He paused. “It’s kind of…illegal.”
I pulled away and looked at him. “I think you need to explain.”
“Okay, so my first school term here was not great. French education is pretty intense, and one day, I froze outside school. I just stopped. Couldn’t make myself go in. Martine and Youssef took one look at me and dragged me off with them. They took me down into the catacombs.”
“You mean the place with all the bones?”
He shook his head, explaining that there were no bones in the catacombs he was talking about. Unlike their famous tourist-attraction cousins, these abandoned undergroundquarries were off-limits to visitors. It didn’t stop people from going down into them; urban explorers see a gate or a locked door, and they want to be on the other side. They want to see what ordinary people don’t.
“It changed the way I saw things, being down there,” Nick explained. “You need to know what you’re doing. You need to be resourceful. It’s hard work getting in, and it’s hard work getting back out again. You need to have technical skills. To be good at solving problems. You need to be good under pressure. Every time I come back up safe, I feel like I can take on anything. And there’s a whole community down there. You look out for each other. You help each other.”
“That,” I said. “That’s what I want.”
“Okay,” he said. “But I’m serious. You can’t talk about it to anyone aboveground. It’s against the law to explore the catas, and if you talk about it up here, someone could get in trouble. The rule is, nobody lets a fellow cataphile down.”
I nodded. When you’ve spent as many years hiking as Dad and I have, you’ve gone…off-trail is how I’ll say it, maybe on posted land so remote and uninhabited no one’s ever going to know that you ducked between the fence wires, and you’ve found some places that are hidden and amazing and unspoiled. Those are the ones you don’t talk about with anybody, because the more people who know about them, the less likely those places are to remain amazing. You go to renew your soul, and while you’re there you walk lightly. So I understood what Nick was talking about. I told him that he could count on my silence.
He grinned. “Sympa. Meet me in the lobby on Friday at midnight.” I reached up and kissed him, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Somebody applauded, because France.
Chapter 10
Ten Weeks Ago
The second stop on our Epic Pastry Quest was Comme les Anglais tea salon for its famous mille-feuille. The three of us simultaneously went silent as we took our first bite of the pastry. I put down my fork. “This is one of those life-changing moments, isn’t it?” I asked. Martine grinned. “I mean, the réligieuse was amazing, but I have now eaten the perfect mille-feuille, and I can never leave Paris. It would break me forever to part from such perfection.”
“It is very good,” Noor agreed, “but I think I require a larger sample size before I can determine whether it is perfect.”
Martine laughed. “I will make another spreadsheet that addresses only mille-feuille.”
“That sounds like months of work.” I broke another corner of the pastry off with my fork.
“It is a challenge that I could be persuaded to undertake.”Noor popped another bite of mille-feuille into her mouth as Martine and I nodded. It was a worthy undertaking.
“We should rank them in order of excellence,” Martine said.
Noor nodded. “Of course.” As we scraped the last crumbs off our plates, she told us that she’d painted a new piece the previous day.
“Did you pin it?” I asked. She nodded. The three of us had been getting together when we had a spare hour to photograph and geolocate all Noor’s pieces. We’d also persuaded her to post TikToks of her making drawings in her sketchbook or at her caricature-drawing job on her feeds. She drew constantly, and I never got tired of watching her. She was a natural performer; she’d sketch as we talked, barely glancing at the page, and a drawing would grow under her hand as if by magic. Her followers loved it, too; engagement had gone up since she started posting the videos.
“Is it nearby?” Martine said. We always did field trips to her new pieces.
“Yes,” Noor said as her phone chirped. She read the text, then looked up. “I am sorry; we will have to go see it another time. Right now I must go to the print shop of my friend and pay him all the money I earned last week for prints of myJocondeso I can paste new ones up where the old ones are painted over. And then I must go to work, so I will have enough money to pay for the posters I will need to buy next week. It is very annoying,” she growled.
“There’s got to be a better strategy,” I said.
“I would love a better strategy.” She slipped hermessenger bag across her body and picked up her portable easel. “But what?”
We promised to brainstorm ideas for her. She headed to her friend’s shop, and Martine and I decided to walk home along the Seine rather than take the Métro. It was just cloudy enough to cool the day off, and we tossed ideas back and forth as we walked. A tourist boat cruised by. I looked at the people aboard and realized that to them I was just another Parisienne, having a promenade with her friend. A sense of belonging bloomed in me. I imagined an ongoing Epic Pastry Quest with Martine and Noor. When we were forty, we would still be meeting at pâtisseries, discussing our jobs and families, laughing, being there for each other.
“What about anti-vandal paint?” Martine said, bringing me back to Noor’s problem. It sounded like a great idea, but Google said it was expensive and needed special equipment. Not the best choice for a street artist.
“Maybe we’re thinking about this wrong,” I mused.
Martine nodded. “Perhaps it is not a question of making it impossible to paint over, but of making it impossible to disappear if it is painted over.”
“That’s genius,” I said. “But how would you do it?” We walked on. A group of tourists on Segways passed us.
“I think I know,” she said, stopping just before we entered deep shade under the arch of a bridge. She pointed up. “Do you see that carving? The head of a man? If you painted it black, you would still see the man, yes?”
