by Ted Mooney
“My daughter’s here. I’ve been busy.”
“Okay. In short, then, all the Peau de l’Ours titles have had their endings altered to about the same extent as the faux version of Fireflies—not grossly, just enough that you’d have to rethink the film, if you know it.” He seemed to consider the matter. “It’s interesting. There is a finesse behind the changes, a certain élan—a definite sensibility.”
“Sensibility,” repeated Max. “So they were all done by the same person?”
Jacques flared his lips moodily and then looked him in the eye, as though to put the question beyond doubt. “Yes,” he said, “the same person. This is what I think.”
“Sylvain Broch?”
“It’s possible. But, all things taken into account, I would say probably not.” He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his boot heel. “Broch was in it for the money, in my view. This other thing, it has more the feeling of a gesture, you know? Something one might do in protest, maybe. To make a point.”
Max squinted up at the overhead lights. They were too bright for his present state of mind and reminded him unpleasantly of antiquated movie sets. “What point?” he demanded. “To whom?”
Jacques shrugged. “Maybe,” he suggested, “it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“Well, you’ll have to see the changes for yourself, and this is only my opinion, yes? But I think this guy wanted to show that anything, no matter how perfect, can always turn out differently and still be convincing. What looks inescapable can be replaced with something else that looks just as inescapable, just as foreordained. Essentially, another way, another life, another outcome is always possible. Something like that.”
Max looked angrily around the hangar. “Isn’t that kind of metaphysical for a petty criminal?”
Jacques watched curiously until Max’s eyes again met his own, then stirred himself to answer. “Maybe,” he said after a moment.
They held each other’s gaze awhile longer before Max capitulated. “You’re right. Whoever this guy is, he’s not petty.” He squinted at the boat, elegantly stranded beneath the lights. “But neither is he a director. Which is what you, I’m beginning to think, might very well end up becoming, by the way. And despite my best efforts.”
Jacques gave a short laugh.
Max said no more, and they gathered up their equipment and set off for lunch.
• • •
“THIS IS JUST PURE SPECULATION, right? I mean, where’s your evidence?” Odile stood with the phone pressed to her ear, watching Allegra bop back and forth across the living-room floor, damp hair swinging, personal stereo in hand. She was wearing high-performance headphones, a lavender top, no bra, and a zebra-print miniskirt. Rachel was on the line.
“I just know,” Rachel said. “Where else would Groot get that kind of money?”
“Maybe his mother gave it to him.” Lowering her voice and turning her back guiltily to Allegra, Odile added, “Besides, you’re not exactly the poster child for a drug-free Europe yourself. Or am I missing something?”
“Personal use is one thing,” Rachel declared, “dealing is another.”
“We’re speaking of hashish, yes?”
“Well, I assume so. But actually I don’t even know that. Shit!”
Cupping a hand around the mouthpiece, Odile said, “Hashish is legal in the Netherlands, remember?”
“I’m losing my mind. Actually going bonkers.”
“Look,” Odile said, “where are you? Come for lunch.” She turned around to see Allegra mouthing something at her and pointing repeatedly out the window. Odile nodded, trying to understand her. “You’ve got to calm down,” she told Rachel. “It’s just not that big a deal.”
“But it is! I mean, I was so pissed off I wouldn’t even go see the Nachtvlinder into dry dock with him. I bet Max is really happy about that. He’s filming today, you know.”
“Don’t worry about Max.”
“My point is, Groot and I had an agreement not to get involved in this kind of thing. Ever. And he broke it.”
“What kind of thing?”
“Dealing dope! So how can I trust him now? And he wants me to marry him? No way. Absolutely out of the question.”
“Rachel, stop talking. You’ve lost perspective. Come here now.”
A titanic sigh. “I can’t,” she said. “I’ll call you later.”
Hanging up, Odile glanced reflexively at her wrist, but her watch was on Turner’s bedside table, where she’d left it on Friday—an infuriating lapse that suggested an ambivalence she was fairly sure she did not feel. Already Max had noticed the watch’s absence. Preempting his questions, she mentioned in passing that she’d taken it to the jeweler’s to be cleaned. Nevertheless it would have to be reclaimed soon, probably in person, and then she’d have to explain herself to Turner, something she had hoped very much to avoid. She was weighing the merits of calling him now, before he fully understood that his assistant wouldn’t ever be coming to work again, when suddenly she realized she was alone in the apartment.
“Allegra?” she called, then went to the foot of the garret stairs. “Where are you, sweetheart?”
Sun falling through the garret skylight made a box of light midway up the stairs and Odile stared into it, trying to reconstruct what Allegra had silently mouthed to her while she was talking with Rachel. Then she remembered the cell phone. She got her own from her purse and punched in Allegra’s number, but the phone just rang on and on, as it sometimes did when the other person was out of range—in the métro, usually. Odile pressed end and began pacing. Something bad is going to happen, she thought. And even though she knew it was a childish notion, a superstitious attempt at warding off the unknown, she couldn’t get the idea out of her head. She went into the kitchen and made a pot of peppermint tea. The mail came. She leafed through a magazine. Every ten minutes or so she tried Allegra’s cell again.
Finally she went to the living-room window and cranked it open for a breath of air. Midway down the courtyard Chantal and two of her comrades were crouched over bedsheets, writing slogans across them in red and black spray paint. She hurried downstairs.
“Are you coming to the demonstration?” Chantal said, straightening up.
“What demonstration?”
Together they looked at the banner she’d just completed. “WE ARE ALL ILLEGAL ALIENS!” it read.
“Tomorrow at three,” Chantal said. “Place de la République.”
“If I can,” Odile said, waving away the aerosol fumes. “But right now I’m looking for my stepdaughter, an American girl, thirteen, blond, I’m sure you’ve seen her. She tried to tell me where she was going, but I was on the phone and—”
“Oh, sure! Allegra!” Chantal’s eyes lit up. “She’s a treasure, you know—someone with a natural sense of justice. Fierce.” She put her paint can down. “Come with me.”
Odile had never been inside the anarchists’ quarters and wasn’t prepared for the row of glowing computer monitors that ran unattended along one wall of the ground-level studio, which, like theirs, retained its original dirt floor. Overhead, sagging bundles of color-coded electrical cable supplied power. The walls bore inspirational graffiti in several hands and, by the stairs, a grid of maybe sixty small snapshots, indecipherable from where she stood. At the back of the space, four teenagers, all of them wearing knee-high rubber boots, together lowered a large circular tabletop onto its flared support. When they had the thing in place and the latches fastened, Chantal called out to them, “Where’s Allegra? Her stepmother’s here. Our neighbor and comrade.”
One of the four came forward, greeted Odile, and shook her hand. She recognized the wispy-mustached boy as one of those she’d let take refuge in her studio the day the policeman had come. “She’s upstairs with Josée and Anne,” he said, “drying her feet.”
“We had a plumbing mishap,” Chantal explained apologetically. “Let me get her.”
Left alone
with the boy, whose name was Fabien, Odile asked him about the computers.
“All recycled,” he said, “castoffs. Now we use them to attack the forces they once served.”
“Really? What forces are those?”
“Banks, multinational corporations, instruments of state.”
“La Santé prison?”
“Who knows? Even La Santé.” He smiled. “Of course, that would require them to install a computer system first. One shouldn’t hold one’s breath.”
Odile was about to inquire further when Allegra appeared, descending the stairs at a pace meant to communicate decorous puzzlement. “I told you where I was going,” she said sullenly when she reached the bottom.
“I know. But I thought you’d like to come with me to Monsieur Ibrahim’s.”
“Monsieur Ibrahim?”
“To pick out fabric for your dress,” said Odile.
Chantal arrived at the head of the stairs. “We’ll look for you tomorrow,” she called down. “Three o’clock, don’t forget!”
“We’ll try,” Odile said, taking Allegra by the hand. “Ciao!”
Once they were outside, Allegra snatched her hand away. “I’m not a child. You shouldn’t embarrass me in front of my friends.”
“Friends already! Well, I wouldn’t have had to if you’d answered your phone.”
“It didn’t ring!”
Deciding not to debate this, Odile steered her out of the mews into the street. “Look,” she said, “they mean well, Chantal and her group, and I agree with a lot of what they say. But the police are investigating them. It would be a very serious matter if you got caught up in their trouble, okay?”
“You think I’m stupid.”
“Not at all. The opposite, in fact.”
“Besides, what do you care? You’re just babysitting me while my father makes his idiotic movie.” She began to cry. “I shouldn’t even be here.”
“Darling.” Odile put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Your father loves you. You know that. He can’t always choose his shooting schedule.” Allegra’s tears continued unabated. “We’ve both been looking forward to your visit so much.”
They walked together to the bus stop. Allegra’s canvas-topped shoes were sodden, presumably from the plumbing problem Chantal had mentioned, but Odile didn’t want to know about it and didn’t ask.
Later, on the bus, when she’d stopped crying, Allegra said, “Are we really going to design a dress together? One just for me?”
And later still, at Monsieur Ibrahim’s, sorting through fabric samples beneath the Tunisian’s indulgent eye, she looked at Odile and said, “My friends are not going to believe this.”
THE ONE CALLED SERGEI approached him, took his chin in one hand, and peered clinically into his eyes. “Ah, so you are with us again.”
Turner’s head hurt. He was seated in a straight-backed wooden chair with his wrists handcuffed behind him, and except for his undershorts he was naked. “Us?” he said.
Sergei and the other one, Volodya, laughed at him. He was extremely confused. “Where am I?” There were newspapers spread everywhere and an empty syringe by his feet. Industrial hooks, chains, and winches hung from the ceiling timbers, but there were also domestic furnishings: an upholstered easy chair, a table, a chessboard, lamps with shades, a daybed. “What happened to … Where’s Nikolai?”
“Mister Kukushkin is unable after all to join you for lunch. I tell you this at least—how many times, Volodya?”
“Four minimum. It becomes tedious.”
“But fortunately we are easily entertained,” Sergei told Turner. “So, where is she?”
He felt very hot, and the things around him seemed to pulsate. Inside them, other things were trying to get out. “Where is who?”
Shaking his head, Sergei turned his back to Turner and walked a short distance away. Simultaneously Volodya stepped forward. He wore a row of heavy gold rings on his left hand and, after studying Turner for a second, slapped him across the face, right and left in quick succession. Both blows hurt, but the second seemed to lift him partway out of his chair onto a plateau of blinding white pain entirely new to him. He spat blood.
“What, please, is the name of your assistant?” Sergei asked.
“Gabriella,” Turner managed to say. “Gabriella Moreau.”
“Excellent. And you saw her last when, exactly?”
“Last Friday, at the auction house. She asked for the afternoon off.”
“Did you give it to her?”
“Yes.”
“And where did she go, please?”
“I have no idea.”
“Really, Turner, this is most hard to believe.” He looked at his companion, who seemed about to intervene again. “Volodya,” he said, “why you don’t put on some music, something with maybe a little feeling, okay?”
Volodya snarled a few words in Russian but went over to the stereo deck in back.
In a quiet voice Sergei said, “Confidentially, he is psychopath. You notice the smell?”
Turner said nothing. He had noticed the smell.
“I require him to wear cologne, but, you know, with hormone imbalance like his …” He shrugged. It seemed to Turner that Sergei’s lupine features were only temporarily human and that at any moment—any second—he might actually turn into the wolf he resembled. The phrase “Don’t sell me no wolf tickets” streaked across Turner’s mind. It was an expression from his childhood.
“So,” said the Russian, clapping his hands together in a brisk return to business. “How long your assistant Mademoiselle Moreau has been consort of Thierry Colin?”
“Consort?” Turner’s heartbeat took off on him, just up and away.
“Mistress, girlfriend, fuck.” Sergei appeared angry. “What is wrong, please, with consort?”
“Nothing. I just didn’t—” And then he grew truly frightened. “Oh, no, that’s not right! Not at all! I would have known.”
“Too bad for you, this is right.” The Russian began to pace. “And they are together now, yes?”
“No! Impossible!” In his panic, Turner was trying to stand up while still handcuffed to the chair. It was made of oak and quite heavy. “They don’t even know each other!”
From the back of this strange space came the lush orchestral opening of an updated 1920s pop ballad. It stopped abruptly, and Volodya cursed.
Turner was struggling to throw his weight forward onto his feet when a wonderful thought occurred to him. “Besides!” he told Sergei. “Thierry Colin was already delivered! To you! At that theater!” Emboldened by the beauty of his logic, he actually managed to stand, bent over beneath the chair’s weight, and walk a few steps toward Sergei. “On Friday, remember?”
The Russian turned and contemplated him without expression. “There was fuckup.” After seeming to think about it, he took a running step and kicked him full in the groin. Turner screamed, fell over sideways with the chair, and began retching onto the newspapers. “Now is good time to share,” Sergei suggested.
“But I don’t know where they are! I thought you had them! Had him! Colin!”
Sergei nodded unhappily. “Volodya!”
Turner’s thoughts began to coast, and he fainted.
When he came to, the chair, and he in it, had been hauled upright again. Music issued from large speakers—Sinéad O’Connor singing “You Do Something to Me”—and Volodya was affixing one of the ceiling hooks to the back of the chair.
“You are reader, Turner?” Sergei had pulled the easy chair into the center of the room and sat facing Turner, holding in his lap a slim book lavishly bound in leather. There was a glass of water on the floor beside him. “Pushkin, maybe?”
“Pushkin.” Turner was trying desperately to see over his shoulder. The hook, though blunt, was large, poking him in the back.
“This very beautiful edition of Pushkin, original Russian, we find in your assistant’s apartment,” Sergei continued. “The Queen of Spades. You are familiar?”
“No. I mean, yes, I knew she had it. A client gave it to her. But neither of us reads Russian.” Volodya, the hook in place, had again escaped Turner’s line of sight.
“Pity.” Sergei opened the book and at the same moment seemed to fall rapidly away, diminishing to barely half his previous size. To his intense dismay, Turner found himself suspended, still manacled to the chair, several feet off the floor. “Is famous book. Tchaikovsky made opera. You want to hear?”
The forward tilt of the chair, hanging nearly motionless from the ceiling, caused the handcuffs to dig hard into Turner’s wrists. “Anything!” he cried. “Please. Just let me down!” Volodya could be heard in back, rattling through hardware and cursing.
“Plot summary only,” said Sergei, “since you are non-Russian speaker.” He leafed through the book, then looked up pleasantly at Turner as if happy to have his company. After a moment of comradely inspection, he returned to the text. “Okay. Ordinary guy, works hard, saves money, is good citizen like you. Then one day he hears about certain countess—ugly old whore with shitty temper, but also most desirable gift. She can predict, in game of faro, three consecutive cards dealer will lay down. Or so local gossip says.” He paused. “Tell me, you know that Thierry Colin is compulsive gambler?”
“No,” replied Turner. He yawned convulsively.
“So this bastard decides to find out countess’s secret. Charms her granddaughter, gets into house, hides in bedroom, and waits for this old bitch to get home from ball. She comes back, he shows himself. Too bad for him, she dies of fright without telling him secret. Nice touch, no?”
Turner wracked his brains for something he could say that would make this whole scene go away. Possibly it wasn’t real.
“Guy feels guilty, goes to countess funeral, despite deceiving granddaughter before, et cetera. But when praying over corpse, he is shocked: countess winks at him. Scared shitless, right? Yet that night he has dream in which countess tells him three cards to play: three, seven, ace. Just like that, one a night, then never again.”
Volodya reappeared carrying a red metal cylinder. The music was very loud.
