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in its center, and to one side, its front door illuminated by the green glow of lamplight reflected off the boughs of a sheltering chestnut, was his favorite restaurant, Chez Marius en Provence.
    Clymer had made reservations in the name of Paul Franck. He was shown to his table—he had asked for a quiet corner—and immediately ordered a bottle of Bordeaux, a Premier Grand Cru Classé from St.-Emilion. He had just finished his first glass when he saw her smiling at him past the shoulder of the maître d’ as she allowed herself to be shown to the table.
    Clymer beamed and stood as she approached. The maître d’ withdrew, and Clymer took her hand and kissed her gently on the offered cheek, catching the familiar scent of sachet.
    “It has been an endless week,” she said, showing no hint of being tired as she sat down. Dennis Clymer relished every accented syllable.
    She was one of over five thousand translators employed by the European Commission, which had its headquarters buildings only a few kilometers away. Clymer had met her on his last trip to Europe two months earlier. In fact, his present trip could have waited another quarter, but the memory of her had made it seem more urgent. During the past three weeks, Clymer, whom she knew only as Paul Franck, had managed to spend one night of each week with her.
    The affair was a surprise to Dennis Clymer. He was not the kind of man who had a roving eye, though his travels frequently put him in situations of opportunity. He was, primarily, interested only in business, and the clients he represented used him for precisely this reason. They did not indulge miscalculations, and though Clymer was reaping stunning profits for his services, which he wisely invested and did not squander, he was cognizant of the fact that a failure to perform could very well have more serious consequences than a loss of income.
    In short, he was a man who was under a good deal of stress, though it was a point of importance with him never to show it. He was on a very fast track, and for a long time now the money he was making was the only seduction to which he allowed himself to succumb.
    She was nothing like the women he usually met when he traveled. Some of his clients always had beautiful women hovering about, and any of them happily would have indulged Dennis Clymer’s requests. But Clymer was wary. Not only did he not trust these gorgeous, tightly fleshed creatures, but he didn’t want to appear to his clients as having a weakness that possibly could be exploited. He kept his mind on his business and his hands on his black Hermés briefcase.
    He had met her, however, in a situation unrelated to his business and well away from the people he represented. The absolute unpredictability of their meeting was what made him comfortable with her. He had been walking through the chic Galerie Louise, one of the several elegant shopping arcades in the center of the city, when he impulsively stepped into a leather goods shop. The place smelled richly of oiled leather, and he wandered around a corner to the briefcases where a woman was trying to decide which attaché to buy for her boss, a busy man who had asked her to get one for him to replace an old one. Unable to decide among the dozens there, she saw Clymer standing nearby and asked him his opinion.
    She was not a stunning beauty, though she was quite pretty in a fresh, uncalculating way. She did not have the sleek, self-aware figure of the women he studiously avoided: she was a little hippy, though pleasantly so. Her hair was butter blond, and she wore it pulled back in a practical style vaguely reminiscent of the 1940s. She wore a smart, working woman’s suit. Clymer noted that she had a quick, genuine smile and a charming way of knitting her brow when he offered a bit of sensible advice about briefcases. After a few minutes she chose one of his recommendations. As she was paying they chatted. When he told her he was from Los Angeles, she