The Same River Twice (22 page)

“And on top of everything else, the police. They’ve got it all wrong. You saw, they took my files! What morons!”

Max shifted in his seat. “Who do the police think killed your partner?”

“Professionals is the word they used. That was their brilliant hypothesis, based on their painstaking evidence—namely, that he was shot eight times in the chest on a busy street.” She shook her head wearily. “This is not me. I’m not saying this.”

“Believe me, I know the feeling.” Max leaned forward. “These people your partner was in trouble with, might they be …” He cast about for a suitable term. “Could they be Russians?”

She stared at him. “What makes you think that?”

“It’s just a guess. You said professionals.”

“No, really. I want to hear.” She straightened in her chair. “What makes you think that my partner was killed by the Russians?”

Max tried to recall the logic that had led him to this supposition, but in fact there didn’t seem to be any, only impressions that had accumulated over the last several weeks, half-formed thoughts belatedly given shape by Véronique’s insinuations or his own reading of them.
They’ll dump our bodies in the Seine
, Madame Leclère had told Broch during Max’s first visit here. It had happened before. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I shouldn’t have said it.”

Madame Leclère appeared to contract slightly. “Did I tell you I had to identify the body?” She shivered. “It was bad, Monsieur. Very bad.”

“Yes, I can imagine.”

“They should’ve shot me also. That would have been more respectful.” She looked fiercely around the room. “Ah, but they’re bastards,” she added, and, burying her face in her hands, began bitterly to weep.

For nearly a minute Max stayed where he was. At the back of the room, past the open file cabinets that the police had emptied, a doorway framed a wrought-iron staircase leading to the upper floors.

Max got up, went over to her, and laid a hand gently on her back. “Please. Is there anything I can do, Madame?”

Still bent over in her chair, she shook her head.

“A glass of water, maybe?” he persisted.

But before she could respond, the front buzzer sounded—a sustained note followed, after a pause, by a staccato flurry of shorter ones.

“Let me get it,” Max told her. She sniffed but made no move to stop him.

Waiting at the entrance was a round-faced, swarthy man dressed in a khaki jumpsuit. He glared at Max through the glass. The key was still in the lock; Max turned it and opened the door.

“Monsieur Sylvain Broch?” the man asked, reading from a clipboard he held cradled in one arm.

“No, I’m sorry. Monsieur Broch isn’t available.”

“He has a delivery of twelve cartons. You will have to sign for them.”

Looking past him, Max saw a dark brown panel truck parked outside. A man got out of the cab, went around to the back of the vehicle, threw open its rear door, and began unloading boxes.

“Wait a moment,” said Max. But just as he turned to call for Madame Leclère she arrived at his side, her equilibrium seemingly restored.

“Excuse me, Monsieur,” she said to the first man, “but we’re not expecting a delivery. You must have the wrong address.”

The man rolled his eyes in a paroxysm of self-control. “Twice we tried delivering this shipment to the designated address,” he said. “At neither time was there anyone to receive it. I am therefore obliged to deliver to the billing address, which is here. So if one of you will just sign the manifest, we can be done with this before our grandchildren bury us.”

Madame Leclère grimaced and took the clipboard from him.

Reading over her shoulder, Max saw that the shipper was a computer-supply wholesaler and that the boxes were to be delivered to an address in the tenth arrondissement. The purchaser was indeed listed as Sylvain Broch. A red stamp across the bill declared the shipment paid for.

“But what do these boxes contain?” asked Madame Leclère.

“That is not my concern, Madame,” said the deliveryman, handing her a pen.

The man unloading the cartons approached with the first six stacked on a hand truck. Madame Leclère stopped him, then turned to Max. “Would you mind?”

Accepting a box cutter from the driver, Max slit the top carton. Inside, wrapped individually in cellophane, were forty packages containing fifty blank DVDs each—two thousand a carton, twenty-four thousand all told.
He handed one of the packages to Madame Leclère. She read the label and shook her head in bafflement.

“What are these?” she asked.

He told her.

She sighed and, signing for the cartons, said, “This is a complete mistake.”

WHEN THREE DAYS PASSED without a visit from the police or any mention in the media of Sylvain Broch’s murder, Turner began to brood. It was one thing to have someone killed—and Kukushkin had doubtless done it before—but to erase the act as well as the man required very deep resources indeed. Worse, he found himself unable to discount the possibility that the men he saw kill Broch were the same two Odile had complained of—a troubling notion, since it meant Kukushkin had been making sport of him in New York, at Balakian’s gallery, when offering to find out who they were. Whatever the truth, Turner understood that he could no longer pretend to be uninvolved.

He picked up the phone and punched in Odile’s number. The line was still ringing when Gabriella swept in with the day’s obituary clippings, which she deposited in his inbox, and two plastic shopping bags stuffed with small objects wrapped in newspaper. When Odile’s voice invited him to leave a message, he hung up. “Are those what I think they are?” he asked.

His assistant smiled with demure satisfaction. “I told you I could do it.”

For months he’d been trying to win the confidence of an elderly woman in Auteuil, the former mistress of a highly placed Vichy official who had bequeathed her his
netsuke
figures, mid-nineteenth century and earlier, the finest collection Turner had ever come across. When his best efforts at wresting them from her had proved unavailing, he sent Gabriella in as backup. Playing to the old harridan’s fears as well as her vanity, she succeeded,
and the woman had now agreed to put the ivory carvings up for auction. The house commissions would be substantial.

“My superb Gabriella,” he said, embracing her, “you’ve outdone yourself.”

She blushed. “The key was her son. When she told me he votes Socialist, I helped her see that if she left the collection to him, he would certainly sell it and give the money to the illegals and Arabs, or at least their advocates. I was afraid she’d have a stroke before I got out of there with the consignment.”

Turner shook his head in sad wonderment. “We risk our lives for art, and no one cares.”

“But of course people care! Besides, someone has to do it.” A hint of caution passed across her features. “What do you mean, our lives?”

“Figure of speech,” he said.

“Oh, I almost forgot. Look what she gave me.” Reaching into her purse, she produced a slim volume elegantly bound in blue calfskin and stamped in gold with Cyrillic characters. “Pushkin, first edition.”

He leafed through the book, a prose work in six chapters and a conclusion, no more than fifty pages in all. “But can you read Russian?”

“Not a word. She told me the story, though, or at least part of it. I’m going to get a French translation. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Indeed the book was a treasure, and handling it Turner experienced a moment of avarice. “She just gave it to you?”

“I was very surprised. We’d been talking about gambling—she goes every summer to Biarritz to play roulette—and she was impressed that I knew the French laws about where you can or can’t play, which, by the way, I bet you don’t know.”

Turner did not.

“Gambling is legal only in towns that have natural hot springs. In any case, the title of this book”—she took it back from him and opened it to the title page—“translates as
The Queen of Spades
, and it’s about a guy who’s obsessed with finding a system for winning at faro. I think it ends badly. There’s a ghost involved.”

In his mind Turner saw the ruddy interior of Bar Flou. He saw the man fan out the deck of cards before the couple, saw the younger man draw out the queen of spades and hold it up for his girlfriend to see. She exclaimed. He saw the two men switch places while the girlfriend clapped her hands in delight and the other women looked on. “Why the queen of spades?” he asked. “Does it have some special meaning?”

“I don’t know,” replied Gabriella. “I’ll tell you when I find a translation.”

After she’d retired to the basement storage rooms to begin cataloging the
netsuke
, Turner set an auction date for the flags, on the second Thursday in June—as late in the season as he dared push it. International buyers would by then already have begun touring the summer art festivals and could reasonably be expected to make a stop in Paris, while French buyers, if any, would not yet have left. The flags would be exhibited a full week prior to the sale, and the catalog, lavishly illustrated and annotated, would go out three weeks before that. Turner had nearly finished writing the copy.

He took lunch alone at a nearby bistro, and as he lingered over coffee his thoughts returned to Odile. He hadn’t seen her since the afternoon at Céleste’s studio, but that image—her sitting nearly naked for the portrait, the green dress open like a robe, her features defiant, even imperious—remained vivid to him still. It was like a taunt, and he recalled how casually he’d brushed aside her worries about the men who were harassing her, with what certainty he’d told her the problem had been taken care of. Now he was certain of nothing.

Through Céleste, Turner had been able to fill in many of the blanks. He knew about her filmmaker husband, their money problems, her American friend Rachel, the houseboat. He knew Odile had lived in New York at about the same time as he had and that she’d met her husband there. He knew about her father, the charismatic geographer and Trotskyite. He even knew she’d recently given up eating meat. All this he had learned, yet far from laying his questions to rest this new knowledge seemed only to underscore the incompleteness of his understanding, not just of Odile but of the events now unfolding around him, events in which she might or might not be playing a part.
I’m half obsessed with her
, he thought. And though he waited for other, less drastic formulations to offer themselves, though he knew better than to personalize what was at bottom no more than a set of circumstances, the notion remained uncontradicted in his mind and he was forced to wonder what it might portend. He sat a second longer with the thought, then roused himself and signaled the waiter for his check.

BILLIE HOLIDAY WAS SINGING
“All of Me.” Amber sunlight bathed the sofa on which Odile sat half dressed, and the air smelled of oil paint, turpentine, and cigarette smoke.

“So he has only the one daughter?” asked Céleste, pausing to squeeze another measure of cadmium red onto her palette plate.

“Yes. And Allegra’s very well brought up for an American kid—respectful, well spoken, not at all spoiled. But at the same time she’s thirteen years old and the child of divorce; one cannot expect her to be unaffected.”

“No, of course not. In which case one must ask whom she blames the most: you, him, her mother, or herself?”

“Herself, certainly. But she takes it out on Max, which in itself wouldn’t be so bad if he just didn’t respond so helplessly. It’s painful to watch, you know? For a serious man to learn doubt and guilt at the exact moment when real success has come to him … Ah, but life is cruel and stupid. Why complain?”

“One complains because one is human,” said Céleste. “Now turn your head a bit to the right. Not so far. Good.” She drew thoughtfully on her cigarette and contemplated Odile. “Yes, I’m beginning to see how this painting must go. Only now do I see what I’m up against.”

“Really?”

“You have the face of a maenad in repose. I look at you and think, here is someone who may be capable of anything. Murder, even. And yet there’s also a kind of control.”

“You flatter me,” Odile said with a small laugh.

“Not at all. I simply tell you what I see.” She resumed painting, her brow furrowed, her eyes darting from Odile to the canvas and back again. “Keep looking out the window. Good. This will be difficult, perhaps impossible, but I must try. There’s an opening, at least that. You’ll work with me?”

“Yes.”

“It will take longer than I thought. But just maybe …”

Two buildings away, near the middle of Odile’s rooftop vista, a woman appeared bare-breasted at a window, flung it open, and dropped an armload of clothes to the tar-paper surface of the roof just below. Immediately after, a man in his undershorts climbed out, landing likewise on the tar paper, while above him the woman slammed the window closed again and shut the curtains so violently that they shimmied back and forth for a few seconds. The man began to dress, taking his time. When he was done, he straightened his jacket, lit a cigarette, and sauntered out of sight past the chimney.

“Have you seen Turner lately?” Odile asked.

“Yes, yes. He comes by often. Sometimes I think I must have married him in another life. But I do enjoy him, you know. So charming for an American.”

“Maybe. Yet I get the impression that in his personal affairs he isn’t so happy. Does he have anyone?”

“There are girls. Nothing serious.”

“And I suppose he prefers it like that?”

“I don’t think he likes it or dislikes it. This is simply how life has turned out for him at the moment.” She stepped back from the canvas and scrutinized it briefly before changing brushes and addressing it anew. “When he lived in New York, though, things were different.”

“Really? You mean he was in love? It’s hard to imagine.”

“I don’t know much about her, except that she was also involved in the art business. ‘Brilliant eye’ was how he once described her to me. They were together two, maybe three years, I think. She died in a car accident.”

“Is that why he moved to Paris, then? To make a fresh start?”