Paris by the Book(32)

I thought: Robert would have loved this.

The bell rang. I shoved aside the thought—still automatic after thirteen months—that it might be Robert, and went out to meet Asif.



* * *



—

He all but snapped to attention and greeted me formally: “Hello, Madame Eady.” English, I would learn, was his way of showing off; he’d spent most of his childhood in Quebec speaking French. (English was probably safer for him in Paris anyway, as the French can find Quebecois accents more humorously awful than Americans’.)

“Hey,” Ellie said, suddenly appearing at the top of the spiral staircase. She smiled at Asif, looked carefully at me, and announced, “I’ll be right back.”

“Okay!” Daphne said.

“And while I’m gone,” Ellie said, “nobody talk.” She disappeared.

“Ignore her, Asif,” I said, and he pretended to relax, at least until I told Daphne to check on the twins. Daphne’s departure would leave the two of us alone.

Asif was smoothly handsome, with lashes longer than Ellie’s, and he was taller than all of us. Eight or nine feet, I’d guess. I liked that. And that our idle conversation revealed that an abiding passion of Asif’s (driven by military or diplomatic life, I assumed) was safety. Ellie was my treasure, or a large part of the dwindling hoard I had left. I didn’t want her stolen away by anyone or anything in Paris; Asif seemed up to the task of protecting her.

Still, when Asif swung his security discussion around to the store, I grew uneasy. Was it secure? Night and day? I thought about telling him about the king’s lions. But I thought: even after I explained, Asif wouldn’t get that. And I thought: I wish for Ellie someone who would get that, someone like her dad.

My wandering mind had missed Asif wandering into a new topic, books. When I began listening again, I heard him asking me a question. I asked him to repeat it and then winced when he winced; he must have thought I was critiquing his English. No, it turned out, just his canon. Trying to impress me, he asked if I’d read Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Kant; trying to be helpful, I asked if he’d ever read anything written by a woman.

That made him nervous enough to start talking about security again: Asif thought a camera or two would help us catch shoplifters. The embassy had quite a system, he said, and then caught himself. “But I really shouldn’t answer questions about it,” he said, and then paused, I realized, so I could ask one.

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

“My dad’s really good with the stuff, though,” he said.

“I thought he was good at ships,” I said.

Asif looked at me blankly.

“Because he’s in the navy,” I said, and he brightened.

“We even have them—cameras—in, around, our apartment,” Asif said, and then caught himself again. “I probably shouldn’t talk about that, either.”

“No,” I said, “because it’s creepy.” I smiled so he would know to as well.

“What’s creepy?” Daphne said, returning with the twins.

“Nothing,” Asif said, quickly but suavely. It charmed me—I liked that he was at least aspiring to be an adult—but seemed to irritate Daphne, as would most things Asif in the months to come. It took some time for me to determine that the reason was jealousy, mixed with the fact that Asif was male. Save George, Daphne had not had much kindness in her heart for men since arriving in Paris.

The twins, on the other hand, were smitten. They’d climbed onto the tall stools behind the counter and watched the whole scene, rapt. Their lives were full of exotic people coming and going, and they loved it. In some children, the result would have been shyness; it made the twins, on the other hand, want to pull their chairs closer to the show. What’s more, Ellie—self-possessed, American, proud—could do no wrong in the twins’ eyes, and she had chosen Asif. The matter was settled.

Peter, decidedly the more docile twin, looked, as he often did, contentedly bemused, like the beloved uncle he will one day be.

Annabelle, on the other hand, looked ready to sub in with Asif should Ellie show even a moment’s disinterest. Her face fell as Ellie returned.

“Where are you going?” I asked Ellie, a reasonable question that was met with pursed lips.

“Maybe we’ll head down to the Seine,” Ellie said. “Look for escapees.” The Seine is lined with pop-up bookstalls; Ellie was forever certain that books stolen from our shop were for sale there. Daphne thought so, too.

Asif nodded grimly. This was exactly the sort of security lapse he was talking about.

Daphne rolled her eyes, and then Annabelle did, too, a new skill, one of several that George told me Annabelle was mastering under our care.

Asif’s eyes, meanwhile, popped wide when I told Ellie to be sure not to cross the Seine and visit Bemelmans’s old wine bar. Again.

Ellie was undaunted. “Fine,” she said, “we’ll go up to the Pompidou and hang out with all the drunk American students.” I actually liked the pedestrian streets around the glass-fronted, inner-workings-on-view Centre Pompidou at night: there were usually people, buskers, music. After dark, our corner of the Marais was so quiet it could be spooky, lions or no.

“They’re not all drunk,” I said.