Her next worry was how to get him home. He bicycled to work every day, rain or shine, winter and summer, but was he in any condition to bicycle now? She would have called a car, but it was wartime and there were no cars available, except maybe for the mayor or the president of one of the big chemical companies, so she really had no choice in the matter. “I’m taking you home,” she said to him firmly, reassuringly, no arguments, and suddenly their roles were reversed—she wasn’t addressing her boss and superior but a child, like Liliane and her sister Juliette, the little girls she’d instructed and chastised and watched over day and night when she worked as an au pair. “You think you can bicycle?”

They were standing out on the sidewalk now, the mild evening sifting down around them, sunlight draping banners across the street all the way to the end of the block and the air charged with the scent of flowers and the cooking smells from the cafés. It was a beautiful evening, the sort of evening she would have reveled in under other circumstances, but all that mattered to her now was that it wasn’t raining and wasn’t going to. There were pigeons at their feet, ubiquitous pigeons, parting and regrouping as she wheeled both bicycles up and held his out to him by the handlebars. He hadn’t uttered a sound since they’d left the building, just let himself be led by her like a schoolboy, but now he began giggling uncontrollably, and a couple, passing close by, arm in arm, gave him a look.

“Can I bicycle?” he repeated in an odd tone, taking hold of the handlebars and swinging one leg over the crossbar, his movements syrupy and slow, which lulled her for just the instant it took for him to push off and begin pedaling furiously up the street. “Just you watch!” he cried, glancing back at her with a triumphant look, and in his distraction he very nearly ran down an old man with a stiff leg limping across the street. But panic and more panic: before she could even mount her own bike he was already at the end of the block, slashing left at the corner directly in front of a tram that somehow managed to miss dragging him under its wheels, and the chase was on.