by Ted Mooney
Thierry stared at her, trying to decide what she knew, and Odile began to realize, under his gaze, just how much she actually might. He excused himself to his friend, walked a short distance with Odile, turned to her, and, with his arms folded across his chest, awaited her words. His recently shaved head and rimless spectacles made him seem to sparkle slightly, like a candy Easter chick.
“The police are after your doctor friend,” she began. “The Russians are after you and Gabriella both. Two days ago Turner was tortured by two Russian thugs who hoped he’d give you up, as he might have, had he known where you were. And then, of course, there’s the doctor over there, who I’m willing to bet is a Belarussian citizen.” She took a deep breath. “Should I go on?”
“No, that will do. Tell me what it is you want.”
“The bear and not the shit.”
Thierry looked bemused. “You ask a lot.”
She shrugged. “Yes, but as one no longer uninvolved in your side project, I’m obliged, you see, to make rash requests.”
Together they turned to look at the doctor, who’d shed his lab coat, unbuttoned his shirt, and was furiously scratching his chest, sides, and neck.
“The gas,” said Odile. “It’s a new compound, I’m told.”
“Well, he doesn’t seem to like it much, does he?”
She thought for a moment. “Listen, Thierry. I live just two blocks away. Why don’t the three of us go there. Your friend can take a bath, and you and I can have a few words in private, a few rather necessary words, yes?”
He peered at her through his crystalline glasses, as though she represented something new to his experience, then consulted his watch. “I’ll tell him,” he said.
After a brief conversation, Thierry brought him over to Odile. “Odile Mével, Doctor Aleksandr Tregobov. Sasha, my friend and colleague Odile represents the same interests we do and would like to help us. We’ll go to her place, just around the corner. You can wash up.”
Looking vastly relieved, Tregobov shook her hand. “I am most grateful,” he said in heavily accented French. “Thank you.”
“It’s my pleasure, what little I can do.”
Walking to the apartment, Tregobov explained what had happened at the prison. “Despite its reputation for filthiness and brutality, La Santé seems to me a very permissive facility, at least compared to institutions in my country.” He was sweating profusely and still seemed somewhat dazed. “For instance, when the inmates are allowed to walk for exercise, they can mingle as they wish instead of being forced to walk two by two, arms behind their backs, as in most prisons. In any case, today, after the exercise period, three men were said to be missing. Then a head count was taken, and no one seemed to be missing after all. After that, the gas. No one knows why. A kind of farce, you know, but very disruptive. I must get out of there.”
“You’re working in the research program?” asked Odile.
“Yes, but only because—”
“We’ll talk about it later,” Thierry interrupted.
Odile punched in the code at the mews’ front gate. As they passed the anarchists’ door, she cast a surreptitious glance at the adjacent window, but no one seemed to be home and the computer screens were dark. Going on, she led Thierry and his friend into the apartment.
Then, once Tregobov had been provided with towel, washcloth, and dressing gown, his clothes had been thrown into the washing machine, he’d retired to the bathroom, and the bathtub faucet had begun to run, Odile brought Thierry into the living room, where he occupied the same spot on the sofa that Turner had half a lifetime ago. She remained standing.
“So,” she said, “you know a man named Kukushkin, a banker of sorts who perhaps has other talents as well?”
Thierry looked glum.
“That’s all right, I know you know him.” She began to pace, anger rising slowly in her like a taint of the blood. “Your cousin worked for Kukushkin,” she said. “You were working nights for Broch, paying off a gambling debt, if I’m not mistaken, maybe—is it possible?—by turning out counterfeit DVDs. Then the flag business presented itself—Turner’s pet project—and Broch recommended you as a reliable courier. Good, so off we go to Moscow, you and I. When you don’t return with me and the flags, Kukushkin has Broch killed for steering you in his direction, for vouching for your reliability.”
“Odile, Odile. Listen to me.”
“Yet even this—how to call it?—surrogate vengeance, this murder, fails to satisfy Kukushkin, since he certainly doesn’t call off his goons, who continue to threaten me and Turner in ways ever less attractive, because he thinks we know where you and Gabriella, once it comes to light that she’s your girlfriend, can be found. And why is that, you might ask. Forgive my frankness, but neither of you seems to me particularly indispensable to the world at large, let alone to someone like Kukushkin. So what is it you have that he wants?” She stood over him. “Is it this doctor, whom no one but the police has asked about? Or is it something else? These silences, you see, they bother me very much. I want them filled. I want them explained once and for all.” She bent over at the waist and thrust her face forward until it was inches from his own. “So start talking.”
Thierry recoiled slightly but otherwise didn’t move.
In the bathroom, water continued to plunge into water.
It suddenly occurred to Odile that she’d be perfectly justified in making a quiet call from the other room and keeping her guests entertained until the Russians, stolid and stupid and tireless, arrived in their black sedan to take them away. But first she needed to hear what Thierry had to tell her. She wanted to be certain, even though she knew that certainty was the invention of a troubled mind. She wanted no regrets.
“Well,” Thierry said, settling back in the sofa, “I’ll explain what I can. But you must realize that the more you know, the more compromised you are and the more jeopardy you’re in.”
“Jeopardy! After the last few weeks, I’ll take my chances.”
“As you wish.” He sighed at her recklessness but went ahead. “When Turner was arranging for our passage through customs in Brest—on the way back, that is, with the flags—he called Kukushkin, whom he knows from various other contexts. The thing was done. Now, as it happens, Kukushkin had plans to go into business with our Dr. Tregobov, who is very brilliant, probably number one in his field, but also, as you pointed out, a Belarussian. This is most unfortunate because—”
“What field?” Odile interjected.
“Molecular biology. Anyway it’s most unfortunate because Belarus, as you know, is the last communist country in Europe and everything worth having, not to mention everything that isn’t, belongs in perpetuity to the state. In this case the property at issue is intellectual: Dr. Tregobov has made a groundbreaking discovery. Anywhere else in the world, the process he’s developed would not only guarantee him a Nobel Prize but also make him a very rich man. In Belarus it cost him his passport. The government supported his research, yes, but essentially by imprisoning him in his laboratory. They wanted to keep his discoveries—and the profits they’re bound to generate when the patents are approved—in state hands.”
Odile had resumed pacing. “So Kukushkin proposed to get him out of Belarus and go into partnership with him. Very enterprising. But what’s your role? You don’t play at their level.”
“Maybe I don’t, maybe I do. We’ll see. But when Kukushkin heard from Turner that I was going to Moscow via Brest, he called Sylvain to ask if I was dependable. He needed someone to drop something off in Brest for Dr. Tregobov and then, if everything went well, take him to Paris on the return trip. I got the job.”
“And you screwed it up. Is that it?”
“No!” Thierry struggled to sit upright on the sofa’s down cushions. “Of course not! I told you: some adjustments had to be made in Brest, so I stayed behind and made them.”
“Why are the French police looking for Tregobov?”
“Because when the Belarussian government re
alized that he’d escaped the country, they put out a terrorist bulletin on him throughout the EU. Mad scientist, bioweapons, I don’t know. These days, obviously, people would rather err on the side of caution. So you get police. Too bad, in my view, but that’s how it is.”
Odile tapped her knuckles against her own forehead in frustration, then, as calmly as she could, walked over to him and in a quiet voice said, “You’re telling me nothing. Why should the Russians be so desperate to find you? I think it’s because you abducted Tregobov yourself. For your own purposes.”
“If that were the case, don’t you think he’d look a little unhappier about it?”
“Maybe he doesn’t know all the facts, either. Or maybe you lied to him. How could I know?”
“None of us knows all the facts, Odile. That was a twentieth-century delusion, and I, for one, am glad to be rid of it.”
“What about Gabriella? Where is she?”
“Hiding. She’s fine.”
There was a silence during which they both realized the bath faucet had been turned off some time ago. The tub gurgled as it drained. Odile excused herself and went downstairs to put the doctor’s clothes in the dryer.
Though it was obvious that Thierry wasn’t telling her everything, she found she believed what he had chosen to reveal. Maybe the problem was her questions; she kept getting sidetracked, as each new supposition replaced the previous one without ever resolving into the certainty at which she still, no doubt foolishly, hoped to arrive.
Upstairs, Thierry had stuck his head out the window and was looking west up the courtyard. Sensing her presence, he drew back inside. “Who are those guys?”
When she looked, she saw three men in their thirties wearing ill-fitting, mismatched clothes and conferring closely, midway down the courtyard. “No idea,” she said. “Probably friends of the anarchist group we’ve got living here.”
Thierry walked back over to the sofa but didn’t sit down. “Well, I’ll tell you this much, because it’s necessary. Dr. Tregobov believes I’m still working for Kukushkin, who I’ve told him is in Siberia inspecting some oil fields—totally unreachable, but most definitely with us in spirit. I’m his representative, as far as the good doctor’s concerned. So are you, for that matter, since that’s what I more or less told him just now.”
“So you did snatch him!”
“No. I’m merely guiding him to safe haven on Kukushkin’s instructions, just as before. The only thing that’s changed is that Kukushkin’s temporarily out of the loop. I’d explain it to him, though right now I don’t think he’d be inclined to understand. But eventually he will.”
In her pique, she turned her back on him and walked several steps toward the kitchen before forcing herself to stop. “Two questions.”
“Ask.”
“One. Why haven’t the three of you left Paris?”
“We’re trying to. But as you can imagine, with the police looking for him and the Russians for me and Gabriella, this isn’t so simple. Airports and train stations are out of the question, and rental cars too easy to track. But we’re giving the matter our fullest attention. Thanks for your concern.”
She turned to face him and was once again struck by his luminescent quality, almost as if he were emitting little points of light. “Two. What was in the package you dropped off at Brest? The ‘refrigeration unit,’ you called it.”
“I did say that, didn’t I?” Thierry laughed. “In point of fact that was just a prop, a precautionary diversion, should one be necessary. What I dropped off was a brand-new Belgian-issue EU passport for Dr. Tregobov. In retrospect, that’s probably where things got off track.”
His eyes went out of focus, and Odile had the impression he was about to say more—one lie so often requiring another for amplitude—when the bathroom door opened and the doctor stepped out, looking thoroughly refreshed in the borrowed dressing gown.
“Madame Mével,” he said with a slight bow in her direction. “My most sincere thanks. You have no idea how necessary that was.”
She smiled at him and went to get his clothes from the dryer.
The actual necessities, she had begun to realize, were only now declaring themselves.
CHAPTER 28
LEAVING TOURS THAT AFTERNOON, pushing the Citroën as hard as he could, Max knew himself to be a man in rebellion.
His meeting had been a success. He’d screened a selection of recent footage for his investors, omitting the police-raid sequence, which would only have confused them, and in return had received praise and the assurance of further funding. Yet the entire experience felt like a personal affront, an interruption of his efforts, a humiliation, a joke. He knew he was being petty, but didn’t care. And then there was this.
Although he’d never thought he was making a documentary and doubted very much that anyone could think so once the film was done, some of his backers’ comments made it obvious that’s what they’d expected and thought they were admiring. Maybe it was because he was improvising and using nonactors, maybe it was the film’s reliance on natural light, or possibly nothing more than the recent box-office success, unforeseen and to Max inexplicable, of a spate of low-budget documentaries in the U.S. In the end, the reasons didn’t matter. Eddie had secured him the right of final cut, so if the investors were unhappy with the film he eventually gave them, too bad. In the meantime he’d have Eddie run interference, and there would be no more days like this.
Flooring the Citroën, he managed to pass a truck he’d been stuck behind for several minutes. It was loaded down with artichokes and, in the rearview mirror, presented a somewhat comic sight as it periodically shed some of its cargo to the wind. Max glanced at his fuel gauge; the needle hovered just a hair above empty.
He refueled at a gas station outside Orléans, washed his face in the men’s room, and bought a bottle of mineral water, which he drank half down at a draw. Somebody had left that day’s Libération on the bench beside the soft-drink machine. Leafing impatiently through it, he looked for a mention of the auction but found nothing. He finished the mineral water, started the car, and lurched back onto the highway, scattering gravel in his wake.
About six kilometers out of Orléans, a police car fell in behind him. Max waited anxiously to be pulled over, but they drove on for another fifteen kilometers before the car passed him, the passenger-side officer looking Max over curiously. Then, an instant later, they shot down the road at full speed, quickly disappearing.
Shaken, Max rolled the window partway down and lit a cigar. When in rebellion, he thought, it was inadvisable to attract the attention of the local constabulary, whose priorities rarely coincided with one’s own. Nevertheless, the encounter had sobered him sufficiently that, for the first time all day, he found himself able to take stock of his situation with some detachment, mentally separating one thing from another, as he should have done some time ago. Of course, he’d been preoccupied.
He now took it as a given that Odile and Turner were having an affair. Though the evidence was thin, he felt the certitude of her betrayal in the marrow of his bones. Any doubts he might’ve harbored had vanished the moment he laid eyes on her the day before, through Groot’s binoculars: her struggle with the cigarette, the first he’d seen her with in years; her puffy, tear-stung eyes; her obvious impatience; and, most of all, her newly shorn hair, lightly feathered and glossed. She’d worn it like that the night she’d accosted him in SoHo seven years ago. Never since had she cut it so close, though the severity became her still, bringing out her cheekbones and the fullness of her lips, emphasizing her youth. As she would know.
He liked to think he was above jealousy, but probably most men flattered themselves on this score. Certainly he was competitive enough. If the two traits came to the same thing, as he often suspected, he would soon find out.
For awhile he scanned the fields of new wheat and corn that stretched out on either side of the highway, rippling in the breeze like the surface of a windblown lake. He felt unpleasantly e
xposed and was wishing for the forest he’d left behind not forty minutes ago when his cell rang. He set the cigar in the ashtray and pulled the phone from his pants pocket.
“Dad?”
“Yes, my little monster.”
“About that party tonight, remember? Everything’s cool. It’s at Lili’s parents’ apartment in the sixteenth, and the kids are all from Dominique’s rallye—which I guess is like her group of officially approved friends, who’ll probably all be ministers of state or CEOs or something when they’re adults, but right now they’re just regular kids, you know? Lili’s parents will be there, and Dominique too, so you don’t need to worry. I’ll give you the parents’ number as soon as I can find it; it’s here somewhere. Anyway, the party’s from seven thirty to eleven, and I’d really like to go. Can I?”
“All right. But I want you to call me at nine thirty and give me an update, okay?”
“Great! Love you, Dad.” Then, not waiting for a response, she punched off.
He put the cell phone away, his thoughts momentarily hazed over by love and worry. In the ashtray, his cigar had gone out. He relit it.
The mood of rebellion hadn’t left him. For as long as he could remember he’d been aware of the unfairness of the world, and, for almost as long, he’d seen that it could be no other way. Perhaps, he often thought, it should be no other way.
Yet now—as he felt his women hurtling off, Allegra toward adulthood, Odile toward another man—an overwhelming exasperation took hold of him. It was like a cry of disbelief, of outrage, that what happened to so many should happen to him.
Just when he felt the need for some recognition of the difficulties involved in what he did for a living, of the optimism and endurance it required, he discovered himself increasingly isolated from those whose appreciation he most needed—his wife, his daughter, maybe even himself. The core of his body pulsed against his rib cage as if about to explode. This anger, murderous and frightening, was of a sort he hadn’t felt since childhood, when he was ignorant of its very nature. He forced himself to breathe deeply and regularly until the feeling subsided.
