I recalled that the eyes only see by moving; we can fasten our gaze on something and stare intently at it only because our eyes are consumed with dozens of tiny involuntary movements each second. Hold something perfectly and genuinely still in our field of vision and that very fixity makes it disappear.

“I love you,” I heard myself whisper.

She glanced up. “What?”

Her hand stopped, poised over the flame. She jerked it away. “Ow!”

In the main salon of the Café Atlantique – vast and echoing, with a ceiling lost in a layer of ancient-looking smoke stirred by giant wobbling ceiling fans – there is a Jupla band playing to the mostly indifferent crowd packing the spaces between the tables, which are variously set for eating, drinking and gaming. Stained-glass circular windows set high in the two gable walls struggle along with globular yellow lamps the size of bathyspheres to illuminate the chaotic scenes below, where small, sweating men wearing sandwich boards run up and down the aisles.

The pretty little Eurasian singer wears a vibrato collar and the snare drums are doubled, one set conventionally while the other is poised upside down directly above, separated by about half a metre. As Madame d’Ortolan enters – her way cleared as best he can by Christophe the chauffeur – the singer on the low stage midway along one long wall hits an especially high and plangent note and uses the cable remote in her pocket to turn her collar to high speed. Batteries in the remote power up a tiny motor attached to unbalanced weights within the device itself, making the collar burr against the girl’s throat just over her voice box so that she produces a sort of staccato ululation impossible to achieve without such mechanical artifice. The drummer has both sticks blurring in between the lower and upper snares, creating a crazed percussive accompaniment to match.

“Your table, ma’am,” Christophe says, quickly dusting and polishing a seat with its back against the wall of a semicircular booth set almost directly opposite the band. He called ahead from the car to book this small, neatly placed table and the previous occupants are still arguing with elements of the management even as their half-finished drinks are being tidied away by white-jacketed waiters.

Madame d’Ortolan eyes the seat sceptically, then sighs, smooths her skirt and sits, prim and upright while Christophe pushes the chair in. She can see the one who is probably the Oh person making his way through the crowds towards her. He is dressed like a peasant and has either a peasant’s skin tone or just that neither-one-thing-nor-the-other colour that Madame d’Ortolan finds irritating. He arrives, stands in front of her, glancing at the towering presence of Christophe. He smiles at her, rubbing his hands. He bows sinuously. “Madame.”

“Yes?”

“Aiman Q’ands. At your service.”

“Sit,” she tells him. She has already forgotten the name he has just spoken. To her he is still Oh. There is shouting beyond the mouth of the alcove, where the table’s earlier occupants have noticed that their drinks have been tidied away. A waiter flaps a pristine white tablecloth across the table, lets it settle and turns to take her order as the greasy-looking little man sits. Christophe, standing greyly behind her, divides his time between looking suspiciously at the man who has just arrived and looking suspiciously at the arguing punters, now in the first stages of being shooed away by the management and a couple of bouncers who have just drifted up and who are even larger than Christophe.

Aiman Q’ands bows from a seated position. “Always a pleasure to see you-”

“I do not require your pleasantries,” Madame d’Ortolan tells him, “and you should not expect mine.” This one, she recalls, surveying his smiling, shining, annoyingly anonymous coffee-coloured face, has always responded well to being kept thoroughly in his place. She turns briefly to Christophe and glances at her shoulder; he lifts the cream jacket from her shoulders and places it carefully over the back of her seat. She suspects that he lets his fingers linger just a fraction longer than fully necessary as they touch her flesh through her silk blouse, and that he surreptitiously sniffs at her hair as he bends to her. This is agreeable but distracting. “Still water,” she informs the waiter. “Bring it sealed. No ice.”

“Double espresso,” Aiman Q’ands says. He flaps the collar of his kameez. “And water; lots of ice.” He drums his fingers on the table.

It is hot in Paris and hotter still in the Café Atlantique; the leisurely spinning ceiling fans are largely decorative. The small sweating men wearing the sandwich boards – which advertise today’s specials and the services of various bookmakers, lawyers, pawnbrokers, bail-bond companies and brothels as well as conveying the latest headlines and sports results – are there principally to create cooling draughts as they pelt up and down the aisles. They are surprisingly effective. Aiman Q’ands squirms in his seat, looking up and all around. His hands knead each other. He seems incapable of sitting still and is making Madame d’Ortolan feel even warmer. “Fan, Christophe,” she says over her shoulder. With a snap, a large lacy black fan is deployed and starts to move air gently past her face.

Aiman Q’ands sits forward, eyes glistening. “Madame, may I say-”

“No, you may not,” Madame d’Ortolan tells him. She glances about her with a look of some distaste. “We shall keep this to the minimum.”

Q’ands looks hurt. He sits back, looking down. “Madame, do you find me so repellent?”

As though she spared the wretch a thought at all! “Don’t be absurd,” she tells him. “I simply have no great desire to be here,” she says, a glance taking in the smokily cavernous space. “Aside from all else, these crowds are, perversely, highly attractive to bombers.”

“Christians?” Q’ands says, looking mildly surprised and also looking round.

“Of course Christians, you idiot!”

Q’ands shakes his head ruefully and tuts. “The religion of brotherly love. So sad.”

Just for a moment Madame d’Ortolan thinks he might be trying to make fun of her. You can never be sure in how much detail these passerines remember previous encounters with things, events or people. Could he be baiting her? She quickly dismisses the thought. “The religion of zealotry,” she informs him testily. “The religion that loves its martyrs, the religion of the doctrine of Original Sin, so that blowing even babies to smithereens is justifiable because they too are sinners.” She jerks her head and makes a sort of dry spitting sound. “A religion made for terrorism.”

She can see what might be a small smile on Q’ands’s unpleasantly glowing face and can feel perspiration starting to gather on her brow. She leans forward and lowers her voice. “Are you properly ambiented? Have you fully embedded here yet?” she asks. “Any idiot ought to know this. Do you?”

“I know what I know, ma’am,” he says quietly, for all the world as though trying to be mysterious. Meanwhile one leg is bouncing up and down as though he is trying to follow the beat of the Jupla band. The fellow is preposterous!

“Well, know that I wish to waste no further time here.” She glances up at Christophe, then has, annoyingly, to clear her throat loudly because he seems distracted by the Eurasian waif warbling on stage. Her chauffeur collects himself, follows her gaze as it flicks to the man seated opposite and, sticking his free hand into his grey tunic, produces what looks like a cigar tube and hands it to Q’ands.

He looks at it sadly and then places it in his chest satchel. “Also,” Q’ands says, “I am almost out of-”

“There are supplies for a dozen journeys in there,” Madame d’Ortolan tells him. “We’re not stupid. We can count.”