I discreetly put my finger to my lips as a signal to Amy not to say anything that might give away her accent. A lot of my former travel survival techniques were coming back to me. In some countries, we found we were treated better if it wasn’t obvious we were Americans. If Amy and I chatted away in English with American accents, I knew we possibly could be charged more than, say, a German tourist.
Amy trusted my subtle signal and kept quiet until the driver asked us something in rapid French. Amy calmly responded.
That was okay. The goof-up was that as soon as she responded to him, she turned to translate for me. Just as she had done for years whenever I didn’t understand Grandmere.
“He said our hotel is close to the Louvre. We should ask for a room facing the Jardin des Tuileries—the park—then we’ll be able to see the Eiffel Tower.”
Glancing at me in the rearview mirror, the driver narrowed his eyes. “American?”
I wished at that moment that I spoke another language. Any language. I would have settled for a Canadian passport, even, to hold up for him to see.
But I was taught never to lie. “Yes. Oui. American.”
I was sure we were doomed. Yet the words that came from our driver’s mouth startled me. “C’est bon! Do you okay eef I practeece English for you?”
“Sure!” Amy said. “Oui.”
“I show to you zee home of Voltaire, our famous philosopher and French writer.”
“Is it on the way to our hotel?” I asked.
“Oui. Yes, yes.”
He was driving on to a city street, and all around us were tall old stone buildings. I hadn’t gotten my bearings to know what part of Paris proper we were entering. Then I saw the familiar spiral of light in the distance on our left. Actually, Amy saw it first.
“The Eiffel Tower! Look, it’s all lit up! Ooh, it’s beautiful!”
“Theese is your first veezit to Paris?”
“Yes,” Amy said. “My friend has been here before, but this is my first time.”
“You must have chocolat to drink at Angelina’s. Right by your hotel. Very good chocolat. And Sacré Coeur. This you must see in Montmartre.” He went on listing all of his personal favorites of this great city and warmed up to his use of English by giving bits of history about various buildings as we sped past them in the dark.
“Voilá! The home of Voltaire. This corner. Up. You see?”
We saw an ornate building, like the many other ornate buildings we had been rolling past for several blocks. I didn’t know exactly what we should have been looking for to see where Voltaire lived.
“And zee Louvre.” He pointed to the enormous U-shaped continuation of buildings on the right. The glass pyramid entrance had been added since I had visited last. Lit up in the center of the commons, the pyramid gave Napoleon’s former palace grounds a strange Star Trekkiness.
Our chatty driver turned left on the Rue de Rivoli and suddenly stopped the car in the lane of traffic closest to the covered sidewalk. “Hotel Isabella,” he announced. Cars honked and swerved around us.
“Do you take credit cards?” Amy asked. “Visa?”
“No, sorry. Cash only.” He pointed to the digital meter that read 78.25.
“Seventy-eight euros?” Amy asked, as the two of us fumbled for our wallets. We had been so caught up in the tour we weren’t prepared to exit the taxi. “Do you have change for a hundred?”
“No, sorry.”
I fiddled with the bills in my wallet, trying to see in the dark. “Here’s a fifty. I think that’s a fifty. What do you have, Amy?”
“Nothing small. Here.” She held out one of her hundred-euro bills. “Keep the change.”
I gave Amy a hard look, but I don’t think she caught my expression in the dark. It wasn’t a good idea to begin our journey with such generosity.
“Thank you. Thank you.”
Amy patted him on the arm and said something in French. He reached for her hand and kissed it twice, gushing a line or two in French that I’m sure were very suave.
Amy giggled, scooted out of the backseat after me, and waved as the smooth operator zoomed off into the traffic. We dashed for the sidewalk before the oncoming cars rolled over us.
“Ooh, the French,” Amy said, as the hotel doors automatically opened. “That was memorable. Wasn’t he charming?”
“Charming.” I made sure the word came out as flat as I felt. It was pointless now to comment on the excessive tip. We were here. That was all that mattered.
Stepping into the unexpectedly compact hotel lobby, I felt another dip. I hoped our rooms weren’t as small and as economically decorated.
A young man in a red vest and white shirt with a bow tie welcomed us in French to the Hotel Isabella. He seemed to be the only one working the night shift.
“Merci.” Amy pulled out her reservations paper. With a few clumsy French sentences, she asked if our room faced the Jardin des Tuileries. It didn’t, but the clerk switched to speaking English and graciously made the room change for us. Amy kept grinning, whispering to me that, thanks to our terrific cab driver’s advice, we would now see the Eiffel Tower from our room.
All I wanted to see was the front end of a steak sandwich as it entered my mouth and then a nice bed to flop in.
“Would you like assistance with your luggage?” the desk clerk asked.
Our luggage?
Amy and I froze.
Our luggage!
“Our suitcases are still in the cab!” Amy squeaked.
“We have to call the taxi company immediately,” I demanded. “And the police. That driver took off with our luggage!”
The desk clerk made a quick phone call and turned to us for more information. “Did your driver give you a receipt?”
“No.”
“No receipt? No business card?”
We shook our heads.
He gave us a wary look, spoke a few more words to the person on the other end of the phone, and hung up. With his palms turned toward us he said, “Without identification, it is not possible to know which taxi or car service brought you to the hotel. Sorry.”
Amy and I looked at each other desperately.
“There has to be some way …” I began.
“Wait!” Amy clapped her hands and spurted out, “050FLX50! That was his license plate. I remember it; I thought it was an ad for flax seed oil.”
The hotel clerk looked amused at Amy’s clever little talent.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Oui! Positif!” Amy picked up a pen and wrote the number on a brochure about Versailles.
He picked up the phone again and made several more calls for us, this time speaking in crisp authoritative French. I stood unmoving, clenching my jaw. Amy pressed her lips together and fidgeted.
It took far too long before the clerk hung up the phone. “The information I have for you is not so good. The police would like for you to go to the commissariat to file a report.”
“The police station?” Amy said. “Why? Can’t the taxi company call the driver and ask him to come back?”
“In a normal problem, yes, it is possible. However, this is not a normal problem.” His expression turned curiously sympathetic. “You are certain of this license number?”
“Positive,” Amy said. “Positif.”
“Then you have a problem. The taxi company says the car you were in was stolen two weeks ago. The police concur. They have not been able to find the taxi.”
“Are you saying a crazy guy is driving around Paris picking up people in a stolen taxi?” Amy asked.
“Oui.”
“I don’t believe this.” I felt a sudden need to sit down. Instead, I grasped the corner of the front desk. “That man is driving around, charging people way too much money for cab fare and stealing their luggage. And you’re saying that in the past two weeks no one has been able to stop him?”
“Exactement.”
“I can’t believe this!”
“I can make for you
a map to the commissariat,” the hotel clerk said.
“Is it far to walk?” Amy asked. “Because we’re not taking a taxi.”
“No, not far.”
As much as I didn’t want to walk anywhere, I knew neither of us would be able to sleep until we had done all we could to retrieve our luggage.
The clerk handed Amy the map along with the keys to our hotel room. We stomped out of the hotel’s automatic door with our arms linked and our purses smashed in between us for added theft protection from sidewalk hooligans.
Our march down the Rue de Rivoli seemed safe enough. Then we turned left at the first narrow side street. The uneven pavement took us past a small convenience store.
“I need some water,” Amy said. “I’m feeling really woozy.”
Entering the small store, Amy greeted the swarthy man behind the register. He was looking at a magazine with a naked woman on the cover.
“Come on.” I nudged her back out of the store. “Let’s keep going. We can get water at the police station.”
“What are you doing?” Amy protested, as I took her arm and pulled her onward.
“What were you doing, trying to start a conversation with that guy?”
“I was being polite. You know, manners? Grandmere taught me a long time ago that when you’re in Paris you’re supposed to greet the shop people and say good-bye when you leave. That’s the Parisian way.”
“Amy, that may have applied when your grandmere lived here, but if you start being polite to every unsavory sort of character in Paris, you’re going to be sorry.”
She looked at me as if I were crazy. “Okay, fine. Let’s just find the police station.”
We forged ahead a few more blocks. The exercise and cool air gave us both a chance to calm down. Turning a corner, we came into an open square encompassed by old stone buildings that looked as though they hadn’t changed for several hundred years. I could almost picture the window shutters on the second story of one of the houses opening up and a maid tossing out a bucket of vegetable peels.
“Look at this!” Amy stopped and took in the slice of Parisian life.
On the corner, accordion music danced its way from under a gathering of café umbrellas looped with twinkle lights. At nearly every table relaxed groups of people sat talking and drinking wine from rounded goblets. A man in a business suit arrived at the café on a Vespa-style motor scooter and parked in front. The streets were too narrow for cars, but plenty of locals were out walking, even though it was past ten o’clock.
“It looks like a movie set.” Amy gazed across the open square to the gathering of human moths fluttering around the flickering lights.
I had to agree. It was magical.
“Look at how happy those people are,” Amy said.
“Yeah, well, that’s because they’re putting food in their mouths, and better still, all of them know where their next change of clean underwear is coming from.”
“Lisa, who cares about underwear at a time like this? Don’t you just want to go over there and start our introduction to Paris all over again?”
I was too numb to answer.
“I do,” she said. “I want to sit at that café with all those French people. I want to eat something deliciously French and listen to them speaking French.”
I wanted to cry. I wanted to sit on that cobblestone street and burst into tears and get it over with. I was too tired, too hungry, and too angry about our stolen luggage to entertain Amy’s dreamy reflections. Using my firmest, nonnegotiable voice, I said, “Amy, we have to file the police report. We can come back and have a leisurely dinner later.”
She sighed, as if the enchanting slice of behind-the-scenes Paris was beginning to evaporate like a mythical Brigadoon and wouldn’t appear for another hundred years. “You’re right.” She fell in step beside me.
We wove our way down another narrow street lined with what looked like front doors to dozens of homes where the lights were off for the evening.
“You know what?” Amy stopped at the comer next to a closed bookshop. “I just realized something. We haven’t prayed yet. God knows where our luggage is. He can direct that driver to come back to the hotel and return our suitcases. Lets ask Him to do that.”
I wanted to say, “Oh, come on, Amy. We shouldn’t bother God with our mess. Hes probably as tired and frustrated as we are. Letsjust keep going and take care of this ourselves.”
But she started to pray before I could protest. Without closing her eyes, Amy took a deep breath. “Papa, You know everything. You know where our suitcases are right now, and You know that taxi driver even if He doesn’t know You. You can do anything. If You want to get our luggage back, You can make that happen. If You want us to go without our things so we can trust You in new ways, thats okay, too. May Your kingdom come and Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.”
Amy smiled at me, and I found a small smile inside my quieted heart to give back to her. It was a good thing she was the one who prayed instead of me. My prayer would have come out a little more … well, aggressive.
Years ago when I heard Amy address God in prayer as Papa, I had questioned her. The term didn’t seem appropriate or honoring. But then I was still reading only the King James Version of the Bible with all the thee and thou phrases I’d grown up hearing in church.
“Calling on God as my Papa changes everything for me,” Amy had told me soon after she discovered the Romans 8 reference to Abba Father could be translated to mean “Papa” or “Daddy” in English. “Don’t you see? I never had a relationship with my earthly father, so it always was difficult for me to picture my heavenly Father as being there for me or wanting to love me. But when I saw God as my Papa, I felt I could trust Him and come close to Him any time, and He would never desert me.”
I knew that everything Amy said to her heavenly Papa in prayer she meant. She trusted and adored God in a way I’d never been able to grasp. She believed her heavenly Papa could direct the heart of a Parisian car thief to tum around and return our stolen luggage. Her simple faith humbled me. Especially because she believed enough for both of us.
The irony was that even though I was the one who gave Amy her first Bible, she was the one who continually gave the Bible back to me every time the truths of God’s Word came springing out in her life like a fountain of fresh water. Whenever they did, I drank deeply, unaware until that moment how desperately thirsty I was.
Continuing on our trek to the police station, I forgot how hungry, tired, and angry I was. We studied the hand-drawn map together and turned right at the next corner.
“There it is. On the right.” Amy led the way down the narrow street lined with small parked cars.
Entering the unassuming police station, I felt as if we were entering a parallel universe to The Andy Griffith Show but with some peculiar twists. The two officers on duty were watching The Simpsons on a small television with the volume turned low. One of them was smoking. He immediately put his cigarette behind his back, as if one of us were his mother and had stepped into his bedroom unannounced.
Both of the men stood up straight to greet us in their freshly pressed uniforms. They couldn’t have been much older than twenty
Amy explained our problem in chopped-up French. She added a stream of apologies in English for all the words she couldn’t remember. Then she apparently asked for something to drink.
The officers responded immediately The shorter one pulled a bottle of wine out of the desk drawer and went looking for glasses.
Amy called after him in French requesting water.
The other officer reached for a pad of paper and asked Amy a string of questions. She tried to keep up with the translation for me, explaining that the men had received the dispatch of our situation and needed more details from us.
Two glasses of lukewarm water were offered to us, and I discreetly didn’t drink mine. I doubted it was bottled water, and I didn’t want to get sick my first night here.
Amy trie
d to explain the questions the officer was asking her.
“Amy, don’t worry about translating for me. You can just answer everything so that things go faster.”
If these young men spoke English, they weren’t planning to use it. Instead, they tested Amy’s weary French vocabulary to its limits. I was proud of her. She kept on task and tried hard to communicate.
I wished I could have been some help. The shorter officer bounced between listening to Amy’s descriptions and trying to engage me in the conversation. I did a lot of sideways nodding, trying to get him to pay attention to Amy. My stomach grumbled loudly at one point, and I placed my hand over it as if to silence it. The officer asked me something, and Amy said he was offering us food.
“That’s okay.” I held up my hand to let him know I was okay. “We can eat later.”
Amy looked at me and then at the officer. She spoke to him, and with a nod he slipped out the front door.
“What did you say?”
“I told him we were hungry.”
“Amy, he doesn’t have to feed us.”
“It’s okay. Relax.”
I was not at all relaxed as I saw the young man take off on a Vespa and putter down the narrow street. He returned less than five minutes later with a long loaf of French bread tucked under his arm. Entering the station, he held up the bread and a small bag of Roma tomatoes and said something to Amy.
“He went to his apartment,” Amy said. “That was nice of him. Merci.”
I watched him slice the crusty bread with a pocketknife and hold out a chunk for me on the tip of the blade. My first thoughts were, “I don’t want the section of bread that was under his armpit,” followed by, “I hope he washed those tomatoes.” Then I realized what a germ-freak I was being. Growing up I had eaten everything placed before me.
“Merci.” I received the gift that was being offered so sincerely. Something inside me stepped down a notch in that moment. I was a guest in a foreign country. Practically a refugee, since we were without luggage. I should just be quiet and be appreciative.
The dry bread and ripe tomatoes were nice. Tasty, even.