The Same River Twice (6 page)

Céleste kissed him on the cheek. “Goat, bastard, pirate. Have you at least cleared your schedule for me this time? I want what’s left of the afternoon, all of it.” Fleetingly the whiteness of her still-abundant hair reminded him of the boat and the fog. A wave of regret passed over him as he relinquished the daydream and in the next instant forgot about it completely.
“I told you, Céleste. Whatever you want.” He stifled a yawn. “And please don’t call me pirate.”

A petite woman in her mid-seventies, she had startlingly large, cornflower-blue eyes whose effect was compounded by the frankness of her gaze. Inspecting Turner’s naked body, she furrowed her brow. “But what is this? You’ve gained at least one kilo since last week.”

“A kilo?” he said. “Impossible. I don’t gain weight.”

She shook her head in reproof. “No, you absolutely cannot get fat until I’m done with you. Promise this to me.”

“You’re worse than a wife,” he said, capitulating.

Céleste trailed a hand across his bare chest, then went over to a corner where an art deco screen created a small, private space within the larger one. She disappeared behind the screen and emerged a few moments later with a wooden easel, a medium-sized canvas on stretchers, and a pushcart loaded with paints and brushes. While she set up in front of him, Turner rearranged himself on the sofa so he was seated mostly upright, legs extended, head tilted to rest on the knuckles of one hand. This was the pose she’d coaxed from him at his first sitting, three weeks ago. Céleste mixed her paints, studied him, and began to work.

For some time she painted in silence, her eyes darting from Turner to the canvas and back again. Twice before she had done his portrait. He’d been the cocky American in the first one, arms folded across his chest and expectation in his eyes. The other showed him two years later, in personal disarray. Both paintings, as it turned out, had captured him at the end of one phase of his life, on the threshold of another, and neither had been kind. Turner hadn’t expected them to be.

Pausing to change brushes, Céleste stared at him.

The completeness of her attention, pitiless and cleansing, laid bare Turner’s vanities and unleashed in him a sudden longing to be known. He was certain that such a thing was possible. He seemed to remember a time when it had been routine.

“What is it?” said Céleste, seeing the look on his face.

He let his gaze drift past her to the window. Three buildings away a woman stood on her balcony shaking out a rug. Dust exploded into the air.

“I think,” he said, “I’ve found someone you should meet.”

THE WEATHER WAS UNSEASONABLY MILD
—the warmest spring in thirty years, the newspapers said—and on Saturday afternoon Odile, Max, and
Rachel installed themselves topside on the
Nachtvlinder
, basking in the sunlight. The houseboat was tied up just downstream from the Pont de Sully, in the center of Paris. Diesel fumes, mildew, and sewage scented the air. Below, Groot hammered at the vessel’s engine mounts and swore intermittently in Dutch.

“Does he really think he can rebuild those engines?” Odile asked.

“Oh, he can for sure.” Rachel pushed her glasses back up her nose and sipped her beer. “But there’s more to it than that. He has, like, a vision.”

Her six-foot frame was hypnotizingly out of scale with the boat. Max zoomed in slowly. “Vision?” he repeated.

“That’s my word, not his. He’s going to clean her up totally, stem to stern. And when he’s done—when
we’re
done, I mean—she’ll be running under her own power for the first time in, like, fifty years.” She grinned and gave the camera an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

“That’s great, Rachel.” He checked the time code. “Could you tell us a little about the boat?”

“Sure. The
Nachtvlinder
started out life as an admiral’s gig at the turn of the last century. She’s made of Burmese teak and British hardware, measures fifty-four feet long, thirteen wide, and she displaces an even thirty tons. After World War II somebody turned her into a motor yacht, with two diesel engines of the kind you used to find in London taxis. Those are the babies Groot’s going to rebuild this spring. Getting parts will probably be the main problem.”

Running behind Rachel’s head was a long window box of brilliant red geraniums that now came into focus. Max panned slowly along these flowers until Odile’s head entered the frame and the shot included both women, Odile squinting into the sun.

“What happened to the boat after that?” asked Max. The vidcam, a beta-built HD digital, was on loan from a Japanese company that Jacques had been badgering for days. Something had been said about product endorsement, but Max had no intention of providing any such thing.

“Basically she was worked to death,” Rachel explained, “then left to rot. When Groot found her in Utrecht, she was sunk up to her wheelhouse in sludge and looked much worse than she does now. He raised her and patched her up, then had her towed here by barge. We’ve been working on her and living on board ever since.” She appeared thoughtful. “Two years now.”

“So thanks to you, the
Nachtvlinder
will have a whole new life,” Max suggested.

“Um. We don’t think of it like that, not really.” Rachel gathered her lustrous black hair in her hands, gave it a twist, and held it up off her neck. “She has her history. All we’re doing is giving her a little rehab. Right, Odile?”

Max kept both women in the viewfinder as they looked at each other.

“Yes and no,” Odile answered after a moment. “It’s a question, I suppose, of how much of a thing can be replaced before it becomes another thing altogether.”

Rachel cocked her head. “You’re kidding, right?”

Reaching out across the frame, Odile squeezed her friend’s hand. Then, looking straight into the camera, she said, “Enough for today, Max. It’s the weekend.”

He lowered the vidcam. Rachel excused herself and, ducking into a low oaken doorway, went below to help Groot.

“Are you really going to use that footage?” Odile said when they were alone.

“No, that was just for posterity.” He sat down beside her in the deck chair Rachel had vacated. “Anyway, according to Eddie, I’m in creative transition.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it?”

“Neither good nor bad. Real, though.” He put the camera down in the small shade cast by his chair. “I’m looking for something, so it goes without saying I’ll find something else. I accept this now, even embrace it. Do you think I’m old?”

“Don’t be morbid, Max,” she told him. “You have no gift for it.”

The two of them looked out over the Seine in companionable silence. Weekend pleasure craft—sailboats, ski boats, outboards, rowboats—plied the river in both directions, and the
bateau mouche
heading upstream now sent these lesser vessels scrambling. From its loudspeakers came a steady blast of tour commentary, and in its wake bobbed assorted flotsam—a shoe, a soccer ball, a hat, a bloated pig carcass.

“Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Max said. “I saw from this month’s bill that you paid off the back rent. Was that the fruit of your Moscow trip?”

She extended her lips in a pout of feigned boredom.

“Odile.” Reaching out, he took her chin in his hand and turned her toward him. “My love. There’s nothing to worry about. Raising money’s a sport I play. I’ll sell the Giacometti drawing.”

“Why?”

“So that you don’t have to—”

Brushing his hand aside, she put her own impatiently over his mouth. “Enough. When the time comes, you’ll do what must be done. I require it, and you won’t fail me.” His breath in her palm was warm, and she held it for another beat before releasing him. His eyes shone. “I see that we understand each other,” she said. “Good.”

Around four o’clock, Rachel called for Max. Groot needed his help in cutting away the old oil storage tanks. Odile remained topside. Across the river a patrol boat of
la brigade fluviale
was ticketing a small outboard that had been sprinting up and down through traffic, leaving the other boats tossing in its wake. As Odile watched, a Welsh terrier jumped from the outboard into the police boat and viciously attacked the warrant officer’s trouser cuff.

Since returning from Moscow, she had been visited repeatedly by an old notion, an idea about herself dating from adolescence. It had then been her private conviction that, under circumstances only marginally different from those in which she found herself, she would renounce the world and its ten thousand excruciations, she would retreat into solitude and live her life as an ascetic. Yet religion had held no interest for her then or now, she didn’t even consider self-denial a virtue. She had only noted, with youth’s cruel eye, that she possessed the capacity for it. It was a choice among many, and meant that another life was possible for her. But now she wondered whether she hadn’t overestimated her own freedom to make such decisions. Perhaps it was just an illusion.

Below, Groot started his saw, and the shriek of metal cutting metal set the deck vibrating. A smell of burn wafted up. The air had grown chilly. She stood and gathered her things.

After calling down the companionway to tell the others she was leaving, Odile descended the
Nachtvlinder
’s gangplank to the packed-sand quai where the boat was docked. Stone steps led back up to the street. She decided to walk home.

Leather jackets in burgundy and black, pleated silk trousers, crocodile shoes and cowboy boots: Odile identified the two men waiting on the sidewalk as Russian even before she realized they were waiting for her. The burlier one, his head shaved and the rim of one ear studded with tiny gold rings, regarded her with an alertness that struck Odile as professional.

The other man was tall and finely featured, with a wolfish smile. “You are Odile Mével,” he said to her in French. “True?”

She made a lunge, trying to get around them, but the burly one easily caught her.

“A most economical answer,” said the taller man. “Unfortunately, certain events, developments, et cetera make it necessary we talk with you in private.” He flashed a police badge at her. “Now is convenient?”

She inhaled deeply, but before she could call for help the other man clapped a thick hand across her mouth.

“Good. We talk in my car. Is more discreet.”

Parked behind them, two wheels up on the curb, was a black sedan of Bavarian make. The burly man wrestled Odile into the backseat, and his employer, as she now judged him to be, slid in beside her. The door slammed shut, and the other man got behind the wheel, started up the car, and pulled out into traffic. At close quarters he smelled very bad.

“Okay, this is the deal,” said the tall man. “You have involved yourself in transborder activities of highly criminal nature. The details are known. My office takes an interest. Maybe I find extenuating circumstances, maybe not. This is up to you.”

Odile grabbed at the door handle on her side. It was locked. “Why do you pretend to be police?” she demanded. “Show me your badge again.”

The man examined her closely for a moment, then laughed. “Police, fireman, garbage inspector—who gives a shit? Actually, I am in import-export business like you.”

Odile sat facing forward, her arms folded across her chest.

“Understand: my interest in Soviet memorabilia is extremely limited—nonexistent, I would say. But in Russia to export such things is serious crime—life sentence recommended. You may find it more desirable to talk to me than Interpol, but I leave this decision also to you.”

He produced a pack of cigarettes and lit one, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. After a couple of long, thoughtful drags, he turned to her. “My question is this: where and when, please, did you last see the man called Thierry Colin?”

Odile stared at him in surprise.

“Colin,” he repeated, “Thierry. The man with whom you went to Moscow. Where is he, please?”

She left a little silence. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

At these words her interlocutor grew mournful in aspect, nodding minutely to himself. Once again, he seemed to say, his small hopes had been defeated by the forces of fecklessness and obstinacy, everywhere abundant. “Why do you make trouble for yourself,
dushka?
This man is a dog. Don’t get involved in his stupidities.”

But already Odile’s anxiety, her anger and resentment, had begun to
shift in character, so that from being on the defensive, detained against her will to fend off questions and threats, she now became detached. “I told you,” she said, “I’ve never heard of the person you’re looking for. What else do you want from me?”

The man slapped the seat with the flat of his hand and cursed in Russian. He ordered his driver to pull over, and the locks popped open. “Consider carefully,” he told Odile. “You are creating bad atmosphere. Our next meeting may not be so pleasant.”

She got out, the car sped off.

Waiting at the taxi stand in the Place de la Bastille, watching the traffic swirl around the monument, Odile tried to recall when she had started lying for Thierry Colin, or about him, and why. None of the obvious answers satisfied her.

“A thief’s not a thief,” he had told her in Moscow. “The police aren’t police.”

In the taxi she allowed her thoughts to grow abstract. Bits of music passed through her mind, just phrases at first, but gradually filling out and cohering until she recognized the work, a small Biber sonata she hadn’t heard in years.

MAX AND JACQUES SAT in the studio one rainy morning watching some footage of Rachel that Max had shot over the past few days. On the screen, Dorothy struck the Cowardly Lion on the nose and rebuked him for chasing Toto.

“An homage,” said Jacques. “Who would have guessed?”

Max ignored him as the camera pulled back to reveal that the Oz sequence was playing on TV, and that a little girl of about five was seated on the floor watching raptly. The reverse zoom continued until it took in the nearby kitchenette, where Rachel was preparing dinner and talking nonstop, apparently to the child.

“She makes most of her money babysitting,” Max explained, “so I asked if I could come along the other night. The little girl doesn’t know a word of English, and Rachel’s French is, shall we say, modest.”