Paris Twilight Read Online Free PDF

urgently through the darkness to where a scrim of light announced a window obstructed by a shade. The shade was like any window shade except that it was made of an infernal heavy flesh, the grasping black fabric of a mourning dress. I gave its hem a quick yank and the curtain reeled to the top of the window and slapped a couple times against the molding for good measure. I twisted the window lock and flung the sashes open as wide as they could go. The air and light of a rainy November midday flooded the room.
    What there was of it to flood. The apartment before me was hardly larger than a parking space, so tiny that I didn’t feel
inside
it so much as perched upon it. A narrow bed covered with an embroidered, tasseled counterpane and a bolster to serve as a daytime divan took up half of one wall; a small yellow writing table and hard-bottomed chair were set against another, next to a vertical dresser with a dozen drawers. In addition to the front door, there were two others, behind which I would discover, later, a bath with a half-length clawfoot tub and a sink in one case, and a cluttered walk-in closet in the other. That was all. My European real estate portfolio apparently comprised a single smelly room. And within these walls a man had lived for more than half a century! Most of his life! With that knowledge burdening my appraisal, the room didn’t strike me as a room at all, more a coffin. Tidy as one too, I thought. The counterpane’s tassels were lined up evenly an inch off the floor; its surface was still dented with . . . what? . . . the shape of Saxe lying there?
    The notable piece of disorder was an old camp stove tipped on its side on the floor halfway under the dresser. A plume of spilled kerosene, evaporated now, had spread from it across the wooden planks—I could see where the wax had lifted into an eczema of scales and chips and blisters—to a shabby hook rug. That explained the odor. That and a lead-lined wooden icebox containing no ice but half a quart of milk gone to cheese and two rinds of cheese gone furry and some other perishables that had perished long ago. I emptied the little crypt’s contents into a plastic bag I found beneath the sink, and then righted the stove—only for ceremony; its reservoir had long since gone dry as bone.
    Why hadn’t the place exploded! The spooky silhouette etched into the floor wax, a flattened phantom with its arm flung out, gave me a shudder. Raindrops spattered in off the windowsill; they seemed restorative. I bundled up the corrupted rug and lugged it clumsily down the stairs, trying not to grasp it close against me, trying not to trip, trying not to breathe any more than I had to. I ejected it through the door into a puddle.
    No sooner had I turned to head back inside than a voice yelled,
“Non! C’est interdit!”
I peered around—no one at all in the courtyard, but, once again, the screech of the raptor, and in a few seconds the door of one of the ateliers burst open to emit a short, round woman in a brown housedress, herself emitting great effusions of protest. The sheer volume of her invective protected me; had she spoken more slowly, I might have caught every word. The point was certainly clear. I was not to dump my crap in the
cour
for her to have to pick up, what did I take her for, a mule, a slave? I fully intended to move it, I promised her (dodging the question of what I took her for), as soon as I figured out the
lieu
of the
poubelle
. My journeyman’s French slowed her for a critical second, just as she drew near.
    â€œQui êtes-vous?”
she asked wonderingly, her voice suddenly bell-like, a wind chime of innocence, and then she figured it out for herself and the rasp resumed. “You’re here about that Saxe!” She crossed herself, without piety, and without pity plowed ahead: the garbage area was over in a room behind the mail drop, and, concerning the mail, I needed to