No one I needed was at the station, so I left a brief message for Harry regarding the Orange Lady and her connection to Hexcamp. It wouldn’t be long until we’d return to Mobile, but the info would give Harry time to pass the word to Roy Trent, maybe get the action moving in a more productive direction.
Neither Danbury nor I felt up to a large dinner, so we dined modestly but well at a quiet hole-in-the-wall restaurant. We felt overdosed on information and drama, content to let it ferment in our heads while enjoying the remaining few hours in Paris. Danbury translated signs in windows, snippets of overheard conversation. We dropped our remaining euros in the hats and instrument cases of street performers. After a few blocks the crowd thinned and we found ourselves on a lamp-lit street bordered by three- and four-story stone buildings. Night slipped from twilight into dark, and light brightened in the windows of pawn shops and piano stores, bakeries and florists.
Danbury stopped short, grabbed my wrist.
“Look up there -” She pointed to a line of large windows on the second story of a brick building across the street. The windows were curtained with a silky, diaphanous material, shadows flowing over the fabric. Music drifted to us, rich and symphonic.
“Spooky,” I said.
Danbury took my hand. “Let’s check it out.”
“We’ve got other things to -”
But I was under her control now, tugged across the street, dodging cars, taxis, a man on a bicycle. “There,” she said, pointing to a sign above the door, L’ACADÉMIE DE DANSE CLASSIQUE. “It’s a dance academy. Classical.”
“I got that impression.”
She pulled me toward a flight of stairs. Music poured down them like water in waltz time. “Come on, pogie. You’re balking.”
“Danbury? Have you gone -”
She had one hand on my sleeve, the other on the banister as we ascended the marble steps. There was a door at the top and she pushed it open.
Dancers. Perhaps two dozen couples. Most seemed in their sixties and seventies, the men in suits, the women in flowing dresses. They stepped and spun and dipped, amazingly adept. The room was high-ceilinged, the floor white, the walls red with triangles of light shot upward from brass sconces. The dancers were followed by shadows.
“It’s like a movie. It isn’t real,” Danbury whispered.
I looked to the side of the room. Behind an ornate wooden bar a mustachioed man in a black suit poured glasses of champagne. He was talking to a handsome woman in a black velvet gown, her dark hair in an elegant bouffant. She looked beautiful and mysterious and every inch a painting by John Singer Sargent. The woman’s eyes found us, and she brightened, moving our way with athletic grace belying perhaps seventy years of age. She offered her hand and her smile. I greeted her in English, and she responded in kind.
“I am Serena Chardin. Have you come to dance? Please tell me yes.”
Danbury said, “You all dance so beautifully. This is a school?”
Mme Chardin laughed, a lovely sound. “We usually teach dance, many of us. From across Paris, beyond. Tonight is not for students, it is - what would you say? - for social. It is our turn to dance.”
Danbury explained our presence. Serena Chardin nodded. “Goodness, all that way for so little time in Paris. And work besides. You must stay and dance. And, of course, share some champagne.”
“I, uh -”
Mme Chardin was summoned from across the room by a dapper old gent beside a phonograph. He seemed to wish to consult on selections. She excused herself and glided away.
Danbury said, “Want to give a quick twirl around the floor? Having been invited, it’s the diplomatic thing to do.”
I said, “I can’t dance a lick. Who our age can dance like that anyway?”
“I can. Can you believe it?”
“Your grandmother again?”
“Grand-mère thought the waltz de rigueur for all young ladies of breeding. I had no one to dance with. In my neighborhood clogging was all the rage. Grand-mère believed clogging more seizure than dancing.”
I felt my face redden with embarrassment. “I don’t know the slightest thing about dancing of any kind.”
“Then you’ll have to let me lead. Can you handle that, mon pogibeau?” There was a shadow of challenge in her voice.
“I’ll manage.”
Mme Chardin made a proclamation and music commenced. The recording was on vinyl, and opened with hisses and crackles. Violins swept into the room, followed by woodwinds. The dancers around us found partners, began to move. Danbury took my hands, guiding them gently.
“This hand holds my hand, this hand goes right here.”
I did as instructed; she was warm both places. “Ready?” Danbury said. “Un, deux, trois?”
I started haltingly, stumbling, mismatched to her rhythm and motion. My knees knocked hers, my feet kicked her toes. She held me tighter, whispered, relax…un deux trois. I searched for her rhythm and released my body to it, un, deux, trois, my feet finding the shape of the dance. At first she used her hands and hips to show me the way, and then all she needed was her eyes. We spun, sashayed, dipped; our moves rudimentary, but fluid. We broke for champagne, returned to the floor.
Somewhere in all the un deux trois, an hour disappeared.
At ten p.m., the music stopped. Everyone applauded. Participants bade us farewell and drifted out the door. Mme Chardin appeared and patted our hands between hers. “You are such a handsome couple, so beautiful in one another’s arms. Will you return?”
“Whenever I dream,” Danbury said.
The night was soft as we walked to our hotel through cones of streetlight. We passed a wine shop. I reached out and took DeeDee Danbury’s hand, my turn to lead. “I owe you a bottle of wine,” I said. “Would you prefer red or white?”
“Silly you,” she said. “It’s a night for champagne.”