Khayyam

“You’re quiet this evening. Everything okay?” Alexandre asks as we round the corner of my block to Quai d’Anjou, steps away from the Hôtel de Lauzun.

It’s true. I’m quieter than usual, but I don’t think I can explain to Alexandre that I’ve been at home alone, waiting for my phone to ring or hoping that maybe Zaid would show up at my door so we could resolve things better, find some semblance of closure. The story of us wasn’t all bad, and we deserved better than slammed doors and angry words. But I can’t control all my endings—or beginnings, apparently. And now I’m all exposed nerves and bruised ego. The sadness of, well, everything growing on me. Not growing, exactly, more like burrowing a hole where all my memories live.

I stop walking about twenty feet from 17 Quai d’Anjou and look up at Alexandre. “Sometimes saying goodbye is difficult. Even if you think you’re ready. Even if it’s right,” I say. If I were talking to Julie instead of Alexandre, I might’ve added that part of me is wondering how I’ll say goodbye to him, to Alexandre. It’s not going to be today, but it’s coming, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Alexandre simply nods, then tilts his head in the direction of the Hôtel.

As we approach, a man with light-brown skin and salt-and-pepper hair steps out of the street door that leads to the courtyard of the Hôtel, talking loudly on his cell phone. Alexandre grabs my hand and pulls me closer. I feel the warmth of his body next to mine and the familiar scent of his home—old books and oranges—as he hurries us toward the entrance. All smiles, he says, “Monsieur, s’il vous plaît.” The man turns to look at us and then catches the door; he pulls the phone away from his mouth and says, “Bonne soireé!” Then he wiggles his eyebrows. Alexandre nods at him and grins as we slip through the door. I pull my hand away as soon as we are safely inside the courtyard and give him a look.

He shrugs. “The men in Paris, we have an understanding—”

“You mean a bro code?” I roll my eyes. “Let’s get on with the breaking and entering,” I say, perhaps a little too loudly.

“Sssshhh.” Alexandre gently places a finger on my lips. I thought I’d already conveyed my deep irritation at being shushed the first couple times he did it, but apparently not sufficiently. Also, I might be imagining it, but I swear he lets his finger linger against my lips a second longer than necessary before I twist away and scowl at him.

There’s no one in the inner courtyard. We can slip right in the door of the Hôtel—it’s not like someone fixed the lock in the last few days. It’s probably been busted for years. We head straight to the winding stairs to the landing with the worn velvet tapestry and yellow border that Gautier mentioned in the first article we found. I can’t get over that it’s still here. Though there are probably tapestries and paintings older than this one hanging all over apartments in Paris, like that Delacroix etching in Alexandre’s foyer. Age increases the value of some objects and diminishes others. It’s a bit of a crapshoot, assigning an object—or a person—worth, isn’t it? It’s luck, and it also kind of sucks because for most of history, the people who got to assign that value were men who didn’t look like me.

But I suppose love assigns value, too. Like the portraits I do every year in school that line our staircase back home in Chicago. Those mean as much to my parents as that Delacroix does to Alexandre’s family—maybe more—but they’re not hoping to sell them and save the family estate because, well, my skills aren’t exactly Delacroix-etching level, and our house is not exactly an estate.

“I don’t remember seeing another door last time,” Alexandre says as we enter the dusty old parlor that is exactly as we left it. As I step into the room again, my heart races. I keep glancing at the windows, hearing a siren, but it’s only in my mind. I grimace, remembering the crack I made in the buffet table drawer. The red silk scarf we found last time rests where we tossed it before making our quick escape after seeing that cop outside.

“Well, it was dark, and we had to hide and—”

“You were distracted by all the kissing,” he says.

“You wish,” I scoff, trying hard not to smile. “You were distracted by all the kissing.”

“Without a doubt.”

Don’t flirt, Khayyam. You’re sending mixed messages. To yourself.

Why is it so hard to do the thing that’s best for you when you know it’s best for you? Sometimes I wonder how human beings have survived from the Paleolithic to now. We always seem to operate against our own better judgment. I’m guessing Byron might say that’s what makes life worth living—Dumas might say the same, too.

But I push their voices out of my head. It’s Leila’s voice I’m here to find.

Alexandre heads to the opposite wall and begins tapping it like Velma in Scooby-Doo trying to find a secret passage. If only there were a giant fireplace with a sconce that was actually a lever revealing a hidden room. Before I join him, I want to look in the cabinets in the buffet we didn’t get a chance to investigate the first time we were here. One is empty, but when I open the other one, I see several ripped pieces of paper scattered on the shelf inside. I gather them up to take a look—it’s bits of a torn-up tarot card. I piece the dusty fragments together. I beckon Alexandre over to show him.

“It’s the last of the three cards Gautier mentioned. The Lovers.”

“L’Amoureux, La Roue de Fortune, La Mort. Past, present, and future for Dumas.”

“He must’ve been pretty upset, but ripping up a tarot card isn’t exactly logical.”

“You know what they say: le cœur a ses raisons que le raison ne connaît point.”

“The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know?” I smirk. It hits a little too close to home. Like, why do I still want to kiss Alexandre even when I’m mad at him? And why can’t I stop wanting to text Zaid when I think I’ve already shut that door?

“The heart is a mystery.” It’s too dark to see Alexandre’s expression clearly, but I hear the softness in his voice.

“Don’t you think there’s a funny contradiction in French culture? It’s all about reason and logic except when it comes to love.”

“There is no logic to love. So I don’t see the contradiction,” Alexandre responds flatly, and it’s hard to tell if he’s serious or joking. Could legit be either one.

Now seems like an excellent time to change the subject. “Gautier said there was a hidden panel, right? Or door?” I circle the room with light from my phone, trying to keep it away from the windows. It’s a risk using the lights, and my shaky hands remind me not to press our luck, but we need to get a closer look. The walls are all panels—rows of intricately painted flowers and elegant carvings of cherubs and garlands of ivy and rosettes along the edges where the wall meets the ceiling. It’s faded glory—the frescoes cracked and broken, paint peeling, the gilt borders tarnished, and bits of glass missing from dusty, ornate chandeliers.

“The only door in this room besides the entrance is to that tiny closet we hid in.”

Alexandre chuckles. “Oh, I remember that very well.”

He’s not helping make the situation less awkward. What’s more, he clearly doesn’t want to.

I ignore his leading comment. “Maybe one of these panels is the panel. We need to see if any of them have doorknobs or keyholes.”

We start at the far end of the room. I move in to get a closer look, crouching to examine the length of each panel while Alexandre guides his light over the surface. There are no keyholes anywhere. Gautier didn’t give any more specifics about the hidden door Leila emerged from. But maybe . . . I straighten up. Like so many things in this mystery, sometimes the meaning behind a thing isn’t what it seems at first.

“Hey, what exact word did Gautier use again? To describe the door Leila went into?”

Alexandre scrolls through his phone, a few seconds that feel like forever. “Cachaient. Meaning something is concealing the door.”

Two floor-to-ceiling tapestries hang against the wide wall at the back of the room. “Something like one of those, maybe?”

We grin at each other. I have a sudden urge to pull the tapestries down, but I don’t want to destroy any other French antiques. I step closer to one, examining the worn threadwork and fading forest scene, trying to figure out a way to handle it with care, like all lost things deserve. I decide to slip behind it, giving rise to plumes of dust that make me cough. The thick fabric feels heavy against my back. I run my fingers along the wall, feeling for a door.

I hear Alexandre walking on the other side of the tapestry, then a gasp, and a metallic squeak. The tapestry slides off my back along the wall. I whip around, and Alexandre points to the ceiling—the tapestry is attached to a heavy rod with metal rings like a drape. An easy way to hide a door. I step back. There’s no keyhole anywhere. No doorknob. We begin running our hands over the entire wall, pushing the panels, but nothing gives.

Then my finger catches on the edge of one of the panels. Alexandre shines his light on it. A narrow pocket door. I catch my breath, fit the pads of my fingers in a tiny grooved indentation along the side, and pull.

The panel groans and creaks and slides into the wall—a low, slim door, big enough for one person to squeeze through.

The room behind the pocket door is tiny and spare, furnished only with a narrow bed and thin bare mattress, a nondescript side table, and a small slanted, wooden writing desk tucked up under the only window in the room. It’s almost painfully austere. I can’t say for sure this was Leila’s, but I want it to be so much that I’m willing to believe it is based on one line in an article and my gut feeling. It’s not exactly sound science.

“It’s like a nun’s room,” I whisper.

Alexandre shakes his head. “No. It’s a prisoner’s room. It’s like the room in The Man in the Iron Mask.”

“Who’s that?”

“Dumas wrote about him in the last Musketeers novel—the king’s twin, imprisoned for his whole life, so he wouldn’t challenge him for the throne. He was forced to wear a mask to hide his true identity. When we first meet him in Dumas’s story, the prisoner is in a sparse room in the Bastille, and there’s a wooden desk tucked up under the only window.” Alexandre points to the desk under the small, dirty window.

“Oh my God,” I whisper. “When was it written?”

“1847? 1850? It was a serial based on a true story from the 1600s, except that, even now, we don’t know the true identity of the man in the iron mask.” He runs his hand through his wavy hair.

“I know,” I say, my pulse starting to pound in my ears. “The timing. He would’ve been writing it when he knew Leila. He could have seen this place. This could be her room.”

I walk the length of this tiny cell of a room in about ten paces. There’s not a lot to look at: bare floor, bare window, bare walls. I’m caught by a stitch of sadness. If this was Leila’s room—and I want to believe that—it’s almost painful to imagine her living like this. How did she survive? Money from tarot readings and séances? That could hardly have been enough. There are too many dots that we can’t connect and maybe never will.

I sigh loudly.

“What’s wrong?” Alexandre asks. “Aren’t you happy we found this place? It matches Gautier’s description.”

“I’m thrilled. Amazed.” I take a second to collect my thoughts. “But it’s infuriating that no matter what we find out about her, we’ll never know the whole story, or even half of it.”

“It’s the cruel irony of being human.” Alexandre inches closer to me, so we’re almost touching. “We spend so much of our life trying to be known, only to be forgotten.”

Alexandre’s assessment may be bleak, but it’s also true. One thing he’s forgetting, though? It’s not just the human condition because the histories that do remain, the people we remember? They’re almost all men. I watch as he crosses the room to the narrow bed and takes a seat, sending more dust into the air.

I move to the window and trace the grooves in what could be Leila’s desk. Maybe she was a writer; maybe these marks are from the metal nibs of her fountain pens that bore the weight of her loneliness and rage and passion. You must’ve had stories to tell, Leila. I wish I could’ve heard them.

I hear a soft thud behind me. When I turn, I see Alexandre on his knees reaching under the bed. “I kicked something with the back of my heel,” he says, then pulls out what looks like an extra-large cigar box—thin, rectangular, wooden. I sit down next to him, resting my hand on his shoulder. The box opens with a little creak of its hinges.

The first thing I see is a dagger.

Alexandre delicately pulls it out from its sheath. The metal shines, luminescent, almost like moonlight under the beams from our phones. It has a sharp point and a sort of curved edge that backs into the handle that looks like it’s made of bone. Ivory, perhaps? There’s a word carved into the handle that I can’t decipher, written in what looks like Arabic or Persian or maybe even Urdu script.

Beneath the dagger are papers. I leaf through a few—receipts, tickets of some sort. Some of them were probably written in pencil because they’re not even legible. I hand Alexandre half the pile. He gasps. “It’s an invitation to a housewarming party—the opening of the Château de Monte-Cristo.”

As I look at the invitation over Alexandre’s shoulder, I stop short. Out of the corner of my eye, I spy a letter written in black ink at the bottom of the box.

My gaze falls on the signature line: Ever yours, L.