by Ted Mooney
“Risky,” Jacques replied, thinking about it. “Definitely counterintuitive. But yes, it might just pop.”
“I’ll take your camera and set up right outside,” Max continued. “Remember to let them move in and out of the frame naturally, even if you lose the sound. But keep the sound on them once they leave the hangar—self-consciousness no longer a factor, okay? When the boat comes out, I’ll stick around while you find your new spot, then I’ll go down to the water to pick up the medium-shot visuals.”
“Check.”
“And don’t forget the priest. There’s a priest out there.”
“A priest?”
“Right. Keep him in the mix. Let’s hear what he has to say.”
Jacques shrugged. “Don’t they all say the same thing?”
“Nevertheless.”
Jacques nodded, trying to work out Max’s thinking. He was by nature a serious young man, his turn of mind unconventional. Max had lately decided to grant him more leeway at work, curious to see what might emerge.
“Okay, then,” Max said. “No shortage of variables, right? So let’s do it.” He took the backup camera and hurried for the door, Allegra hastening after him.
“Daddy!”
“What is it, sweet? I’m working right now.”
“I know. I just wanted to ask you.” She was holding her cell phone in a stage-one adolescent death grip. “Can I go to this party with Dominique tomorrow night? Monsieur Bouvier thinks it’s okay.”
“Where is it, when is it, and who’ll be there?”
“Um, like, I’m not totally sure? But I’ll find out.”
“Then get your data together and we’ll talk again, all right?”
“Cool.”
“And watch out for this boat thing. It could be dangerous, I don’t know. Stay away from the rails.”
“Check,” she said, in imitation of Jacques. Laughing merrily, she withdrew to make the necessary calls.
Frowning at the sky, Max set up his camera.
Since coming to the conclusion that his wife was having an affair with this art impresario, a man Max had scarcely thought about before, he found himself prey to a host of conflicting notions. Maybe she’d betrayed him a dozen times, with a dozen men, or perhaps Turner was her first. It was love, it was sex, it was boredom, it was revenge. He was supposed to find out about it, or he wasn’t. He was meant to suffer, or he wasn’t. Maybe there was a side to her character he didn’t know, or maybe her character had changed. But amid all this circular thinking, useless and demeaning, Max knew one thing to be unquestionably true: Odile did nothing without purpose. She had a message for him, and however painful it might be, he wanted to fully understand it. A man could do nothing less. Then, quite often, he had to do much more.
“Excuse me, sir.”
Max looked up from his camera to find the priest addressing him. God’s servant looked uneasy. “Yes, Father.”
“I am not acquainted with these people, this Rachel and Groot, but I have been asked to bless their boat before it is launched. Of course I shall do so; it is my duty. But I wonder if you could tell me: have they married within the Church?”
“Of course, Father. Why else would they have called you?”
“It wasn’t they who called me. But no matter. This is an ancient nautical tradition. I am happy to be of service, and of course such is God’s will.” He withdrew a few steps toward the river, looking, if anything, even more disconsolate. Max discreetly filmed him for nearly a minute as he gazed out over the Seine and paced back and forth. There was always room in Max’s films for priests, if only for a few seconds. Their black-and-white raiment made everything surrounding them snap to, visually speaking, and inspired in much of his audience a vague sense of guilt or revulsion, if only subliminal, that served his purposes. Still, there was no point in overdoing it. He stopped shooting and checked his watch.
Moments later, mounted as before upon the wheeled railroad chassis and attended by half a dozen men, the Nachtvlinder emerged from the hangar onto the short expanse of flat ground outside. Close behind it, holding hands and staring at the boat like proud parents, were Rachel and Groot, seemingly reconciled, or at least united in the glow of their now resplendent boat. Max zoomed in slowly on their faces, until Rachel noticed and turned to whisper something into Groot’s ear. Jacques stood at some distance behind them, holding the sound boom low over their heads. Good, thought Max.
The priest cleared his throat, and it immediately became apparent that no one present had expected him. Still, he was a priest, and when he called them to prayer, they all reflexively bowed their heads. That was all he required.
“Hear us, O Lord, from Heaven Thy dwelling place,” he intoned. “Thou, Who dost rule the raging of the sea, when loud the storm and furious is the gale …” The prayer was mercifully short, another six or eight verses at most, and when amens had been said, he sprinkled holy water over the bow of the Nachtvlinder, blessed it, and hurried off as precipitously as he had arrived.
“Now,” the chandler announced, slapping the side of the Nachtvlinder, “let’s see if she floats.”
Max took his camera and tripod down the incline to the riverbank.
Not much later, as the Nachtvlinder slowly descended the tracks toward him, it came to Max that nothing about the boat was so radiantly beautiful, so infused with hope, as its knife-edged prow, designed to part the waters of the world so that men might pursue dreams of which they were only half aware. She’s been around the world, for sure, Rachel had said of the boat, the day of the police raid. Max cursed himself for not having shot the Nachtvlinder head-on while she was still in dry dock, but there was no time now for second thoughts. The boat was nearly upon him.
The railway track ran down into the river, where the descending vessel would be lifted off the chassis and onto the surface by her own buoyancy. Still, a thirty-ton boat doesn’t return lightly to her element, and Max was glad to be no closer to the Nachtvlinder than he was when she reentered the Seine, throwing up jagged curls of green-tea-colored water on either side, pitching fore and aft like a yearling horse at play. The vidcam got it all.
When Groot had her tied up to a pair of bollards embedded in the bank, the chandler threw a ladder over the side, and everyone but Jacques, who’d agreed to film the boat’s departure and drive the Citroën to the quai de la Tournelle, climbed on board to cluster respectfully on deck. There was enchantment to the moment, an alien magic that Max hadn’t anticipated, but he reminded himself to record precisely what was there and decide later what really shone the most. Groot and Rachel embraced and kissed. Allegra spoke excitedly into her cell phone, using, it seemed to Max, some sort of post-linguistic teenage speed-talk. Boldly colored ensigns fluttered crisply in the breeze. And finally, tantalizingly out of sight, were the rebuilt engines, as yet neither tested nor mentioned, though they weighed heavily on the minds of all present.
Three days before, bringing the boat downstream, Groot had chosen not to engage the untested engines until the ship chandler could look them over. Instead he’d hired a tugboat to prod and nudge the vessel into its place of rest. For the journey back, however, there would be no tugboat. There would be a reckoning.
Once aboard, Groot immediately assumed formal command, stationing Rachel and Allegra on the bridge while he went below to the engine room. Max had planned from the first to stay close by Rachel at the helm, to record her response as, for better or worse, the vessel got under way or failed to, taking her and her boyfriend’s hopes with it. The scent of diesel hung heavy in the air about them, an uncertain omen. Rachel stared at the control-console gauges: oil pressure, water temperature, fuel. She looked scared and beautiful, Allegra bored and thirteen. Max kept them both in the frame, as closely fitted together as the optics of the lens would allow.
“Now!” Rachel shouted suddenly, her eyes still fixed like a fighter pilot’s on the gauges.
There followed the infuriating pause that precedes all diesel combustion, th
en the starboard engine came to life with a low, stuttering rumble that settled into a roar. An agonizing second later, the port engine did the same. Rachel hopped up and down with joy. Allegra hugged her, hopping too, both soon doing a comic dance of happiness unhinged.
Groot appeared, grinning, at the top of the companionway, his face streaked black with grease. “You see,” he said in English. “For the stubborn and the stupid, everything is possible.” He said it again in Dutch. “This is the secret motto of my people,” he added, laughing. “You can say that—motto?” He gave the chandlery crew a thumbs-up and received theirs in return. They almost seemed to approve of his success.
Relieving Rachel of her post, Groot engaged the port-engine clutch and then the starboard. Slowly at first, but gaining momentum, the boat edged into the river’s upstream lane, headed again for Paris. Before long, the Nachtvlinder had attained a bracing seven knots, an impressive speed when running against a strong current. Rachel laughed and wept and laughed again, her hair streaming out behind her with such abandon that Max was reminded of mortal things, things he didn’t care to name, but that he nonetheless found strangely moving, especially as framed by the camera. All that was merely nautical seemed to fall away before this silencing sight, so real and yet so much like beauty.
“Really, really ultra,” Allegra cried, obviously suffering no such inhibitions.
And then, as if in response to her words, Max was suddenly pierced to the heart by a baffling sliver of fear, fear as cold as a steel lancet. It staggered him, almost literally casting him to the deck. Embarrassed, he made gestures of exaggerated landlubberliness and repositioned himself behind the camera, itself serenely stable on its tripod. Nerves, he told himself. But he knew it wasn’t nerves, that it was something he’d never felt before. So, for want of other options, he filmed. Filming without flinching was what he understood. It was what he did best. And before very long at all he was himself again, seeing the sort of things he saw, filming the sort of things he filmed, his sudden moment of foreboding—if that’s what it was—now dispersed and forgotten.
Barge traffic, which had been diminishing year by year on the Seine, seemed unaccountably heavy that afternoon, and the Nachtvlinder, which commercial boatsmen contemptuously categorized as a “yacht,” was over and over again forced to yield to vast, freight-laden barges whose pilots honked deafening horns at them and shouted imprecations, reminding them that “yachts go last.” It didn’t matter, though; nothing could spoil the crew’s collective good mood as the boat churned upstream to Paris.
At Andrésy, not far out of Conflans, Groot threaded them through the crowded lock, navigating between the two rows of barges tied up on either side, where they waited for the gate at the upstream end to open and the water to spill in so they could continue their journey. Groot’s was a risky maneuver—normally he should have taken his place behind the last barge, on one side or the other—but he was feeling cocky, and besides, Max thought, it made for good film. The female half of the crew—Rachel at starboard, Allegra at port—stood by with tires suspended on ropes to cushion against any accidental contact with the barges’ steel hulls as Groot, defying protocol, took them farther and farther forward. Finally, he chose to tie up to a barge near the front. Turning the wheel over to Rachel, he tossed first one line, then another, over the barge’s bollards. Her captain scowled at this heedlessness, but allowed his deckhands to secure the ropes. Shortly after, the gate opened, the lines were cast off, and they were under way again, ahead of most of the pack.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” Groot confided to Allegra. “I could easily have wrecked our boat.”
“What, you mean you did it just for the rush?”
Groot smiled. “That’s right. For the rush.”
The rest of the passage was smooth going. While Allegra napped in the aft hammock, Max leaned over the side, unable to resist filming the water. It had such variety of color and shimmer, as if it were itself a film or, perhaps, a sly commentary on the light that made film and everything else possible. Then, to his astonishment, an enormous fish—a carp, he thought—leapt from the water, thrashing furiously in the air before splashing back in again, just a few feet away. A sign, had he believed in such things. Anyway, he’d gotten it on camera.
He took a break, keeping Groot company at the helm.
The weeping willows and greenery lining the banks soon were replaced by an ugly sprawl of concrete yards, abandoned industrial parks, ad-hoc dumping grounds, and high-rise buildings with cheap office space. Then, quite suddenly, they were in Paris, passing under the first of the city’s bridges. Rachel and Allegra emerged from the companionway with a pair of binoculars.
“They’re superpowerful,” Rachel was saying, “so you have to hold them very steady. But they’re especially good just before twilight, like now.”
The girls joined Groot and Max on the bridge, and, fitting her eyes to the instrument, Allegra began a slow survey of her surrounds. “Wow!” she said. “Unreal!”
No one spoke. They passed under the bridges in the appointed order: Grenelle, Bir-Hakeim, Iéna, Passarelle Debilly. When they reached the westernmost tip of Île de la Cité, Allegra inhaled sharply. “Dad?”
“What is it?”
“I can see Odile! She’s waiting for us on the quai! Right by the berth!”
“I guess she missed us,” said Max. “What else?”
“Her hair. She’s cut it very short. And she … I’m not sure. Here. You’d better look.” She handed him the binoculars and walked off, not waiting for a verdict.
It took Max some time to refocus the glasses and find her, but when he did he saw at once what Allegra meant. Odile had been crying—her eyes were rimmed with red—and she was attempting to light a cigarette: two things she almost never did and would certainly never admit to. As he watched, she gave up on the cigarette and, defeated by the river breeze, threw it pettishly to the ground. Max lowered the binoculars.
It was time to film.
CHAPTER 27
THAT NIGHT, despite a double dose of sedatives washed down with brandy, Odile lay in bed sleepless, her mind churning. Again and again she looked at Max stretched out beside her in apparent peace and wondered if she shouldn’t tell him everything. No doubt he had guessed at her affair with Turner by now, but that—and perhaps he’d sensed this too—was hardly everything. Turner had said that if they didn’t produce Gabriella and Thierry for the Russians by Thursday, they’d be fucked. And Thursday it now was. She hoped with an urgency verging on prayer that Max had given up his idea of attending the auction that evening; probably he hadn’t been serious about it in the first place, but certainly nothing would induce her to accompany him now. Toward dawn, she fell into a thin sleep that gave her no peace.
Max had a backers’ meeting in Tours that day and left early in the car. Allegra set out shortly after, claiming that she was going to the Centre Pompidou to see the Brassaï show. When Odile was finally alone, she made sure her cell phone was off and set to work on Fatima’s wedding dress. A tightly cross-wrapped sheath of white taffeta with linen-mesh eyeholes distributed liberally across the bodice and hips, it was coming along, better than she’d envisioned it.
Shortly past two o’clock there arose outside a curiously wavering banshee wail. Although she’d never heard it before—in La Santé’s century and a half of existence only two escapes had occurred—she knew at once that it must be the prison alarm. Not much later, she heard the dull, relentless thudding of a helicopter and she went outside to take a look.
At first there was nothing to see, the prison’s crises as shut off from the world as its inmates. The helicopter made a slow, banking circuit of the area, looking for escapees, she supposed, then moved into position over the central courtyard. From there, the copilot leaned out the open side of the chopper and, rather haphazardly, it seemed to Odile, dropped three tear-gas canisters in succession. Curious to see what this was meant to accomplish since the inmates were now surely under loc
kdown—unless they had taken over the prison completely, a virtual impossibility—Odile walked the length of the Arago side of the facility and turned left onto rue Messier just in time to see a stream of prison personnel, nonsecurity staff by the looks of them, emerge from the main entrance with handkerchiefs held over their faces. She couldn’t help but laugh—another triumph for French bureaucracy—and briefly wished Max was there to share her amusement. But then she saw something that stopped her cold.
Exiting the prison with the others, looking extremely annoyed, was a balding middle-aged man in a white lab coat and black slacks. In one hand he held a pair of black-framed eyeglasses, while with the other he rubbed his eyes and nose. Odile at once recognized him as the doctor whose picture the police had shown to Rachel—and, inadvertently, to Max’s camera—aboard the Nachtvlinder. She backed farther down the street, out of his sight, such as it was at the moment, and produced her cell phone, intending to call Turner. Before she could punch his number in, however, she saw he’d left eight messages that morning. She closed the phone without listening to them.
The man walked back and forth at some distance from the others, still rubbing his eyes and muttering to himself. Since he obviously wasn’t a prisoner, Odile, recalling what Eddie had said at last week’s dinner party, concluded that he was working in La Santé’s medical research program, the one involving prison volunteers. Why the police should be after him was a matter she was still considering when, not twenty feet ahead of her, a taxi pulled up and Thierry Colin got out, shoving money into the driver’s hand. He then made straight for the doctor, who appeared greatly relieved to see him. They embraced three times, in the Russian manner, and began conversing rapidly in French.
This is it! Odile thought. This is it.
Without a moment’s hesitation, she transported herself to the spot where the two men stood talking and, offering no apology, broke immediately into their exchange. “Hello, gentlemen. Thierry, I’ve been looking for you everywhere, and I’m hardly the only one. We have to talk. Immediately.”
