Sleeping in Flame
bought Maris two chocolate golf balls.
    As I was coming out, I saw her bustling down the street toward Saint Stephen's Church, our designated meeting place. I watched her for a moment. An idea struck me, and I moved fast to catch up. When I was about ten feet behind her I slowed, wanting to see other people's reactions to this tall woman in a red hat.
    I wasn't disappointed. Men watched admiringly, women gave two looks: the first of recognition, the second a quick up-and-down appraisal to see what she was wearing, or what she'd done with her makeup or clothes.
    I touched her elbow from behind. Instantly, she touched my hand with her own before turning to face me.
    "It must be Walker. Ha, it _is_ you!"
    "You're pretty trusting. What if it hadn't been me?"
    "If it hadn't been you? It had to be you. Who else do I know on the Graben today?"
    "But how can you be so trusting after all that craziness in Munich you've been through?"
    "Because I want to keep trusting people. If I become scared and suspicious, then Luc really has won, even when I'm so far away from him. Where should we eat? Is the Café Diglas still alive?"
    To my surprise, she was thirty-five years old, much older than she looked. Her father was one of those trouble-shooting engineers who carts his family around the world with him while supervising the building of a university in Paraguay or an airport in Saudi Arabia. There were two children in the family: Maris, and her older brother Ingram, a disc jockey in Los Angeles.
    She had gone to international schools in six different countries before entering the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia at eighteen to study painting and sculpture.
    "But the school and I were like oil and water. From the beginning, I wanted to work with all kinds of crazy things like LEGO, and crayons, and those little rubber soldiers you buy in a plastic bag at the supermarket. You know the kind I mean? That's all I really wanted to do, but they didn't go for it at all. So I did the typical dumb-ass thing and quit after two years. I
    went to Hamburg instead because one of my greatest heroes lived there -- Horst Janssen, the painter. I figured that if he lived there, then that would be my starting point. I went one summer and stayed. Took jobs in bars and restaurants, whatever I could find. I learned how to speak good German by taking orders and having to tell people how much their bills were.
    "I was working in a bar called Il Giardino, which was where all of the models and photographers in Hamburg hung out after work. Right in the middle of our busiest time, around eleven-thirty one night, a man came up and asked me to hold a bouquet of white roses. Actually, he didn't ask, he just sort of handed them to me and walked away. I had a giant tray of empty glasses in one hand and suddenly all these beautiful flowers in the other. I didn't know which to put down, so I stood in the middle of the floor and started laughing.
    "The man came back with a camera and started taking pictures of me. I hammed it up and posed like Betty Grable, or as best I could with all the glasses and flowers!
    When the guy was done, he handed me a card and told me to come to see him the next day. It was the photographer Ovo. You've heard of him, haven't you? Well, the most shocking thing was, I discovered the next day
    Ovo was a woman! When I got to the studio, there she was right in the middle of all her assistants and models, and it was so obvious she was a woman . . .
    I felt terrible for ever having thought otherwise!"
    Maris went on talking about her modeling career, about three months spent in Egypt, about living with a famous German opera singer. There were enough experiences and adventures for Page 15

    three separate lives. Her thirty-five years were so full and consummately interesting that it struck me, more than once, that she might be lying. I had known great liars before and had enjoyed their tales. But if this were true about Maris York, then it was both
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