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“You’re out of your head. You should see the lines on the Champs-Elysées waiting to get into Caldofreddo. And it’s your achievement. That should give you a feeling of secret power—a kick. I know you’re sore because the French made a phony knight of you and you took it like an insult. Or maybe you hate them because of Israel. Or their record in the last war.”

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

“When I try to guess what you’re thinking I have to try nonsense. Otherwise it would take me a million years to figure out why to you Paris is a ghost town. Would old Chicago aldermen retire to a ghost town to spend their graft-money? Come on Charlie, we’ll eat pressed duck tonight at the Tour d’Argent.”

“No, that kind of food makes me ill.”

“Well then give me the stuff to take back with me—the envelope Humboldt mailed to himself.”

“No, Cantabile, I won’t do that either.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because you’re not trustworthy. I’ve got another copy of it, though. You can have that. And I’m willing to write a letter. A notarized letter.”

“That won’t do it.”

“If your friends want to see the original they can come to me in Madrid.”

“You irritate the shit out of me,” said Cantabile. “I’m about to hit the ceiling.” Incensed, he glared at me. Then he made a further effort to be reasonable. “Humboldt has some family yet, doesn’t he? I asked Kathleen. There’s an old uncle in Coney Island.”

I had forgotten Waldemar Wald. Poor old man, he lived in kitchen odors, too, in a back room. He needed rescuing, certainly, from the nursing home. “You’re right, there is an uncle,” I said.

“What about his interest? What, just because you have a mental thing against Paris? You can pay a maid to look after the kid. This is a big deal, Charlie.”

“Well, perhaps I should go,” I said.

“Now you’re talking.”

“I’ll pack a bag.”

thirty-nine

So we flew. That same evening Cantabile and I were on the Champs-Elysées waiting with our tickets to get into the vast movie house near the rue Marbeuf. Even for Paris the weather was bad. It was sleeting. I felt thinly dressed and became aware that my shoe soles had worn through and that my feet were getting wet. The queue was dense, the young people in the crowd were cheerful enough but Cantabile and I were both displeased. Humboldt’s sealed envelope had been locked in the hotel vault and I had the claim check. Rinaldo had quarreled with me about possession of this brass disc. He wanted it in his pocket as a sign that he was my bona-fide representative.

“Give it to me,” he said.

“No. Why should I?”

“Because I’m the natural one to take care of it. That’s my kind of thing.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“You’ll pull out your hankie and lose that check,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re absent-minded.”

“I’ll keep it.”

“You were ornery about the contract, too. You wouldn’t even read it,” he said.

The ice beat on my hat and shoulders. I disliked intensely the smoke of French cigarettes. Above us in the lights were colossal posters of Otway as Caldofreddo and of the Italian actress, Silvia Sottotutti, or something of the sort, who played the role of his daughter. Cantabile was right, in a way, it was a curious experience to be the unrecognized source of this public attraction and to be standing in the sleet—it made one feel like a phantom presence. After two months of what was virtually a retreat in Madrid it felt like backsliding to be here, in the fog and glitter of the Champs-Elysées, under this icy pelting. At the Madrid airport I had picked up a copy of Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals to read on the plane and to insulate me from Cantabile’s frantic conversation. In Baudelaire I had found the following piece of curious advice: Whenever you receive a letter from a creditor write fifty lines upon some extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved. What this implied was that the vie quotidienne drove you from the globe, but the deeper implication was that real life flowed between here and there. Real life was a relationship between here and there. Cantabile, one thousand percent here,