by Ted Mooney
“What we need,” he told his assistant, “is a biomolecular chemist.”
Jacques accepted the disk and looked it over suspiciously. “But why?”
“Just find one, will you? Have him tell you what this is.”
Getting to his feet, doubt clouding his thin features, Jacques held the disk away from him as though it might constitute an affront to hygiene. “And what do we think it is?”
“We don’t have the least idea,” Max said, opening the door that gave onto the cobblestone courtyard.
THE WORK WENT BADLY almost from the moment Odile took up her pose on the sofa, or at least that was how she interpreted the grim silence that settled over Céleste as she painted. Holding her long, thin brush at nearly arm’s length, she would touch it first to a dish of turpentine, then to one of the smears of oil paint on her palette plate, and finally to the canvas, using short, smooth strokes to render what she saw. She never swiped the brush more than five or six times without her eyes darting back to Odile. Every so often she’d step away from the canvas and stare ferociously at it for a minute or more before shaking her head and resuming work. Odile had yet to be granted so much as a glimpse of the painting, in any of its states, and now was beginning to doubt she ever would be.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Céleste said suddenly. “But if I let you see it now, it would change how you show yourself to me, and that’s out of the question since you change enough as it is.”
“I do?”
“Yes. Today, for instance, you look completely different from all the other times. That’s why I’m having such trouble.” She gave a small rueful laugh. “But don’t worry. I’ll get it right eventually, and then you can see it, I promise.”
Odile glanced down at herself: her bare breasts and thighs framed by the green silk dress, her pale lacquered fingernails and toenails, her knees. “But I can’t have changed completely since last week. It’s impossible.”
“I agree,” said Céleste, “yet you have, so I must adjust my painting. That’s how it is.”
For the next hour, with Céleste too absorbed for conversation, Odile felt adrift in a welter of conflicting impulses. She hadn’t planned to tell Céleste about her evening with Turner, not least because she assumed he himself already had. Even now, wanting to say something after all, she forced herself to refrain, certain that Céleste would attribute her change in appearance, if there really was one, to Turner’s influence alone. It was all quite adolescent and embarrassing, truly absurd, and she was relieved when, at three o’clock, Céleste declared an end to the session. Odile dressed, agreed on a day to return, embraced her friend, and left.
Once on the streets, she walked without direction until arriving by default on boulevard Saint-Michel, outside a movie theater advertising a John Huston festival. She had two hours to kill before the rendezvous she’d hastily arranged with Turner by phone the day before, and consulting the screening schedule she saw that The Maltese Falcon, undubbed, had just begun. She bought a ticket, took a third-row center seat in the darkened theater, and delivered herself gratefully into the keeping of Bogart, Astor, Lorre, and Greenstreet.
A hundred minutes later she emerged refreshed. The world depicted in the film, for all its duplicity, innuendo, and fruitless striving, resembled the real world only in part. Why she should draw strength from this utterly ordinary observation, available to virtually anyone on earth for the price of a movie ticket, was beyond her, but as she started east on boulevard Saint-Germain she felt its power in every step she took.
Crossing the Pont de Sully, she stopped to peer down at the Nachtvlinder. Tarps now covered the newly acquired engines, but otherwise there was nothing to suggest recent activity, and she continued north.
At Turner’s apartment, she let herself in with the key he’d given her. He was not yet back from work. She washed her face, put on fresh lipstick and a little perfume. Finding Berg’s Lulu already loaded in the CD player, she turned it on at low volume and made a pot of tea, then leafed impatiently through an American art magazine.
When Turner arrived a few minutes later, she felt sharply glad to see him but reluctant to show it. “I should have told you,” she said, remaining seated, moving the teacup away from her mouth, “that I’m always very punctual.”
“If only I’d known,” he said with a straight face. Taking the cup from her hand, he drew her to her feet.
“What are you doing?” she said teasingly as he led her down the hall to the bedroom.
In bed, making love, she felt him apply himself, attentive to her every move, deferent to her pleasure. She tried to make light of it, laughing a little at his assiduous pursuit, but before long there was no room left for playfulness or pretense and she cleaved to him, ankles locked at the base of his buttocks, arms wrapped tight around him. In her mind’s eye she saw a clock being wound, a nylon duffel getting unzipped, rope playing out from a dockside coil. A long, bright moment became a sound that lasted. Not until her cry died away did she realize that she had uttered it.
They lay together for awhile, listening only to their breath.
Had she come to the apartment knowing exactly how she intended to handle Thierry’s call, by either refusing his request outright or agreeing to it in some form that might or might not include her contacting the Russians, then she would’ve informed Turner of the situation—and her decision—at once, before going to bed with him, in hopes of learning something more about the man with whom she dealt. As it was, she’d postponed telling him—and deciding—in hopes of learning something more about herself. Either way, she thought, it was a brutal business.
When she’d had enough of self-discovery, she got up and, for economy’s sake, retrieved the tape cassette from her purse and played it for Turner on his own answering machine. She watched him register Thierry’s voice, saw the shine come to his eyes and the absent-looking smile settle over his features. Her mood shifted. The taped phone message came to an end. There was no need to replay it. She waited.
“Okay,” he said, “but what about the first part of the call, before you started recording?”
“Right.” She spoke carefully, aware that if she wasn’t clear now then they might both suffer later. “First, he apologized for disappearing in Brest. He said that people weren’t where they were supposed to be, that he’d had to improvise. He mentioned a side project he had going that I didn’t know about but wasn’t implicated in. Nobody thought I was. He emphasized that.”
“Any idea what he meant?”
“None. There’s that people-trafficking business, but who knows how real that is.”
Turner repositioned the pillows behind him until he was nearly sitting upright. “It might be just one person,” he said unhappily, “or, who knows, maybe a truckful.”
“What?”
He told her of his lunch with Wieselhoff and the message he’d relayed from Kukushkin. He also mentioned the Russian’s helpfulness in getting the flags through Belarussian customs.
“But I don’t understand,” Odile said. “If you know this man, why can’t you deal with him directly and settle the whole thing once and for all, regardless of what it is?”
Turner sighed. “Direct,” he said, “is not Kolya’s way.”
“It seems to me that having someone killed is quite direct.”
“Yes, but there’s more to it than that,” said Turner. “He wants me to figure out on my own what the problem is and then act accordingly. It’s as if he sees himself as my mentor, which maybe he is. But unfortunately this lesson’s lost on me. I don’t know what he wants.”
Hung on the wall opposite the bed were three etchings of what appeared to be antique prison interiors—Odile wondered if they could be Piranesis—and as she let her eye travel the eerie bridges, passages, and cell blocks they detailed, places that owed more to the imagination than to the pragmatics of penology, she felt the weight of indecision lift and her mind grow clear. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
/> Turner looked at her as if he feared he’d misunderstood.
“Just give me the thirty thousand, and I’ll meet Thierry and hand him over to the Russians.” She got out of bed and began to dress. “Quickly, okay? I’ve got to go.”
The relief that passed across Turner’s face shamed her for a moment, but she regained her calm when he left the bedroom to get the money. It was as Thierry had said. She wanted to believe a new life was possible, even if not for her.
CHAPTER 21
MAX SURVEYED THE CAFÉ for undesirable patrons, found none, and chose a table under the green canvas awning that extended partway over the sidewalk. He set a manila file folder he’d been carrying down on the table, then moved it beneath his chair. When the waiter arrived, he ordered a café-calva and dashed across the street for a copy of Le Monde. He returned to find Véronique settled in at his table with a mineral water, very much as if she’d been waiting there all along. She was wearing sunglasses and a sleeveless blue dress that left her shoulder tattoo exposed, the wheel of many spokes.
“You’re prompt,” he said, sitting down beside her.
She shrugged. “Your call came at the right time. I’ve been working day and night on a translation I never should’ve agreed to in the first place. Maybe you’ll be amusing. If not, too bad, I go back to work.”
Max looked her over thoughtfully, downed his coffee, and signaled the waiter for another. “I have to ask you,” he said. “At our last meeting you more or less told me to pay a second visit to that real-estate office, which I did. Did you already know what had happened to Sylvain Broch?”
She showed him the flushed, half-coy smile with which she acknowledged her lapses and indiscretions. “I had an idea. But at that point I didn’t know for certain, no.”
“Still, you guessed he was dead, so you could probably guess who did it, right?”
She shook her head. “This isn’t the sort of thing I like to know. But if he was running a bootleg-video factory—which is what you told me, no?—then he would’ve had any number of enemies. It’s a very competitive business, I’d imagine.”
From her backpack she took a cigarette, and as he lit it she held his outthrust hand as if to steady it. The scent of her gardenia-drenched perfume brought back jumbled memories of their last encounter, when he’d been blindsided by her youth and perfect lack of compunction. It would be necessary, this time, to take a more considered approach.
“Speaking of business,” he said, “how’s your partner, the one in your plan? Has he gotten any more communicative? He made it hard for you to help him, you said.”
Her laugh was engagingly musical, agreeable to hear. “No, none of that has changed. It’s his nature, you know. A man conducts his business but takes care not to trouble others with the details. Very proper and masculine, but in this case personally frustrating to me, as I think you can appreciate.”
“And what about that guy you were looking for? Still missing?”
“Alas.” She looked at him hard, no longer troubling to hide her impatience.
“Sorry to hear it,” said Max. “But maybe you’ll be interested in this Peau de l’Ours circus, which, in my small way, I’m still researching.” Reaching under his chair, he retrieved the folder and took out the amber-washed DVD, which Jacques had returned to him the day before. “Ever seen one of these?” he asked, handing it to her.
She frowned over it noncommittally, but when she turned it data side up he saw her blanch for an instant. “Sure,” she said coolly, giving it back. “It’s a video disk. Why, is it counterfeit?”
“I did find it at that factory Broch operated in the tenth,” he admitted, “but it’s not one of the counterfeits.” He held it up for her further consideration. “See that amber coating?” He removed a photocopied document from the file and passed it to her. “It took my assistant most of yesterday to track down the author of this paper and me most of last night to understand what the guy was talking about. But now I have the gist, I think.”
Véronique examined the document warily. “‘Molecular Screening and the Digital Video Disk,’” she read aloud from the title page, then leafed through the paper without enthusiasm. “I have not the slightest idea what this ‘molecular screening’ means. Is it lucrative, I hope?”
Max laughed. “You are one focused woman,” he told her. “I won’t be surprised when your business plan kicks in.”
She granted him a luminous smile that, though fleeting, left a pleasant afterglow in its wake. When the waiter arrived with Max’s café-calva, Véronique relinquished her water and ordered a beer.
“What this paper describes,” said Max, “is a cheap and efficient method for using ordinary DVDs to profile a person’s entire genetic makeup, sequencing the DNA from a single sample—a drop of blood, an oral swab, whatever—and storing the results on disk. I’m told the technology has been around for awhile, but only recently perfected. Any of this sound familiar?”
She shook her head, but looked, Max thought, rather unhappy.
“Well, for instance.” He flashed the disk at her once more. “The sample here belongs to a blond European female, probably not you, given your eye color, which I remember as gray-blue.” He waited for her to lift her sunglasses, but she didn’t. “I found several of these disks at the loft Broch was renting, so I think it’s fair to assume that movie piracy wasn’t his only extracurricular interest.” He put both disk and document back in the folder, stowing it again under his chair. “Oh, and La Peau de l’Ours is incorporated in Malta as, among other things, a medical group. So maybe there really is a lucrative side to all this—not in the testing procedure, naturally, since that’s hardly a secret, but in whatever was being tested for, which could be anything.”
Véronique stubbed out her cigarette. “And you are telling me this why, exactly?”
“Because last time we talked you seemed interested. Also, you told me you were watching Broch’s office in case this guy you’re looking for, whoever he is, eventually showed up there, which leads me to wonder if he wasn’t working for Broch in, well, one capacity or another.” He shrugged. “But for me it’s academic now. I got the police to close down the bootleg operation, so my problems with La Peau de l’Ours are over. The rest is really none of my business.”
For some seconds Véronique stared at him through her dark glasses, absorbed in difficult mental calculations of a sort that didn’t seem entirely abstract. Then she pulled a cell phone from her backpack, excused herself, and, walking to a spot some twenty yards away, almost into the street, punched in a number.
Watching her—and as soon as she got a connection she began pacing up and down, gesticulating with her free hand, talking nonstop in a voice lost in the traffic’s heedless snarl—he experienced a moment of clarity that amounted to an insight. Its purport was that the visible world, to which he’d devoted most of his waking life, exercised its power over the human imagination precisely because it had no meaning. What it had instead was detail, infinitely exfoliating, capable of lending itself to every human interpretation without losing any substance at all. A kind of magic, almost. A plenitude.
He kept his eye on Véronique as she abruptly snapped her cell phone shut, returned to the table, and sat down beside him. Still fuming, she sipped her beer in silence. “Is there anything you want to tell me?” Max asked.
Turning to him, she took off her sunglasses.
He was encouraged to see he’d been right about her eyes.
“This man I’m looking for,” she said, “he has something of mine, something personal.”
“You’ll find him,” Max said.
“I intend to,” she replied, putting her shades back on. “Now.” With her head tilted to one side, she considered him. “Tell me about your wife. You love her, I remember that. What else?”
“What do you want to know?”
She drank the rest of her beer and set the glass down on the table. Despite the other patrons and the heavy sidewalk traffic and the se
ething, anarchic swarm of vehicles circling the Bastille monument, it was as if the two of them were alone together, tête-à-tête in a place of suspended fortune.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
THROUGHOUT THE MORNING, in countless small ways, Odile found herself inexplicably at odds with the physical world. She forgot to put water in the espresso maker and returned from taking out the garbage to find the apartment acrid with the smell of burnt metal. A crystal vase she was washing slipped through her fingers and shattered in the sink. Downstairs, when she switched on her studio lights, they flared out with a small pop, and when she turned on her desk lamp it, too, burned out. She cut herself sharpening her fabric shears.
When by noon she still hadn’t heard from Thierry, she felt a glimmer of doubt. Maybe it would be unwise to involve herself further in Thierry’s plans, instead letting him and the Russians settle their differences without her. Her motives seemed to shift with each passing minute, yet she told herself that the prospect of having the whole affair over and done with remained argument enough for seeing it through.
Going to the living-room bookcase, she reached behind Max’s collected Chekhov and extracted the envelope Turner had given her the day before. She counted the contents—thirty thousand francs exactly—then sealed the envelope with tape and put it in her purse. Having thus committed herself, she took a set of linens from the hall closet and made up the bed in the guest room. Allegra’s imminent arrival had begun to occupy a small but definite place in her thoughts. It was hard to know exactly what to prepare for, since she hadn’t seen the girl in almost two years, but she doubted the visit would be entirely tranquil.
