The Same River Twice (15 page)

Some minutes later, apparently content with her efforts, his visitor closed her notebook and put down her pen. She looked at Max quizzically, as if noticing him for the first time. Then, with a hint of challenge, she smiled at him.

“Did you get it all down?” he asked, indicating the notebook with a lift of his chin.

“Enough, I hope.”

“That’s the trick of things, isn’t it? Enough. Knowing what to put in, what to leave out. Enough is the secret of a life well lived, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, of course. Although one must allow that excess has its advocates too.” She gathered her hair in her hands and brought it forward over her shoulder in a twist. “You are looking for an apartment? I saw you at the window.”

“I’m not sure what I’m looking for, now that you mention it. Have you ever heard of something called La Peau de l’Ours?”

“Is it a nightclub?”

“I don’t think so. I was given that address, supposedly a video distributor or something like that. A film company, maybe.”

“I see. So you’re a filmmaker?”

“Yes. And you’re, what, a graduate student?” She nodded once.

“Slavic studies.”

Max thought he saw a ghost of her earlier smile flicker across her features, but an instant later he wondered if he’d imagined it. He held out his hand. “I’m Max.”

“Véronique,” she said.

But as she uttered her name, Max saw a man unlock the door across the street and, preceded by the woman who accompanied him, disappear inside. He had the impression that they were arguing. “Well,” he said, “I see that my bears have arrived.” Getting to his feet, he put down enough cash to cover their bill. “But I’ve very much enjoyed talking to you, Véronique.”

She shrugged. “I come here sometimes.”

He said goodbye and crossed the street.

The door had been left ajar, so Max, pushing it open, entered with unintended
stealth. He found the front office deserted. From somewhere in back came the voices of the couple he’d seen from the café. They weren’t quarreling, but speaking in anxious tones, their words sometimes overlapping. He lingered in the front office and pretended to study the splash-lit photographs pinned to the wall.

“I still can’t believe it,” she was saying. “Of all people.”

“Everyone has a dream,” he said.

“But what will we say if they come to us? They’ll think we knew.”

“It doesn’t matter. We knew nothing, remember?”

“You think the truth carries any weight in an affair like this? They’ll run us out of business at the very least. Dump our bodies in the Seine.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Stupid? Who suggested him in the first place? Why are we even involved in this?”

“You said you wanted to expand the business, right? Good. This is how it’s done. A favor for a favor. How did I know he was going to disappear?”

“But he’s your cousin, Sylvain!”

“Enough. You’re giving me a headache.”

Realizing that the conversation was coming to an end, Max walked silently back to the front door and pushed it shut with the heel of a hand. “Hello!” he called out pleasantly. “Anyone here?”

The woman emerged first, a strained smile on her face. With her compact body, the clipped precision with which she moved, and her closely shorn brown hair, she had a coiled efficiency that to Max suggested disappointments gamely overcome. He took it as cause for caution. “Good afternon,” the woman said in turn. “How may we help you?”

“My wife and I,” Max began, “are thinking of moving, and I thought I’d get an idea of what rents are running lately. Here, I mean, in Bastille.”

“Very well. And what price range are you looking for?”

“Under twenty thousand. Let’s say eighteen thousand francs a month, plus or minus.”

She frowned. “Difficult, but perhaps not impossible. Let me see what I have here.” From a shelf behind the desk, she pulled down two loose-leaf notebooks, one for the fourth arrondissement, the other for the twelfth. “Have you considered buying?”

But before Max could answer, her male colleague emerged from the back. No taller than the woman but noticeably younger, he regarded Max with an assessing eye and introduced himself as Sylvain Broch. “You have come to the right place.”

“I hope so,” Max said. “Your agency has been highly recommended to me.”

The woman, Madame Leclère, led him to a green leather sofa set diagonally across one corner of the office, a glass-topped coffee table positioned before it on a kilim. There she laid open the first of the notebooks, and for the next twenty minutes they leafed through the current offerings, sometimes stopping while she listed the amenities of those she thought he ought to be interested in. Seated at a nearby desk, Broch worked the phone.

When Max had had enough, he thanked her for her help and got to his feet. Broch had finished with his phone calls. Together they walked him to the door.

“You see,” she said, “you ask too much for your price range. It is necessary to be more flexible.”

“Thank you, Madame. Maybe I’ll try again in a week or so.” Max had his hand on the doorknob, but then, as if in afterthought, he turned back toward the two realtors. “This
is
La Peau de l’Ours, isn’t it?”

“La Peau de l’Ours?” the woman cried. “No, no, no! You see, Sylvain! What did I tell you?”

“What my colleague means to say,” Broch explained, “is that this other establishment you mention has nothing to do with us, nothing at all, other than having once occupied these premises, long before our tenancy.” He shrugged sadly. “It is confounding. Sometimes we still get their mail.”

“But is it true that La Peau de l’Ours also handles real estate?” Max ventured to ask.

“Unfortunately, we know nothing at all about their business.”

“I see,” said Max. “Please accept my apologies.” He started to turn away. “Goodbye, then.”

“Au revoir!”
they both said immediately.

As he left, he felt their eyes on his back. Véronique had abandoned the café. He walked the length of the block without undue haste, then turned the corner and kept on going.

SEATED HALF CLAD on Céleste’s maroon sofa, Odile by degrees began to say things that she knew bordered on the reckless. Her trip to Moscow, Thierry’s disappearance, her Russian stalkers. The firebombing of the
Nachtvlinder
. Céleste attended her fully, laying down the first layer of paint in reds, yellows, and off-whites.

“So finally,” Odile said, “when I was out of ideas, I asked Turner to put a stop to these Russians and their stupid games. Can he do that, do you think?”

“Probably. He’s very well connected.” Céleste held the brush up vertically before one eye, checking her subject’s proportions. “Also he likes you. Maybe he’s a small bit smitten.”

Odile was intrigued despite herself. “Really? With me, the vagabond dressmaker?”

“He sees you as a kindred spirit, I think. Are you attracted to him?”

“No. Anyway, he knows I’m married.”

“Married! What difference does that make?”

Odile smiled. “You haven’t met my husband.”

“No, but I’ve had husbands of my own.” Céleste squeezed a curl of alizarin crimson onto the glass plate that served as her palette. “Is yours very jealous?”

“No more than most. But he hates tedium. This is his great advantage.”

“Ah,” Céleste said, “then everything is possible.” Tilting her head, she
resumed her inspection. “Now would you please keep your gaze directed out the window? And don’t drop your chin. Good.”

The light around Odile began to change, going from nickel gray to silver as the morning clouds burned off. She blinked, her eyes grew moist, she slipped into a luminous reverie.

And then it was as if she were viewing the world through a surveillance camera, one that looked down not on Céleste’s studio but on the vestibule of what seemed to be a place of entertainment—a small theater, perhaps, or an after-hours nightclub. A crowd of well-dressed people were waiting to be admitted. Red velvet ropes held them in check, and they were speaking atop one another in a Slavic-sounding language; silver flasks were being passed back and forth, and there was intermittent laughter. Then a woman’s high heels sounded in a quickened staccato and Odile saw herself, or a likeness of herself, still from the overhead angle, hurry into the vestibule from the street. She was wearing Céleste’s jade-green dress and appeared quite out of breath.
Please
, she heard herself tell the burly man behind the velvet rope,
there is a man following me
. Without a word the bouncer unhooked the rope and let her pass. She pushed through the red leather padded door into whatever lay beyond, club or theater, then the scene fractured into zigzag static and at once went black.

Odile’s eyes flew open. “I fell asleep,” she said, sitting up and taking in her surroundings. “Was I out long?”

“Thirty seconds, not more. Do you feel all right?”

She felt as if she’d just had a full night’s rest. “I’m fine,” she said. “Shall we continue?”

And so they did, working in silence, until early afternoon. Céleste had prepared a charcuterie plate and salad for lunch, but Odile politely declined, saying she had an appointment. She didn’t ask to see the portrait in its current state, nor did Céleste invite her to look. After making a date for the next sitting, one week hence, they embraced and parted company.

Bursting out onto the street, Odile was seized by the sudden human turbulence around her. A man on a motor scooter called out to her as he passed. Two Islamic women in head scarves made a wide detour around a miniskirted girl walking a wet-nosed dog. Where Céleste’s street intersected rue Saint-Jacques, students were collecting signatures on behalf of undocumented aliens.

Making a right onto rue Soufflot, skirting the Panthéon, she considered and then dismissed her blackout episode at Céleste’s. The portrait sitting
had left her energized, confident. Buoyed by this new, nearly accidental friendship, she wondered again at the passivity with which she had lately been waiting on events. Such negligence, so unlike her, suddenly struck her as an invitation to calamity. She crossed the street and turned left. Two blocks east, Thierry Colin’s last known place of domicile entered her field of vision.

It was a narrow white-brick apartment building, recently renovated, with a smoked-glass entry and modern intercom. Twice before she’d come here, buzzing his number to no avail, but those attempts now seemed fatally halfhearted, even false. Slowing her pace to a stroll, she approached the entrance, where a woman holding grocery bags stood on the step. Odile watched her punch in the four-digit entry code, then the door clicked, and she disappeared inside. A minute later Odile reentered the numbers, pushed the door open, and stepped into the tiny unlit foyer. She summoned the elevator, a cage barely big enough for two, rode it to the fourth floor, and got out.

This was her plan: to knock long and loud on his door until she was sure no one was home, then open the frosted-glass hallway window that looked out over the courtyard, carefully gauge the distance to Thierry’s balcony terrace—a meter at most, she guessed—and squeeze through the two vertical bars of the window guard, jump the distance from sill to terrace, then, using her driver’s license as a shim, jimmy the terrace door open and calmly enter his apartment.

Her fist was poised to begin this sequence when she noticed a buzzer set into the jamb at the normal height, and for reasons not immediately available this caused her whole plan to evaporate. Her heart was beating hard. She tried the knob and it spun in its mechanism, engaging nothing. Then, realizing she wasn’t the first trespasser here, she pushed, and the door swung soundlessly open.

“Hello?” she called. “Is anybody home?”

She closed the door behind her and turned the deadbolt.

Traveling with Thierry, sharing sleeping quarters with him and noting his fastidiousness, Odile had formed an impression of how he lived in Paris, and she now found that impression largely confirmed. The shelves of books, grouped by language and alphabetized by author; the CDs, mostly classical and jazz; the academic journals, neatly stacked beside the bookcases; the mass-produced Scandinavian-style furniture—all this she felt she could have predicted item for item not twenty-four hours into their journey to Moscow.

But as she grew calmer, her sense of trespass beginning to fade, she became aware of other elements that complicated her view. Laid out on the dining table was a chess set abandoned in mid-match, a couple of empty vodka bottles, and an over-inked Russian newspaper, roughly folded open to the business page. That the Russians had staked out Thierry’s home wasn’t a surprise, but their apparent quiescence—nothing broken or out of place—left her puzzled and mildly irritated. She’d half expected the kind of ruin that had greeted her and Max.

Moving now without caution, satisfied she was alone, Odile passed into the bedroom and scanned it: the low, neatly made-up bed, its white coverlet partly turned down as if for a guest; the desk and chair; the computer system, piles of weighted-down papers on either side of the keyboard; the closet, with its louvered wooden doors and, opposite it, a half-length oval mirror framed in distressed mahogany.

Advancing toward her reflected image—brow knit, mouth set, eyes moist and unblinking—she experienced a sudden flush of purpose. Thierry’s presence was strong here, the faintly rootlike scent of his cologne seeming to hover. Turning from the mirror, she went to his desk and, casually at first, then more systematically, began to go through his papers. Examining bills paid and unpaid, class schedules, faculty memos, newspaper clippings, reading lists, she began to piece together a picture of Thierry as a popular professor whose classes were oversubscribed and whose extrascholastic interests—witness the article he’d clipped on a fainting contagion at an Iranian girls’ school—tended toward the esoteric. According to his charge statements, he spent quite a lot of money in brasseries and clubs, not much on travel, less on clothes. His phone bills were moderate. He collected fountain pens.

Odile was in the midst of rifling the bottom drawer of his desk when she noticed a worn leather briefcase set unobtrusively against the baseboards beneath. Finding it locked, she cast about fruitlessly for a key, then took a paper clip from the desk, straightened it out, and, inserting one end into the brass keyhole, worried the satchel open. Inside were a sheaf of printed documents bound in plastic and a smaller, paperbound notebook of the sort used by university students. She turned first to the notebook, which appeared to be a kind of journal, though the entries were undated. The handwriting was Thierry’s. After flipping through it back to front, she began reading.