Lawless by John Jakes

Whistler was a pugnacious little dandy, just five feet four, and the grandest raconteur Matt had ever met. A failed West Point cadet, Whistler was fond of telling how his military career had come to a sudden end. He’d been asked to step to the blackboard and discuss the properties of silicon. “I began by saying, ‘Silicon is a gas.’ If it were, I’d probably be a major general.”
    Whistler claimed he couldn’t function in the stultifying, tasteless environment of his homeland. He was a brilliant artist, Matt thought, even if he did bestow curious titles on his paintings—almost as if he wanted to deny that they had subjects. Studies of fireworks exploding in a night sky were “nocturnes.” A portrait of his mother Mathilda who lived with him and his mistress in London—a picture he’d been struggling with since ’66, he complained—was an “arrangement in grey and black.”
    Matt now shared Whistler’s contempt for the United States. For that reason he rejected appealing subjects from his past whenever they came to mind. Now Paul had suggested that might be a mistake. But he didn’t see how he could find good art in bad memories.
    He had to do something about his work, though. Even a simple portrait of Dolly was foundering. Was it because there were problems with Dolly?
    The change in their relationship had been gradual. He couldn’t recall a specific time when it had started. Perhaps, after three years, the novelty of a Bohemian existence had worn off, and Dolly had started to think about the future. He never did that. He seldom even thought seriously about the present. In fact, when he was working, the real world was little more than a peripheral haze. Dolly had begun to let him know that although she understood that, she didn’t like it.
    Today he was no better prepared to meet her objections than he had been when she left on the holiday. Well, maybe a visit with her parents had relaxed her a little, he thought anxiously as he made his way through the neighborhood near the Gare du Nord.
ii
    The storm clouds had moved in, bringing a sudden shower. He wove his way through crowds near the station entrance, first avoiding a couple of street musicians playing a flute and a curious new instrument called a saxophone, then an open-air dentist who was striking his portable chair and umbrella. He jumped off the curb and across the gurgling water in the gutter so as not to interfere with a couple of the Sûreté specials who were becoming more and more visible as street crime increased. The specials were trussing up a howling, kicking man in rags. A purse grabber, probably.
    A flower girl who would have been pretty except for the sores around her lips interrupted her chant of “May your love life flourish!” long enough to sell Matt a bedraggled bunch of violets. She glanced into his eyes, then down at his trousers in case he was interested in an additional transaction. He smiled and shook his head but felt an embarrassing physical reaction to the girl’s invitation. Problems or not, three weeks was a devil of a long time to be without the woman he loved.
    He darted out of the rain into the tumult of the station. In an atmosphere of smoke and noise, people rushed to and fro, knocking against one another like balls striking tenpins. Parisians were constitutional hurriers, he’d discovered. Even a pair of sweet-faced nuns almost bowled him over.
    A local train arrived with a scream of iron wheels and an eruption of steam. There were several trains standing on the tracks which ran right up to barricades within the central area of the station. He didn’t know which track would receive the Calais express, so he sought the schedule board hanging from iron rafters at one end of the hall.
    He found the Calais train and its designated track. As he gazed upward, he became aware of a man standing just to his left, rattling off the numbers of all the listed trains, as well as their arrival or departure times. The man