Antoine is pacing up and down in front of me. “So what are we going to do about her?” he asks, with drunken belligerence.
“Keep your voice down,” I say. “She might understand something.” The walls have ears in this place.
“Well what the fuck is she still doing here?” He kicks at the doorframe. “What if she goes to the police?”
“I’ve handled that.”
“What do you mean?”
“It helps to have friends in high places.”
He understands. “But she needs to go.” He’s muttering to himself now: “We could lock her out. It would be so easy. All we’d need to do is change the combination on the front gate—she wouldn’t be able to get in then.”
“No,” I say, “that wouldn’t—”
“Or we could make her leave. Little girl like that? Wouldn’t be hard.”
“No. If anything we’d just force her into going to the police again on her own . . .”
Antoine lets out something between a roar and a groan. He’s a total liability. Family, huh? Because blood is always thicker than water, in the end. Or, as we say in French: la voix du sang est la plus forte. The voice of blood is the strongest. Summoning me back here to this place.
“It’s better that she stays here,” I say, sharply. “You must see that. It’s better that we can keep an eye on her. For the time being we simply have to hold our nerve. Papa will know what to do.”
“Have you heard from him?” Antoine says. “Papa?” His tone has changed. Something needy in it. When he said “Papa” for a second he sounded like the little boy he once was, the little boy who sat outside his mother’s bedroom as Paris’ best physicians came and went, unable to make sense of the illness eating away at her.
I nod. “He got in touch this morning.”
I hope you’re holding the fort there, son. Keep Antoine under control. I’ll be back as soon as I can.
Antoine scowls. He’s Papa’s right-hand man in the family business. But right now, for the time being, I’m the trusted one. That must hurt. But that’s the way it’s always been, our father pitting the two of us against each other in a struggle for scraps of parental affection. Except on the few occasions we unite against a common enemy.
Seventy-Two Hours Earlier
She watches through the shutters as he is carried from the building. Just as she watches everything in this place. Sometimes from her cabin in the garden, sometimes from the recesses of the building where she can spy on them unnoticed.
The body in its improvised shroud is visibly heavy. Already stiffening perhaps, unwieldy. A dead weight.
The lights in the third floor apartment have been on up until now, blazing out into the night. Now they are extinguished and she sees the windows become dark blanks, masking everything inside. But it will take more than that to expunge the memory of what has occurred within.
Now the light in the courtyard snaps on. She watches as they set to work, hidden from the outside world behind the high walls, doing everything that needs to be done.
Seeing him, she thought she would feel something, but there was nothing. She smiles slightly at the thought that his blood will now be part of this place, its dark secret. Well, he liked secrets. His stain will be here forever now, his lies buried with him.
Something terrible happened here tonight. She won’t talk about what she saw, not even over his dead body. No one in this building is entirely innocent. Herself included.
A new light blinks on: four floors up. At the glass she glimpses a pale face, dark hair. A hand up against the pane. Perhaps there is one innocent in this, after all.
Jess
I’m hunting through Ben’s closet in case there’s an outfit an old girlfriend left behind, something I could borrow. Before Theo hung up on me I was going to tell him that I don’t have anything smart to wear this evening. And no time or money to get something—he’s barely given me any warning.
Just for a moment I pause my riffling through Ben’s shirts and pull one of them against my face. Try, from the scent, to conjure him here, to believe that I will see him standing in front of me soon. But already the smell—of his cologne, his skin—seems to have faded a little. It feels somehow symbolic of our whole relationship: that I’m always chasing a phantom.
I drag myself away. Choose the one of my two sweaters that doesn’t have any holes and brush my hair: I haven’t washed it since I arrived, but at least it’s less of a bird’s nest now. I chuck on my jacket. Thread another pair of cheap hoop earrings through my earlobes. I look in the mirror. Not exactly “smart,” but it’ll have to do.