The Same River Twice (32 page)

She arrived at the next intersection just in time to see Gabriella, half a block ahead of her, pass through the entrance of the Théâtre Bastille, a well-regarded two-stage venue on the east side of the street. Retreating to the sidewalk, she forced herself to slow down. Whatever awaited her inside, she would need to keep her wits about her if she really meant to complete her errand. For a moment she couldn’t even concentrate on what that might entail.

The lobby of the theater was attended by a bored young man seated behind a table on which he’d laid out a game of solitaire. He hardly glanced at her before pointing to a descending staircase. “Downstairs,” he said, dealing himself another card.

The staircase lights were out, and a familiar dread—of darkness, of basements, of bottomless descent—passed over Odile as she moved down to the lower level. The foyer there, too, was dark. Spotting a set of doors, she pushed through them into an intimate space with a stage at the bottom and perhaps fifty rows of seats rising steeply up to where Odile now found herself. A man stood in darkness at the extreme left of the stage, speaking into a microphone while a slide show of what looked like underground caverns and tunnels was projected onto a screen behind him. The audience was sparse, seated here and there singly and in small clusters, but it was too dark for Odile to see if Thierry or Gabriella was among them. She took a seat in the last row, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

“What you must understand,” said the man at the microphone, “is that the subterranean Paris you see here bears very little relation to the official version, the one visited by tourists and familiar to most of us from photographs of the Catacombs. The neatly stacked skulls, femurs, and tibias that one encounters on the guided tour, while justly celebrated, are far from typical.” The slide changed. “Here is a more characteristic ossuary, where the bones, as you can see, are piled randomly together—some thirty generations of Parisians originally buried in the Cimetière des Innocents, then moved into the underground quarries in 1785.”

She continued to scan the audience. The slide changed.

“But forget about bones. In the eleven years that I’ve been exploring subterranean Paris, I have charted hundreds of kilometers of passageways on several distinct levels, and I can attest without exaggeration to the existence underground of an alternative Paris, one by no means populated exclusively by the dead. This man, for example, whom I call the catacyclist.”

None of the people seated below Odile resembled Thierry or Gabriella, at least from behind, and she tried to retrace in her mind the layout of the building. Maybe the man in the lobby had misdirected her.

“However,” said the speaker, “the vast majority of underground passages are too low or too narrow to negotiate by bicycle; indeed, quite frequently one must be prepared to crawl. Here you see my friend doing just that, as he follows me into what was once a command post for the Resistance.”

Odile felt a soft rush of air as the door behind her opened and closed.

“Note the mural, a later addition.”

As discreetly as she could, she looked over her shoulder. There was no one.

“Let me take this moment to remind you,” the speaker went on, “that it is a crime to enter these tunnels, and you will be severely fined if caught. In recent years concerns that terrorists might use underground locations to mount an attack have led to the closure of many points of entry, though more remain open than is generally supposed.” The slide changed. “Here is a little-known entry in the thirteenth arrondissement, accessible only through a partly collapsed wine cellar dating to the eighteenth century.”

Odile was debating whether to check the bathrooms when she saw a female form in silhouette begin to edge into a row of seats midway down the incline to the stage. Almost at the same moment the slide changed again, replaced not by a new image but by a brilliant rectangle of white light, a vacancy in the slide tray, that illuminated Gabriella as she sidled
past a pair of spectators to take a seat beside a man sitting alone. He had a shaven head and wire-rimmed glasses, but when he looked up at Gabriella, Odile saw that it was Thierry. Then the next slide came on, and the audience was swathed once more in darkness.

“There exist as many reasons for entering our city’s underground labyrinth as there are people who do so. This man, whom I have met on more than one occasion, comes to practice his fire-breather’s art in a place utterly devoid of light. As you can see, the effect is quite spectacular.”

For several minutes Odile stayed where she was, half listening to the speaker as she waited for some small understanding to come to her, some idea of Thierry’s recent activities or their purpose, some sliver of explanation that might satisfy her curiosity. But nothing came. Both Thierry and Gabriella seemed fully absorbed in the lecture. Odile waited a little longer, then got up and left the theater.

She called Dmitrovich from the street. In a bookshop opposite the theater she browsed the new releases until she saw the Russians’ black sedan pull up outside and both men get out. They entered the theater briskly, straightening their jackets as they went.

She didn’t linger for the rest. On her way home she called Turner.

“YOU’RE SURE?” Turner stood with the telephone to his ear, watching the man from parcel post stack cardboard boxes against one wall. Gabriella, who normally would’ve overseen the delivery, had asked for the afternoon off. “I mean, did you actually hand him over yourself?”

“No,” said Odile. “But I waited until I had him cornered—in a theater in Bastille, sitting in the dark—before I called the Russians. Believe me, they got him. I just saw them go in.”

“Good, so it’s settled.” Without putting down the phone, Turner took the clipboard handed him by the delivery man and signed for the boxes. “And what about you—are you okay?” She had never called him at the office before.

“You mean do I feel guilty? Why? Do you?”

He spoke carefully. “It wasn’t our business, Odile. You did the right thing.”

“But they’ll kill him.”

“You don’t know that.” Taking a mat knife from his desk, Turner slit open one of the boxes and removed two copies of a glossy paperbound volume. One he gave to Ronald Balakian, who had been hovering nearby in an attitude of polite abeyance; the other he set on his desk. “Anyway, we had no choice, given the situation.”

“Tell me,” said Odile, “is your assistant there?”

“Gabriella? No, I gave her the afternoon off. Why?”

To this she didn’t respond.

“Look,” he said. “I can’t really talk right now, so why don’t we save it till we see each other. We are on for tonight, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know yet. It’s complicated. I’ll have to call you.”

Turner hesitated. “Everything’s going to be all right,” he heard himself say.

“I’ll call,” she repeated, and hung up.

Balakian had taken a seat on the Shaker bench and was paging slowly through the auction catalog. He’d flown in from New York to attend the opening that evening of an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, a mid-career survey devoted to one of his artists. “Trouble?” he said, without looking up.

“No, no. Just a friend who’s feeling a little emotional right now.” Turner sat down at his desk and picked up his own copy of the catalog. “So what do you think, Ron? Am I going to sell some flags?”

“It’s a very professional job,” Balakian said, still looking. “Of course I’d expect no less from you.”

In fact Turner was well pleased with the catalog, and these copies were from the second printing. Each of the flags was reproduced in lavish color across a right-hand page, with the facing page of text giving the corresponding particulars. Very often, in Turner’s experience, two or three well-chosen sentences of description could make the difference between an adequate sale and an extraordinary one. People wanted to be romanced, and he tried to oblige.

Balakian closed the catalog and said, “I see you’re low-balling the estimates pretty aggressively.”

“And why not, since it works.” Turner leaned back in his chair. “Certain price expectations get set up—I decided on a hundred and twenty to two hundred thousand for the least-interesting flag—and once those numbers are exceeded there’s no way of judging what a reasonable price might be. People get excited, they bid high. Considering the groundwork I’ve done here—with your help, needless to say—I expect a hammer price closer to three hundred thousand each.”

“And you’ll probably get it.” Balakian cocked a steely eyebrow. “Myself, though, I prefer a retail environment. Fewer variables.”

“More control.”

“That too,” Balakian agreed.

They had a laugh together.

Later, after Balakian had left, Turner reviewed the list of people to whom the catalog had already been sent, cross-checking it against the larger database maintained by the auction house. Publicity remained a concern, but once the rest of the catalogs went out he’d call in a few last favors from his media contacts. Then only the pre-sale exhibition and the auction itself would be left to attend to. Money would be made, the thing would be complete.

Yet satisfaction eluded him. Whatever pleasure he might have taken in the success of this venture—hearing of the flags, recognizing their worth, and, by force of will and imagination alone, turning that worth to profit—now seemed fleeting and insubstantial, an artifact of a self already half shed. Recalling the night Odile had walked in on him, he winced. It had been years since he’d allowed his personal well-being to come so frankly under the influence of someone else. He doubted very much whether any good could come of it. Still, he would have to try.

When his thoughts grew calm again, he called Céleste.

MAX ARRIVED
half an hour late at the quai de la Tournelle to find that Jacques, whom he’d sent ahead with the equipment, had been pressed into service as a proxy mechanic, helping Rachel dismantle the second of the engines. The other had already been cannibalized and taken down to the engine room.

“That’s quite a cologne you’re wearing,” Rachel said as she and Max embraced. “What is it, hibiscus?”

Max stepped back and scanned the boat without favor. “Where’s Groot? He’s not here?”

“Sorry, he left for Rotterdam this morning.”

“Rotterdam? But we had an agreement! I can’t shoot this scene without him.”

“I know, and he asked me to give you his apologies.” She wiped her hands on a rag and passed it to Jacques, who accepted it gratefully. “His mother’s sick.”

“Really?” Max had never heard Groot mention his mother. He handed Jacques the manila folder he was carrying. “Is it serious?”

“I don’t know.” Rachel gave a small, nervous laugh. “I mean, he says it’s his mother, but he’s still pretty fixated on the money my parents wired us for the engines. I never should’ve teased him about it because now he really wants to pay it back. Wants to a whole lot. So maybe he went to raise the
money somehow, or maybe just needed a break from his killer-bitch girlfriend. Or maybe his mother
is
sick.”

Max glanced at Jacques, who commenced setting up the camera and sound equipment. “Okay,” he said to Rachel, “we’ll just have to make the best of it.” She was wearing jeans and a red leotard top that contrasted nicely with her jet-black hair, a strand of which strayed across her cheek. “Can you walk us through the mechanics of what you’re doing here with the engine?”

“No problem.”

“We’ll keep it kind of free-form, if that’s all right. Don’t worry too much about staying on topic, just follow your thoughts. Jacques, you shoot it. I’ll take sound.”

“Check.”

When Rachel was again positioned over the engine, removing the fuel pump, Max cued Jacques and they began. She explained what she was doing, pointed out which parts would probably replace their opposite numbers in the
Nachtvlinder’s
original engines, and managed to convey a genuine enthusiasm for the mysteries of the diesel-combustion cycle. It was peculiar, Max thought, the hushed zealotry with which she and Groot spoke about the boat, almost as if it embodied a cause of some kind, a spiritual principle larger than themselves, to which they felt privileged to sacrifice their time and resources.

When he sensed that Rachel was nearing the end of her technical commentary, he intervened. “You’ve said before, Rachel, that a boat is like a living thing. Could you expand on that a little for us?”

“Sure.” She pushed aside the errant strand of hair, leaving a smear of engine grease across her cheek. “Every boat has her own character, a combination of traits that makes her unique. How she handles, what she’s capable of, what she was designed to do, all that. Plus, from the moment she’s launched, she accumulates a history that shapes her just like experience shapes a person. In the case of the
Nachtvlinder
, that’s more than a hundred years. We’ve seen logs that show her sailing throughout the former Dutch colonies, from the Antilles—Curaçao, Aruba, Saint Martin—to the East Indies—Java, New Guinea, Sumatra, Borneo, the Moluccas, and the rest. She’s been around the world, for sure. And that kind of history leaves its mark.”

Max threw a quick look at Jacques to make certain he was getting all this. “So am I right that your and Groot’s attachment to the
Nachtvlinder
is personal, even intimate?”

“Oh yes. Definitely. She’s our baby.”

Leaving a small silence, Max allowed the sense of this last remark to settle. Then he said, “Where’s Groot today?”

Rachel looked momentarily confused. “Groot went to Rotterdam.” She hesitated. “We had a quarrel.”

“What about?”

“Money, supposedly.” She seemed to think about it. “But we wouldn’t really fight over money. That’s just an excuse.”

“Yes? So what’s the real issue?”

“Well, us—him and me. Do we go on or not.” She folded her arms and shook her head in a wry approximation of perplexity. “And actually the
Nachtvlinder’s
at the center of all that, because she’s like a standard of some kind, an example of endurance and good faith, nothing false about her.” She laughed. “I realize how frivolous that might sound to people who don’t know boats, but believe me, it’s real enough to us.”