The Same River Twice (5 page)

“Moscow! Really? What for?”

“The job was to pick up some flags—big folk-art things from the Soviet
years. Some Americans are going to sell them at auction, I think.” She paused, reaching out to straighten a candle before it dripped. “Moscow, though—it’s extraordinary. Unreal, I want to say. Everything for sale. Ordinary people seemed to lack basic things, but the mafia cowboys, it was almost comical, you know? If one paid with hard currency, anything was possible. Armored … how do you call them? Like tanks, but not so many guns?”

“Personnel carriers?”

“Yes. A man was selling them. I saw one in traffic, like a car.” Odile had encountered the APC early on the first day, before she had registered the full extent of the disorder surrounding her, and she had been shocked. Now all that seemed far away.

Max wiped his mouth and put his napkin on the table. “Poor Russia,” he said.

“It wasn’t what I expected,” she agreed.

“How long were you there?”

“Not long. Just long enough to pick up the flags.”

Max nodded. “Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

He traced her jawline gently with his fingertips. “You’re tired, Odile. Go have a bath. I’ll finish up in here.”

“What about the police?”

He seemed to consider. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

Odile looked the apartment over skeptically, then let her glance be drawn to his. “As you said,” she replied. “Just another kind of trouble.”

In her bath, amid clouds of steam, Odile closed her eyes and systematically willed herself to relax. She heard the phone ring. Max answered. She did not listen to his words.

Some months ago, at her father’s house in Brittany, she was alone one evening—Bastien away on business, Max en route from Paris—when an unusually violent thunderstorm knocked out all electric power in the region. Odile tried the phone, but the lines were down. For a time, lightning flashes provided jagged instants of illumination, but the storm passed on and soon she was sitting in a darkness so complete that her only reference point was the chair beneath her. She seemed to remember that her father kept candles and a flashlight on a shelf in the cellar. Once she worked out the route in her mind, she stood, took a few steps, stumbled, and was immediately disoriented. Feeling for a wall, she traced the room’s perimeter to a connecting corridor, continued through the dining room to the
kitchen, and stopped at the cellar door, her hand on the latch. The rain, while it lasted, had been torrential, and it dimly came back to her that the cellar was prone to flooding. Abruptly she was seized by a neck-prickling animal fear for which she could find no cause, fear that had a life of its own, fear of darkness, certainly, but also of something pre-human to which darkness only alluded. For perhaps three minutes she stood there frozen, unable or unwilling to lift the latch. “This must be what it’s like to be blind,” she said aloud. Then she opened the door. A series of sickening thumps sounded on the wooden stairs, followed by a small skittering. She cried out softly, immobilized before a wall of blackness within blackness, but heard nothing more. When her heart ceased pounding, some time later, she forced herself down the stairs, and, wading through ankle-deep water, located both flashlight and candles. She fumbled the flashlight on. A heavy plastic bucket floated near the foot of the stairs, surrounded by hundreds of polystyrene packing pellets, clearly its contents until a moment ago. But if this accounted for what she’d heard, what had knocked the bucket down the steps? She hadn’t touched anything, and the cellar door opened outward, into the kitchen. She hurried back up the staircase, eager to leave her speculations behind.

Now, nodding down into her drowsiness, Odile jerked awake. She was still herself. The bathwater had gone cold. She pulled the plug and got out.

What’s done is done
, she thought. But at once she doubted the truth of this ancient tautology and saw any number of reasons why what’s done would be done over and over. Very possibly—or so it seemed to her for a second—nothing happened at all until it happened again. She toweled herself dry, put on her dressing gown, and let these strange thoughts pass from her mind.

She was asleep when Max came to bed but woke at his touch. Turning to him, she pressed her forehead to his and, in the bedside lamplight, let herself be held. “I missed you,” she told him.

“I missed you too,” he murmured. “I always miss you.”

She wriggled closer to him. “No regrets? You know you could pick up your New York life in a minute, if you wanted to. Even now.”

“But I don’t want to. I want to be here with you. You know that.”

After a small silence she said, “Tonight scared me. What do you think they were after?”

“Ah, it was probably just some punks with nothing to do, no place to do it. I wouldn’t worry.” He slipped one strap of her negligee off her shoulder.

“So it’s over now?”

“Definitely. What possible reason would they have to come back?” He ran a hand down her side, over her hip and back again. She shivered. They kissed. When he reached out to turn off the bedside lamp, she intercepted him.

“Leave it,” she said.

Sitting up, she pulled the nightgown off over her head. With this unveiling her breasts became the forwardmost part of her body, the nipples stalks from which all that was about to happen would bloom. She tilted her head back and shook her hair out to confirm this sensation. Once again it was true. When she opened her eyes, they met Max’s, blue and unblinking. “Does Madame still please Monsieur?” she asked.

“Very much. More all the time.”

Her lips swelled, she saw him see them swell, and all at once Odile and Max were avid for each other, giddy with appetite. “I want everything,” she said as he pulled her to him. “All of it.”

He drew the inside edge of his hand, wrist to thumb to forefinger, up between her legs. She moved sideways to be beneath him and a moment later guided him in.

“We both do,” he said into her ear.

And it was as if they were home free.

THE AUCTION HOUSE where Turner worked had its physical premises in a restored Second Empire building just off the Champs-Élysées, and he was allotted a small, rather cluttered office on the third floor, overlooking the courtyard. Standing there now with the phone pressed to his ear, he switched on the lightbox he kept in one corner. A red glow suffused the air.

“Believe me, Ron. Schedules are not the issue. As soon as you see these you’ll
make
room. Plus, I can guarantee the show will sell out. I’ve got buyers lined up for you, and, as I said, I’m discounting my usual fee.” He had a Manhattan art dealer by the name of Ronald Balakian on the line. In the two years since Balakian had opened his gallery on West 24th Street, it had become the exhibition venue of choice for rising young art stars, and the man himself a minor celebrity.

“How many would I show?” Balakian asked, affecting puzzlement and indecision. “I mean, I don’t even know what size these things are.”

“The size is jumbo. Heroic-statement size. And I’ve picked out seven I think you’ll like.” Turner contemplated the color transparencies he’d laid out on the lightbox. It was helpful, he thought, that the flags photographed so well.

“Seven big red flags that I’d like,” mused Balakian. “Not totally impossible, I guess. And, let’s see, you’re doing me this favor because …”

“Because I want them positioned as artworks, not historical curiosities.
For this, Ron, your gallery is perfect—a true no-context space. It’s the only setting that will let people see what’s really there.”

Appearing just then in the doorway, Turner’s assistant regarded him neutrally, her arms folded across her chest. Disapproval barely contained was Gabriella’s natural expression, but she was fiercely loyal and Turner often relied on her judgment. He waved languidly at her. She frowned—message received—and disappeared.

“I’d have to look them over,” Balakian was saying. “The real thing, of course—not photo repros.”

“Say no more,” Turner told him cheerfully. “In your hands by this time tomorrow.”

“I’ll be waiting. Oh, and Turner?”

“Yes?”

“Let’s keep the paperwork on this one to a minimum. In case people get the wrong idea.”

Turner spent the next hour on the phone, making the necessary arrangements. The buyers he had in mind were all first-time clients, unaware of their role in developing the objects’ worth, and in such cases Turner had learned that a modicum of personal attention at the outset made the whole process exponentially easier. After speaking with each of them, he communed briefly with his calculator, had the seven flags insured at thirty thousand dollars each, and turned them over to Gabriella to pack up and ship to New York.

He left the auction house at three o’clock, walking east on Saint-Honoré. Businessmen, shoppers, and tourists filtered onto the sidewalks for lunch. Small winds gusted.

In the five days since Odile had appeared at his door, Turner had again and again found himself replaying her visit in his mind. Her ironic manner, the casual arrogance with which she’d moved around his apartment, even the care with which she cradled the Egyptian head in her palm—all this had inexplicably put him on the alert, so that well before she left he thought,
She’s not to be trusted, this girl
. And, a moment later:
She’s all but telling me so herself
.

Though he concealed his misgivings, waiting for her to reveal more, she evaded his probes and refused his invitations. Now he wondered if he’d overreacted. Sending in the Corsican brothers to search her apartment—he knew how much these thugs and clowns enjoyed their errands—had then seemed the logical thing to do. Had she kept one or two flags for herself, it would have compromised his ability to price the rest. Inventory control
was everything in this business. Yet when the Corsicans told him that he’d been mistaken, that she’d withheld nothing, Turner felt no relief, quite the contrary; it was like a further betrayal, and he was forced to question his insight.

Turning now down rue de Castiglione, he walked the length of the chilly sidewalk arcade, crossed Rivoli, and entered the open ground of the Tuileries. The April light held color and new warmth. He passed a couple changing their infant’s diapers on a stone bench. A boy with a remote was sailing a white model boat across one of the reflecting pools.

It was strange, he thought, that such a woman should have involved herself in the Moscow venture. Usually his couriers were students, proofreaders, interim dropouts—people still buffered by youth and inexperience who took the jobs as much for the small adventure as for the money. But Odile was a candidate of a different order. She’d seen something of life and didn’t trouble to hide it. She handled herself with aplomb and understood the value of the unspoken. At the very least, it seemed to Turner, you had to wonder where she had learned it all.

And there was this that was also strange: as Odile increasingly occupied his thoughts, Turner developed the impression, faint at first but already difficult to dismiss, that they’d met before—somewhere else, in another context, he couldn’t say how. When he tried actively to place her, to recall the specifics of a previous encounter, this feeling of familiarity evaporated and he would turn his mind to other things. Then, like water returning to its customary level, the feeling would seep back into place, growing gradually to a conviction, until he was once again driven to ransack his memory in search of a time and locale, and once again it would seem obvious to him that no prior meeting could possibly have occurred.

He crossed the Seine at the Pont des Arts. As he looked out over the water, cocoa brown and swollen with spring runoff, a Dutch barge piloted by a housewife in slippers eased out from under the bridge.

On the Left Bank he stepped up his pace, continuing east to the Latin Quarter. Here the narrow, mazy streets were clogged with students as well as tourists, and Turner was repeatedly obliged to sidestep both as he hurried along, navigating by blind habit until, on a backstreet that was more like an alley, he stopped before an inconspicuous pair of wooden doors painted green. Punching in the entry code, he let himself into the building’s courtyard, a shady, quiet place crisscrossed by laundry lines and presided over by a single stunted lime tree.

He unlocked the semiprivate entrance at the courtyard’s far end, then
climbed three flights of stairs to the top apartment. The door had been left ajar. He went in without knocking.

“Céleste!” he called. And, a moment later: “It’s me.”

Receiving no answer, he proceeded into the long rectangular front room, sunny and underfurnished, that offered an unimpeded view of rooftop Paris. Placed informally here and there, as if they might be rearranged at any time, were a pair of halogen floor lamps, a cordless telephone, some filing cabinets, three easy chairs losing their stuffing, a mahogany coffee table, a distressed armoire, and, at dead center, facing the windows at an angle, an antique sofa upholstered in maroon satin. Turner stood beside it and took in the view—terra-cotta tile roofs and chimney pots, TV aerials and balconies—and then, after glancing at his watch, began to undress.

“You’re late, my dear,” the woman he had come to see called in French from the back of the apartment. “I hope you’re not planning to make yourself interesting today.”

He stretched out naked on the sofa and sighed. Sunlight poured over him. “Anything you want,” he called back, and she replied with something not quite intelligible from where he lay.

Already the sunlight was making him drowsy. Turner closed his eyes and let his thoughts drop down a level. He saw himself on a boat, a white boat cruising fog-shrouded waters. There were other people on board, and, in the distance, sirens. Because this daydream—if that’s what it was—belonged to him, he knew he could alter it at will, so he now added a little music, settling on a small Biber sonata. Then he decided to take the fog away, but he must not have been concentrating because instead it just grew thicker—a dazzling, pearlescent white that matched the boat and enveloped everything—and he no longer could tell up from down or locate himself in space at all. He felt that an event long anticipated by everyone was finally about to unfold, and he was grateful in a distant, almost paternal way to be part of it. So this was what it was going to be like! A woman whispered something definitive in his ear. He realized it was Odile but couldn’t understand what she was telling him. Then there was a plunging splash, and the incandescent whiteness went dark. The music stopped. He opened his eyes.