by Ted Mooney
“First night, guy bets on three and wins. Second night, he bets on seven and wins. Third night, puts all his winnings down on ace.”
There was a whoosh as Volodya got the nozzle at the end of the metal cylinder to ignite. A propane torch. Turner began to struggle wildly in his chair.
“Okay,” said Sergei, tossing the book to the floor, “story time over. Where we can find your assistant and Thierry Colin?”
Volodya tested the heat of the torch, holding one calloused hand a couple of feet from its jutting blue flame.
“I swear I don’t know! I didn’t even know they were together. Gabriella didn’t show up for work today, didn’t call in. I have no idea what to think.”
“What of Odile Mével?”
“Odile? She told me she saw you go into the theater where Thierry Colin was. She tracked him down for you! We thought you got him.”
Stepping forward, Volodya grabbed one of Turner’s flailing ankles, brought the torch slowly up under the sole of his foot, and held it there. Turner screamed. When Volodya let go of the ankle, he turned to Sergei and shrugged. “Could be he is a little ticklish, I think.”
From what seemed to Turner like another world, Sinéad O’Connor sang on, her voice a miracle of insinuation. “Do do that voodoo that you do so well.”
“You must understand, Turner,” said Sergei, “we no longer have time to fuck around. Serious people are missing things. Your assistant and Thierry Colin are both involved, maybe Odile Mével, maybe even you. We need to know what it is you know. Right now. Or you will not enjoy rest of afternoon, I promise.”
Turner’s foot hurt him very much. “But you know everything already! Everything!”
Wearily Sergei lifted a finger to Volodya, who came forward again with the blowtorch. At the sight of him, Turner struggled so violently in the chair that Volodya was forced to steady it with one hand while he brought the blowtorch up under the seat, directly beneath his testicles. The seat was sturdy oak and maybe two inches thick, but it began to smoke immediately.
“How long has Gabriella Moreau worked for you?” asked Sergei.
“Three years.”
“And she is often absent like today?”
“No, never!”
Sergei got to his feet and approached Turner, arms folded across his chest. “To your knowledge, please, she was acquainted with Thierry Colin before you hired him as courier?”
“No! I didn’t know she knew him now. I told you that.” The heat from the blowtorch was rapidly coming up through the chair seat. “Please.”
“What are habits of this girl?”
“Habits?”
“Drugs, sex clubs, expensive clothes? Or is good clean French girl who goes to visit mother on Sunday?”
“I don’t know! Both! Oh, God! Shit!” A column of intense heat was rising through the chair now, smoke curling up on either side of him, and he struggled to shift his body away from the advancing burn. The handcuffs cut into his wrists. He began to cry from fear.
“You are trying to save this girl’s ass, Turner?”
“No! I couldn’t!”
“Exactly. You couldn’t. But you could maybe make it your most urgent business to find her, yes? Between now and Thursday, maybe before auction?”
“Yes! Yes!” he shrieked as a searing burst of pain rose from his groin to inhabit every particle of his being. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “Please!”
Sergei appeared embarrassed. He put up a hand to Volodya, who lowered the blowtorch. Turner’s undershorts were on fire and he was screaming at a pitch that even the music couldn’t cover. Sergei took the glass of water from beside the easy chair, poured it over Turner’s crotch, and said, in a voice not devoid of sympathy, “You bring it on yourself, you know.”
Volodya lowered the chair to the floor. He unlocked the handcuffs, and Turner rolled away from the still-smoking chair. The two Russians began to talk, then argue, their voices inaudible over the music. Seeing a stack of cardboard boxes to his right, Turner dragged himself in that direction, thinking he could hide behind them and avoid further provoking his hosts. He was halfway there when, abruptly, consciousness deserted him.
CHAPTER 25
“NO, I don’t mean that,” said Allegra. She and Max were walking south along the Canal Saint-Martin under marbled skies. It was Tuesday.
“This guy Willard that Mom’s been seeing, I just get the feeling she’s serious about him.”
“So what’s wrong with that? Don’t you like him?”
“He’s a Martian. He wears sandals with white socks. Plus he’s a proctologist: how gross is that?”
Max thought about it. “Medium.”
“She’s going to marry him, I know it. And then what happens to me? I’m supposed to, like, obey this alien? I’m not even related to him. Anyway, it’s pretty obvious, whatever she tells herself, that Mom’s just fucking him because of his money.”
“Hey! Watch the language.”
“Which? ‘Fucking’ or ‘money’?” She laughed bitterly. “Everything Mom does, you know, she still does because of you. If you hadn’t put every dime you had into your dumb movies, right now we’d probably all be—”
Max stopped and enfolded her in his arms, as he had at the airport, but this time she gave in to his ministrations, pressing her face to his shirtfront and weeping silently. He held her close, wracked with unparsable love. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. It’s unfair, I know.”
She looked up at him, her anger now displaced by grief and perplexity. “Then why—”
“There are some things a person just has to do. In my case, it’s make movies. I can’t help it.”
She sighed and drew back to wipe away her tears. “I know, I know. You’re a fucking artist.”
“Please don’t use that word.”
She looked him squarely in the eye and, unable to resist, repeated slowly, “Fucking, fucking, fucking.”
“No, not that word. The other one.”
“Artist?”
“Right. I don’t ever want to hear it again.”
They had a feeble laugh together and resumed walking.
Since the Nachtvlinder had entered dry dock, Max had in fact found his artistry decidedly superfluous. Groot was sleeping aboard the boat, both to guard its contents and to make sure no work was done on it without his approval. Rachel—in protest of what she continued to regard as his ill-gotten gains, though he’d admitted to nothing—was staying on the sofa in Max and Odile’s living room, having long, rambling talks with Allegra and weighing the future. None of it made for compelling cinema. But he’d come up with something—tomorrow, or the day after at the latest.
At rue des Récollets they turned west and headed for a patisserie that he recalled Allegra favoring on her last visit. There was a line out the door but they waited, talking now of lesser things: why the French shake hands with everyone, whether anarchy was really a tenable belief system, if Rachel would end up marrying Groot or not. Again and again, he found himself marveling that this well-spoken, inquisitive girl was his daughter, and each time he was pierced once more by sorrow at the time lost to them since he’d moved to Paris—four of her thirteen years. Love was pitiless. It kept track. He knew this as well as a man could know a thing, but of course this knowledge did him no good.
When they reached the glass cases at the front of the line, he let Allegra pick out a sackful of pastries—far more than they could possibly consume—and they left the store and started for the nearby Jardin Villemin to sample their purchases. It was not to be.
Around the corner, a tour bus had sideswiped a couple on a motorcycle, the man and woman now lying motionless in a bright red pool of their mingled blood, their limbs extended at unpleasant angles. Police cars had blocked off the street, their roof lights spinning silently, and ambulances were backed up beside the victims as medics labored with no particular urgency to get them onto stretchers. Both were dead. Parked halfway onto the sidewalk was the tour bus, fifty Japanese
tourists fogging the windows in bewilderment. A red and yellow kite fluttered lazily above the park, silent witness to the carnage.
Max immediately took hold of his daughter’s arm and tried to steer her away.
“No, wait,” she said, resisting. “I saw all this before.”
“What do you mean?”
“This whole scene happened once before, exactly like this. That bald medic, the big kidney-shaped pool of blood, the Japanese tourists and their breath, that kite. It was totally and completely the same. You were with me. We were going to the park to eat pastry. I had to go to the bathroom but didn’t want to ask. Then a little boy with a soap-bubble wand ran by. A trail of bubbles.”
“Sweetheart, you’re in shock. Let’s find you a bathroom, then we’ll go home and relax.”
She allowed herself to be led away. “There’s a word for it when you have this kind of memory, isn’t there?”
“Déjà vu.”
“Déjà vu,” she repeated to herself.
“Don’t worry, it’s just a feeling,” he explained. “A misfire of the mind, more or less. It’ll go away in a minute.”
“But I don’t want it to go away,” she informed him.
He didn’t know what to say to this.
They walked. A little boy with a plastic wand ran by trailing soap bubbles.
EVEN BEFORE ODILE took up her pose on Céleste’s sofa she sensed that today would be their last sitting. This she gathered not from the painting itself, which she still hadn’t been permitted to see, but by Céleste’s uncharacteristic irritability, a certain abruptness of her movements as she set to work and the infrequency with which she actually looked at her, concentrating instead on the brushwork, occasionally rubbing the surface down with a turpentine-soaked rag. It was as if Odile herself were already irrelevant, replaced now by her likeness.
Twenty minutes later, looking suddenly fatigued, Céleste put down her brushes. “Voilà. It’s done.” She lit a cigarette. “You can get dressed.”
“But don’t I get to see it? After all this time?”
“Of course, my dear. Let’s just permit it to settle for a minute. In the meantime one will have a glass of champagne to celebrate, yes?” She seemed to recover some of her vigor. “There’s a bottle in the fridge.”
Céleste set out plain glass flutes on the dining table. When Odile had changed back into her street clothes, she fetched the bottle, popped the cork, and poured them each a portion. “To the things that last,” she said, raising her glass.
Céleste was pleased. “To the things that last!” she repeated. They clinked their glasses and drank.
A blue-tinted glass vase on the table held three sprays of white clematis.
“When I was a little girl,” said Céleste, “I had a horror of being photographed. I believed that each time someone took my picture, a layer of my self was shaved away and lost, trapped in the photograph, to which anything could happen. I didn’t want to dwindle, you see. I wanted to last.”
Laughing as she spoke, Odile said, “And now you’re a portraitist, taking all the layers and leaving nothing! A kind of revenge, isn’t it?”
“Maybe.” Céleste smiled and sipped her champagne. “You can judge for yourself in a moment.”
“There’s something I need to tell you,” said Odile, setting her glass aside. “In confidence, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course. This is about Turner?”
“As a matter of fact it is. How did you know?”
“He’s been calling here, desperate to talk to you. He says you’ve been avoiding him.”
“That’s not entirely true. My stepdaughter is visiting, as he knows, so I’ve been busy. And my cell phone’s broken.” This last wasn’t even remotely true—she’d turned it off on Saturday, before the dinner party—but somehow the lie seemed essential to the truth of what she wished to communicate. “Anyway,” she went on, “I’ve decided to end things with him. I just haven’t found the right moment to tell him yet.”
Céleste raised an eyebrow. “Ah, he’ll be disappointed.”
“Maybe at first, but it really is for the best. Even if I weren’t married, I’m the wrong woman for him. He needs someone less ordinary, someone who can scheme right along with him and laugh about it afterward. Quite frankly, I’m too conventional for a man like him.”
“That’s not what he thinks.”
“No? But he’s a closet romantic, someone with—what did you call it before?—an optimistic streak. I suppose his profession requires it.”
“And you? You have no optimistic streak?”
“Not in this world.”
“Ah, so the maenad is a mystic. That’s hardly ordinary.”
Odile laughed and ran a hand through her hair. “I didn’t mean that I believe in other worlds. I just meant that in this one I’m no optimist.”
Shaking her head, Céleste said, “Poor Turner. He’s going to suffer more than he imagines. But then again, who of us doesn’t? Life makes no promises.” She drained her glass. “So. You are ready now?” Without waiting for an answer, she got to her feet and moved the canvas, its painted side still to the window, fully into sunlight. Odile followed, coming around the easel to stand beside her and contemplate the results.
A shiver rippled through her.
In the weeks she’d been sitting for the portrait, Odile had formed a mental image concocted of what she’d seen of Céleste’s other paintings—high colored, mildly expressionistic in style—and of what she imagined herself to look like, half draped in the green dress. But her imagination had failed her.
What had seemed like expressionism in the two portraits she had seen of Turner served here more as a corrective to her own self-image, both physical and otherwise. Flesh no longer as young as she routinely imagined it, hands and feet beginning to grow venous, skin that bore only traces—though at least that—of its former translucency. Yet none of this disturbed her. On the contrary, it was as if she were seeing herself for the first time in years. And then there was the face.
In effect, Céleste had solved the problem of the disappearing maenad by giving the painted image two faces. In one, Odile’s head was bowed and turned to the side in near profile, creating an impression of modesty lightly borne. Then, as in a photograph in which the subject moves at the moment of exposure, leaving a wavy trail behind, she was shown lifting her head upright and turning to face the viewer, at whom she stared with just the suggestion of avidity. Her features extended in a painted smear from the first position to the second, where they resolved into something very like the maenad Céleste had claimed to see in her. A creature capable of anything, as she’d said—murder, even, though naturally that was an exaggeration, a portraitist’s stratagem.
Odile’s eyes filled. She looked at the painting for some time. “It’s marvelous,” she said at last. “Better than I can tell you.”
“I’m satisfied with it,” Céleste allowed.
“Turner was right,” Odile added after a moment. “You really do see everything.”
In the distance, faintly, police sirens sounded. The demonstration, thought Odile.
“Call him,” Céleste said.
• • •
THEY ARRANGED to meet outdoors, at the Promenade Plantée, an elevated railroad bed that had been converted into a strip park running southeast out of Bastille, three stories above street level. He had explained nothing to Odile over the phone, not wanting to alarm her, afraid of what she might say, mistrustful of both the line’s security and himself. He arrived fifteen minutes early to stake out a bench under the lindens at the park’s north end. His burnt foot hurt him, but rather than use a cane he’d taken a double dose of painkillers. Trivial vanities: he was known for them.
She arrived late, appearing before him with her arms folded over her chest, her whole being luminous with ill-concealed misgiving. He got up, and they kissed.
“Give me your wrist,” he said, mock sternly.
Odile stared at him, fro
wning as she inspected the lurid bruise across his right cheekbone. She seemed about to say something, then thought better of it and thrust one bare wrist forward. He slipped her watch around it.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m glad you understand.”
“I miss you, though,” he replied. “More than I should.”
They sat down on the bench. She looked at him, then lightly traced the bruise on his cheek with a forefinger. “So tell me. Whose door did you bump into?”
“Right. Well, you see, I did finally meet your Russian friends, and they are—how to put this?—quite actively disappointed with whatever happened at that theater the other day.”
“Disappointed? But I thought they wanted Thierry Colin. I told them exactly where to find him. He was there.”
“Maybe so, but he got away. And that’s not all. You remember my assistant, Gabriella? According to these guys, she’s his consort, I guess meaning lover, but also aide-de-camp, partner in crime, whatever. Is that possible?”
“I don’t know. He never mentioned her.”
“But did you see her at the theater?”
Odile hesitated. Turner reached out and lifted her chin until their eyes met and she said, “Yes, Gabriella was at the theater. She came in late and sat with him, right before I left. I didn’t think to tell you because, I don’t know, I just assumed the whole thing was over the moment I called the Russians. They were very prompt, very businesslike.”
He let go of her chin. “And now very pissed off.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, looking away. “Did they … Well, they obviously gave you a hard time.”
He shrugged. “You know how they operate.”
A flock of pigeons rose suddenly from the grass promenade and wheeled off north toward the Opéra.
“But that was yesterday,” he said. “And now is what we have to worry about. These guys are holding us responsible for Colin and Gabriella’s escape. If we don’t find them by Thursday we’re basically, you know, fucked.”
“They said that?”
“They didn’t have to.”
She shook her head. “This is insane,” she said, “totally senseless.”
