The Paris Apartment(79)

Half an hour ticked by. How long was he going to be?

I wandered over to his desk. I wanted to read what he was writing so late into the night—scribbling notes, typing on his laptop.

I found a notebook. A Moleskine, just like I use for my sketching. Another sign that we were meant to be: twinned souls, soulmates. The music, the writing. We were so similar. That was what he was telling me that night when we sat in the darkened park together. And before that, when he gave me the record. Outsiders, but outsiders together.

The book was full of notes for restaurant reviews. Little doodles in between the writing. Cards for restaurants tucked between the pages. It made me feel so close to him. His handwriting: beautiful, clever, a little spiky. Exactly as I would have imagined. Elegant like the fingers that had touched my arm that night in the park. I fell a little deeper in love, seeing that writing.

And then, on the last page, there was a note that had my name written there. A question mark after it, like this:

Mimi?



Oh my God. He’d been writing about me.

I had to know more, had to find out what this meant. I opened his laptop. It asked me for the password. Merde. I hadn’t a chance of getting in. It could be literally anything. I tried a couple of things. His surname. His favorite football team—I’d found a Manchester United shirt hanging in his closet. No luck. And then I had an idea. I thought of that necklace he always wore, the one he said came from his mum. I typed in: StChristopher.

No: it bounced back at me. It was just a blind guess, so I wasn’t surprised. But just because I could I tried again, with numbers substituted for some of the letters, a tighter encryption: 5tChr1st0ph3r.

And this time, when I pressed enter, the password box closed and his desktop opened up.

I stared at the screen. I couldn’t believe I had guessed it. That had to mean something too, didn’t it? It felt like a confirmation of how well I knew him. And I know writers are private about their work, in the same way that I’m private about my art, but it now felt almost like he wanted whatever was on here to be found and read by me.

I went to his documents; to “Recent.” And there it was at the top. All the others had the names of restaurants, they were obviously reviews. But this one was called: Meunier Wines SARL. According to the little time stamp this was what he had been working on an hour ago. I opened it.

Merde, my heart was beating so fast.

Excited, terrified, I began to read.

But as soon as I did I wanted to stop; I wished I had never seen any of it.

I didn’t know what I had expected, but this was not it.

It felt like my whole world was caving in around me.

I felt sick.

But I couldn’t stop.





Jess




The girl steps forward into the light of the streetlamp. She appears totally different from how she did in her act. She wears a cheap-looking fake-leather jacket and jeans with a hoodie underneath—but it’s also that she’s taken off all that thick makeup. She looks a lot less glamorous and at the same time much more beautiful. And younger. A lot younger. I didn’t get a proper look at her in the darkness near the cemetery that time—if you’d asked me I might have guessed late twenties. But now I’d say somewhere closer to eighteen or nineteen, the same sort of age as Mimi Meunier.

“Why did you come?” she hisses at us, in that thick accent. “To the club?”

I remember how she turned and sprinted away the first time we met. I know I have to tread very carefully here, not spook her.

“We’re still looking for Ben,” I say, gently. “And I feel like you might know something that could help us. Am I right?”

She mutters something under her breath, the word that sounds like “koorvah.” For a moment I think she might be about to turn and sprint away again, like she did the first time we met. But she stays put—even steps a little closer.

“Not here,” she whispers. She looks behind her, nervous as a cat. “We must go somewhere else. Away from this place.”



At her lead we walk away from the posh streets with the fancy cars and the glitzy shop windows. We walk through avenues with red-and-gold-fronted cafés with wicker seats outside, like the one I met Theo in, signs advertising Prix Fixe menus, groups of tourists still mooching about aimlessly. We leave them behind too. We walk through streets with bars and loud techno, past some sort of club with a long queue snaking around the corner. We enter a new neighborhood where the restaurants have names written in Arabic, in Chinese, other languages I don’t even recognize. We pass vape shops, phone shops that all look exactly the same, windows of mannequins wearing different style wigs, stores selling cheap furniture. This is not tourist Paris. We cross a traffic intersection with a bristle of flimsy-looking tents on the small patch of grass in the middle, a group of guys cooking stuff on a little makeshift stove, hands in their pockets, standing close to keep warm.

The girl leads us into an all-night kebab place with a flickering sign over the door and a couple of small metal tables at the back, rows of strip lights in the ceiling. We sit down at a greasy little Formica table in the corner. It’s hard to imagine anywhere more different from the low-lit glamor of the club we’ve just left. Maybe that’s exactly why she’s chosen it. Theo orders us each a carton of chips. The girl takes a huge handful of hers and dunks them, all together, into one of the pots of garlic sauce then somehow crams the whole lot hungrily into her mouth.