Waiting For Columbus (31 page)

At 3:30 A.M. on the third night, Emile can’t sleep, can’t watch the television anymore, and doesn’t want to drink anything. He heads for the roof of the hotel to get some air, to breathe, to move his legs. There’s a jazz club on the top floor. He gets off the elevator and walks down the hallway, barefoot and wearing the hotel housecoat over his trousers, looking for a stairwell to the roof. He can hear the sound of someone tuning a piano coming from inside the club. Emile walks past the door, which is slightly ajar, and is halfway down the hall before he stops—acknowledges the pull of the piano. He hasn’t played since before the Paris incident. He hasn’t felt the desire to play.

Inside the doorway it takes a while for his eyes to adjust. Through the windows the sparkling lights of Marbella arc along the shore of the Mediterranean. One thin spotlight shines directly onto a piano sitting on a small stage against the far wall. The man at the piano has a full gray beard and a no-nonsense face. His focus is on tuning the piano. He looks up at Emile quickly, then back to his job. He says nothing. Emile stands in the entranceway, awkward but also drawn to the pure sound of the piano. The single notes ring out—they hang in the room. Emile thinks of a raven, or a hawk, suspended in an air current, wings motionless except for a small flutter. A minute later, the gray-bearded man is packing up his gear. He looks toward Emile.

“Still there?”

“I—”

“Come and play then. It’s what you need, yes? I will have a nightcap—a little Courvoisier. It is my custom. And I will listen.” The man has a thick Slavic accent. Emile’s not sure that he wants an audience tonight. It seems his feet are nailed to the wooden floor.

“It’s what you need,” the man says. “I’ll pour some drinks in the back.” He does not move like an old person. There is a lithe vitality in his walk.

Emile sits at the piano. It’s a Steinway, a good choice for a jazz piano. He read a story in an online news service that Keith Jarrett plays a Steinway. Emile plays a single note, a middle D, and lets it ring out in the dark room. Then he begins to unravel all he was taught as a child. He purposely forgets how chords work. He un-remembers scales, theories, and circles of fifths. He plays notes and combinations of notes that make no sense—he embraces dissonance, and yet there is an ephemeral order. Emile draws on feelings and colors. If he stumbles upon a musical cliché, he will repeat it, warp it, ruin it to the point where it becomes original and new. He remembers scents. Rain. Patchouli. Sandalwood. Cedar. Leather. He plays weather. He plays the stars in the village of his youth in France. The color of ocean at dusk—the indigo sky meeting the
water evenly. The way dried grasses touch the wind. He plays the memory of his wife’s long legs and slender toes. He plays a scant memory of her voice speaking his name—whispering his name over and over inside an absence of periwinkle. And then he comes to what happened in Paris and he plays this, too. He plays its pain, its sadness, its loss and remorse. He begins to play the damaged parts of himself. Half an hour later, he is improvising inside a sixteen-bar blues riff he didn’t know he knew. The gray-bearded man is sitting at a table in the middle of the club sipping his cognac and reading a newspaper by candlelight. Emile notices there is a snifter of cognac sitting on the bench beside him. He stops playing, turns around on the bench, and looks out into the club. “Thank you,” he whispers.

The man pulls the newspaper down, away from his face. “It’s nothing to pour two drinks when I am already pouring one,” he says.

“No, not the cognac—”

“I know what you meant.”

Emile reaches for the snifter and sips. It’s lukewarm. How long have I been playing? he thinks.

“I’m here every night. Come when you like and play. Or not. Just come for Courvoisier if you prefer.”

“I’m … I don’t play well enough to do this piano justice.”

“It is not always about technique—but it’s
always
about heart. What more can we do? Your playing is suggestive of Monk’s style. I saw him once. It was amazing the way he would get up in the middle of a song and do that little dance of his, around in a circle beside the piano. Completely absorbed in the music.”

Emile finishes his cognac and begins to put his hand into his pocket. He wants to pay for the drink, at least.

“Stop. I own this place,” the man says, his voice flattened out and matter-of-fact. “I can buy drink for whomever I please. Besides, you gave me this beautifully broken music of yours.”

The next day, he goes down to the beach at two in the afternoon,
when most sane people are out of the sun. He swims two hundred strokes exactly, straight out into the gulf, then turns around and swims back to shore. He does not remember making a conscious decision to choose the number two hundred. It just seemed like the right number.

On the morning of the fifth day, he opens the door. “Oh, hello,” he says. “I desperately need coffee.”

The concierge is a short, efficient man with a very smooth complexion and he smells like cigarettes. He flips open his cell phone, says something very quickly, ending with Emile’s room number.

“I have some news,” the concierge says, and then pauses.

He takes Emile’s money without blinking. “I believe your missing man was in a bar near here, a few months back,” he says. “A place called the Pom-Pom. It’s a gay bar, you know? Several of the patrons of this bar showed interest in your man—if you know what I mean. But it seems he only wanted to talk.”

“Are you sure it was him?”

“We are quite certain. I don’t think he belonged there, though, if you catch my meaning. He kept looking around—said he was worried about the Inquisition. The patrons of this bar thought he meant the police.”

“Do you know where he went? Did he say anything about where he was going?”

“Apart from his nervousness, he did not appear to be confused. He did say he was a sailor and that he would be going to sea. Eventually, he went home with someone.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Nobody in this bar has a name.”

The concierge opens the door and Emile hands him a couple more folded bills.

Emile’s mind is racing. What was this guy doing in a gay bar? Did he actually get picked up?

Emile is back in Paris for a few days to catch up on paperwork, to put a few of his simpler cases to bed, to recharge. He puts his book down on the bed. The apartment misses his wife. He misses her. It’s been two years, and he still carries the hole created by her absense. In the kitchen, he pours boiling water over a tea bag in a mug. I’m alone, Emile thinks. Get used to it. So is my strange man of great interest. He’s somewhere in Spain.

Emile crawls into bed—places his tea next to his laptop on the bedside table. He knows exactly what he would say to this man. He would tell him that no matter how far he runs, or how much he drinks, or how badly he wants a new beginning, his life is always with him. There is no separation from your own shadow. Emile sniffs, smiles. This is the culmination of his wisdom after two years of therapy.

He imagines this man living alone somewhere in the mountains, perhaps in the Basque region, on the French side, in a small village where he works as a laborer. He disappears into the mountains on weekends—comes back with fish. He is known in the town only as the
arrantzale
—the fisherman. He will be exhausted from his day, barely able to eat his soup. He will stagger home to his apartment above a wine store, walk through the doorway, and flick on the light. Maybe he will look down at his own shadow, which is sprawled into the hallway, sigh heavily, and reach for the
ardo
before he closes the door. He will down half the bottle in his first attack. Some of the wine will drip down his chin and he will not care. He wants sleep. He wants dreamless ironclad sleep and then backbreaking labor in the morning. And then more wine, and more dead sleep.

Emile sits up in bed. He has a sudden shadow-memory, an image of
his ex-wife beside him in the bed. Like when a cat dies and you think you see the cat moving from room to room, or sitting at the door waiting to be let out in the morning. The ghost cat exists only as a hazy afterburn in your retina. But, of course, she is not there. She’s in Guadeloupe with her sister. She’s out of his life. Has taken her leave. Moved on. This half memory is enough to shock him fully awake. It’s eerily quiet, a muffled lull—the street sounds pulled back. Even Paris can be becalmed. Emile listens. The clock in the kitchen has the loudest tick he’s ever heard. Water is running somewhere in the building.

He wishes the man well. He hopes he is able to successfully escape any horrors that chase him in the night. If he is alive.
If
. He’s been off the grid for a long time.

Consuela searches the words Hafiz, Columbus, fifteenth century, Persian, chess, professor, and teacher. Hafiz because of his knowledge of the poet, his poems, and his comment about reading them in Persian. Columbus and fifteenth century for the obvious reasons. Chess because she suspects he’s very, very good—much better than he pretends. And, finally, teacher and professor because he lectures—he seems like a teacher. It’s a guess, but a guess is all she has. On the thirty-fourth page of her search she finds an oblique reference to Mehmet Nusret, the birth name of Turkish humorist and author Aziz Nesin, who died in 1995. He had apparently championed free speech, especially when it came to the right to openly criticize Islam.

On a whim, she adds this name to a new search, with the words April and March. Columbus came to the institute in April, but nobody knows where he was before that. These are more calculated suppositions. Consuela is sitting at her computer with a glass of chardonnay on the desk beside the screen. After almost two hours, her search is still fruitless. She forgoes the glass and drinks out of the bottle.