“I should return to the apartment now to see if there is any news from my friends,” I said. I wouldn’t put it past the hostile concierge to turn away a telegram messenger if I wasn’t there. So I carried a now grouchy Liam up all the stairs again and made us a boiled egg for lunch. The afternoon dragged on. I tried not to worry but worry consumed me. There had to be something very wrong. Sid would not have gone away without her cigarette holder. If they had been going away for any length of time they would have cleared up the remains of a meal first. And my overriding reason for concern—they knew I was coming. They were expecting me.

I took Liam back to Madeleine across the street. She was cooking, making dumplings to add to a delicious-smelling stewed chicken, but she wiped her hands on her apron and beamed at us. “Look what I have found, mon petit,” she said to him, going over to a box on the table. “See?” And she held up a Noah’s ark with carved wooden animals. “It was mine when I was a child. My grandfather carved it for me.” I left Liam happily playing with this and crept quietly away. I had no idea how I was going to locate Reynold Bryce but Paris was a city of artists and he was supposed to be the mentor of American artists here. Someone would know where to find him.

I walked down the street, back to Place Pigalle. There was a café at the intersection of two of the streets leading off Pigalle—a narrow building with glass windows and the sign Café de la Nouvelle Athènes painted above the door. There were tables outside but the day was fresh and they were unoccupied. However inside I could see a group of young men clustered around a table. I moved closer to the window. Their attire, ranging from workers’ overalls to shabby jackets to well-cut dark suits, and the way they gesticulated with their hands in animated discussion, indicated that they might well be artists of some kind. Then I spotted a sketchbook that one of them had open and charcoal in his hand. I was about to go in when I also noticed that there were no women among them. I couldn’t think that women were barred from a café, as they were from taverns in New York. The men were only drinking coffee, by the look of it. A perfectly respectable establishment. So I took a deep breath and went in.

Conversation stopped at the table. The man behind the marble counter looked up from the glass he was drying. “Are you looking for someone, mademoiselle?” he asked.

“Luckily he is not here, or there would be hell to pay, no doubt,” one of the young men said.