Free Bones of Paris (9780345531773) by Laurie R. King

more copies.”
    “That’s what she figured. A shrewd businesswoman, our Kiki. No doubt I’ll carry it, when it’s published in English. Oh, and there’s this—It made me think of you.”
    She jumped up and came back with a book, a detective novel by a new writer named Hammett. Stuyvesant had his doubts, but other than his subscription to the store’s lending library, buying books was the only way he could pay her for information. He also promised that he’d return for a copy of Hemingway’s upcoming hymn to manliness.
    She took the novel over to the cash desk to write up his slip. “Will you be with us for a while, this time?”
    “Maybe, if I find another job here. Believe it or not, I was thinking the other day that it might be nice to settle down. Keep my books on a shelf rather than in trunks scattered across Europe.”
    “Here?” She sounded dubious.
    “Why? Sylvia, don’t tell me you’re growing tired of the City of Light?”
    “Me? Never! I adore Paris. The problem is, so do an awful lot of others, and the sheer numbers are making things go a bit … dark. The party’s over, and the sad children and criminals are moving in. The Americans who matter will move on, leaving the rest of us washed up with the other flotsam and jetsam.”
    “I don’t know that having the non-mattering Americans move on would be the end of the world for the locals,” he said.
    “We Yanks haven’t always been kind to Paris, have we? Less ‘flotsam’ than an occupying army.”
    “Even armies go home. Still, I can’t see this one shifting for a long time. Certainly not until the boom fades and the exchange rate drops.”
    “Heavens, don’t say that. Where would we be without the stock market?”
    “Where, indeed?” he agreed, then took his parcel, and his leave. As he passed through the door, another wan poet slipped inside.
    Out on the street, the sun was nearing the rooflines, suggesting that the worst of the day’s heat might be past. Stuyvesant walked down l’Odeon (dodging a bus-load of tourists) and crossed over into the Luxembourg gardens (giving wide berth to a quartet from the Midwest) inthe direction of his hotel. As gardens went, he preferred the Bois de Boulogne—being a Central Park boy, after all—but even these were restful on the eyes. Or they would be, once his countrymen had gone home.
    A child with a dripping ice-cream ran across his toes, shrieking wildly. In English.
    Yes, Parisians had the right idea when it came to summer: get out. Paris obscured by snow or softened by fog, Paris adrift on fallen blossoms or carpeted in autumn leaves, Paris in the rain, at night, the lights streaking on the pavement—yes. But not Paris with a blast furnace overhead, when five minutes after finishing a beer, a man felt thirsty. Days like this, you kept a close eye on stray dogs, expecting one to come at you with foam-slathered jaws. Days like this, you wondered if winter would ever come again. If a snowdrop would ever bloom in the badlands.
    It had been a long summer, in all kinds of ways. He’d begun to feel as tired as Paris, a city worn down by the heat, as used up by foreign invaders as an aging femme de nuit. Maybe even Paris had a limit to her charms. Maybe in another generation, the social and cultural center of the country would shift south, to Lyons, or Marseilles.
    And maybe men had been thinking that very thing since the Emperor Julian fell in love with the place, over fifteen hundred years ago.
    His thoughts were broken by a loud voice. “Hey, mister, you mind taking our picture?”
    “I’spreche kein English,” he snarled and pressed on.

TWELVE
    T HE RUE C OLLE was a truncated attempt at a Paris arcade off the rue Vavin.
Colle
meant glue, and the name probably didn’t help attract the flaneûrs, particularly when the rue Colle’s only shops were a florist’s that specialized in funeral wreaths, a stamp-collector who sold pornography, and a nervy Russian gentleman who made beautiful