Paris Trance Read Online Free PDF Page A

think I mean?’
    ‘In about an hour and a half.’
    ‘Make it just the half,’ said Lazare. ‘And you’ve got the job.’ With that he hung up.
    We were all working flat out that day. Lazare was in a temper (that is, he was in a good mood), bawling out orders, yelling at people for not having done things he hadn’t told them needed doing. When Luke knocked on the office door Lazare was shouting at a client on the phone. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and yelled at Luke to come in. Luke didn’t hear. He waited, knocked harder.
    ‘Oui.’ Luke opened the door. Stood there.
    ‘Monsieur Garnier?’
    ‘ Vous attendez quoi là? Un visa? Entrez . . . Attendez. Non,’ he said into the phone, ‘Je parle avec une espèce de con qui vient d’entrer . . . Ne quittez pas.’ He cupped his hand over the phone again. ‘Asseyez-vous, asseyez-vous,’ he gestured to Luke and then turned his anger back to the phone. ‘Écoutezmoi. Si vous êtes con . . . Allo? Qu’est-ce que vous faites? Il a raccroché, ce con!’ With that he crunched the phone down and glared at Luke who had not yet sat down. ‘Et maintenant, pour nous monsieur c’est quoi?’
    ‘My name is Luke Barnes. We spoke on the phone this morning about my coming in to work.’ Luke advanced into the room and held out his hand. Lazare waved him away.
    ‘So get out there and start working. Bernard will tell you what to do.’ He swivelled round, picked up the phone and began jabbing numbers.
    Bernard introduced Luke to everyone. He was tall, confidently nervous. He was wearing jeans – which he almost never wore – and the blue work shirt which, as it grew older and softer, would be reserved for evenings when no wear and tear could be expected. His sleeves were rolled up above his elbows. He had that brittle friendliness of the Englishman adapting to a life larger than the one he had so far encountered. He seemed too tall to carry off the manners that he had evolved to diminish his awkwardness. Perhaps I didn’t notice these things at the time. It is hard to say, difficult to preserve those first impressions because they are being changed by second – and third and fourth – impressions even as they are registering as impressions. Even when we recall with photographic exactness the way in which someone first presented themselves to us, that likeness is touched by every trace of emotion we have felt up to – and including – the moment when we are recalling the scene. He was tall, thin. He looked English – something in the set of his mouth. His face was angular, the jawline pronounced. He was handsome, attractive; as yet his circumstances had played almost no part in determining his expression. You could not yet read his history in his face; his looks were a fact of biology. The eyes were blue, full of looking, but – how else to say it? – behind the blue (or am I amending that first meeting in the light of what came later?) there was a remoteness, almost a refusal.
    We shook hands. He had the handshake of a thin person who has learned how to make a good impression by shaking hands firmly even though that strength always feels as if it is made up of bones and nerves. He knew there wasa way of getting an intensity of feeling into shaking hands but he had not learned how to do it. He was one of those people who have to learn everything. I say ‘one of those people’ and I am not sure why. Perhaps because, as I got to know him better, he came to seem so emphatically himself, so individual. Perhaps it is from people like this that we come to an understanding of types. When I met him that day – or so it seems to me now – he was poised on the brink of becoming himself, as I came to know him.
    ‘Vas - y , ’ said Bernard. ‘Je vais te dire comment qu’on fait.’ Which was to clamber up to the second tier of storage racks and catch the packages of books thrown to him by Daniel before throwing them down to Matthias who piled them on to the