Hopscotch Read Free Page A

depressing.”
    She drove along the quay. There was a good moon but it was very late for lovers; the evening was silent and uninhabited but for the clochards , the human flotsam in rags sleeping in the streets underneath the globular streetlamps that hung like rotted melons on their corroded stalks. The woman said, “They disturb your friend Jaynes, the clochards . For some reason they frighten him. Would he have us house them in the best hotels, I wonder? Then where would all the Americans live?”
    Her laughter was mocking but not unkind. He didn’t respond but he couldn’t share in her contempt for Jaynes’s compassion: he couldn’t deceive himself any longer into mocking anyone else’s convictions. He could only envy them.
    Past the Tour Eiffel , Napoleon’s tomb, up the Saint Germain, a tourist’s route across the island beneath Notre Dame—the architectural gestures of an ambitious past. His eyes opaque, Kendig watched it all flow past; watched the woman’s animated face hovering above the wheel. A tiny Renault squirted in front of her and she shouted at it: “ Cochon! ”
    Then they were on the right bank threading the maze below the Opera; his hotel was only a few blocks distant. She hadn’t asked where he was staying but evidently she knew. She slid the sports car in at the curb a block short of it. “You honestly didn’t care, did you.”
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œYour cards. The size of the wager.”
    He turned his hand palm up.
    â€œRemarkable,” she said.
    â€œIs it.”
    â€œYou find it an effort merely to grunt a word or two, don’t you, Miles Kendig. Yet like the ashes of Alexander you were once Alexander. An exciting reputation precedes you, you know.”
    He looked at her. “What the hell.” It was said of her that in her bedroom in Neuilly there was a statuette of a Punjabi idol clutching his distended giant member. “I’ll go to your place.”
    â€œYou needn’t have made it such a bloody concession,” she said angrily; but she put the car in gear.
    In another few years she might become one of those middle-aged divorcées who take up with young Continental gentlemen who teach Italian. But she had not yet degenerated into that sort of female impersonation; she was vital and she stirredwhat juices had not atrophied in him. “At least you’re not a zombie there ,” she told him. He took no particular pleasure from the knowledge.
    In the morning he pushed away his plate of breakfast untasted and left her, on foot, strolling in any direction through the Bois . She had smiled gently but she’d made no demands when he got up to leave: she was interested but not desperate, she was willing to be casual about it and he thought he might even come back to her some time.
    After a while he ambushed a taxi and rode into the snarled center of Paris, made arrangements to have his winnings transferred to Switzerland for deposit, walked to his hotel and met the concierge and paid tomorrow’s rent as if he believed there would be a tomorrow.
    In his room he stripped and bathed and took the trouble to shave; the little daily routines reassured him a bit. In the mirror his face showed the years: every crease. He still had a full head of hair, pepper-grey now; his face was rectilinear, all parallel planes, and his eyebrows were two bushy triangles over his slanted eyes. It was a middle-Caucasion face that had served him well in the chameleon years. In France he passed easily for a Frenchman because it never occurred to the French that a foreigner could speak the language properly. He had posed at one time or another as an Italian, an Arab, a German and a Croat.
    From eleven until three he sat in the room waiting, neither reading nor smoking nor otherwise stirring his consciousness. At three he went out.
    He had a croque monsieur in the Deux Magots and took the bus along to the rue de la