Alone in the white windowless room with the grill he sat rigid at the table. Crosby suspected. Crosby was infallible, the bastard. Sure enough, the wired two-way grill in his room and in all the other teaching-rooms in the Academy coughed twice and expressed itself in Crosby's received English, crisp as icebox lettuce.
     "Attention. Attention. Mr Grossman. Mr Grossman, you will immediately pick up your cheque at Madame Vignot's office. Think you."
     Harry Grossman took his method book and yesterday's issue of Le Monde, slung his Voigtländer single-lens reflex over his shoulder and went outside into the long corridor. It was packed profitably tight with pupils. Two giant oil paintings of the Founding Fathers gazed over the heads bobbing down the staircase. In their robber-baron beards and paterfamilias frock coats, they looked content, with reason, at being, from left to right, William C Fry and Daniel O Fitz. Harry had often reflected that they were among the outstanding inventive geniuses of their genial inventive age (circa 1890). This was the period that had alchemized gold out of all sorts of nasty by-products like slag, sewer-offal and pig-guts. The achievement of Fry and Fitz was even greater. They hit upon a use for the expatriate misfits who clutter up all of the world's capitals.
     These now began straggling out of their white grilled rooms, guardedly greeting each other in the cotton-muffled Georgian, barbed-wire Scots, neurotic Newyorkese and penal-colony Australian that had permitted Fry and Fitz to look out upon mid-century in smug posthumous oils. Mrs Carter, the cat-woman from Birmingham, England, passed by him with exaggerated myopia and hurry. None of the other teachers greeted Harry.
     They knew, of course. Whenever Mr Crosby fired a teacher for that one sin for which there was no remission - trying to lure pupils away from the Academy - the news was broadcast simultaneously in the thirty other windowless grilled rooms to instill fear in the radically underpaid staff.
     Pushing in the direction of the staircase Harry encountered Herrick of Liverpool who was vaguely in love with him. Herrick's eyes darted to and fro like fearful pale-blue swallows. "Sacked?" he whispered, gangster-style, out of the corner of his motionless lips. His breath was fruity with cheap armagnac.
     "Bounced," Harry confirmed. "No tragedy, though." Just the prospect of starvation and eviction from his whorish 20th arrondissement hotel room. But already his mind was occupied with the splendid poster-tattered Place de la République wall that awaited his f 4.5 Zeiss-Tessar. The sun would have to come out, though.
     "Pit-tee," replied Herrick. With the initial labial of his condolence, Herrick's lips, necessarily, moved. He twitched Harry a frightened farewell smile and neutralized himself in the milling throng. It was unwise to be seen in chitchat with an axed colleague. Herrick composed odes to dead Greek boys and he needed the money.

After Madame Vignot and his checkout, Harry emerged from the ornate Fry-Fitz building for the last time. His mind was occupied with more important things. No wall shots today. It was still raining. When the Île de France had docked five months earlier at Le Havre, his first view of France had been of rain falling on the raw concrete buildings of the bombed-out and reconstructed city. The rain hadn't seriously stopped since.
     Harry screwed his semi-waterproof beret on, experimenting with a new angle. He dug out a pack of Gauloises. The cheap blue paper was badly crumpled and the last two cigarettes ruptured. The French made no more concessions to modern packaging techniques than they did to 20th century plumbing. Harry recalled his last Camembert wrapped in a back-issue of l'Humanité. He salivated. He stared down at the greasy fingerprints over the winged helmet of the Gauloise pack. They testified to last night's 280-franc (90-cent) meal of hard-boiled egg with mayonnaise, ray-fish with capered butter sauce, runny Camembert and climactic caramel custard. He salivated again.
     No more splurges like that now. Boiled, the greasy blue paper might yield a thin soup. He might soon be reduced to such extremities the way things were going. Anyhow, would it be worse than his usual onion-soup home-boiled over an alcohol lamp?
     He lit up one of the cigarette fragments and breathed in the acrid authentic smoke. How could he have ever smoked anything else? He kept the fragment in the corner of his mouth as the French did, wondering if it gave him that desirable exotic hard-bitten air. Although blinded a little by the smoke curling up behind his left lens he jay-trotted across the avenue in anarchistic French style, dodging a Hotchkiss and a Citroën Traction and two cyclists. He bore towards the red carrot of the corner cafè-tabac.
     He picked up a pack of Gauloises and sat down at a little round table facing a weeping window. It looked out on the river when weather permitted. To his left a blue-jeaned teenager grappled with a pinball machine, muttering, "Merde, merde, merde." The garish bikinied girl beneath the legend Hollywood Dreams lit up erogenously in response to the zipping and binging. The teenager's bottle of Coke, tucked away with his pack of Chesterfields on a corner of the glass top, trembled with the action. The waiter came over to Harry's table.
     "Une saucisse chaude," said Harry fluently. "Un hot dog, un!" shouted the waiter at the kitchen.