By noon he had seen no sign of a man fitting the description of Papadopoulos. At one o’clock he bought half a baguette with ham and cheese and a thin mayonnaise, and washed it down with two small black coffees. At half past one he had to go in search of a bathroom, which he at last found in a local brasserie, where they grudgingly let him use it. At two o’clock he thought he saw someone fitting the description and followed him for forty-five minutes through twists and turns and stops that seemed very promising, until the man at last went into a butcher’s shop on Rue de Londres with pig heads staring mournfully through the glass: the man turned the sign on the door from Closed to Open, put on a white apron, and went behind the counter.
Joe decided to call it a day. As he walked back, the great grey structure of the Gare St. Lazare rose above him, and he watched the dark railway lines spread out from the station like a spider bite, their paths crisscrossing and hatching, and the great metal beasts of burden trudged along them, fleeing across the earth. His footsteps led him to the back of the station. It seemed a wild wasteland that took him by surprise. Beyond the gate, at the back of the station, pools of standing water littered the ground, and amidst them, like a still landscape, were strewn abandoned objects, broken and unwanted, like sacrificial offerings to St. Lazare. Joe paused as his shoes squelched in the water, and watched a man leap from a floating wooden ladder, his reflection caught in the smooth surface of the water. He saw bicycle tires, and disused pipes, a wet newspaper, an army helmet, clothes pegs, a broken torch, an upturned beer crate, a pair of spectacles with the glass missing, a toy monkey with its eyes missing, something that looked like the inside of an electronic device of some sort, all wires and copper, lines in complicated patterns, a milk bottle, an empty packet of cigarettes, a floating ticket stub, for a train or a cinema, a broken pencil, white toilet paper strewn this way and that like bandages that had been torn away from a rising corpse. All that and, as his eyes wandered over the sea of debris, that geography of abandoned human lives, further away and to the left, disappearing behind a corner: polished black shoes.
‘Hey!’ Joe shouted. ‘Wait!’ And he ran, following the shoes, but as he turned the corner there was nobody there. Joe swore. Then he said, ‘Enough,’ and turned, and went to the St. Lazare Métro station. The clouds were amassing overhead, and as he descended the steps into the underworld of the train network, a fine rain began steadily to fall.
everybody comes
from somewhere
——
He thought about a post office box that wasn’t being collected, and he thought about a man in black shoes, and he wondered who was watching whom, and why, and then he thought about the train station, the grey edifice rising out of the Parisian soil like a ghostly castle, and he thought about trains: he liked trains. They made him feel safe. He thought about rain, because just as he was descending down to the platform, he glanced up, and a ray of sunlight had come through the clouds behind the rain, and for a moment he thought he saw her, the girl who came to him for his help, and she was looking at him, and her eyes were clouded. He had blinked, and the world was grey again, the clouds joining overhead, and the girl had gone, and he had most likely imagined it. He pictured her face, but it was like rain falling down on his memory, obscuring her face behind the drops, and he wondered why the thought of her made him feel the way he did, and then he drank what remained in his glass and ordered another one, s’il vous plait, merci, and lit a cigarette and thought of nothing at all.
This was the third or fourth bar he’d tried, each one dingier than the other, in each subsequent one the music quieter, the lights dimmer, the drinking more intense. There were women there, from Asia and Africa and Europe, a cosmopolitan blend who all wore the same exaggerated makeup, the same too-short skirts, the same look in their eyes that was at once an evaluation and a wariness and an invitation, and deeper than that, a great restless tiredness resembling fear, and the men who came to the bars returned that look with one of their own, a corresponding mix of hunger and reticence and unvarnished need and a little bit of shame: they were a dance, Joe thought, an intricate wavering pattern criss-crossing and hatching like the web of train lines outside St. Lazare, criss-crossing and hatching, but never quite meeting, and if they ever did it would be fatal. It was the third or fourth bar, he couldn’t now recall, and the only illumination was provided by fat candle-stubs scattered across the room, and couples were dancing to the tune of some slow, mournful African jazz. There were hairy hands on naked thighs, lips touching ears, whispered words, a groping in the half-light, fabric rubbing against fabric in the close-dance, and beyond that, sitting against the bar, the solitary figures waiting or still deciding or, like himself: the lonely ones who wanted only drink.
It was there that she found him, the girl of the day before, and she sat herself on a stool beside him and her skirt rode high up her thighs and she smoothed it with a practiced hand and shook her hair back and looked at him, not smiling, not speaking either, but companionable.
‘You shouldn’t be drinking alone,’ she said. He didn’t reply.
‘None of us should,’ she said. He looked at her sideways. Her wide almond eyes looked back at him steadily. She made a gesture with her fingers, signalling the bartender. The man ambled over, replaced Joe’s glass without comment, and put a shot glass in front of the girl. Not looking at him, she put a note on the counter. The bartender took it and ambled off.
The girl held Joe in her sight. Her eyes were like screens; he wondered what he was projecting onto them. The girl said, ‘Where are you from?’
Joe broke eye-contact. The sight of his glass was welcome. He took a sip, and then another. He had had several drinks already, going from one bar to another, searching for a fat, pale man – like a mushroom, the bartender a day and several bars ago had told him – and with an eye for working girls. There were several men he had seen who might have fit the description, but none of them had turned out to be Papadopoulos. He felt the weight of the girl’s expectation beside him and turned, unwillingly, and said, ‘Here and there.’
‘Here and there,’ she said flatly, repeating him, and he shrugged. ‘All about,’ he said.
‘All about,’ she said, imitating him. Her hand grasped his on the counter; her fingers were long and brown and strong where they held him. He faced her. He wondered if the bleached blonde hair was a wig. She had very full lips. They seemed soft, but her eyes were hard. ‘Everybody comes from somewhere,’ she said.
He turned from her and looked away, at the swaying drunken couples and the solitary drinkers slouched on the bar. Candle-light flickered in an unseen, unfelt breeze. There was nothing beyond the windows. He spoke very quietly then, his lips barely moving, speaking to no one but the emptiness of this compressed world, and it was as if he didn’t even know that he was speaking. ‘Then where do we come from?’ he said. He turned to her, but she was not looking at him any more. She too was looking away. ‘And where do we go?’
She was crying. Her face was turned away from him; her glass was empty. Her hands were withdrawn, closing her off from him; they were a screen to shelter her.
They didn’t speak. When she took away her hands her makeup had run, but she seemed not to notice, or care. She said, ‘Is that why you are looking for him? You think he could lead you? Where? Forward or…or back?’