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He vastly prefers Inez, with her scarves and freckles and wide-set deer-in-the-headlights eyes.
    “Bonjour, Monsieur Rhodes. Comment ça-va?”
    “Ça va bien, Inez. Et toi?”
He removes the envelope from his jacket, hands it over.
    “Pas mal.”
She takes the envelope.
“Et merci.”
Inez punches in the six-digit touch-tone code that unlocks a cabinet drawer, a handful of audio frequencies. The lock’s notes are barely audible, but they definitely remind Will of something, a melody, maybe the theme of some song his band used to cover. It bothers him that he can’t place it, feels like this might be the onset of memory decay; hearing loss and erectile dysfunction can’t be far behind.
    It’s now Inez’s turn to remove a file from this drawer, then an envelope from the file. The overseas bureaus were founded well before the advent of computers and the Internet, and their paper filing system functions perfectly. Every few years someone new proposes a digital overhaul, and the editor rejects it.
    Will takes a seat, slices the envelope with a letter opener, sharper than it needs to be, dangerous. He removes a few sheets of paper, runs his eyes down one page. He looks at some six-by-nine glossy photos. Then a couple of maps, which he will study closely, memorizing the major routes, identifying the locations of his destinations, familiarizing himself with the names of streets and parks, beaches and museums, towns and villages and mountain ranges. Whenever Will arrives somewhere, he wants to already know where he’s going.
    “These are all new notes?”
    “Oui. Je croix que c’est vrai.”
    “Some of this looks familiar. Are you sure?”
    “You know quite well, Monsieur Rhodes, that I am not.”
    The girl doesn’t know anything; she never does. “Ah!” she says, finger up. She unlocks another drawer, and hands over a bulky nylon bag.
    Will takes the packet, unzips it, peeks inside.
“Merci, mademoiselle, comme toujours.”
    “De rien, Monsieur Rhodes.”
    —
    He spends a long day scouting, hopping on and off the Metro, into cafés for fortifying espressos while scribbling notes. He takes a late-afternoon shower, puts on fresh clothes, exits the hotel between a pair of potted topiaries complemented by a pair of burly doormen who could be either welcoming or the opposite.
    A woman is emerging from a long black Mercedes in a miasma of perfume and hair spray and shopping bags, like an ultra-
riche
Pigpen. She gives Will a once-over, then lowers her sunglasses, extends her legs from a Chanel skirt to the rue St-Honoré. She glides into the hotel, another successful afternoon of shopping accomplished, and now to a deep bubble bath with a glass of chilled Sancerre and a home-décor magazine, a nibbled dinner at L’Arpège, an eau-de-vie nightcap, and finally a deeply gratifying earthmoving fuck with her handsome jet-setting husband…
    Maybe not. Maybe that’s merely the mythical version of her life that Will is conjuring so he can try to sell it, the type of fantasy he attempts to invent every time he sits down to type, to project unto readers the striving and yearning, and hopefully the transference from the unattainable fantasy of this woman’s life to a more attainable, less fictional one, relatable to a woman who lives in a big house in North Indianapolis, a woman who isn’t coming to Paris on a shopping spree but nevertheless can purchase the handbag that’s advertised on page 89, facing Will’s byline, a handbag that any woman can find at any upscale mall in America, and perhaps pretend that she bought it here, on the rue St-Honoré, and hung in the crook of her arm as she strode to her prime-time table on the rue de Varenne.
    Most of the time, it goes unsaid. But Will is always aware that at the end of the day,
Travelers
is in business to sell that handbag to that reader.
    He takes a circuit of Plâce Vendôme, mostly to see if anything has changed, but nothing ever does, except the progress of the