Harm's Way Read Online Free PDF Page B

arrive. Then came an old man with birch-silver hair who, in his green-flash trainers, squeaked gently from photograph to photograph, taking care not to get too close to the prints, lest the images should fly away like rare birds. When he reached the penultimate exhibit – a picture of a soulful young man sitting outside a Bastille café clinking a cloudy glass of Pastis with a young woman – he stopped and looked around nervously. The picture had done what only a photograph of genius can do; it had captured the essence of life at the very moment it expired, like the last dance of a butterfly. It was the millisecond of anticipation prior to the first sip of a shared drink; the instant two people lean a fraction closer, that moment somehow encapsulating all that was most intimate and exciting about human companionship. The old man sighed and turned abruptly towards me, the frayed corners of his mouth approaching a smile. It was then that I understood his veneration.
    â€˜C’est moi.’
    I rose from my chair, unsure of what he meant and a little apprehensive. Then a closer inspection eliminated all doubt: the man in the picture was him.
    â€˜It’s exquisite,’ I told him, touched by his look but conscious of the banality of my words. Having nothing more significant to add I directed him to the gift shop, telling him he could buy a copy of the picture there. I watched him grow smaller andsmaller as he walked jerkily through the atrium, rendered a little pathetic by the surrounding grandeur, occasionally pausing on his way, as though to contemplate in silence this miraculous recovery of a moment in his past.
    That night I moved restlessly in my sleep, my dreams overrun by armies of Cartier-Bresson images. At five in the morning, rather later than I had become used to, I was awoken by the now familiar sound of a fist pounding against the wall. This time I got up determined to find out the cause of the knocking. After a fruitless phone call to Madame Guigou, I went to the boulangerie beneath my flat to buy a
chausson aux pommes
for breakfast.
    â€˜Vous avez l’air fatigué, Mademoiselle,’
the florid boulangére reflected.
    I reached for my paper bag, transparent with seeping butter, and told her about the knocking that had been keeping me up every few nights since I’d moved in.
    â€˜Which flat are you in? Not the sixth floor?’
    I nodded.
    â€˜Ah,’ she exclaimed with a dismissive gesture, as though the reason was self-explanatory. ‘That’ll be Monsieur Abitbol. He’s a troubled man. In fact,’ she added brightly, ‘the last girl who lived in your flat, poor mite, had such a terrible time she had to move out.’
    I wanted to discover more, but a small and impatient queue was forming behind me, so I left. No wonder my wreck of a landlady had neglected to tell me that I was renting a property next to a well-known sociopath.
    Beth looked concerned when I recounted the exchange, while Stephen, caught in the vortex of his own laughter,rocked back and forth on his chair, helplessly trying to bring himself back from the brink.
    â€˜The thing is that I’m not even surprised,’ he finally managed. ‘The French go about in that decorous way of theirs, as if their lives were perfectly normal, but I swear this city is full of madmen. It comes from them living on top of each other. And all that self-control: it’s got to crack sometime.’ The impact of this remark was diminished when he reached for a cigarette and ran his index finger and thumb down the length of it before lighting up, a gesture I suspected he had only acquired since moving to Paris.
    Stephen was right. Paris had little of the space or greenery of London, added to which the sense of people being piled on top of one another intensified the general mood, from the scowls on pedestrians’ faces to the angry behaviour of the drivers hunting them down. But there was a fruitful