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.
“Who’s he?” she mumbles through her mouthful, nodding at Theo.
“This is Theo,” I say. “He works with Ben. He’s helping me. I’m Jess. What’s your name?”
A brief pause. “Irina.”
Irina. The name is familiar. I remember what Ben had scribbled on that sheet of wine accounts I found in his dictionary. Ask Irina.
“Ben said he would come back,” she says suddenly, urgently. “He said he would come back for me.” There’s something in her expression I recognize. Aha. Someone else who has fallen in love with my brother. “He said he would get me away from that place. Help find a new job for me.”