The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

someone there would cover the fare, if not one of the patrons then one of the uniformed police officers who paced the beat near the taxi stand.

He would have to promise to pay them back. And he would pay them back. He had paid everyone back, which was about the only good thing he could say about himself at the moment.

Nothing he did was any damn good, not even the daily copy he wrote for the Trib. The words were fine, the prose was solid, the assignments stank. His friends were just as miserable as he was (although, as Wave Root said, miserable in Paris is like happy everywhere else), and there wasn’t even a woman in the picture. Well, not a relationship woman. There’d been more than Decker’s fare share of one-night women. He might have even had one tonight.

The thought made him search his pockets as the taxi pulled up on the Rue Delambre side of the Dome. The cafe had been on this corner for nearly thirty years, but only since the War had it become a haven for Americans. Know-it-all Hemingway, the only one of Decker’s acquaintances who had finished his novel after he arrived in Paris, called it one of the three principal cafes in the Quarter, and the only one filled with people who worked.

No one who worked was there now. The tables on the terrace were empty, the chairs pushed out expectantly. A glow fell across them from the cafe’s open doors.

Decker staggered out of the taxi, handed the driver the lone franc he’d found in his front pocket, and had to grip the pole marking the taxi stand to keep from falling.

Not only did he have a throbbing headache, but wobbly legs as well. He had to stop drinking, that was all there was to it.

“Coffee?”

Decker still had one arm wrapped around the pole. He thought maybe the ubiquitous uniformed policeman had spoken to him, but he didn’t see an ubiquitous uniformed policeman. Instead, he saw an elderly man sitting against the wall, beneath the awning that someone should have rolled up by now.

“Or are you one of those British gentlemen who prefer tea?”

The old man spoke the oddly clipped English that Parisians learned-not quite British upper-class, but not quite British lower-class either. Continental English, Root called it. Incontinent English, Thurber always amended when Root had left the room.

“Water would probably help,” Decker said, not sure he should let go of the pole.

“Water will help. Alcohol dehydrates the system. That is half of what causes the so- called hang over.”

The old man put a deliberate space between “hang” and “over.” It was those kinds of errors that Decker usually found funny. The French often mangled English idioms, like the time the editor at Le Petit Journal had introduced Decker to his assistant, calling the man “my left hand”-and not meaning it as any kind of joke.

“Monsieur,” the old man said with a wave of a hand. “Une bouteille d’eau.”

Decker was going to tell him that the waiters here never showed up when you wanted them, and certainly wouldn’t show when there were only a few customers, but the waiter who appeared, happily prying the top off a bottle of water, contradicted his very thought.

Of course, the old man wasn’t just French. He had to be a regular. French regulars were prized at places like this, places which the Americans had taken over, like they had taken over most of Montparnesse just south of the Luxembourg Gardens. It was essentially an extension of the Latin Quarter without being in the Latin Quarter at all. It had been that way since the 16^th century when Catherine de Medici had expelled students from the university. They had set up shop here and called it Montparnesse.

Decker knew such things about Paris, indeed, he had become a font of Paris trivia in his two years at the Tribune, all learned with bad schoolboy French and only a modicum of charm.

“It would be nice if you joined me,” the old man said to Decker as the waiter put down the empty bottle and a single, rather grimy glass.

“Easier said than done,” Decker said, not certain he could let go of the pole and remain standing.

The old man had a croissant in front of him and, despite the hour, a cup of coffee. He wore a proper black suit but no hat, which looked odd in the thin light. His hair was a yellowish white, speaking of too many hours in cafes around cigarette smoke.

As Decker lurched closer, using tables and the occasional chair to maintain his balance, he realized that the old man’s beard was yellowish brown around his mouth. His fingers were tobacco stained as well. But he held no pipe and no cigar or cigarette had burned to ash in the tray in the center of the table.

Decker made it to the table and sank into the chair the old man had pushed back for him. It groaned beneath his weight. He tugged his suit coat over his stained white shirt. He had to look as filthy as he felt.

The old man poured water into the glass. The water looked clear and fresh despite the fingerprints on the side of the glass.

“You are an American newspaper man, yes?” the old man asked.

“Yes,” Decker said, not that it was a hard guess, given their location.

“Joseph Decker, the American newspaper man, yes?” the old man said.

It gave Decker a start that the old man knew his name. “Is there another Joe Decker in Paris?”

The old man ignored the question. “I have a story for you, should you take it.”

Everyone had a story for him. Usually it was the kind of thing tourist rumors were made of, like why there were no fish in the Seine. But the old man didn’t look like someone who would give Decker a song and dance.

Of course, Decker wasn’t yet sober, so he had to assume his judgment about all things-like the kind of man the old man was based on how he appeared-was probably flawed.

“It’s two a.m.,” Decker said, “and-”

“Three a.m.,” the old man said.

“Three a.m.,” Decker said with a flash of irritation, “and I’m drunk. If you’re serious about this story thing, we’ll meet here tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to sleep this off, and we can talk then.”

“I do not go out in the daylight,” the old man said.

Two years ago, Decker would have rolled his eyes. But by now, he’d seen and heard everything. There were guys on the copy desk who didn’t go out in the daylight either, saying it hurt their precious eyes.

Decker went out too much in the daylight, seeing things that sometimes he wished he hadn’t.

He flashed on her then, body crumpled beneath Pont Neuf, feet dangling over the edge of the walkway along the banks of the Seine, pointing toward the river.

He closed his eyes and willed the image away.

“And that is why I do not,” the old man said. “You see them too.”

Decker opened his eyes. The old man was staring at him. The old man’s eyes were blue and clear, not rheumy like Decker had expected. Maybe the old man was younger than Decker thought. He’d met a number of those guys in Paris-men in their forties who could pass for someone in their eighties by their clothing, their white hair, and their gait.

“I don’t see anything, old man,” Decker said.

“Nonsense,” the old man said. “It is why you drink.”

“I drink because I’m lonely,” Decker said. Because he kept writing the beginning to that damn novel over and over while Know-it-all Hemingway sat in this very cafe with his stupid notebook and scribbled story after story, book after book. Decker drank because he hated writing puff pieces for the folks back home, puff pieces about touristy restaurants and American musicians and writers like Know-it-all Hemingway. Decker drank because the stories he wanted to cover “would discourage the tourist trade from coming here. ” He drank because Paris wasn’t the answer after all.

“You drink,” the old man said, “because it closes your mind’s eye. I have watched you. You see too much.”

“You’ve watched me?” Decker was getting more and more sober by the minute. “You’re following me?”

“If you recall,” the old man said with the patience people reserve for drunks, fools, and children, “I arrived before you did. But I must confess that I have been waiting for you.”

“Me and all the other American hacks,” Decker said.