The Watchtower

walk away. I closed the book just as a waitress appeared with my breakfast tray. I looked up, hoping to get another glance at the handsome Italian journalist, but he was gone. He’d left his paper, though, and I decided to swipe it to get a clue to his nationality. When I’d retrieved the paper—an International Herald Tribune —I forgot all about trying to find out more about my fellow hotel guest. Staring out from the page was a picture of Amélie, the homeless woman from the Square Viviani. The caption below said that she’d been found dead at dawn, drowned in the Seine.
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    I walked to the Jardin des Plantes thinking about poor Amélie. According to the newspaper she’d been a great beauty once, an artists’ model and mistress of several well-known artists, but she’d fallen on hard times. The reporter implied that her death was most likely a suicide. Pausing above a flight of stairs, I recalled Amélie’s yellow, nicotine-stained fingers, scabby knees, and toothless gums. How sad to go from being a vaunted beauty to a scrawny creature sleeping on park benches. As I passed the Arènes de Lutèce, the remains of a Roman arena, I noticed a few more homeless people gathered on the benches in the adjacent park. I stopped and looked at the scene. There was the man in the Renaissance beret—Amélie’s friend. Did he know that Amélie was gone? Should I speak to him? I took a step into the park, but then I looked across the sandy circle and noticed that someone else was watching the group of homeless people—a tall man in a long coat and wide-brimmed hat. Could it be the same man whom I’d glimpsed last night standing outside the Square Viviani? I took another step forward and the man suddenly retreated into the trees. When I looked back at the area where the homeless people had been gathered, they were all gone. I looked all around the arena for any sign of Amélie’s friend, but finally gave up and continued on my way to the Jardin des Plantes. All along the rue Linné, though, I had the feeling that I was being followed. At the corner of rue Cuvier, next to a fountain featuring snakes, crocodiles, lions, and other exotic beasts, I turned sharply around, half-expecting to surprise the man in the long coat and wide-brimmed hat, but all I found were the scaly snakeheads on the fountain spewing water—and they were creepy enough. Still I couldn’t shake the sensation that something bad was at my heels—or maybe up ahead. After all, I was on my way to a labyrinth—which, I reflected uneasily, was the legendary home of the Minotaur. I wasn’t going to meet a Minotaur, was I?
    I’d met a dragon in New York and survived it, I reflected as I followed a sign pointing to LE LABYRINTHE up a steep path. I passed a tall, feathery tree labeled CÈDRE DU LIBAN and scanned its roots for any portals, but found none. I continued on the hedge-bordered path, which circled around a small but steep hillock. Less a labyrinth than a spiral. Good, I thought, no minotaurs lived in spirals as far as I knew.
    At the top of the path was the cast-iron gazebo, a pretty, whimsical “folly” capped with two interlocking rings that looked like one of the astronomical devices I had been sketching in the Musée des Arts et Métiers recently. When I got to the foot of the stairs leading up into the gazebo, I stood panting slightly from the climb, staring up at the gazebo. On top of it was a bronze arrow pointing northwest. I knew because back in New York an earth elemental named Noam Erdmann, mild-mannered diamond dealer by day, had implanted a compass stone into the palm of my hand. I wondered if the direction meant something. Was it pointing toward where I had to go to meet Monsieur Lutin? How was I supposed to find Monsieur Lutin? Should I stand in the gazebo and shout his name?
    I was about to give it a try when a man in a blue jumpsuit appeared around the last curve of the spiral path waving his arms and shouting something in French. From the official-looking patch on his jumpsuit I guessed he was a gardener, but I couldn’t figure out what he was yelling about.
    But he wasn’t yelling at me; he appeared to be yelling at the hedge. He bent down, thrust his arm into the branches, and pulled out a small, squirming child—a little boy wearing red shorts and a Tintin T-shirt. The gardener deposited the boy on the path and, waving his finger in the boy’s face, delivered an impassioned tirade, the gist of which was