Free The Paris Key by Juliet Blackwell

buses built for wide American dimensions. Middle-aged women in cardigans and sensible shoes, hair cut short more for convenience than with an eye toward fashion; middle-aged men in baseball caps and cargo shorts, displaying sturdy American legs. A few slouching teens forced to accompany their parents. They appear alternately enchanted and exhausted, limping through a city they have seen in movies and read about in books. It is part of the lore, the City of Lights.
    But what that lore doesn’t tell them is that Paris is a workaday place full of folks just trying to get to and from work. It is, like any other urban center, a vast, hurried, confusing mélange of streets and boulevards and museums and street people begging for change. There are more smokers here, true, and the streets are lined with cafés, and if you turn around you might see a plaque telling you that you are standing near the home of Victor Hugo, or you might find yourself, quite by accident, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, looking up into its steel-and-lace guts—a building so lofty that, like tall buildings everywhere, it disappears when you draw near.
    But in the end, Paris is still just a city.
    So Angela skirts the tourists and keeps walking, past kiosks selling newspapers and cigarettes and gum and stamps, past outdoor café tables and tiny shops selling kitchen gadgets, back across the Pont Neuf, past the Louvre and the Palais-Royal, and down the avenue de l’Opéra. Now that she has started walking, it seems she cannot stop. Perhaps if she keeps walking, no particular destination in mind, she will eventually get some air into her lungs; she will feel herself breathing.
    The day has turned cold and gray; the sunshine, as Pasquale had predicted, was fleeting. The Parisians are just as cold and gray, Angela thinks. They stand in stark contrast to the colorful, overeager Americans, like really well-dressed gargoyles come to life.
    Except for him.
    He is on his hands and knees, using chalk to draw a huge painting on the sidewalk in front of the place de l’Opéra. He scuttles around gracefully, adding dimension, bringing his picture to life. He has smudges of yellow and blue on his face; his big hands and forearms are covered in multicolored dust. His hair is so dark it is almost black, and when he looks up, his heavy-lidded eyes are a somber, and startling, light blue-gray.
    â€œBonjour, belle femme!”
says a man sitting nearby in a folding chair, holding out a cup for people to give money. He is pudgy and sandy haired, with a pleasant face. Angela had been so absorbed watching the dark-haired chalk painter that she is startled by this voice. He repeats, in English: “Hello, beautiful woman!”
    â€œI . . . hello,” she says. She wishes she had thought to answer in French, but when she gets nervous, the words flee her mind. In any case, her accent is so bad she fears he would have known her origin anyway.
    â€œI am Thibeaux. This is Xabi.”
    â€œXabi?” She wants to hear the voice of the man covered in chalk, wants his remarkable eyes to lift again. So she asks, “How do you spell that?”
    To her disappointment, the chalk painter remains silent, his head bent over his work.
    So instead, Thibeaux spells the name for her: “
X-A-B-I.
It’s short name for Xabier. Basque name.”
    Angela roots around in her bag for some francs but isn’t sure how much the coins are worth in U.S. terms. She hasn’t figured out the money here yet; she spends every day hidden in Dave and Pasquale’s apartment, letting them handle the outside world.
    The coins clank loudly as she drops them in the cup. Thibeaux hoots, rattles the coins, and gives her a huge smile. She blushes, not sure if the money is too much or if he is teasing her for putting in so little.
    Angela walks around the chalk painting to see it from the proper perspective, and only then does she realize it is the Statue of