by Ted Mooney
She didn’t look back. The number of revelers had by now increased sufficiently that she was forced to devise a new system for her search, passing first through the middle of the party, then prowling some distance along its edges before crossing the center again. The lighting, provided by miner’s lanterns, flashlights, and candles, wasn’t much help. Several times she thought she saw Allegra dancing with Fabien, but in each instance she was mistaken, deceived by shadows and her own anxiety. I can’t let this happen, she told herself, pushing on. I refuse.
Minutes passed before, in an accidental synchrony of the party’s movements, a channel of free space opened up, and she glimpsed Allegra, dancing with abandon—loose hair flying, arms raised high, sweat pouring from her brow. She was at the center of a ring of other dancers, both male and female, who were urging her on, and for a moment Odile found herself transfixed, as if this were a half-remembered scene from her own adolescence. Prancing out to the ring of spectators, Allegra teasingly chose a partner and resumed her dance, this time just the two of them. Then the crowd shifted again, abruptly cutting off Odile’s line of sight. At once she began to press forward, squeezing between these total strangers.
By the time she got there, the music had changed and the dancers had re-sorted themselves accordingly. She quickly found Allegra and Fabien seated on a dilapidated sofa by the limestone wall, Allegra on his lap, the two of them laughing and trying to catch their breath. Since Odile hadn’t yet decided what to say, she simply stood there in front of them.
When Fabien noticed her, he got to his feet so quickly that Allegra nearly fell to the ground. They displayed identical clenched smiles for a moment before he stepped politely forward to greet Odile. She ignored him.
“I hate to interrupt this no doubt urgent dialogue, but getting here was hell, and my patience is running low. So let’s go, Allegra. I’m taking you and Dominique home immediately.”
“Home? What for?”
“What do you mean, what for? You lied to your father and me about the party, you’re on drugs—no, don’t bother, Dominique told me everything—you’ve been crawling around in the dark and dirt with people you don’t even know, risking your lives. So now I’ve come to take the two of you home. End of story.” She grasped Allegra by the upper arm and began steering her toward the spot where she’d left Dominique.
“Wait! I can’t believe this!”
“Believe it.”
“And I didn’t lie to you and Dad. Dominique and I just … we just had a change of plans.” She turned to Odile in appeal, pupils dilated, face flushed. “Don’t you ever do that? Change your plans? Your mind?”
“Save your breath, Allegra. We’re going.” To her relief, Odile saw Dominique, still some distance away, dancing by herself right where she’d left her. Now all that remained was to find Chantal, their underworld guide, and persuade her to lead them back to street level.
“I know you’re not really mad at me, Odile. You have such a beautiful soul. I love you, don’t you realize that?”
“At seventy-five francs a pop, everyone’s soul is beautiful. Until you come down, that is. Then you pick up where you left off.”
“Odile, it’s not like that.”
“Everything’s like that,” she surprised herself by saying.
They continued to edge sideways through the crowd. When they finally reached Dominique, the girls embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in years, squealing, laughing, talking. Odile had forgotten that at their age you could somehow speak and listen simultaneously, and she found the sight of them exercising this skill unexpectedly reassuring.
“Good,” she said at last. “Now, you two will stay right here while I find Chantal and get us out of here. Understood?”
They nodded solemnly, looking for the first time somewhat frightened.
Odile set off. She hadn’t gotten very far, however, before she saw exactly what she’d feared and hoped to see ever since leaving Chantal’s apartment. Gathered in a shallow niche in the bunker’s wall, not a hundred meters away, were Thierry, Gabriella, and Tregobov, locked in close conversation.
She hesitated. Then she thought, Tonight’s the night. She was not sure herself what she meant by this. Tonight has got to be the night.
When she reached them, she stepped up and tapped Thierry on the shoulder.
“Hello,” she said as casually as she could.
Both Thierry and the doctor turned to look at her in astonishment, but Gabriella seemed strangely unsurprised—part of her style, Odile thought. She decided to match this indifference of affect for the next several hours; and if it worked, she’d keep it.
“You were at the slide lecture, weren’t you?” Gabriella said. “I was almost certain I saw you, but he”—she continued, indicating Thierry—“said that was impossible.”
Odile ignored this question. “Right now,” she said in her best faux-festive voice, “what I’d most like is a word with your leader. Alone, if that’s possible.”
“Alone in a crowd,” said Gabriella, as if singing to herself, but she made no move to intervene. Meanwhile the doctor had assumed the expression of polite confusion with which, Odile had noticed, he tended to veil his true opinions. Thierry threw a quick glance at each of them, then stepped several feet to the side.
Odile joined him. “What would you say, Thierry, if I told you I can get the three of you out of Paris tonight? In total safety.”
“I’d say, great, fantastic, let’s do it. But what’s the catch?”
She waited a beat before replying. “The catch, as you put it, is that I require the truth from you, the whole truth this time, with no inventive feints and flourishes. If you lie to me in one single detail—and I’ll know right away if you do—I will pick up the phone and have the Russians on you so fast that your scheming little mind will spin until it stops for good. Which in this case shouldn’t take very long at all, I’d imagine. What do you think?”
Thierry looked out over the crowd. The recorded MC, now female, was singing very fast, over and over: Nu-oh / We’ll never go / We’ll never go / Cha-ching! / Cha-ching! / Nu-oh / We’ll never go / We’ll never go…
Throwing a quick glance behind her, Odile saw that Allegra and Dominique remained where she’d left them. They were talking and hugging and giving off a glow. Good, she thought. The night, she was beginning to suspect, would be long. She turned back to Thierry.
“Why would you want to help us now?” said Thierry. “And what if you don’t like the truth?”
“The truth is not to be liked or disliked. It simply is. I want to know it, and I want all the rest of this to disappear from my life forever. By dawn at the latest, I definitely will have made this happen in every particular. So, if you care at all for your safety or that of your friends, you’d better choose how you want to play it. Immediately. Right now.”
Thierry produced a pack of American cigarettes and offered her one that she refused. He took it for himself. “As I said before,” he reminded her, “the more you know, the more you’ll be at risk. You understand this isn’t about a few flags, correct?”
She waved his words and cigarette smoke impatiently away. “We’ve been through all this. Don’t you get it? I don’t care.”
He nodded past her to Gabriella and the doctor, smiling to indicate that all was fundamentally on track. “If you say so. But then how do I know you’re not working for the other side now?”
“You mean the Russians? Because in that case I would’ve fed you to them long ago and washed my hands of this whole embarrassment. Besides, did I not bring you the thirty thousand?”
Someone was distributing glo-light necklaces, a gesture that lent the proceedings a suitable retro touch. As Odile surveyed the room, she saw that chemical goodwill was much more prevalent among the guests than she’d first thought.
“I like your haircut,” Thierry said.
“I like yours,” she answered evenly.
“So,” he asked, scratching his neck, “how d
o I know this escape plan you’re proposing is real?”
“You don’t. But consider the alternatives.”
“And what I tell you will remain only with you? Nobody else? Not even your husband?”
“You have my word.”
He exhaled smoke lengthily, waiting out one last moment of doubt before he began. “All right. Everything I said at your house is true. Except there was no passport to be delivered en route to Moscow, not then. And the refrigerator unit really was a refrigerator unit.”
“Containing human egg cells, perhaps?”
“Yes.” He looked troubled, as though about to qualify what he’d just said, but he let it stand.
Odile inspected him closely. “Egg cells you were taking to your doctor friend, yes?”
Thierry sighed massively. “You really are too smart for your own good, you know.”
“My own good’s my own business. Tell me what the original plan was, and what it is now. Or, you know—or else.”
“The plan.” He scratched his head pensively. “Well, without getting too technical, I will tell you that Dr. Tregobov has perfected—”
“Get technical. As you said, I’m a smart girl.”
“So you know what stem cells are, I assume?”
“Of course. Pluripotent cells is the technical term, I think, something like that. They’re the ones capable of growing into just about any kind of human tissue. The idea is to use them for therapeutic purposes, organ repair in particular. Right now they’re more or less the holy grail of genetic research. The big problem, as I recall, is how to direct them to grow into the exact kind of tissue you want—Nobel Prize guaranteed for whoever figures it out.” She felt herself growing irritated again. “I do read the newspapers, you know.”
“And you’re familiar with the whole idiotic uproar over using human eggs, with their DNA replaced by someone else’s, to produce these stem cells? The so-called moral dimension?”
“Of course,” she snapped. “But all that was taken care of a year or two ago. When they figured out how to use skin cells, I think it was, instead of embryos to start a stem-cell line.”
“No,” Thierry said. “It wasn’t taken care of. Because the truth is that the younger the starter cell, the better the results. And what’s younger than an embryo?”
At that moment a black-clad kid, dancing wildly and wearing pink prism glasses, crashed into Odile from behind. Pushing him violently away, she shouted after him, “Fuck you, monkey boy!” She knew she wasn’t contributing to the sought-after atmosphere of peace and tolerance, but she didn’t care about that either. “Hurry up!” she told Thierry, who was laughing despite himself.
“Patience, my little horror, patience.” He ran a hand over his scalp as if he still had hair. “The crux of the matter is that Dr. Tregobov has worked out a process for turning on and off the genetic material that has been added to the egg—whose own nucleus has been removed, remember—so that it will infallibly turn into stem cells. This is a first, a great discovery. But. The exact proteins required to make this happen must be adjusted to suit the cytoplasm, the denucleated egg cell. Unfortunately, not all cytoplasm works equally well with this process. So a two-step approach is required for each case. The doctor needs a first set of eggs from the donor, both to see if the cytoplasm is viable and, if so, to adjust his standard protein set for the woman in question. Then he can store the unique protein signature he arrives at, the essential information, on a gene chip—which these days can be nothing more than an ordinary DVD—so that, should he have to leave his lab suddenly, as Dr. Tregobov obviously did, he needn’t bring the actual stem cell line with him. Instead he can re-create it from the DVD and a second set of donated eggs from the same woman. Are you with me?”
“Perfectly,” Odile said. “Now tell me what you don’t want to tell me.”
“Kukushkin’s idea was to have his fiancée donate the eggs. For this he promised to get Tregobov out of Belarus, a most disagreeable place, as I’m sure you would concur. Fine. But there’s more: Kukushkin also wanted the doctor to share with this woman the worldwide patent rights to his incredibly promising, not to say staggeringly lucrative, scientific breakthrough. Tregobov agreed immediately, of course, the potential earnings from his discovery being virtually limitless.” Stroking his chin dreamily, Thierry grew reflective. “It’s very clever, the way Kukushkin works, keeping his own name at a distance from his various projects. One can always learn from him.” He shook his head in what Odile took to be admiration.
She glanced back one last time at the girls. Allegra was braiding a love lock into Dominique’s hair and talking nonstop.
“At any rate,” Thierry went on, “my task, which you somehow deduced, was to drop off the first set of eggs at the Brest station so they could be tested. If their cytoplasm was found viable, their necessary protein signature would be worked out and put on a DVD. The dropoff went very smoothly. One of Tregobov’s assistants met me at the station, where I gave him the refrigeration unit and returned to you. A walk in the park.” Overhead, in the middle of the stone ceiling, an electric candelabra flickered dimly to life. A couple of boys on a stepladder had been working on it for some time, and there was scattered applause as everyone looked up to admire the fixture.
“But then, coming back,” Odile prompted.
“Not so smooth,” agreed Thierry. “I was supposed to provide Tregobov with that EU passport—his Belarussian one having been confiscated—and bring him back to Paris with us. But there was no one—not a soul!—waiting for me in the Brest station. So I had no choice, I had to stay behind and work something out.”
“That’s quite a commitment,” said Odile. “What did Kukushkin give you for this extra initiative? Another thirty thousand francs?”
Thierry looked away, feigning distraction.
“Don’t worry,” Odile told him. “I already know you replaced Kukushkin’s fiancée’s eggs with Gabriella’s.” She tried, but failed, to suppress a triumphant smile. “Turner found out that Gabriella had been taking fertility drugs,” she explained. “It was just a guess on my part that you had her eggs with you, in that container. But that’s right, isn’t it?”
Thierry didn’t dispute the point. “And does Kukushkin know?” he said.
“I’m not sure. At first I think he was just upset when you didn’t bring him the doctor. But then, when his associates discovered that Gabriella was your girlfriend, and she disappeared too …”
“Right.”
Odile glanced away. Many of the dancers were chewing on pacifiers to avoid grinding their teeth—a hazard of the drug, she seemed to recall. “It’s possible there are other elements involved,” she said finally, “but I don’t really know. What I do know is that if I were you, I’d plan for the worst.” She watched him carefully, but he didn’t flinch. “I take it Tregobov doesn’t know you switched the eggs.”
“No, but he couldn’t care less. They’re compatible with his process. Now that he’s out of Belarus, his only concern is to get to England, which has laws very supportive of stem cell research. He’s anxious to have the patent approved, so his discovery will be officially credited to him outside the usual professional journals. Money doesn’t seem to matter much to him, except to fund his work, of course. He’s a scientist. Whether he shares the patent with Kukushkin’s fiancée or Gabriella isn’t even on his radar. His only concern is that the cytoplasm be viable.”
“Lucky for you.” She was about to go on when she felt her waist suddenly encircled by youthful arms, sweaty and affectionate.
“I love you, Odile,” said Dominique, “and this is so much fun. But we’re really hot, and there’s no more water.”
“Don’t worry. We’re going to leave in a minute, sweetheart. Please, would you and Allegra go find Chantal? And I’ll meet the three of you over there by that swastika sign, all right?”
Dominique looked suddenly anxious. “You won’t tell my father, will you?”
“We can talk about that
on the way.” She gave the girl a hug. “Now, get going.” Dominique hurried off.
“So that’s my story,” Thierry said. “What’s your plan?”
“I want the three of you to meet me at midnight at le quai de la Tournelle. There’s a houseboat tied up there called the Nachtvlinder. You’ll see it. There’ll be one blue light turned on at the top of the wheelhouse, otherwise nothing. Don’t call out, just come aboard as quietly as you can. I’ll explain the rest then.”
He appeared to think about it. “You wouldn’t set us up, would you, Odile? I mean, a boat is so much like a trap, when you think about it.”
“Set you up?” She laughed in his face. “No, I just want to believe a new life is possible, even if not for me. Surely you can understand that.”
Thierry suppressed a smile but nodded as though admiring an unusually deft bit of handiwork. “All right, then. We’ll see you at midnight.”
“On the dot,” Odile added, though it made no difference if he arrived promptly or not.
“On the dot,” he repeated, eyes sparkling, then he turned and rejoined his group.
Not much later, the girls showed up with Chantal, whom Odile asked to get them to street level. Their exit from the bunker was considerably less taxing than their entrance, but once back in the passages, they had to go down a couple of levels before ascending again, passing countless side tunnels—the real catacombs—piled three or four feet deep with human bones and receding immeasurably into the distance. At the mouth of one lay a pair of latex gloves. Allegra stopped to stare at them.
“What?” Odile asked.
“This,” Allegra said. “I’ve seen it all before. Those gloves. The four of us standing here. The water dripping down the walls. Dominique twisting her hair and holding it up like that. The bones crisscrossed just like that. Everything.”
No one could think of what to say to this, and in twenty minutes they were on the street. Odile flagged down a cab. As they lurched off, she took out her cell phone to see if Eddie Bouvier was home.
