by Ted Mooney
“Does he really think he can rebuild those engines?” Odile asked.
“Oh, he can for sure.” Rachel pushed her glasses back up her nose and sipped her beer. “But there’s more to it than that. He has, like, a vision.”
Her six-foot frame was hypnotizingly out of scale with the boat. Max zoomed in slowly. “Vision?” he repeated.
“That’s my word, not his. He’s going to clean her up totally, stem to stern. And when he’s done—when we’re done, I mean—she’ll be running under her own power for the first time in, like, fifty years.” She grinned and gave the camera an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
“That’s great, Rachel.” He checked the time code. “Could you tell us a little about the boat?”
“Sure. The Nachtvlinder started out life as an admiral’s gig at the turn of the last century. She’s made of Burmese teak and British hardware, measures fifty-four feet long, thirteen wide, and she displaces an even thirty tons. After World War II somebody turned her into a motor yacht, with two diesel engines of the kind you used to find in London taxis. Those are the babies Groot’s going to rebuild this spring. Getting parts will probably be the main problem.”
Running behind Rachel’s head was a long window box of brilliant red geraniums that now came into focus. Max panned slowly along these flowers until Odile’s head entered the frame and the shot included both women, Odile squinting into the sun.
“What happened to the boat after that?” asked Max. The vidcam, a beta-built HD digital, was on loan from a Japanese company that Jacques had been badgering for days. Something had been said about product endorsement, but Max had no intention of providing any such thing.
“Basically she was worked to death,” Rachel explained, “then left to rot. When Groot found her in Utrecht, she was sunk up to her wheelhouse in sludge and looked much worse than she does now. He raised her and patched her up, then had her towed here by barge. We’ve been working on her and living on board ever since.” She appeared thoughtful. “Two years now.”
“So thanks to you, the Nachtvlinder will have a whole new life,” Max suggested.
“Um. We don’t think of it like that, not really.” Rachel gathered her lustrous black hair in her hands, gave it a twist, and held it up off her neck. “She has her history. All we’re doing is giving her a little rehab. Right, Odile?”
Max kept both women in the viewfinder as they looked at each other.
“Yes and no,” Odile answered after a moment. “It’s a question, I suppose, of how much of a thing can be replaced before it becomes another thing altogether.”
Rachel cocked her head. “You’re kidding, right?”
Reaching out across the frame, Odile squeezed her friend’s hand. Then, looking straight into the camera, she said, “Enough for today, Max. It’s the weekend.”
He lowered the vidcam. Rachel excused herself and, ducking into a low oaken doorway, went below to help Groot.
“Are you really going to use that footage?” Odile said when they were alone.
“No, that was just for posterity.” He sat down beside her in the deck chair Rachel had vacated. “Anyway, according to Eddie, I’m in creative transition.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Neither good nor bad. Real, though.” He put the camera down in the small shade cast by his chair. “I’m looking for something, so it goes without saying I’ll find something else. I accept this now, even embrace it. Do you think I’m old?”
“Don’t be morbid, Max,” she told him. “You have no gift for it.”
The two of them looked out over the Seine in companionable silence. Weekend pleasure craft—sailboats, ski boats, outboards, rowboats—plied the river in both directions, and the bateau mouche heading upstream now sent these lesser vessels scrambling. From its loudspeakers came a steady blast of tour commentary, and in its wake bobbed assorted flotsam—a shoe, a soccer ball, a hat, a bloated pig carcass.
“Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Max said. “I saw from this month’s bill that you paid off the back rent. Was that the fruit of your Moscow trip?”
She extended her lips in a pout of feigned boredom.
“Odile.” Reaching out, he took her chin in his hand and turned her toward him. “My love. There’s nothing to worry about. Raising money’s a sport I play. I’ll sell the Giacometti drawing.”
“Why?”
“So that you don’t have to—”
Brushing his hand aside, she put her own impatiently over his mouth. “Enough. When the time comes, you’ll do what must be done. I require it, and you won’t fail me.” His breath in her palm was warm, and she held it for another beat before releasing him. His eyes shone. “I see that we understand each other,” she said. “Good.”
Around four o’clock, Rachel called for Max. Groot needed his help in cutting away the old oil storage tanks. Odile remained topside. Across the river a patrol boat of la brigade fluviale was ticketing a small outboard that had been sprinting up and down through traffic, leaving the other boats tossing in its wake. As Odile watched, a Welsh terrier jumped from the outboard into the police boat and viciously attacked the warrant officer’s trouser cuff.
Since returning from Moscow, she had been visited repeatedly by an old notion, an idea about herself dating from adolescence. It had then been her private conviction that, under circumstances only marginally different from those in which she found herself, she would renounce the world and its ten thousand excruciations, she would retreat into solitude and live her life as an ascetic. Yet religion had held no interest for her then or now, she didn’t even consider self-denial a virtue. She had only noted, with youth’s cruel eye, that she possessed the capacity for it. It was a choice among many, and meant that another life was possible for her. But now she wondered whether she hadn’t overestimated her own freedom to make such decisions. Perhaps it was just an illusion.
Below, Groot started his saw, and the shriek of metal cutting metal set the deck vibrating. A smell of burn wafted up. The air had grown chilly. She stood and gathered her things.
After calling down the companionway to tell the others she was leaving, Odile descended the Nachtvlinder’s gangplank to the packed-sand quai where the boat was docked. Stone steps led back up to the street. She decided to walk home.
Leather jackets in burgundy and black, pleated silk trousers, crocodile shoes and cowboy boots: Odile identified the two men waiting on the sidewalk as Russian even before she realized they were waiting for her. The burlier one, his head shaved and the rim of one ear studded with tiny gold rings, regarded her with an alertness that struck Odile as professional.
The other man was tall and finely featured, with a wolfish smile. “You are Odile Mével,” he said to her in French. “True?”
She made a lunge, trying to get around them, but the burly one easily caught her.
“A most economical answer,” said the taller man. “Unfortunately, certain events, developments, et cetera make it necessary we talk with you in private.” He flashed a police badge at her. “Now is convenient?”
She inhaled deeply, but before she could call for help the other man clapped a thick hand across her mouth.
“Good. We talk in my car. Is more discreet.”
Parked behind them, two wheels up on the curb, was a black sedan of Bavarian make. The burly man wrestled Odile into the backseat, and his employer, as she now judged him to be, slid in beside her. The door slammed shut, and the other man got behind the wheel, started up the car, and pulled out into traffic. At close quarters he smelled very bad.
“Okay, this is the deal,” said the tall man. “You have involved yourself in transborder activities of highly criminal nature. The details are known. My office takes an interest. Maybe I find extenuating circumstances, maybe not. This is up to you.”
Odile grabbed at the door handle on her side. It was locked. “Why do you pretend to be police?” she demanded. “Show me your badge again.”
The man examine
d her closely for a moment, then laughed. “Police, fireman, garbage inspector—who gives a shit? Actually, I am in import-export business like you.”
Odile sat facing forward, her arms folded across her chest.
“Understand: my interest in Soviet memorabilia is extremely limited—nonexistent, I would say. But in Russia to export such things is serious crime—life sentence recommended. You may find it more desirable to talk to me than Interpol, but I leave this decision also to you.”
He produced a pack of cigarettes and lit one, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. After a couple of long, thoughtful drags, he turned to her. “My question is this: where and when, please, did you last see the man called Thierry Colin?”
Odile stared at him in surprise.
“Colin,” he repeated, “Thierry. The man with whom you went to Moscow. Where is he, please?”
She left a little silence. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”
At these words her interlocutor grew mournful in aspect, nodding minutely to himself. Once again, he seemed to say, his small hopes had been defeated by the forces of fecklessness and obstinacy, everywhere abundant. “Why do you make trouble for yourself, dushka? This man is a dog. Don’t get involved in his stupidities.”
But already Odile’s anxiety, her anger and resentment, had begun to shift in character, so that from being on the defensive, detained against her will to fend off questions and threats, she now became detached. “I told you,” she said, “I’ve never heard of the person you’re looking for. What else do you want from me?”
The man slapped the seat with the flat of his hand and cursed in Russian. He ordered his driver to pull over, and the locks popped open. “Consider carefully,” he told Odile. “You are creating bad atmosphere. Our next meeting may not be so pleasant.”
She got out, the car sped off.
Waiting at the taxi stand in the Place de la Bastille, watching the traffic swirl around the monument, Odile tried to recall when she had started lying for Thierry Colin, or about him, and why. None of the obvious answers satisfied her.
“A thief’s not a thief,” he had told her in Moscow. “The police aren’t police.”
In the taxi she allowed her thoughts to grow abstract. Bits of music passed through her mind, just phrases at first, but gradually filling out and cohering until she recognized the work, a small Biber sonata she hadn’t heard in years.
CHAPTER 5
MAX AND JACQUES SAT in the studio one rainy morning watching some footage of Rachel that Max had shot over the past few days. On the screen, Dorothy struck the Cowardly Lion on the nose and rebuked him for chasing Toto.
“An homage,” said Jacques. “Who would have guessed?”
Max ignored him as the camera pulled back to reveal that the Oz sequence was playing on TV, and that a little girl of about five was seated on the floor watching raptly. The reverse zoom continued until it took in the nearby kitchenette, where Rachel was preparing dinner and talking nonstop, apparently to the child.
“She makes most of her money babysitting,” Max explained, “so I asked if I could come along the other night. The little girl doesn’t know a word of English, and Rachel’s French is, shall we say, modest.”
Here the soundtrack brought Rachel’s monologue to the acoustic foreground. She was talking about her childhood in California.
“So whenever my parents got, like, really confused? We’d all pack up and go to Disneyland. It was their holy city, you know? People make pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Mecca, Oz, whatever, but my folks would go to Disneyland. I still don’t know why. One thing, though: it definitely wasn’t for me, it was for them. Whenever they needed spiritual guidance or reaffirmation or just some kind of emotional boost, boom, Disneyland here we come. This happened so many times, and I was so young, that I thought Disneyland was a real place, a city with extra-good zoning laws or something. Seriously impaired, right?”
As she spoke, the camera showed Rachel moving around the kitchenette, chopping vegetables, tending the stove, throwing a hand into the air for emphasis. The length of her limbs gave her movements an elastic, oddly centripetal grace that compelled the eye and engaged the mind. It was as if her physical presence in the frame reduced everything else to subtext.
Jacques was impressed. “I’ve never seen her like that before. Is she acting?”
“Hard to say,” Max admitted. “But I don’t think so. Watch this.”
Again the camera showed the TV screen in frame-filling close-up. The Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion were hiding outside the Wicked Witch’s castle, mustering their courage to rescue Dorothy, when a column of the Witch’s green-skinned sentinels, looking like Cossacks and singing their terrible dirge, marched into the scene. Here Max’s camera reversed angles to show the little girl reacting to these events: her jaw dropped, her face turned crimson, she covered her ears, staggered to her feet, and, gasping for breath, emitted a prolonged wail of fear and outrage.
Immediately Rachel scooped the child up in her arms, seizing the remote control from the floor to mute the sound. Max’s camera zoomed in until his subjects’ faces filled the screen. Light from the TV played over them kaleidoscopically, bouncing off the white wall behind, ringing Rachel and her sobbing charge in an unearthly phosphorescence. Rachel pressed her cheek against the top of the little girl’s head, and here Max froze the frame. After a short silence he said, “I could look at that for five seconds. Maybe more.”
Jacques nodded. “It’s good, Max. Verging on the numinous. How did you do it?”
“I don’t know.” He began to pace. “Maybe it’s her. Somehow she affects the look of things around her. I can’t put my finger on it.”
Since withdrawing from the Isabelle project, Max had videotaped Rachel on five occasions—informal, spontaneous shoots whose only common element was the woman herself: cleaning the Nachtvlinder’s bilge pumps, dancing solo in a nightclub in Oberkampf, being fitted by Odile for a birthday dress. And although Max had no plans for this footage and no investment in it, professional or otherwise, he was growing mildly possessive of her, as if she really were his project.
That afternoon, at a small Left Bank theater where Der blaue Engel had premiered almost seventy years ago, Max attended a screening of his own first feature film, a tragicomic drama called Fireflies. It was being shown as part of a festival—a dozen debut films by independents who’d since made their names—and although Max disliked speaking in public about his work, he’d agreed to introduce the film and to take questions afterward. Sixteen years had passed since its release. He allowed himself to believe that there was something to be learned by revisiting it now, when he’d exhausted the vision that had made it possible.
Despite the rain, Max found the theater almost full when he arrived—the crowd a mix of film students, intellectuals, and others who he supposed just happened to be free at four o’clock in the afternoon. He’d sent Jacques ahead with the actual film cans, and when he spotted his assistant, waving to him from the balcony, he relaxed somewhat. Before him stood a short, bearded man in spectacles who had been addressing him continuously since his arrival.
“… less a film than a conflagration of images,” the man was saying. “What is seen is consumed, what is consumed is seen. In this way, one makes possible the new. A brilliant attack.”
“Thank you,” said Max. He stifled a sudden impulse to harm this man, who seemed to be the program director, and leave the theater, taking his film with him. Instead he said, “Let’s keep it informal today. No need to introduce. Just let me know when, I’ll say a few words, and we’ll roll the film. Okay?”
“As you like,” the man said. He looked unhappily at the speech he had prepared, then folded the pages lengthwise and put them in his jacket pocket. “You will take questions afterward? The audience—”
“Yes. I’ll take questions.”
“Thank you.” He nodded his head in relief. “Please begin whenever you’re ready.”
&nbs
p; A podium and microphone had been set up at the front of the theater, and as Max took up position behind them the audience fell silent. He hadn’t prepared any remarks, thinking instead to take his inspiration from the moment. Apparently he would have to do without inspiration.
“Mesdames, messieurs,” he began, leaning over the microphone. “Bonjour. Je vous remercie d’avoir bravé la pluie pour venir voir ce film, mon premier.”
A woman in the front row stood up, aiming a camera at him. The flash went off and she sat down again.
“When I made this film,” Max continued, “I was twenty-six years old, working on a budget of nothing, more or less. We shot it in New York in thirteen days, averaging thirty-two setups—complete changes of camera and lighting—per day. The conditions were not ideal, but I can tell you that I have never again worked as freely and easily as I did making Fireflies. Maybe that’s what first films are for.”
Pausing to drink from the glass of water that had been set out for him, he recalled that at the time of Fireflies’s release he was still married to Diana, Allegra had yet to be conceived, and he spoke no French at all. His real life, in any sense that mattered, had barely begun.
“Well,” he said, “it’s easy to sentimentalize one’s youth. So let me not waste more of your time. We’ll see the film, and afterward, if you have questions, I’ll try to answer them.”
An usher with a flashlight hurried two last ticket holders to their seats. The lights went down.
Movies, Max thought, are just another kind of lie.
RAIN FELL IN SHEETS against the facades of buildings and rebounded off the pavement in bull’s-eye splashes. Odile shook out her umbrella. She’d spent the morning inspecting the clothing boutiques of the first and second arrondissements to see what was selling and to catch up with the trade. Now she stood just outside the glass vestibule of a music-and-electronics emporium on the Champs-Élysées, waiting for the rain to let up. She stared into the downpour, half mesmerized by its fall and force.
