The Same River Twice (29 page)

“We needed forty-two thousand francs,” she told Groot. “You didn’t have it, and I didn’t either, so I asked my parents. There’s no shame in that.”

“We’ll pay it back.” He wagged the bottle at her like an accusing finger. “Tell them we’ll pay it back.”

“But we won’t pay it back. We can’t. How could we?”

“There’s always a way. We’re not derelicts.”

“God, you’re a drag when you’re like this.” She took the bottle from him and took three long swallows. When he reached out to reclaim it, she laughed at him and dropped it neatly overboard into the Seine.

He shrugged and looked away.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I get it. How could I not have seen?” Her eyes narrowed on him. “It scares you to think you might be in debt to me, doesn’t it? That’s what this is about.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I sure do. This has nothing to do with my parents. It’s your ego, isn’t it? Come on, admit it. You’d rather not get what you want than get it through me, right? Your California girl.”

“This is madness. This is shit.”

“Your little fantasy of self-sufficiency. That’s what really matters to you, isn’t it? And anything that—”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Anything that threatens it is crazy, right?
Or
stupid. Because the one unshakable rule is that Groot can do it all himself. I mean, God forbid you should accept anybody’s help. Then the whole myth of your independence or whatever the fuck it is goes right out the window.”

“Ja,”
he told her. “I am a man who walks alone in my clogs.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Garbage. Ignorance. Shit.”

“Think so? Then why do you want to sabotage the very thing we’ve been working toward all this time? What are you afraid of?”

“Me? It’s you who are afraid.”

“So sensitive. Your big, scary male ego—so vulnerable.”

“These are only insults. Why embarrass yourself?”

“‘Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me!’” she said in a high-pitched voice meant to be his.

“Bitch. You childish, spoiled, American—”

They argued in circles, letting pettiness and spite become the point of the exercise, its deeper meaning, its only meaning. Max filmed. The light decayed. Either one of them might do anything now.

ODILE WOKE UP with a hangover and an imperfect memory of the night before. Max had already left, and she seemed to recall him saying that he was meeting Eddie Bouvier for breakfast. Or was it lunch? She sighed and got out of bed.

In the kitchen, over café au lait, she tried to reconstruct her evening aboard the
Nachtvlinder
. She remembered Rachel and Groot quarreling, she remembered Max filming, she remembered Eddie leaving early to pick up his daughter. Bits of conversation came back to her, faces and gestures. She recalled talking to a woman who was wearing a knockoff of one of her designs—an off-the-shoulder dress that had once appeared in
Vogue
—and that she’d impulsively poured her drink down the woman’s front, pretending it was an accident. Other moments resurfaced, other encounters, yet the sense persisted in her that something significant was missing from her inventory of events—a person, an image, a turn of phrase, she didn’t know. Alcohol now repelled her as much as meat. She wanted nothing more to do with it.

Downstairs in her studio she spent the better part of the morning working up a revised set of drawings for Fatima’s wedding dress. While the earlier design had invoked the burka’s billowing excess, this one called for a tightly wrapped sheath, closely fitted fabric inset with mesh hexagons of the sort that, in the traditional burka, allowed the wearer her only means of seeing out. Here they served the opposite function, allowing the observer,
at strategically placed intervals, to see in. It was a daring solution, bold but not blatant, and Odile was eager to see it realized. She faxed the drawings to her client, along with a note asking her to call, then went out to do some errands.

When she returned, the phone was ringing. She raced upstairs and snatched the handset from its cradle, but the caller had hung up.

She put away her purchases, looked through the mail, made a pot of camomile tea. Thinking of the previous day’s visit from the police, she went to the window, but everything in the quiet little courtyard appeared to be in order. Across the cobblestone walk, on the green metal table that belonged in common to the inhabitants of the mews, someone had left a jarful of marigolds and a well-thumbed deck of playing cards. A three, seven, and ace lay face up in a row.

The phone rang a second time. She answered.

“I realize, Odile,” the caller said, “that you may not be completely happy to hear from me.”

She sat. “Thierry.”

“And for what it’s worth, I want to apologize for my admittedly hasty departure in Brest. That wasn’t part of the plan, but, you see, people weren’t where they were supposed to be and, well, I had to improvise a little. Anyway, I knew you’d be safe, because everything about the flags had already been taken care of. I made a point of telling you that, you may recall.”

“What plan?” Odile managed to say. “I thought you and I had the same plan.” His voice was very clear in her ear.

“And we did, assuredly. Only, there was another aspect to my part in it, a side project, one could say, that you weren’t involved in. Nobody thinks otherwise. Nobody at all. Understand?”

She bit her lip. In the background she heard birds. “Where are you?” she asked.

“Not where I’d like to be, I’ll tell you that. But it’ll do for the moment.”

Odile glanced at the answering machine plugged into an outlet beside the phone. She hesitated, then pressed record. “Okay. So what do you want from me, Thierry?”

“Very simply, I need my fee for the Moscow run, the thirty thousand that, it must be said, I earned just as you did. The fact is that I hadn’t expected this … hiatus in which I find myself. Naturally, there are expenses.”

“But why call me?” she asked. “Turner’s the one with the money.”

“Yes, Turner.” Thierry laughed softly. “Tell me, do you like him?”

She left a small silence, then said, “He’s okay.”

“See? How can you doubt that I have your best interests at heart? I knew you two would get along.”

A chill passed through her, but she refused the bait. “You haven’t answered my question, Thierry.”

“No?” He struck a match, and she imagined him lighting the cigarette. “All right.” He exhaled at length. “I have the feeling it might be awkward for Turner to deal with me directly at the moment. For purely circumstantial reasons, but nonetheless. So if you’d be willing to act as intermediary—”

“Then no one need be inconvenienced. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“I guess you really have been out of town.” Standing, taking the phone with her, she began to pace. “And supposing I were to do you this favor, how would I get the money to you?”

“We can arrange a place for you to drop it off. In Paris, of course, somewhere mutually convenient.”

“Ah, but Thierry, this is so vague.” She walked to the window. “I’ll have to think about it. Give me your number and I’ll call you back.”

“Odile, please.”

“What, you don’t have a number?”

“It’s not that. But as to where I’ll be later … My schedule—”

“It’s very complicated, I’m sure.” She pinched off two yellowing leaves from the potted geraniums on the windowsill. “By the way, Thierry. Have you spoken to your cousin lately, the one who recommended you for the Moscow trip?”

A short silence ensued, broken only by the complex warbling of the birds on Thierry’s end.

“Don’t worry,” Odile said. “I know you haven’t. Because, for better or worse, he’s dead.”

“That’s not funny.”

“No, not at all. I never joke about things it’s too late to change.”

“Are you saying he was murdered?”

“So it would seem.”

There was another pause. Then, in the patient tone of someone determined to misconstrue, he said, “My cousin sometimes lacked judgment in his selection of business associates. Real estate offers many opportunities to make stupid decisions of this sort, needless to say. Most likely a deal
went bad, an investor took revenge. People don’t realize how cutthroat the real-estate industry is.”

“Really? Is that how you read it?”

“Yes,” he said, “it is. Now, about the thirty thousand. Will you help me, Odile?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Turner for it, obviously.”

“When?”

“Tonight, maybe.”

“Do it, please. I’m depending on you, okay?”

“But Thierry—”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “You’ll hear from me.” And before she could protest, he hung up.

She went to the answering machine, pressed stop, followed by eject, and removed the cassette. Sorting through her purse, she found the card Sergei Dmitrovich had given her at the Jardin du Luxembourg. She considered the phone number written there, then returned the card to her purse, threw in the cassette as well, and left the apartment, already late for her weekly portrait sitting with Céleste.

“A PITY I COULDN’T STAY
last night,” Eddie Bouvier said from behind his desk. “Did you get everything you needed?”

“I got a lot.” Max was seated on a cream-colored leather sofa in Eddie’s office, a modest but carefully appointed suite of rooms off the Champs-Élysées. “I got lucky, maybe.”

“A man makes his luck, Max. You know what you want. Most don’t.”

Max’s eye drifted to a row of head shots, signed and framed, that ran along the wall behind Eddie’s desk. One of them was of Isabelle H., whose comely and expensive features, so recently under contract to Max, occasioned him a moment of senseless gloom. “So tell me what you found out about our bootleggers. No arrests, you said.”

“Correct. I gave the police the address of the loft you mentioned—or, rather, the loft you broke into and illegally searched, as they reminded me not too politely—and it turns out that the place was indeed leased to the guy you mentioned, the real-estate agent.”

“Broch,” Max prompted. “Sylvain Broch.”

“Exactly. A man the police were already interested in because—I’m going to assume you didn’t know this—he’d been shot dead a few days earlier. So they raided the premises, confiscated equipment consistent with
DVD piracy, seized the answering machine, and did whatever else they do. Their conclusion, which I strongly urge you to embrace, is that Broch was killed for dabbling in the notoriously profitable bootleg-video trade, said to be controlled by organized crime, foreign malefactors, and your great-aunt’s dog—all right? Nobody cares. What matters is that the police believe that the piracy explains the murder, so instead of having two open investigations it’s a single closed case, end of story.”

Max shook his head, vexed. “I don’t buy it. Why the reworked ending on
Fireflies?
And what about La Peau de l’Ours? Surely we ought to be looking into that.”

Sighing, Eddie reached for the pitcher on his desk and poured himself a glass of water. “You’re a filmmaker, Max. Don’t put your health at risk.”

“My health?” Max stared at him. “You’ve never mentioned my health before, Eddie.”

“You don’t want to pursue this,” Eddie said. “Because in my considered opinion nothing good will come of it.”

“I need to know what you know,” Max said. “It’s as simple as that.”

Eddie grimaced and set his glass down without drinking. “In that case I’d better bring in the legal department.” He picked up the phone. “Lisette, I’ve got Max Colby here. Would you pull the file on La Peau de l’Ours, please?”

Lisette was a short, fine-boned woman in her forties whose air of bustling efficiency seemed to carry with it the certain knowledge that any victory over disorder was by definition provisional. When she appeared in the doorway, file folder in hand, Max hastened to his feet to greet her. She raised an eyebrow and offered him a measured smile.

“Max,” said Eddie, gesturing for her to sit down, “would like to hear what we have on La Peau de l’Ours. Also any commentary you might care to add, speculative or otherwise. Entirely off the record, of course.”

She chose a straight-backed chair that placed her midway between the two men and a bit to the side. “Unfortunately,” she began, “this information is not so easily obtained. La Peau de l’Ours appears to be a shell corporation comprising several separate interests, all of them seemingly legitimate but perhaps with illicit sides as well. For instance.” She removed a document from the folder. “There exists a postproduction film facility called La Peau de l’Ours, apparently quite aboveboard, if curiously hard to track down. And yet, as you are aware, this was also the name of the counterfeit-DVD factory that the police shut down yesterday. So maybe the postproduction studio was really the pirate operation. We don’t know.”

Eddie raised a hand. “Max. Consider this carefully. Do you really need to hear more?”

Max waited.

Eddie dropped his hand, and Lisette continued.

“So, one corporation, several enterprises.” She consulted a second document. “The other branches of La Peau that we were able to turn up represent themselves variously as a travel agency, an investment firm, a resort casino, a string of restaurants, and a medical group. What any of these businesses might have to do with the others, or, for that matter, whether they actually provide the services they ostensibly offer, we cannot say. All we know for certain is that they are wholly owned subsidiaries of La Peau de l’Ours and are incorporated under that name in the Republic of Malta.”

“Malta?” repeated Max. “Why there?”

“It’s a convenient tax haven,” Lisette informed him, “with banking laws that favor privacy.”

“You see?” said Eddie. “These matters have nothing to do with you, Max. Forget about them. Make movies.”

Ignoring him, Max appealed to Lisette. “What about addresses? The bootleg factory was easy enough to find. What about the other companies?”

“If they are real,” she allowed, “they could perhaps be located. In principle. But at the moment, we have only a post office box in Valletta. Regrettably, even the name of the person renting this box is beyond our reach.”