The Radiant City (20 page)

She quickly lights a candle, murmurs a prayer and goes out the side door. It looks like rain. People have draped torn plastic garbage bags over laundry that hangs from racks out of second-storey windows. She passes the Hotel Myrha, advertising rooms with hot water and heat that rent for the month or for the day. Market shops sell dried fava beans, green tea in many varieties, pine nuts, pistachios, fermented milk in used Evian water bottles, rice, mangoes and dates. She passes the little shop that sells live chickens, its air powdery with feathers, and she sneezes.

A sharp voice calls out in Arabic and she hears the sound of palms slapping together. A group of young men spill onto the sidewalk. They do not move for people passing and so everyone, old ladies and women with baby strollers, must move around them out into the street. Farther along, the crowd parts for a large man, head and shoulders above the crowd. She sees the figure only from the back but it is familiar. Jack Saddler. There is no mistaking the bestial lumber of his walk. She strains her eyes after him, but he turns a corner and is gone.

The youths speak loudly and one of them, a big boy wearing a bright yellow jacket and a heavy gold medallion, flips a lit cigarette into the street. It narrowly misses a man carrying bags of groceries. Saida frowns, considers crossing the street, and then she spots him.

“Joseph! Joseph!”

He sees her; she knows he does, for he glances in her direction and then, quickly turns away, a cigarette cupped in his palm.

“Joseph! Come here!”

“Oh, look, your
Maman’s
here!” The boys laugh and nudge each other, brave and sneering in the safety of their numbers, of their size, of their youth.

“
Merde.”
He says this, and perhaps he thinks he speaks too low for her to hear, but she does hear it. He drops the cigarette, as though she will not see it. He slouches toward her, one shoulder down, moving as if he is limping, or dragging something, his hand on his crotch.

“What’s wrong with you?” she says.

“Nothing. What do you want?”

“What do I want? What do you think, Joseph? What do you think?” Anger makes her repeat herself, and under anger, the cringing little worm of fear in her stomach.

“I’m busy here. I said I would be by the restaurant later. You come looking for me?”

“I wanted to see you play soccer.”

“The game got cancelled.” There is much laughter from the group at this. The indignation flickering like flames up her face makes Saida braver and she stands her ground.

“So this is what you do? Who was that I saw up the street? Was that Jack Saddler I saw just now?”

“No.”

“It was.”

“No.”

“I want you to stay away from that man.”

“I told you. It was not him. Look, I have to go now.”

“You are going to go all right, you’re going to come with me. Help me do the shopping. If you do not have a game you have no excuse, and besides, a game, what excuse is that? I let you get away with murder. Enough. It is over. You come with me.”

“
Imma
,
please. Not now. I’ll come later.” He says this under his breath almost, and she knows he does not want his friends to hear.

“Don’t
Imma
me. Now. You can help Anthony.”

Joseph stares at her, his handsome face becoming the impassive mask she hates so much. She scrambles, trying to find a way to get him out of there, and she knows if she is not careful now she will push him too far, he will balk, flex his muscles, and she will lose him. “Listen, he told me he has a new CD he’s made for you, blues musicians from America. He said you wanted it.”

Joseph’s face twitches as he struggles with his pride, and it is all Saida can do not to reach out and stroke his cheek. “He made it for me?”

“Yes. He told me he would bring it today for you, but he wanted to talk to you about someone named Robert Johnson and a pact he made,” she grins, “with the Devil at a crossroads.”

“Oh, yeah, that one!” He smiles now and her heart, which had been clinging like a bird to the side of her ribcage, flutters and relaxes. “Okay, I’ll come. Wait a minute.”

Joseph goes over to his friends and tells them a black American friend from New York wants to see him, has some blues music for him, he will get it and share it with them.

“You know a lot of Americans,
hein
?” says the boy with the yellow jacket.

Saida and Joseph walk together without speaking. They walk past the
téléboutique
, where customers who do not have phones can make cheap calls to Turkey, Romania, Poland, Algeria, Iran, Egypt, Cameroon, Senegal and more. They move into the Haitian and French Caribbean sections of the neighbourhood. People lay out their wares on the tops of parked cars. Brightly coloured African cloth, carvings, jeans and cosmetics especially designed for African skin. Here
the shops sell wigs and hair gel, manioc, plantains, taro,
igname
, gumbo and sweet potatoes. Green-and-grey metal construction barricades lay tipped over and flat on the torn-up street and people walk over them because it is impossible not to, there are so many people. As they pass the Paris Refugee Bar, Joseph waves back to a man with a thick black moustache and a cigar who calls his name from the doorway. Saida says nothing.

The market is crowded, as always, and smells of fish, meat and the faint rot of discarded greens. Plastic-roofed stalls are set up to sell every sort of vegetable and fruit, sweaters and boots, watches and linens. She gives Joseph some money and sends him off with a list. They will meet in twenty minutes.

“I’ll take you for pizza after, if you want,” she says, by way of reconciliation.

As he ambles through the market, she wonders if he will disappear into the crowd. While she shops, haggling with vendors over cracked wheat, rice, vine leaves, parsley and mint, she turns her head this way and that, trying to keep sight of him. When they meet at last at the far end of the market, she hugs him and kisses his cheek.

“You’re a good boy,” she says.

“
Imma
, please!”

Matthew does not leave his apartment for five days. He sleeps and writes, but sleeps more than he writes. All he sees is Suzi’s ribcage, the points of her hips, the bruises on the inside of her thighs. On the fifth day, he watches Ramzi and Elias argue in the window of the café. Their arms wave, their faces redden. Finally, Ramzi flicks his hand skyward in a gesture of dismissal and turns away. The old man looks out the window. He rubs his hands over his face. Matthew wonders how long it will be before Ramzi takes his maps and hits the road.

He wonders if he should ask to come along, but he has no energy left for journeying. Turn to the page.
All right. Down to business
. For several hours he writes about Afghanistan, about being holed up in a cave with the
mujahedeen
,
among them Zakirya, a one-eyed Tajik Matthew had considered a friend. Zakirya died, no,
evaporated
in a Russian mortar assault, after which Matthew found himself terrified of confined spaces for the first time. He writes about arriving in Peshwar and spending three days and four nights in Green’s Hotel with two other reporters. They drank themselves blind with booze someone smuggled in from the United Nations Club in Islamabad. They took turns throwing shoes at the enormous but slow-moving cockroaches. They told stories about how brave they were, and special, and what important work they did. “But we’re all right now, we’re all right now,” Matthew had said, repeatedly, and prayed that by the next morning the dread would be gone. It wasn’t, but after the fourth night of incessant drinking and talking, it did reduce to a manageable level, a sort of spiritual tinnitus.

By evening his stomach burns. He goes to the medicine cabinet and chews a few chalky antacids. The mirror rattles when he slams it. In the living room, the walls bend in, pressing on him. Dust particles filter through the light like bacteria.

“Fuck it,” Matthew says, “I’ve earned my fun.”

Forty-five minutes later, he fans his hand in front of his eyes, watching the smoke swirl like grey ink through dark water in the Bok-Bok air. There is no sign of Suzi. Jack is at his usual table at the back of the room, sitting with Anthony and a guy Matthew doesn’t recognize. The guy is of medium build, red-haired and young, probably no more than twenty-five. He wears combat pants and a bright red tee shirt. A leather jacket hangs on the back of his chair. As Matthew watches he leans back, balancing the chair on two legs, his thumbs hooked in his front pockets. He looks relaxed, which means he is probably just a guy and not a problem to be avoided, but you can never tell. Matthew lingers at the bar until he gets the lay of the land.

He does not see Suzi come up behind him. “Ah, Matthew, I missed you.” She kisses him on both cheeks, and then rubs away a smear of red lipstick. She wears her black wig and her Chinese dress. Her fingers stink of nicotine. Her nails are ragged and covered in chipped blue nail polish. The smell of cigarettes, wine and heavy, musky perfume combine in a noxious ball.

“How are you?” Matthew says. Her eyes are too bright. She looks even thinner. There are bluish smudges under her eyes that thick makeup cannot hide, although the bruise on her cheek has faded away so that it is nothing more than a reproaching tint on her skin. “Are you all right?”

She shrugs. “I have my worries.”

“Jack?” Matthew glances over to see if Jack is looking at them, but he seems engrossed in his conversation.

“Jack? No. Jack is nothing. Past history.” She pats his hand. “Things come and go, Matthew. One does not dwell.”

And with that he relaxes, slightly. Secrets will be kept where they belong.

“No. It is my daughter.”

Matthew recalls the child’s drawing on the fridge, the box of stuffed animals. “I didn’t know you had a daughter. How old is she?”

“Ten. Eleven next month.”

Matthew whistles. “You must have been a kid yourself.”

“Of course I was. And she’s like me. A wild one. She will not listen. Two months ago she goes to live with her father. He is a bastard. He will beat her, but she will not believe me. She is like her mother, eh? She has to learn the hard way. She’ll end up in the bois if she’s not careful,” she says, referring to the hookers who ply their trade in the white vans lined up along the boulevards in the Boulogne forest and its environs. “She calls last night, all tears. But when I say come back and live with me, she refuses. I begged her.
Merde
. But she has made her bed, now. Let her father keep her. I do not care, I tell you. It does not matter to me at all.” She puts her hand on Matthew’s sleeve. “I am thirsty, Matthew.”

“Sure. Dan, get the lady a drink.”

“Thanks, Matthew,” she says, and leaves him to sit next to a guy sitting at the end of the bar with a huge grey beard and a belly the size of a basketball. Matthew cannot tell if he feels relieved or disappointed. A bit of both, he thinks.

The guy with Anthony and Jack says something that must be funny, because both of them laugh, but it is guarded, certainly not Jack’s usual sonic boom.

“Jack, Anthony, how you doing?”

“Where you been?” says Jack.

“Downtime.”

“Matthew, meet Brian Dance. He was in Bosnia, too.” This close Matthew can see the slight narrowing of Jack’s eyes, the tight smile. Matthew’s stomach squirts acid. Brian Dance transfers his cigarette to his mouth and holds out his hand. It is a soft, small hand and Matthew does not like the feel of it against his palm.

“How are you?” Matthew sits down, fights the urge to wipe his hand against his pant leg. He risks a glance at Jack, who leans back in his chair, his arms folded over his chest. Jack keeps his clouded gaze on Brian Dance, which may mean his amiability toward the red-haired man is insincere or it may mean he does not, for some reason that does not bear examining, want to look at Matthew. Matthew’s pulse quickens.

“Matthew’s a war correspondent,” says Anthony. “He knows Christiane Amanpour. Tell him, Matt.”

“Yeah?” says Brian. “I hung out with her for a few days, in Srebrenica. Only woman I ever met who chain-smoked more than me. You know her too, huh?”

“Not really, but our paths have crossed a couple of times is all. What were you doing in Srebrenica?”

“I’m a reporter, man, like you. With FOX news—you?”

“I was freelance. AP, Reuters. When were you there?”

“I was in and out for a couple of years.”

“Matthew goes all the way back to El Salvador,” says Jack. “Nineteen eighty-three, right?”

Matthew listens intently to Jack’s voice, searching for any clue as to what he is not saying. “Eighty-two, actually. Israeli invasion of Lebanon. I was about your age.”

“I lost my cherry in Yugoslavia. Damn near lost more than that. Forty-four journalists died in that crappy little war, did you know that?”