The food smelled good and it made Joe’s stomach rumble. Briefly he thought about the woman he had met at the airport. On-board meal, that’s all I can taste now, she had said. He grimaced. He lifted up his spoon, thought of the bartender’s question. The man was watching him patiently. He had a bald head and a pug nose and hair on the back on his hands. His eyes were a clear, calm blue. ‘I don’t know,’ Joe said. ‘Am I?’

The man shrugged. ‘No business of mine,’ he said affably. ‘Enjoy your meal.’

Joe ate. The bartender went back to polishing glasses. When Joe was finished the bartender returned and removed his plate. ‘Wait,’ Joe said.

‘Yes?’

‘Do you know who I’m looking for?’

The man shrugged. ‘Who are we all looking for?’ he said, with just the hint of a smile on his face. Joe said, ‘I need to know.’

‘We serve drinks and stew,’ the bartender said. ‘Everything else’s extra.’ He wandered off, carrying Joe’s plate.

Joe smiled; then he carefully inserted a twenty franc note under his by-now empty glass. When the bartender returned his eyes didn’t miss the note; and with a slight nod he went to refill Joe’s glass, putting a measure of whisky in and a new ice cube. The note had disappeared. ‘One for yourself?’ Joe said. The bartender shook his head. ‘I never drink,’ he said.

‘More for the rest of us,’ Joe said. The bartender smiled. ‘Sure,’ he said. He pulled up a chair and sat on the other side of the counter. Joe said, ‘Talk,’ and it made the bartender smile wider. ‘You didn’t sleep with her?’ the bartender said. ‘The girl that brought you here?’

‘Why would I – ? No,’ Joe said. The bartender nodded. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘She’s not all there, you know,’ he said, as if imparting a great secret. ‘Which can make it interesting, if you follow my meaning. At least, I think it would. Fuzzy around the edges, that girl. Especially if she’s not drinking.’ He shrugged again. ‘Not that there’s much chance of that.’

‘The Greek,’ Joe said, ignoring him with some effort. ‘Papa D. Who is he?’

‘Ah, so you are looking for him,’ the bartender said. ‘I thought as much. Didn’t mean to pry, mind, but I can’t help overhearing things.’

‘Sure,’ Joe said. ‘You can’t.’

The bartender gave him a long look, then seemed to decide to let it drop. ‘Not sure what I can tell you,’ he said at last. ‘The girls call him Papa D. His name’s Papadopoulos. Not sure what his first name is, if he even has one. Strange little man. Tubby. Book publisher, if you can call the things he publishes books. Half-Greek, half-Armenian, half-fuck-knows-what. Papa D.’

Joe lit a cigarette. The bartender fell silent, seemingly exhausted with the effort of producing such a concise biography. His math, Joe thought, was a bit off. He blew out smoke and said, in carefully-bored tones, the voice of a man checking items against an inventory on a clipboard, ‘What is the name of his publishing company?’

‘Medusa,’ the bartender said. They locked eyes. The bartender’s said, Don’t fuck me around, boy. Joe smiled and shrugged in a good imitation of the man. ‘You ever see him around?’

‘I see a lot of things,’ the bartender said. Joe said, ‘See this?’ and extracted a second note. He had used the black credit card again at the airport upon landing, taking it into the branch of the Crédit Lyonnais and asking to withdraw money. To his surprise, they gave him the money.

The bartender took the note and looked at it critically. Joe pulled on the cigarette and when he looked back the money had disappeared. There was something terribly familiar about the situation for him: his job required him to pay people for information, but he wondered how often the bartender went through the same routine, and what sort of questions he was asked. He also wondered if anyone had been asking the same questions he had.

‘Fat and small, like I said,’ the bartender said. ‘Looks a bit like a mushroom – just as white, too. Don’t think he sees the sun much.’ He and Joe exchanged a glance. Neither of them was seeing much sun either, just then.

‘Know where he lives?’

The bartender shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Know where to find him?’

The bartender thought about it. ‘No,’ he said.

Joe waited. ‘He comes here some times,’ the bartender said at last, reluctantly. ‘If not here, the shops around, you know. The sex shops. They sell his books. Also, he likes to pick up the girls. Like your drinking friend there. But Papa D, he doesn’t usually have the money.’

‘Seen him recently?’

The bartender shook his head.

That was then. He pulled himself back to the present, the even soothing sound of the projector in the booth above falling over him like a blanket. It didn’t help. He thought there was something wrong with the film, black and white figures going through an alien ritual while he was frozen, on the wrong side of the screen. The other watchers seemed frozen in their seats, bent statues made of weathered stone.

On the screen, the sideshow people were having a party. A tall woman was marrying a midget. Around the table were a pair of conjoined twins; two girls with no arms; a legless man and an entirely limbless one; a dwarf with a head resembling that of a bird; a skeletal man; a figure who was a man on one side of the body, a woman on the other; the midgets; and others. They were shouting. The words echoed around the dark cinema hall. One of us, the sideshow people were crying. One of us. One of us. Joe tried to light a cigarette and found that his hand was shaking. He rose from his seat and walked hurriedly through the door at the back, through the narrow corridor, the silent, empty foyer, and into the night outside. The air felt humid, feverish, but not of the tropics: a city’s smell hung on it like limp laundry, a smell of pavement slabs and concrete blocks and cars and fumes and smoke and food and urine and spilled alcohol and spilled tears, it was a smell of many lives. He walked back through empty streets to his hotel and climbed up the silent flights of stairs and to his room; and sleep at last claimed him.

being a detective

———

Finding the fat man had not been easy. In the morning he woke early, and took his coffee standing up beside an outdoors kiosk, with Sacré Coeur towering overhead. He took the Métro to Boulevard Haussmann and was stationed outside the post office at number 102 when it opened.

Joe was the first customer.

He located the post box easily enough. The post office was an old, run-down establishment on the ground floor of 102. There were apartments above. Inside, the sound of traffic was strangely diminished, and the lighting, too, was dim, and the floor was stained concrete, and the spots on the floor and walls could have been old blood stains from the German war or they could have been spilled coffee – either way they weren’t telling. The woman guarding the boxes did not ask him for identification but he still made a show of jingling keys in his pocket and going confidently, as if merely to collect his morning post. There were rows upon rows of small wooden doors set in the walls, thousands of boxes: already the first customers of the day were coming in, each wrapped in their own private universe, each going to their own small address, and for a moment the feeling came to Joe of the weight of expectations there, the pressing body of letters waiting just behind the little locked doors, beyond the thin makeshift wooden walls and the metal grilles that separated the inside and outside of this outpost. He thought of wild mail, living freely behind those doors; of lost mail, like buried treasure, waiting to be unearthed in dark booby-trapped tombs; and of the mail that wasn’t there but was hoped for, the unreal mail that would never be written or delivered, but still hoped for every day, still expected against all hope: We made a mistake, your daughter is alive. Please accept our apology, your son has been found well and is on his way back home. And then he shook his head, because he was being fanciful, and he had located the box, and now all he had to do was wait for the man to come and collect his post, because one thing a publisher had to do every day, if nothing else that day, was check his mail. He was tempted to break the lock and look inside, but decided against it. There would be time later, but for now he needed only to watch, and wait: which was ninety-five percent of being a detective.