A silence fell over the room. Bruce realised, too late, what he already well knew, that not only did damn near everybody in the room speak more English than he spoke French, but he had just lost the argument all over again.
Bonne chance! somebody observed, not too quietly, and a few too many people laughed a little too loudly and altogether genuinely.
No loss, Bruce told himself, struggling for composure, in the lift down to the street, alone except for a little lady in a sweater with a dog likewise, I never liked any of those besuited fucks anyway.
Though it was the last week of his scheduled tenure, Bruce paid but little mind to the details of his departure. The plane reservation had been secured at the beginning of the trip. Physically, he’d left but little impression on the apartment. He hadn’t burned five sticks of wood from the quintal.
Increasingly, however, as the day approached, something nagged at him. He knew what it was. He’d been putting it off, why or how or when he hadn’t bothered or been able to discern, but suddenly, with three days to go, his mind was made up.
He went to the ATM in the little triangular place and withdrew five hundred euros.
He took a late supper – it was long past dark – in the deserted bistro opposite the teller machine, drinking an entire carafe of Cotes du Rhone with his pommes frites and steak pavé, and only varied the routine by calling for a pricey bas armagnac with his coffee afterwards. Vogue Homme, an element of his habitude, remained face down beyond his place setting, unpursued.
At half past midnight he headed up the rue de la Tour d’Auvergne. And did Bruce notice the five-gallon wooden molar hanging, brown roots and all, barely two metres above the sidewalk, marking a long-shuttered bar called La Dent Creuse, The Hollow Tooth, the French equivalent, as goes capacity for drink, of the hollow wooden leg? He did not. Just up the block, at rue des Martyrs, he took a right. All the shops were closed. Traffic was light.
At Pigalle, things were different. The never-moving neon wings of the Moulin Rouge loomed scarlet over a thronging abundance of tourists of sex and otherwise, as well as hustlers and pickpockets and every sort of prostitute and dope dealer, as well as people like himself, on the way to some place else, more or less.
He took the alley past the hotel, up to the deadend street. At the foot of the steps, which lead up to the rue des Abbesses, he took a left. The shadows were there. They rippled on the cobbles. The sound of high heels receded down the curve at the far end of the street. It had been nearly five months.
Akhmed was there.
So was Bruce.
They each had something, one for the other.
LA SHAMPOUINEUSE by JEROME CHARYN
1.
He lived in a honeycomb, a prison with wallpaper and a panoramic view. He could have climbed right into the graves of Maupassant and Maria Montez from his balcony window. But Calvin Morse wasn’t supposed to climb. He wasn’t supposed to walk or fly or leave his honeycomb. He was an accountant on the lam from federal prosecutors and a little gang of mob bankers and lawyers.
Until last week he worked for a factory that made faucets – faucets of silvered chrome – that went into every building put up by Joshua Lightning’s own construction company. Lightning & Lightning was a kind of corporate octopus, but Calvin had been the full-time accountant for its largest affiliate, Lightning Faucets & Chrome. How could he have guessed that the ingenious way he cooked Joshua’s books would be copied by Lightning & Lightning’s other accountants, and that federal prosecutors would consider him the brains behind the whole octopus?
If he hadn’t gone to Columbia with Josh, roomed with him for three years, he would have been disposed of, dumped into a truck, and become part of lower Manhattan’s landfill. But Josh had pleaded Cal’s case with the mob bankers, had convinced them that he could hide Cal, keep him out of harm’s way. Josh would have preferred that he disappear into Bolivia or Brazil, where gringo prosecutors would never find him, but Paris had always been Cal’s dreamland, ever since he read Baudelaire and Maupassant at Columbia.
He’d gone to work for Josh’s dad right out of college, had to attend accounting school at night, and slave for Lightning Faucets & Chrome – he’d been married and divorced, had one daughter at Amherst and a second daughter at Yale, and all his vacations up until now had been packaged retreats that Lightning & Lightning put together and paid for: the Bahamas, Cape Cod, the Hemingway country of Key West.
Cal had five million in a retirement account, held at Lightning & Lightning’s own private bank, but he was having a crisis long before federal prosecutors swooped down on Lightning’s books, which were almost like fairy tales with elaborate fictional plots. He couldn’t bear his accumulations of money. His daughters went to Joshua for their tuition, not to Cal. He’d always been absent, even while he was at Faucets & Chrome. He was a walking, talking filament of fire, a hot wire that could create or swallow up a whole column of numbers and categories – he was like a musical instrument that had learned to play itself. In fact, his only pleasure had come from his manoeuvrings with a sea of lines on a ledger book. He’d never been in love, and his connection to his daughters was so ambiguous and remote that it too was at the point of disappearing.
But there was a touch of eccentricity to Cal – his passion for Paris, a city he had only seen once in a mad weekend whirl when he accompanied Joshua to a convention of faucet makers at some palais in the middle of nowhere – he’d barely had time for a pilgrimage to Baudelaire’s grave, a hike in Montparnasse, a visit to the Dingo, where Hemingway had first met Scott Fitzgerald. Yet that weekend had sculpted Cal, defined him in some essential way – and his dream, or delirium, was to escape Lightning Faucets and live in that city of desire he knew so little about.
And now he hid in a luxurious apartment with a bird’s-eye view of Maupassant. He hadn’t realised that his flat on the rue Boulard would be just another tomb. Joshua had commanded him never to venture into the street – not even after midnight. All his meals were prepared by the concierge, a Portuguese woman who also dusted the apartment and did his laundry. He had 180 channels he could watch on a plasma screen that covered an entire wall. A call girl visited him on Tuesdays, a ravishing métisse with green eyes and mocha skin. Her name was Mélodie. She was a figurante at some theatre company in the provinces, could recite Molièere and Shakespeare, and talk to Cal about books until he was blue in the face. The sexual splendour she offered was beyond the realm of what he might have imagined, and yet something gnawed at him. Mélodie could deliver all the mechanics of love, even camaraderie and companionship, but it felt like the dress rehearsal for a play that Cal would never be in.
He had a suspicion that Mélodie might be spying on him, and he wondered if she was Joshua’s own mulatto mistress. She knew things about Cal she ought not to have known, that he was a fanatic about fantasy baseball, had used his command of statistics to invent his own baseball league, where Babe Ruth could bat against Sandy Koufax, and Joe DiMaggio could duel with Willie Mays in centrefield – Cal’s artistic trick was to merge time and space in his fantasy league, as if the whole history of baseball could collapse into one titanic season. He’d ‘cooked’ baseball with the same imaginative leap in which he’d cooked Lightning’s books.