Paris Noir

FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNO by JIM NISBET

Bruce inherited a bunch of paper from his mother’s father.

After he’d shaken off the good-fuck/bad-fuck couplings of Mr Leather World, whose year of ascendancy Bruce had never precisely determined – and, since M. Cuir du Monde dyed the pelt favoured by Pediculosus capitis and depilated all the rest, including that of his legs, pubis, armpits, and back (which might otherwise have been positively ursine), and his neediness, which exceeded even that of Regis Capone, a minor (no pun intended) soap opera star Bruce had dated for a while, occluded all the other factual topics, leaving little room for age determination, although his birthday was very important, etc. – Bruce found himself at the end of a bindle of cocaine with nothing better to do, at four o’clock in the morning, even in New York City, maybe especially in New York City, than to break out and study his legacy.

By the time the sun was well up that July morning, everything had changed.

By the end of the week he’d opened a brokerage account and sold off half his grandfather’s gas leases which, though depreciated over their various lifetimes, left him with approximately the same value in cash as remained in the leases, which, though he’d never before shown the slightest talent or inclination for financial manipulations, arcane ones least of all, he fed straight into a diversified portfolio projected to earn him nine per cent per annum, excepting $40,000 in cash which, however, would itself earn four per cent in the brokerage checking account, so long as he maintained a minimum balance, leaving gas leases sufficient to yield some $5,000 a month for the foreseeable future.

Bruce had always perceived his as a charmed life. While everybody around him was dropping like flies in the eighties, for example, and though he visited the Rude Dude Bathhouse (not six blocks from The Trucks) weekly, he had emerged unscathed. He told people it was genetic, he told people it was because he didn’t eat right, he told people it was because he was careful: he told himself that his was a charmed existence.

The half-million inheritance, out of the blue from a man he barely knew, served to confirm this de factor analysis.

That, and he judged the men he allowed himself to sleep with by their Facial Index. To wit:

as measured in an anterior/posterior vertical plane bisecting the sagital crest through the occiput, and, trust Bruce, it’s much more interesting than a man’s score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The less acute the angle, the wilder the sex, or, as Bruce could also put it, copping W.C. Handy’s line from St Louis Blues, the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. Hence the truth of Virgil’s dictum, facils descensus Averno, the descent to hell is easy – especially if you know the way. Remind me to look up Averno, he would say to whatever bar bait in whatever bait bar he was quoting Virgil, as he dissolved into peals of the histrionic laughter he’d learned from Regis Capone, who in his heyday had the most un-acute facial index to be seen on network television.

In English, one man in one bar, out of the hundreds of men he’d met in dozens of bars, had once helpfully pointed out to him, it’s Avernus.

Bruce didn’t go home and look it up. Are you kidding? He just never went to that bar again.

Cast in the glare of all that money, the Village suddenly looked tawdry, When he pointed this out to some guy in some bar the guy said, if you think this is tawdry, you should visit the Castro District in San Francisco, where they have bars that cater to big fuzzy guys who want to hook up with little sleek ones, and vice versa.

That’s disgusting, Bruce said, scrolling through his cellphone directory for his travel agent’s number. Everybody else books online, but, since Bruce could afford it, he preferred to pay others to do the grunt work. After all, what’s money for?

His acquaintance was right about San Francisco. Bruce was back in a week. He ran into his friend almost immediately.

They’re called bears and otters.

I beg your pardon?

That’s what they call them.

Oh, please, the man said, as he palpated his ascot. Do you think I was born yesterday?

Still, the Village looked tawdry.

OK, Bruce thought, there’s only one answer to this problem.

Paris.

He’d taken plenty of French in school, and had lived a semester in Bordeaux. He’d read all of Genet of course, worked at the obscurities of Villon and Baudelaire and Verlaine and Rimbaud, perused and found boring Pagnol, plunged back into the existentialists and whatnot, but found himself gravitating towards the English of William Burroughs, Hubert Selby, Jr, John Rechy, Dennis Cooper and Bruce Benderson, writers prejudiced towards an edgy milieu, more towards his taste in the daring and the experimental – and, in short, unapologetically queer. This was before he quit reading novels altogether. Whether or not such work would hold up until such time as he troubled to reread them, Bruce simply didn’t care, for he could always stick with pornography.

He traded apartments with a French couple who wanted to spend a school year, nine months, in New York City. An agency handled the details, he didn’t even have to meet the people. And why should Bruce have told them that since his was a rent-controlled apartment he’d tenanted for seven years he paid only $275 a month for it? What business was it of theirs? Value is value. Location location location.

He found himself in the ninth arrondissement on a fifth floor – sixth by gringo accounting, and since there was no elevator, he was counting. A plus of the staircase was its age, which must have been 200 years. Each tread had been dished by hundreds of thousands of footfalls and the banister was a continuous piece of naturally finished French oak that whipped up the six floors with nothing less than a magnificent sinuosity. The apartment’s entire north wall consisted of a pitch of wire-glass lites, waist-high up to the six-metre ceiling, through which he could see the zweible-based spires of Sacré-Coeur high atop the butte of Montmartre, and he readily became accustomed to hearing the legendary 19-ton Savoyarde, whenever they chose to ring it. There was a working fireplace, with a quintal of cordwood in the cave which was eight flights down, and the concierge kept the wooden staircase so thoroughly waxed that the first time Bruce ventured down into the stone vaults of the cave in his stocking feet was the last time. He busted his tailbone not once but twice on those slick treads; his feet shot out from under him as if they had encountered black ice.

The very first piece of rough trade – he said his name was Étienne – he brought home with him immediately put the value of the apartment at 3,000 euros per month, and stole, of all things, a pair of books. Pretty tony rough trade, Bruce was thinking, maybe two weeks later, when he noticed them missing. But that was until he figured out from careful comparison with the inventory manifest, that the nicked items could only have been a two-volume edition of Anti-Justine, ou, les Délicieux d’Amour dans Les Nuits de Paris, by Restif de la Bretonne. Though less than perfect, they were valued at 750 euros, and Bruce was entirely responsible for this value – along with that of everything else in the apartment. He himself fervently hoped that his French tenants in New York would manage to lose or misplace damn near everything in his apartment, which he had absurdly overvalued in his own manifest. Still, why the stupid breeders had left such valuable items in plain sight seemed beyond reason. How irresponsible could they be?

He told himself to calm down. At the present differential between their rent and his:

(2,000 euros * 1.2758 $/euro) – $250 – $750 – (agency commission = 10% = 200 euros @ 1.2758 =) $255.16 = $1,296.45.

Therefore, at the end of only one month and despite this one fuckup, Bruce would still be way ahead of the game.

See? A charmed existence.

From then on, however, Bruce took them to a hotel in Pigalle.

And despite this almost nightly additional expense he remained ahead of the game.

He liked Pigalle. Pigalle reminded him of Bruce Benderson’s novel The United Nations of Times Square. Not that he had read it. But he had his own version of Times Square and, in the same airy rooms of Bruce’s mind, Bruce Benderson was known as ‘the other Bruce’. He was charmed by the fact that he and that distinguished author shared a given name. People will always, some guy in some bar had once observed to him, elicit the slightest pretext to hold in common with a celebrity, no matter how minor. The pretext? Bruce had asked. The celebrity, had come the reply.

Bruce soon discovered that, in a narrow, cobbled, unlit, dead-end street, parallel to and just down the hill from the rue des Abbesses, he could get anything he wanted. The menu was varied, the prices were right, and most of the talent was Arab or North African or both. All he had to do was take care to distinguish them from the transvestites. But that was pretty easy. The transvestites had their own bar, for one thing, from which they sallied to work and to which they repaired between tricks. For another, the transvestites seemed to be maintaining and upholding a tradition of the zaftig in prostitution, of a buxom, wide-hipped, red-lipped, frilled-décolletage and altogether blowsy ideal of womanhood that had to have gone out of fashion, even among horny and naive GIs, shortly after World War Two.

No matter. The Arab boys, most of them from Morocco, were slim-hipped, full-lipped, tall, and mean. Of these Apaches sauvages, Bruce aimed to count his coup.

By and by the concierge of the hotel, a cheap narrow affair that leaned over an alley perpendicular to the cobbled one, across the street from a bar/hotel of heterosexual assignation such as, too, seemed to be a relic of another era, a place where you’d go to fuck a woman who reminded you of your mother, got to know him. This individual had determined Bruce’s purpose right away, of course. He rented Bruce a room at an hourly rate equivalent to a whole night’s stay in any nearby hostel. Bruce didn’t care. Bruce was ramping up.

Soon enough, he’d more or less forgotten whatever other reasons he’d told himself he’d come to Paris. Museums, food, history, the language, whatever, Bruce was having none of it. He didn’t have the time. Much as he’d been in New York, he became a creature of the night. After only six weeks he had solid connects for cocaine, heroin, hashish, and amyl nitrate. While he was all too familiar with each of these substances, he was also chary of them. The idea was to accommodate the tastes of his dates. No trick he was willing to engage, however, as it turned out, wanted anything to do with any of them. Himself, Bruce sipped Côtes du Rhône with his steak pavé, pastis before supper, beer for refreshment in between. After all meals were over, during the night, which was the dark part of the morning to ordinary people, he would take only calvados, and that sparingly. Of debauchery, as it is usually defined, only sex interested him.

Soon enough he was hitting the hotel two and even three times a night, each time with a different date. Upon reflection, it reminded him of the old days. Although, of course, in the old days, when he was young and good looking and everything was free, sex, especially, was free. Upon reflection – for Bruce was not incapable of reflection, far from it; Bruce deployed most of his waking hours in such manner as to distract or fragment reflection – he realised he had never dated older men, ever, in the old days.

Now, of course, and he tittered inwardly, it would be quite a chore to find men older than himself sufficiently sub-decrepit to date at all; downright onerous.

Akhmed was a looker. His facial index was straight off Easter Island, a thick-lipped mask of brooding menace. Bruce had run across him more than once and subsequently found himself seeking him out. Akhmed was one of those rough types Bruce favoured. Akhmed’s delusional system went so far as to include the old prison adage, I pitch but I don’t catch. Like that kid who killed Pasolini. In other words, Akhmed could do all kinds of weird things to Bruce, but Bruce couldn’t so much as discuss Akhmed’s giving Bruce a blowjob. No matter. Bruce could scare up a good-faith sissy any old time. Akhmed shaved maybe once in two weeks, so, after their every meeting, one or another of Bruce’s shoulders prickled from the abrasion for a day or two. Never did Bruce’s face prickle. Think of the ‘Were you in the Army?’ ‘Oui, La Légion Étrangére.’ ‘No kissing.’ ‘Bon – ptui!’’ scene in Fassbinder’s film of Genet’s Querelle de Brest. Finding aloe vera at the sign of the green cross turned out to be not so much trouble as he thought it might have been. Akhmed rarely bathed, either. And he didn’t like to talk. But he liked it that Bruce bathed. And he tolerated that Bruce liked to talk. Both traits were distinctively American, so far as Akhmed was concerned.

That’s typically American, Akhmed said offhandedly one night, as he watched Bruce ablute over the bidet. Clean at home, filthy abroad.

What’s that supposed to mean? What’s the matter with a little personal hygiene? Akhmed deigned no reply. Bruce might have suggested to Akhmed that he might himself consider periodic upgrades to his personal hygiene, but, the truth was, Bruce liked him just the way he was. Visit the planet, was Bruce’s credo, but don’t disturb the fauna.

Still, he couldn’t see what Akhmed’s problem was with cleanliness.

Forget it, Akhmed said, and he settled his black-eyed gaze upon the faux Degas screwed to the wall at the foot of the bed. I’m hungry. You ready to go?

They had fallen into a routine of a meal after the hotel room. These repasts were uncomfortable, for Akhmed didn’t want to talk and Bruce did. Bruce wanted to know where Akhmed was from, what his mother was like, how many brothers and sisters, their circumstances, how much and what kind of education, and so forth, but very little information was forthcoming. Akhmed was only there to eat, and he was there to eat only because Bruce would pick up the cheque.

Once Bruce pointed out a couscous place and suggested they eat there. Non, was all Akhmed said. Instead, they stuck strictly to French bistros and cafés more or less south of Pigalle and, Bruce presumed, resolutely out of whatever neighbourhood Akhmed called his own, which, by hints Bruce detected here and there, was within walking distance of Barbès-Rochechouart.

One night as they lay in bed entre’acte, Bruce having paid in advance for a double play, as Bruce prattled on about how most people in New York had an overdeveloped sense of style, Akhmed blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling and abruptly said. In many countries in the middle east and about a third of those in Africa, I could sell you to the Islamists and they would drill holes in your knees.

As Bruce was somewhat taken aback by this turn in the conversation, as a witty friend used to term the appropriately uneven match of social skills, he simply asked why.

Because you’re American, Akhmed said, as if staring the obvious.

No, Bruce said, why would you sell me? And, despite himself, the construction sell me sent a shiver up his spine, a shiver unexpected, licentious, and unexplored.

Akhmed, who seldom deigned to look Bruce directly in the eye, did so now, and he did so out of frank incredulity. For the money.

And now another unexpected sensation shimmied up Bruce’s spine like a fun-loving singe after a banane flambée au rhum: Sold for money. Not ideology. Money. OK. Got it. But in the here and now what it means is that all this terrific sex we’ve been having tonight, and for any number of nights over the past four months, means nothing to this guy. I’m hurt, Bruce said sarcastically, but to himself. Mordacity as a defence mechanism. The root is to bite, but the one bitten is oneself. Because, quite irrationally, be was hurt. A little bit, anyway. But beneath that he liked it. Les Délcieux d’Amour dans Les Nuits de Paris, indeed. He liked it.

And what would you do with the money, he asked.

Akhmed shrugged. Same thing I do with all my money.

Which is?

I send it home to my mother.

All of your money?

All of my money.

Admirable. A Confucian would call that filial piety.

Whatever a Confucian is, Akhmed glowered, is not me.

Mostly a lost value, in my society anyway, Bruce concluded lamely.

Akhmed’s silent expression reflected only a sour disinterest.

Bruce snuggled up and traced Akhmed’s lower rib with a forefinger. And you don’t send the least tithing cent to your local mosque? he asked playfully.

The side of Akhmed’s hand clipped Bruce above the ear, catching his head between it and Akhmed’s chest, the musculature of which Akhmed had the reflexive foresight to tense, thus inducing a temporary tinnitus in both of Bruce’s ears.

Cocksucker, Bruce said reflexively, though he said it in French. He didn’t mean it that way, in the way that Akhmed thought he meant it. Bruce meant to say mangeur de bite! merely as an exclamatory remark, an expostulation of marvel over the abrupt change in the course of events. But Akhmed thought Bruce was calling Akhmed an eater of dick which, even in ordinary circumstances, would have represented a breach of protocol – another word the French may have invented, which thought caused Bruce to giggle incontinently.

Under the circumstances, Akhmed beat the shit out of Bruce. Beat him well and thoroughly, all the while saying to himself, Akhmed, you are a fool. It’s his western way. He’s an idiot. He has no idea who you are. All you’re doing is thrashing your meal ticket. And cross-rationalising: he insulted me. I pitch but I don’t catch. I’ve had it with this suceur, all he does is insult me. When he wakes up, maybe he will have learned his lesson.

Indeed, Bruce lost consciousness long before Akhmed finished with him. So that Bruce took no pleasure when, at the end, having set aside everything of Bruce’s that could possibly have any value, including his clothes, Akhmed fucked him again. Fucked him hard. Fucked him so hard that it was all that Akhmed could do to refrain from finishing the job, i.e., killing the fuckee. For he hated himself at the last moment of pleasure, because it was pleasure, and for that pleasure, he hated himself.

Finally, pretty worn out, he rolled Bruce’s senseless and pasty white old man’s bag of bones, some of them broken, off the bed onto the floor, doubled the dive-hotel pillow between his back and the wall, and smoked himself a cigarette. His hands were trembling. Strictly adrenalin, but he saw it as a weakness for which he blamed the old man and gave him a kick.

But, after only a few drags, Akhmed became too introspective to relax. What he had done, what had happened, was complex. The rigidity of the discipline he applied to his prostitution, to his money, to the whole of his circumstances, as altogether illegal as they were altogether modest, here in this thousand-year-old city of extreme decadence, of lights everywhere and of people from all over the world, a city which allowed him to live in a way that he could never live almost anywhere else… did not apply so easily to the emotions coursing through him. He felt himself a one-man colonial uprising. He would never feel himself up to the stature of a warrior of God. Yet God must have something to do with it, else why do fools such as this Bruce cross his path? He’d never had a French client who wanted to ask him about his mother. Never had a French customer who cared what he did with his money or his time away from work. Nobody had even so much as asked him what part of Morocco he was from; to them, it seemed to him, Morocco was a sort of child’s alphabet block lost among similar blocks, indistinguishable, one from the other, in a pile called ‘Africa’.

Meanwhile, the very freedom against which he and others like him railed was the very freedom which enabled him to pursue the almighty euro according to his lights. To wit: his mother had thought for years that Akhmed was teaching Berber as a second language at L’Ecole de Science Polytechnique, a position modest enough, but secure and respectable, which enabled her to live in a paid-for house.

At least, that’s what he let her let him think that she thought.

With a grunt of frustration he stubbed out his cigarette on one of Bruce’s exposed butt cheeks and threw the end at the bidet. The tang of burnt flesh suffused the room with unexpected vigour. A memory fleeted across Akhmed’s mind, and he frowned. He looked down on the unconscious Bruce with the scowl of an annoyed and very handsome Easter Island deity. The American’s hands were small, like his eyes and his dick. His paunch, despite a gym membership, was pronounced. Akhmed half-consciously compared the flatness of his own abdomen by touch. I could kill this guy. He looked at Bruce. Maybe I already have.

He didn’t bother to check.

Outside in the hall, which was really just a landing not one metre wide, a man and a woman trudged up the staircase, breathing hard between snatches of conversation. Footfalls passed by the door and the couple worked their way up to the next étage. The couple’s desultory remarks diminished. A door opened and then closed. Silence returned to the hotel. Out of the little window adjacent to the bed, several floors down via an airshaft, along the narrow alley to its mouth, a feeble klaxon marked the slow progress of a police Peugeot threading through traffic on the boulevard Clichy. On the way to some place else.

No, Akhmed thought. I cannot blame this man for my life.

He took a bird bath at the sink and soaped his split knuckles. It felt good. Then he gathered Bruce’s effects and decamped.

That felt good, too. Akhmed had pulled off a bigger job than normal, and felt like thereby he’d improved on his circumstances. Which he had. Bruce’s wallet, cellphone, watch, the opal ring, the credit cards, but especially the passport, brought Akhmed some thirty-five hundred euros.

He took the money and went home to his mother for a while.

It felt good, when he considered how this largesse had come about; which, soon enough, was never.

It took six weeks for the bruises to revert through purple, blue and yellow to the natural sallowness of Bruce’s skin, better than two months for the two broken ribs to heal and for his piss to stop going pink except every once in a while, and even longer for the lousy French dentist to grind the posts and take the mould and design and build and fit and finally install a bridge for the two lower front teeth that had been knocked out. The guy didn’t even wear latex gloves, for chrissakes, while he had his hands in Bruce’s mouth, and he reeked of cigarettes. What the hell, Bruce wryly reflected, maybe it had become his destiny to have to pay for any kind of dirty behaviour, getting old isn’t for sissies, and the dentist had to take his hands out so Bruce could laugh without choking on mirth.

No matter the time, however, for it took him the better part of three months to gather up a new passport and replacement credit cards – forget the keys to the French couple’s apartment, which for some reason Akhmed had stolen too, even though he had no idea where Bruce lived. You think you can pay two bucks for a lousy key in Paris, like you can in the States? Forget it, mon vieux. It turns out that a French key, some of the designs of which are hundreds of years old, can easily cost a hundred euros. Some have to be hand-forged, for chrissakes. Losing your keys in Paris is a very big deal, very expensive. Dealing with a Parisian locksmith is very much like dealing with a hairdresser: they’re artists!

But that inconvenience, too, passed, and in the course of these things Bruce learned a lot about the French language, the French people, Paris, bureaucracy, and keys. He learned that a kidney is un rein. He learned that there are as many French words for keys as there are Eskimo words for ice. He already knew that a civil servant is called a fonctionnaire, but he discovered that, whereas such a beast is held in almost universal contempt, the true example of it is a proud creature, able to perform miracles on a whim. Not only that, but many of them are queer, they have parties and disposable income and houses in the country and, moreover, some of them know Paris like, surprise surprise, like Bruce knows lower Manhattan, inside and out.

In other words, by the time four or five months had passed, a whole new world had opened up. And before Bruce knew it, it was nearly time for him to go back to New York.

He had learned a lot in his stay in Paris. He retained a certain satisfaction. He had begun to run with a tonier crowd, too, much like the various crowds he’d occasionally run with in New York, which consisted for the most part of boursiers, for example, men who worked in the stock exchange; and bankers, other government officials, real estate agents, and so forth. Professionals.

But what he hadn’t learned always lingered in the back of his mind. The polite doings of his new friends could be amusing. They enjoyed a cocktail and could talk – boy, could they talk. They knew wine and France and food. They knew contemporary culture, they knew a great deal about America, they knew a great deal about the long, complicated history of France.

Bruce noticed that his new friends smoothly, adroitly, and almost certainly avoided topics like Vietnam, Algiers, Congo, the Middle East, and the hegemony of American consumerism. Finally, one night, one man among them who, though not uncivilised, nurtured some obvious antipathy towards him, drank enough to express loudly and clearly and in so many words that the reason nobody talked to Bruce about certain topics was that Americans don’t know fuck-all about the rest of the world, and for the very simplest of reasons, which is that Americans don’t care fuck-all about the rest of the world, because they only care about themselves, and, pay attention, forty per cent of American high-school students can’t find their own fucking country on a fucking globe.

Bruce took umbrage. He suddenly found himself in the very uncomfortable position of defending not only himself, but his patrimony. Which was ridiculous. Why was it ridiculous? Because, in fact, as his arguments unravelled, his antagonist – hesitant at first, for he didn’t want to make a scene, but, sensing that Bruce’s entire political acts consisted of little more than know-nothing bluster – proved himself devastatingly correct. Bruce didn’t know anything about the rest of the world. He supposed he’d allowed himself to lose track of the names of the President of Israel, for example, not to mention that of the leader of the Palestinians, forget Syria, even though the titular head of Syria had been there his entire adult life, and never mind the name of a single other so-called foreign leader. Bruce kept his head to the extent that he managed not to blurt out that he’d stopped voting ages ago, mainly so he would never be called for jury duty, but the fact of it stuck in the forefront of his mind and stayed there, hindering his wit to the extent that he could name no more than two out of three personalities prominent upon the political landscape of France itself, not even a woman conspicuous among French leaders friendly to the idiotic foreign policies of the United States, despite the great cost to her domestic popularity.

Finally, as much as the average French fairy with a drink in his hand appreciates a good political debate, the atmosphere at the party began to sag under the imbalance of the argument. Cela suffit, Alain. Alors, the man’s friends began to say to him, back off, let’s have a drink. And yeah, Bruce found himself saying, in English, I didn’t come here to talk about politics, I came here to get laid.

A silence fell over the room. Bruce realised, too late, what he already well knew, that not only did damn near everybody in the room speak more English than he spoke French, but he had just lost the argument all over again.

Bonne chance! somebody observed, not too quietly, and a few too many people laughed a little too loudly and altogether genuinely.

No loss, Bruce told himself, struggling for composure, in the lift down to the street, alone except for a little lady in a sweater with a dog likewise, I never liked any of those besuited fucks anyway.

Though it was the last week of his scheduled tenure, Bruce paid but little mind to the details of his departure. The plane reservation had been secured at the beginning of the trip. Physically, he’d left but little impression on the apartment. He hadn’t burned five sticks of wood from the quintal.

Increasingly, however, as the day approached, something nagged at him. He knew what it was. He’d been putting it off, why or how or when he hadn’t bothered or been able to discern, but suddenly, with three days to go, his mind was made up.

He went to the ATM in the little triangular place and withdrew five hundred euros.

He took a late supper – it was long past dark – in the deserted bistro opposite the teller machine, drinking an entire carafe of Cotes du Rhone with his pommes frites and steak pavé, and only varied the routine by calling for a pricey bas armagnac with his coffee afterwards. Vogue Homme, an element of his habitude, remained face down beyond his place setting, unpursued.

At half past midnight he headed up the rue de la Tour d’Auvergne. And did Bruce notice the five-gallon wooden molar hanging, brown roots and all, barely two metres above the sidewalk, marking a long-shuttered bar called La Dent Creuse, The Hollow Tooth, the French equivalent, as goes capacity for drink, of the hollow wooden leg? He did not. Just up the block, at rue des Martyrs, he took a right. All the shops were closed. Traffic was light.

At Pigalle, things were different. The never-moving neon wings of the Moulin Rouge loomed scarlet over a thronging abundance of tourists of sex and otherwise, as well as hustlers and pickpockets and every sort of prostitute and dope dealer, as well as people like himself, on the way to some place else, more or less.

He took the alley past the hotel, up to the deadend street. At the foot of the steps, which lead up to the rue des Abbesses, he took a left. The shadows were there. They rippled on the cobbles. The sound of high heels receded down the curve at the far end of the street. It had been nearly five months.

Akhmed was there.

So was Bruce.

They each had something, one for the other.