The Woman in the Fifth by Douglas Kennedy Read Free Book Online

There was rubbish everywhere. And grubby cafés. And shops that sold cheap synthetic wigs in garish colors like purple. And storefront telephone exchanges, advertising cheap long-distance rates to Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroun, Sénégal and the Central African Republic and Burkina Faso and . . .
     
I was the only white face in sight. Though the mercury was hovering just above the freezing mark, the boulevard was crowded, with a lot of café conversations spilling out on to the street, and people greeting passers-by as if they were in a small village, and merchants selling vegetables or exotic candy from carts. No one eyed me suspiciously. No one gave me a telltale look, saying I had wandered into the wrong corner of town. I was ignored. Even the elderly black man I stopped to ask for directions to the rue de Paradis seemed to look right through me – though he did point up a side street and uttered one phrase, ' Vous tournez à droite au fond de la rue ,' before moving on.
     
The side street brought me out of Africa and into India. A row of curry houses, and video shops with Bollywood posters in their windows, and more telephone exchanges – only this time the rates were for Mumbai and Delhi and they were also advertised in Hindi. There were also a lot of cheap hotels; giving me a fast, grim alternative for a few nights if the chambre de bonne turned out to be beyond bad, or if this guy Sezer was a trickster and I had walked into some class of set-up.
     
I had to cross the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis – a scruffy food market with more cheap shops, brimming with huddled people, their heads down against the cold wind that had started to blow through the streets. I turned right, then took a sharp left into rue de Paradis. At first sight, it looked bland. It was long and narrow – a hodgepodge of characterless nineteenth-century architecture and the occasional modern block. At street level, it seemed dead on arrival – no visible signs of life; just some large wholesale outlets for china and kitchen equipment. Then I began to pass by a place marked Kahve . It was a large, faceless café – all fluorescent tubes and gray linoleum and the Istanbul Top Forty blaring on the loudspeaker systems. I peered inside. Men were huddled over tea and talking conspiratorially. A couple of late-morning drunks were asleep at the bar, and a low cloud of cigarette smoke hung over everything. The young, tough-guy bartender turned away from some soccer match on the television to look long and hard at me, wondering why I was loitering with intent outside this establishment. His hostile stare hinted that I should move on.
     
Which I did.
     
There were two more kahves on rue de Paradis. There were also a handful of Turkish restaurants and a couple of bars whose shutters were still pulled down at midday. I picked up my pace and stopped examining the street in detail. Instead, I started looking up to check numbers, noting the chipped paintwork on many of the buildings. Number 38 was particularly mangy – its facade blistered with chipped masonry and large yellow blotches, like the ingrained stains on a chain-smoker's teeth. The front door – a huge, towering object – was also in need of several coats of black gloss. I looked around for some sort of entryphone, but just saw a button marked Porte . I pressed it and heard a telltale click. I had to put my entire weight against it to push it open. I pulled my bag in after me and found myself in a narrow corridor of battered mailboxes and brimming trash cans and a couple of fuse boxes from which loose wires dangled. Up ahead was a courtyard. I walked into it. Off it were three stairways – marked with the letters A, B and C. The courtyard was a small dark rectangle, above which loomed four blocks of apartments. The walls here were as ragged as their exterior counterparts, only now adorned with laundry that draped from windows and makeshift clothes lines. The aroma of greasy cooking and rotting