“Do you remember when you last saw him about?” she asks. “Ben, I mean? He was meant to be here last night. I tried asking one of the girls—Mimi?—on the fourth floor, but she wasn’t too helpful.”
“I don’t recall.” Perhaps my answer sounds too quick, too certain. “But then he keeps so much to himself. You know. Rather—what’s the English expression?—reserved.”
“Really? That doesn’t sound anything like Ben! I’d expect him to be friends with everyone in this building by now.”
“Not with me.” That at least is true. I give a little shrug. “Anyway, maybe he went away and forgot to tell you?”
“No,” she says. “He wouldn’t do that.”
Could I remember the last time I saw him? Of course I can.
But I am thinking now about the first time. About two months ago. The middle of the heatwave.
I did not like him. I knew it straightaway.
The laughter, that’s what I heard first. Vaguely threatening, in the way male laughter can be. The almost competitive nature of it.
I was in the courtyard. I had spent the afternoon planting in the shade. To others gardening is a form of creative abandon. To me it is a way of exerting control upon my surroundings. When I told Jacques I wanted to take care of the courtyard’s small garden he did not understand. “There are people we can pay to do it for us,” he told me. In my husband’s world there are people you can pay for anything.
The end of the day: the light fading, the heat still oppressive. I watched from behind the rosemary bushes as the two of them entered the courtyard. Nick first. Then a stranger, wheeling a moped. Around the same age as his friend, but he seemed somehow older. Tall and rangy. Dark hair. He carried himself well. A very particular confidence in the way he inhabited the space around him.
I watched as Nick’s friend plucked a sprig of rosemary from one of the bushes, tearing hard to wrench it free. How he crushed it to his nose, inhaled. There was something presumptuous about the gesture. It felt like an act of vandalism.
Then Benoit was running over to them. The newcomer scooped him up and held him.
I stood. “He doesn’t like to be held by anyone but me.”
Benoit, the traitor, turned his head to lick the stranger’s hand.
“Bonjour Sophie,” Nicolas said. “This is Ben. He’s going to be living here, in the apartment on the third floor.” Proud. Showing off this friend like a new toy.
“Pleased to meet you, Madame.” He smiled then, a lazy smile that was somehow just as presumptuous as the way he’d ripped into that bush. You will like me, it said. Everyone does.
“Please,” I said. “Call me Sophie.” The Madame had made me feel about a hundred years old, even though it was only proper.
“Sophie.”
Now I wished I hadn’t said it. It was too informal, too intimate. “I’ll take him, please.” I held out my hands for the dog. Benoit smelled faintly of petrol, of male sweat. I held him at a little distance from my body. “The concierge won’t like that,” I added, nodding at the moped, then toward the cabin. “She hates them.”
I had wanted to assert myself, but I sounded like a matron scolding a small boy.
“Noted,” he said. “Cheers for the tip. I’ll have to butter her up, get her on side.”
I stared at him. Why on earth would he want to do that?
“Good luck there,” Nick said. “She doesn’t like anyone.”
“Ah,” he says. “But I like a challenge. I’ll win her over.”
“Well watch out,” Nick said. “I’m not sure you want to encourage her. She has a knack for appearing round corners when you least expect it.”
I didn’t like the idea of it at all. That woman with her watchful eyes, her omnipresence. What might she be able to tell him if he did “win her over”?
When Jacques got home I told him I had met the new inhabitant of the third–floor apartment. He frowned, pointed to my cheekbone. “You have dirt, there.” I rubbed at my cheek—somehow I must have missed it when I had checked my appearance . . . I thought I had been so careful. “So what do you make of our new neighbor?”
“I don’t like him.”
Jacques raised his eyebrows. “I thought he sounded like an interesting young man. What don’t you like?”
“He’s too . . . charming.” That charm. He wielded it like a weapon.
Jacques frowned; he didn’t understand. My husband: a clever man, but also arrogant. Used to having things his way, having power. I have never acquired that sort of arrogance. I have never been certain enough of my position to be complacent. “Well,” he said. “We’ll have to invite him to drinks, look him over.”
I didn’t like the sound of that: inviting him into our home.
The first note arrived two weeks later.
I know who you are, Madame Sophie Meunier. I know what you really are. If you don’t want anyone else to know I suggest you leave €2000 beneath the loose step in front of the gate.
The “Madame”: a nasty little piece of faux formality. The mocking, knowing tone. No postmark; it had been hand-delivered. My blackmailer knew this building well enough to know about the loose step outside the gate.
I didn’t tell Jacques. I knew he would refuse to pay, for one thing. Those who have the most money are often the most close-fisted about handing it over. I was too afraid not to pay. I took out my jewelry box. I considered the yellow sapphire brooch Jacques had given me for our second wedding anniversary, the jade and diamond hair clips he gave me last Christmas. I selected an emerald bracelet as the safest, because he never asked me to wear it. I took it to a pawnbroker, a place out in the banlieues, the neighborhoods outside the peripherique ring road that encircles the city. A world away from the Paris of postcards, of tourist dreams. I had to go somewhere no one could possibly recognize me. The pawnbroker knew I was out of my depth. I think he could sense my fear. Little did he know it was less to do with the neighborhood than my horror at finding myself in this situation. The debasement of it.
I returned with more than enough cash to cover it—less than I should have got, though. Ten €200 notes. The money felt dirty: the sweat of other hands, the accumulated filth. I slid the wedge of notes into a thick envelope where they looked even dirtier against the fine cream card and sealed them up. As though it would somehow make the fact of the money less horrific, less demeaning. I left it, as directed, beneath the loose step in front of the apartment building’s gate.
For the time being, I had covered my debts.
“Perhaps you’ll want to return to the third floor now,” I tell the strange, scruffy girl. His sister. Hard to believe it. Hard, actually, to imagine him having had a childhood, a family at all. He seemed so . . . discrete. As though he had stepped into the world fully formed.
“I didn’t catch your name,” she says.
I didn’t give it. “Sophie Meunier,” I say. “My husband Jacques and I live in the penthouse apartment, on this floor.”