Free Paris Twilight by Russ Rymer Page B

more literal deconstructing of his closet. All of this—all of it—would have to go. I pulled much of the wardrobe out onto the divan, with a double satisfaction—there, try reposing on that!—and drew up a quick inventory, and when I got home to the Clairière that night, I called Goodwill and arranged a pickup for the next day, which was the day I encountered the armed roadblock and discovered my detour and met the proprietor of Café Portbou, who’d handed me the second letter and said, “This may be yours.”
    A second letter!
    I knew what it was right away, of course—in all outward aspects, it was identical to the one I’d pulled from the mailbox (Passim had left that one there when he delivered the phone bill): a large flat envelope with
Saxe
and
confidentiel
scrawled across its face. Its effect was utterly different, though. Its detonation was retroactive. The first letter had seemed to me a plain enough relic, a memento mori, some laggard piece of Saxe’s corpus slow to get the word, that had, like hair and fingernails, gone on growing an hour or two after his decease and would by now be as dead as the man was, dead and over. The second letter told me that the first had been no such thing. What I received from Passim and now held in my hand was a live, ongoing correspondence, and what did that mean for me? I’d been put in charge of tidying up for a dead man; was I now supposed to drive a stake through affections still alive?
    â€œUnder the door, just yesterday,” Passim said. “Some of them arrive like that.”
    â€œSome,” I said.
    â€œThe others she drops off in person. He liked to read them over his dinner.”
    â€œHow many . . . ?”
    â€œOnce a week, twice,” he said. “Other weeks nothing.” The news so obliterated the obvious question that it didn’t occur to me until I’d turned away and almost left, and I had to lean back through the door to inquire.
    â€œNot the least idea,” Passim answered. “Couldn’t tell you her name.”
    Â 
    I had no time then to look at the envelope’s contents; I had to race. The Goodwill truck was idling in the impasse when I got there. My consternation was running a little high, but in emotion, at least, the driver had me bested. He seemed furious to be there, furious at having to wait. I couldn’t tell if this was a provisional condition or simply how he was, his personal expression of what he thought it meant to be Parisian. At any rate, his irritation rose with every stair he climbed (
“Pas d’ascenseur?”
) and soared when he got a good look at the state of my gift (
“Pas de cartons?”
). No boxes and no elevator and I had to plead (
“S’il vous plaît! Désolée!”
) and ply him with a tip, but at last he did the job.
    Actually, his underling, a gangly and beleaguered teenager, did the job, the part of it that I could see, mounting the stairs over and over to grapple with armloads of loose garments while the driver handled the truck end of things, which evidently took a lot of handling. The transfer consumed most of an hour. On the teen’s last climb, I tipped him also, gave him more than I’d given his boss just for the satisfaction of it, and he handed me an ornately itemized receipt (so that’s what Pas de Cartons had been doing down there!) on which the monetary value of my generosity was left blank for me to fill in, I’m sure because the job boss didn’t want to climb five flights to haggle.
    The receipt listed seventy-three items of clothing, seven pairs of shoes and boots, and three hats (two felt fedoras and a Panama), and how I wish I had it all back to look at again, knowing what I now know of Saxe and wishing as I do for any piece of evidence of which I might ask questions. I would check every sweater for Spanish moth holes, every pocket for Algerian sand, peruse his trousers