The Same River Twice (19 page)

A dolorous sigh. “Yes, me. Who else?” He seemed to be on the point of elaborating when, from the depths of his pants pocket, his cell phone began to ring. He considered the situation, then apologized to Turner, extracted the device, and answered. “Yes, hello?”

Turner watched his features expand in a rictus of professional bonhomie. “Not at all! I was planning to call you myself … Yes … Yes, that’s true … No, I understand, but … Yes, and let me assure you that everything …” He listened, a mask of bewilderment descending over his face. “Of course.” Avoiding eye contact, he shrugged and held out the phone. Turner took it.

“To trust is good,” said the voice on the other end. “Not to trust is better. Traditional Russian expression.”

“Nikolai! What a pleasure to hear your voice.” In fact Kukushkin’s voice, which he hadn’t heard since their conversation in Balakian’s gallery, provoked a whole range of feelings, but pleasure wasn’t one of them. “Where are you?”

“Is not important. Maybe later I come to Paris. You are well?”

“I’m fine. And you? Business is good, I hope?”

“Currently is transition period. We have decided to downsize, as they say in U.S. Certain positions to be eliminated in very near future.”

“Well, I’m sure it’s for the best,” Turner said, “given today’s climate.”

“This is precisely true, yes.” Kukushkin sighed. “Now, Turner. I must suggest you seek alternative company at earliest convenience.”

“Excuse me?”

“The man with whom you are sitting is about to receive disappointing news, to be delivered in person. Is most essential that you not be with him.”

“I see.”

“Good. Because the messengers have strict instructions to leave no extraneous elements behind, okay? You have my drift?”

“So it’s imminent.”

“No. In motion.”

“Aha. Okay, then. I’ll certainly do that, Kolya. Thanks for calling.” He pressed the end button and looked up.

“What is it?” Broch’s liquid brown eyes searched his. “What did he say?”

Turner gave him back the phone. “He wants me to bid on something for him at auction next week. I can’t really talk about it.”

Broch put up a hand. “Not my business, I understand.”

Looking at his watch, Turner forced himself to stay calm. Nothing definitive would happen inside the bar, he reasoned, but the space was tightly enclosed and had only one exit and entrance. “Listen, Sylvain, I hate to cut this short, but I just realized I’ve got to stop by the office to pick something up. Do you mind if we get the check?” Already he was signaling the waiter, making writing gestures at him across the crowded room.

“I didn’t know you knew Nikolai,” Broch said, sounding a little hurt.

“Yes, well, that’s Paris, isn’t it. You bump into everyone sooner or later.” He brought out his wallet and inspected its contents. It would be desirable to pay in cash.

“And I wonder, how did he know you were with me?”

“No idea. You must’ve mentioned it to him.”

“Me?” Broch seemed obscurely troubled by the notion. “Why would I do that?”

Up front a party of people in their twenties had arrived, perhaps eight or ten of them, streaming in through the door even as the manager tried to shoo them out again. They backed up beside the bar, scanning the room for a free table, exclaiming to one another about the crowd. Cell phones sprouted.

“Thank you, sir,” the waiter said, delivering the check.

Turner put down several bills and stood up, the blood suddenly rushing from his head. His vision granulated and grew dark. When it cleared again, he was gripping the back of his chair and the man with the cards was switching places with the one who’d drawn the queen of spades. The girlfriend clapped her hands and laughed delightedly, while the other two women looked on with new interest.

“Ready?” said Broch, and the two of them edged their way toward the front.

Accustomed though he was to people and their needs, Turner found it difficult to make sense of what was about to happen. Evidently Broch was working for Kukushkin in some capacity, his performance had been found unsatisfactory, and now there would be a reckoning, probably violent. Whether he himself had wandered into this skein of circumstance accidentally, as it seemed, or as part of somebody else’s design, Turner was at a loss to know. He wanted to believe that it didn’t matter, but of course it mattered quite a lot.

The young people had now reversed course and were flowing back out onto the sidewalk, trying to agree on a destination, and Turner and Broch trailed behind them. “But the DJ at Colors is a thousand times hotter than whoever’s at Le Charbon these days,” one of the girls insisted petulantly.

The night was clear. Cars prowled the streets. Pedestrian traffic had thinned.

Turner was taking his leave, shaking Broch’s hand and thanking him for the game, when the men he’d seen earlier rounded the corner and stopped, stepping into shadow even before he could look away.

At the curb, a woman was getting out of a taxi.

“Listen,” Turner said. “Come by the office tomorrow and we’ll take care of business, okay?”

“Great. I appreciate it, Turner. Really.” Broch sounded genuinely grateful.

The young people, having come to a decision, crossed the street together and passed under a pair of chestnut trees at the bus stop, then were gone. Turner sprinted for the taxi. He gave the driver his home address and, as they pulled away, looked back at Broch, who’d set off for the métro.

Broch had taken no more than five steps when suddenly he was jerked violently back as if someone had seized him by the belt from behind. In the next instant his chest exploded. He convulsed again, then twice more
before collapsing—eight shots in all, Turner thought. The two men walked briskly across the street. Abruptly Turner looked away, willing himself forward, out of this moment and back into a world made credible by destinations and streetlights and appointments it was perhaps still possible to keep.

“LA PEAU DE L’OURS?” repeated Odile, tearing open a croissant. “But that’s so interesting. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

Max frowned and peered vexedly into his morning bowl of café au lait. “I don’t know. First there was the flood, and then I guess I had other things on my mind. Don’t tell me you’ve heard of it before?”

“But of course I have.” She took a bite of croissant, ignoring the raspberry jam Max had set out for her, jam being another thing she had decided to renounce. “Didn’t Jacques explain it to you?”

“My assistant,” said Max, “believes me to be a man of attainment. He respects me and avoids humiliating me more than absolutely necessary. Which is why it falls to you, my love, to deliver me from ignorance, if you’re not too busy.”

Raising an index finger, she took a long swallow of coffee. “La Peau de l’Ours,” she said, setting down the bowl and touching her napkin to her lips, “refers to a fable by La Fontaine that every French child learns at a very young age and then probably never thinks about again. It begins: ‘Two comrades, pressed for cash, / to their neighbor the furrier sold / the skin of a bear who was still alive, / but whom they soon would kill, / according at least to them.’”

“Pithy,” said Max. “A parable about speculation, perhaps?”

“Exactly. Because this is what happens. A price is agreed upon, and the two boys say they will deliver the skin to the furrier within two days. They
set out, but before they can find the bear, the bear finds them. Realizing suddenly that they’ve given no thought to the bear’s part in their contract, they panic. The deal’s off, every man for himself. One guy climbs a tree, the other pretends to be dead. The bear sniffs at the one playing dead, then goes back about his business and disappears into the forest. Climbing down out of the tree, the boy embraces his friend—now they’re just happy to be alive, obviously—and then asks what the bear said to him. And his friend says, ‘He told me that one must never / sell the skin of a bear / that one has yet to bring to ground.’ Good, no?”

Max thought about it. “But what’s it doing on the copyright line of my DVD? My vandalized DVD, to use your word.”

“Ah, that’s another matter completely.” Odile finished her coffee. “But very likely you’ll soon find out, don’t you think?”

“I will?”

“Well, I don’t know. Have Eddie sort it out.” She looked at her watch. “Shit. I’m late. We can talk about it later, okay?”

Taking the number 6 métro from Glacière, transferring to the 4 at Denfert-Rochereau, Odile replayed the breakfast conversation in her head. The La Fontaine fable lent itself to so many real-life situations that she’d felt compelled to make light of it before Max could extrapolate. One might, for example, be tempted to read it as a comment on filmmaking in general, where standard accounting practice dictated that those involved were forever selling something that had yet to be sighted, let alone subdued. Other, darker enactments of the tale also suggested themselves. Odile refused them all. She had promised herself a productive day.

She got off at Strasbourg-St. Denis, in a quarter known as Le Sentier, where the night shift of prostitutes had for the most part punched out, and the garment trade, which for well over a century had claimed the daylight hours, was in full swing. Pakistani porters pushed clothing racks through the narrow streets at bracing speeds; trucks waited to be unloaded; sewing machines attended by Chinese, Cambodians, Indians, and Turks whined in courtyards and glass-roofed passageways; managers and salesgirls stood in doorways recently vacated by hookers of many nations. Odile knew the district well—it was like the souk of Paris—and she took pleasure in cultivating its more prominent players.

The man she’d come to see, a corpulent Tunisian Jew named Monsieur Ibrahim, owned several local business concerns but operated officially out of a small storefront in the Passage du Caire, another bit of Orientalist fantasia originally inspired by Napoleon’s Egyptian adventures of 1798. She
found him at his usual post, loudly berating his son for accepting delivery of an inferior shipment of Indian cotton. In the cubbyhole where the son normally worked,
Titanic
was playing on a small video monitor. Gargantuan seas washed over the beleaguered ocean liner, and as Odile waited politely for Monsieur Ibrahim to finish, she found herself identifying with it. She supposed everybody did. It was a Hollywood film.

“Ah, Madame! Excuse me!” this man exclaimed when he finally noticed her.

They embraced, and the son slunk past them out of the shop.

“It has been too long! You and Monsieur are both well, I hope.” He led her to a seat beside a mosaic-topped table and poured them each a glass of mint tea sweetened with honey. “I love my son, but he is an imbecile. Perhaps this is my own fault. I don’t know.”

“But he’s still young!” said Odile. “He’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

Monsieur Ibrahim shook his head unhappily. “He wants to be a singer in nightclubs, an entertainer. From his mother he gets this idea. I can do nothing.” He drank his tea. “How may I assist you this morning?”

Odile described the wedding dress she was designing and asked to see samples of white taffeta in various weights. Restored to his usual good humor by this request, the Tunisian excused himself and, after a brief interval, returned with several fabric swatches. He and Odile discussed the merits of each, then she chose the next-to-lightest of the samples and bought six meters of it, charging it to her account. Having until recently been in arrears to Monsieur Ibrahim, she started to apologize for not paying cash, but he cut her off.

“Let me show you something.” From his son’s workspace he retrieved a lockbox, which he set down on the table between them and opened up. Inside were stacks of crisp new five-hundred-franc notes in paper-banded packets. “That’s sixty thousand francs, right there. Take one.”

She plucked a bill from the stash and held it up to the light.

“It looks good, does it not? You see the watermark, the quality of the paper and ink, the sharpness of the printing?”

“Yes. It looks fine to me.”

Monsieur Ibrahim took another five-hundred-franc bill from his wallet and handed it to her. As she compared the two notes, he produced a pen-sized ultraviolet light and shone it on both bills. The one from his wallet fluoresced brightly at the lower left-hand corner, while the other went dull purple. “Those in the box are all counterfeit. Le Sentier is flooded with them. I myself took in almost ninety thousand in fakes before I realized it.”

She gave him back the bills. “But where are they coming from?”

“The police won’t say. But I have talked with other wholesalers here, and though nobody is certain, we think the source is Eastern European—Warsaw, some place like that.” He shrugged. “Whoever it is, they are very skilled.”

Odile watched him put the box away. “Maybe it’s no longer necessary to be skilled,” she said. Outside, a rack full of astrakhan coats wheeled by. “Now that everything’s going digital, I mean.”

She made arrangements to pick up the fabric later that afternoon, then emerged onto the Place du Caire, where pharaonic heads in stone gazed out languidly from the facade of the square’s principal building. She remembered the Egyptian heads Turner had shown her when she’d delivered the flags to his apartment. Two of the heads were genuine, he said, three fake. She felt quite certain that if she saw them again she would know which were which.

Errands and small appointments occupied her for the rest of the morning. At one o’clock she had an omelette and a salad in a café near the Centre Pompidou. Then, on impulse, she called Rachel on her cell, and they agreed to meet at the Jardin du Luxembourg, by the Medici Fountain. They hadn’t seen each other in four days.

“I have so much to tell you,” Rachel said as they embraced.

Odile had commandeered two chairs at the statuary end of the fountain, in the shade of the giant sycamores that flanked it. “Me too,” she said, though she wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that.

Rachel’s big news was that she thought she’d located a pair of vintage London taxicabs of the sort that could provide parts for the
Nachtvlinder
. She ran across them while surfing the Internet at a cybercafé in Oberkämpf, but because she had yet to hear back from the owner and indeed had no idea where he or his taxis might actually be found, she’d held off informing Groot of her discovery. “I mean, for all I know, they could be in Australia,” she said. “Plus I hate to think how much the guy probably wants for them. It’s not as if we’re in the car collector’s income bracket, after all. Still, it would be so great to get those parts.”