The next day, Sunday, Katie and David went to Mass at Notre Dame, spellbound by both the beauty of the cathedral and by the rolling way the hymns echoed through its vast interior. Katie was in awe of it all, while David felt deeply the peacefulness of the atmosphere, perfumed by billows of incense.
         Afterwards they stopped for a quick bite at a nearby café then began their Hemingway tour, guided by a map of locations Catherine had given them and by a copy of the author’s memoir of the 1920s in Paris named A Moveable Feast.
       Starting on the Île de la Cité and having already seen The Ritz, they crossed the Pont Neuf to the Left Bank where Hemingway lived with his first wife, Hadley, at a time when he said they were poor but very happy. Katie and David strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens (above) whose Palais held works by Monet, Manet and Cezanne whom Hemingway admired, and soon came upon the modest walk-up building on the rue Cardinal-Lemoine where Ernest and Hadley had rented their first apartment. Then it was up to Montparnasse, where they’d had lunch the day before, to see those brasseries Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir frequented, like Lipp, La Cloiserie des Lilas (right, Hemingway, with Hadley in the middle), Le Select and La Coupole, where they stopped for coffee and pastry.
    By the end of the afternoon, they felt suffused not only with the spirit of Hemingway but with the bohemian culture of what his friend Gertrude Stein called “the lost generation.”
    Katie said, “I guess the 1920s was a lot different from the Jazz Age back in New York, but it must have had the same vitality, and I suspect the bohemian life of Greenwich Village in the fifties tried to capture some of that, too.”
    David said, “I missed that by a few years, but I do remember a little of the scene in the Village in the seventies and the drug culture of the Lower East Side when I joined the force. It was uglier than you can imagine, Katie. You’d hear and feel the heroin needles crunch under your feet when you walked through the neighborhood. I hated going on assignment down there, mainly because even if you made a bust, nothing ever really changed. One dealer was replaced by five others the next week. Artsy, it was not, except for some of the grunge bands that were starting up back then.”
    “I never hung out there,” said Katie, “and by the time I was old enough to go, there was nothing left to see. Hip Hop was just starting up in the Bronx, which displaced the downtown music scene very quickly. Which is what New York always does.  Here everything seems to go on much the same. Montparnasse looks just the way Hemingway described it.”
    “Maybe, but don’t kid yourself. Most of the people around here are tourists, and 9/11 put a big hole in that.”
    “Which must really hurt the hotels, not to mention those three that got contaminated.”
    The couple had been so enthralled with what they’d seen that day that they’d hardly thought at all about the hotels, and Katie began to feel nothing significant would show up in the next few days and that she and David could continue sight-seeing.
    “I hope that infectious disease scientist we’re seeing tomorrow can at least tell us what kind of contamination occurred,” said Katie. “How did it get into the hotels and if there are any links among them.”
    “It’d better be real solid info for Alan to keep us here much longer. And if it’s anything like the Legionnaires Disease incident, it might take forever to find out the source.”
    “Ah, well,” said Katie, “as the French say, “‘Peigner la giraffe.’”
    “Meaning what?”
    “To comb the giraffe.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “Don’t kill yourself on something not likely to be of any use, like combing a giraffe.”
    “That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.”

         Early the next morning Katie and David took a taxi to the Pasteur Institute (left), whose two buildings flanked the Rue du Dr. Roux. One was a stately old building of red brick with a date of 1900 on its façade and contained a museum that maintained Doctor Pasteur’s original laboratory; the other was a very modern six-story structure of glass, stone and steel where  most of the research was being conducted. Katie told the attendant that she had an eight o’clock appointment with Dr. Judith Baer, and, after a few minutes the two Americans were buzzed through a glass inner door where they were greeted by a woman in a white lab coat who seemed to be in her sixties or perhaps early seventies. She was fairly tall, slender, quite attractive and might have been a model or actress when she was young. She had dark hair with some streaks of gray, tied back in  a chignon. Her complexion was fair and largely free of wrinkles, with a small beauty mark above her lip. A pair of glasses hung from her neck. She was wearing a white lab coat.
         “You are the American woman I spoke to Friday?” she said in clipped English, without any hint of being happy to see them, suggesting this would not be a long interview.
         Katie introduced herself and David and repeated that she was a journalist and David was assisting her. They were looking into the story of what happened at the hotels.
         “All right,” said the physician, “we can go to my office,” then turned and briskly went left down a corridor to a small office devoid of any décor except a desk, three chairs, a computer and a filing cabinet. On the wall was Dr. Baer’s certificate of medicine, which she earned at the Sorbonne.
         Katie said, “Ah, the Sorbonne! I studied for a semester there in college.”
         Dr. Baer said only, “And how do you think I can help you?”
         Katie said, “Do you mind if I tape record our interview.”
         The woman only shrugged to indicate her assent.
         “I suppose the first thing I want to know is if they’ve identified what exactly the contamination was. Viral or bacterial.”
         “It was not bacterial,” said Dr. Baer, sounding as if the idea was naïve. “Had it been so, the effects would not have hit everyone so suddenly. Bacteria needs time to grow in the body, and different people would react over different time lengths, not all at once, like this.”
         “So, it’s viral, then?” asked David. Dr. Baer looked at him as if he asked something so obvious that it reflected on his intelligence.
         “Yes, of course,” she said. “If you have ever had the flu you know that it hits you suddenly.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that. You feel fine, then you feel terrible. Of course, it might take a day or two to develop, but once in the air many people will come down with the same symptoms within hours. That is the nature of a virus.” She looked at her watch.
         David continued. “So, you’re saying that the virus might have been in the hotel for at least a couple of days and that people who might have contracted it and checked out of the hotel would get the symptoms a day or two afterwards?”
         “Yes, I’m sure there are many people who left the hotel who are sick by now but did not connect it with the virus in the hotel. Those who had been staying there for a few days all got the symptoms at the same time. It’s not unusual. It happens in offices and schools all the time.”
         “But no one has yet died from the virus?” asked Katie.
       “Not so far. I understand there are some much more sick than others, the older ones and those with pre-existing conditions, but no, no deaths yet.”
         “Do you expect any?”
         “It does not seem to be a killer virus, if that’s what you mean. But it’s not one I have seen before, which is always a reason to worry.”  Another glance at her watch.
         “So, you don’t fear a pandemic in Paris?” asked Katie.
         “Not if it can be contained with the people who have been exposed. It’s possible all those they came in contact with could contract the virus, including the staff members who went home at night.”
         David asked, “Have the hospitals provided you with, what would you call them samples of the virus?”
         “Yes, I will be working on them today, myself and other doctors here at the Institute. We may know something within twenty-four hours.”
        David ventured, “Dr. Baer, I’m sure you’re very familiar with the so-called Legionnaires Disease incident that occurred some years ago in a Philadelphia hotel, that supposedly came through the air ducts.”
    “Of course. It turned out to be a form of atypical pneumonia. But that was a unique bacteria. The even named it legionnairosis. There were no symptoms for several days.”
        “So, there’s no possible connection.”
        Dr. Baer shook her head once and said, “Now, do you have any other questions, because I need to meet my colleagues about this issue in five minutes?”
         Katie realized the interview was over.
         “Just one more, Dr. Baer. Do you think there might have been a crime involved in this incident?”
         “In what way?”
         “That the virus was somehow deliberately introduced into the three hotels with some criminal intent?”
         “It is . . . possible, but I have no reason to believe that right now. It is out of the ordinary that three hotels separated from one another were all hit with the same malady, but until we know what it is, I cannot comment on that.”
         Then, rising deliberately from her chair and without extending her hand, Dr. Baer said, “Well, I don’t know if I’ve helped you or exactly what you are looking for, but if you want to call me tomorrow I shall tell you what we may find out about this virus.”
         Her last words had only the slightest tinge of cordiality, and Katie said she appreciated the time Dr. Baer had taken and that they would appreciate knowing anything more that the doctors might find out by the next day.”
After leaving the Institute Katie and David decided to walk awhile—they were already in Montparnasse—and talk over the interview.
         “Well, she wasn’t exactly a fount of information,” said David.
         “I swear to God,” said Katie, “she reminded me so much of some of the French professors I had when I was here at the Sorbonne. Totally lacking in any sense of humor, always ready to criticize a student for a lapse, never patting you on the back.”
         “Well, I wasn’t expecting a pat on the back, but she might have been a little more forthcoming with details.”
         “I think she’s just being tight-lipped because she doesn’t want to make a mistake talking to the press before anything’s been confirmed and passed by the Institute’s p.r. people. It has to be an official statement.”
         “So, what do we do now?”
         “We’ll always have Paris.”