1 #5
In that first year after high school I was working at a grocery store in the 2nd arrondissement, and living in a tiny apartment in Nico’s neighbourhood.
My apartment was a single room with a tiny closet for a toilet carved out of the corner.
There was a bathtub next to the kitchen sink.
I could open my fridge from my bed. I’d rented it sight unseen and never regretted it—restocking grocery shelves didn’t pay well, and after all those years in dormitories I was desperate to not have roommates—but when I tried to think ahead, to consider living in this space in a year, five years, ten, the walls closed in and I felt very tired.
“But what a gift to have your own apartment,” the girl I was dating said.
Her name was Marie-ève. We’d met at the grocery store, where we worked overlapping shifts, and she lived out in the Vincennes forest, in a former equestrian centre that had been taken over years earlier by climate refugees.
It wasn’t terrible, she said, but it was crowded, and the apartment she shared with another woman had previously been an administrative office.
“I know,” I said. “It’s incredibly fortunate.
” We were lying together after sex, and she’d gotten chilled so I’d wrapped her up in the blanket.
I loved the weight of her head on my chest at these moments, her soft hair.
I was running flashbacks in my head from the preceding half-hour, and Marie-ève was blinking shortsightedly at my kitchenette. Her glasses were on the side table.
“I don’t even want to know how you managed to get this place,” she said. “You must have some serious connections.”
Did I have serious connections? I had Nico.
She was the one who’d gotten me this place, but until that moment, lying there with Marie-ève, I hadn’t entirely thought through what that meant.
Nico worked in a retail job, but there was no possibility, now that I thought about it, that this work lined up financially with the size of her apartment a few blocks away, let alone her travels around Europe to speak with other scientists about parallel universes.
“It’s not like we’re inside the dome, though,” I said.
“Still.” There was a heaviness in Marie-ève’s voice that meant she was falling asleep.
My apartment was south of the dome, on a street that had been abandoned by the municipal government.
A local gang had negotiated control of the block, but the cost of that control was an absolute absence of municipal services.
Garbage had to be hauled to a designated corner, where hypothetically some gang-affiliated service was supposed to pick it up on Tuesdays, except they seemed to miss the pickup three Tuesdays out of four.
My street was so dirty that the sidewalk appeared several shades darker than the rest of the neighbourhood.
There were a few old people on the block who went out with brooms sometimes and tried to restore order to the sidewalks, but it’s difficult for individuals to fill the void left by absent systems, and an air of abandonment remained.
The men who ran the neighbourhood were a constant presence.
They were sitting on stoops, they were pulling up in their cars at all hours, they were carrying boxes of who-knows-what in and out of buildings.
They were elaborately polite in a manner that chilled me.
My school friend Obie was among them. I stumbled across him almost literally one night, on my way home from a bar where I’d been drinking with Cole and the girl he was dating.
We’d lost track of Obie immediately after graduation, and now that I saw him, I understood why.
Obie was on a corner with two older men whom I recognized as local gangsters, the three of them speaking quietly, confidentially.
“Obie!” I said, too loud, too bright.
He responded with a nod, unsmiling. I thought I detected a warning in the way he looked at me. He’d moved past me somehow, and seemed much older than I felt. He’d slipped into his father’s underworld. The other two men stared flatly at me.
“We went to school together,” he said finally, to one of them, who nodded too.
I didn’t like their gaze on me, the three of them.
I found myself thinking stupidly of a long-ago TV show, some drama about people who could see ghosts, and the thing that was announced in a portentous tone at least once per episode was that if you can see ghosts, the ghosts can see you back.
I’d seen these men, because Obie was among them, and now they could see me. I’d drawn their attention.
“Well, good night,” I said awkwardly, “good to see you again,” and went up to my apartment feeling like an idiot.
But the weeks slid past without incident after that, and I tried not to think about it.
I didn’t mind living there. The neighbourhood wasn’t noticeably more dangerous than anywhere else in the area, I was close to Nico, and so long as my hours didn’t get cut at the grocery store, I could make my rent.
I didn’t have to think about how Nico had gotten me the apartment.
“Are you happy working at the grocery store?” Nico asked. It was a spring evening in her apartment, where we met for dinner twice a week.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I could imagine staying there for a while.” We sat side by side, so that we could both look at the mural.
She’d had it painted two or three years ago, but it retained a sheen of novelty for me.
It was beautiful. I liked to imagine myself standing in that garden, looking up at the lights of towers.
I liked to imagine that my mother was Nico.
“What do you want to do with your life?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I know that sounds like an evasion. I’m just not sure. I don’t think I’m the most ambitious person.”
“Sometimes it’s clarifying to pose the question in reverse. What don’t you want your life to be, Sebastian?”
“I don’t want to be violent,” I said, after a moment. I was thinking of a bully at school, a terrifying boy who’d pushed me down a staircase and given me a mild concussion when I was fourteen. “I don’t want to be mean. I know that sounds childish.”
“It doesn’t,” she said. “A word of advice, Sebastian, if you don’t want to be mean?”
“What is it?”
“The guys who run the neighbourhood,” she said. “You see them around.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t get into debt with them,” she said. “I don’t just mean money, I mean don’t put yourself in a position where they do you a favour of any kind.”
“Because then I’ll have to work for them?”
“They’ll own you,” she said.
Did they own Nico? I didn’t want to ask.
It’s important to have a mission. After Eddie Kalisa died, I decided I would wait a beat, so for two long, careful years I put my mission on hold.
I would steal the painting from Ari Soriano, but not yet.
A man has to have a code, a character said in some reality TV episode I watched as a child, and I knew that idea was outdated but it was something I thought about.
I wanted to steal my father’s painting, but I didn’t want to steal from a woman reeling from the loss of her wife.
I wanted to give her time to recover and then steal it, instead of joining a parade of bad luck. I didn’t want to be mean.
Waiting was difficult. Can you be the still point of the turning world?
Can you remain still, purposefully still, when all of your instincts bend toward action?
For two years I worked in the grocery store, commuted on the metro between home and work, said my careful good mornings and good evenings to the quiet men who moved through the neighbourhood, slept with Marie-ève and went on dates with other girls on occasion, went to Nico’s apartment for dinner when she was in town, and ignored Gloria.
Twenty-five months after Eddie Kalisa’s death, I began staking out Ari Soriano’s apartment.
She was a surprisingly busy person, at least on the surface.
I’d known old people in Paris who’d settled into their apartments and almost never left, but Ari wasn’t like that.
She was up early, walking very slowly down the block toward the park—her housekeeper followed at a discreet distance—and once at the park she would sit and watch people go by.
She seemed to like dogs. She went to lunches with friends, she sat in a café not far from her apartment, she went to concerts and to the opera.
On a spring morning, on one of my days off from the grocery store, I dressed carefully and approached her at the café.
“Excuse me,” I said, in English, “are you Ari Soriano?”
She looked at me appraisingly. She was impeccably dressed, as always, and she carried what I’d come to recognize as her opera cane: it was black, very elegant, with an ivory handle.
“You’re an American,” she said.
“My parents were American. I was born in Paris.”
“Please,” she said. “Sit.”
I sat across from her. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I’m studying art history, and, well, I’ve been working on a master’s dissertation that involves some of your art collection.”
7
On the appointed afternoon I entered her building and took the elevator to the fifth floor, which was as high as the elevator went, but she lived on the sixth.
I did two laps of a silent carpeted square at the top of the stairwell before I realized that the closet-sized door furthest from the grand apartment entrances wasn’t a closet at all.
It opened into a cavernous space, an oddly unfinished back stairwell, with extremely sketchy electrical wiring flowing down the walls and bare lightbulbs suspended overhead.
I climbed a long flight of wooden stairs to a plain white corridor.
There were three doors here, but now my instructions made sense, and I followed the corridor to the end.
The housekeeper answered the door. She was younger than Ari by at least a decade. Pilar.