The Paris Apartment(41)
Nick shrugs. “Well . . . it’s no excuse but his wife just left him.”
“Yeah?” I say. “If you ask me she had a pretty lucky escape.”
“Look,” he says, pointing beyond me, “you can see the Sacré-Coeur, over there.” Clearly he doesn’t want to talk about his neighbors any more. We gaze together at the cathedral: illuminated, seeming to float above the city like a big white ghost. And in the distance . . . yes—there—I can see the Eiffel Tower. For a few seconds it lights up like a giant Roman candle and a thousand moving lights shimmer up and down its height. I’m suddenly aware of how huge and unknowable this city is. Ben’s out there somewhere, I think, I hope . . . Again, that feeling of despair.
I give myself a mental shake. There must be something else I can learn, some new angle to this I haven’t explored. I turn to Nick. “Ben never mentioned what he was looking into, did he?” I ask. “The thing he was writing? The investigative piece?”
“He didn’t say anything to me about it,” Nick says. “As far as I knew, he was still working on restaurant reviews, that kind of thing. But then that’s typical of him, isn’t it?” I think I hear a note of bitterness.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you have to ask whether anyone really knows the real Benjamin Daniels.” You’re telling me, I think. Still, I wonder exactly what he means by it. “Anyway, it’s what he always wanted to do.” He sounds different now, more wistful. “Investigative stuff. That or write a novel. I remember him saying that he wanted to write something that would have made your mum proud. He talked all about it on the trip.”
“You mean the one you took after uni?” The way he said “the trip” made it sound important. The Trip. I think of that screensaver. Some instinct tells me to press him on it. “What was it like? You went all across Europe, right?”
“Yeah.” His tone is different again: lighter, excited. “We spent a whole summer doing it. Four of us: a couple of other guys, Ben and me. I mean, we were really roughing it. Grotty trains with no air-con, blocked loos. Days, weeks, of sleeping sitting up in hard plastic seats, eating stale bread, hardly washing our clothes. And then when we did we had to use launderettes.”
He sounds thrilled. Babe, I think, if you think that’s roughing it you don’t know you’re born. I think of his minimalist apartment: the Bang & Olufsen speakers, the iMac, all that stealth wealth. I kind of want to hate him for it, but I can’t. There’s something melancholy about the guy. I remember the oxycodone I found in his bathroom.
“Where did you go?” I ask.
“All over,” he says. “We’d be in Prague one day, Vienna the next, Budapest a few days later. Or sometimes we’d just spend a whole week lying on the beach and hitting the clubs every night—like we did in Barcelona. And we lost a whole weekend to food poisoning in Istanbul.”
I nod, like I know what he’s talking about, but I’m not sure I could point to all those places on a map.
“So that’s what Ben was up to,” I say. “Sounds a long way from a one-bed in Haringey.”
“Where’s Haringey?”
I give him a look. He even pronounced it wrong. But of course a rich kid like him wouldn’t have heard of it. “North London? It’s where we come from, Ben and I. Even then he couldn’t wait to escape, to travel. Actually, it reminds me of something—”
“What?”
“My mum, she used to leave us on our own quite a lot, while she went out. She did shift work and she’d lock us in from about six, so we couldn’t get up to any trouble—it can be a rough part of town—and we’d be so bored. But Ben had this old globe . . . you know, one of those light-up ones? He’d spend hours spinning it round, pointing out the places we might go. Describing them to me—spice markets, turquoise seas, cities on mountaintops . . . God knows how he knew any of that. Actually, he probably made it all up.” I pull myself out of the memory. I’m not sure I’ve spoken to anyone else about all of that. “Anyway. It sounds like you had a ball. The photo on your screensaver, that was Amsterdam, right?”
I look at Nick but he’s staring out into the night. My question is left hanging in the chill autumn air.
Concierge
The Loge
I’m watching the roof terrace from my position in the courtyard. I saw the lights come on a few moments ago. Now I see someone step close to the rail. I catch the sound of voices, the faint strains of music floating down. Rather a contrast with the sounds coming from a few streets away, the whine of police sirens. I heard it just now on the radio: the riots are beginning again in earnest tonight. Not that any of them up there will know or care.
The radio was a gift from him, actually. And only a few weeks ago I watched him up there on the roof terrace, too, smoking a cigarette with the wife of the drunk on the first floor.
As the figure next to the rail turns I realize it’s her, the girl staying in his apartment. She has somehow gained access to the penthouse. Invited in? Surely not. If she is anything like her brother I can imagine she may have invited herself.
In a couple of days she has gained access to parts of this building that I have never entered, despite working here for so many years. This is only to be expected. I am not one of them, of course. In all the time I have worked here I can only recall the great Jacques Meunier looking at me twice, speaking to me once. But of course to a man like that I am barely human. I am something less than visible.