You could be doing nothing, and the story will still find you.
A theft, a lynch mob, a trip to the police station, a lady wearing two hats, an alleged family plot, a mysterious phone call, a risky rendezvous, an attempted gaslighting. In the first 24 hours.
This long isolation is making me nuts, so I rewrote this essay. It appeared in my book, Twisted Travels: Rambles in Central Europe (Though it included pieces on France and Italy. Sadly, the book is out of print). For an hour I pretended I was somewhere else.
In the fall of 2017 I got a grant that allowed me to go to Paris for a few weeks. As always I inhabited the spare room of my friend Anouk, who has lived in Paris for 30 years. I arrived on Saturday afternoon and promptly passed out.
When I came to on Sunday, I suggested brunch. Anouk said brunch wasn’t a thing in Paris, but there was a café nearby that served English breakfast all day. At the café she asked for a table upstairs but all the tables were occupied, except for one that had a “Reserved” sign on it.
“How did they reserve a table?” Anouk asked a waiter.
“They phoned us.”
“Aha! I was told that you do not accept reservations by phone,” Anouk said. She was sure that her accent had identified her as a non-native so her reservation was declined.
The waiter gave us a tiny table on the ground floor. It was draughty in that spot, so as soon as another table became available we moved. This other table was just as cramped and draughty. We ate our omelets and discussed our novels. Then Anouk reached for her bag under her coat and realized that it was gone.
We alerted the manager, who checked the CCTV. A customer lent Anouk her phone so she could call her own number. Of course the call went straight to voicemail. Anouk’s house keys, passports, cards, everything, were in the bag. (My friend has two passports which for some reason she carries with her everywhere.) Anouk hurried back to her apartment to get the spare keys from her daughter. I stayed in the café to wait for the CCTV photo of the thief. Anouk said she would be back.
After 5 minutes the manager gave me a photo of a man who was entering the café. He was not holding Anouk’s bag so I don’t know why he was the suspect, unless it was because he looked foreign. If someone else was robbed after I left, would I become the suspect? The manager and the waiter talked to me very fast. I took 12 units of French in college and had been to Paris several times. I had seen every movie by Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut. I did not understand a word. Then they gave me the bill for our breakfast.
It was crowded in the café—maybe brunch was becoming a thing—so I decided to wait for Anouk outside. I read a poster for a found cat. I watched the people walking their dogs. A delivery van zipped by and hit a dog on a leash. The dog yelped and ran away. Within seconds a lynch mob assembled and I was in it. Snatching bags is one thing, maybe the thief was hungry, but hitting a dog? Fortunately the dog seemed unharmed. The driver remonstrated with the dog’s human and they agreed to take the dog to the vet. Satisfied, the lynch mob dissipated.
I walked up and down the street for 20 minutes. I could’ve walked back to the apartment, but if Anouk wasn’t there how would I get in? The radius of my wandering grew larger. Through a bookstore window I longed for all the tomes I couldn’t read because they were in French.
Then I had to use the WC in the café. I asked the manager if Anouk had returned. Yes, the manager said, but she did not know where I had gone. “You did not leave a number,” she scolded me. (They probably would not have called anyway, as it is a Manila number.)
It was growing colder. I walked back to Anouk’s house and found her making phone calls. She had to have all her cards cancelled. Government IDs, ATM cards, driver’s license, membership cards—in France if you lose a document, even your supermarket discount card, you have to present a police report to get it replaced.
We went to get a police report at the prefecture in Clignancourt. It was exactly the sort of place where they march Jean-Paul Belmondo inside in handcuffs, then slam his face on a table. There were four people in line ahead of us. The cops were kind of cute, and their uniforms were flattering, but I’m from Manila and my standards are abysmal. If they’re not trying to murder you, they’re attractive.
One guy was pacing across the lobby and having a passionate argument with himself. After 10 minutes a cop told Anouk that someone would take her report in 30 minutes. We decided to find a bar nearby and get a drink. The first bar looked like everyone had just thrown up in it. The second was full of dads who probably saw their kids every other Sunday but were too tired to bring them somewhere exciting. We sat and ordered Calvados and charcuterie. Anouk apologized again for this start to my visit and I said, “Are you kidding? It’s a story.” When I went to the WC in the basement, a man emerged from the ladies’ room.
Forty minutes later there were nine people sitting in the lobby of the prefecture. Pickpockets do love Sundays, when there are more tourists about. One lady was wearing two straw hats, two scarves and five brooches. In front of her were two large suitcases. She spoke to Anouk, and then to me. I tried to explain that I don’t speak French, but the woman clearly needed to talk so what the hell, I just nodded at everything she said. Then the woman said, in English, “I will go out and smoke a cigarette. Please watch my bags, for they are all I have left in the world. I have no more home.” A single tear rolled down her brightly rouged cheek. The other people restrained their smiles. I am always the last to notice when someone is behaving oddly, because I assume that everyone is crazy.
Anouk explained that the woman was reporting the theft of a suitcase containing all her bank books, jewelry, and real estate titles. She believed that the bank manager had informed her family of the valuables in that suitcase, so her family stole it. She also said her sister had purloined her beautiful brooches. “But you’re wearing five brooches,” Anouk had pointed out. “Ah, but these are the ugly ones,” the woman replied.
A family of Greek tourists appeared. The aunt’s bag was stolen when they were changing buses. Her passport was in the bag, and they had to return to Greece the next day. With impressive speed the cop on duty produced a document she could present to the Greek embassy for a temporary travel document. Then he reverted to his regular pace.
Finally Anouk was summoned to an inner office, where a cop took down her statement. The process took an hour. The cop was not happy to be interviewing people on a Sunday, and he stamped the papers with great force. Police report in hand, Anouk could now reconstruct her life in documents.
The next morning Anouk went to the locksmith while I visited the Louvre. After we parted, Anouk got a call on her ancient Nokia. “I am sanitary services,” said a voice that seemed to issue from the bottom of a well. The voice told her he had found her bag with keys, passports, cards, and even a cheque made out to Cash, in a public toilet. (Apparently pickpockets dispose of stuff in public toilets because they have no CCTV.) He told her to meet him on the second floor of a parking building.
When Anouk got to the parking building, it occurred to her that it is dangerous to meet with strangers who claim to have your stolen things. What if it was the thief himself, planning some nefarious sequel? She approached a beefy stranger on the street, explained her predicament, and asked him to accompany her to the rendezvous. The man said she was foolish to meet with strangers who claimed to have her stolen things, and how did she know that he himself was not a criminal? But he agreed to go with her anyway.
The second floor of the parking building was almost empty. They walked and walked, and at the very end of the building there was a garbage truck and two guys in sanitary services uniforms. They had Anouk’s bag. In her relief Anouk clutched the bag in her hands, forgetting that it had been in a garbage receptacle in a public toilet. Everything was in it but her cash and her phone. The sanitary services guys declined the reward she offered, but she forced them to take it. “For champagne,” she said.
Anouk got to work canceling the notices of loss she had filed. Perhaps she would be spared the aggravation of having her documents replaced, but no, the bureaucracy was not about to let her go. The embassies told her that once the police had reported her passports lost, they were cancelled. She could try asking the police to report them found, but the police probably wouldn’t do it.
Anouk returned to the prefecture. This time a more cheerful cop took her report, and he marveled at her luck. This was only the second time that stolen documents had reappeared. She told him that something similar had happened to our friend in Manila. That time, a bag snatched in Glorietta was dumped in a bargain bin in Landmark, where it was discovered by the eccentric sister of that same friend’s former pediatrician. They laughed.
In the next cubicle, a morose cop was reading out a report. A woman was filing a complaint against her husband. She maintained that he was attempting to drive her crazy by clomping around the house in heavy shoes late at night. The morose cop overheard Anouk’s story and said, “Good thing you got your bag back.” It was the same cop who had taken her statement the previous day.
This was the only time I ever regretted going to the Louvre.