The Paris Deadline Read Online Free PDF Page A

disapproval and regret. "Young. She went away."
         "Is she coming back?"
         The French think pessimism is a sign of intelligence. Madame Serboff shook her head conclusively and handed me my key. "She won't be back."
         My flat was four floors up a rickety spiral staircase. At every landing there was a water spigot and basin and a recessed closet with a pissoir and a slops jar, just like at my grandfather's old farm in Massachusetts. Bathtubs were all the way downstairs again in the basement, next to a row of tiny locked rooms Madame Serboff rented out for storage. From the window on my landing, next to my door, I had a panorama of moonlit tile rooftops, church towers, red chimneys, and off in the distance, also to remind us of the glory of France, there was the great golden dome of Napoleon's tomb.
         I would take another fistful of aspirin for my aching head tonight, I thought, and go over in the morning to the American Library to look up more about Vaucanson.
         I put my key in the lock and opened the door and the girl in the trilby hat sprang out of my one and only chair and threw a shoe right past my ear.
         "Dammit, Mr. Toby Keats! Why don't you answer your horrible phone?" she said, and promptly burst into tears.

            Six

    "I NEVER CRY," SHE SAID , and blew her nose and burst into tears again.
         I bent and picked up the shoe.
         "Never," she said, wiping her nose with her handkerchief. "I telephoned you five times at your office and when I finally got you, all you could say was 'Allo?' over and over like a stupid Frenchman."
         "The Problem of Communication," I said.
         "And then you hung up."
         I put the shoe on the corner of my desk. Back in the chair by the window the girl had removed her trilby hat and used it to cover the purse in her lap. She had quite pale blonde hair, I could see now, bobbed close like a Viking's helmet. Her face was bright and round, and despite the red eyes and tears, she had a general air of being ready to jump up and start catapulting shoes all over again. If you were my grandfather, you might have said that there was a good deal of the West Highland terrier about her. She was still wearing her waterproof coat, but the wet Paris snow had soaked

her head and shoulders so thoroughly her collar had turned dark and her mascara was beginning to run. Before she could shake herself dry on the carpet I went over to the bed and sat down.
         She looked at me warily and slid the chair a few inches to the left.
         "My name is Elsie Short."
         I nodded noncommittally. Her accent was unmistakably American, though I couldn't place it.
         "I came up the back stairs when your landlady wasn't looking."
         "Burglars usually just toss a bone to distract her."
         "I'm not a burglar!"
         Elsie Short sat up straight and lifted her chin defiantly. Then she evidently thought about the burglar idea, sniffed again, and let her gaze travel about the little room until it stopped at the desk and the ancient clothes wardrobe next to it. The doors of the wardrobe were still wide open. The papers and notebooks on the desk had been raked to one side and quite obviously tossed like a salad.
         "Well." She stuffed her handkerchief into her purse and snapped it shut. "Anyway, I apologize for throwing your shoe at you."
         "That's okay. I wasn't wearing it."
         "But I want my duck back."
         "Ah."
         She moved her eyes around the tiny room again, from the desk to the Juan Miro lithograph on the wall, to the two bookcases overflowing with second-hand books from the stalls along the Seine. There were even more books on the floor and on the windowsill, looking out at Napoleon's tomb. Root had visited once and said my room had books the way other places had ants.
         "It's a Christmas gift for my nephew," Elsie Short said, bringing her eyes back to me. "He lives in Rye, New