The Same River Twice (25 page)

Across the street a small altercation had broken out in front of the club: two men in their twenties scuffling over a woman. The doorman looked stolidly away, his arms crossed.

“Your mother and I,” Max began, “think the best thing would be for you to spend June here in Paris. You’ll still have July and August with your friends, but we’ll get a chance to visit first, you and me. How does that sound?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Dominique will be here. She’s really looking forward to seeing you. And Odile, too. We’ll have a great time.”

There was a sullen silence. Outside the club the woman at the center of the dispute now pummeled the doorman with her fists, demanding that he stop the fight, which, in keeping with local custom, consisted almost exclusively of verbal insult and fierce physical posturing. Max had yet to see either man land a clean blow.

“Dad?”

“What is it, sweetheart?”

“Like, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but it’s just totally obvious that Mom wants me out of the way this summer so she can be with Willard.”

“Willard? Who’s Willard?”

“Her new boyfriend. That’s where she is tonight—you know, on a
date
. You called the apartment first, right?”

Max sighed at his daughter’s stratagems. “Nobody wants you out of the way, Allegra. And your mother deserves to have a life, just like anybody else.” As he watched, the doorman sidestepped the woman, grabbed the two men by their collars, and banged their heads together, sending them reeling off in opposite directions to light applause from the crowd. “So I’ll book you a ticket for, let’s say, the Friday after school lets out.”

“Whatever,” she said, as though suddenly bored by her own obstinacy. “Hey, will I still have my own room?”

But before he could answer, the line was again hijacked by screechy teenage laughter. “Woah, Allie! You are
so
dark shadows tonight!” And another voice: “Yeah, can we get a little
light
on the subject, please?” Gales of giggles, music.

“You
guys!
I’m on the phone.” Then another door slammed shut, and it was quiet again.

“Allegra,” said Max after a moment, “do I need to worry about you?”

“No, Dad. Really. Everything’s cool.”

“All right. So I’ll see you in, what, three weeks.”

“Okay. Bye. Love you, Dad.”

“I love you too, Allegra.” He hit the end button and leaned back on the bench. After a moment, he took a small black cigar from his jacket pocket and lit it. Long-distance conversation with his daughter often left him feeling stupid and regretful—as he felt now—but sometimes there was another element to his response, one that trumped everything else. Probably all fathers felt it. All fathers of daughters. He stood and began pacing back and forth as he smoked, trying to work out what it was.

“Max!” cried a voice from across the street. “Oh, Maximilian!”

He looked up to see Katje beckoning to him from the rolled-down driver’s-side window of her minivan, Rachel, Groot, and Yvette already aboard, waving giddily. Max tossed away his cigar, crossed the street, and, getting in up front with Katje, was suddenly excruciatingly awake.

“You think you can escape,” said Rachel, passing him another cigarette, “but you can’t.”

“Of course I can,” he replied. After taking a long drag, he handed the cigarette back over his shoulder. “Why can’t I?”

“In the theater of the real,” the Ivorian assured him, “nearly everything is possible.”

Groot laughed softly to himself.

“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” Rachel told him. “Exactly.”

Then Katje put the van in gear, turned on the radio, and in an instant Paris was passing by like a dream—sparsely trafficked, elegantly lit, alive with night thirst.

Their ostensible goal was an after-hours club whose name and address Katje insisted she’d remember in just a second, though she was quick to add that she’d never been there and couldn’t recall who had told her about it. Max soon determined, however, that arrival wasn’t the point, driving was the point, and as the conversation grew more and more disjointed, and the
van kept approaching the same intersections from different quadrants before lurching off again to a renewed chorus of encouragement from the backseat, he belatedly began to realize what had him so on edge.

“Stop!” he told Katje.

“Here?” she demanded, pulling over. “Why?”

“I just need to walk for awhile. Clear my head.” He leaned back over the seat to kiss Rachel goodnight and shake hands with Groot and Yvette. “Thanks, everybody. It’s been great.”

“But how will you get home?” Rachel asked. “The métro’s closed, and taxis—” She looked up and down the empty street.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” He got out with his camera, said goodnight again, and, as the van lurched off down rue du Faubourg du Temple, took stock of his surroundings. It was nearly three o’clock, with everything closed or pretending to be, and he believed himself to be within five blocks of the address he’d seen on the manifest for Sylvain Broch’s shipment of blank DVDs.

He walked for twenty minutes, checking street names and questioning whether he had remembered the address correctly. When he finally turned the corner onto what he thought was the right block, he saw, at its far end, a man loading boxes into a dark green panel truck. Max got there just as he pulled the rear door shut and slapped it twice with the flat of his hand, sending the vehicle careering off into the night. With all the self-control he could muster, Max greeted the man, slipped him a fifty-franc note, and asked what was in the boxes.

The man shrugged. Merchandise, he didn’t really know.

But where was it being taken, then?

After appearing to check the sky for adverse weather conditions, the man told him that quite possibly the boxes were bound for Saint-Ouen, at the north end of Paris, where, though naturally he himself could not say, it was conceivable that their contents would be sold later that morning at the flea market—or perhaps not, as the case may be. Then, bidding Max an abrupt goodnight, the man unlocked a bicycle leaning against a nearby wall, mounted it, and pedaled off.

Max turned to inspect the building from which he judged the man to have emerged. The ground floor was occupied by a cell-phone franchise, and neither it nor the three darkened stories above showed any sign of life. But also set into the limestone facade was a knobless metal door painted red. Max was about to knock when he reconsidered, gave it a tentative push, and slipped inside, the door closing behind him.

A man lay on his back in the middle of the floor, playing slow, dissonant chords on an electric guitar strapped across his hips. Overhead, ultraviolet lights provided the only illumination, while at the room’s peripheries, in darkness, a drummer kept complex, skittish time—cymbals and snare—and a bassist provided a lush arpeggio.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Max made out a half-dozen circular tables with two or three customers at each, a waitress leaned up against a wall smoking, a man passed out on a corner banquette. Closer to him he saw a small bar, a skinny bartender, some stools.

Max sat at the bar and put a fifty down in front of him.

After awhile, the bartender brought him a clear iceless drink in a plain glass, took the fifty, and came back with the change.

Max leaned across the bar and asked, “Is this La Peau de l’Ours?”

The man stared at him, uncomprehending.

“Okay, not important. But how about Sylvain Broch? He rents a space here, yes?”

“That depends.”

“It’s all right. I’m a friend of his.”

The bartender looked hard at Max, then lifted his chin to indicate the freight elevator in back. “Third floor.”

Crossing the room, Max peered down at the recumbent guitarist, who appeared to be in a trance, his eyes rolled back in their sockets, but with his band behind him and his small audience fixed in place, he seemed quite ready to go on for hours. Max took care not to disturb him.

The elevator opened, at the third floor, onto a shallow space created by a steel-mesh screen blocking access to the main area. Max felt around for a light switch. A ring-shaped fluorescent tube sizzled on overhead, and he saw that the pass door was secured not with a lock but with a twisted coat hanger, which he undid without difficulty. A string brushed his face; he pulled it.

He found himself in a medium-sized loft of whitewashed brick and wooden floors, its street-side windows painted black. Along one wall was a folding cafeteria-style table, set up, very much as he had envisioned, with a computer and a linked series of DVD burners, twelve in all. On the floor beside this array was a carton half filled with blank DVDs and another with black plastic boxes for the completed product. Farther on, against the adjoining wall, another table held two color printers and a stack of stick-on labels. It was all there—all the instruments of intellectual piracy—except, of course, the intellect and the pirates.

He sat down in front of the computer and switched it on. When the boot sequence ended with a password prompt, he got up and began a more methodical inspection of the place, working counterclockwise around it. He’d almost completed his circuit when he noticed a loop of wire protruding from the drywall on the north end. He pulled the loop, a door opened, and he switched on another light.

Inside was what seemed a personal refuge for whoever worked the computer, with a neatly made-up cot, its white coverlet turned down as if for a guest; a bookshelf stocked with commercial DVDs and academic journals; a board resting on cinder blocks to form a narrow desk; a jar of several fountain pens; a binocular microscope next to some loose DVDs; and, pushpinned to the drywall above the desk, a laser-jet photo of a building seen from above in black and white.

He went first for the shelved DVDs, which were arranged alphabetically, so that
Fireflies
, the genuine version, was flanked by
Fanny and Alexander
and
Fort Apache
—company he was hardly inclined to disavow, whatever the circumstances. After scanning the shelves for his other films—all, he thought, more successful than his first—he turned with small enthusiasm to the microscope. The DVDs beside it bore a pale amber coating on their data side, an almost transparent veneer he decided must be some sort of quality-control indicator. Tilting one of the disks back and forth in the light, he felt a sudden wave of fatigue that forced him to sit down on the cot behind him and, a moment later, to stretch out on it at full length, disk still in hand. He closed his eyes.

Then he was in a race of some kind, a polycathlon in which he moved through pine forest on cross-country skis, wearing night-vision scopes, with a high-powered rifle slung over one shoulder. Other contestants, intermittently visible through the trees, loped along parallel trails, and he shot at them, downing two and winging another before the slope grew precipitous and he had to jettison the rifle to stabilize himself for the downhill run, crouching over his skis like a racer, the poles tucked under his arms. When he hit the jump, the wind ripped the night scopes from his eyes and he flew or fell, pure velocity, into dark unbounded space.

He awoke in a state of confusion. At first he thought he’d been incarcerated in a jail cell or hospital room, but the DVD in his hand reminded him what had brought him here. Pocketing the disk, he glanced at the shelf of academic journals—back issues of
Revue de la Chimie Organique et Biomoléculaire
, not his subject—and was about to leave the little room when his eye fell on the laser-jet photo over the desk.

The building depicted, a massive fortress with barred windows and thick stone walls, was unfamiliar to him, but given its trapezoidal shape, and the stone aggregate walls ringing it, he knew that it must be La Santé prison, around which he had walked countless times, after innumerable dinners, two blocks from home. Inspecting the photo more closely, he noticed that one of the prison windows had been circled in red.

He went back out to the loft space, found his camera, and systematically set about photographing everything—the computer and DVD burners, the printers and stick-on labels, the shelves of movies and journals, the cot, the microscope, the prison photo—all the while imagining legal proceedings in which such documentation would prove useful. Eddie Bouvier would know how to handle it.

Emerging from the freight elevator at the ground floor, he found that the music was over and the audience had left. At the bar, beneath a hanging lamp, the waitress he’d seen before was reading sports scores aloud from a newspaper while the guitarist, now becalmed behind dark sunglasses, listened attentively. Max said goodbye and stepped outside into the dirty dawn.

“EVERY DAY,” said Turner from behind his desk, “people die, divorce, go bankrupt, or become incompetent in the eyes of the law.” He let his glance drift up to the dust-dimmed chandelier overhead. “Naturally, on such occasions, property changes hands. Our job is simply to see that this process unfolds in a timely and reasonable fashion, with due regard for the legal position of our clients, who in this case happen to be ourselves.” He returned his gaze to Gabriella, seated before him. “What part of this do you not understand?”

“You know quite well that it’s a risk,” she said. In her lap she held the galley proofs of the catalog copy Turner had written for the flags. “Why create a false provenance for objects that no one expects to be documented in the first place? It draws unnecessary attention.”

“My dear Gabriella. Did I or did I not ask you to acquaint yourself with Russian patrimony law?”

“Certainly, but as I also told you, those statutes have never been enforced in France. And even if they were, it wouldn’t happen over a roomful of Soviet flags. Some fifteenth-century icons, perhaps; but not those things.”

“Well,” Turner said after a pause, “let’s just say I think we need an extra layer of deniability in this instance, given the likely media coverage. Okay?”

She said nothing, but as she turned away he saw her jaw tremble and clench.

“Gabriella, what’s the matter?” He came around the desk and she rose reflexively to meet him, sending the galleys cascading to the floor. He enfolded her awkwardly in his arms.