Free One Damn Thing After Another by Nicolas Freeling

those extremely large oriental cities thought to be strategic and important. Singapore, or Shanghai? Or perhaps Hong Kong? Well, I’m sorry, but they’re somehow all Hong Kong to me. Anyway the mixture of climate, airconditioning, and natives, doesn’t suit Madame’s health, and the children are a great bother, and anyway they’ve got to be sent back to Paris because you can only get educated at the Collège Stanislas or the Lycée Louis le Grand, I don’t recall which. Yes, there’s a boy as well, year or two older than the girl, his name is Gilles. Of course I’ve got it all down exactly, but my notes are in the office.
    The boy produces, as was very much to be expected, a fairly massive revolution against both Shanghai and Victor Hugo, and goes native in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince or thereabouts. Works selling life insurance, throws that up because of its extreme dishonesty, acquires a girlfriend called Caroline and traffics in heroin. He is caught in possession of a ludicrous quantity, sixteen grammes or something. To him, this simply represents a sum of x francs upon which he can live for x months. He gets clapped in the Santé for x months instead: x plus y, probably. She, Caroline that is, is heaved into the Petite Roquette or whatever the modern version is. This breaks the boy up utterly because she kills herself there, the poor silly wretch. End of story.
    â€œHow, end of story?” asked Arthur.
    â€œThe father doesn’t want to know. A consular career is quite difficult enough without children, and of course he does worse things daily than ever the boy did. The mother is blackened totally by the shame of it all, it seems the old aunts in Passy made some very disapproving sounds, and has retired to this dusty provincial corner where she has relatives of sorts until she can live it down.”
    â€œWhat are you supposed to do?”
    â€œFind the boy: he did a bunk the moment he was released.”
    â€œIs it known where he bunked to?”
    â€œYes, it is.”
    â€œThen it’s a cop problem and not a widow problem, no?”
    â€œThat’s what I thought, until I got told it was Buenos Aires.”
    â€œYou can’t go there!”
    â€œNo,” said Arlette. “No, I suppose not. I’ve in any case at the present moment a great deal too much to think about.”
    Very close by the Rue Ravel lived a friend of hers, an advocate called Paul Friedmann. She possessed after a year’s practice a few handy contacts, lawyers and doctors, and so forth, spoken of vaguely as ‘tame’. Paul was anything but tame, but as well as being close by was bright. He wasn’t at home, reportedly was not pleading at the Palace of Justice, was, reportedly, inhis office in the Rue de Verdun, and there with difficulty was routed out.
    â€œCome on round,” he said on the phone.
    â€œI’m on foot.”
    â€œI’ll drive you home.”
    From this exchange Arlette concluded that Maître Friedmann would welcome a pretext for putting an end to a boring day. It was pleasant to see her: she found it pleasant to see him. It was nice having a sprightly chat: likewise. He was plainly making lots of money, which showed in the furniture – nothing like that she had been looking at – and was indeed boringly lecturing at some length about Chippendale pattern-books, and being learned about mahogany. But he wasn’t very helpful about Madame Bartholdi. Ready enough to have her as a client, but couldn’t see what it all had to do with actions-at-law.
    â€œYou were nodding a bit there, weren’t you? Any criminal action is extinguished. Remains a civil action, consisting of efforts to put a price upon a boy’s life. Not up my street, not, if I’ve understood, up hers, and in the circumstances a weary row to hoe. She feels like pulling all this fellow’s teeth out one by one and we can sympathize in that laudable