everywhere’s a good place
for a drink
——
Finding the fat man had not been easy.
He had landed at Orly; taken the train into Paris; checked himself into a small run-down hotel in the foothills of Montmarte. Orly was a concrete busyness. On the jetty as they disembarked a man slipped and fell, hitting his head on the ground. Outside the terminal building there was a statue of a French general: the small brass plaque read: Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces, Lille 1890-Algiers 1944. “Fighting France calls upon you.”
Sprayed against the concrete base was a faded inscription, partially covered in dried bird droppings. It read, France has no friends, only interests. CDG.
The trains were busy and the seats worn. There were sprayed messages against the sides of the carriages, and burn-holes in the upholstery. Joe’s hotel room was on the third floor, overlooking a narrow, climbing street. Just outside the hotel entrance there was a man with an upturned cardboard box offering passers-by a chance to find the lady, his hands moving incessantly as the three playing cards, face down, changed and shifted places. Joe stared out of the window and smoked. He felt restless, tired, but not able to sleep. The air was hot and muggy, a dirty Parisian summer beginning to angrily emerge from a winter’s sleep.
The first stage of the investigation had been easy enough. The address of Medusa Press was a post office box, followed by a numerical code. Consulting the local branch of La Poste, he found out that the code identified the location as set in the 8th arrondissement. ‘It is the old post office on Boulevard Haussmann,’ the clerk told him. The building number was 102. He was going to go there, but now it was most likely too late. He would set up surveillance tomorrow, early. He stood up. The room was almost bare, a narrow single bed, a grey blanket, off-white sheets, a dresser that was either antique or old rubbish, depending on one’s point of view, dirty maroon curtains, a picture on the wall of former French president Saint Exupéry against a blue background, a sink. There was a shower and bathroom at the end of the corridor. There was an ashtray on the dresser. There was a smell of disinfectant. Joe left the room and closed the door behind him.
He negotiated the stairs down to the ground floor, nodded to the Algerian man behind the counter, and strolled outside. Hats were back in fashion, he noticed. He passed the card tout and his small crowd of hopefuls, and in a street stall further down the road bought a black, wide-brimmed hat and put it on at an angle.
‘Ooh, very nice, monsieur,’ the large African woman standing behind her crude makeshift table of colourful cloth said. ‘Very good for the ladies.’ Joe smiled and paid her. He needed a drink. He needed to eat, too, but mostly he needed a drink. He walked down the Boulevard de Rochechouart, towards Place Pigalle.
‘Hey, you want company?’ a voice said. She was leaning against the wall, one leg lightly crossing the other, flashing him a smile. She had bleached blonde hair and long brown legs and her skirt was very short. She had a nice smile, but it didn’t seem real, somehow. She looked strangely insubstantial standing there, like a mirage on a city street, shimmering in the hazy air. There was a faint but lingering smell of booze.
Joe shook his head.
‘You don’t like girls?’
He shrugged and walked past. Behind him the girl called, ‘You like boys? I can find you a boy. Or we can party all together, what do you say? What colour you like?’
There was something her voice, a way in which it caught as she spoke the last words, a falling intonation that caught him off-guard; there was something lonely in there, and hurting, and raw, and he turned around. ‘I like the colour of whisky when the ice-cube is just beginning to melt in the glass,’ he said. ‘When you hold up the glass to the light and watch the drink through the underside, and it’s like the sky after it’s stopped raining.’
The girl laughed. ‘I like the colour of it neat, myself.’
‘Where’s a good place to get a drink around here?’
‘From where I’m standing,’ the girl said, ‘everywhere’s a good place for a drink.’