it, but it's a magical place. I haven't been there since my mom was alive."
"You're not seriously thinking of going?" Paolo Cozmici sounded incredulous. "Robert, my sweet, you 'ave concerts booked every weekend in July. Paris, Munich, London. You can't just pull out."
"Come with me?"
Paolo almost choked on his croissant.
"Come with you? Absolutely not. Now I 'ave irrefutable evidence, mon amour. You have lost your mind."
"Maybe." Robbie Templeton smiled, and Paolo Cozmici felt his resolve melting like a bar of chocolate in the sunshine. "But you knew I was crazy when you fell for me. Didn't you?"
Raising Paolo's hand to his lips, Robbie kissed it softly.
"Hmm," Paolo grumbled. "Oui, je suppose."
The love affair between Robbie Templeton, the American piano prodigy and classical music's hottest male pinup, and Paolo Cozmici, the fat, bald, famously irascible Italian conductor, was a mystery to all who knew them, as well as to millions who did not.
It began six years ago. Robbie, then almost twenty, had just arrived in Paris and was living hand to mouth as a freelance piano player, moving from bar to bar and jazz club to jazz club, wherever the work took him.
"You're being stubborn, Robert. I've told you, you can have an allowance."
Peter Templeton had mixed feelings about his son's Great European Adventure. He and Robbie had been reconciled for less than a year. Now Peter was sitting across the table from him at the Harvard Club, being told that he was about to lose him all over again.
"I don't want your money, Dad. I need to do this by myself."
"You've no idea what the real world is like, Robert."
You'd be surprised how much I know about the real world, Dad.
"You don't even speak French."
"I'll learn."
"At least let me set up a bank account for you at Societe Generale. You can look on it as emergency money. A safety net, should you need it."
Robbie looked at his father and felt a stab of pity for him. Lexi's kidnapping had aged him permanently. The reality of caring for a deaf child, even one as determined and independent as Lexi, had also taken its toll. Every hour Peter spent away from his daughter was an anxious, guilt-ridden purgatory: he hadn't been there when Lexi needed him most. The least he could do was to be there now, protecting her, loving her, helping her cope with her disability.
The irony was that Lexi was coping just fine. It was Peter who was lost.
Robbie's fixed mental image of his father was of a strong, handsome, youthful man, a sportsman and a scholar. But the truth was that that man had died years ago. The face Robbie saw across the table from him now was broken and defeated, crisscrossed with lines and dark shadows under the eyes. It was a road map of suffering, a lifetime of loss. And it had all started because he married a Blackwell.
Kruger-Brent did that to him. The curse of the Blackwell family. Don't you see, Dad? I can't stay. I can't let myself be broken, like you were.
"Honestly, Dad, I appreciate the offer. But I don't want the money. I've only been clean for eleven months, remember? A big fat French bank account might be more temptation than I could handle."
It was this last argument that had finally won Peter over. He knew that if Robert ever went back to drugs or drinking, he would die. It was that simple.
"Fine. Have it your way. But promise me, when the romance of the whole starving-musician-in-a-garret thing wears off, you won't be too proud to come home. I...I love you, Robert. I hope you know that."
Robbie's eyes filled with tears.
I know, Dad. I love you, too. But I have to go.
The first few months were a living hell.
Dad was right. What in God's name have I gotten myself into?
Unable to afford even a shoe box in the city center, Robbie had finally rented a room in Ogrement, a run-down part of the suburb of epinay-sur-Seine. It was the most depressing place he had ever seen. Ugly sixties tenement buildings with broken windows, the stairwells covered in graffiti and stinking of piss, were home to a plethora of gangs and petty criminals. The gangs seemed to split along racial and religious lines. Ogrement was not a great place to be a Jew, that was for sure. But neither was it overly welcoming of preppy, blond Americans whose six words of French included foie gras and clavier (piano keyboard), but not percer (to stab)