"Marseille runs on pastis, the mistral, and a shrug that means it's your funeral"
Émile Laurent is a software tester from Lille who writes bug reports about his own life. He notices things for a living: expected result, actual result, severity. Five weeks ago he noticed something at work, said so and filled in the correct form, and was sent on enforced paid leave for his wellbeing. So he takes the TGV south to Marseille in a beige raincoat, with a strong maroilles sandwich from his mother and a Lille scarf buried in his bag, for a week of sun, sea and culture, and a secret away ticket for Sunday's match at the Vélodrome. He has no idea that someone in Paris has been paid to make sure the man in Bed 14 never talks.
Hostel Calanque is loud, lovely and run from the desk by Soraya, a law student and Marseille ultra who says she would have to kill any Lille supporter and is mostly joking. Le Galet moves Émile to a sea-view bunk four minutes after check-in, beside Pree Iyer, an unemployed actuary in town for a risk conference who reads the terms and conditions of everything. The new occupant of Bed 14 is Chase, a sunburnt vlogger who got fired and is calling it a reset. The others include Monsieur Fuji, a retired judo teacher who has been staying one more week for years; Mémé Rose, who cooks the Monday bouillabaisse and tells the legend of La Couseuse, the plague-year seamstress who sews the dead into their sheets by bed number; and Madame Aubert, a silver-haired retired seamstress from Neuilly who booked Bed 13.
Then the mistral arrives and every door in the Panier starts slamming. At four on Saturday morning someone comes for Bed 14 in the dark and gets judo-thrown across the dormitory by whoever happens to be sleeping in it that night. The Hub's log says the guest in that bed was not in the system. Émile starts keeping a bug report on the hostel itself, and Pree starts asking awkward questions at her conference. Meanwhile Mémé Rose is buying the fish for Monday, when the whole hostel will sit down at one long table for Bouillabaisse Night.
Age: 31
Type: Software QA tester from Lille, on enforced leave
Fatal Flaw: Files a mental bug report on everything, and marks all of them minor
Role: Protagonist
Age: 27
Type: UNC frat alum filming his Euro Reset
Fatal Flaw: Believes every coincidence is the universe picking him
Role: Victim
Age: 24
Type: Unemployed actuary in town for a risk conference
Fatal Flaw: Has read the terms and conditions, and will tell you page forty
Role: Ally
Age: —
Type: Receptionist, law student and South Winners ultra
Fatal Flaw: Passionate, not violent, a difference she admits is very small
Role: Staff
Age: —
Type: Retired sixth-dan judo teacher and permanent long-stayer
Fatal Flaw: Throws first, wakes up second
Role: Long-stayer
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Measure Twice"
The envelope arrived on a Wednesday, between a hem and a funeral.
The hem belonged to a baroness in the Seventh, a dove-grey bouclé skirt she had worn to four weddings and three divorces and wanted taken up two centimetres "for spring." The funeral belonged to a Belgian shipping executive in Antwerp, and had been scheduled, in a sense, by the woman who now sat at the long oak table in the back room of a small, unmarked atelier on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, with a thimble on her finger and eleven pins in her mouth.
She did not take the pins out when the bell over the shop door rang. She did not take them out when the courier, a boy in a helmet with a bicycle clip still on his trouser leg, set the envelope on the counter and said, "Pour Madame," and waited, as if someone might tip him. She let him wait. She finished the row. Then she put the pins back into the tomato-shaped pincushion one by one, from left to right, the way she had done it every day since she was fifteen, and she stood up, and she walked to the counter, and she looked at the boy until he left.
The envelope was thick, cream-coloured, cheap. That annoyed her. A person commissioning work of this kind ought at least to buy decent stationery.
She took it into the back room, sat at the oak table under the lamp, put on her reading glasses on their little silver chain, and slit it open with a pair of silver embroidery scissors shaped like a stork. The stork's long beak went through the paper like a thought.
Inside: a banker's draft for forty thousand euros, which was half. A single sheet of paper, typed. A photograph.
And, stuck to the gummed flap of the envelope, a small grey feather.
She plucked it off between finger and thumb and held it to the lamp. Soft, grey, barred with a darker grey at the tip. Pigeon. Paris had pigeons in everything. They got into the Métro and the churches and the Louvre, they got into the gutters of her own building and cooed at five in the morning like old men clearing their throats. She dropped the feather into the wastepaper basket and did not think about it again.
She read the typed sheet.
Hostel Calanque · Marseille (2e), Le Panier
Arrival: Thursday. Stay: seven nights.
Dormitory "Rascasse" · Bed 14.
He is from the North. He will be alone.
Before Tuesday, please. He is going to talk.
Then she looked at the photograph, and for the first time in a long while, she laughed out loud.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Hostel Calanque, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Amazing vibes!" — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Soraya is a QUEEN." — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Best bouillabaisse of my life." — FreeToWander guest
☠ "the wind is from the north. so is one of our guests." — @HostelReaper