Paid and Loving Eyes

desperate to meet Gobbie, see how many pantechnicons he’d counted. If Lysette had done her job, she’d have followed them, and I’d know all.

“Where are we?” We alighted at a beautiful vantage point. The restaurant overlooked a promontory, some sort of turrets visible below, a few pretty houses, trees. A tiny steamer drew a dark mathematical wake in the shimmer.

No answer, just a stroll into this expensive place. They swept aside the need for reservation, awarded us the table Monique went to as a matter of course. I followed, wondering if any second I was going to get the elbow. Suit reduced daylight near the doorway, standing motionless. She ordered, offering me the choice but deciding everything, the way they do.

“Lovejoy.” Here it comes, I thought. A duchess doesn’t splurge on a serf for nothing. “Tell me. Why are you not afraid?”

“Why?” Was I asking did I have reason to be scared, or why ask such a barmy question?

She was inspecting me. From nothing I’d been promoted to vaguely interesting specimen, a blundering troglodyte.

“You are a scruff, poor as…” Her education came good. “An habitual criminal.”

Which raised the question of why she was bothering. “Am I discharged the service, like your Foreign Legionnaires?”

Her expression clouded. “You disturb me, Lovejoy. Most of what you say is imbecilic, except for certain phrases.”

“Look, Monique.” She was narking me more and more, and the bloody soup was frozen. It even had ice in the damned stuff. I gave it back to the waiter and said to warm it up, please. Even I can work a microwave, for God’s sake. He started a distressed harangue with Monique in explosive lingo. She shut him up. He crawled off with my soup. She’d started hers. Too polite to complain, I suppose. I went on, “I’m having enough trouble with the lingo. If it’s declensions you’re worried about you should have hired a certified linguist.”

“As you please.” I don’t like it when women give in that quick, because they never do unless they’re working something out. “But I find it strange that you often move so surely in areas of which you are supposedly ignorant.”

“Eh?”

“It happened a number of times at the Repository. You detect human fondnesses which others might miss.” That took some saying, but she did it, with pauses. “I’m unsure of you. Is it a quirk of speech? Or some intuition in your nature?”

My soup came back. The waiter managed not to chuck it at me, and retired rolling his eyes. “Well,” I told her defiantly, “he should have got it right in the first place.” Hot, at last.

“You mention the Foreign Legion. Our Red-and-Greens.” She looked at me as I quaffed away, but her eyes were somewhere else. “Founded in 1831, mainly to sweep up drunken German students bothering our towns. But French in culture, as we are. You can never understand, Lovejoy. Your multiculture society is hopeless. We meld all comers into one entity called France.”

“Or else what?” I’d have had the rest of her soup except the waiter would disintegrate when I told him to hot it up.

“Or else they are superfluous to requirements, Lovejoy.” The main course came steaming, thank God. The waiter was learning. “Our Legion’s desertion rate was never half that of the American forces, though envious nations make much of our discipline.”

Our? I tried to find a resemblance to Marimee in her features. Well, thinking of Veronique and her brother Guy. And Lysette, more platonically related to Jan.

“We French face an onslaught, Lovejoy. On spelling—you’ll not have heard of the criminals on Rocard’s High Council on the French Language, who want to change the spelling of nearly a tenth of our words. Or the idiot bureaucrats of Brussels who want to change them all! To compel us, by economic force. What is Brussels, but a suburb of a suburb? France is under attack. Washington’s population evaluers score Paris — Paris!—a mere seventy-two per cent. Our brilliant war record is decried as sham. Our superb wines are ignored; bribery among international judges! So we French now lead the world—in swallowing tranquillizers, twice the German rate! And in counterfeiting, of course. Along the Rue de la Grande Truanderie—the Street of Crooks, in your appalling language, Lovejoy—we excel in laserprinted fifty-franc notes.”

Nice does the best 200-franc notes, though, I’d heard, but wisely did not say. She almost hit two poor approaching waiters, who almost recoiled. She managed to stay silent until they’d poured the wine and retreated. “Our President learns from the American Secretary of State that France depends on U.S. nuclear technology, and has to admit ignorance of this at a public dinner table. Our airports score—”

“Can I start, love?” I was famished.

“—highly. But for what? Perfume! Nothing else!” Well I started anyway. “Our empire is gone, our currency surrenders to the Common Market. We must eat foreign food, as ordered by foreign minnows in Brussels! And our great Marseillaise is to be bowdlerized. No longer Aux armes, citoyens!” It’s to be All one, friends, dance hand in hand. Marchons becomes Skip on.” She was pale, her lips bloodless. “Rouget de Lisle will turn in his grave.”

“Politics is shifting sand.” I get uncomfortable.

“Once it was only the Americans—with their crass ambassadors. Camelot Country, whose President got the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage written by somebody else.” She became bitter, really vicious, the way all people speak of an envied friend. “Still, it shows there are advantages to having a President with a father capable of making a fortune from buying up cheap liquor licences during Prohibition.”

“Your art—” I was sick of her and her bloody whining. So folk have faults. What else is new?

“Is thieved, stolen. You see the headlines, Lovejoy: Paris: The Empty Frames! Our honour is shattered everywhere now that any hairy student actor can walk in and steal —”

“He wore a wig to look like a Rasta.” I had a mouthful. “Pretty clever. Sixteenth arrondissement, wasn’t it? Your Banditry Repression Brigade moved pretty sharpish.”