The Paris Apartment(19)

My whole body is trembling.

And then suddenly the door is opening and a light flashes on. A man stands there. I take a step back. It’s Antoine, the guy I just watched casually smashing a bottle against a side table—

No . . . I can see now that I’m wrong. It was the height, maybe, and the breadth of the shoulders. But this guy is younger and in the weak light I can see that his hair is lighter, a dark golden color.

“?a va?” he asks. Then, in English: “Are you OK? I came down to get my laundry and I heard—”

“You’re British!” I blurt. As British as the Queen, in fact: a proper, plummy, posh-boy accent. A little like the one Ben adopted after he went to live with his new parents.

He’s looking at me like he’s waiting for some kind of explanation. “Someone locked me in here,” I say. I feel shivery now that the adrenaline’s wearing off. “Someone did this on purpose.”

He pushes a hand through his hair, frowns. “I don’t think so. The door was jammed when I opened it. The handle definitely seems a bit sticky.”

I think of how hard I threw myself against it. Could it really just have been stuck? “Well, thanks,” I say weakly.

“No worries.” He steps back and looks at me. “What are you doing here? Not in the cave, I mean: in the apartment?”

“You know Ben, on the third floor? I’m meant to be staying with him—”

He frowns. “Ben didn’t tell me he had anyone coming to stay.”

“Well it was kind of last minute,” I say. “So . . . you know Ben?”

“Yeah. He’s an old friend. And you are?”

“I’m Jess,” I say. “Jess Hadley, his sister.”

“I’m Nick.” A shrug. “I—well, I’m the one who suggested he come and live here.”





Nick





Second floor



I suggested Jess come up to my place, rather than us chatting in the chilly darkness of the cave. I’m slightly regretting it now: I’ve offered her a seat but she’s pacing the room, looking at my Peloton bike, my bookcases. The knees of her jeans are worn, the cuffs of her sweater frayed, her fingernails bitten down to fragments like tiny pieces of broken shell. She gives off this jittery, restless energy: nothing like Ben’s languor, his easy manner. Her voice is different too; no private school for her, I’m guessing. But then Ben’s accent often changed depending on who he was speaking to. It took me a while to realize that.

“Hey,” she says, suddenly. “Can I go splash some water on my face? I’m really sweaty.”

“Be my guest.” What else can I say?

She wanders back in a couple of minutes later. I catch a gust of Annick Goutal Eau de Monsieur; either she wears it too (which seems unlikely) or she helped herself when she was in there.

“Better?” I ask.

“Yeah, much, thanks. Hey, I like your rain shower. That’s what you call it, right?”

I continue to watch her as she looks around the room. There’s a resemblance there. From certain angles it’s almost uncanny. . . . But her coloring’s different from Ben’s, her hair a dark auburn to his brown, her frame small and wiry. That, and the curious way she’s prowling around, sizing the place up, makes me think of a little fox.

“Thanks for helping me out,” she says. “For a moment I thought I’d never get out.”

“But what on earth were you doing in the cave?”

“The what?”

“Cave,” I explain, “it means ‘cellar’ in French.”

“Oh, right.” She chews the skin at the edge of her thumbnail, shrugs. “Having a look around the place, I suppose.” I saw that bottle of wine in her hand. How she slipped it back into the rack when she didn’t think I was looking. I’m not going to mention it. The owner of that cellar can afford to lose a bottle or two. “It’s huge down there,” she says.

“It was used by the Gestapo in the war,” I tell her. “Their main headquarters was on Avenue Foch, near the Bois de Boulogne. But toward the end of the Occupation they had . . . overspill. They used the cave to hold prisoners. Members of the Resistance, that kind of thing.”

She makes a face. “I suppose it makes sense. This place has an atmosphere, you know? My mum was very into that sort of thing: energy, auras, vibrations.”

Was. I remember Ben telling me about his mum. Drunk in a pub one night. Though even drunk I suspect he never spilled more than he intended to.

“Anyway,” she says, “I never really believed in that stuff. But you can feel something here. It gives me the creeps.” She catches herself. “Sorry—didn’t mean to offend—”

“No. It’s fine. I suppose I know what you mean. So: you’re Ben’s sister.” I want to work out exactly what she’s doing here.

She nods. “Yup. Same mum, different dads.”

I notice she doesn’t say anything about Ben being adopted. I remember my shock, finding out. But thinking that it also made sense. The fact that you couldn’t pigeonhole him like you could the others in our year at university—the staid rowing types, the studious honors students, the loose party animals. Yes, there was the public school accent, the ease—but it always felt as though there was some other note beneath it all. Hints of something rougher, darker. Maybe that’s why people were so intrigued by him.