Metro Winds

THE DOVE GAME



It was hot in Paris.

The minute Daniel stepped from the air-conditioned cool of Charles de Gaulle airport, the sun dropped a hammer on his forehead. The unexpectedness of it stopped him dead, and a woman in a white dress that looked like a silk petticoat wove around him, her thin arms and long neck a glowing pink. He had never imagined people getting sunburned in Paris. The heat seemed wrong here, misplaced, as if he had somehow brought the aridity of the outback with him.

He was to catch a Roissybus to Avenue de l’Opéra in the city, and then take a taxi to his hotel. A queue extended from the closed doors of the bus, through which the driver was visible reading his paper. He took his place behind the elderly couple at the end. It was evident that they were arguing. Daniel thought of the comfortable bickering of his own parents, which had always seemed to him like two old warped boards rubbing together whenever the wind blew from a certain direction.

The woman stabbed a finger towards a mound of baggage and Daniel wondered what could possibly fill so many cases and bags. The rest of the people in the queue also seemed heavily laden. He carried only a half-empty canvas bag. Perhaps it was because he did not need his luggage to anchor him when he was only staying for a few days.

He found himself remembering the look on the face of the travel agent when he said he needed to be in Paris for one day. Her eyes had flickered with faint confusion over his dusty jeans and faded flannel shirt, but she had said nothing, so he pressed on and asked if she could book him a room in a specific quarter.

The girl – she had been little more than that, for all her thin black suit and the slick vermilion smile painted onto her lips – had taken out a map. Daniel could have pointed to the street because he had looked it up to make sure it existed, but she had been absorbed in the mechanics of her own efficiency.

‘It must be an important occasion,’ she said, pecking at her computer. Her eyes flicked up, inviting him to explain, as if it were part of her job to offer curiosity so that travellers could talk about their plans and be admired for their adventurous spirits; or maybe so that they could be reassured they were doing the right thing.

‘It’s the right thing to do,’ he had said, and been startled to find he had spoken aloud.

‘I’m sure it is.’ The girl had smiled, offering the possibility of a week in Hong Kong or in Singapore as a stopover. Daniel had shaken his head, saying again that he only needed to go to Paris for one day and would like to return to Australia the next day.

She had regarded him with fleeting severity, as if she thought he was making some sort of joke.

‘I’m afraid that is not possible,’ she had said finally. She looked at her computer screen and began to type rapidly. Her face grew smooth and her expression bland, as if the computer had consumed her personality. Then the quick, slick smile again. ‘The soonest I can get you home is five days from the date you fly. There are already heavy bookings because it will be the European summer, and there is a World Cup game. If you could go on another date . . .’

‘No,’ he had said softly.

In the end, he had agreed to the extra days, but the decision had made him uneasy because it had been forced on him. The travel agent had explained that countries wanted more tourists, and there were various kinds of inducements and controls. But Daniel had felt that under the little pat of truth were the bones of something harder.



In the Roissybus, he took the back seat because it looked as if his long legs would fit better there. He found himself pressed between a teacher from a Friends school in Baltimore and a German geneticist. He was amazed at how easily and quickly they told their business to one another and to him.

‘What about you?’ the American teacher on his left asked with friendly insistence.

‘What is a jackaroo?’ the geneticist asked when Daniel had told them his job. The faint slurring of the edges of words that was her accent made her sound gentle, and she looked like someone’s elderly aunt, but Daniel reminded himself not to be taken in by appearances. He knew what a geneticist did.

‘Mess with the business of God, they do,’ Teatree had said wrathfully one night by the campfire when someone had started talking about the sheep they cloned. ‘Scientists think they can do anything. Splitting the atom and cloning Hitler. Growing crops of arms and legs and eyes,’ he had said indignantly.

‘A sort of Australian cowboy,’ the American told the geneticist.

Daniel struggled to think of a question to ask them, because his indifference seemed impolite. A teacher had once written on one of his reports that he had a lazy mind. He didn’t know if that was true or not. The geneticist told the American she had been presenting a paper at a conference in Brisbane on the future of corn and regretted there had been no time to visit the outback. Ouwtbeck, she said. The American teacher said he had been on a short exchange to an Australian Quaker school in Tasmania.

Daniel said he had a meeting in Paris. ‘Not a business meeting,’ he added, to short-circuit the questions.

‘Personal business.’ The geneticist smiled and the teacher fell silent. Abruptly Daniel decided to tell them the truth.

‘I’m going to meet someone in place of a man who died. I promised to go in his place and explain.’

‘How sad,’ the geneticist exclaimed softly. ‘He will come to meet his friend and learn that he is dead.’ Det, she said.

‘It’s a woman,’ he said.

The teacher gave Daniel a look of sober approval. ‘You are a good friend. To go all that way, instead of giving her the news over the telephone.’

I was not his friend, Daniel wanted to protest, but the bus lurched to a halt at a huge roundabout where many streams of cars flowed. It was as if someone had decided to tie a knot in a highway. Horns were sounding, brakes screeched and the noise was such that conversation was impossible.

His two companions were gone by the time Daniel emerged from the bus. There were at least thirty taxis lined up along the kerb and people from the Roissybus and other buses were streaming to join the line at one end and climbing into taxis at the other.

On impulse, Daniel turned on his heel and set off in long, loping strides, determined to find a quiet café and check the map, then walk to the hotel. He was soon deep in a maze of streets hemmed on either side by buildings with ornate facades and a multitude of statues. He was struck by their beauty, but also oppressed by the weight of time they represented. No building in Australia was more than two hundred years old, but some of the buildings around him now looked as if they might have been there for many hundreds of years, especially the ones with crumbling, black-streaked stonework.

He had a sudden sharply painful longing for the simplicity of the flat red landscape outside the bedroom window of his parents’ home. That particular view of what some would call nothing, framed by limp, flowered curtains.

He crossed the street because there was a car parked on the footpath and realised he was panting like a dog, he who had ridden a hundred boundaries in the outback without raising a sweat. It was something to do with the way the heat was pressed between the stone buildings maybe, compressed so that it was almost solid. In the outback, the heat was light, stretched thin.

There was no café in sight, so finally he stopped in the shade of a building and took out the map. He had not bothered with maps in the outback. The country offered its own landmarks and signs to one who had grown up with Murri jackaroos and trackers.

Cities smothered the land, he reckoned, stopping it communicating with the people who lived on it, though maybe it was more that cities reflected people’s desire not to hear the land. Once when the family had come up to the city to plead with the bank to give them more time, his father had said sadly that cities were as confused as the people who lived in them, and that you needed maps for dealing with the people as much as for finding your way around the streets.

A metal sign fixed to the side of a building said Rue Cloche. Daniel took out his map and plotted a course to the street where he would find his hotel, and as he set off again, he looked at his watch and saw that no time had passed since the plane had landed. The watch had stopped, but there was no point in winding it again until he learned the correct local time.

The hotel turned out to be no more than a doorway leading to carpeted stairs, with the name written above a glass door in fancy writing. The bottom floor was a restaurant and, as he climbed the stairs, Daniel smelled coffee. It reminded him of his father so strongly that for a moment he actually seemed to see his father’s hands on the rail instead of his own. Bigger, always bigger, soft-furred with golden hair that caught the sunlight, the huge scarred knuckles and the missing index finger.

Some people coming down the stairs eyed him disapprovingly as they passed him, and Daniel realised they thought he was drunk. He felt as lightheaded as he had the time he got sunstroke as a kid. He still remembered how everything had sagged and tilted when he moved, the heaviness of the shadows and the silky feeling of sickness. An older woman in a fitted green dress and smooth bun examined him with shrewd eyes as he approached the reception desk.

Once he had proffered his passport and filled out the papers, the receptionist pressed the lift button for him and explained breakfast was to be eaten in the restaurant below, he had only to show his key to the waitress.

The room when he reached it was tiny. He bumped his elbows on both walls going to the toilet and was forced to shower with the door open, struggling with a single lever that controlled heat, cold, and the force of the jet. At last he lay full-length on the bed, naked, his feet hanging over the end and his head touching the bedhead.

He had slept for hours on the plane, yet his eyes felt gritty the way they did after a long day of riding in the sun, his body jumpy and tense from lack of exercise. He couldn’t remember when he had done so little yet felt so tired. He needed to walk, he decided.



He was walking through the fields at dusk, and he saw that there was a pool of light on the horizon where there ought to have been nothing but more night.

‘What’s that, Dad?’ he asked and discovered from the sound of his voice that he was a boy again.

‘Circus has come to town,’ his father said, squinting his eyes and peering towards the light. He glanced down at Daniel. ‘Want to go, son? Don’t suppose it’ll be anything special, a couple of clowns and a mangy lion with no teeth. A lot of rigged sideshows to draw your money. But we could take a look-see if you want.’ That slow, kind smile.

Daniel felt an aching burst of love for his father that made him realise that he was dreaming, and he woke to find the room dark and stiflingly hot, the bedclothes wrapping his limbs like bandages. He padded over to open a window, but it was as if he had merely opened it into a larger room.

Leaning out into the still, hot night air, he stared down into the narrow street below and wondered what time it was. The thought brought him a vivid image of the dead man’s watch; the wide silver band and face had matched the overturned silver car and the silvery grey suit the man had worn, which might have been sleek before the crash had hurled him onto the side of the road. The man had seemed as exotic as a metal spaceman, lying there. His eyes had been a light silvery grey too, when they opened.

‘Help me,’ the man said. His accent was thick and heavy, but part of the heaviness was pain.

There were visible head injuries and Daniel knew it could be fatal to move him. ‘There’s a property back about thirty clicks. The Watleys. Tim’ll radio the Flying Doctor.’

The man made a strange rattling noise. Was he laughing? ‘I fear there is only one creature with wings that will come for me in time.’

Daniel began to shake his head, but the man’s blood was puddling in the red dust beneath him, darkening it to black. It looked as if his shadow was swelling around him.

Daniel knelt, but the man’s nearest hand twitched in agitation, the silver watch throwing a knife of light into his eyes with accidental, painful precision.

‘There is a woman,’ he rasped, and Daniel half turned to the crumpled car before he continued. ‘You must tell her what has happened.’

‘The police . . .’ Daniel began.

‘Ssst,’ the man hissed like a snake. ‘Will you help me?’ The pale eyes held Daniel’s with a strength that seemed hypnotic and he found himself nodding.

‘I have . . . have the ticket in my . . . wallet. You must go and meet her in my place. Tell her I was coming. That she was right.’

‘Ticket to where?’ Daniel had asked.

‘Paris,’ gasped the man.

How strange the word had sounded, spoken in the hot air, the end of it caught by the harsh flat arc of a crow’s cry rising in the spare distance. ‘Paris?’ Daniel echoed, relieved, because of course no one could expect him to go to Paris.

‘I was to meet her on July seven.’

‘But you must have a friend who could call to tell her you have had an accident . . .’ Again the rattling laugh, this time with a bleak edge. ‘I could . . . call her,’ Daniel offered at last.

The light eyes fixed on his face. For a moment, Daniel thought there was a radiance behind them, something struggling to blaze out. But perhaps it was no more than a matter of contrasts: the white-hot light and the tanned skin. Even so, he felt the touch of those eyes like a cold draught moving across his face.

When the man answered, the grain of his voice was rougher, as if the smooth surface of it were being sanded away by pain. ‘I do not have a telephone number nor any address for her. Only the date and the name of the café where we were to meet.’

Daniel blinked, feeling as if a genie had appeared to grant three wishes. Only it was one wish, and he must grant it. ‘Maybe she won’t come . . .’

‘She will come,’ the man said. He had begun to shiver slightly like a snake-bit cat Daniel had once seen. ‘We were to meet . . .’ the man whispered, ‘in the café where I first saw her. Such an absurd . . . name – The Smoking Dog – Rue de Gris. July seven, at dusk. I thought she was mad but she said she would be there, and that knowing this, I would have to come. She was right. Tell her that. I would have come to her.’ After a pause he added, ‘The café has . . . had a view of Sacré-Coeur.’



Daniel had looked up the French words in a phonetic dictionary. Rue de Gris merely meant Grey Street, and Sacré-Coeur was probably Sacred Heart Basilica. He had looked up the street on a map of Paris and found that there were seven different Grey Streets, but only one that would afford a view of the basilica.



Somewhere in the hotel a baby began to cry, and Daniel turned away from the window. He felt wide awake because back home it was early afternoon. The thought that his sense of time connected him to Australia reassured him. He heard men’s voices in the street below, the words unintelligible, a hard blat of some other language. Daniel took up the television control on the bedside console, pressed the mute button and channel-surfed. Usually he found it soothing to see people talking silently, gesticulating and laughing, cooking and singing or driving along roads. But tonight – today – for the first time, the images seemed too personal, too full of meanings he did not want to puzzle out.

He lay back and watched the play of light reflected on the wall instead, wondering as he had done before if the dead man and the woman he had promised to meet had been lovers.

‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ his mother might have said. A tough, stocky, practical little farmer’s wife, she had performed a staggering number of daily duties, her favourite being the care of a small beloved flock of hysterical silkies. Yet Daniel had never seen his mother as a domestic slave. She had been a woman with a sharp edge to her tongue and strong opinions, which she did not hesitate to air, and she had ruled the house with an iron will.

Discipline had been the provenance of his mother, too. She had wielded a willow switch with the same determined efficiency she had applied to cleaning the rugs, as if misbehaviour could be beaten out in much the same way as dust. Age had bent and narrowed his father, faded his blue eyes, but his mother had become more and more solid, without ever being fat, more densely energetic.

David fancied that in another life his father might have been a librarian or a scholar in a university, for he loved to read, but his mother could only ever have been a farmer’s wife. Daniel had loved his father, and respected him, but it had always seemed a waste of time to bother wading through a lot of words written by someone he didn’t know when he could be roaming hills rippling with dry grass, or swimming in the tea-coloured water of the creek. It did not matter to him that he was barely average at school, since he was to inherit and work the farm.

Of course it hadn’t turned out that way. His father had overextended himself to buy some long-overdue farm equipment and then there were a couple of bad drought years, and then a year of floods, and the bank foreclosed. They had gone under with barely a struggle, and Daniel’s mind stuttered to the weeks of packing, to watching his mother crating her beloved silkies for sale. Daniel hated everything about the unit in suburbia to which they had moved, but he knew his parents needed his income to help pay the mortgage.

He had gone to work in a trucking company; then, three months after they had moved into town, his father had a heart attack on the way to church, crashing the ute and killing himself and his wife both. She had died on impact, but his father had lingered three days, though he had never become conscious.

Daniel had been glad it had happened so suddenly and unexpectedly, and that they had died together. But missing them was a deep ache that had never eased. Memories kept jumping at him, forcing him to remind himself that his parents were gone and that he would never see them again, never feel his father’s gentleness or watch him tamp down the tobacco in his pipe, never see his mother’s ferocious energy or taste her golden-syrup dumplings. He had left the city, for the house had been sold up to pay their debts, and so had begun his long drift from job to job, looking for some indefinable thing that would make him feel that same sense of rightness and belonging that he had felt on the old farm. The smell of eggs and bacon on dark winter mornings and the bitter aftertaste of strong sweet tea in the bunkhouse kitchens brought the home breakfasts back to him with such clarity that the present had sometimes seemed a thin, sour dream.

If he was honest, it was his father he missed most, that quiet presence. You never got the feeling he was just waiting for you to finish talking so he could offer advice or an opinion. In fact, he said very little and seldom offered solutions or even suggestions. Mostly he asked mild questions and listened. It seemed little enough, and yet at one time or another practically every one of the neighbours had come to him for advice. People would invariably go away feeling less angry, less desperate, or just plain cheerful. Daniel had consciously modelled himself on his father. He had striven to be patient, gentle, courteous and honest. He was not and never would be his father, yet he believed that he had grown into a man his father would have at least respected.

How many times had he imagined telling his father about seeing the smoke and then the overturned silver Mercedes crumpled against the stand of eucalypts? How many times had he described kneeling beside the big foreigner in his supple steel-dust suit and the strange conversation that followed? The gradual realisation the man was going to die. In his imaginings, as in life, Daniel’s father never once interrupted his tale. Nor, when Daniel stopped, had he offered opinions or advice.

Yet Daniel had come to understand he must go to Paris. And so he had flown across the world, violating time. Was it possible to return after coming so far, he suddenly wondered. The thought was like a kidney punch and he stumbled mentally into a vivid memory of the way the dying man’s eyes had grown more and more pale.



‘It was so hard to trust anyone back then,’ the man had said. ‘You never knew who would repeat your words, or how they might be used. You could never be high enough to feel safe. That was what made it so extraordinary, that she trusted me. She told me it was because I had offered her an ultimate truth. I do not think you can imagine how rare truth was in that time. I answered that truth was what I wanted from her and she laughed at me. She knew it was a lie. All I told her were lies, but she said that when we met again, she would show me the truth I had shown to her.

‘You must go in my place and tell her she was right when she said I would need her . . .’ He stifled a groan.



There had been something almost military in that iron control, Daniel thought. The man would have been in considerable pain, the ambulance people had told him after they came, explicit because he was a stranger to the dead man. It was a wonder he had been able to talk at all. Even if they had arrived in time, they could not have saved him, they said, except to administer a mind-obliterating dose of morphine, a little death to ease the bigger death that was looming.

It was the police, when he gave his report several days later, who told him the man’s name was Tibor Esterhazy and that he was Hungarian and eighty-five.

Daniel could hardly credit it. He would have taken him for sixty-five at most. The man had been a permanent resident in Australia for over fifty years, and had not once left since his arrival. He had probably been a dissident, given the date of his arrival, a political exile, or so one of the younger police had observed.

Later that same night it had occurred to Daniel that if the man had made an appointment to meet the woman when they had been in Paris, that agreement had to have been made more than fifty years ago; the man would only have been thirty-five. That was the moment when it struck him that the woman might be dead. After all, if she had been thirty when the meeting had been agreed to, she would be eighty now.

The following week, when he had gone into town to sign his deposition, a policeman told him of the ticket found in the man’s coat. The destination was Paris, and the date of departure was July 5, two days before the date upon which the dead man had claimed he was to meet the woman. The ticket was proof that his story had not been delirium.

He had asked the man if the woman he was to meet was German too, assuming that was the man’s nationality, but instead of answering, the man closed his eyes and died. It seemed to Daniel that he had witnessed that death a thousand times since it happened. It had affected him profoundly, though he did not truly grieve for the dead man. It was the fact that the man had been a stranger, yet witnessing his death had felt so intimate. Perhaps that was why he contacted the police to find out when and where the funeral would take place, wondering if a friend or acquaintance would attend to whom he might confide the dead man’s last wish. But no one came other than a policeman who was there for the same reason. The policeman told him the man had left money enough for his funeral. The remainder of his property was bequeathed to a charity that cared for children. It seemed that he had not worked at all, having come to Australia with a collection of antique family jewellery he had sold, investing and living off the proceeds.

‘It seems impossible that a man could have lived so long without making any sort of connections,’ Daniel had murmured.

‘You would be surprised how many people live that way,’ the policeman had responded.

It was as he stood and watched the earth shovelled onto the coffin that Daniel had pictured a woman coming to a café to sit and wait for a man who would never arrive. In the imagining, she was very frail, a female version of his father, emanating patience and gentleness. She was a woman who you could see would wait out the day, hope slowly fading, until she understood that the man she was expecting would not come.

Another thing that the dying man had muttered floated though his mind. ‘There is no greater intimacy than truth, boy. Remember that.’

He woke to broad daylight and showered again, thinking of Mick, who was the stocky Irish owner of the small boxing gym which Daniel had joined when he was fifteen. His father had not understood that the attraction was not the violence or the fact that one man triumphed over another. Daniel had liked the gallantry of a sport where two men could drink and slap one another on the back between bouts. Mick symbolised all that was best about boxing, and their relationship, which had begun with respect and admiration, had become, though the word would never be spoken between them, love. Daniel knew he had disappointed Mick when he decided not to go professional, and it was love for Mick that had kept him sparring with young newcomers, trying to teach aggressive young cocks the need to be smart fighters rather than street sluggers. But few of them had the deep gallantry that Daniel considered to be the secret of greatness.

After Daniel’s parents died, Mick tried to talk him into working for the gym, but Daniel refused and started drifting from one seasonal job to the next and from property to property. He hadn’t seen much of Mick the last couple of years, but he had told the older man of his decision to go to Paris, and why, and asked if he would take care of his quarter horse, Snowy.

‘It’s like . . . like I picked up a stone when that man died, Mick, and I have to find the place to put it down,’ he’d said.

‘It’s a deep thing to watch a person die,’ Mick had murmured, a stern, distant look in his brown eyes. And Daniel had remembered that once, earlier in Mick’s career, one of his fighters had died in the ring from a ruptured aneurism. Mick still sent Christmas cards to the widow, though twenty years had passed.

‘How will you know who she is?’ Mick had asked in the car, having insisted on driving Daniel to the airport.

‘She’ll be alone and she’ll be looking for someone.’

‘She might not be alone,’ Mick had said. ‘And everyone is looking for someone.’

Prophetic words, Daniel thought, walking through the streets, again struck by the age of the city.

Many of the buildings had obviously been sandblasted or repainted in recent times, and though most buildings were crumbling at the edges and grey with filth, on every street there was at least one building undergoing a facelift surrounded by a carapace of scaffolding and billowing plastic. He was startled when asphalt suddenly gave way to smooth, oyster-grey cobbles, but he made no effort to orientate himself using the map. He was beginning to become aware of a flow along the streets, like a hidden current.

He turned a corner and collided with a couple kissing languidly. They seemed oblivious to the impact. You didn’t see kissing like that back home, other than at the movies. Young people kissed in the street, but with defiant self-consciousness rather than passion. Not that Daniel knew too much about kissing or passion. He had kissed exactly three women in his life, and one of them had been a whore who had taken pity on his mortification over his youthful inadequacy.

The other boys had not believed his tale, claiming that prostitutes never kiss. Even now he did not know what to make of the fact that a prostitute had broken what seemed to be some sort of cardinal rule and kissed him, or what he had done to deserve it.

He passed through a square and there was a group of black men talking, dressed in expensive suits. They began laughing, flashing confident white teeth, and Daniel found himself wondering what it would be like at home if the Aboriginal men who drifted into town to drink and socialise in the park or the malls dressed in suits like that. There was something so crushed and battered about the old derelicts you saw drinking in the streets, no matter how aggressive or strident they might be about native title and the disputes it had caused in some Aboriginal communities.

Daniel walked for hours, his mind flicking back and forth between life on his parents’ farm and his current errand, as if it was trying to weave a tapestry connecting the two. It was only when he entered a street that showed him the sun low in the sky that he looked for his watch and realised he had left it in his room. Twice he asked the time of passersby before someone lifted a wrist to show him their watch face.

It was just past five, so Daniel reached for his map. It was gone; he must have dropped it. Fortunately he had noticed maps under glass at bus stops and busy intersections, but it was six o’clock before he found one that was readable and traced out a path from where he was to Grey Street, near the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. The sky had clouded over, and it seemed as if dusk would come sooner than seven. He walked swiftly, thinking there was something primitive about arranging a meeting at dusk.

The roads had grown busier than before, and people walked purposefully, their faces abstracted by end-of-day thoughts. Daniel found that no matter which way he walked or which side of the pavement he chose, he was moving against the flow of human traffic. Several times he had to step into a doorway to let a group of people pass before he could continue.

When he found that one of the doorways belonged to a small café, he realised he had not eaten for the entire day, though he felt no hunger.

He came to a great square pool of water in a mall. Several mechanical devices were spitting, stirring, ploughing or slashing the water.

‘You see that one?’ a woman told another woman in English. ‘I call it the jealousy machine. See how stupidly it threshes at the water; how ferociously it moves. Yet it goes nowhere.’

The words provoked the memory of a fight Daniel had seen between two Murri men in a camp far from towns and police. He had met them on walkabout during a boundary ride and had been invited to join them. The men had begun by talking but had ended up almost killing one another over a woman they both wanted. They had fought with a ferocity that Daniel had never witnessed between two white men, in the boxing ring or out of it. There had been no sense of display or competition. They had fought almost silently and for nothing, since the woman had chosen another man.

A derelict tapped at his arm, startling him into the present, and he gave the old man the coins in his pocket. His feet were burning and he was thinking he would have to find another illuminated map when he saw a metal sign that read Rue de Gris.

As he entered the street, he noticed two men standing on the corner watching him. Both wore their hair cut so short he could see their scalps shining pinkly through the black stubble and one had HATE tattooed on his upper arm. He nodded to Daniel, a half smile curving thin, soft-looking lips, as if they shared a secret. Daniel’s neck prickled as he passed the pair, and he had the sudden absurd notion that they were watching to see where he went.

It was the sun and lack of food that were making him imagine things, he told himself. A headache drilled into the top of his skull like a hot needle.

He came to the end of the street and realised he must have walked right past the café. Only when he retraced his steps did he understand there had been nothing to miss. The street was short and the only thing in it, aside from residences and apartments, was a smart boutique with a hat draped in a swathe of emerald cloth. Standing outside the shop he noticed a small tobacconist on the other side of the road. He was about to turn away when his eyes fell on the sign above the door.

The Smoking Dog.

He crossed the road and went inside. The man behind the counter spoke and when Daniel did not answer, he looked up. He had thinning salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from a slight widow’s peak, but his brows were so thick and black they looked false. He raised them enquiringly as he asked in accented but very good English what Daniel wanted.

‘The name of this shop. The Smoking Dog,’ Daniel told him. ‘I came from Australia to find a restaurant by that name. In this street.’

The owner’s eyes slitted, but perhaps it was only that the coiling, heavy-looking smoke from his cheroot had got in his eyes. ‘There was a restaurant here before the war,’ he said. ‘It was burnt out. It was still a mess when I moved here from Estonia and took it over.’

‘Burned?’ Daniel prompted.

‘It was a Resistance stronghold. They were betrayed and the Boche took away everyone they found here, then burned it.’ Daniel thought of the policewoman who suggested the dead man had probably been a political refugee. Was it possible that he and the woman had been in the Resistance and had been taken by the Germans for interrogation? If the man had been the informant, and the woman had realised the truth, it would explain why she had issued her strange invitation, talking of truth and lies instead of love. But when could they have had that conversation? At the club when they had been rounded up, or later wherever they had been taken to be interrogated? Or even after they had been freed? The woman might have realised the man had been the traitor and confronted him with it, concluding with her invitation. Which in turn might have caused the man to flee to the other side of the world, fearing vengeance by the Resistance. But why make a date so far in the future? And what was it she had intended to give him at that meeting? Proof of betrayal?

Realising he had been standing there like a fool, his head full of wild speculations, Daniel gathered his wits and said, ‘I was supposed to meet a woman in the restaurant this evening.’

‘You want a woman?’ There was a mocking note in the man’s voice.

‘I am to meet a specific woman. She made the arrangement,’ Daniel said, hoping the man would not ask her name.

‘Have you heard the saying about sleeping dogs?’ asked the man. ‘Forget about a woman who makes an appointment in a place that doesn’t exist. Go back where you belong.’

‘I’m not sure where I belong anymore,’ Daniel murmured, for the man’s words reminded him of his mother. He felt a sudden dizziness at the depth of his words, at the unexpected abyss they opened up in him.

The man said, ‘You can see the old restaurant, if you want. The shop is only a frontage. I couldn’t afford to refurbish the whole place and there was no need. A tobacconist’s shop should be cosy.’ The man stood up from his stool, becoming in an instant extraordinarily tall. He opened a door behind the counter and Daniel entered the darkness of an enormous warehouse-sized room whose walls retained striped sections of what once might have been some sort of giant mural. There were round tables and a few chairs pushed against one wall, and he had a strange sense that he had stepped back in time, or at least into another dimension.

‘The whole place was done up to look like a circus,’ the man said, relighting his black cheroot. ‘The name of the place comes from a famous sideshow act with a dog. It was a popular place among intellectuals and students, a good cover for secret meetings and the passing on of information and microfilms and all the rest of it. You can still smell the smoke. That’s why I got it so cheap.’

‘If a woman comes in asking about a man, would you give her a note from me?’

The tobacconist nodded to indicate that Daniel should return to the shop. As he turned, Daniel heard, quite distinctly, a gasp or a cough. He glanced back but there was no movement. The shadows hung like frozen smoke, darkening with every minute that passed. The tobacconist gave him a little push and they went into the shop that had also darkened in their brief absence.

The proprietor closed the door and reached for a panel of switches on the wall while Daniel dug from his wallet the receipt the receptionist had given him. He scrawled his name on the back of it, along with the name of the dead man. He did not know the name of the woman and he told himself he had done all he could. She would come, or she wouldn’t. The lights flickered on and the tobacconist brushed a brown-stained forefinger over the words written on the receipt, but he did not read them.

‘If she comes, tell her I will come in again tomorrow in the morning,’ Daniel said. He thanked the man and went out into the street. He had walked several blocks before he noticed a small boy shadowing him. Clad in scruffy, too-big clothes of the hand-me-down rather than the American-street-cool variety, his skin was the colour of dark honey and his eyes liquid tar, the lashes as long as those of a newborn calf.

‘Want to go to circus?’ the boy asked, seemingly unabashed. Sair-coos, he said.

‘Circus?’ Daniel echoed, wondering if he had misheard. ‘What kind of circus is there in the middle of a city?’

‘A ver’ zmall sair-coos,’ the boy said, and they laughed together.

‘Why not?’ Daniel said, liking his cheek. The boy looked puzzled, so he added, ‘Yes.’

The boy beamed at him. ‘Okay!’

Daniel felt suddenly lighter. He had done the best for the dying man, after all. ‘Let’s go then,’ he said.

The boy took the lead, walking quickly. Several streets later, they turned into a lane that sloped down to a small square where, to Daniel’s amazement, he could see the dim yet certain shape of a circus tent, though it did not seem to be properly circular. There were lanterns swaying around its uneven rim, but they gave off very little light, so that he could only see the sections of the tent where they hung, blurring away into the growing darkness. The sight of it reminded Daniel of what the tobacconist had said about the decor of the café during the war, and he shivered a little at the coincidence.

The lane became wide, shallow, uneven steps and Daniel came along behind the boy cautiously, forced to concentrate on his footing. When he reached the bottom, he was startled to find his young guide had vanished. He hesitated, and heard music, long sobbing notes that roused in him an unexpected and potent hunger to be home, riding the flat red plains. Moving closer to the tent, he had the unsettling feeling that the longing evoked by the song was the same as his longing for his parents, who were irrevocably lost to him.

‘Shall I whisper your future?’ a voice asked by his ear, and Daniel started violently.

He turned to see a gypsy woman with a small baby in her arms, sitting cross-legged in an opening in the side of the tent. She seemed to be sitting on a platform, but he could not make out what was behind her.

His silence seemed to anger her, and she sat up stiffly, eyes flashing. ‘But you have no time for Calia, have you? You want the main attraction! Another mooncalf come lusting for the Dove Princess. Fool! There is no future in her for any of you.’ She was so angry she was almost spitting, and Daniel, taken aback, wondered if she was mad. Yet her words made him curious enough to decide that he would go into the tent.

The gypsy gave an angry grunt when she saw him glance to where a wooden sign had been erected, marking the entrance to the tent. She bared a plump golden breast with a dark nipple. The baby seemed to scent it and butted and struggled until it had the nipple fastened in its mouth, then began to suckle hard. Embarrassed by the bared breast and the derision in the woman’s eyes, Daniel made his way to the entrance and pushed the closed flap aside. Light flowed out past him in bright streams as he stepped into a sort of curtained corridor that followed the outer curve of the tent to the left. He tried to push the curtain aside so that he could go into the main part of the tent, but the fabric was heavier than it looked and there was no opening. He gave in and went along the corridor. The outer wall swayed and brushed against him as the wind gusted, and a heavy musty smell puffed out of the cloth. The music he had heard grew steadily louder until he came to an opening in the inner wall of the corridor, through which he could see the main section of the tent. It was smaller than it had looked from the outside, because of the outer corridor that took up a good portion of the space.

Bright lights centred on an empty circle of sandy ground that ran up against the tent wall on the farthest side of the space. On the near side of the circle were curving rows of bench seats, separated from the circular stage by long wooden bolsters wrapped in red satin. There were not more than fifteen people in the audience, most sitting alone. Daniel glanced around, looking for someone to pay, and saw a lean gypsy man approaching with a leather pouch slung about his neck. Daniel paid what he was asked, fumbling at the unfamiliar bills, distracted by a high-wire artist he had just noticed, clad in glittering red and gold, spiralling down on a rope. Obviously she had come to the end of her performance, for when she reached the ground, she stepped away from the rope and bowed to a smattering of applause. Then she ran lightly away and vanished through a slit in the tent wall. The strange, complex tent must have been constructed in this way to allow a backstage area.

Daniel took a seat at one end of the front row of benches as a man in a black cloak lined in gold silk stepped through the slit onto the sandy stage. His long, thick, red-brown hair was drawn tightly into a tail that hung down his back like the brush of a fox. His face was narrow and his teeth flashed white with a hint of gold as he bowed gracefully. The boy who had shown Daniel to the circus pushed through the slit after him, wheeling a glittering gold casket as big as a fridge on wheels. A magician, Daniel thought, as the boy withdrew, and he set himself to watch for sleight of hand.

Cymbals crashed and another boy appeared, so like the first as to be a younger brother, leading a small white goat. There was a burst of violin music and the fox magician began to speak. His words were foreign and incomprehensible to Daniel, but it was clear from his movements that he was describing his prowess as a tamer of the most ferocious sorts of beasts. Then, very slowly and theatrically, he opened the mouth of the goat and pushed the top of his head gently against its teeth.

It ought to have been funny. That music and the seriousness of the cloaked man allied to the symbolic offering of the bright head to the blunt teeth of the goat. Certainly the plump woman nearest Daniel gave a bark of muffled laughter and a young man with a shaven head and ripped T-shirt giggled wildly, hitting his leg and rocking back and forth. But Daniel found that he was not able to laugh or even to smile.

The goat was led away, and the violin music swelled as the man opened the case, unfolding its sides. Gypsy music. Daniel’s father had loved classical music, but had said that most of it was like beauty prowling in a cage. This was wild music and Daniel felt a sudden sharp ache that his father would never hear it.

The spotlight split and the music stopped abruptly.

For a long, straining moment, all that could be heard was the wind and the flapping of the tent walls and roof. Daniel saw that the opened case had become a red velvet table upon which lay gleaming rows of daggers.

A pale, strikingly lovely, dark-haired woman clad in a skin-coloured body suit stepped through the slit in the tent into the light. Instead of looking naked, the skin suit made her look like a sexless doll. The boy came darting out after her to fasten about her slender waist the flexible frame of a crinoline, which reached the ground, caging her lower body and legs.

A movement drew Daniel’s gaze to the fox magician. He took up one of the daggers, kissed the blade and raised it over his head, looking all the while at the woman who lifted her arm, a slender pale stalk. The gypsy violinist began to play a swift, staggering tune until, without warning, the man threw the dagger straight at the woman. Even as people in the audience cried out in shock and alarm, the dagger exploded into feathers and suddenly it was a bird fluttering to her uplifted hand. A white dove.

The audience applauded in relief and delight as the woman lowered her arm. The bird hopped from her fingers into one of the gridded squares of the crinoline and began preening itself. She lifted her arm again. The music played and another dagger flew and was transformed into feathers and beak and bird. The music quickened and slowed and dipped and wailed as dagger after dagger flew, unerring and deadly, from man to woman, always to transform into doves until her lower body was hidden in a dress of living birds. It was an extraordinary sight, but the music went on, striving ever higher, and the birds began to land on the woman’s torso and on her slender shoulders and along her arms, which she now held out on either side of her at shoulder height. There must be a net over the body suit, Daniel guessed. The doves flew to her head, too, but their grasp on the silky braids was less secure and occasionally one of the birds slipped and had to claw its way back into place. Daniel noticed a small streak of red on the woman’s forehead. He told himself it was only a scratch, a minor accident in a masterly act and nothing more, but there was something in the way the woman stood, the defencelessness of her, the seeming nakedness and the way she offered herself to the man and his daggers, that troubled him.

It had taken only a few moments, his senses told him, but Daniel was sweating hard, as if the performance had lasted an hour. There were more birds and more scratches. None were serious, but the blood on her white skin was very vivid. There was a cruel beauty in the spectacle and the possibility that a knife might not become a dove in time or that the doves were daggers after all. That possibility was provoked by the tiny smears of blood. He was repelled by the thought that the blood should be part of the act. For some reason he found himself remembering the two Murri men engaged in their silent deadly fight, and the savage beauty of their desperate and hopeless desire for a woman who wanted neither of them. The beauty, he thought now, came from the hopelessness; the fact that both had known the fight would make no difference.

Watching the dress of living feathers thicken, he wondered suddenly what his father would say of the performance. But for the first time in his life, Daniel found he could not summon up the older man’s face. The conjuring of doves began to seem endless to Daniel, and yet there was no monotony in it. He would have to be a monster to be bored by something so horribly beautiful.

Outside the tent, the wind was howling, and the roof billowed and heaved in convulsive shudders. There were more than a hundred doves on the woman now, and the weight of the crinoline must have been considerable. Yet she did not buckle or show any sign of strain. The doves gradually covered her arms and her neck and hair until only her face was visible.

The violin changed and the last dagger flew straight at her face, became a final dove that landed there somehow, obscuring her. Daniel thought of claws sinking into white skin, gouging, finding purchase, and he started to his feet, but before he could cry out, the music abruptly ceased. He froze and for a moment there was only the sound of the wind. Everything was in motion – the tent, the air, the shifting, jostling doves. The only fixed point was the black-clad magician with his glimmering foxtail of hair, and so all eyes fixed on him, the eye of the storm.

Slowly his hands lifted until he stood as the woman had stood, mirroring the shuddering, dove-covered mass, and then the doves rose up in a churning coil of feathers, swirling and widening at the top until they formed a spinning funnel, a white whirlwind. Then they exploded outward, and in their midst there was only a falling drift of feathers gleaming in the lights.

The woman had vanished.

The bright lights blinked off as suddenly as the music had stopped, plunging the tent into darkness, then two lanterns were hung, one either side of the entrance which was now, perforce, an exit. After a few forlorn claps, people began to rise and make their way outside. The sudden end of the show had left Daniel feeling off-balance and he remained seated to gather himself. His heart was pounding even as he told himself that it had all been a trick of some kind. But he did not believe it. The blood had been real. He was sure of it. The boy who had brought him to the circus came to sit beside him.

‘You like?’ he asked, grinning, but his eyes were serious. It was as if the two of them had made a bargain and he was checking the details of their agreement.

‘Why does she let him hurt her . . .’ Daniel began, and then stopped, not sure what he meant to ask.

‘That is what is always being asked,’ the boy interrupted gleefully and ambiguously. ‘You ask her. Maybe she will answer. You want?’

Daniel realised the boy was offering to bring him to the woman, and found himself nodding. The boy beamed and rose and Daniel did the same. His body ached the way it sometimes did after days of riding. They made their way through the seats and he stumbled a little in the near darkness, for his eyes would not adjust. The pale woman in her dove dress seemed to have imprinted her image on his retina, so that whenever he blinked, he saw her pallid form.

The boy preceded him to one of the exits but instead of leading Daniel outside, he lifted a flap in the blind end of the cloth corridor to reveal a long, narrow chamber furnished with a low table, two battered kitchen chairs and a worn couch. Daniel let himself be ushered through the flap into unexpected warmth. Left alone, he turned to examine the chamber. A half-drunk bottle of red wine stood on the floor, glowing red in the light of a lantern suspended over the table from an old dressing-gown cord. A plastic fast-food container on the table was half filled with cigarette butts and the air smelled of old ash and fumes from a kerosene heater. Daniel was about to sit when a flap at the other end of the space opened and the fox-haired magician entered. He had stripped off his cape and wore dark jeans and a crumpled open-necked blue shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal strong forearms and sinewy wrists covered in the same wiry red hairs that showed at his throat.

‘You want woman. Sit and we discuss,’ he commanded in guttural English.

Belatedly it occurred to Daniel that he had misunderstood what the boy had been suggesting. He had been an idiot. ‘I am sorry, I think there has been a mistake,’ he said, beginning to rise.

‘No mistake, you come to Paris for a woman,’ said the fox man, narrowing his eyes.

‘No . . . Yes, but to see a specific woman. I have arranged to meet her,’ Daniel stammered, hoping the man would not ask her name.

‘Arranging with me for time with Dove Princess,’ said the fox magician.

Daniel rarely lost his temper and now, feeling it stir, he realised how much he had disliked the performance, how much he disliked this man. The realisation calmed him. ‘I would like to meet your assistant,’ he said evenly. ‘She is very brave.’

‘Assistant,’ mocked the fox magician. Then he sneered and added, ‘She is very beautiful.’

Daniel flushed. Almost he wished the fox magician would attack him so that he could act instead of sitting here tangling up his tongue like a fool. Then he told himself that he was a fool indeed, for whatever was happening here in this strange little circus, it was none of his affair. What was he doing here? He said quietly, ‘Perhaps you can pass on my thanks for the performance.’

The other man shrugged and seemed to relax. ‘You wan’ a wine?’

Daniel hesitated. He wanted to leave but he did not know the words that would release him. He nodded and moved to sit on the couch after the fox man pointed to it and poured wine into two plastic cups he drew out from beneath the table.

‘Where is she?’ Daniel asked, when he took the cup of wine.

‘She vanished.’ The fox magician gave him a sly smile before drinking a mouthful of wine. ‘Is gift she learned in childhood.

Has been ver’ useful.’

‘It was a trick,’ Daniel said slowly, setting down his cup untouched.

The magician put down his cup too and reached out in one smooth gesture to turn Daniel’s hand palm up with a quick strong twist. He stared at it intently. ‘Here is calloused working hand and yet it is hand of child who knows nothing.’ He looked into Daniel’s face, and for a moment the cunning in his expression slipped like a mask that had nearly been dislodged, as he murmured, ‘Nothing more than a child’s pain, perhaps . . . which is far from nothing.’

Suddenly his English was perfect, though accented, and Daniel stared at him, shaken and confused. ‘What is all this? Why does she let you hurt her? She must have been half-smothered at the end.’

‘Art requires pain,’ the fox magician said, but absently, as if his mind were elsewhere. ‘Tell me where have you come from, that you seek audience with the Dove Princess?’

‘I’m Australian,’ Daniel said.

‘Ahh. So. A country of children, I think, full of light and thoughtlessness.’ His eyes now seemed to glitter and Daniel saw that they were a very light soft green. ‘And why did you come here?’

‘I came to meet a woman.’

‘You do not truly wish to meet the Dove Princess,’ said the fox magician, cutting him off. ‘She will bring you nothing that you desire.’ His voice was very soft, very serious.

‘I . . . no,’ Daniel stammered.

The magician seemed not to hear him. ‘You think to rescue her. But she is not my victim. I am hers. All of us are her instruments, the boys, the doves, you. She designed the Dove Game.’

‘The blood is a trick?’ Daniel asked.

‘The blood is real. The pain is real. That is how she wants it. She sculpts her own pain.’

‘But that . . . It’s sick . . .’ Without realising it, he had taken up the cup and now wine slopped over the brim onto his hand.

‘It is monstrous,’ the magician agreed wearily. ‘But the blood is what gives the game its power. You see that? Even you could see that.’

‘But . . . why does she do it? Surely not for money?’

‘She says the Dove Game reminds her of a truth she experienced in the camp.’

Daniel found his mouth was dry. ‘She . . . she was in a concentration camp? But that was decades ago. It’s not possible.’

‘She was a child. Children were taken. Not just Jews. Gypsies also. The chosen people prefer to forget that, of course. She was taken from near here. My grandfather was taken, too. That is how she came to join us after the war. He brought her. He said he owed her his life, for she had stolen food for him that kept him from starving. We come here each year on the day that they were taken. She always sends the boy out for men to come and watch her performance, so that she can choose one.’ His sighed. ‘Her mind is gone, of course. There are brilliant shards left, but not much else. She says that one day a man will come, and she will show him the truth that he revealed to her.’

Daniel thought of a foreign man, dying on a remote outback road, and the pale woman in a dress of living doves, and wondered if it was possible that she was the woman he had been sent to meet. It was too much of a coincidence that he had just happened on the circus, he told himself. But then, he had not just happened on it. The boy had come to find him. He seemed to hear the beating of wings and to feel the full living weight of the doves descending on him, their claws cutting into him.

‘The boy who led me here . . .’

‘A pretty little monkey she feeds and pets and sends running to do her errands. When we are here, I think her madness worsens, and that is why she sends him for men. They want to meet her, of course, after the show. They offer money and we take their money, but she never meets them. None of them is the man she is seeking.’

‘I need to see her,’ Daniel said urgently.

‘I told you . . .’ the magician said.

‘You don’t understand. The man she is looking for is dead. There was an accident and he asked me to come in his place. To meet her as they had agreed.’

‘I suppose it was inevitable that eventually she would summon up a man whose madness matched her own,’ the fox magician said in a resigned voice. He rose in a fluid movement. ‘Go home, boy. The Dove Princess is not for you.’

‘Please, she promised to tell him the truth that she learned . . .’ Daniel said, no longer sure of his motives.

‘No,’ the fox magician said urgently, but he was staring past Daniel.

Daniel felt the air stir behind him. He would have turned but a cool hand descended on the back of his neck, staying the movement. ‘Leave us.’ The woman spoke in English, her voice husky and accented. The magician bowed and withdrew.

The woman spoke again. ‘I have lived only to give back the truth that was given to me.’ Daniel felt a knife at his neck, like the tip of a bird’s claw, as she asked, ‘Do you desire the truth I offer?’

Many things fluttered through Daniel’s mind. The sound of madness in the woman’s voice like the beating of a bird trapped in a chimney; the way his father’s breath had rattled as he died in hospital; the sound of the crow’s call on the day the foreign man died; the way the desert air shimmered and transported visions; the velvet touch of Snowy’s muzzle against his palm. And then, at last, the sight of a woman wearing a dress of doves, who lived for a truth that was pain.

And he grew old with understanding.

He turned towards her, not caring how the edge of the knife slid shallowly into his skin. The woman was very beautiful but much older than she had looked on the stage, her skin white and finely wrinkled. Her large eyes were dark and full of shadows and he wondered if she would see him through them. He felt the dribble of blood on his collarbone and the sting of the air against the tiny wound.

‘He wasn’t in the Resistance, was he?’ he asked. ‘He didn’t betray you. He was one of them, the one that tortured you.’

How still her face became, like a skull. ‘He asked me over and over for the truth. He said he would use pain to teach it to me,’ she rasped. ‘He was an artist of pain. I told him that he would one day long for the truth that he had given me, and that he would have to come to me for it, because no one else could give it to him. I told him to meet me where we met. That I would come on the day we had met, every year, until he returned.’

‘He was coming,’ Daniel said. ‘He had an accident. Before he died he asked me to come in his place. To tell you that you were right.’

‘Who are you to him?’ she asked fiercely. ‘His son? His grandson?’

‘He had no wife, no children, no friends,’ Daniel said. ‘I am no one – a stranger he talked to as he was dying.’

‘I waited for nothing, then,’ the woman said.

‘I came,’ Daniel said.

She laughed hollowly. ‘You want the truth I would have given him?’ she hissed. ‘You do not want that truth, for once you have had it, there is nothing else.’

‘There is nothing else,’ Daniel said, feeling that all his life had been leading him to this moment of perfect clarity and purpose.

The Dove Princess gazed down at him and madness and hope and confusion churned in her lustrous eyes, then there was pity and she said, almost lightly, ‘But you are only a child.’ And swift as a striking bird, she drew the edge of the dagger across her throat. A red mouth widened in a leer as her head fell back.

Daniel heard a scream and knew it was his. He tried to rise, but his legs would not hold him. His head swam and he fell. The world spun and the fox magician appeared in the centre of it, once again the eye of the storm. His mouth moved but Daniel could not hear the words. A dark sea engulfed him.



When he woke he was in hospital, having been found lying unconscious on the cobbled pavement, unable to be roused. Two police came and heard his story. They told him he had been the victim of a scam. He had given the gypsies all the information they needed to dupe him. They did not say he had been a fool, but it was in their faces. That he had drunk wine that was drugged, that his wallet had been taken, that it was his own fault. There was no dead woman they assured him when he insisted. No body. No permit had been issued for a small gypsy circus anywhere in the city.

When they released him, Daniel went back to the square where the tent had been. There was no sign of it, of course, only a drift of white feathers in a gutter that might have belonged to any of the hundreds of roosting pigeons in the eaves of buildings around the square.

He sat down on the edge of a fountain. It was very hot. His temples pulsed with the heat as two boys on rollerblades sped by. A woman passed, dragging a screaming, red-faced child; an ambulance clanged past, then another. Or maybe they were fire trucks. Daniel tried to picture his parents and found their faces with difficulty. It seemed to him that they were drawing rapidly away from him, as if they had boarded a train and were leaving him standing on the platform.

He thought about the man who had died in the accident, and wondered if he had truly been a Nazi soldier who had interrogated and tortured a child to the point where a sort of madness had fused their lives so that they had made some strange impossible pact to die together, or if, somewhere in this city, a woman was mourning the failure of her lover or friend to meet her after a long parting. Perhaps both endings could be encompassed. Or neither.

In the antiseptic hospital night he had dreamed of the woman; dreamed that she had embraced him in her dove dress. He had not been able to tell where her flesh ended and the frantic dove trembling began. He had felt her touch as a cool hand, as claws, as a knife.

Had she cut her throat? Had he dreamed it? Had it been a trick? He would never know the truth.

An elegant old man in a pale suit with a cane came tapping across the square, holding the hand of a boy in a little blue sunsuit. The old man sat carefully on the edge of the fountain, watched by the boy. He sighed and took a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and unwrapped a crust. He spoke to the boy as he crumbled the crust and threw the crumbs in a pale arc. Pigeons began to land on the cobbles and peck at the crumbs and the boy and the old man watched them gather and squabble. Suddenly the boy darted into the midst of the birds, routing them. They fled, fluttering and shrieking into the air. The old man swayed with laughter and the boy ran at the few birds that had waddled hastily to the sidelines, sending them scrambling into the air too. He glanced at the empty cobbles with satisfaction, and then strutted back to his grandfather, who had turned to rinse knotted fingers in the water.

The boy noticed Daniel watching and gave him a long, solemn, assessing stare. Then he smiled conspiratorially.

Daniel smiled back and felt all at once that the shadows that had come to roost in him had been routed, too. He felt sunlight and a clean soft breeze flowing through him.