on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in the heart of the Latin Quarter. The area had always despised the bourgeoisie. Tachyon wondered if Danelle still did. Or had the years dampened her revolutionary ardor? One could only hope it had not dampened her other ardors. Then he remembered, and shrunk down once more.
Well, if he could no longer taste passion, he could at least remember it.
She had been nineteen when they'd met in August of 1950. A university student majoring in political philosophy, sex, and revolution. Danelle had been eager to comfort the shattered victim of a capitalist witch-hunt: the new darling of the French intellectual left. She took pride in his sufferings. As if the mystique of his martyrdom could rub off with bodily contact.
She had used him. But by the Ideal he had used her. As a shroud, a buffer against pain and memory. Drowned himself in cunt and wine. Nursing a bottle in Lena Goldoni's Champs-Elysees penthouse listening to the impassioned rhetoric of revolution. Caring far less for the rhetoric than the passion. Red-tipped nails meeting a slash of red for a mouth as Dani puffed inexpertly at larynx-stripping Gauloises. Black hair as smooth as an ebony helmet over her small head. Lush bosoms straining at a too tight sweater, and short skirts that occasionally gave him tantalizing glimpses of pale inner thigh.
God, how they had screwed! Had there ever been any emotion past mutual using? Yes, perhaps, for she had been one of the last to condemn and reject him. She had even seen him off on that frigid January day. That was when he'd still had luggage and a semblance of dignity. There on the platform of the Montparnasse railway station, she had pressed money and a bottle of cognac onto him. He hadn't refused. The cognac had been too welcome, and the money meant that another bottle would follow.
In 1953 he had called Dani when another fruitless visa battle with the German authorities had sent him careening back into France. Called her hoping for one more bottle of cognac, one more handout, one more round of desperate fornication. But a man had answered, and in the background he had heard a child crying, and when she had finally come to the phone, the message was clear. Get fucked, Tachyon. Tittering, he had suggested that was why he'd called. The unpleasant buzz of a disconnected phone.
Later in that cold park in Neuilly he'd read of Blythe's death, and nothing had seemed to matter anymore.
And yet when the delegation arrived in Paris, Dani had reached out. A note in his box at the Ritz. A meeting on the Left Bank as the silver-gray Parisian sky was turning to rose, and the Eiffel Tower became a web of diamond light. So maybe she had cared. And maybe, to his shame, he hadn't Dome was a typical working-class Parisian cafe. Tiny tables squeezed onto the sidewalk, gay, blue, and white umbrellas, harried, frowning waiters in none-too-clean white smocks. The smell of coffee and grillade. Tach surveyed the handful of patrons. It was early yet for Paris. He hoped she hadn't chosen to sit inside. All that smoke. His glance kept flicking across a thickset figure in a rusty black coat. There was a watchful intensity about the raddled face, and--
Dear God, could it ... NO! "Bon soir, Tachyon."
"Danelle," he managed faintly, and groped for the back of a chair.
She smiled an enigmatic smile, sucked down some coffee, ground out a cigarette in the dirty ashtray, lit another, leaned back in a horrible parody of her old sexy manner, and eyed him through the rising smoke. "You haven't changed." His mouth worked, and she laughed sadly. "The platitude a little hard to force out? Of course I've changed-it's been thirty-six years."
Thirty-six years. Blythe would be seventy-five. Intellectually he had accepted the reality of their pitifully short lifespans. But it had not come home to him before. Blythe had died. Braun remained unchanged. David was lost, so like Blythe remained a memory of youth and charm. And of his new friends, Tommy, Angelface, and Hiram were just entering that uncomfortable stage of middle age. Mark was the merest child. Yet forty-one years ago it had been Mark's father who had impounded Tach's ship. And Mark hadn't even been born yet!
Soon (or at least as his people measured time), he would be forced to watch them pass from youth into inevitable decay and thence into death. The chair was a welcome support as