“So bad you had to come here just to contact the writers?”

“That’s right. Trying to set this up online from inside the US might be … well. Let’s just say I didn’t want to take the chance.”

“Jeez,” I said. “That bad.”

I looked back down at the books and saw that my forefinger had landed, as if guided by an invisible hand, on the spine of a J. Neil Schulman paperback. I tugged out Alongside Night.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve found what I’m looking for. You?”

Bob shrugged. “Just browsing,” he said. “Fancy a coffee?”

“Sure.”

I nipped inside, paid a euro for the book, and rejoined Bob outside in the chilly February afternoon. He stood gazing across the Seine at Notre-Dame.

“Hard to believe I’m actually looking at it,” he said. He blinked and shook his head. “Where to?”

I indicated left. “Couple of hundred metres, nice traditional place.”

The cafe was on the Quai des Grands Augustins. The bitter wind blew grit in our faces. Along the way, I noticed Bob looking askance at the flaring reds, yellows and blacks of the leftist, anarchist and altermondialiste posters plastered on walls and parapets.

“Must be kind of weird, seeing all that commie kipple everywhere,” he said.

“You stop noticing,” I said.

The doorway was easy to miss. Inside, the cafe seemed higher than it was wide, a little canyon of advertisement mirrors and verdegrised brass and smoke-stained woodwork. Two old guys eyed us and returned to their low-voiced conversation around a tiny handheld screen across which horses galloped. I ordered a couple of espressos and we took a table near the back under a Ricard poster that looked like it predated the Moon landings, if not the Wright brothers. We fiddled with envelopes of sugar and slivers of wood, and sipped for a few moments in silence.