Votes All Counted
I guess we all stopped listening to what we didn’t like. You could turn down the volume and cut off the mike. You could cut yourself off from half the people in town Until their voices came through like hard rain slashing down. There’s a flashlight I hold with my...
Creamy Stucco
It was a much larger apartment than she had expected, with soothing walls of creamy stucco. A dim hallway stretched from the front door toward a spacious living room. Large, multipaned glass doors dominated its rear wall beyond which was a tiled courtyard and a...
Amira Learned How
Amira learned how to affix photos to the readied passport pages, a more demanding process with the logoed overlay than she imagined. The uniform texture of the sealant was difficult to achieve and the brushes she used left waves, so she paid Sylvain a visit for...
Near UCLA
Sylvain wished them luck and told them they could find him in Westwood, where he had an apartment near UCLA.
Figueroa Street
Their weekly meetings, which grew increasingly lighthearted, went on for a year. Then, one day in late spring, he told them he was closing his Figueroa Street studio. He gave Amira an old suitcase. Inside was a vintage camera, a 1937 Leica II Model and dozens of...
Musso and Frank
On a rainy Friday when the city seemed off balance, they took Sylvain to lunch at Musso and Frank. For an appetizer, he had olives antipasto and consommé, progressed to Bouillabaisse which made Francine think of her mother in Marseille. Each of the women had a...
Sadness
His sadness brought to mind rustling leaves, a long-ago autumn before something had carved a slice out of his life and an endless winter settled in.
Forlorn
Caroline and Francine immediately understood what Amira meant. Sylvain was indeed delicate. His face was full of loss, although a cheerful twinkle pierced his naturally forlorn expression each time they met.
Sylvain
“From what little I know of Sylvain, he is an extraordinarily delicate man,” Amira told them. “He learned from his father, who was a forger for the Resistance. Sylvain came to Los Angeles the same as the Egyptians when Nasser came to power. If there is a more...
Fridays
On Fridays Amira, Caroline and Francine drove downtown and dropped the passports off with Sylvain. His photography studio on Figueroa Street had been in business since 1952. Sylvain paid Amira a thousand dollars apiece. Amira was handed back passports in progress,...
Amira Fell
Amira fell into a routine that allowed her, with little or no self-imposed pressure, to create the frameworks of 49 passports a week for a man she knew only as Sylvain. She worked at the kitchen table, turning them out in batches of seven. Her favorite countries to...
Ramon
They knew him as Ramon. He sent two of his men up to Los Angeles every day and each drove a car Caroline or Francine had stolen back to Tijuana. That wasn’t enough to unclog the bottleneck. Within a week, four cars headed south every day.
In From Marseilles
Francine’s mother was tempted to pay a visit to Los Angeles but thought the better of it and stayed put in Marseilles. She emailed back an introduction to a man in Tijuana she had once worked with, who, it turned out, would be pleased to buy all the cars Francine and...
The Rarest Of Teachers
Caroline found Francine to be the rarest of teachers, one who stitched together the finer points of an exercise with its broader objectives in a way that appeared natural, even anticipated. Francine saw in Caroline the rarest of students, a tempered thirst for...
Vaguely Drawn Into A Study
Only vaguely could he imagine being drawn into reading this study. Detached researchers could only hunt and peck. Rarely would they cross over wretched waters to the essential questions. Would a marriage be more likely to dissolve if a child’s death was sudden and...
Father
Caroline’s father figured that somewhere a study had been published on the impact of a death of a child, how the loss sears the family and ultimately scorches its once sturdy framework.
The Cheltenham Ladies College
Six years of boarding school at the Cheltenham Ladies College did nothing to lure Caroline into British ways. The opposite unfolded. Each passing day intensified her yearning to be back in the States.
Francine
Francine, the girl from Corsica, took Caroline out every day and taught her how to steal cars. At night, in the spare bedroom of their house in Silver Lake, Amira taught them the finer points of forgery.
