We were more concerned about the fact that Guillaume, who was single-handedly manning a second balloon a hundred yards away, was floating to his certain death.
Below us, Paris rose up around the ribbon of the Seine, a gentle sprawl of cream-colored, centuries-old apartments, little chimney tops, quaint bridges, and geometric green parks. We were just west of the city, so the Eiffel Tower jutted gracefully into the sky right in front of us, and had I not been in such a state of panic, I would have marveled at just how beautiful it was as it loomed, all thousand feet of iron gridwork and graceful symmetry, over the glorious green ladder of the Champ de Mars, which spread out in a neat rectangle to the foot of the dark-domed école Militaire.
The Arc de Triomphe, the stone masterpiece Napoléon had commissioned two hundred years ago, looked palatial in the waning sunlight as it sat across the river in the center of the busiest roundabout in Paris, twelve avenues radiating like points on a star from its center. The Avenue des Champs-élysées, lined with trees and sparkling lights, marched away from us toward the center of Paris, ending in the octagonal Place de la Concorde, where I could see the tall, slender, thirty-two-hundred-year-old Egyptian obelisk that pointed at the sky, framed by two fountains.
Beyond that, the perfectly geometric Jardin des Tuileries was an emerald expanse toward the enormous Louvre, which hulked on the Right Bank, long and limber around I. M. Pei’s famed glass pyramid. On the ?le de la Cité, the island in the middle of the Seine, I could just make out the twin towers of Notre Dame beyond the Palais de Justice and the spires of the Sainte-Chapelle cathedral. All along the gently winding river, which sparkled bright blue in the fading daylight, bridges looked like rungs of a ladder from the air.
Yet there was hardly time to take in any of the incredible beauty. Instead I was in a state of panic as Gabe and I, with the help of a hastily hired balloon operator, chased Guillaume through the clouds above Paris. Gabe had called me an hour ago to tell me tersely that Guillaume had taken a hot-air balloon and was currently floating solo above the city. My stomach had twisted into knots, and I’d asked Gabe if he could arrange for another balloon so that we could go up and try to talk Guillaume down before he killed himself. After all, hot on the heels of the success of “City of Light,” Guillaume was just finishing recording his second album and was due to embark on a world tour the week after next. It would be a little difficult for us to fill auditoriums if the headliner was in a body cast or, heaven forbid, splattered across the Paris pavement. I shuddered at the thought.
Now Guillaume was floating high above Paris, all by himself, without a balloon operator, in a green, yellow, and red balloon that he’d evidently somehow stolen from a field just outside Paris. He was cheerfully firing up the propane tank every few minutes, making his balloon rise and gently fall as our balloon, which Gabe had scrambled to hire from a tour site outside the city, floated close enough to put me in shouting distance. I didn’t even want to think about the legal trouble we’d all be in when we landed; we were currently much closer to Paris than we were allowed to be.
“Hi, Emma!” Guillaume’s voice wafted over, faint over the wind and the periodic gentle hiss of the propane burner heating the air inside our balloon.
“Guillaume!” I shouted back, fearing that my voice wouldn’t carry far enough. “What on earth are you doing?”
I’d just been counting myself lucky, too. I should have known better. But it had been two whole months since a major incident with Guillaume. Sure, he’d done dumb things here and there—swimming in the fountain in the Place de la Concorde (along with his favorite rubber ducky, no less) one afternoon two weeks ago, for example—but nothing life threatening. Until now. And of course Guillaume wasn’t just my insane rock-star client anymore. He was also the brother of the man I loved, which made me that much more worried about how this situation would play out.
“Emma!” Guillaume shouted. He sounded surprisingly chipper for someone who was all by himself in a hot-air balloon that could plummet earthward at any moment. “I thought you’d never get here! And you’ve brought Gabe with you? How fantastic!”
“Guillaume!” I shouted back. “You’re going to get yourself killed!”
I turned to Gabe, feeling panic rise inside me. “We have to help him get down,” I said urgently. “We have to have our balloon operator tell him how to land.”
Gabe nodded, but he made no move to help or to yell across to Guillaume.
“Gabe!” I exclaimed in exasperation. “Why aren’t you doing anything? Aren’t you worried?”