The Fugitive by Massimo Carlotto, Anthony Shugaar Page A

waited in the room for a while, trying to understand if it was a con, and I finally decided that it wasn’t.
    â€œThanks for everything, doctor.” I went back, despite the advice of all my friends, who told me in every language spoken on earth that I was crazy, and that if I went, the police would be waiting to greet me. I had an instinct that the dentist would not betray me. And I was right: nothing bad happened. In fact, he cleaned my teeth. As I was about to leave, I gave in to my curiosity:
    â€œListen, doctor, could you tell me something? Would any dentist have noticed?”
    â€œNo. I worked in Chile for a couple of years.”
    I started laughing:
    â€œYou mean to say that out of the hundreds of dentists in Paris, I ran into the only one that could cause me problems?”
    He was laughing too. “That’s probably right.”
    â€œSo long, doctor. You’re a good man.”
    Â 
    Another time, our patron saint intervened with a taxi driver. I was with Alessandra and we had stayed out late at a party. The Metro had stopped running some time earlier and we lived on the other side of the city. As a basic security precaution, we walked about ten blocks away from our friend’s house before starting to look around for a taxi. After a while we found one. I can’t remember what the driver looked like, because I couldn’t take my eyes off the German shepherd sitting next to the driver and eyeing us in an unsettling way.
    Taxi drivers in Paris are convinced that every one of their fares is a potential mugger, and they’ve outfitted themselves accordingly. They travel with ferocious dogs; they carry electric cattle prods or cans of pepper spray. Urban legends tell of rear seats that trap the passenger and other diabolical gadgets. I have always been afraid of taxi drivers and, aware of the fact that I am not exactly the most fortunate person on earth—in fact, I am particularly prone to the worst kinds of trouble—I have always avoided doing anything that might make my driver suspicious. Such as putting my hand into my pocket a little too quickly, or looking around nervously.
    Despite the late hour, we ran into a line of cars leading into an underpass along the Seine. A few hundred yards ahead, I could see the unmistakable lights of a police car, and I assumed that there had been an accident.
    Wrong. It was one of those really nasty roadblocks, where they stopped everyone and checked everyone’s documents very carefully. I might look like Gustave, but all I had in my pocket was my Italian identity card. I never would have carried it off. The minutes ticked by, and slowly but inexorably we drew closer to the police barriers blocking the road. I didn’t know what to do; getting out of the cab and running was not an option. They would have caught me immediately.
    I was just resigning myself to the worst when Alessandra burst into tears, weeping bitterly, which in turn caused the dog to bark and attracted the taxi driver’s attention. An odd conversation sprang up between them. She in Italian, he in French, the dog in German Shepherd.
    And that was when the saint placed his hand on the taxi driver’s conscience and made a charitable man of him. He stepped out of the taxi and began to shout at the police: “This city is a disaster, we can never work in peace. The traffic jams during the day aren’t enough already. Now the police want to block traffic at night too. I’ve got a family to feed. If I have to sit here all night like some jerk-off, how am I supposed to work?” His outburst caught everybody’s attention. When I saw a police officer walking aggressively toward us, I sank back into my seat, doing my best to blend into the upholstery.
    â€œWhat is all this noise?” demanded the
flic
. “There is a police operation going on, and citizens need to cooperate.” He clearly didn’t know much about Parisian taxi drivers, if he