Free Russian Spring by Norman Spinrad Page B

that André told Jerry was his own car. “Ecologically atavistic, peut-être,” André admitted as he peeled rubber away from the Ritz, “but I prefer a bagnole, as you Americans say, with some crash.”
    And as if to prove it, he took Jerry on a crazy alfresco ride during which crashes seemed to be averted by a whisker every other minute—down a traffic-choked side street to a main avenue running between a park on one side and a crowded arcaded shopping sidewalk on the other and into a huge square where hundreds of cars careened across each other’s paths every which way at once like a monstrous demolition derby in which no one managed to score a hit, across abridge over the Seine, down another boulevard, through an impossible maze of back streets, another boulevard, more back streets, then onto a riverside avenue going the other way for a couple of blocks, to a parking space, such as it was, that seemed squarely athwart a crosswalk.
    By the time they had parked, Jerry was wide awake—how could he not be?—and by the time André had led him up three flights of steep, rickety old stairs to a strange sort of rooftop restaurant redolent with enticing aromas, he realized that he was now quite hungry.
    “Le Tzigane,” André told him the place was called, not that it purveyed Romany cuisine, whatever that might be, Jerry was assured.
    Formally set tables with white tablecloths were set out in the open air under a moveable canopy, rolled halfway back now to afford most of the tables sun. Waiters in traditional black and white moved in and out of a mysterious tent at the back of the rooftop as a similarly clad maître d’ who seemed to know André showed them to a choice table at the front with a truly magnificent view across the river at the Gothic gingerbread spires and buttresses of Nôtre-Dame.
    “A gypsy restaurant indeed,” André told him, as they were handed menus in ornate handwritten French that Jerry found about as comprehensible as Arabic graffiti. “No fixed address, it moves around Paris with the months and the seasons, here for a while, the Luxembourg Gardens, a riverboat, Montmartre, one never knows where it will appear next when it folds its tents—unless one is on the mailing list—they refuse to even list the new location on the minitel. It is intimated that master chefs from other restaurants rotate through its portable kitchen, though that too they insist upon mystifying.”
    André ordered for them, and it was all quite delicious. Tiny raw oysters in little individual nests of fried buckwheat-sesame noodles topped with shredded wild mushrooms, green onions, and roasted peppers in rice-wine vinegar, washed down with a hearty white wine. Thin slices of wild boar in a fresh raspberry sauce served with thin green beans stir-fried with cumin, cayenne, and turmeric; roasted onions glazed with Stilton; tiny baked potatoes soaked in some tangy caraway-flavored butter and garnished with caviar; and a truly powerful Bordeaux. Little soufflés in three flavors—chocolate, orange, and walnut—with three different sauces. Cheeses. Roasted pecans. Coffee. Cognac. One of André’s Cuban cigars.
    By the time they were back on the street, Jerry had a wonderful glow on, though what with the small portions of everything, he did not feel at all stuffed. Nevertheless, he readily enough agreed when André suggested they “take a little stroll along the Seine and St.-Gerrnain to walk it off,” for by now he was quite eager to finally explore a bit of the city afoot.
    The “little stroll” turned out to be a meandering promenade that lasted something like three hours, with time out for three leisurely pit stops people-watching at sidewalk cafés, two for coffee, and then another for a blackberry-flavored wine drink called “kir.”
    For a native Southern Californian like Jerry, whose only previous acquaintance with real pedestrian street life had been a dozen or so blocks of Venice and Westwood, Tijuana sleaze,