“But when Bercy was swallowed up by the city, these buildings were abandoned, and Jean Paul Favand bought them to house his collection of performing and fairground arts.”

“Wow, you really know your stuff,” I say.

“Just wait. You’ll see why I love it so much,” Siaka promises.

We head through a door at one end of the interconnected warehouses and begin walking through rooms packed with the most astounding, beautiful and downright weird objects that could possibly be assembled under one roof. We pass a couple of tour groups led by official guides, but head off to be on our own.

We walk up to a mannequin composed of a woman’s body with a unicorn head. It wears an old-fashioned nightgown and stands next to a grand piano like it’s about to belt out a solo. “This is like being in a nightmare,” I say, genuinely freaked out.

“Funny you say that,” Siaka laughs. “It was honest-to-god used in a horror novel about nightmares. Authors treat this place like an inspiration playground.” He takes my hand and pulls me past the creeptastic unicorn.

“This is only the beginning,” I hear him say, but I lose all focus because he takes my hand in his. All I can think about are his short-cropped curls and how I want to run my fingers through them.

We arrive at a vintage fairground game: a ten-foot-tall backdrop painted as though it’s the inside of an old café. A troupe of metal waiters holding trays aloft are grouped at one end, and the goal is to race them horizontally across the tableau to a finish line at the far end of the café. In front of the set-up are twelve mini-bowling alleys with a pyramid of holes instead of bowling pins, and in front of the bowling alleys are twelve stools.

“It’s like Skee-ball,” Siaka says, dropping my hand and settling onto the furthest stool. I take the one next to him, and six other visitors eagerly plant themselves on the others. “You take the wooden balls and roll them up into the holes. Each hole counts a different number of points and moves your waiter forward.”

An attendant starts the game. With the rolling of the wooden balls and the excited cries of the participants, the noise is deafening. I grab each ball as it rolls toward me and spin it up the alley toward the elusive top hole, worth fifty points. I haven’t done anything like this since I was a kid, and in seconds revert to eight-year-old me, yelling and jumping with the rest of the players. In the end, Siaka’s tray-carrying, white-aproned waiter crosses the finish line first.

“Yes!” he yells, leaping up and pumping his fist.

“Wait a minute. How many times have you played this?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “That there was pure skill.”

“Why do I get the feeling you come here on your free time just to practice?”