The narrator flashes back six months to Paris, recounting her first contact with Lucien Dubois. She approached him as a stranger at a bar near the Place des Vosges, where Lucien was playing pinball while wearing a fedora, affecting the look of a 1960s French new-wave film. The narrator notes that this style was already an affectation even in Godard's era, and that she had researched Lucien's tastes thoroughly before the encounter.

She entered the bar and ordered a pastis, deliberately dressed to attract his attention: tight jeans with suspenders and a thin, transparent white T-shirt that emphasized her braless chest. She rhetorically dismisses any question about whether her breasts are real. Lucien, sensing her presence, played pinball with extra showmanship, winning extra games as he performed for her.

While watching Lucien manipulate the flippers, the narrator muses on the pinball machine as an atavistic descendant of older male labor: the plow, the cart, the tinker's wagon, now reduced to play. She distances herself from such games, uncertain whether her disinterest stems from not being a man or simply not being drawn to games.

When Lucien ran out of coins, the bartender asked if he was finished; Lucien replied that it depended, staring at her. She smiled shyly. He came over, introduced himself, and she gave her name as Sadie, the identity backed by an American passport under that alias. The cold approach succeeded, establishing the cover relationship that frames her current infiltration mission.