Only fools and the desperate stay near Gare du Nord or Gare de l’Est. Like nearly all major stations in every major city on the planet, all they’re good for are thin coffee, overpriced cigarettes and the fumes of taxis waiting in ranks. Noise, bustle and a sense that nobody cares define the drab station concourses where money cannot buy a decent sandwich, and I made sure to be at least fifteen minutes’ walk from them before I looked for a hotel.
Down a street too narrow for the height of houses that fronted it I found a thick black door with a bell pull that weighed as much as my old thin arms. The proprietor seemed surprised to have a guest, but I shook his hairy hand nonetheless and slammed the gate in the bemused face of my former host.
Inside, a windowless hall was lit by bare tungsten bulbs, the filaments wound like strands of DNA. The air smelt of warm breath and wood varnish. I trotted round to the back of the reception desk and assigned myself a suite on the top floor, marked it as paid for, tucked the key in a plant pot on the landing of the stairs, grabbed my coat and went to find a hearty meal and a missing ghost.
My body didn’t need the food, but routine dies hard, and the mental compulsion to eat outweighed physical desire. As stew steamed before me and coffee cooled by my side, I watched the street and thought about Janus.
Three weeks ago she’d been photographed by Aquarius: a Japanese woman sitting in this very same café, newspaper on the table in front of her. She’d looked distracted, her eyes wandering off somewhere to the left of the lens, but then Janus probably had plenty to think about.
“Excuse me,” I said to the waiter, pushing a very generous tip on to the tray, “I’m looking for a friend of mine. Osako Kuyeshi. Comes to this café sometimes. Have you seen her at all?”
Paris isn’t as diverse as London or New York. A lone Japanese lady sipping coffee by herself had been noticed. As, indeed, had her absence.
I found her in outpatients at Georges-Pompidou, waiting for a CT scan. Slipping into a woman in hospital robes and thick support socks, I sat down by her and said, “Are you waiting for the scanner?”
She was.
“What’s it for, can I ask?”
“I get cysts,” she explained. “And I lost my memory.”
“That’s terrible for you. I’ve been waiting months,” I grumbled, rolling my tongue against the false teeth glued to my gums. “I have terrible problems with my memory. One day I’m standing talking to this stranger on the train, next thing it’s two months later and I’m down to my knickers in someone else’s bedroom.”
No! exclaimed Osako Kuyeshi. Not you too?
Yes! Shocking, it was, just shocking, I mean, they weren’t even my knickers…
… but enough about me. Tell me about you.
Forty minutes later I walked out of the hospital, a junior doctor with a stethoscope round my neck.
Three days ago Osako Kuyeshi had opened her eyes and not known where she was. Five months of her life had vanished. She barely even spoke French; the last thing she remembered she was in Tokyo, waiting to collect her benefits. The doctors were baffled, so were the nice men who came to ask her questions about it as she sat waiting for the psychiatrist.
“It’s all right,” I’d said. “I’m sure something good will come of this.”
I don’t think so, she’d replied. My husband died last month, and now I’m alone. I don’t think anything good will come ever again.
Osako had woken in an apartment not her own.
That was interesting.
If Janus had left Osako as an emergency move, she would have done so in a crowded street, a place hot with bodies to jump to.
An apartment sounded more planned, less alarmed.
I went to Sèvres-Lecourbe, south of the monument to military ambition that was Invalides, searching out Janus’ new host.
The place turned out to be a holiday apartment, rented in Osako’s name, though she couldn’t remember the purchase. The first face that Osako had seen–young, green eyes and a purple veil–was the house cleaner, a Moroccan woman with flawless French and shoes going through at the toe, who exclaimed that she’d been asked about Madame Osako’s condition already, first by the doctors, then by the men who came knocking on her door, and she had told them what she told me–that she had helped Osako when Madame stumbled.
And after Madame stumbled?
The cleaner wasn’t sure. She remembered a stumble, then she stood in the street and Madame Osako was screaming, just screaming. Poor woman, is she all right?
“You found yourself in the street but cannot say how you got there?”
“Of course I can say!” she exclaimed. “I walked there! I can’t remember why I walked there, but I must have walked there, because there I was!”
And in the street did you see someone walk away?
Funny thing: that was precisely the question the other men asked her too.
Janus, you two-faced god, where are you?
Osako to the cleaning woman, the cleaning woman to a stranger in the street.
Only he wasn’t a stranger, because this was planned, this was something Janus had arranged, and the stranger was…
Monsieur Petrain, who lives at number 49, and there’s only one question I really want to ask here, one question that will crack this case wide open:
“Monsieur Petrain. His arse. Would you describe it as ‘tight’?”
Chapter 61
I remember Will, my gofer from the days of Marilyn Monroe, Aurangzeb and champagne.
I did not wear his body long, for he and I had a deal, and at the termination of our contract I shook him by the hand, and he was unafraid of my touch, and I said, “Good luck to you, Will.”
He grinned and squeezed my palm and replied, “Likewise. Likewise.”
Thirty-two years later I was sitting in Melissa Belvin in a diner off Columbus when a man entered. He was chubby without being fat, portly without being uncomfortable, and he ordered strong black coffee, a Danish pastry and a copy of the New York Post.
I watched him flick through political scandals, corruption, reports on dictators and economics, straight to the back. There he started earnestly on the sports pages, scouring each line of every article like a holy text.
After a while I walked over to him, swinging myself on to the high stool by the bar at his side.
His eyes flickered up to me from the paper and, perceiving no threat, returned to his reading. Others might have stopped to stare, for in my yellow dress and fair hair I was beautiful even by the rules of the time.
“How are the Dodgers doing?” I asked.
He glanced up again, re-evaluating then dismissing. “OK. But they can sure do better.”
“Tough season?”
“It’s always a tough season for the Dodgers. It’s how they make success feel sweet.”
That should have been that, but I said, “And how are you, William?”
His eyes focused fast, now trying to read the face that moments before he’d disregarded. “I’m not William. You’re thinking of someone else.”
“Then who are you?”
“I think you have me mistaken—”
“How’s your memory?”
Silence, and now his eyes moved though his body was still, sweeping me top to bottom. “Jesus,” he breathed. “Jesus! Look at you! Who the fuck are you?”
“I am Melissa.”
“And how the fuck have you been, Melissa?”
“Well, thank you. Moving around a bit. You?”
“Good. Good! Fucking good! You still agenting? Is this–” he leaned back abruptly “–is this work?”
“I’m not in that line of business any more.”
“Seriously?”