The Third Woman. Mark Burnell
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Nazi persecution. Later, he joined the Resistance, creating papers for SOE agents dropped into France between 1942 and 1943, before his eventual capture. He survived for two years at Auschwitz. After the war, he developed the trade in forged documents for profit, protected by the legitimate screen of the family garment business.
He retired from his art – art being exactly what he considers it – in 1995 when the arthritis in his fingers began to affect the quality of his work. Over the years, Furst passed on his expertise to a small handful of apprentices. One of them was an Irish art student who was studying in Paris during the 1960s. His name was Cyril Bradfield.
Cyril has been creating independent identities for me as long as I’ve been Petra Reuter. In that sense he knows me better than any person alive. In the perverse way that logic works in my world, it seems appropriate that he’s the closest thing I have to a parent; after all, he’s fathered so many of me.
Cyril feels for Jacob Furst the way I feel for him. Which is why the only time he’s ever asked me for help was when it was on Furst’s behalf. It wasn’t a complicated situation, just undignified; an elderly man and his wife threatened by a crooked landlord and his troop of Neanderthal thugs.
That was four years ago and it was the only time I spent with Jacob and Miriam Furst. But we formed a bond. A bond that feels as strong today as it did then. It’s no exaggeration to say this: without Furst, there would have been no Cyril Bradfield for me, and without some of his documents, I’d probably be dead. But the reason I’m going to Paris is that I liked Furst. If I think of Cyril as a surrogate father it’s easy to think of Jacob and Miriam as surrogate grandparents. With some people, you don’t need time to make the connection; it just happens. Often, when you least expect it.
Twelve-fifty, boulevard de Sébastopol in Sentier. Stephanie dropped euro coins into the driver’s palm and climbed out of the taxi. Despite the hard rain, she wanted to walk the last bit. She entered rue Saint Denis from rue Réaumur and it was how she remembered it; clothes shops and garment wholesalers along either pavement, the road itself a narrow artery clogged by double-parked vans, their back doors open, rolls of fabric stacked for delivery. And noise everywhere; bleating horns, music, the rain, half a dozen shouted languages. At the intersection with rue du Caire a dozen Indian and Bangladeshi porters were loitering with trolleys, waiting to be summoned. In the doorways and alleys were the whores; oblivious to the weather, the wrong side of forty, sagging breasts and bloody make-up done no favours by the dismal daylight.
Stephanie entered Passage du Caire, an arcade of cramped passages with filthy glass overhead, and came to the place where the Fursts’ family business had once been. Part of the sign still hung above the door, the red plastic letters faded to dirty pink. The window was crammed with mannequins; beige females with no heads or arms. A piece of paper pasted to the glass offered fifty percent discounts for bulk orders.
Four doors down was La Béatrice, the kosher café where Cyril Bradfield had introduced Stephanie to Jacob Furst. Seven tables with magnolia Formica tops, a selection of snacks laid out behind a glass counter, fluorescent tubes taped to sagging ceiling panels, one of them hanging loose. On the wall beside the espresso machine was a large wooden framed photograph of George Clooney next to a smaller frame containing a certificate bearing the words ‘Shin Beth de Paris’.
There were half a dozen people in the place. Mostly from the arcade, she guessed; none of them were wet. Stephanie recognized Béatrice, a haughty-looking woman with dyed black hair. She ordered a cappuccino and took it to a vacant table by the small circular staircase leading to the upper floor. Béatrice fiddled with the portable radio on the counter until Liane Foly was singing ‘Doucement’. In the café’s wet warmth, Stephanie caught a whiff of cinnamon.
One o’clock came and went. So did Béatrice’s customers. Stephanie noticed a man who seemed vaguely familiar; slim, tall, well dressed, in his fifties with the same dark blonde hair she’d had as Krista Jaspersen. He was sitting at a table near the staircase. She couldn’t pin a name to the face but wondered whether she might have seen him on TV.
At one-fifteen her mobile rang.
‘Petra?’
‘Jacob?’
‘Where are you?’
The high-pitched voice sounded more tremulous than usual.
‘I’m where you should be. Unless my memory’s going.’
He didn’t reply straight away and she regretted her sarcasm.
‘I apologize, Petra.’
‘Where are you? I don’t have long, Jacob.’
‘Fifteen minutes, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘You’ll stay?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good. Two minutes, then …’
He finished the call and Stephanie sat there for a moment trying to remember something she’d forgotten. Something she’d intended to ask him. Something that had come back to her on the train.
The phone. The number. How had Furst got Marianne’s number? And now that she thought about that, there was something else. Fifteen minutes? Or two?
She found she was reaching into her coat pocket for loose change; as usual, Petra was ahead of Stephanie, her instinct taking over. There were no coins left. The last of them had gone to the taxi driver. She put a ten-euro note beneath the saucer and stood up.
Out in the passage she looked both ways. Nothing. She decided to wait for his call somewhere nearby. When he arrived and discovered that she’d left, he’d phone again. She was certain of it.
She turned back towards the rue Saint Denis entrance.
And was airborne.
The shockwave was the sound somehow. A flash. Light, heat, no air in her lungs. She was aloft in a hurricane of debris. Then gravity reclaimed her and she was smeared across … what, exactly?
Darkness followed. Unconsciousness? Or just darkness?
The screams began. Cutting through the hum in her head. When she opened her eyes she couldn’t see. A cloud of dust enveloped her, as impenetrable as highland mist. She didn’t know if she was injured because she was numb. But she was aware of wetness down her back. And dirt in her mouth. There was a smell too; something cloying. Burning plastic, perhaps?
Her foot was trapped, wedged between two solid shapes.
She closed her eyes. Time to sleep.
No.
Petra twisted her body so that she could see her right foot. A grey filing cabinet was on top of it, two of its three drawers blown out. Beneath it was half a beige mannequin. She used her left foot against the filing cabinet, creating a gap for the right, then rolled off her mattress of fractured dummies.
Water droplets splashed on her face. A burst pipe. Or rain. She looked up but saw only smoke and dust.
The right ankle was tender. She hauled herself to her feet. Nausea rose up inside her. One step, then another. For now, that was enough. Adrenaline, her most faithful servant, would see her through.
In the remains of the passage fires sprouted in the gloom, deep orange and gold. A severed cable spat white hot sparks over a soggy roll of material with a floral print. Except it wasn’t a roll. It was a body in a dress. Petra made out an arm, filthy black, the hand crushed to pulp.
The passage had a lawn of broken glass. Not just from store windows but from the canopy overhead; metres and metres of it reduced to splinters.
La Béatrice was burning rubble. How many people had been inside? Half a dozen? Maybe. The upper floor had collapsed into the café. She didn’t know whether there had been anyone up there. Scorched body parts hung from the fractured iron staircase. At the foot of the stairs, Béatrice’s head and upper torso were on fire. Petra couldn’t see the rest