Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
“We’re closed tomorrow,” she said. “It’s Wednesday, you know.” As if it was the most natural thing in the world that not only did civil servants in French immigration get most of the days of the year off in holidays or vacation, this office also got Wednesday, too.
“Thursday, then.”
She opened her mouth but had to close it again. It was February, one of the few months when the French have to work every Thursday, so she knew I had her.
I went past the other people waiting on plastic chairs in this miserable gray room, down the twisting narrow stairs. Just by the stairs was a photocopier where you could make copies for the equivalent of eighty cents apiece. Broken. Out on the street, it was raining, a cold, bone-aching rain that poured straight down, and the cars driving by sprayed water up onto my legs. I tucked my stack of documents under my coat and slogged to find a photocopier, then down slick steps into the Métro, which was packed with dangling wet umbrellas and the grim faces of all the other people wishing they were somewhere else with fewer people and better weather. Thank God for Parisian bakeries and chocolate, we were probably all thinking.
Damp and spattered, I made my way up the five flights of stairs to our apartment, from which wafted a smell of cat piss. Something crunched under my boot.
I looked down and at first thought that Indy had been using his contributions to the litter box as toy balls again. He seemed to do about anything when he was bored. But when I bent closer, the squished brown thing suddenly took on a drastic resemblance to the antidepressants I had brought back from a weekend trip to see friends of Sébastien’s in Belgium: chocolate from my favorite Belgian chocolatier. Yes, yes, I know we were too broke for me to buy expensive chocolates. Even Citibank was starting to think we might be too broke to buy expensive chocolates, and that was a bad sign. But some things are essential.
On the table, the sealed plastic sack inside a second plastic sack had been pulled out and ripped open, and I found the round Belgian truffles in every corner of the room. Had Indy eaten the truffles, they might have at least poisoned his liver as he deserved, but no. He had just played with them and covered them with cat hair.