by Ted Mooney
After leaving the museum, they crossed the plaza to the Café Beaubourg for coffee. She insisted on sitting upstairs, away from the sidewalk traffic, and when they were installed side by side on a banquette overlooking the staircase, she said, “So you’re a filmmaker. Have I seen your films?”
“Probably not,” he answered.
She nodded. “I almost never go to the movies. The important thing is, are you a successful filmmaker?”
“That depends on what you mean. My films get made, distributed, and seen. Some of them win awards. None of them has made anybody rich.”
“And do you want to be rich?”
“I want to make more films, and for that money’s required. Otherwise I’m indifferent.”
“You’re lucky,” she said. “Me, I want to be filthy rich, rich to the point of nausea and beyond. It’s a burden, this desire—completely at odds with what I’ve set myself up to do.” She ferreted a cigarette from her backpack, and he lit it for her. “Yet there it is. Undeniable, you know?”
“And what is it you’ve set yourself up to do?” he said.
“My field is Slavic studies—Russian history, literature, art—so in effect I’ve set myself up to teach. But I’ll never do that. Maybe business or international relations, something in the real world, such as it is.” She exhaled smoke through her nostrils. “Do I shock you?”
“Me? Hardly. Not that I know what you mean by the real world.”
She gave him an odd little smile, started to say something, then visibly reconsidered.
The waiter brought them their espressos.
“I’m not an expert,” said Max, “but I’d think that Russia would be a pretty good place to get rich these days. For someone who’s not going to teach.”
“There are opportunities,” Véronique allowed, “but one has to have the right contacts. Where the rules are uncertain, personal influence is the only reliable index of worth. Access, that’s the game. Anyway, I didn’t say I wanted to make money myself. Not at all. What I want is for someone else to make it for me.”
“I see,” said Max. “So you have a business plan.”
She laughed. “And you’re American, yes?”
“By birth, citizenship, and sensibility. But I live here now.” Raising the espresso cup to his lips, he saw her register his wedding ring. “My wife is French,” he added.
“And you love her, this wife of yours?”
“I do, yes.”
“Good.” Véronique leaned slightly away as she withdrew one arm and then the other from her little cardigan sweater. Underneath she had on a lavender tank top, and on her near shoulder was that tattoo, a finely etched wheel of many spokes. “Then we have no misunderstandings, right?”
Max considered his answer. “Okay.”
“Tell me,” she said, “did you find what you were looking for the other day?”
“In a word, no. But of course I didn’t really know what it was I was looking for.”
“La Peau de l’Ours,” she replied helpfully. “Something by that name.”
“Yes, but the people in the office said they knew nothing about it. They were very emphatic.” Not entirely to his surprise, Max became aware of Véronique’s bare shoulder pressed in seeming negligence against his. He decided to elaborate. “I’ve been having problems with pirated videos of my films. The one that came to my attention was issued under that label, La Peau de l’Ours, at that address. But it seems that both the name and the address were false, at least according to what I was told.”
“Really?” Her gray-blue eyes scanned his. “That must be so frustrating.”
“It’s nice of you to take an interest in my situation,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Mine?” She expelled a puff of breath. “But I’ve already told you—” Still looking at her, he discreetly increased the pressure where their shoulders touched.
“All right,” she said. “I was watching too, waiting for someone I had reason to believe might show up there. When you arrived, I thought you might be him, but of course you weren’t.” She shrugged.
“So this guy you were after, you’d never seen him before?”
“No. I was acting on behalf of a friend.”
“I see. Not the friend in your business plan, by any chance?”
She smiled, acknowledging the connection even as she invited him to share her amusement at his having made it. “I told you my desires are burdensome.”
“Yes, well, whose aren’t.” He drew away somewhat peevishly.
“The problem,” she said, “is that my friend’s too much of a gentleman to tell me about his business decisions. This makes it hard for me to help him. So sometimes I have to strike out on my own.”
“To protect your interests. Sure, I understand.”
She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Have you been back to the agency?”
“No, what for?”
“I just thought maybe you had.”
Max considered her. “Do you want to tell me who you’re looking for?”
“Better not. But you’d know him if you happened to run into him. You’d realize right away.” She took a card from her backpack and wrote a phone number on it in green-black ink. “This is the best place to reach me.”
He glanced at the card and put it in his pocket. “You know,” he said, “I’m always reading about the Russian mafia, how they’ve infiltrated this business or that, using legitimate operations to launder black-market profits, manipulating currency rates, bribing officials, killing competitors, all that. But I never really thought they had much of a presence in Paris.”
“They don’t. Not really.” Her eyes shone with what he at first took for glee but a second later couldn’t interpret at all. “Anyway,” she said, “what does it matter? One must cultivate one’s own garden, no?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “One must.”
When they parted, outside on the plaza, Véronique pressed her body fleetingly to his before cheek-kissing him goodbye. “Ciao,” she said. “Call me whenever.”
Max watched her go. Her perfume clung to him, making him feel vulnerable and distinctly absurd. Now he’d have to change clothes at the studio before going home. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d been so expertly handled.
On rue Charles V he stopped at a bookstore and killed half an hour there by reading the first and last pages of whatever volumes caught his fancy. It was what he did whenever he found himself needing to clear his thoughts. At four thirty, somewhat refreshed, he decided to revisit the realtors.
There was a police van outside when he arrived and two officers loading it with cardboard boxes filled with manila file folders. Madame Leclère stood by the door of the agency, fuming. “Idiots!” she said. “Flunkies!”
Max watched from across the street, looking up and down the block and pretending to check his watch as though inconvenienced by someone late for an appointment. A third officer emerged from the office and attempted to engage Madame Leclère in conversation. She turned on him. “This is an outrage. I’m a French citizen. What has any of this to do with the crime committed against my partner?” Catching sight of Max, she seemed suddenly to call him to witness. “The crime of murder!” she cried.
Max hastened to look away.
“Why am I being punished? And my business? Can’t you see what they’ve done to me?” She began to weep. The police officer took her arm and spoke into her ear, but she shook him off. “Please! I’m not a child.”
Max decided to walk around the block.
When he returned, minutes later, the police were gone and the door was locked. He hesitated, then rang the buzzer. Madame Leclère appeared, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, and through the glass she tried to shoo him away, but he held his ground. After staring hard at him, she let him in.
“Madame,” he began, “I saw what happened just now, with the police. If you plan to file a complaint, I would be more than willing to—”
“Who
are you?” she demanded.
“I came by before, about an apartment in Bastille.”
She sighed. “Ah, yes. Well …” She stepped aside to let him in. After locking the door again, she turned and walked past the deserted front desk to the back room. He followed.
“Please.” She gestured toward a green leather sofa.
Sitting, Max saw that she didn’t remember him.
A bottle of peppermint schnapps stood open on the desk where she now lingered, and from the bottom drawer she produced a teacup. “An aperitif?” she asked.
Max shook his head.
She filled the teacup from the bottle, closed her eyes, and drank the contents down in two quick swallows, and then, with a shudder, sank into the club chair opposite him. “I must still be in shock,” she said.
“What happened?” Max asked.
“What happened? Well, they murdered him, shot him down in the streets like a dog and left him there, that’s what.”
After a brief interval Max said, “They?”
“He took risks, of course. That was Sylvain. But I never thought he’d get into serious trouble. I thought he was mostly trying to impress me.” She got up and poured herself another half cup of schnapps. “Excuse me, but my husband died barely a year ago, in a car accident. Now this.” She made a face and downed the drink. “Do you have any idea how I feel?”
“I’m sorry,” Max said, watching her return to her chair.
“And on top of everything else, the police. They’ve got it all wrong. You saw, they took my files! What morons!”
Max shifted in his seat. “Who do the police think killed your partner?”
“Professionals is the word they used. That was their brilliant hypothesis, based on their painstaking evidence—namely, that he was shot eight times in the chest on a busy street.” She shook her head wearily. “This is not me. I’m not saying this.”
“Believe me, I know the feeling.” Max leaned forward. “These people your partner was in trouble with, might they be …” He cast about for a suitable term. “Could they be Russians?”
She stared at him. “What makes you think that?”
“It’s just a guess. You said professionals.”
“No, really. I want to hear.” She straightened in her chair. “What makes you think that my partner was killed by the Russians?”
Max tried to recall the logic that had led him to this supposition, but in fact there didn’t seem to be any, only impressions that had accumulated over the last several weeks, half-formed thoughts belatedly given shape by Véronique’s insinuations or his own reading of them. They’ll dump our bodies in the Seine, Madame Leclère had told Broch during Max’s first visit here. It had happened before. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I shouldn’t have said it.”
Madame Leclère appeared to contract slightly. “Did I tell you I had to identify the body?” She shivered. “It was bad, Monsieur. Very bad.”
“Yes, I can imagine.”
“They should’ve shot me also. That would have been more respectful.” She looked fiercely around the room. “Ah, but they’re bastards,” she added, and, burying her face in her hands, began bitterly to weep.
For nearly a minute Max stayed where he was. At the back of the room, past the open file cabinets that the police had emptied, a doorway framed a wrought-iron staircase leading to the upper floors.
Max got up, went over to her, and laid a hand gently on her back. “Please. Is there anything I can do, Madame?”
Still bent over in her chair, she shook her head.
“A glass of water, maybe?” he persisted.
But before she could respond, the front buzzer sounded—a sustained note followed, after a pause, by a staccato flurry of shorter ones.
“Let me get it,” Max told her. She sniffed but made no move to stop him.
Waiting at the entrance was a round-faced, swarthy man dressed in a khaki jumpsuit. He glared at Max through the glass. The key was still in the lock; Max turned it and opened the door.
“Monsieur Sylvain Broch?” the man asked, reading from a clipboard he held cradled in one arm.
“No, I’m sorry. Monsieur Broch isn’t available.”
“He has a delivery of twelve cartons. You will have to sign for them.”
Looking past him, Max saw a dark brown panel truck parked outside. A man got out of the cab, went around to the back of the vehicle, threw open its rear door, and began unloading boxes.
“Wait a moment,” said Max. But just as he turned to call for Madame Leclère she arrived at his side, her equilibrium seemingly restored.
“Excuse me, Monsieur,” she said to the first man, “but we’re not expecting a delivery. You must have the wrong address.”
The man rolled his eyes in a paroxysm of self-control. “Twice we tried delivering this shipment to the designated address,” he said. “At neither time was there anyone to receive it. I am therefore obliged to deliver to the billing address, which is here. So if one of you will just sign the manifest, we can be done with this before our grandchildren bury us.”
Madame Leclère grimaced and took the clipboard from him.
Reading over her shoulder, Max saw that the shipper was a computer-supply wholesaler and that the boxes were to be delivered to an address in the tenth arrondissement. The purchaser was indeed listed as Sylvain Broch. A red stamp across the bill declared the shipment paid for.
“But what do these boxes contain?” asked Madame Leclère.
“That is not my concern, Madame,” said the deliveryman, handing her a pen.
The man unloading the cartons approached with the first six stacked on a hand truck. Madame Leclère stopped him, then turned to Max. “Would you mind?”
Accepting a box cutter from the driver, Max slit the top carton. Inside, wrapped individually in cellophane, were forty packages containing fifty blank DVDs each—two thousand a carton, twenty-four thousand all told. He handed one of the packages to Madame Leclère. She read the label and shook her head in bafflement.
“What are these?” she asked.
He told her.
She sighed and, signing for the cartons, said, “This is a complete mistake.”
CHAPTER 16
WHEN THREE DAYS PASSED without a visit from the police or any mention in the media of Sylvain Broch’s murder, Turner began to brood. It was one thing to have someone killed—and Kukushkin had doubtless done it before—but to erase the act as well as the man required very deep resources indeed. Worse, he found himself unable to discount the possibility that the men he saw kill Broch were the same two Odile had complained of—a troubling notion, since it meant Kukushkin had been making sport of him in New York, at Balakian’s gallery, when offering to find out who they were. Whatever the truth, Turner understood that he could no longer pretend to be uninvolved.
He picked up the phone and punched in Odile’s number. The line was still ringing when Gabriella swept in with the day’s obituary clippings, which she deposited in his inbox, and two plastic shopping bags stuffed with small objects wrapped in newspaper. When Odile’s voice invited him to leave a message, he hung up. “Are those what I think they are?” he asked.
His assistant smiled with demure satisfaction. “I told you I could do it.”
For months he’d been trying to win the confidence of an elderly woman in Auteuil, the former mistress of a highly placed Vichy official who had bequeathed her his netsuke figures, mid-nineteenth century and earlier, the finest collection Turner had ever come across. When his best efforts at wresting them from her had proved unavailing, he sent Gabriella in as backup. Playing to the old harridan’s fears as well as her vanity, she succeeded, and the woman had now agreed to put the ivory carvings up for auction. The house commissions would be substantial.
“My superb Gabriella,” he said, embracing her, “you’ve outdone yourself.”
She blushed. “The key was her son. When she told me he votes Socialist, I helped her see that if she left th
e collection to him, he would certainly sell it and give the money to the illegals and Arabs, or at least their advocates. I was afraid she’d have a stroke before I got out of there with the consignment.”
Turner shook his head in sad wonderment. “We risk our lives for art, and no one cares.”
“But of course people care! Besides, someone has to do it.” A hint of caution passed across her features. “What do you mean, our lives?”
“Figure of speech,” he said.
“Oh, I almost forgot. Look what she gave me.” Reaching into her purse, she produced a slim volume elegantly bound in blue calfskin and stamped in gold with Cyrillic characters. “Pushkin, first edition.”
He leafed through the book, a prose work in six chapters and a conclusion, no more than fifty pages in all. “But can you read Russian?”
“Not a word. She told me the story, though, or at least part of it. I’m going to get a French translation. Isn’t it beautiful?”
Indeed the book was a treasure, and handling it Turner experienced a moment of avarice. “She just gave it to you?”
“I was very surprised. We’d been talking about gambling—she goes every summer to Biarritz to play roulette—and she was impressed that I knew the French laws about where you can or can’t play, which, by the way, I bet you don’t know.”
Turner did not.
“Gambling is legal only in towns that have natural hot springs. In any case, the title of this book”—she took it back from him and opened it to the title page—“translates as The Queen of Spades, and it’s about a guy who’s obsessed with finding a system for winning at faro. I think it ends badly. There’s a ghost involved.”
In his mind Turner saw the ruddy interior of Bar Flou. He saw the man fan out the deck of cards before the couple, saw the younger man draw out the queen of spades and hold it up for his girlfriend to see. She exclaimed. He saw the two men switch places while the girlfriend clapped her hands in delight and the other women looked on. “Why the queen of spades?” he asked. “Does it have some special meaning?”
