“Oui, madame. Rue des Martyrs.” He climbed down, took Liam from me, and assisted me. “I will bring the baggage,” he said, handing Liam back to me as the child started to cry.
I managed to open the heavy wrought-iron and glass front door with my free hand and entered into a dark foyer. There was a faint smell of drains, and someone had been cooking with garlic. On one side of the foyer a flight of stone stairs curved up. The only adornment was a large, sad-looking potted plant on a marble table and a speckled mirror on the wall. As I stood looking around, wondering which apartment might be Sid and Gus’s, I noticed that there was an open doorway beside the front door, leading to a dark cubbyhole. As I approached it a large woman emerged. She was dressed in a high-collared black dress. Her dark hair was pulled back severely from her sallow face and she wore a black cap with trailing black ribbons perched on her head.
“Bonjour, madame,” I said, smiling at her.
“What do you want?” she asked, staring at me as if I was a worm that had just crawled onto her clean floor. “There are no rooms available if you are looking for one.”
I recoiled at the unfriendly reception. “I’m here to visit my friends, Mademoiselle Walcott and Mademoiselle Goldfarb, who reside here,” I said, my brain wrestling with long-forgotten French. “I am Madame Sullivan, just arrived from America. Perhaps you can tell me the number of their apartment.”
She folded her arms across a large bosom. “They are not here,” she said coldly.
Twelve
“Pardon?” I asked, not sure that I’d understood her correctly.
She repeated it, spitting out the words slowly as if for an idiot.
Of course, I thought, realizing my stupidity. They had gone to the station to meet me as planned and somehow been delayed. I should have waited longer.
“I expect they went out to meet me at the station and somehow we missed each other,” I said in my halting French. “Do they keep their door locked, do you know? Or do you have a key so that I can go up and wait until they come back?”
“I told you, madame. They are not here,” she repeated. “They have gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?” I demanded. I could hear my voice, shrill and echoing in the tall narrow hall.
“How do I know? I have not seen them for one, maybe two days. At least I know they did not return home last night because they were not here when I locked the front door at eleven. This is a respectable household. The door is always locked at night.”
“And they didn’t tell you where they were going?”
“I am the concierge, not their confidante,” she said. “I do not ask questions. They pay their rent and what they do with their time is their own. The rent is paid until the end of the month. It matters not to me whether they are here or not.” And she gave a very Gallic shrug.
“But they are awaiting me,” I said. “I sent a cable from America. They replied that they were glad I was coming. They told me to send a telegram to inform them which train I was taking from Le Havre and they would come to meet me.” I fought to find the words to make this clear to her in French. “Did a telegram not arrive for them this morning?”
“The telegraph boy did come. I told him they were not here. He went again.”
By now the cabby had brought my bags into the hall and stood there behind me, waiting to be paid.
“This is mad,” I said, not knowing the word for ridiculous. “It doesn’t make sense. They are not the type of people who would depart and not tell me.”
But a small voice nagged at the back of my brain that they were that type of people. They did lots of crazy things on impulse. The one thing they wouldn’t do would be to let down a friend.
She shrugged again. “What can I say? If they are not here, you cannot visit them, can you? I suggest that madame return her bags to the vehicle and go to a hotel until her friends come back. If they decide to come back, that is.”
I was tired, I was weak. The floor was beginning to sway again as if I was back on the ship, and now I was angry too. “Absolutely not,” I said. I opened my purse and rummaged in it. “Look.” I waved a piece of paper at her. “Here is their cable. Do you see? I will translate if you don’t read English. It says, ‘So excited you are coming to stay. Send telegram with arrival time and will meet train at Saint-Lazare.’ You see. They are expecting me. Obviously something has delayed them but they will return shortly. Now please escort me to their room and I will await their return.”