Fiona crossed to Île Saint-Louis and passed an ice-cream shop, the smell of the waffle cones reminding her that she was starving, and she passed shops selling bright leather purses and wine and Venetian masks. Here, finally, was Richard’s building, three stone stories above a shoe shop. “Campo/Thibault,” it said beside one of the five black buzzers. It was 8:45 now—close enough, good enough. She rang, and a minute later it wasn’t Richard who came down but a thin young man in a motorcycle jacket. He said, “You’ve arrived! I’m Serge, partner of Richard.” Ree-sharr. “I take you up, okay? You get settled. Richard is having a shower, then he joins us.”
Serge plucked up her suitcase as if it were empty, and she followed him up the dark stairs.
The apartment was chic and sparse, but the light fixtures and windows and the wrought iron railings outside the glass doors looked wonderfully ancient, and the details on the walls—the relief pattern of vines, and even the light switch panels—had been softened by endless layers of paint. Fiona remembered Richard’s place in Lincoln Park, the treacly peaches and pinks. This was its opposite: bright monochromatic paintings over gray furniture straight out of an architecture magazine. Serge showed her where she’d be staying—a book-lined room with a white bed and a single plant—and then brought her to the kitchen and poured her an orange juice. She heard Richard’s shower end, and Serge called that Fiona was here. Richard called back something she couldn’t understand, and it took her a moment to realize he’d answered in French.
A minute later, there he was, interrupting Serge’s tour of the view. He’d combed what remained of his hair wetly to his scalp, and he wore a pressed shirt that was too large, as if he’d recently shrunk. He cried, “Fiona Marcus in the flesh!” and grabbed her arms to air-kiss both cheeks, and although she hadn’t used that surname in decades, she didn’t correct him. It was a gift, this name of her youth handed back to her by someone she associated with a time when she’d been optimistic and unencumbered. Granted, she associated him with the next years, too, the ones with Nico gone, with Nico’s friends, who’d become her only friends, dying one by one and two by two and, if you looked away for a second, in great horrible clumps. But still, still, it was a time she missed, a place she’d fly back to in a heartbeat.
“Now the trick, my dear, is to keep you awake the rest of the day. No sleep whatsoever. Caffeine, but only if you drink it regularly. And no wine, not a drop, till you’re rehydrated.”
“He’s an expert,” Serge said. “Before I met Richard I hadn’t crossed the Atlantic.”
“And now how many times?” Richard asked. “Twenty?”
“Alors, beaucoup de temps,” Fiona said, speaking French for no reason at all, and then became certain that she’d just said “a lot of weather.” She felt dizzy and stupid and like she really should lie down, against Richard’s advice. She said, “You mentioned coffee.”
And soon they were sprawled across Richard’s gray furniture. She wanted to pry open the clamshell packaging on her converter and charge her phone, call the detective even if it was still seven minutes too soon, but she forced herself to sit still and tell them how grateful she was for the place to stay, the warm welcome. It felt good, in fact, to rest for a moment, to be Fiona Marcus again, twenty years old again, doted on by Richard Campo again. It filled her up.
Serge had made her a latte, right there in the kitchen with a machine that belonged in a cockpit, and now she sipped at the thick foam. He said, “You tell me everything about this guy when he was young, yeah? I need some scandals!”
At that, Richard went to a low shelf by the windows and pulled out a photo album he’d apparently lugged all the way to Paris and into the new century. He sat between Fiona and Serge on the long couch, started flipping through. How strange to see Richard Campo’s work in snapshot form, yellowed Polaroids and Kodak prints. He’d been doing more serious work back then, too, but those photos weren’t the ones preserved in cheap cellophane slots.
Richard said, “Nico’s here somewhere,” and then he must have found a picture, because he handed the album to Serge, tapping a page. “Oh, was