The Travelling Companion by Ian Rankin

“My French isn’t very good,” I told him.
    â€œThe seller’s English. You’ll be fine.” Mr. Whitman thrust the postcard towards me again. He had insisted I call him George, but I couldn’t do that. He was my employer, sort of. Moreover, if the stories were to be believed, he was a descendant of Walt Whitman, and that mattered to me. I had graduated with First Class Honors from the University of Edinburgh that same summer. My focus had been on Scottish rather than American Literature, but still—Whitman was Whitman. And now my employer (of sorts) was asking me to do him a favor. How could I refuse?
    I watched as my fingers plucked the postcard from his grip. It was one of the bookstore’s own promotional cards. On one side were drawings of Shakespeare and Rue De La Bucherie, on the other my handwritten destination.
    â€œA five-minute walk,” Mr. Whitman assured me. His accent was an American drawl. He was tall, his silver hair swept back from his forehead, his eyes deep-set, cheekbones prominent. The first time we’d met, he had demanded a cigarette. On hearing that I didn’t smoke, he had shaken his head as if in general weariness at my generation. This meeting had taken place outside a nearby cous-cous restaurant, where I had been staring at the menu in the window, wondering if I dared go inside. Money wasn’t the main issue. I had been rehearsing my few French phrases and considering the possibility that the staff, seeing me for a lone traveler, might mug me for my pocketful of francs before selling the contents of my heavy rucksack at some street market in the vicinity.
    â€œPassing through?” the stranger next to me had inquired, before demanding that I give him one of my “smokes.”
    A little later, as we shared a table and the menu’s cheapest options, he had told me about his bookstore.
    â€œI know it,” I’d stammered. “It’s rightly famous.”
    He had offered a tired smile, and, when we’d filled our bellies, had produced an empty thermos flask, into which he poured the leftover food before screwing the lid back on.
    â€œNo point wasting it,” he had explained. “The store doesn’t pay, you know, but there’s the offer of a bed. A bed’s all you get.”
    â€œI was going to look for a hotel.”
    â€œYou work the till for a few hours, and mop the floor at closing time. Rest of the day’s your own, and we do have some interesting books on the shelves …”
    Which is how I came to work at Shakespeare and Company, 37 Rue De La Bucherie, Paris 5. On the postcard we boasted “the largest stock of antiquarian English books on the continent,” and added Henry Miller’s comment that we were “a wonderland of books.”
    It wasn’t the original shop, of course—not that we trumpeted the fact. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company had opened in the year 1919 on Rue Dupuytren, before moving to larger premises on Rue de l’Odeon. This was where Joyce, Pound and Hemingway could be found. Mr. Whitman had called his own bookstore Le Mistral, before renaming it in Beach’s honor—her own Shakespeare and Co. having closed for good during the German occupation of Paris. The new Shakespeare and Company had been a magnet for Beat writers in the 1950s, and writers (of a sort) still visited. I would lie on my hard narrow bed in a curtained-off alcove and listen as poems were workshopped by ex-pats whose names meant nothing to me. Contemporary writing was not my period, however, so I tried hard not to judge.
    â€œYou’re from Scotland, right?” Mr. Whitman had said to me one day.
    â€œEdinburgh, specifically.”
    â€œWalter Scott and Robbie Burns, eh?”
    â€œAnd Robert Louis Stevenson.”
    â€œNot forgetting that reprobate Trocchi …” He had chuckled to himself.
    â€œStevenson is my passion. I’m starting my PhD