Consumed (31 page)

He was not downstairs. The house was empty except for her. Three days later, it still was.

THE FRANTIC BANGING
at the front doors terrified Naomi, who cowered for some minutes in Arosteguy's bedroom before daring to creep down the stairs, flinching at every repetition of what she felt was a focused assault on her solitude. She was experiencing the odd doubling in memory of her own arrival at those doors, only now she was playing the role of the reclusive, neurotic
philosophe
—she felt haggard and unshaven, and her unwashed hair felt Arosteguy gray to her—and the unknown at the door was playing, unwittingly, the newly arrived Naomi. Her three days of burrowing into the life of Ari as incarnated by his house and everything in it was no doubt
partially responsible for this shift in identities, but there was a willfulness about it on her part as well. She had not yet washed off the surgical guidelines on her breast the way Ari had washed off the murderer's tattoos she had so lovingly applied to his cheek. (That had seemed callous to her, and even a rejection.) She had not changed her clothes from her garden surgery outfit; she had not left the house to forage for food; and, pathologically, she had not browsed the net, or even opened her laptop or turned on her tablet. She had not felt any sense of violation of Ari's privacy when she went through every drawer and shelf and cupboard and cabinet in the house precisely because he had abandoned himself by leaving without a word and not returning, abandoned Arosteguy-in-his-Tokyo-house the way a hermit crab casts off its borrowed shell when it has outgrown it. Naomi gratefully crawled inside that shell and became its new tenant, a female Arosteguy, who was close to Célestine, but was not Célestine.

She had not been downstairs since it had gotten dark. When she switched on the same pallid, watery lights that had greeted her on her first arrival at the house, that sense of Naomi-at-the-door was heightened to the point that, on sliding the doors open, she expected to see herself. To her confusion, she did recognize the woman at the door, a woman in a crisp open-collared navy business suit who was teary-eyed and obviously emotionally stricken, and Naomi could not understand how that could be. The woman stared at Naomi, her fist frozen in mid-knock, her mouth slack with disappointment and shock at what she was seeing—namely, Naomi.
“Qui êtes-vous?”
she said, with an absurd, barely contained outrage.

“I'm Naomi. Who are you?”

The woman lowered her threatening fist in slow motion, seemingly unaware of its independent life. “Where is Ari? Does Ari live here? Does he live here with you?” The English into which she slipped in response to Naomi was confident, overly forceful, and shaped by a hybrid French-German accent.

“This is the house of Aristide Arosteguy. He is not here now. What is your name, please?”

“I'm a friend. I was waiting for him and he did not come to me …” Unexpectedly, she began to sob, and as her thin face crumpled and she turned away from Naomi in shame, thus exposing a comically protruding ear, Naomi realized that she was Arosteguy's—and Romme Vertegaal's—audiologist, Elke Jungebluth.

Once inside, sitting in the larval beanbag chair with a hot tea in her hand, Elke dealt crisply with her various errant fluids—the tears, the snot—using the Cute tissues Naomi had brought her from the bathroom. “It took me some time to connect with Professor Matsuda at Todai. This was the contact that Ari had given me. He did not want me to know his address directly. To protect me, he said. I am a French citizen, and his is a scandalous criminal case. And so on. But it was understood that I would come to Tokyo to meet with certain technicians of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. I am an audiologist. Some of our hearing instruments are of North Korean origin. Perhaps Ari mentioned to you that he wears them?”

“He told me that they were German. Siemens, I think.”

A rueful smile from Elke. “They were what you would normally call Chinese knockoffs, except they weren't Chinese. They were North Korean, and not just imitations, but of special North Korean design. It is true that they were stamped with Siemens markings, but it was in the nature of camouflage rather than commercial deception. We have a French electronics manufacturer standing by, very eager to get into the audiology market. The brand name will probably be Eternal President's Voice.” A secret inner smile. “I have ambitions beyond my immediate métier, as you might have guessed. And so Ari had agreed to test them for us before we dared to expose them to the Western markets, and we arranged for him to report to me at my hotel here.” A catch in her voice. “But he never came. We texted, he was on his way, and he never reached me. I brought my mobile audiology
station with me. We were going to finesse the software before my engineering contacts returned to Pyongyang. It's a big problem for me now. I'm not really prepared to deal with the North Koreans without Ari's feedback. They can be very harsh in the face of disappointment. Are you Ari's new girlfriend? You seem to be an American.”

“I was born in Canada. I have dual citizenship.” Naomi was not sure why she thought this was an appropriate response, but there was something in the references to France, Germany, and North Korea that tasted of passports. She peripherally wondered if Canada had any sort of diplomatic relations with North Korea that France or the US did not. She might have to open up her Air and hit the net again, though it had been liberating to pretend the net didn't exist for the last three days. “I'm a journalist. I'm covering the Arosteguys' story for some magazines. I was surprised too when he didn't show up.” This last deliberately ambiguous. She knew that her own bedraggled appearance belied her objectivity re Ari; she and Elke were quite a pair.

“Elke, did your North Korean colleagues know about Ari? That he was acting as a test subject for you?”

“Of course. It was his standing in the international community that made it interesting for them. That he would turn to North Korea for technology of such a personal nature. The emotion of hearing, of communication, of speech and language. Perhaps you've come across some of Ari's children's philosophy books? They're all wonderfully illustrated by Célestine. So charming and wistful. They say that Kim Jong Un was given some of them to read as a child of ten years and absorbed them immediately, and that's why the Arosteguys have such status in the DPRK. They are seen as being fervently anticapitalist and anti-consumerism. It's possible, of course, that they have been somewhat misunderstood.” A wry pause followed, during which Naomi was able to flagellate herself for having read only the three Arosteguy airport primers, which probably left her as advanced in
Arosteguyan political philosophy as the then ten-year-old inheritor of the Kim dynasty. “And there was a personal element involved as well.”

“Romme Vertegaal,” suggested Naomi.

It was not that her eyes were of different sizes, as Ari had described them, but that they were not aligned properly in her face, the left being substantially higher up than the right, giving her a permanently quizzical look, as though skeptically raising an eyebrow; and now that she
was
raising an eyebrow, the net effect was indeed comical, but also somewhat disturbing, smacking as it did of insanity and deformity. “I see that Ari has taken you deeply into his confidence,” said Elke, sweeping her hair back with both hands and plumping it up a bit at the back.

“He was anxious that I should have enough information to write … intelligently.”

“Well, some of that information is not for public consumption.” “Like Program Vertegaal?”

“Yes, like that. It has some dangerous edges to it—commercially, politically, neurologically, and, as Ari pointed out repeatedly, philosophically.”

“Elke, did your North Koreans, did Romme himself, know that you were to meet Ari at your hotel? Did they know when?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Was Ari planning to go to Pyongyang himself ? Perhaps with you?” Elke dropped her gaze and blushed. At that moment, it was obvious that at some point Elke and Ari had been lovers, his humorous description of her homeliness notwithstanding. “Not originally, no. But I did hear from Professor Matsuda that the Japanese government was thinking of deporting him, returning him to France—there is apparently a gray area or two in the treaties between France and Japan. And of course Ari is not a Japanese national. I imagine he might have been forced to consider going beyond Japan to North Korea.”

“He would have told you, wouldn't he? He would have taken you with him.”

“I would have loved that, of course. But somebody had to stay in Paris to coordinate. And truly, there are enough of us in North Korea.”

“Enough? Who is there?”

“Romme, of course. And then there is Célestine Arosteguy.”

“In Pyongyang? Right now?”

“Yes.”

“How can that be? Célestine is dead.”

“No, she's not. She is with Romme in Pyongyang. I Skyped with her this morning—she has a special internet connection that is only allowed for certain foreign celebrities. Closely monitored, of course. Her hair was cut in Approved Hairstyle Number 3, very short and tight.” Elke made emphatic chopping hand motions along her jaw to illustrate the cut, one of eighteen government-approved for women in the DPRK. “She looked very different, but adorable. Just adorable.” A pause with a faraway smile while she visualized Célestine's new North Korean look, and a small shake of the head in wonderment over the infinite adaptability of this superb woman. Elke returned her gaze to Naomi, smile fading rapidly. “She didn't mention to me that she expected Ari to join her.”

“But there is a criminal homicide investigation going on in Paris regarding her murder, her dismemberment. There are photos.”

“This is something orchestrated by Romme for Kim Jong Un. It is a virtual murder. Don't ask me how it was done, but it's a Vertegaal specialty. He would have had particular, shall we say technical, help from Paris.”

“What kind of help?”

“There was a brilliant student of the Arosteguys who became very enamored of Romme. And he is a wizard.”

“Hervé Blomqvist.”

Elke laughed a resigned laugh.

“Hervé, yes. So the French would rather have Célestine be dead than to think that she has, in a cultural, non-technical sense, defected to North Korea. It's entirely possible that they know the truth and have decided to accept the cover-up presented to them: she is just dead, murdered by her husband, who has also proven to be a traitor to France—again, in a cultural sense, which is to the French a betrayal worse than political betrayal. I would not be surprised to read that Ari was kidnapped by North Korean agents and bundled off to Pyongyang to help the new young dictator polish his special North Korean philosophical social policy. It would be the kind of subversive fiction generated by the French to offset Ari's genuine desire to cast off his old, deeply French life for a new, vibrant Asian one. But what a ménage they will be up there, if that's in fact where he's gone. The three of them.” Elke would obviously have loved to make it four of them.

“Could that have been what happened? The kidnapping of Ari? On his way to meet you. And they were waiting for him?”

“They probably could have just talked him into it. If Matsuda knew about the possible deportation, they did too. Maybe that was enough.”

“But if Célestine is alive as you say, then Ari has committed no crime. He could go back to France an innocent man.”

“There was more involved in that investigation than just the supposed murder of Madame Arosteguy. Many crypts were broken open. He did not want to go back.”

“Sex with students? Is that what you mean?”

“An approved learning tool for three thousand years, now considered an atrocity.”

Naomi had found all of Arosteguy's electronic paraphernalia strewn around the house, including some thumb drives and SD cards that she had not had the heart to explore, and this suggested that he had expected to return to the house. He had left three European phones as well, including
an ancient Nokia and a prehistoric two-toned Sagem, all of them chipped, dented, scraped, scratched, and generally disheveled, in keeping with the personal esthetic of their owner; you could feel them falling out of various pockets onto various hard and wet surfaces just looking at them, and she felt a pang of separation at the thought. He must, she concluded, have taken his pink Japanese LG DoCoMo flip phone with him. She decided that she could not trust Elke with the possibility of accessing Ari's electronics.

“Elke, did you happen to record that Skyped conversation with Célestine? I'm surprised she left herself that vulnerable. And did she not care that people thought she was dead? Or was she even aware of that? If it were ever posted on YouTube …”

Elke stood up. “You have been very kind to me. I shall try to connect again with my DPRK technical affiliates, who seem to have disappeared along with Monsieur Arosteguy. If this continues, I shall return to Paris to lick my various wounds. I'm sure you understand.” And she stepped around the low table, bent down, and kissed Naomi on both cheeks. She smelled of sour caked makeup and anisette.

Once Elke had left, Naomi rumbled the house again from top to bottom, only this time it was not an expression of longing and abandonment, but a focused hunt for hard and possibly hidden information. She assembled all devices that could be considered information-bearing entities on the living room table, and she included her own arsenal of electronics just in case she needed to remind herself of critical words that Arosteguy had spoken which only now would reveal their true import. The appearance of the real Elke, who was absolutely as described by Ari during his long “confession,” which Naomi had comfortably, even happily, taken for lies, or at the very least, artful delusion, had snapped things into focus like a phase-detect DSLR camera.