The Same River Twice (21 page)

Max began to pace. “People and their money. It could make you weep.”

“Save your tears,” said Eddie. “Give me a copy of the key scenes, edited to seduce, and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Fine. But keep those zombies away from me. Final cut is my decision alone, right?”

“Naturally.” Eddie spread his arms in a personification of reason. “You do your work, Max, and I’ll do mine. As always.”

“Sorry, Eddie. I’m a little jazzed.”

He and Jacques spent the rest of the morning choosing scenes for the prospectus package Eddie had proposed. And while the footage he’d already shot was rich with implication, suggesting several narrative lines even as it gave natural precedence to Rachel and to the boat’s renovation, Max couldn’t help feeling he had overlooked some crucial element or tendency—in the woman, or the setting, or the forces that shaped them—that, when finally laid bare, would upend his understandings and reduce all his labors to insignificance. It was a foolish notion, distinctly counterproductive, but he found it difficult to dismiss. Maybe, he thought, he was trying too hard.

At one o’clock he sent Jacques home and closed up the studio. He lunched alone and paid some bills, then, with most of the afternoon still ahead of him, took the métro to the Centre Pompidou, where an exhibition of Brassaï photographs had opened the night before. Viewing them, he hoped, might somehow allow him to see Paris afresh. It seemed important that he shift perspective.

The show was unusually crowded for a weekday afternoon—tourists, mainly—and the galleries dimly lit so as not to damage the vintage prints. He moved patiently from one section of the exhibition to the next, waiting
his turn to stand before each picture, which he would then examine until he had his fill, heedless of those shuffling by behind him according to the dictates of the instructional headphones they’d rented. And the images were ravishing: nighttime scenes from the 1930s, dark tableaux of bordellos and bridges, lovers and lowlife, addicts, apache dancers, and architectural monuments, all of them suffused with the night vigor peculiar to Paris, where dawn could seem an afterthought and daylight more like a distraction than the main event.

He was examining a scene depicting two
clochards
barely visible in the darkness beneath a bridge over the Seine when he heard himself addressed from behind by a voice he recognized without at first being able to identify, a woman’s voice speaking softly in French.

“You’re alone?” the voice asked.

“Yes,” he answered without turning around.

“Would you like some company?”

It was Véronique, the graduate student he’d encountered at the café across from the estate agent’s. “Maybe so,” he said.

“Good, me too.”

They laughed. She was prettier than he remembered, her thick blond hair gathered in a French braid down her back, and she wore a darkly floral perfume redolent of gardenia. Together they moved on to the next photograph.

“It is a cliché to love Brassaï,” Véronique said, “but I don’t care. He captured most of what’s best about Paris—both the romance and the heartlessness. He makes you see how they can be the same thing.”

The print before them depicted a prostitute standing on a deserted corner in shadowy profile; a light source outside the frame picked out the back of her head and shoulders. Across the street a shop sign read
FROMAGE
.

“You see?” Véronique said. “It should be a bad joke that she stands under a sign advertising cheese, but no, not at all. Instead, the effect is of tenderness without illusion. The world is what it is, neither more nor less. Extraordinary, don’t you find?”

In fact the photograph, with its closely valued blacks and silver-white highlights, aroused in Max both envy and a flicker of despair. “Yes, it’s good. Great, even.” They lingered over the picture. “And the lighting’s sublime.”

She looked at him curiously. “Yes, you’re a filmmaker. I remember.”

“Lit from the side like that,” he said, “the scene’s indelible. The camera rests in darkness, complicit with the night. Likewise the viewer. Hitchcock does the same thing in some of his films.”

“I love it,” she said simply, returning her gaze to the photograph.

And as they progressed through the show, adapting to each other’s pace and exchanging comments on what they saw, Max began to form an impression of someone quite unlike the graduate students he was used to. Secure in her intelligence, at home in the physical world and its representations, Véronique seemed free of the need to prove herself or establish her bona fides, intellectual or otherwise. Her observations about the photographs were astute, but casually offered. She displayed none of the exacerbated sense of time, the gotten-up anxiety, that others thought demonstrated their commitment to a purpose. Yet the air of unfocused aggression he noticed at their first meeting remained latent in her gestures and in how she carried herself; it wasn’t hard to imagine her flying into a rage, and Max wondered whether she herself knew why she’d sought him out.

After leaving the museum, they crossed the plaza to the Café Beaubourg for coffee. She insisted on sitting upstairs, away from the sidewalk traffic, and when they were installed side by side on a banquette overlooking the staircase, she said, “So you’re a filmmaker. Have I seen your films?”

“Probably not,” he answered.

She nodded. “I almost never go to the movies. The important thing is, are you a
successful
filmmaker?”

“That depends on what you mean. My films get made, distributed, and seen. Some of them win awards. None of them has made anybody rich.”

“And do you want to be rich?”

“I want to make more films, and for that money’s required. Otherwise I’m indifferent.”

“You’re lucky,” she said. “Me, I want to be filthy rich, rich to the point of nausea and beyond. It’s a burden, this desire—completely at odds with what I’ve set myself up to do.” She ferreted a cigarette from her backpack, and he lit it for her. “Yet there it is. Undeniable, you know?”

“And what is it you’ve set yourself up to do?” he said.

“My field is Slavic studies—Russian history, literature, art—so in effect I’ve set myself up to teach. But I’ll never do that. Maybe business or international relations, something in the real world, such as it is.” She exhaled smoke through her nostrils. “Do I shock you?”

“Me? Hardly. Not that I know what you mean by the real world.”

She gave him an odd little smile, started to say something, then visibly reconsidered.

The waiter brought them their espressos.

“I’m not an expert,” said Max, “but I’d think that Russia would be a pretty good place to get rich these days. For someone who’s not going to teach.”

“There are opportunities,” Véronique allowed, “but one has to have the right contacts. Where the rules are uncertain, personal influence is the only reliable index of worth. Access, that’s the game. Anyway, I didn’t say I wanted to make money myself. Not at all. What I want is for someone else to make it for me.”

“I see,” said Max. “So you have a business plan.”

She laughed. “And you’re American, yes?”

“By birth, citizenship, and sensibility. But I live here now.” Raising the espresso cup to his lips, he saw her register his wedding ring. “My wife is French,” he added.

“And you love her, this wife of yours?”

“I do, yes.”

“Good.” Véronique leaned slightly away as she withdrew one arm and then the other from her little cardigan sweater. Underneath she had on a lavender tank top, and on her near shoulder was that tattoo, a finely etched wheel of many spokes. “Then we have no misunderstandings, right?”

Max considered his answer. “Okay.”

“Tell me,” she said, “did you find what you were looking for the other day?”

“In a word, no. But of course I didn’t really know what it was I was looking for.”

“La Peau de l’Ours,” she replied helpfully. “Something by that name.”

“Yes, but the people in the office said they knew nothing about it. They were very emphatic.” Not entirely to his surprise, Max became aware of Véronique’s bare shoulder pressed in seeming negligence against his. He decided to elaborate. “I’ve been having problems with pirated videos of my films. The one that came to my attention was issued under that label, La Peau de l’Ours, at that address. But it seems that both the name and the address were false, at least according to what I was told.”

“Really?” Her gray-blue eyes scanned his. “That must be so frustrating.”

“It’s nice of you to take an interest in my situation,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Mine?” She expelled a puff of breath. “But I’ve already told you—” Still looking at her, he discreetly increased the pressure where their shoulders touched.

“All right,” she said. “I was watching too, waiting for someone I had reason
to believe might show up there. When you arrived, I thought you might be him, but of course you weren’t.” She shrugged.

“So this guy you were after, you’d never seen him before?”

“No. I was acting on behalf of a friend.”

“I see. Not the friend in your business plan, by any chance?”

She smiled, acknowledging the connection even as she invited him to share her amusement at his having made it. “I told you my desires are burdensome.”

“Yes, well, whose aren’t.” He drew away somewhat peevishly.

“The problem,” she said, “is that my friend’s too much of a gentleman to tell me about his business decisions. This makes it hard for me to help him. So sometimes I have to strike out on my own.”

“To protect your interests. Sure, I understand.”

She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Have you been back to the agency?”

“No, what for?”

“I just thought maybe you had.”

Max considered her. “Do you want to tell me who you’re looking for?”

“Better not. But you’d know him if you happened to run into him. You’d realize right away.” She took a card from her backpack and wrote a phone number on it in green-black ink. “This is the best place to reach me.”

He glanced at the card and put it in his pocket. “You know,” he said, “I’m always reading about the Russian mafia, how they’ve infiltrated this business or that, using legitimate operations to launder black-market profits, manipulating currency rates, bribing officials, killing competitors, all that. But I never really thought they had much of a presence in Paris.”

“They don’t. Not really.” Her eyes shone with what he at first took for glee but a second later couldn’t interpret at all. “Anyway,” she said, “what does it matter? One must cultivate one’s own garden, no?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “One must.”

When they parted, outside on the plaza, Véronique pressed her body fleetingly to his before cheek-kissing him goodbye.
“Ciao,”
she said. “Call me whenever.”

Max watched her go. Her perfume clung to him, making him feel vulnerable and distinctly absurd. Now he’d have to change clothes at the studio before going home. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d been so expertly handled.

On rue Charles V he stopped at a bookstore and killed half an hour there by reading the first and last pages of whatever volumes caught his
fancy. It was what he did whenever he found himself needing to clear his thoughts. At four thirty, somewhat refreshed, he decided to revisit the realtors.

There was a police van outside when he arrived and two officers loading it with cardboard boxes filled with manila file folders. Madame Leclère stood by the door of the agency, fuming. “Idiots!” she said. “Flunkies!”

Max watched from across the street, looking up and down the block and pretending to check his watch as though inconvenienced by someone late for an appointment. A third officer emerged from the office and attempted to engage Madame Leclère in conversation. She turned on him. “This is an outrage. I’m a French citizen. What has any of this to do with the crime committed against my partner?” Catching sight of Max, she seemed suddenly to call him to witness. “The crime of murder!” she cried.

Max hastened to look away.

“Why am I being punished? And my business? Can’t you see what they’ve done to me?” She began to weep. The police officer took her arm and spoke into her ear, but she shook him off. “Please! I’m not a child.”

Max decided to walk around the block.

When he returned, minutes later, the police were gone and the door was locked. He hesitated, then rang the buzzer. Madame Leclère appeared, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, and through the glass she tried to shoo him away, but he held his ground. After staring hard at him, she let him in.

“Madame,” he began, “I saw what happened just now, with the police. If you plan to file a complaint, I would be more than willing to—”

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“I came by before, about an apartment in Bastille.”

She sighed. “Ah, yes. Well …” She stepped aside to let him in. After locking the door again, she turned and walked past the deserted front desk to the back room. He followed.

“Please.” She gestured toward a green leather sofa.

Sitting, Max saw that she didn’t remember him.

A bottle of peppermint schnapps stood open on the desk where she now lingered, and from the bottom drawer she produced a teacup. “An aperitif?” she asked.

Max shook his head.

She filled the teacup from the bottle, closed her eyes, and drank the contents down in two quick swallows, and then, with a shudder, sank into the club chair opposite him. “I must still be in shock,” she said.

“What happened?” Max asked.

“What happened? Well, they murdered him, shot him down in the streets like a dog and left him there, that’s what.”

After a brief interval Max said, “They?”

“He took risks, of course. That was Sylvain. But I never thought he’d get into serious trouble. I thought he was mostly trying to impress me.” She got up and poured herself another half cup of schnapps. “Excuse me, but my husband died barely a year ago, in a car accident. Now this.” She made a face and downed the drink. “Do you have any idea how I feel?”

“I’m sorry,” Max said, watching her return to her chair.