Chapter 17
17
18 NOVEMBER
‘Ugh, JP told him where to find us.’ Noah locks his eyes on mine through the rain-dashed window. By the set of his jaw, it’s obvious he’s not happy. He swaggers inside, as if he owns the place. No surprise there; it tracks with his massive ego. Noah points in our direction as the waiter gives a lackadaisical shrug, leaving him free to stomp towards us.
‘You didn’t think to tell me renovations were starting today!’ Noah says, his voice tight. Just who does he think he is? He doesn’t own the entirety of Rue de Vaugirard, so it’s none of his business.
Not wanting to rush my retort, I take a sip of Kir, the alcohol instantly warming me. ‘Oh? I didn’t realise I had to run everything past you.’ While it might be good manners to warn the neighbours, I didn’t want to get into a slanging match with Noah about it. Looks like that avoidance tactic has backfired.
He sighs and gazes up to the heavens as if he needs guidance from above. ‘They’re already banging about, making enough noise to wake the dead.’
‘I’m not sure if there’s a way to bang noiselessly, but I can ask.’ How else does he think I can change the ‘desolate’ hotel that’s bringing down the entire 6th arrondissement without creating any noise?
‘I have a literary event in the bar today. How are my patrons going to hear the guest author with that sort of carry on going on next door?’
I frown. ‘Obviously renovations aren’t silent for the most part.’
He huffs and puffs like the big bad wolf. ‘Can you tell your builder to stop the noise between two and fourp.m. at least?’
‘I mean, I could, but isn’t it best for all involved if we get the work done as fast as possible?’
Noah scrubs his face as impatience radiates off him. ‘ Oui , faster is better, but there are so many of them. The place is heaving. There are trucks going up and down the length of the street. It cannot continue like this.’
I bristle at the way he talks to me, as if I should be conferring with him for permission like I’m some underling.
I’m about to retort when he says, ‘And why would you get that huge industrial-size skip deposited right out the front of the hotel? It’s an eyesore. Every time they throw something in it, a layer of dust coats my freshly washed windows.’ This man is obsessed with clean windows!
I fold my arms across my chest to stop myself poking a finger in his face. I have to force myself to remain composed because I’m at my limit with men who think they’re the supreme voice in every matter, even matters that aren’t their concern. ‘When you renovated your wine bar, where did your skip go?’
Noah has the grace to blush. ‘How is that relevant?’
‘How is it not? You know there’s no room at the back of the building for the skip, Noah. If there was, we’d have put it there. It’s double standards, is what this is.’
He unravels his woollen scarf as if he’s overheating. I’m not sure if it’s from his temper or the warmth in the restaurant. ‘There’s plenty of room out the back, further down the side street.’
I arch a brow. ‘And your skip went all the way down there, did it?’
A muscle works in his jaw as if he’s trying to stop the truth leaking out, but I can see right through that. Typical alpha-male behaviour. ‘Well… non , but my renovations were on a smaller scale, and I discussed it with the previous hotelier first. We can work together, Anais, if you keep me informed.’
The hide of this man. The wannabe king of Rue de Vaugirard. ‘I’m acting under accordance of city rules and regulations and with the guidance of my building supervisor. There’s going to be some disruption, noise, and mess for a month or so, but we’ll keep it to daytime hours as is standard practice. Your bar is usually closed during the day, so I can’t see this being an ongoing issue for you.’
Another glass of Kir is deposited on the bar and Manon motions to Noah that it’s for him. He gives her an easy smile and takes a sip, pressing his lips together. She’s trying to drag this confrontation out for her own amusement.
Noah continues, in a softer tone, ‘I often open the bar during the day for various literary events, so I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from, but it’s wrong.’
‘I got the information from your website.’
His shoulders stiffen as if I’ve won a point. I could get used to one-upping him. And all men. ‘I update the website when I can, but not every event is advertised on there. I’d prefer if you check in with me and ask what I’ve got on and we can come to an arrangement that way.’
My eyebrows shoot up. ‘You want me to run our schedule past you every day? And then what? You’ll tell my builder no? I’m on a timeline, and JP has other projects too. We can’t delay simply because you say so.’
‘We can compromise.’ What Noah’s saying by ‘compromise’ is me stopping all tradespeople whenever he sees fit. How is that fair?
‘This is me compromising. I’ll be mindful of your patrons when you have events, but you can’t expect I’m going to kowtow every time you have an issue. I have to fix my desolate hotel, non ?’
‘Fine.’ He lets out a long, weary gas-lighter sigh. ‘I have something for you.’
‘Oh?’ A list of handwritten rules? An invoice for cleaning my windows?
He takes a key from his pocket. ‘I found this behind the hotel a few months back. I presume it’s for one of the rooms in L’Hotel du Parc?’
I gasp and take the rusty antique key from the palm of his hand. ‘It could be for suite nineteen!’
Noah shrugs. It’s a completely different shape from the other suite keys, which were updated at some point. While the patina of this key has suffered being exposed to the elements, it’s also clearly from another era. It might just be a coincidence and not the missing key in question, but there’s a weight, a heft, to it. Inexplicably, it feels special. What lies behind the door of suite nineteen?
‘The secret room might finally be revealed!’ Manon says.
‘Secret room?’ Noah queries.
I shoot Manon a warning look. Would Noah know anything about the room, or what it contains, from his friendship with the former owner? Do I dare tell him? I decide to risk it in case the previous hotelier shared anything with Noah that may be helpful to us.
‘On the third floor, a heavy mirror fell, leaving a head-size hole in the plaster. Sealed behind that wall are two suites: nineteen, which is locked tight, and twenty, which is unlocked. The locksmith refused to toy with the lock itself in case he damaged it. Not being able to see what’s in there adds to the intrigue, I guess.’
Noah scratches his chin. ‘Ah. I take it you never heard the rumours then?’
Manon sits up straighter on her barstool. ‘What rumours?’
‘It might just be one of those stories that gets exaggerated with each retelling, but there have always been whispers that a famous writer once lived in L’Hotel du Parc, though no one could ever confirm who it was. The previous hotelier said he’d searched every inch of the place but couldn’t find evidence of such a thing, though he still believed it.’
A rush of blood to the head makes me woozy, but I press him for more details. ‘When did he think the writer lived there?’
‘Oh, this is going back to the 1920s or ’30s.’
My eyebrows shoot up. ‘Really?’ The timeline fits with the belongings we found in suite twenty, which were of that era.
Noah grins and it transforms his features from gruff to pleasant. ‘Really.’
It’s so strange to think of a mystery as great as this as I sit on Hemingway’s barstool in a restaurant that it’s rumoured he wrote part of The Sun Also Rises in.
‘So, this writer holed up at L’Hotel du Parc? Like a Coco Chanel situation?’ It’s well known that Coco Chanel moved into suite 302 in The Ritz in 1937 and lived there for over thirty years until her death. It’s awe-inspiring to think of the sumptuous hotel being called home to a famous fashion designer for all that time. Now her suite costs around forty thousand euros per night, a price tag that puts most of us out of contention. Still, I’d love to see it one day.
‘Well, Coco residing in The Ritz was never a secret. Whereas details about this mysterious writer staying at the hotel are sketchy. It’s said she was a reclusive for some reason. It could be a rumour perpetuated over time, who knows, but I like to think that there must be some truth to it. The way the hotelier spun the story was that the writer assumed another name when they moved into the hotel, so perhaps no one knew their real identity.’
‘But how did the previous hotelier know that but not any further details?’
‘That’s just it, it could all be gossip. But he believed it enough he searched his own hotel inside and out. L’Hotel du Parc was owned by generations of the same family until he bought it in the seventies and remodelled.’
‘So he’s to blame for the atrocious colour scheme,’ Manon pipes up.
I ignore her jibe and ask, ‘Were they an affluent family?’ The belongings in suite twenty were rich and lustrous, with a few house clothes that had more humble origins.
‘I’m not sure. Do you think these hidden suites have something to do with the writer?’
I think back to objects we sifted through in suite twenty. There was nothing that pointed to a writer: no books, no letter-writing paper, no typewriter; not even a fountain pen.
I drop my gaze to the key. I have the urge to run back to the hotel and, trust me, I don’t get an urge to run very often. Noah’s eyes twinkle; I sense he’s feeling the same way too. ‘There was nothing in suite twenty that would indicate a writer stayed there. Perhaps there could be in suite nineteen? It would make sense if they were reclusive to hide away in the rooms at the furthest point of the hotel, but why seal the suites up for all this time? What is it that they wanted to keep hidden?’
Noah lifts a shoulder. ‘Only one way to find out.’
‘ Oui .’ I pocket the key. ‘We’re staying elsewhere for a bit so it’ll have to wait, but thanks for passing on the key, Noah.’
‘You’re welcome. I hope it fits.’ He glances at his watch. ‘So, two to four this afternoon. Can you ask them to keep the noise down just a little?’
I give him a solemn nod. ‘I’ll call JP now.’
He smiles and drinks the rest of his Kir and takes some euros from his pocket and places them on the bar.
‘ Non , it’s—’ But he’s gone, back into the drizzly day.
Manon makes a show of pulling out her collar as if she’s hot and bothered. ‘Ouah, you two are sizzling together! It’s like… Pow. Pow, pow – pow! Those sparks, like fireworks. I wonder if I caught them on camera.’
‘What do you mean, caught them on camera?’
Manon takes her phone, zooms in on the photo and turns it to me. ‘Sparks!’ she says as if such a thing is tangible. I squint at the screen. She’s managed to catch the moment we both looked up from the antique key with awed expressions at the possibility of a literary mystery to solve. Drops of rain on the windows are caught through flickering candlelight, making it look like sparks are flying between us.
‘Those are candlelight rain drops.’
‘Really?’ she groans. ‘The universe is still throwing signs directly your way and yet you’re still blind to them. What will it take?’
‘For what? I told you romance is dead and buried. My heart is a no-go zone. Closed for business. And sure, Noah did the right thing sharing the key with us, but did you hear him before that? He’s bossy and unyielding.’
Her eyebrows shoot up. ‘Truth-bomb time: since the divorce, you’re bossy and unyielding.’
‘Exactly. So no man will ever get the better of me again. I’m sick to death of the opposite sex telling me what I can and can’t do, like my divorce lawyers, who carried on the farce for so long draining me of money, knowing winning was futile but urging me to continue to fight a losing battle and increase their billable hours. Noah is no exception. Fine, he might be hot in that suave, cocktail-swilling, intense masculinity, broody way, but he’s still a guy who is attempting to control me and that means he’s going to learn the hard way that I’m no pushover.’
Manon’s shoulders droop. ‘What about his event today then?’
I sigh. ‘I’ll call JP and ask about minimising noise for the sake of his customers, but we can’t stop altogether. Noah has to learn that he can’t stomp around and expect the world to fall at his feet. I’m over men trying to orchestrate my life. Delete that photo.’
‘ Non , I will not. Let’s eat or I will die.’ Manon clocks the waiter returning with our meals, who motions to a nearby table for us to sit to eat more comfortably. The plaque on this table reads S DE Beauvoir , better known as Simone De Beauvoir, a French writer famous for her revolutionary ideas around feminism.
I make a note to research the plaques on each table for the literary map before I find JP’s number and call to explain the situation about our surly neighbour. JP complains about time constraints and his scheduling, but agrees to try his best to reduce the noise between 2 and 4p.m.
After I end the call, I say, ‘Bon appétit.’ But Manon is already digging into her lunch with great gusto. Once our plates are cleared, we order café crèmes and pull out our laptops. We chat for a while about a literary name for the hotel, but nothing sounds quite right.
‘I’ll start redesigning the website because that’s going to be a big job, making the booking system more efficient,’ Manon says. ‘We’ll also need to take photos but we can’t do that now, and of course we need the new hotel name, but I can make a start at least.’
‘ Oui . I’ll look for suppliers for the items we need, mattresses and linens specifically.’ I spend an hour trawling through various websites and sending enquiries, but I’m distracted. The mystery of room nineteen is far too enticing to let go.
I google ‘reclusive writer living at L’Hotel du Parc’, but nothing comes up. Not one hit. Did Noah make it up? Surely not. If it’s a mystery from the twenties, I presume there’s not much online about it, but it’s strange there’s not a whisper. Not even an outrageous conspiracy theory to work with.
My phone beeps again with a text message from Giselle:
Bonjour, Anais, of course you’re always welcome to stay and so is your cousin. Key is in the lockbox by the door, the code is 9876.
‘Giselle is happy for us to stay. We can return to the hotel on Friday afternoon to meet with JP before they finish work for the weekend.’
Finally, I open my Word document and promise myself I’m going to write one paragraph, then two and then a page.
Rain lashed the windows of the La Closerie des Lilas as Hilary sipped her café crème and considered the new man in her life. Or what was left of him.
I shake my head. I’ve killed my hero. Again. In the second sentence. What is wrong with me?