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took up his position every morning to listen to the news he kept a book in his hand, slowly turning the pages, his eyes down, though he never read a word. Joss Le Guern sometimes shot a glance at him in a pause between two headings. Decambrais really didn’t like being looked at by those narrow blue eyes. It felt as if the crier was checking up on him being there, as if he imagined he’d hooked him and worn him down like some lousy fish. Because all the Breton had really done was to apply his brutal fishing skills to the city : he’d cast his net along the boulevard among the shoals of pedestrians and had trawled them in just like they were cod. It occurred to Decambrais that Joss probably couldn’t tell men from mullet any more, seeing the way he treated both kinds of catch, that is to say, making his money by pulling out their guts.
    But Decambrais was hooked, and he had enough insight into human nature to know it. The only thing that made him slightly different from any other outdoor newscast addict was the book in his hand. But wouldn’t he be less of a rat if he were simply to put it away and to assume his new identity, three times a day, as a fish on a line? For he had to confess he had been caught. Despite his education he’d failed to swim against the tide of the street.
    Joss Le Guern was a bit late that morning, which was very unusual. From the corner of his lidded eye Decambrais saw him arrive in a great hurry to rehang
Nor’Easter II
, as the ex-sailor had pretentiously dubbed his gaudy blue-painted box, on the trunk of the plane tree in the square. Decambrais wondered if Joss was really all there. Maybe he’d given pet names to all his personal possessions – chairs, table, and so forth. He watched Joss flip his heavy stand upright with his brawny hands and set it up on the square as easily as he would have put a parrot on a perch, then spring on to it with a single leap as if he was hopping on board. He took the messages out from inside his pea-jacket. There were about thirty people waiting for him to start reading. One of them was the ever-faithful Lizbeth, standing as she always did with her hands on her hips.
    Lizbeth lived in room 3 at Decambrais’s place, and instead of paying rent she saw to the running of his unofficial hotel. She was a pillar of strength. Decambrais could not possibly have managed without her, and he lived in fear of the day when someone would steal his splendid Lizbeth from him. It had to happen, one way or another. She was tall, she was stout, she was black, and she stuck out a mile. Not someone you could hide away from the peering eyes of the world. Nor was Lizbeth afflicted by timidity – she had a voice that carried, and was inclined to state her mind on anything that crossed her path. The worst of it was that Lizbeth’s smile – fortunately, it was not on display terribly often – made you want to throw yourself into her capacious arms, bury yourself in her expansive bosom and settle in for the rest of life. She was thirty-two, and one day, Decambrais knew, he would lose her. But right now Lizbeth was taking it out on the newscaster.
    “What’s been keeping you, Joss?” she asked, arching her back and jutting her chin towards him.
    “I know I’m late, Lizbeth,” the crier admitted breathlessly. “It was those coffee grounds.”
    Lizbeth had been swept from the black ghetto of Detroit at the age of twelve and flung into a brothel as soon as she hit Paris, where she’d learned the language on the street – to wit, Rue de la Gaîté. Fourteen years of immersion, until she’d been moved on again because she’d grown overweight and could no longer plausibly appear in a peepshow. She’d been sleeping rough on a bench in the square for ten days when Decambrais decided to haul her in one cold and rainy night. One of the four upstairs rooms that he rented out in his old house was vacant. He offered it to her. Lizbeth said yes, and as soon as she got into the hall