The Body In the Vestibule by Katherine Hall Page

the trash. Fish heads, bones, lobster and shrimp shells, orange rinds splayed out on the stairs as Faith screamed. She screamed again.
    It wasn’t old clothes. It was the clochard.
    And he was dead.
    The clochard of St. Nizier—his mouth hideously slack, eyes rolled back, and one hand grasping the filthy casquette, still in place on his head.
    The lights went out. Faith was alone with the corpse.

Three

    Faith stumbled down the few stairs to the vestibule and frantically pushed the button to turn on the lights. She intended to turn right around and run as fast as she could up those 121 steps to Tom and a phone.
    But she knew she had to do something first. She had to make sure he was dead.
    The thought was nauseating and she could hardly bring herself to approach the trash again. Slowly, she crept around to the side of the large container and groped for his hand. She could feel the slick plastic of the garbage bags surrounding him, then the rough wool of his coat. The stench of the rotting garbage made her feel faint. She followed the arm down to his naked wrist and tried to find a pulse. She did not even want to think about what she might have to do if she did.

    There was no pulse. It wasn’t just the smell of the trash. It was the smell of death that filled the hall.
    Faith instantly dropped the lifeless hand and went up the stairs, pausing to close the lid of the poubelle that was now a casket. It didn’t seem right to leave it open. Besides, she didn’t like the idea of looking down on the body as she went up the stairs—and she knew she would look, no matter how much she told herself not to.
    As she started to close the lid, she wondered what death throes had caused that convulsive grasping for his cap. His hand was like a leathery claw—the skin in folds, crossed on the back by a deep scratch, perhaps inflicted during yesterday’s fight. She let the top come down and it slammed shut. She shuddered and quickly started to climb the stairs, hitting the light switch at each landing in terror at being left alone in the dark again. The cold from the stone stairs traveled through the thin rope soles of her shoes and she clutched her robe closer to her body.
    How had the clochard gotten into the building and why had he climbed into the trash? Clochards slept wherever they wanted—in the parks or under the bridges of the Sâone and Rhône in good weather; in shelters or the silk workers’ tunnels, the traboules, in bad. If they could get into a building, they’d sleep in halls, but even clochards wouldn’t sleep in dustbins, especially with the lid down. And the door to Place St. Nizier had been locked.
    One more flight. She raced up and arrived at the door, panting for breath. It was only while she was fumbling with the keys that she realized no one had responded to her screams. Were the walls that thick?
    â€œTom!” She ran into the room and jumped on the bed, shaking him. “Wake up, Tom!”
    Tom did not make the transition from deep sleep to consciousness easily even in the best of circumstances and it took a moment for him to sit up and ask, “What the hell
is the matter?” In another moment, he was out of bed, “Ben? Is it Ben?”
    â€œNo, Ben’s fine!” Faith grabbed Tom’s arm and pulled him back to the bed. She sat down next to him. “We’ve got to call the police. I don’t know how it happened, but that clochard who’s always outside the church is in the trash downstairs, and he’s dead.”
    Tom shook his head and rubbed his eyes—hard. He knew that pregnant women had fancies, and during Ben’s gestation, Faith had been fanciful indeed, yet it had usually taken the form of cravings for certain delicacies from New York restaurants and delicatessens that there was no way he could find at the Store 24 in Byford, the only source of food at ungodly hours. This hallucination was definitely something