The Same River Twice (42 page)

“And you screwed it up. Is that it?”

“No!” Thierry struggled to sit upright on the sofa’s down cushions. “Of course not! I told you: some adjustments had to be made in Brest, so I stayed behind and made them.”

“Why are the
French
police looking for Tregobov?”

“Because when the Belarussian government realized that he’d escaped the country, they put out a terrorist bulletin on him throughout the EU. Mad scientist, bioweapons, I don’t know. These days, obviously, people would rather err on the side of caution. So you get police. Too bad, in my view, but that’s how it is.”

Odile tapped her knuckles against her own forehead in frustration, then, as calmly as she could, walked over to him and in a quiet voice said, “You’re telling me nothing. Why should the Russians be so desperate to find you? I think it’s because you abducted Tregobov yourself. For your own purposes.”

“If that were the case, don’t you think he’d look a little unhappier about it?”

“Maybe he doesn’t know all the facts, either. Or maybe you lied to him. How could I know?”

“None of us knows all the facts, Odile. That was a twentieth-century delusion, and I, for one, am glad to be rid of it.”

“What about Gabriella? Where is she?”

“Hiding. She’s fine.”

There was a silence during which they both realized the bath faucet had been turned off some time ago. The tub gurgled as it drained. Odile excused herself and went downstairs to put the doctor’s clothes in the dryer.

Though it was obvious that Thierry wasn’t telling her everything, she found she believed what he had chosen to reveal. Maybe the problem was her questions; she kept getting sidetracked, as each new supposition replaced the previous one without ever resolving into the certainty at which she still, no doubt foolishly, hoped to arrive.

Upstairs, Thierry had stuck his head out the window and was looking west up the courtyard. Sensing her presence, he drew back inside. “Who are those guys?”

When she looked, she saw three men in their thirties wearing ill-fitting, mismatched clothes and conferring closely, midway down the courtyard.
“No idea,” she said. “Probably friends of the anarchist group we’ve got living here.”

Thierry walked back over to the sofa but didn’t sit down. “Well, I’ll tell you this much, because it’s necessary. Dr. Tregobov believes I’m still working for Kukushkin, who I’ve told him is in Siberia inspecting some oil fields—totally unreachable, but most definitely with us in spirit. I’m his representative, as far as the good doctor’s concerned. So are you, for that matter, since that’s what I more or less told him just now.”

“So you did snatch him!”

“No. I’m merely guiding him to safe haven on Kukushkin’s instructions, just as before. The only thing that’s changed is that Kukushkin’s
temporarily
out of the loop. I’d explain it to him, though right now I don’t think he’d be inclined to understand. But eventually he will.”

In her pique, she turned her back on him and walked several steps toward the kitchen before forcing herself to stop. “Two questions.”

“Ask.”

“One. Why haven’t the three of you left Paris?”

“We’re trying to. But as you can imagine, with the police looking for him and the Russians for me and Gabriella, this isn’t so simple. Airports and train stations are out of the question, and rental cars too easy to track. But we’re giving the matter our fullest attention. Thanks for your concern.”

She turned to face him and was once again struck by his luminescent quality, almost as if he were emitting little points of light. “Two. What was in the package you dropped off at Brest? The ‘refrigeration unit,’ you called it.”

“I did say that, didn’t I?” Thierry laughed. “In point of fact that was just a prop, a precautionary diversion, should one be necessary. What I dropped off was a brand-new Belgian-issue EU passport for Dr. Tregobov. In retrospect, that’s probably where things got off track.”

His eyes went out of focus, and Odile had the impression he was about to say more—one lie so often requiring another for amplitude—when the bathroom door opened and the doctor stepped out, looking thoroughly refreshed in the borrowed dressing gown.

“Madame Mével,” he said with a slight bow in her direction. “My most sincere thanks. You have no idea how necessary that was.”

She smiled at him and went to get his clothes from the dryer.

The actual necessities, she had begun to realize, were only now declaring themselves.

LEAVING TOURS THAT AFTERNOON, pushing the Citroën as hard as he could, Max knew himself to be a man in rebellion.

His meeting had been a success. He’d screened a selection of recent footage for his investors, omitting the police-raid sequence, which would only have confused them, and in return had received praise and the assurance of further funding. Yet the entire experience felt like a personal affront, an interruption of his efforts, a humiliation, a joke. He knew he was being petty, but didn’t care. And then there was this.

Although he’d never thought he was making a documentary and doubted very much that anyone could think so once the film was done, some of his backers’ comments made it obvious that’s what they’d expected and thought they were admiring. Maybe it was because he was improvising and using nonactors, maybe it was the film’s reliance on natural light, or possibly nothing more than the recent box-office success, unforeseen and to Max inexplicable, of a spate of low-budget documentaries in the U.S. In the end, the reasons didn’t matter. Eddie had secured him the right of final cut, so if the investors were unhappy with the film he eventually gave them, too bad. In the meantime he’d have Eddie run interference, and there would be no more days like this.

Flooring the Citroën, he managed to pass a truck he’d been stuck behind for several minutes. It was loaded down with artichokes and, in the rearview mirror, presented a somewhat comic sight as it periodically shed some
of its cargo to the wind. Max glanced at his fuel gauge; the needle hovered just a hair above empty.

He refueled at a gas station outside Orléans, washed his face in the men’s room, and bought a bottle of mineral water, which he drank half down at a draw. Somebody had left that day’s
Libération
on the bench beside the soft-drink machine. Leafing impatiently through it, he looked for a mention of the auction but found nothing. He finished the mineral water, started the car, and lurched back onto the highway, scattering gravel in his wake.

About six kilometers out of Orléans, a police car fell in behind him. Max waited anxiously to be pulled over, but they drove on for another fifteen kilometers before the car passed him, the passenger-side officer looking Max over curiously. Then, an instant later, they shot down the road at full speed, quickly disappearing.

Shaken, Max rolled the window partway down and lit a cigar. When in rebellion, he thought, it was inadvisable to attract the attention of the local constabulary, whose priorities rarely coincided with one’s own. Nevertheless, the encounter had sobered him sufficiently that, for the first time all day, he found himself able to take stock of his situation with some detachment, mentally separating one thing from another, as he should have done some time ago. Of course, he’d been preoccupied.

He now took it as a given that Odile and Turner were having an affair. Though the evidence was thin, he felt the certitude of her betrayal in the marrow of his bones. Any doubts he might’ve harbored had vanished the moment he laid eyes on her the day before, through Groot’s binoculars: her struggle with the cigarette, the first he’d seen her with in years; her puffy, tear-stung eyes; her obvious impatience; and, most of all, her newly shorn hair, lightly feathered and glossed. She’d worn it like that the night she’d accosted him in SoHo seven years ago. Never since had she cut it so close, though the severity became her still, bringing out her cheekbones and the fullness of her lips, emphasizing her youth. As she would know.

He liked to think he was above jealousy, but probably most men flattered themselves on this score. Certainly he was competitive enough. If the two traits came to the same thing, as he often suspected, he would soon find out.

For awhile he scanned the fields of new wheat and corn that stretched out on either side of the highway, rippling in the breeze like the surface of a windblown lake. He felt unpleasantly exposed and was wishing for the forest he’d left behind not forty minutes ago when his cell rang. He set the cigar in the ashtray and pulled the phone from his pants pocket.

“Dad?”

“Yes, my little monster.”

“About that party tonight, remember? Everything’s cool. It’s at Lili’s parents’ apartment in the sixteenth, and the kids are all from Dominique’s
rallye
—which I guess is like her group of officially approved friends, who’ll probably all be ministers of
state
or
CEOs
or something when they’re adults, but right now they’re just regular kids, you know? Lili’s parents will be there, and Dominique too, so you don’t need to worry. I’ll give you the parents’ number as soon as I can find it; it’s here somewhere. Anyway, the party’s from seven thirty to eleven, and I’d really like to go. Can I?”

“All right. But I want you to call me at nine thirty and give me an update, okay?”

“Great! Love you, Dad.” Then, not waiting for a response, she punched off.

He put the cell phone away, his thoughts momentarily hazed over by love and worry. In the ashtray, his cigar had gone out. He relit it.

The mood of rebellion hadn’t left him. For as long as he could remember he’d been aware of the unfairness of the world, and, for almost as long, he’d seen that it could be no other way. Perhaps, he often thought, it
should
be no other way.

Yet now—as he felt his women hurtling off, Allegra toward adulthood, Odile toward another man—an overwhelming exasperation took hold of him. It was like a cry of disbelief, of outrage, that what happened to so many should happen to him.

Just when he felt the need for some recognition of the difficulties involved in what he did for a living, of the optimism and endurance it required, he discovered himself increasingly isolated from those whose appreciation he most needed—his wife, his daughter, maybe even himself. The core of his body pulsed against his rib cage as if about to explode. This anger, murderous and frightening, was of a sort he hadn’t felt since childhood, when he was ignorant of its very nature. He forced himself to breathe deeply and regularly until the feeling subsided.

Outrage, disbelief, anger. And beneath all three, an intimation of something else that made him prefer them to it. He pushed it from his thoughts.

The business with Odile would have to be faced—not just soon, but tonight. And much as he might have wished to just confront her and let things unfold naturally in the form of confession or, less likely, denial, he knew that this was not the right approach. A man lied by fabricating false truths, a woman by omitting real ones. This tactical difference not only made women superior liars but also required the serious man to work
against his own inclinations if he hoped to determine where matters actually stood.

How strange, thought Max, that he knew this in his films yet so often forgot it in life. He looked out again at the fields on either side of him, admiring their stringent vitality, their orderliness. For how many centuries, he wondered, had they been cultivated, and by how many men. How little was forgotten here.

When he arrived home, shortly after four o’clock, the apartment was deserted. Odile had left a note saying that Rachel and Groot had invited them to dinner aboard the
Nachtvlinder
that evening and she hoped very much he wanted to go. They could discuss it when she got back from Fatima’s fitting, around seven, but she really needed to see him tonight. He realized he had expected something of the sort.

Not to be outdone, Allegra had also left a note, this one informing him in purple ink that she had gone with Dominique and Lili to the Turkish baths, where Thursdays were reserved for women, and she’d be back to change for the party, if there was time. No matter what, she promised (underlined) to be home by eleven thirty. Love, A.

Shaking his head, Max went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a couple of fingers of scotch. He sat by the phone for awhile, thoughtfully sipping his drink, then looked up the number for the auction house and dialed it. A woman answered, and he asked whether it was too late to reserve a bidder’s seat for tonight’s sale. Not at all, she replied, and after he gave her his name and address, she gave him his bidder’s number.

“It starts at eight o’clock sharp, sir,” she cautioned him, “but you should get here at least half an hour early.”

He said he would, then thanked her and hung up. After pouring himself another scotch, he took it to the window.

Odile’s trip to Moscow, the subsequent trashing of their apartment, the firebombing of the
Nachtvlinder
, the altered version of
Fireflies
, La Peau de l’Ours, Turner and the Giacometti, Broch’s murder and the confiscation of Madame Leclère’s files, the amber-coated DVDs, Véronique, the CRS raid on the
Nachtvlinder
, his wife’s affair—all these glittered in his mind’s eye like shards of broken mirror, each reflecting one or two of the others but refusing to come together into a whole. If there’d ever been a whole. If it had ever been a mirror.

He took a bath and a nap, then got dressed for the auction.

TURNER SPENT THE BETTER PART of the afternoon overseeing the transfer of the flags from the exhibition galleries on the second floor to the auction hall on the fourth. Most of the banners, sandwiched now in glass, were too large to fit on the display carousel normally used at sales, so he had it replaced by a large gilt-wood easel that was quite grand, even czarist, in effect. The idea was for the porters to bring each lot in from stage left, place it on the easel for the duration of the sale—about two and a half minutes, if things went well—and whisk it off stage right, newly priced and purchased. After consulting briefly with the auctioneer, showing him which flags might be worth an extra push, he went home to prepare for the event.