Everything is perfectly clear.”
EIGHT
NOTHING HAPPENED THAT first night. I set up my laptop. I forced myself to work—my eyes straining under the single naked lightbulb. I pushed myself into writing five hundred words. I turned up the radiator and discovered that it gave off no more heat. I drank the two liters of Evian. I peed several times in the toilet and was grateful that I didn’t need a bowel movement, as I couldn’t have handled standing up to do it. I read some of the Simenon novel—a dark, sparely written tale about a French actor getting over the breakup of his marriage by wandering through the night world of 1950s New York. Around four in the morning, I started to fade—and fell asleep sitting up at the desk. I jolted awake, terrified that I had missed something on the monitor. But the screen showed nothing save the glare of a spotlight on a doorway—an image so grainy it almost seemed as if it was from another era, as if I was looking at the past tense just downstairs.
I read some more. I fought fatigue. I fought boredom. I drew up a list of what I’d buy this afternoon to fix the place up. I kept glancing at my watch, willing 6:00 AM to arrive. When it finally did, I unlocked the door. I turned off the light in the room. I closed the door behind me and locked it. I hit the light for the stairs. At the bottom of them, I stood for a moment, trying to hear any noises from the big steel door at the end of the ground-floor corridor. Nothing. I unlocked the front door. Outside it was still night—a touch of damp in the air, augmenting the chill that had crawled under my skin during those six hours in a badly heated concrete box. I locked the door, my head constantly turning sideways to scan the alleyway and see if anyone was waiting to hit me over the head with a club. But the alley was clear. I finished locking the door. I walked quickly into the street. No cops, no heavies in parkas and balaclava helmets, waiting to have a few words with me. The rue du Faubourg Poissonnière was empty. I turned left and kept moving until I came to a little boulangerie that was on the rue Montholon. This took me a few minutes past my own street, but I didn’t care. I was hungry. I bought two pains au chocolat and a baguette at the boulangerie. I ate one of the croissants on the way back to my chambre. Once inside I took a very hot shower, trying to get some warmth back into my bones. Then I changed into a T-shirt and pajama bottom, and made myself a bowl of hot chocolate. It tasted wonderful. So too did the second pain au chocolat. I pulled the blinds closed. I set the alarm for 2:00 PM I was asleep within moments of crawling into bed.
I slept straight through. It was strange waking up in the early afternoon—and knowing that I wouldn’t see bed again until after six the next morning. Still, I had things to do—so I was up and out the door in ten minutes. Much to my relief—because the paranoid part of me wondered if, indeed, I would get paid at all—an envelope was waiting for me at the Internet café. As agreed there were sixty-five euros inside it.
“Where’s Kamal?” I asked the guy behind the counter—a quiet, sullen-looking man in his late twenties, with a big beard and the telltale bruise on his forehead of a devout Muslim who prostrated himself several times a day in the direction of Mecca.
“No idea,” he said.
“Please tell him I picked this up, and say thanks for me.”
I headed off to a paint shop on the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, and bought two large cans of off-white emulsion and a set of rollers and a paint pan and a tin of white gloss and a brush and a large bottle of white spirit. I would have preferred bringing all the decorating gear to “my office,” but I had to obey the “No Arrival Before Midnight” rule. So I made two trips back to my room with the gear, then headed out back to the Cameroonian dude who had sold me all the bedding and kitchen stuff. Yes, he did have an electric radiator in stock—all mine for a knockdown price of thirty euros.
Getting all the paint stuff to my office that evening proved tricky. Before setting out, I made a pit stop by the alley at around eleven and discovered that, at the start of this laneway, there was a large crevice in a wall: currently filled with rubbish and animal droppings. Never mind—it was perfect for my needs. I returned with two cans of paint and some old newspapers. As I bent down to place the newspapers on the ground inside the crevice—I wanted to avoid getting rat shit on my stuff—the fecal smell became overwhelming. I shoved the two cans of paint in, and returned to my room to bring the next load of stuff over. It took a further run after that to have everything in place.
Then I sat in a bar on the rue de Paradis, nursing a beer and waiting for midnight to arrive. The bar was a dingy joint—all Formica tables and a battered zinc counter, and a French-Turkish barmaid dressed in tight jeans, and a dude with serious tattoos also working the bar, and the jukebox playing crap French rock, and three morose guys hunched over a table, and some behemoth splayed on a barstool, drinking a milky substance that was obviously alcoholic (Pastis? Raki? Bailey’s Irish Cream?) as he was smashed. He looked up when I approached the bar to order my beer—and that’s when I saw it was Omar. It took him a moment or two for his eyes to register it was me. Then his rant started. First in English: “Fucking American, fucking American, fucking American.” Then in French: “Il n’apprécie pas comment je chie.” (“He doesn’t like the way I take a shit.”) Then he pulled out a French passport and started waving it at me, yelling, “Can’t get me deported, asshole.” After that he started muttering to himself in Turkish, at which point I didn’t know what the hell he was saying. Just as I was about to finish my beer and bolt from the place before Omar got more explosive, he put his head down on the bar—in mid-sentence—and passed out.
Without my asking for it, the barmaid brought over another beer.
“If he hates you, you must be all right. C’est un gros lard.”
I thanked her for the beer. I checked my watch—11:53. I downed the pression in three gulps. I headed off.
At midnight precisely, I walked up the alleyway and unlocked the door. Then, in less than a minute, I made three fast trips to retrieve my hidden gear and bring it into the hallway. I bolted the door behind me. There was the same mechanical hum I’d heard yesterday emanating from the door at the end of the corridor. I ignored it and headed upstairs. A minute later, all the gear was in my office and the door locked. I was “in” for the night. I plugged in the electric radiator. I turned on my radio to Paris Jazz. I checked the monitor. All clear in the alley. I opened the first can of paint. I went to work.
That night, nothing happened again—except that I managed to give the office two coats of paint. I did my “job” as well—checking the monitor every few minutes to see if there was anyone lurking in the hallway. There wasn’t. Before I knew it, my watch was reading 5:45 AM—and though it was clear that the second coat wouldn’t sufficiently cover the chalky gray concrete walls, at least I knew that another night had passed.
I packed away all the gear. I washed the brushes in the sink. I left at 6:00 AM exactly. I took several deep gulps of Paris air as I walked down the still-dark street toward the boulangerie. My usual two pains. One eaten on the way home, the second with hot chocolate after a shower. Then—with the aid of Zopiclone—seven hours of void until t
he alarm woke me at two and a new day started.
That night, I finished painting the walls. I sanded down the woodwork. I left at six. The next night, I finished glossing all the woodwork. Again, there was no activity whatsoever on the monitor. At six that morning, I moved all the empty cans and paint gear out of the office and dumped the lot in the rubbish bins at the end of the alley. When I awoke that afternoon, I went straight over to the café to collect my wages. For the third day running, Mr. Beard with the Prayer Bruise was behind the counter.
“Still no Kamal?” I asked.
“He goes away.”
“He didn’t say anything to me about that.”
“Family problems.”
“Is there a number I could call him on?” I asked.
“Why you want to call him?”
“I liked him. We got on well. And if he’s got some personal problems . . .”
“There is no number for him.”
The tone of voice was definitive. It also didn’t encourage further questioning. So I picked up my pay envelope and said nothing, except, “I want to buy a few more things for the office. Might you be able to get a message from me to the boss?”
“You tell me what you need.”
“A small refrigerator and an electric kettle. It’s very hard to work in that room all night without coffee or hot water. I’d also like a rug. The concrete floor still gives off a bit of damp—”
“I tell him,” he said, cutting me off. Then he picked up a rag and started swabbing down the bar. Our conversation was over.
When I arrived at work that night, a fridge was awaiting me in a corner of the room. Though somewhat battered—with hints of rust on its hinges—it was still working. So too was the electric kettle positioned on top of it. It looked new. When I filled it with water, it boiled its contents in less than a minute. The only problem was, I didn’t have any coffee or tea on hand. But, at least, I now knew that the man in charge was amenable to certain requests—even though there was still no rug.
But there was a change in my usual routine: a visitor in the alleyway. He arrived at 1:48 AM precisely. The phone rang on my desk, jolting me. I looked away from my Simenon novel and turned immediately to the monitor and saw a man of indeterminate age (the grainy image made it hard to discern his features) standing outside. I was instantly nervous. I picked up the phone and said, “Oui?”
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