It’s like renting a room over a kindergarten class to a newly released pedophile. God help me.

Robbie was determined to stay clean. He knew his life depended on it. But it was tough. The loneliness was grinding, soul destroying, and ever present. Not being able to communicate was the worst part.

Why did I have to “find myself” in France? Why couldn’t I have gone to London, or Sydney, or some other place where they speak English?

Of course, Robbie knew the answer to that. Paris was the musicians’ mecca. The Paris Conservatoire, where Bizet and Debussy had once studied, was a place of mythical significance to Robbie. The newly opened Cité de la Musique, architect Christian de Portzamparc’s celebrated ampitheater, concert hall, museum of music, and workshops in La Vil-lette, the old slaughterhouse district, had a new generation of musicians and composers flocking to the city.

The best musical talent in the world came to Paris. It was the center, the hub, the beginning and the end of everything for a would-be concert pianist like Robbie.

Unfortunately, would be turned out to be the operative words. Since he had no formal training or qualifications, the conservatoire refused even to see him, never mind hear him play. Simply finding bar work proved far harder than Robbie had imagined. The problem with moving to the most exciting city in the world for classical music was that everyone else had done the same thing. Paris was crawling with hot-shit piano players, and most of them had years of experience. Robbie was an unknown Yank whom no one could understand, who’d once had a job playing blues piano in a gay bar in New Orleans for all of three weeks.

Robbie did, however, have three things going for him. Talent, determination and looks. And the greatest of these was looks.

“Pay is fifty francs an hour, plus tips. Take it or leave it.”

Madame Aubrieau (“Please, call me Martine”) was a fifty-two-year-old ex-hooker who wore a blond wig to cover her bald patches, weighed approximately the same as a young hippo and whose breath smelled of a combination of garlic, menthol cigarettes and Benedictine that made Robbie want to gag. She wore a low-cut, cheap red top that exposed a quivering expanse of larva-white cleavage, and when she spoke to Robbie, she stared unashamedly at his crotch.

In addition to these attributes, Madame Aubrieau owned Le Club Canard, a dive bar in the twelfth arondissement whose piano player had quit the previous week in a dispute over unpaid wages. Madame Aubrieau liked the look of the shy young American. If he took the job, she would eat him for breakfast. Afterward, she would have him eat her. It was good to be the boss.

Robbie looked at Madame Aubrieau’s Jabba the Hut body and felt sick. Fifty francs an hour was not a living wage. On the other hand, his current earnings of zero francs an hour were beginning to irritate Marcel, his Ogrement landlord. Marcel was not a man Robbie wished to irritate.

“I’ll take it. When do I start?”

Madame Aubrieau clamped a fat, dirty-fingernailed hand on Robbie’s thigh and flashed him a toothless smile.

“Immédiatement, mon chou. Suivez moi.”

Robbie first laid eyes on Paolo Cozmici at the Salle Pleyel concert hall on the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Cozmici was conducting the resident Orchestre de Paris. And he was magnificent.

Like every other musician in Paris, Robbie knew of Paolo Cozmici by reputation. The youngest son of a dirt-poor family from Naples, Cozmici was completely self-taught as a composer, a pianist and, most recently, a conductor. Nicknamed Le Bouledogue-“the bulldog”-by the French musical establishment, Paolo Cozmici had famously won his place as conductor of the Paris Philharmonic by storming unannounced into rehearsals for Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, seizing the baton from a bewildered Claude Dechamel and displaying the sort of instinctive virtuosity that had since made him one of the most sought-after conductors in the world.

In the front row of the glorious Art Deco concert hall, Robbie Templeton sat mesmerized. Later, he would be unable to recall the specific piece that Paolo had been conducting. All he remembered was the beauty and grace of his movements, at one with the music, swept up in the same passion that Robbie himself felt whenever he sat at a piano stool. Robbie could see nothing of Paolo but his back-an ill-fitting tuxedo jacket stretched across broad, workman’s shoulders-but it didn’t matter. Just watching Cozmici at work gave him a sexual charge so violent it was all Robbie could do not to jump out of his chair and storm the stage.

Afterward he waited at the stage door for hours. When Cozmici finally emerged, tired, grumpy and more than a little drunk, Robbie found to his horror that he was completely tongue-tied. Staring mutely, like an idiot, he watched as his idol began to walk away.

“Arrêtez! Monsieur Cozmici. Je vous en prie…”

“I don’t do autographs,” Cozmici barked. “Please, leave me alone.”

“But I…”

“Yes? What?”

“I love you.”

Paolo Cozmici looked at the boy properly for the first time. Even through his drunken haze, he could see that Robbie was extraordinarily attractive. On the downside, he was clearly a lunatic. A sexy lunatic was not what Paolo Cozmici needed in his life right now.

“Get away from me. Understand? Leave me alone, or I shall be forced to call the police.”

The next morning, Paolo found a handwritten note in his mailbox.

“I’ll be playing piano at Le Club Canard tonight. My set starts at eight P.M. I’ll understand if you can’t make it, but I hope you can.” It was signed: “Le garcon de la nuit passée. RT.”

Paolo Cozmici smiled. He had to admire the boy for his tenacity. It was what he was famed for himself.

But no, he wouldn’t go. The whole thing was crazy.

Sexy lunatic would have to find someone else to harass.

Robbie peered into the gloomy half light of the club, searching for Paolo Cozmici’s face.

He’s not coming. I scared him off. Man, of course I scared him off. What kind of fruit loop yells “I love you” in the street to a man he’s never met before? The loneliness must be getting to me.

Madame Aubrieau was becoming impatient. It was time for Robbie’s set to start. Launching into Bill Evans’s soulful “Waltz for Debby” followed by a passionate rendition of “My Foolish Heart,” he was embarrassed to find himself fighting back tears. Jazz was not Robbie’s preferred genre, but no one could deny that Bill Evans was a genius. The fact that he’d been a heroin junkie, like Robbie, dogged by addiction and self-doubt for most of his life, made the emotional connection even stronger. Robbie closed his eyes and gave himself up to the music. He thought about Lexi and his mother. He thought about home. He wondered how long he could bear to continue in this half-life in Paris, with no friends, no family, no hope.

He heard the applause dimly at first, as if waking up from a dream. He had no idea how long he’d been playing. As so often with Robbie, the music had transported him into a trance-like state where time and space dissolved. But as the cheers and clapping grew louder, he realized that the usually somnolent Canard crowd was on its feet, roaring approval, begging him for more. Robbie smiled, nodding in shy acknowledgment. As soon as he stood up, he found his hand being shaken and his back slapped by a sea of strangers, men and women alike. Some of them pressed notes into his hand.

“Incroyable.”

“Absolument superbe!”

“Twenty percent of those tips go to the house,” Madame Aubrieau reminded him tersely. She considered Robbie her property and disliked seeing him mobbed by other, more attractive women.

“Good evening.”

Paolo Cozmici looked even shorter and squatter than he had last night, scurrying away from the stage door at the Salle Pleyel. In a crumpled suit and tie, an incipient paunch spilling over the waistband of his pants, he could easily have been a decade older than his thirty years. But none of that mattered to Robbie. He was so awestruck he could barely force the words out of his mouth.