Paris Twilight Read Free Page A

of my rounds. The obsolescent wing, the other interns called it, a room where patients who’d worked so hard and paid so much to secure a few extra minutes of life ran out the clock with hearts and gin rummy, and time filtered in through the yellowed drapes and settled like dust on anything that stopped. I felt my certainties plummeting.
    Daniel, when did my first impressions turn so traitorous? You remember how I relied on them, how whatever I sensed at the outset would always turn out to be true. By now my old clairvoyance has become a game of bait and switch, and the shine of bright promise turns out to be gilt in the long run, and my monsters do something human as often as not. Indeed, when the receptionist returned, I no longer saw a gorgon but a long-faithful lover fiercely defending her companion’s final dignities, knowing her battle was lost.
    The man who emerged with her had a hint of a shuffle in what was left of his stride, and an air that said he accepted his own fate genially. Monsieur Rouchard was stooped and impeccably mannered, his coat impeccably tailored to the bulge of a dromedary back, his yellow bow tie deliriously askew beneath an iodine goiter, his gray eyes clear amid the moles and liver spots of a face that was no longer handsome, though it had been. The tinge I’d heard in his secretary’s voice was outrage.
    â€œDocteur!”
he exclaimed, and his speech still had a deep, young timbre. “
Enchanté
. May I get you a
café
? A tea? Nothing? Please excuse our mysterious note. For someone so prominent, you are not so easy to track down,
non
? Not with what we had to start with, which was not even a name. Finally, we reached your university and learned our good fortune, that you are already on your way to us!”
    He took my arm and steered me toward an alcove off the lobby, a space just big enough to accommodate a half-couch, a couple of chairs, and a diminutive coffee table, and also the phantom birdcage, inside of which a trio of orange-faced finches busied themselves flitting from peg to perch. “Now, tell me,” Rouchard was saying, “do you have a late aunt from Ohio who then moved to Fort Worth?” I did indeed, though I had to give this a moment’s thought, for I couldn’t possibly picture her. She was storied in our family, but the only time she and I had met, I’d been too young to remember.
    â€œShe was not actually my—”
    â€œBlood relation, just so,” he said. “But do you recall her name? . . . Yes, Bettina, of course. And her sister, Alice, is your mother,
legal
mother, deceased also, can you remind me when? . . . A decade ago. Well, you see, we are like the surgeon, we must be sure we have the right patient.” He glinted with the pleasure of it. “Now, my last question. What do you know of a gentleman named Byron Manifort Saxe? Nothing? Nothing at all. I see. Sit down, please, and let me tell you why we are searching for you so eagerly.”
    Byron Saxe, he explained, was a Parisian pensioner who had recently suffered a medical catastrophe that put him first in a hospital and soon thereafter in a cemetery, prior to which transition he had composed a will leaving an estate that Rouchard’s firm was still engaged in assessing, not having checked all possible channels, but that seemed to consist primarily of a single item of property, an apartment his parents had purchased for him fee simple in the spring of 1933 and in which he had resided without interruption, except for one notable sojourn, ever since, and that he had bequeathed, along with its contents and whatever else in the way of assets the lawyers might be able to find, to me.
    â€œTo whom?” I asked.
    â€œTo you, madame,” he repeated.
    â€œThen there’s clearly been a mistake.”
    â€œ
Non,
madame.”
    â€œBut I told you, I don’t know this man.”
    Among the finches, a scuffle broke out, with a