Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction by Dominique Sylvain, Michael Moorcock, Jerome Charyn, Jason Starr, Cara Black, John Williams, Barry Gifford, John Harvey, Scott Phillips, Stella Duffy, Maxim Jakubowski, Jean-Hugues Oppel, Dominique Manotti, Sparkle Hayter, Jake Lamar, Jim Nisbet, Romain Slocombe Read Free Book Online Page B

old, score several million on the pinball machine.
    For a while we were all one, high on the adventure, but as the evening wore on Beth and I went back into our bubble and drifted towards the back of the bar. I walked over to the counter to order more drinks. There was a guy leaning there, a real classic French boho in his late thirties, looked like Jean-Pierre Leaud’s dodgy older brother. He looked at me, then looked at Beth and said something to the
patronne
, and she laughed and reached up for one of the good bottles of wine and poured off three glasses. Jean-Pierre smiled and handed two glasses to me, then raised his glass. ‘
Salut.’
    ‘Salut
,’ I said back, and Jean-Pierre motioned us towards the bar stools next to him, and told us his name was Laurent, and I talked to him in bad French and translated everything for Beth, and I could see in Laurent’s eyes just how fine he thought Beth was, and I was not worried, just proud, because I knew our heartbeats were just casing themselves together, ready to beat fast.
    Soon we were sitting at a booth together and Laurent was talking about shoes. He had stared at Beth’s shoes as we’d moved from bar to booth and shaken his head and said that ‘a
très belle fille
like you needs better shoes than those’. Those being a pair of deliberately old-fashioned schoolgirl sandals. ‘I have some wonderful shoes at my apartment,’ he said. ‘You must come and see. I will give you some.’
    I translated for Beth and she smiled and said
‘Oui merci.’
    ‘You like to come now. Is not far.’
    We looked at each other and laughed, shook our heads.
    ‘No problem,’ said Laurent, ‘I will see you again,’ and he returned to his perch at the bar and we went back to the others, who must have been waiting for us, as they stood up as one and we headed out into the street.
    I knew then, as the night air hit, that I was drunk. I picked out the route back to the gypsy’s hotel without thinking, almost without looking. As we passed the school on St André des Arts I turned to Beth, the self-same second she turned to me, and our kiss started there, lasted all the way home and up the four flights of stairs and into a room that was instantly ours and I’ll spare you the details, spare me the details.
    In the morning we staggered down to breakfast late, sat in Renée’s parlour, eating croissants and drinking coffee from bowls. The bubble around us seemed positively hermetic and it was only when we were finally dressed and standing outside with the others, looking like a band of gypsies, that I realised it was raining, not just a shower but the implacable stuff that’s booked in to stay.
    We did our best, tried a few bedraggled songs outside the Beaubourg, went down into the maze of Châtelet Métro, but nothing was right. The public hurried past us and the sense that we were a team had been destabilised by Beth and me. By mid-afternoon we’d barely earned enough for food, let alone another night at the gypsy’s. Don had had enough.
    ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ he said, as we huddled outside a patisserie awning. ‘Let’s go back out to the
forêt
, go to the sports centre there, have a swim.’
    The others grunted agreement. I wasn’t ready to give up, wasn’t prepared to cede defeat to the bloody weather, but Don was implacable and the rain kept on, so I opted for a partial surrender.
    ‘Fine,’ I said, then turned to Beth. ‘You fancy going to see a gallery first?’ She nodded and stared at her feet, embarrassed to be marked out like this as part of a couple, apart from her friends, but still clear in her choice, choosing me.
    That settled, we said we’d see the others later, out at the
forêt.
They headed off to the RER and we took the Métro up to Notre Dame de Lorette and soon found ourselves the only people in the Musée Gustave Moreau, all princesses and serpents and opium, beloved of any young aesthete who’s read Huysman’s
Against Nature
, and