by Ted Mooney
“You would enjoy her,” Odile said, pouring herself a glass of mineral water. “She has a natural grace, Fatima. Mischievous and sexy. Like a djinn.”
“But won’t you basically have to cover her from head to toe? I’m assuming she’s Muslim.”
“Muslim, yes, but very modern. No head scarf, no djellaba, none of that.” Leafing through the day’s mail, she blew a puff of air. “Have you heard any more from Allegra? You called her, right?”
“E-mailed her.” Max opened the refrigerator and contemplated its contents. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. I’m just trying to get a picture of the summer.”
From the meat compartment he removed two veal chops wrapped in brown paper. “Probably what will happen is she’ll spend a month or so with us—June or July. But it still has to be worked out. With her mother, I mean.”
Odile sat down at the kitchen table with that afternoon’s Le Monde. “Diana will cooperate.”
“Yes, but she’ll drag it out, exacting her small revenge.”
“Ignore her, then. Your concern is Allegra.”
Max unwrapped the chops and ran cold water over them. While it had been understood, virtually from the outset of their relationship, that he and Odile would have no children of their own, he sometimes wondered if she was as unconflicted about this as she seemed. The official line, that their respective professional ambitions precluded responsible child rearing, was sound enough, and Odile relished her personal freedom. But occasionally he could feel a shadow pass and would worry that something essential had been sacrificed. A room left dark in the marital mansion.
“Max?” She had laid the newspaper open on the table and was scanning the headlines. “Don’t make a chop for me. I think I’ll just have salad.”
“What? But you adore veal. Aren’t you feeling well?”
“No, I’m fine, really. But I—” She looked up.
“Yes?”
She shrugged. “My meat-eating days are finished. I’ve just decided.”
He blinked, awaiting clarification.
“Oh, come on, Max. I just feel like a change of diet, okay? Don’t take it personally.”
Retrieving the brown paper from the garbage, Max wrapped the second chop back up and put it in the refrigerator. “You’re not undergoing a religious conversion, are you?”
“Rest assured,” she told him, returning to the newspaper.
Over dinner he recounted the rescue of the Nachtvlinder, taking pains not to embellish or overdramatize, seeking in Odile’s reaction some clue to the nature of the day’s events and the film that had begun to coalesce around them. She listened closely and asked the occasional question, trying to visualize it all. Together they entertained the possibility that a second act of sabotage had taken place, that the firebombers had returned to cut the Nachtvlinder loose and send her to ruin. But of course that hadn’t happened, and it strained belief that the would-be saboteurs could have failed a second time.
“What I wonder about,” Max said, pouring them coffee, “is why Groot’s putting so much energy into restoring the engines if he isn’t planning to move the boat.”
“How do you know he isn’t?”
“Various things Rachel’s said. Today I heard her tell him there was no point in saving the boat if they alienated the neighbors. Which wasn’t an exaggeration, I’m beginning to see. Those houseboaters are tough.”
“Okay. But what’s your point? Say he moves the boat. So what?”
Max shook his head vexedly. “It’s not that alone. I have to consider the big picture. Up till now I’ve just been shooting Rachel on spec, a kind of extended screen test, really. But with what I got today I can begin to imagine an actual film, one I’d kill to make.”
“The one you’ve been looking for?”
“Maybe, yes. So the problem becomes, how hard do I push it? Do I let it come to me, which is what I’ve done till now, or do I take a more proactive approach? Because my instinct tells me there’s more at play here than I’ve got a grip on.”
She leaned back in her chair and regarded him shrewdly, holding the coffee cup before her lips. “You know what Bastien says.”
“No, what?”
“Better a lie that’s big enough than a truth too small.”
“Well, good for him, the old terrorist. I’ll have to remember that the next time Allegra tells me film’s just another kind of lie.”
“He likes you, you know. Despite what you think.”
“Spare me. He’d have me sent to the countryside for reeducation if he could.” Max wiped his mouth on his napkin. “To the gulags.”
“That’s Stalinism. He’s a Trotskyite, remember?”
“Whatever. Dustbin of history, either way.”
Leaving Odile to do the dishes, he went outside to smoke one of his small black cigars. The sky had cleared, and in the moonless night the stars scintillated with a fiery brilliance that was rare over Paris. He let himself out through the gate of the mews, turned left on rue Léon Maurice Nordmann, and walked a block west to La Maison d’arrêt de la Santé, the neighborhood’s most notable though least remarked-upon feature, a top-security nineteenth-century prison whose glowering hulk occupied an entire trapezoidal block adjacent to boulevard Arago. Eighteen-foot stone-aggregate walls surrounded the facility, shielding it utterly from view, and in the warmer months Max had fallen into the habit of making a brisk circuit around it while smoking his postprandial cigar. The atmosphere at such times inclined him toward introspection of a strangely detached sort that he often found therapeutic. Lockdown was at six, and there was rarely anything to be heard from inside the prison after that, but earlier the sidewalks outside would be filled with the relatives of inmates—women and children and young men—calling out to their loved ones inside, who would then respond, their harsh voices requesting justice or cigarettes, damning faithless accomplices and friends, vowing love or revenge or vindication in several languages. These scenes made Max uneasy, so he confined his walks to the later hours. The communion he sought was with silence, the massive penitentiary hum of captive souls.
When he returned to the apartment, Odile was sitting on the sofa in her bathrobe, painting her toenails and watching Chinatown. He poured himself a Calvados and sat down beside her. Roman Polanski thrust the point of a switchblade up Jack Nicholson’s left nostril and said, “Hold it there, kitty cat.” Odile took a sip of Max’s drink. “You are a very nosy fellow, kitty cat. You know what happens to nosy fellows?” Scene for scene, Max reflected, Chinatown was quite possibly the greatest American film of all time.
Afterward, in bed, he and Odile sought each other out with an avidity that seemed to refer to lately unspoken things. Cupping her buttocks in his hands, he drew his tongue up between her legs in slow, deliberate strokes, sometimes pulling back for a beat or two, waiting her out, until she buried her fingers in his hair, locked her ankles at the small of his back, and, pushing herself hard against him, let loose a long keening cry that made his senses trill. When her spasms trailed off, he entered her and they began again, slowly, ascending together. The night was close about them, dense and many chambered, provisionally infinite.
Max woke much later in a confusion of dream fragments and half-remembered voices. Odile slept with her back to him, clutching a pillow to her chest. He got up to get a glass of water, and, in the living room, cranked open a window. Three doors down, the anarchists were having a party and their guests had spilled out into the courtyard, smoking and conversing in low voices while Brazilian hip-hop emanated from inside. He listened for awhile, reminded of his own youth. He had been rash, dismissive of reason, fearless. It didn’t seem all that long ago.
When he returned to bed, Odile stirred. “Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.”
She came into his arms. “Max?”
“Yes?”
“Did I dream it or did you say … did you say this is a film you’d kill to make?�
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“No, I did say that.”
“Good.” She sighed and wriggled closer. “That’s what I thought.”
And though her breathing soon evened out, Max’s thoughts ran on, attaching to nothing in particular but giving him no peace, and he lay awake beside her, awash in nameless feeling, until nearly daybreak.
CHAPTER 13
TURNER’S SQUASH CLUB was on the Left Bank, in an unassuming building on rue de Pontoise, and he played twice a week when he could. From a strictly business point of view, the Ritz might have offered more suitable contacts, but it was expensive and sufficiently ancien régime to put him off his game. Worse, it had no Asian members. All the best players Turner knew were Asian.
He had booked a court for five thirty. When he arrived Sylvain Broch was already warming up, smashing the ball against the wall with a vengeance. Turner hadn’t seen Broch since he had suggested Thierry Colin for the Moscow trip, but now, with the development of the flags well under way, he was curious to hear what the man might want to tell him about his missing cousin.
“I thought maybe you’d gone back to the States,” Broch said when they shook hands. “Is everything okay?”
“Very okay, my friend.”
“So it’s a woman. I knew it.”
Turner laughed. “No, not a woman. Not really. I’ll tell you later.”
“You will, because I’ll insist.”
They volleyed until they were both warmed up. Broch spun the racquet, Turner won first serve, and they began.
Although technically they were well matched, Turner had discovered that the younger man harbored a small, subconscious fear of being hit—by the ball, by the racquet—that tended to hamper his game. Sometimes he was able to use this fear as a spur to more aggressive play, working willfully ahead of it, but more often it shaved just a fraction of a second off his moves, and he’d spend the whole match trying to catch up. Turner had never been able to determine if Broch was aware of this weakness, but over the course of their acquaintance he’d lost more often than he’d won.
They played hard for about an hour. Turner lost the first game and was about to lose the next when he gave in to temptation and began slamming the ball off the front wall so it came straight back at Broch, who then had to fight it off blindly or step aside and wait for it to rebound off the rear wall. Soon Turner had him on the run, and before long Broch was spending as much energy avoiding the ball as he was chasing it.
“Enough, you bastard,” he said at last, bent over at midcourt, panting for breath. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight.”
“You’re a little out of shape, that’s all.” Turner laid a hand on his shoulder. “Been working late?”
“Fuck off. Drinks are yours this time.”
They showered, dressed, and repaired to Bar Flou, small, chic, but studiedly informal, where the patrons were regulars, the drink was champagne, and dinner was never ordered before ten. The walls were painted a deep brothel red, making it seem even smaller, and behind the minuscule bar a single Corinthian column rose to meet the stamped-tin ceiling to bizarre effect. Turner rather liked the place, and it wasn’t expensive.
The tables around them quickly filled with people settling in for the evening. Most knew one another at least by sight, and the small rituals of self-display—a sweater brandished and draped over bare shoulders, a cigarette proffered and lit, an earring adjusted—lent the proceedings a collective intimacy. Conversations eddied and overlapped.
When their champagne arrived, they clinked glasses.
Turner looked at him. “You asked earlier if I’d met a woman and I told you not really, but in point of fact I have. You know her, I think. Her name is Odile Mével.”
Broch frowned and shook his head. “What does she look like?”
“Pretty, auburn hair that’s almost red, marvelous breasts. Early thirties, I’d say. You’d remember.”
Broch opened his palms. “Who is she?”
“I’m still finding that out myself, but she was the woman I hired along with your cousin, you remember, to run that Moscow errand?”
“Oh, yes.” Bored. “But I never met her.”
“No? I thought maybe Thierry might’ve mentioned her to you.”
Broch finished his champagne and signaled the waiter for another. “It’s possible. I don’t remember.”
“But have you talked to him lately?”
“Lately? No. He has a full teaching schedule, and examinations are coming up. Anyway, he’s just my cousin. I don’t pay much attention to his social life.”
Turner nodded. At a corner table two women kissed lavishly while the man who’d brought them cut and recut a deck of cards, speaking all the while to a couple at the adjacent table. They listened intently, watching his hands.
“The reason I ask,” Turner said, “is that Thierry never showed up to collect his fee for the Russian trip. I mean, I realize that thirty thousand francs isn’t what it used to be, but somehow I thought he’d want to be paid. Any idea what happened to him?”
The waiter whisked away Broch’s empty champagne glass and put a full one in its place. Broch drank it down and handed the glass back to the waiter, who put a third one before him and swept off with the empties. “Is he dead?” Broch asked, avoiding Turner’s eye.
“I don’t know. Should he be?”
A moment of thoughtful silence ensued, which an instant later made both men laugh.
“He can be a pain in the ass,” Broch said. “This is certain. But he’s reliable in his way. He did what you asked him to, didn’t he?”
“Absolutely.”
“So.” Broch dismissed the subject with a shrug. “I wouldn’t have recommended him otherwise.”
They sipped their champagne.
There were three aspects of Broch that Turner considered worth knowing, and with all three the trick was to know nothing more. First, he was afraid of squash balls traveling at high velocity. Second, his real-estate dealings quite probably constituted the lesser part of his financial interests, the rest of which Turner assumed were, to one degree or another, illicit. This he had gathered from a number of hints Broch had let drop from time to time and, more tellingly, from the intuitive grasp he seemed to have of the workings of the art market, which, while not necessarily illicit, nevertheless responded agreeably to selectively applied bits of intelligence. This aspect of Broch presented some difficulties, since not only was Turner curious to know what he was up to, but Broch himself seemed to want to tell him, an eventuality to be avoided at all costs because with knowledge came liability. Third, and most problematic, Broch felt his true talents were being squandered. What exactly these talents might be remained unclear. Turner had the impression that he considered them to be imaginative or possibly artistic in nature, though again there could be no advantage in knowing more about them. What mattered was that they had no suitable outlet, which, at least in principle, made him a likely recruit for any number of adventures in self-vindication. Here be monsters, Turner thought. He disliked getting involved in people’s hopes for themselves.
“So,” Broch said, “tell me about this woman. You are in love with her, yes?”
“Certainly not,” Turner replied primly, glancing reflexively around the room to see if anyone had heard. “Besides, I have no time for women these days. An accidental tumble, maybe. An actual woman with needs and grievances, no thank you.”
“Are you fucking her?”
“It hasn’t even crossed my mind.”
Broch nodded gravely. “Tell me about her. You’ll feel better.”
“I don’t want to feel better. I’m fine.” Turner finished his champagne and caught the waiter’s eye. “How about you? Break any hearts lately?”
“You know my situation.”
“Yes, but—”
“The same. Unchanged.”
His situation, as Turner understood it, was curiously strenuous. He was not only sleeping with his partner in the real-estate business, a rec
ent widow, but also had undertaken a second liaison with a much younger woman, a music student from Strasbourg who liked to show up unannounced and be taken to the city’s most fashionable restaurants and nightclubs, preferably with a gram or two of cocaine to give the experience scale. That Broch was headed for a train wreck could not be doubted, but what impelled him in that direction—audacity or sorrow or simple fecklessness—remained opaque to Turner, who was happy enough to leave it at that.
“In any case,” Broch was saying, “I’d like your advice about something. My great-aunt died this winter and left me a small inheritance. This is awkward, you see, because, okay, she was a bit eccentric, and …” He stopped, exasperated.
The waiter set two fresh glasses of champagne in front of them and hurried off.
“What I mean is—”
“To your health.”
“To yours. What I mean is this inheritance …” Again Broch stopped. He inspected his wine closely, then drank all of it.
“It’s okay,” said Turner. “I think what you’re telling me, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that this is a small cash inheritance, right?”
“Exactly.” Broch sighed with relief. “In U.S. dollars, to be precise. And I want to invest this sum in, I don’t know, something that doesn’t require much paperwork, an art object perhaps, if something suitable could be found. Of course, knowing this is your specialty, I’m more than curious to hear your thoughts.”
Turner nodded and, leaning forward, said in a mock-conspiratorial whisper, “How much?”
“Fifty thousand,” Broch said a bit unhappily.
Turner eased back in his chair. “Let me think.”
As far as he knew, Broch had never asked what exactly his cousin had been dispatched to Moscow to retrieve, but now that the goods had been secured on French and American soil it didn’t much matter anyway. Ten of the flags had been sold through Balakian’s gallery at thirty-five thousand dollars each; of those, three would soon be donated to major New York museums at Turner’s suggestion, the purchase price to be recouped by the donors in tax write-offs confirming, for the record, the objects’ value. While he hadn’t planned on selling prior to auction any of the flags still in his possession, chance had brought him opportunity. Still, there were risks.
