by Ted Mooney
The girls slumped against each other in helpless laughter.
“Max, perhaps our guests would like some more lamb,” said Odile. “And I’m almost certain I put another bottle of mineral water in the fridge.”
Max got up, shaking his head, and went inside.
“The point is,” Rachel said, “I mean, isn’t the point really that marriage is a doomed but noble gesture, quaint and powerful like, I don’t know, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’? You throw your fate to the winds, right? Because you have no choice.”
“‘Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred,’” Eddie recited pensively. “Yes, in effect.” He poured Rachel more wine. “Not bad at all, that.”
“Don’t let him fool you,” Odile said. “He’s been married three times, yet not once has he died, at least to our knowledge.”
“All I’m saying,” Rachel offered, “is that I don’t think this detective will have much effect on your brother, one way or the other.” She drank deeply of her wine. “But what do I know? I’ve also been proposed to quite recently, I myself.”
Eddie raised an eyebrow. “And you answered how, if I may ask?”
“I declined to answer on such short notice. I gave the answer of no answer.” Her eye fell on the girls, who were regarding her with renewed interest bordering on awe. “How about you two? Boyfriends?”
They shook their heads.
Rachel smiled. “That’s also the answer of no answer. Don’t think I can’t remember how that goes.”
“But if you really love the guy,” Allegra said.
“Oh, I do really love him, I certainly do. It’s just that—well, love, you know, sometimes it can end up creating more problems than it solves. Right, Odile?”
“Frequently,” Odile agreed. “Often.”
“But we’ll see. Because he’s coming back tomorrow. From the old and aptly named town of Rotterdam.” Rachel finished her wine.
“How’s his mother?” Odile asked.
“She’s better,” Rachel said. “She was sick, and now she’s better.”
“But certainly this is good news,” said Eddie.
“Oh, for sure.” Rachel stared at her glass as he refilled it once more. “But then again, Dutch mothers—that’s a whole subject unto itself.”
The sound of a motorcycle turning onto rue Leon Maurice Nordmann created a brief lull in the conversation. When the engine cut out and the gate to the mews swung open a moment later, only Odile and Allegra were still paying attention. Jacques, wearing a crash helmet and a small beat-up leather backpack, dismounted, leaned the bike up against the wall, and let himself into Max’s studio. He didn’t appear to notice anyone at the other end of the courtyard.
“He’s really kind of cute for an older guy,” Allegra observed.
“There’s more lamb,” Max announced, emerging from the apartment with a platter in one hand, a bowl in the other, “and, for those of you who object to eating flesh, or even if you don’t, there’s salad.” Once everyone was served, he said, “Odile, you got a phone call just now. Male voice, nobody I know, youngish. But he wouldn’t leave a message.”
“Strange.” She glanced down to check her watch before she remembered she was without it. “French?”
“Definitely. A little high-strung, maybe.”
Eddie laughed and bit his lip. “It’s only that we have so much to be high-strung about,” he added apologetically.
“He’ll call back if it’s important,” said Odile.
Max thought she seemed relieved that her caller was French, but an instant later he could no longer be sure. Like her father, she had scant patience for the phone.
Midway down the mews, the anarchists’ door opened. A young man stuck his head out and peered peevishly skyward, surveyed the heavens, then ducked back inside, closing the door behind him. His observations had been carried out against a backdrop of strange music emanating from the apartment, something dusky-voiced that seemed to promise eventualities both sweet and spiteful.
“British, I think,” said Eddie.
“East London,” Dominique confirmed. “Leytonstone and that whole scene.” They were speaking of the music.
“Dad?” said Allegra, laying her fork across her empty plate.
“Yes, my sweet.”
“How come you didn’t, like, tell me there was a high-security nineteenth-century prison practically next door to where you live?”
“Actually,” he said, “I did. Last time you were here.”
“Really? I think I would’ve remembered that.”
“Well, maybe your sense of social concern hadn’t fully blossomed yet.” He smiled at her unthinkingly; she had been eleven at the time. “Why, do you want a tour?”
“A tour?”
“I just meant that—” A glance at Odile, whose lips had composed themselves into a lopsided smile, confirmed the delicacy of his position. He made at once for firmer ground. “People do go to prison,” he told Allegra, “and prisons have to exist somewhere. That one exists here. That’s all I meant.”
“Right.” Allegra sighed, her worst suspicions evidently confirmed. “I mean, did you even know, Dad, that almost three-quarters of that prison’s inmates aren’t even French citizens? Or that most of them have been convicted of no crime at all; they’re just waiting to be charged with something, anything, sometimes for years? And that the suicide rate—”
“She’s quite right, of course,” said Eddie, hurriedly dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “An appalling scandal for which no excuse can suffice.” He threw a quick glance at Max, who nodded minutely in response. “But,” Eddie added, now addressing Allegra, “La Santé, among French prisons, is a special case.”
“Tell us,” said Dominique with a note of mischief in her voice. She raised her water glass to her lips, and Max saw again the bluebird tattooed between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand.
“Right, like special in what way?” Allegra said.
Max made no move to interfere.
“First,” said Eddie, “it is the rule in Paris and environs that detainees are assigned to a particular prison alphabetically by name. La Santé receives, with certain exceptions, those whose last names begin with the letters T through Z, which means, in practice, that it receives all illegal immigrants, since these individuals are always, by convention, given the last name of X by the state. Okay?”
“But they actually do have names,” Allegra said, her chin jutting militantly.
“Obviously, but since these men are without documents there’s no way of knowing if they are who they say they are, so officially they are X. Not a perfect solution, of course, but that’s why La Santé’s population has so many noncitizens.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Rachel observed to her glass.
“What else makes La Santé different?” Dominique asked.
Eddie began to look a bit uncomfortable. “Of course it is a prison, so naturally the men inside it can only be unhappy, one must expect this.”
“But?” Odile prompted, fixing Eddie with a level gaze.
He took a swallow of wine and pressed on. “Although it isn’t widely known, there exists at La Santé a program, very sophisticated and well regarded, that tries to match willing inmates with some of the world’s finest medical researchers. Participation is strictly voluntary, of course, but this program allows inmates access to experimental treatments that would otherwise be completely beyond their reach. In many cases, lives are saved. Sometimes, when, in due course, a successful technique is introduced to the world at large, many thousands of lives are saved. Anyway,” he concluded, “this is why I say that La Santé, despite its undoubted shortcomings, must be considered a special case.”
By way of response there was a shocked silence.
“So really these inmates are, like, human guinea pigs?” Allegra said.
“No, no, not at all. As I explained, they are volunteers.”
“That’s so disgusting. I mean, how can a prison
er be a volunteer anything?” She turned to Dominique. “I wonder if Chantal and the black team know about this.”
“Chantal?” said Max, who felt that there were just a few too many things going on right now for him to process. “Black team?”
“Girls,” Odile said firmly, “would you help me clear the table for dessert?”
Allegra and Dominique hastened to their feet, and Rachel along with them.
“Not you,” Odile told her, laughing gently.
She sat back down.
When Odile and the girls had gone inside with the plates, leaving Rachel alone with Max and Eddie, who yet again was filling her glass, the three of them became aware almost simultaneously of a soft battering sound just above their heads, a kind of drubbing, at once senseless and urgent. They looked up.
Around each of the Chinese lanterns in the overhanging tree, perhaps a dozen moths fluttered, hurling themselves repeatedly against the illuminated rice-paper globes, drawn beyond all resistance by the candle flames that burned within. For the better part of a minute, everyone watched, neither able nor willing to look away.
“‘Theirs not to reason why,’” Rachel said.
CHAPTER 24
TURNER GLANCED one last time at his watch. The press conference, which he’d called for eleven that morning, was already twenty minutes late getting started—the most he dared push it. He stepped up to the podium and tapped the microphone twice with his forefinger.
Crowded into the auction house’s second-floor galleries, along with the freshly installed Soviet flags, were perhaps two dozen members of the working press, including three video crews—a gratifyingly strong turnout for a Monday in June. When he had his audience’s attention, Turner introduced himself, then told them what he thought they needed to know about the flags. He explained their origin in the May Day competitions among Soviet factories. He mentioned dates and places, collectives and historical figures, but he devoted most of his comments to the banners’ status as art objects. They were slated for auction that Thursday evening.
After speaking for about thirty minutes, he took questions for another twenty. Interest seemed to be running high, and the curiosity was both informed and sympathetic. Only once was he invited to comment on the political ironies of selling communist artifacts in a venue so aggressively market oriented, but he’d rehearsed his answer, which was that history had prepared it for him, and this provoked general amusement. Finally, an Italian journalist, elegantly shod and dressed, surprised him completely by remarking upon the similarities between the flags and Warhol’s portrait paintings of the 1970s and ’80s. Did he, she wondered, expect comparable prices? He politely declined to speculate, and the event came to an end.
Climbing the stairs to the third floor, Turner encountered the director, a fastidious horse-faced man who sometimes pretended to disapprove of Turner’s freewheeling methods. Today, though, he congratulated him on the press conference with a collegiality that struck Turner as a bit smug. Maybe, he thought, he’d been too hasty in declaring the ironies of the Cold War defunct.
Finding his office empty, he shut the door, checked his phone for messages—there were none—and, reminded now of what he was unhappy about, sank without relish into his desk chair.
In the three years Gabriella had worked for him, she never before had failed to show up on time. Her truancy this morning, at first only irritating, now began to set off in him a series of faint alarms whose nature, though distantly familiar, he hoped very much not to discover.
Thinking back, he seemed to recall that on Friday, when asking him for the afternoon off, she’d hinted at a family crisis. Though he’d never really believed in this crisis, her request required no excuse, and he’d sent her off without a second thought. Still, supposing there actually had been an emergency, and that it had persisted over the weekend, surely she would’ve called him this morning to say so. And that, he realized, was what troubled him: not the absence, but the not calling in.
He went to her desk, located in a small alcove outside his office, and stood leafing through her phone log for nearly a minute, even though he knew he wouldn’t find anything there. Then, assuming a pleasantly quizzical expression for the benefit of whoever might happen by, he sat down and began to go systematically through her desk drawers.
Amid all the expected office supplies and personal effluvia, only two things struck him as possibly noteworthy, though neither one lent itself to easy interpretation. The first was a computer printout of a document titled “Traité Mondial de Coopération de Breveté”—Worldwide Patent Cooperation Treaty—a numbingly technical agreement that he couldn’t imagine Gabriella ever having the patience or occasion to read. After a moment’s thought, he dismissed its presence as almost certainly circumstantial. The other artifact to catch his eye, though, was more troubling.
Finely printed on a multiply folded sheet of onionskin paper were the particulars of a Swiss medication, itself nowhere in evidence, whose purpose was specified in French, English, German, and Spanish as “maximal ovulation induction.” At first Turner could make no more sense of this document than of the patent treaty—surely if Gabriella were attempting in vitro fertilization, he’d know about it—but then he recalled his own strange question to her some weeks back, the day he had sold a flag to Wieselhoff and later bought the gun. “Are you pregnant?” he asked her, for no reason that he knew. And then her still stranger reply, delivered, it had seemed to him, with an unintended shading of sadness: “No, believe me. Pregnant would be the easy version of what I am.”
He sat awhile longer at her desk, sensing the convergence there of forces that might well have engaged him at his best, driving him to new prodigies of invention and craft, had he only been party to them and their possibilities from the outset, had he only been—and the word struck him with the comic force of a Zen blow to the brow—younger. He couldn’t help but laugh out loud at this insight. Every day he knew less than the day before. Perhaps, despite everything, he was getting somewhere.
He had just finished putting Gabriella’s desk back in order when a call came in on her line, the receptionist downstairs letting him know that the car service he’d requested had arrived. Before he could protest that he’d ordered no such thing, she corrected herself. The car had been sent by a Monsieur Kukushkin, who very much hoped Turner might join him for a celebratory lunch, if he was free. Turner, greatly relieved to know that he’d been restored to the Russian’s good graces, replied that he was indeed free and would be down directly.
THAT SAME MORNING, at a boat chandlery forty miles downstream from Paris in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, Max stood crouched over his camera, filming the Nachtvlinder’s perilous ascent to dry dock. Visually, the scene was captivating to an almost biblical degree: a thirty-ton, century-old boat being hauled from the Seine onto a wheeled chassis that ran on railroad tracks into an enormous hangar, where it would be worked on nonstop for two days, to emerge, at last, in all its former glory, ready to return under its own power to the quai de la Tournelle. Meanwhile, like figures in a Breughel painting, Groot and the staff swarmed variously across the camera’s field of view, facilitating the boat’s transfer while seeming also to serve other purposes known only to themselves. Finally, there was the light: diagonal shafts of silver that emerged from charcoal-gray cloud cover with marvelous rectilinear clarity, like a mathematical proof of the ineffable. All this Max recorded gratefully. It would play very well on a big screen and moved the narrative along with a dispatch that no amount of planning could have improved upon. Yet his mind was already half elsewhere.
When, at length, the Nachtvlinder was safely ensconced in dry dock, he joined Jacques, who’d arrived at the site separately and had been taking sound throughout, to stroll the arc-lighted hangar with Groot and the ship chandler, a leather-faced Breton in a soiled blue captain’s hat. Max shot some close-up footage of the Nachtvlinder’s river-fouled hull and props, which hadn’t been out of the water in years, prevailing on Groot to provid
e a bit of commentary to go with it. Then he loudly thanked everyone present and pulled his assistant discreetly aside. “Well?” he demanded.
“I can’t swear to it,” Jacques said, “but this is what I think happened, in some version.” He cast a furtive glance about him. “It turns out that there were actually two different lines of bootleg DVDs coming out of the loft rented by this guy Sylvain Broch. One of them was, so to speak, legitimately illegitimate: in other words, duplicate disks of well-known movies being pirated for profit. Fine. Maybe we don’t like it, but we understand. It’s normal.”
“Was this operation Russian owned?” Max asked.
“Naturally, no one would say. But it’s possible.” Jacques paused to light a cigarette, and Max, looking reflexively around, blundered into eye contact with Groot, who veered toward them.
“We’re going out for lunch,” he said, “while the shop calculates what I must pay them for the job. I don’t think it will be too bad, now that I’ve seen what has to be done. You are coming, yes?”
“Definitely,” Max said. “We’ll catch up.”
They watched him go.
“Rachel has retired to her tent in righteous wrath,” Max told Jacques.
“Really? Why? What tent?”
“I’ll explain later. You were saying, two lines of bootlegs.”
“Right. The regular ones and then these Peau de l’Ours numbers.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Of those I found only the seven titles I left for you last night at the studio. Nice classic films, don’t you think? Fanny and Alexander, Blue Velvet, The Marriage of Maria Braun, La Dolce Vita, you saw what they were.”
“Knife in the Water.”
“Exactly. So maybe, you know, this part of the operation is more specialized—the films a little artier, less popular, not obvious moneymakers, but successful enough critically that they’ll sell steadily over time. And they have a certain prestige.” He paused, staring at the end of his cigarette. “I don’t know if you’ve had time to look at them.”
