The Same River Twice (18 page)

When he returned to the apartment, Odile was sitting on the sofa in her bathrobe, painting her toenails and watching
Chinatown
. He poured himself a Calvados and sat down beside her. Roman Polanski thrust the point of a switchblade up Jack Nicholson’s left nostril and said, “Hold it there, kitty cat.” Odile took a sip of Max’s drink. “You are a very nosy fellow, kitty cat. You know what happens to nosy fellows?” Scene for scene, Max reflected,
Chinatown
was quite possibly the greatest American film of all time.

Afterward, in bed, he and Odile sought each other out with an avidity that seemed to refer to lately unspoken things. Cupping her buttocks in his hands, he drew his tongue up between her legs in slow, deliberate strokes, sometimes pulling back for a beat or two, waiting her out, until she buried her fingers in his hair, locked her ankles at the small of his back, and, pushing herself hard against him, let loose a long keening cry that made his senses trill. When her spasms trailed off, he entered her and they began again, slowly, ascending together. The night was close about them, dense and many chambered, provisionally infinite.

Max woke much later in a confusion of dream fragments and half-remembered voices. Odile slept with her back to him, clutching a pillow to her chest. He got up to get a glass of water, and, in the living room, cranked open a window. Three doors down, the anarchists were having a party and their guests had spilled out into the courtyard, smoking and conversing in low voices while Brazilian hip-hop emanated from inside. He listened for awhile, reminded of his own youth. He had been rash, dismissive of reason, fearless. It didn’t seem all that long ago.

When he returned to bed, Odile stirred. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

“Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

She came into his arms. “Max?”

“Yes?”

“Did I dream it or did you say … did you say this is a film you’d kill to make?”

“No, I did say that.”

“Good.” She sighed and wriggled closer. “That’s what I thought.”

And though her breathing soon evened out, Max’s thoughts ran on, attaching to nothing in particular but giving him no peace, and he lay awake beside her, awash in nameless feeling, until nearly daybreak.

TURNER’S SQUASH CLUB was on the Left Bank, in an unassuming building on rue de Pontoise, and he played twice a week when he could. From a strictly business point of view, the Ritz might have offered more suitable contacts, but it was expensive and sufficiently
ancien régime
to put him off his game. Worse, it had no Asian members. All the best players Turner knew were Asian.

He had booked a court for five thirty. When he arrived Sylvain Broch was already warming up, smashing the ball against the wall with a vengeance. Turner hadn’t seen Broch since he had suggested Thierry Colin for the Moscow trip, but now, with the development of the flags well under way, he was curious to hear what the man might want to tell him about his missing cousin.

“I thought maybe you’d gone back to the States,” Broch said when they shook hands. “Is everything okay?”

“Very okay, my friend.”

“So it’s a woman. I knew it.”

Turner laughed. “No, not a woman. Not really. I’ll tell you later.”

“You will, because I’ll insist.”

They volleyed until they were both warmed up. Broch spun the racquet, Turner won first serve, and they began.

Although technically they were well matched, Turner had discovered that the younger man harbored a small, subconscious fear of being hit—by
the ball, by the racquet—that tended to hamper his game. Sometimes he was able to use this fear as a spur to more aggressive play, working willfully ahead of it, but more often it shaved just a fraction of a second off his moves, and he’d spend the whole match trying to catch up. Turner had never been able to determine if Broch was aware of this weakness, but over the course of their acquaintance he’d lost more often than he’d won.

They played hard for about an hour. Turner lost the first game and was about to lose the next when he gave in to temptation and began slamming the ball off the front wall so it came straight back at Broch, who then had to fight it off blindly or step aside and wait for it to rebound off the rear wall. Soon Turner had him on the run, and before long Broch was spending as much energy avoiding the ball as he was chasing it.

“Enough, you bastard,” he said at last, bent over at midcourt, panting for breath. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight.”

“You’re a little out of shape, that’s all.” Turner laid a hand on his shoulder. “Been working late?”

“Fuck off. Drinks are yours this time.”

They showered, dressed, and repaired to Bar Flou, small, chic, but studiedly informal, where the patrons were regulars, the drink was champagne, and dinner was never ordered before ten. The walls were painted a deep brothel red, making it seem even smaller, and behind the minuscule bar a single Corinthian column rose to meet the stamped-tin ceiling to bizarre effect. Turner rather liked the place, and it wasn’t expensive.

The tables around them quickly filled with people settling in for the evening. Most knew one another at least by sight, and the small rituals of self-display—a sweater brandished and draped over bare shoulders, a cigarette proffered and lit, an earring adjusted—lent the proceedings a collective intimacy. Conversations eddied and overlapped.

When their champagne arrived, they clinked glasses.

Turner looked at him. “You asked earlier if I’d met a woman and I told you not really, but in point of fact I have. You know her, I think. Her name is Odile Mével.”

Broch frowned and shook his head. “What does she look like?”

“Pretty, auburn hair that’s almost red, marvelous breasts. Early thirties, I’d say. You’d remember.”

Broch opened his palms. “Who is she?”

“I’m still finding that out myself, but she was the woman I hired along with your cousin, you remember, to run that Moscow errand?”

“Oh, yes.” Bored. “But I never met her.”

“No? I thought maybe Thierry might’ve mentioned her to you.”

Broch finished his champagne and signaled the waiter for another. “It’s possible. I don’t remember.”

“But have you talked to him lately?”

“Lately? No. He has a full teaching schedule, and examinations are coming up. Anyway, he’s just my cousin. I don’t pay much attention to his social life.”

Turner nodded. At a corner table two women kissed lavishly while the man who’d brought them cut and recut a deck of cards, speaking all the while to a couple at the adjacent table. They listened intently, watching his hands.

“The reason I ask,” Turner said, “is that Thierry never showed up to collect his fee for the Russian trip. I mean, I realize that thirty thousand francs isn’t what it used to be, but somehow I thought he’d want to be paid. Any idea what happened to him?”

The waiter whisked away Broch’s empty champagne glass and put a full one in its place. Broch drank it down and handed the glass back to the waiter, who put a third one before him and swept off with the empties. “Is he dead?” Broch asked, avoiding Turner’s eye.

“I don’t know. Should he be?”

A moment of thoughtful silence ensued, which an instant later made both men laugh.

“He can be a pain in the ass,” Broch said. “This is certain. But he’s reliable in his way. He did what you asked him to, didn’t he?”

“Absolutely.”

“So.” Broch dismissed the subject with a shrug. “I wouldn’t have recommended him otherwise.”

They sipped their champagne.

There were three aspects of Broch that Turner considered worth knowing, and with all three the trick was to know nothing more. First, he was afraid of squash balls traveling at high velocity. Second, his real-estate dealings quite probably constituted the lesser part of his financial interests, the rest of which Turner assumed were, to one degree or another, illicit. This he had gathered from a number of hints Broch had let drop from time to time and, more tellingly, from the intuitive grasp he seemed to have of the workings of the art market, which, while not necessarily illicit, nevertheless responded agreeably to selectively applied bits of intelligence. This aspect of Broch presented some difficulties, since not only was Turner curious to know what he was up to, but Broch himself seemed to want to
tell him, an eventuality to be avoided at all costs because with knowledge came liability. Third, and most problematic, Broch felt his true talents were being squandered. What exactly these talents might be remained unclear. Turner had the impression that he considered them to be imaginative or possibly artistic in nature, though again there could be no advantage in knowing more about them. What mattered was that they had no suitable outlet, which, at least in principle, made him a likely recruit for any number of adventures in self-vindication.
Here be monsters
, Turner thought. He disliked getting involved in people’s hopes for themselves.

“So,” Broch said, “tell me about this woman. You are in love with her, yes?”

“Certainly not,” Turner replied primly, glancing reflexively around the room to see if anyone had heard. “Besides, I have no time for women these days. An accidental tumble, maybe. An actual woman with needs and grievances, no thank you.”

“Are you fucking her?”

“It hasn’t even crossed my mind.”

Broch nodded gravely. “Tell me about her. You’ll feel better.”

“I don’t want to feel better. I’m fine.” Turner finished his champagne and caught the waiter’s eye. “How about you? Break any hearts lately?”

“You know my situation.”

“Yes, but—”

“The same. Unchanged.”

His situation, as Turner understood it, was curiously strenuous. He was not only sleeping with his partner in the real-estate business, a recent widow, but also had undertaken a second liaison with a much younger woman, a music student from Strasbourg who liked to show up unannounced and be taken to the city’s most fashionable restaurants and nightclubs, preferably with a gram or two of cocaine to give the experience scale. That Broch was headed for a train wreck could not be doubted, but what impelled him in that direction—audacity or sorrow or simple fecklessness—remained opaque to Turner, who was happy enough to leave it at that.

“In any case,” Broch was saying, “I’d like your advice about something. My great-aunt died this winter and left me a small inheritance. This is awkward, you see, because, okay, she was a bit eccentric, and …” He stopped, exasperated.

The waiter set two fresh glasses of champagne in front of them and hurried off.

“What I mean is—”

“To your health.”

“To yours. What I mean is this inheritance …” Again Broch stopped. He inspected his wine closely, then drank all of it.

“It’s okay,” said Turner. “I think what you’re telling me, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that this is a small
cash
inheritance, right?”

“Exactly.” Broch sighed with relief. “In U.S. dollars, to be precise. And I want to invest this sum in, I don’t know, something that doesn’t require much paperwork, an art object perhaps, if something suitable could be found. Of course, knowing this is your specialty, I’m more than curious to hear your thoughts.”

Turner nodded and, leaning forward, said in a mock-conspiratorial whisper, “How much?”

“Fifty thousand,” Broch said a bit unhappily.

Turner eased back in his chair. “Let me think.”

As far as he knew, Broch had never asked what exactly his cousin had been dispatched to Moscow to retrieve, but now that the goods had been secured on French and American soil it didn’t much matter anyway. Ten of the flags had been sold through Balakian’s gallery at thirty-five thousand dollars each; of those, three would soon be donated to major New York museums at Turner’s suggestion, the purchase price to be recouped by the donors in tax write-offs confirming, for the record, the objects’ value. While he hadn’t planned on selling prior to auction any of the flags still in his possession, chance had brought him opportunity. Still, there were risks.

At the corner table, the man fanned cards out before the couple he was addressing and invited them to choose one. The two women he’d brought were feeding each other escargot from tiny forks, oblivious.

“You understand,” said Turner, “that if it’s a quick turnaround that you’re looking for, art is not your friend.”

“Yes, yes,” Broch said, “I know. My main concern is to find a solid long-term investment that doesn’t require much paperwork. Purely for the sake of convenience.”

“And your inheritance—it’s fully accessible when?”

“Anytime. Immediately.”

“Good.” Turner assumed the brisk, professional manner with which his clients were most comfortable. “Come by my office tomorrow afternoon and I’ll show you something I think will meet your needs. I hate to part with it, but, considering your position …”

“Thank you.”

“In return I ask only that you keep the sale quiet. The price you mentioned will amount to a discount that others acquiring comparable objects have not been offered, so naturally there’s a need for discretion. I can’t have my clients made unhappy.”

“Of course not. I understand.”

Turner’s spirits soared. The world was with him. He watched two expensively dressed men enter the bar and take a look around before leaving. It seemed to him that the shorter one had nudged the other in the ribs and they’d both glanced at his table, but the next moment he was sure he had imagined it.

“So,” he said, “now that we’ve solved your dilemma, are you going to tell me what’s really going on with your cousin? I mean, what’s his problem, exactly?”

Broch appeared to suffer another bout of ennui. “Oh, it’s nothing. He owes some money, that’s all. I thought the trip to Moscow would help him to pay it off sooner, of course. He’ll be back.”

The card shark at the corner table said, “Queen of spades,” and the man who’d drawn the card held it up to his girlfriend to confirm its identity. “I can’t believe it!” she exclaimed fetchingly.

“To whom does he owe this money?” Turner asked. “You?”