The Paris Apartment (29 page)

“You animal,” she says. “You did this to her? Who the fuck are you?”

I put up my hands. “It—it wasn't me. I just found her.”

It was Antoine, of course. Going too far, as usual. An old woman, for God's sake: to shove her like that.

“It must have been a . . . a terrible accident. Look. There are some things I have to explain. Can we talk?”

“No,” she says. “No, I don't want to do that, Nick.”

“Please, Jess. Please. You have to trust me.” I need her to stay calm. Not do anything rash. Not force me to do something
I'll regret. I'm also still unsure whether or not she has a phone on her.

“Trust you? Like I trusted you before? When you took me to meet that shady cop? When you hid from me that you were a family?”

“Look, Jess,” I say, “I can explain everything. Just—come with me. I don't want you to get hurt. I really don't want anyone
else to get hurt.”

“What,” she gestures to the concierge. “Like her? And Ben? What have you done to Ben? He's your friend, Nick.”

“No!” I shout it. I've been trying to be so calm, so controlled. “He was not my friend. He was never my friend.” And I don't
even try to keep the bitterness at bay.

 

Three nights ago my little sister Mimi came and told me what she had found on his computer.

“It said . . . it said our money doesn't come from wine. It says . . . it says it's girls. Men buying girls, not wine . . .
this horrible place, this club—
ce n'est pas vrai . . .
it can't be true, Nick . . . tell me it's not true.” She was sobbing as she tried to speak. “And it says . . .” she fought
for breath, “it says I'm not really theirs . . .”

I suppose we always knew about Mimi, Antoine and I. I suppose all families have these kind of secrets, these commonly agreed
deceptions that are never spoken of aloud. Frankly, we were too afraid. I remember how, when we were little more than kids,
Antoine made some comment that our father overheard—some insinuation. Papa backhanded him across the room. It has never properly
been mentioned again. Just another skeleton thrown to the back of the closet.

Ben had clearly been very, very busy. It sounded as though he had discovered more about Papa and his business than I even
knew myself. But then I haven't wanted to know all the deplorable particulars. I've kept as much distance, as much ignorance,
as possible over the years. Still, it was all tied up with the thing I had told him in strictest confidence ten years before
in a weed café in Amsterdam. The confession he had promised me, hand on heart, never to share with another soul. The secret
at the very heart of my family. My main, terrible, source of shame.

I can still remember my father's words when I was sixteen, outside that locked door at the bottom of the velvet staircase. Taunting: “Oh, you think this is something you can just turn your nose up at, do you? You think you're above this? What do you think really paid for that expensive school? What do you think paid for the house you live in, the clothes you wear? Some dusty old bottles? Your sainted mother's precious inheritance?
No, my boy.
This
is where it comes from. Think you're immune now? Think you're too good for all of it?”

I knew all too well what Mimi had felt, reading about it on Ben's computer. Learning about the roots of our wealth, our identity.
Discovering it was sullied money that had paid for everything. It's like a disease, a cancer, spreading outward and making
all of us sick.

But at the same time you can't choose your blood. They are still the only family I have.

When Mimi told me what she had read, all of it—Ben's casual text message months ago, our meeting in the bar, the move into
this building—suddenly revealed itself to be not the workings of happy coincidence, but something far more calculated. Targeted.
He had used me to fulfil his own ambitions. And now he would destroy my family. And in the process, he apparently didn't care
that he would also destroy me.

I thought again of that old French saying about family.
La voix du sang est la plus forte
: the voice of blood is the strongest. I didn't have a choice.

I knew what I had to do.

Just as I know what I have to do now.

“Please Jess,” Nick says in a reasonable tone. “Just hear me out. I'll come down there and we can chat.”

For a moment I think: just because they're a family, it doesn't mean they're all responsible for what's happened here. I remember
how Nick briefly referred to his father as “a bit of a cunt”: clearly they don't all see eye to eye. Maybe I've jumped to
conclusions—maybe she really did fall. An old woman, frail, slipping on the stairs late at night . . . no one to hear her
because it's late. And maybe the front gate is locked because it's late, too—

No. I'm not going to take my chances. I turn to look back at the concierge, slumped on the floor and grimacing in pain. And
as I do, I see the door to the first-floor apartment opening. I watch as Antoine steps out onto the landing to stand next
to his brother—the two of them so much more alike than I had realized. He smiles down at me, a horrible grin.

“Hello, little girl,” he says.

Where to run? The front gate is locked. I refuse to be the girl in the horror film who flees into the basement. Both brothers
are advancing toward me down the stairs now. I don't have any time to think. Instinctively I step into the lift. I press the
button for the third floor.

The lift clanks upward, the mechanism grinding. I can hear Nick running up the stairs below: through the metal grille I can
see the top of his head. He's chasing me. The gloves are off now.

Finally I reach the third floor. The lift clanks into place agonizingly slowly. I open the metal gate and dash across the landing,
shove the keys into the door to Ben's apartment and fling it open, slam it shut behind me, lock the door, my chest heaving.

I try to think, panic making me stupid, just when I need my thoughts to be as clear as possible. The back staircase: I could
try and use that. But the sofa's in the way. I run to it, start trying to tug it away from the door.

Then I hear the unmistakable sound of a key beginning to turn in the lock. I back away. He has a key. Of course he has a key.
Could I pull something in front of the door? No: there's no time.

Nick starts advancing toward me across the room. The cat, seeing him, streaks past and jumps up onto the kitchen counter to
his right, mewing at him—perhaps hoping to be fed. Traitor.

“Come on, Jess,” Nick says, coaxingly, still that chillingly reasonable tone. “Just, just stay where you are—”

This new menace in Nick is so much more frightening than if he hadn't worn that nice-guy mask before. I mean, his brother's
violence has always seemed to simmer just beneath the surface. But Nick—this new Nick—he's an unknown quantity.

“So what?” I ask him. “So you can do the same thing to me that you've done to Ben?”

“I didn't do anything—”

There's a strange emphasis on the way he says this. A stress on the “I”: “
I
didn't.”

“Are you saying someone else did? One of the others?” He doesn't answer. Keep him talking, I tell myself, play for time. “I
thought you wanted to help me, Nick,” I say.

He looks pained now. “I did want to, Jess. And it's all my fault. I set this whole thing in motion. I invited him here . . .
I should have known. He went digging into stuff he shouldn't have . . . fuck—” He rubs at his face with his hands and when
he takes them away I see that his eyes are rimmed with red. “It's my fault . . . and I'm sorry—”

I feel a coldness creeping through me. “What have you done to Ben, Nick?” I meant it to sound tough, authoritative. But my voice comes out with a tremor.

“I haven't . . . I didn't . . . I haven't done anything.” Again that emphasis: “
I
didn't,
I
haven't.”

The only way out is past Nick, through that front door. Just by the door is the kitchen area. The utensil pot's right there;
inside it is that razor-sharp Japanese knife. If I can just keep him talking, somehow grab the knife—

“Come on, Jess.” He takes another step toward me.

And suddenly there's a streak of movement, a flash of black and white. The cat has leapt from the kitchen counter onto Nick's
shoulders—the same way it greeted me the very first time I entered this apartment. Nick swears, puts his hands up to tear
the animal away. I sprint forward, yank the knife out of the pot. Then I lunge past him for the door, wrench it open, and
slam it behind me.

“Hello little girl.”

I turn: fuck—Antoine stands there, he must have been waiting in the shadows. I lunge the knife toward him, slashing so violently
at the air with the blade that he staggers backward and falls down the flight of stairs, collapsing in a heap on the next
landing. I peer at him through the gloom, my chest burning. I think I hear a groan but he's not moving.

Nick will be out any moment. There's only one way to go.

Up.

I'm clearly outnumbered here, one of me: four of them. But perhaps there's somewhere I can hide, to try and buy some time.

Come on, Jess. Think. You've always been good at thinking yourself out of a tight spot.

“What's going on out there? Maman?” After everything I have learned the word still feels strange, painful.

“Shh,” she says, stroking my hair. “Shh,
ma petite
.”

I'm crouched on the bed, trembling. She came down to check on me. I've allowed her to sit beside me, to put an arm around
my shoulders.

“Look,” she says. “Just stay in here, yes? I'm going to go out there and see what's going on.”

I grab hold of her wrist. “No—please don't leave me.” I hate the neediness in my voice, my need for her, but I can't help
it. “Please,” I say. “
Maman
.”

“Just for a couple of minutes,” she says. “I just have to make sure—”

“No. Please—don't leave me here.”

“Mimi,” she says, sharply. “Let go of my arm, please.”

But I keep hanging onto her. In spite of everything I don't want her to leave me. Because then I'd be left alone with my thoughts—like
a little girl afraid of the monsters under the bed.

I sprint up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Fear makes me run faster than I've ever done in my life.

Finally I'm on the top floor, opposite the door to the penthouse apartment, the wooden ladder up to the old maids' quarters
in front of me. I begin to climb, ascending into the darkness. Maybe I can hide out here long enough to gather my thoughts,
work out what the hell I'm going to do next. I'm already pulling the hoop earrings from my ears, bending them into the right
shape, making my rake and my pick. I grab for the padlock, get to work. Normally I'm so quick at this but my hands are shaking—I
can feel that one of the pins inside the lock is seized and I just can't get the pressure right to reset it.

Finally, finally, the lock pops open and I wrench it off and push open the door. I close it again quickly behind me. The open
padlock is the only thing to give me away; I'll just have to pray they won't immediately guess I've come in here.

My eyes start to adjust in the gloom. I'm looking into a cramped attic space, long and thin. The ceiling slopes down sharply
above me. I have to crouch so I don't knock my head on one of the big wooden beams.

It's dark but there's a dim glow which I realize is the full moon, filtering in through the small, smeared attic windows. It smells of old wood and trapped air up here and something animal: sweat or something worse, something decaying. Something that stops me from breathing in too deeply. The air feels thick, full of dust motes which float in front of me in the bars of moonlight. It feels
as though I have just pushed open a door into another world, where time has been suspended for a hundred years.

I move forward, looking around for somewhere to hide.

Over in the dim far corner of the space I see what looks like an old mattress. There appears to be something on top of it.

I have that feeling again, like I did downstairs when I found the concierge. I don't want to step any closer. I don't want
to look.

But I do, because I have to know. Now I can see what it is. Who it is. I see the blood. I understand.

He's been up here all along. And I forget that I am meant to be hiding from them. I forget everything apart from the horror
of what I'm looking at. I scream and scream and scream.

A scream tears through the apartment.

“
He's dead. He's dead—you've fucking killed him.
”

I let go of my mother's arm.

The storm in my head is growing louder, louder. It's a swarm of bees . . . then like being crashed underwater by the waves,
now like standing in the middle of a hurricane. But it still isn't loud enough to shut out the thoughts that are beginning
to seep in. The memories.

I remember blood. So much blood.

You know how when you're a kid you can't sleep because you're afraid of the monsters under the bed? What happens if you start
to suspect that the monster might be you? Where do you hide?

It's like the memories have been kept behind a locked door in my mind. I have been able to see the door. I have known it's
there, and I have known that there is something terrible behind it. Something I don't want to see—ever. But now the door is
opening, the memories flooding out.

The iron stink of the blood. The wooden floor slippery with it. And in my hand, my canvas-cutting knife.

I remember them pushing me into the shower. Maman . . . someone else, too, maybe. Washing me down. The blood running dilute and pink into the drain, swirling around my toes. I was
shivering all over; I couldn't stop. But not because the shower was cold; it was hot, scalding. There was a deep coldness inside me.

I remember Maman holding me like she did when I was a little girl. And even though I was so angry with her, so confused, all
I wanted, suddenly, was to cling to her. To be that little girl again.

“Maman,” I said. “I'm frightened. What happened?”

“Shh.” She stroked my hair. “It's OK,” she told me. “I'm not going to let anything happen. I'll protect you. Just let me take
care of all of this. You aren't going to get into any trouble. It was his fault. You did what had to be done. What I wasn't
brave enough to do myself. We had to get rid of him.”

“What do you mean?” I searched her face, trying to understand. “Maman, what do you mean?”

She looked closely at me then. Stared hard into my eyes. Then she nodded, tightly. “You don't remember. Yes, yes, it's best
like that.”

Later, there was something crusted under my fingernails, a reddish-brown rust color. I scrubbed at it with a toothbrush in
the bathroom until my nail beds started bleeding. I didn't care about the pain; I just wanted to be rid of whatever it was.
But that was the only thing that seemed real. The rest of it was like a dream.

And then she arrived here. And the next morning she came to the door. She knocked and knocked until I had to open it. Then
she said those terrible words:

“My brother—Ben . . . he's . . . well, he's kind of disappeared.”

That was when I realized it could have been real, after all.

I think it might have been me. I think I might have killed him.