Waiting for Monsieur Bellivier Read online

  It’s always the same at dinner whenever the two women have been out shopping. The table is groaning beneath the fresh goods. The usual stew is replaced by salad, the rich sauces by light yoghurt dressings, and, in honour of the day, fresh tuna steaks which don’t seem to bear any relation to the usual chunks out of cans.

  ‘This is the opposite of fireworks,’ Tariq says after studying one delicious thing after another.

  Adèle looks up at him as though she doesn’t quite understand what he is talking about.

  ‘I mean that with fireworks, you start gently and then have a crescendo at the end. But you two do the opposite. The day you’ve been shopping, you go big straight away and then we end with simplicity.’

  Adèle is looking for Fatima’s support, which comes quickly.

  ‘What does the man mean by that? Isn’t he happy with the food? He can cook his own dinner if he’d rather.’

  Fatima sounds angry as she tries to give Tariq a telling-off. But you never know with her, she can sound furious even when she’s joking. Tariq glances at Mancebo for support, but he gets none. The men at the table don’t stick together like the women do. And one of the men, Amir, doesn’t even seem to be in agreement with himself. Pale and silent, he helps himself to some avocado salad.

  The sight of Amir gives Mancebo mixed feelings. First, relief that he knows the plan was a success. It seems as though Amir has found something. But Mancebo is also slightly anxious about what he will find out later, and how Amir will take it.

  Suddenly, Amir gets up and thanks the women for the food, despite the fact that both Adèle and Fatima are still eating.

  ‘I feel a bit rough. I think I’m going to go up and get some sleep, if you don’t mind.’

  Amir’s words go relatively unnoticed. Fatima mumbles something about the English exam having taken it out of him, and Adèle says goodnight as he leaves the room and the apartment. At first, Mancebo thinks that leaving the table early is a conscious move on Amir’s part. Though they never agreed on it, he might want Mancebo to follow him up so that they have time to talk. But the more he thinks about it, the more convinced he is that Amir genuinely doesn’t feel well. Whether that has anything to do with his task, Mancebo isn’t sure.

  Mancebo stays for a while, and then gets up and excuses himself, saying he’s going to check on his son. No one raises an eyebrow, and he leaves them during a heated discussion about recycling.

  The apartment is dark. Mancebo closes the door, and before he goes over to Amir’s room he pauses in the living room and looks out towards the dark apartment opposite.

  ‘Black, black, black like the cat,’ he whispers to himself without really knowing why.

  He peers down at the small, pink, glittery bird on the chest of drawers and then confidently moves over to Amir’s closed door. He knocks. No answer. Mancebo is convinced that Amir is sleeping, maybe he really is ill. That, in turn, may mean he wasn’t able to complete the task after all.

  Mancebo can’t blame his son, not under any circumstances. He’s already asked too much of him, he knows that. He has placed too big a burden on Amir’s slender shoulders. Mancebo knocks again. No answer. Worried about his son, he takes hold of the door handle and discovers, to his surprise, that it’s locked. He can’t remember Amir ever having locked his door before. No one locks doors in this apartment. They don’t even lock the toilet door, something their guests have often complained about. Mancebo knocks again.

  ‘Amir? Are you there?’

  No answer. He knocks and pulls at the door handle. He listens. Silence. All he can hear is Adèle’s laughter from the floor below.

  ‘Amir, please, open the door, I’m worried.’

  Just as he is about to head to the kitchen to grab something to open the door, it swings open and Mancebo sees Amir making his way back to bed.

  His son lies down on his back and stares up at the ceiling. Mancebo has forgotten all about the task, he’s just happy to see his son. He sits down on the bed, hesitates for a few seconds and then strokes Amir’s cheek. He was worried that Amir would flinch, but he actually seems to appreciate it.

  ‘How are you?’

  Amir doesn’t react. His cheeks have regained some of their usual colour, and Mancebo can detect a hint of anger in his eyes.

  ‘Why did you lock the door?’

  Amir sits up and gives his father an accusatory look.

  ‘Maybe we all should.’

  Amir gets up from the bed and walks over to the window. Mancebo is silent, because he knows that Amir needs time to gather himself. After a while, he turns around and comes back to sit on the bed next to Mancebo, who attempts a smile. It’s not too successful. Amir is about to start talking, but he stops himself and moves over to the desk instead. He reaches as far as he can underneath it and pulls out one of the Chinese notebooks. At first, Mancebo doesn’t react, he’s used to seeing them everywhere, every day. But then he freezes. Amir realises what it is immediately.

  ‘Oh, sorry. I saw a few of these under the till and took one to use. Is that OK?’

  Mancebo quickly comes back to his senses and looks up at his son with pride. Of course a person needs a notebook for an important job. The murmur of the discussion below calms them both. It means they can talk without being disturbed. Amir opens the notebook and then snaps it shut again.

  ‘First of all, everything went to plan. I went over there this morning and Tariq was happy to help me. I pretended to be reading the school website, the test results and that kind of thing. He had a few customers, and since I didn’t have time to catch the password – he was the one who logged in – I turned the computer off and told him I’d accidentally shut it down. He whispered that the password was under the keyboard. Not very smart.’

  Amir falls silent, but Mancebo nods to show that he is keeping up and that his son can go on.

  ‘Anyway, it was there. He changes his password pretty often, he crosses out the old one and writes down the new one. Weird to change so often …’

  ‘What’s the password?’

  Amir leafs through the notebook. He has written down thirty or so words.

  ‘Here are all the ones he’s had.’

  Mancebo licks his lips and nods again, proud of his little companion who has clearly managed to keep a cool head in a difficult situation. Mancebo reads through the words, scratching his head as he does. Doha, Al-Qahira, Bamako, Ouagadougou, Dubai, Riyadh, Penza … He scratches his head again. Amir knows that his father isn’t exactly a geography buff and gives him a helping hand.

  ‘The majority are cities in the Arab world, but there are also a few in Africa and even some in Russia.’

  Though the names fascinate Mancebo, he’s well aware that he shouldn’t come to any hasty conclusions. Maybe his cousin has just been picking them from a map he has lying somewhere.

  ‘When I was leaving, I deliberately left a book behind. So I waited here,’ Amir points to his desk, ‘until Mum and Adèle went to the supermarket. Then I opened the window and heard you shout to Tariq that it was time to go to Le Soleil. We got lucky.’

  Amir’s face lights up with a childish, slightly excited smile.

  ‘And once you left, I went back over to the cobbler’s.’

  He falls silent, as though he is afraid to remember.

  ‘Getting into the computer was no problem. And Tariq is sloppy with his documents, no passwords or anything.’

  ‘Documents?’

  ‘Yeah, papers, information, the things on his computer. It was a bit like doing a puzzle, but I think I have everything you need to know. The key for the cabinet was hanging there too … there were two shoeboxes at the very bottom, and …’

  The front door opens.

  ‘My little chicken, how are you feeling?’

  It’s Fatima’s voice, and Amir quickly hands the notebook to his father.

  ‘It’s all in here. I wrote down everything first, then a summary. You’ll understand.’

  Fatima’s head appears
around the edge of the door. Her gold earrings swing as she speaks.

  ‘My little chicken, how are you? We’re just washing up downstairs, but if you’re feeling ill I can ask Adèle to do it herself. Do you need anything? A cup of tea?’

  Amir shakes his head.

  ‘I just need to sleep, it’s been a long day.’

  Mancebo closes the notebook he has been reading in the armchair by the window. It was an unparalleled read. Amir’s report towers above any crime novel. And all that information just from looking at Tariq’s computer. The last few notes were the most shocking thing he has ever read. Amir’s description of how he opened one of the shoeboxes in Tariq’s cabinet could be the start of a thriller.

  Mancebo swallows, he now knows why Amir locked the door to his room. Mancebo knows that he might only have a few minutes, perhaps even seconds, to gather himself before his wife makes her entry. A similar state of shock to the one Amir was in earlier has now dug its claws into Mancebo. He’s heard far too many uncomfortable truths about close relatives lately. Dear God, I’m related to that man, Mancebo thinks, staring out towards the cobbler’s shop. Thanks to Amir’s notes, the place now looks completely different. And he doesn’t even want to think about how he’ll view his cousin from now on.

  Before the door is flung open and Fatima comes in with a couple of pans beneath her arm, Mancebo decides that it’s best to try to get to bed as soon as possible. It’s the only way he can give himself time to think before the curtain comes up on yet another performance. Because a performance is exactly what it is. Everyone is playing some kind of role. Fatima: the hard-working woman who never has time for breakfast, who’s allergic to cigarette smoke and who could never be with another man, not least the tobacconist. But offstage, she’s completely different. And Tariq, he’s been playing the role of the cheery cobbler who fixes shoes and makes copies of keys, but he is, in fact, an arms dealer. He also has hundreds of cartons of cigarettes stashed away in his office. Those shoeboxes of his contain something very different to shoes.

  ‘That’s all I know for now, but I’m not done yet,’ Mancebo mumbles quietly to himself.

  I won’t give up before the truth to this rotten story is out, Mancebo thinks, staring up at the ceiling. Fatima is snoring away next to him. Occasionally, he hears Amir go out into the kitchen to get a glass of water. He doesn’t know whether his son is doing it just to convince Fatima that he’s ill, or whether he really can’t sleep. The last wouldn’t be surprising, given the day’s events.

  Before the sun starts to rise, Mancebo has time to think back to his childhood and how Tariq could have ended up the way he has. Tariq’s parents ran a dairy with several hundred goats in Tunisia. They were honourable people. But what do I know, Mancebo thinks, with his hands beneath the pillow. The goats might’ve been full of smuggled goods.

  The district was unfamiliar to me. All Parisians have areas they don’t know too well, places they rarely go. The city grows over time. Sacré-Cœur towered up on the horizon. The white church was in a different and, to me, alien neighbourhood: Montmartre.

  For many tourists, the area is synonymous with Paris. It’s a historic part of the city, but to me, everything there seemed as though it was built for and by our age; it’s as though the quarter was made up entirely of backdrops meant to depict the turn of the century, La Belle Époque, a time when the can-can dancers raised their dresses in front of an absinthe-drinking Toulouse-Lautrec as he sat there, discovering the art of the poster.

  Cars thundered past along the boulevard. I didn’t know what I had expected, but it was probably something more intimate. The idea that Bellivier lived on such a wide boulevard just didn’t seem to fit. I realised I was walking around with the cheque in my hand as though it was a GPS. I knew the address by heart, I had been staring at it for hours, so I could have easily stashed the cheque safely in my bag. But I kept it in my hand anyway.

  I realised that I was on the wrong side of the boulevard and crossed over to the even numbers. A pink sign bearing a shoe acted as my pole star. Sure enough, it turned out to be number 78, and it was a cobbler’s shop. The door was closed. I cautiously peered in through the window. There was someone towards the back of the shop. Maybe Monsieur Bellivier was a cobbler?

  I knocked on the door. The man inside shifted, but he paid no attention to the fact that someone had knocked. I tried again, more firmly this time. A well-built man came to the door. Though he only opened it a fraction, I caught a waft of chemicals, leather and cigarette smoke. The cobbler didn’t say anything, he just stared at me. I shoved the cheque into my bag.

  ‘Good morning. I’m looking for a Monsieur Bellivier at this address, I was wondering if you knew who he was?’

  The cobbler peered at me with a look that was hard to read. Then he smiled an odd smile, but he still didn’t speak.

  ‘Are you Monsieur Bellivier?’

  The man wiped the sweat from his brow.

  ‘No, I’m not, and I don’t know anyone by that name. But you’re not the first person to come here asking. Maybe I should put up a sign saying: “No Monsieur Belliviers here.”’

  ‘Yes, maybe you should, because there’s a chance there’ll be more of us.’

  ‘Who is this Monsieur Bellivier? Why all this chasing after him? Actually, don’t tell me, I don’t want to be dragged into any of this madness.’

  ‘Who lives above the shop?’

  ‘No one. The apartment’s empty. The pharmacy has been using it as a storeroom.’

  ‘What about the apartment above that?’

  ‘No idea. A couple, I think.’

  I tried to make out what was behind the cobbler’s back. Whether there was anything to suggest he was lying, that he was, in fact, the man I was looking for. But everything looked normal for a cobbler’s shop.

  ‘You are Monsieur Bellivier, aren’t you?’

  It was my last chance. I had nothing to lose by trying. His eyes narrowed.

  ‘Look, madame. I don’t know what your problem is, but I’m not open yet and I can’t help you. OK?’

  ‘OK. Thanks anyway.’

  The man flashed me a fake smile and then closed the door. There was one more possibility – the apartment at the top of the building. I noticed a fire escape to one side of the cobbler’s shop, and I took out the cheque as though to justify my behaviour. The stairs were rusty, but there was something charming about them. Maybe because it was something different in the overall picture of the city. Fire escapes like these were common in American cities, but they were unusual in Paris. In some strange way, as I climbed the stairs, I had the feeling I had found the right place.

  Here, above the boulevard, I finally experienced the intimate feeling I had been missing since I came up out of the metro. This was somewhere Monsieur Bellivier could live. I was standing in front of a door without a nameplate. Was he just behind it? I glanced down at the boulevard before I knocked. With each knock, my heart started beating harder. Maybe this was how he got hold of his victims? The empty apartment below could be used for all kinds of things. Maybe the pharmacy had left behind some less popular drugs. My imagination ran wild. The cobbler might have a direct staircase up here. I took a step back, with one hand on the railing, the other clutching the cheque like a white flag I could wave in the air. But no one came to the door. That didn’t help my nerves.

  I knocked once more and then went down to the floor below. Something about the door suggested it hadn’t welcomed anyone in a long time. I knocked anyway. Empty apartments were unusual in Paris, which made it all the more interesting.

  Above the cobbler’s shop, there was a narrow metal roof. Now that I was here, I had to take all the chances I could. If I climbed out onto the roof, I would be able to see into the empty apartment. And without really thinking it through, I ducked beneath the handrail and out onto the roof. The whole time, I was waiting for someone to shout at me and wonder what I was up to. I saw an old lady staring at me, but she chose to continue down the
boulevard. She was probably afraid she would have to catch me if I fell. One look through the first window was enough to get a good overview of the entire apartment. It was completely empty. Not a trace of anyone or anything. I carefully made my way back to the fire escape, and with it, safety. I decided not to look down at the boulevard until I was back onto the stairs. My hands were damp with sweat, and that made me happy. It meant I didn’t have a death wish.

  Once I made it back to the stairs, I turned towards the boulevard as though nothing had happened. Happily, the scenario I had imagined, in which a group of people had gathered beneath my feet, hadn’t materialised. But outside a grocer’s shop on the other side of the boulevard, I noticed a man in a blue coat studying me through a pair of binoculars.

  The man who, just a few seconds earlier, had been standing on the pavement with a pair of binoculars pointed straight at me had his back turned as I came into the greengrocer’s. The shop smelled like an unidentifiable herb.

  ‘Hello.’

  The man turned around.

  ‘How can I help you in this heat?’ he asked.

  ‘Well … I was just wondering if you knew who lived in the building opposite, monsieur?’

  ‘Opposite …?’

  ‘Yes, number 78.’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  ‘OK … It’s just I saw you watching me … you were using a pair of binoculars.’

  I realised that I had never been closer to the truth than I was now. The little man stared at me with raised eyebrows.

  ‘Are you Monsieur Bellivier?’

  ‘No.’

  He said the word no clearly and firmly, as though he was in court and it was of the utmost importance that everyone knew that he was not, under any circumstances, Monsieur Bellivier. His denial felt too firm for me to be able to strike him off the list of suspects.

  ‘Do you know anyone by that name?’

  Again, the man said no, this time slightly too confidently to be convincing.

  ‘OK, but you were watching me through your binoculars. Do you often do that to people?’