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confidence the second time around. All that remained to them was the patch of landscape they held in common – a domain reserved for the winning, collecting, and sharing out of profits, a territory where believer and skeptic, dupe and embezzler, the loving and the faithlesscould walk hand in hand. Lydia had a talent for money. He could sense it. She had never been given much chance to use it, and she had waited so much longer than Speck.
    He opened his eyes and saw rain clouds over Paris glowing with light – the urban aurora. It seemed to Speck that he was entering a better weather zone, leaving behind the grey, indefinite mist in which the souls of discarded lovers are said to wander. He welcomed this new and brassy radiation. He saw himself at the centre of a shadeless drawing, hero of a sort of cartoon strip, subduing Lydia, taming Henriette. Fortunately, he was above petty grudges. Lydia and Henriette had been designed by a bachelor God who had let the creation get out of hand. In the cleared land of Speck’s future, a yellow notebook fluttered and lay open at a new page. The show would be likely to go to Milan in the autumn now; it might be a good idea to slip a note between the Senator’s piece and the biographical chronology. If Cruche had to travel, then let it be with Speck’s authority as his passport.
    The bus had reached its terminus, the city limit. Speck waited as the rest of the passengers crept inch by inch to the doors. He saw, with immense relief, a rank of taxis half a block long. He alighted and strode towards them, suddenly buoyant. He seemed to have passed a mysterious series of tests, and to have been admitted to some new society, the purpose of which he did not yet understand. He was a saner, stronger, wiser person than the Sandor Speck who had seen his own tight smile on M. Chassepoule’s window only two months before. As he started to get into a taxi, a young man darted towards him and thrust a leaflet into his hand. Speck shut the door, gave his address, and glanced at the flyer he was still holding. Crudely printed on cheap pink paper was this:
    FRENCHMEN!
FOR THE SAKE OF EUROPE, FIGHT
THE GERMANO-AMERICANO-ISRAELO
HEGEMONY!
Germans in Germany!
Americans in America!
Jews in Israel!
For a True Europe, For One Europe,
Death to the Anti-European Hegemony!
    Speck stared at this without comprehending it. Was it a Chassepoule statement or an anti-Chassepoule plea? There was no way of knowing. He turned it over, looking for the name of an association, and immediately forgot what he was seeking. Holding the sheet of paper flat on his briefcase, he began to write, as well as the unsteady swaying of the cab would let him.
    “It was with instinctive prescience that Hubert Cruche saw the need for a Europe united from the Atlantic to the … That Cruche skirted the murky zone of partisan politics is a tribute to his … even though his innocent zeal may have led him to the brink … early meeting with the young idealist and future statesman A. Bellefeuille, whose penetrating essay … close collaboration with the artist’s wife and most trusted critic … and now, posthumously … from Paris, where the retrospective was planned and brought to fruition by the undersigned … and on to Italy, to the very borders of …”
    Because this one I am keeping, Speck decided; this one will be signed: “By Sandor Speck.” He smiled at the bright, wet streets of Paris as he and Cruche, together, triumphantly crossed the Alps.

Overhead in a Balloon

    A ymeric had a family name that Walter at first didn’t catch. He had come in to the art gallery as “A. Régis,” which was how he signed his work. He must have been close to sixty, but only his self-confidence had kept pace with time. His eyes shone, young and expectant, in an unlined and rosy face. In spite of the face, almost downy, he was powerful-looking, with a wrestler’s thrust of neck and hunched shoulders. Walter, assistant manager