The Same River Twice (52 page)

“Max?”

He wheeled round in surprise. “Odile.” He hadn’t heard her approach.

“You
are
with me on this, aren’t you?”

He stepped forward so that they were both in the camera’s field. “Of course I’m with you.”

“Good. Because there’s no other way, believe me.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“We’re going to get the doctor out of here. Apart from that, I have no idea. But you and I are pooling our chips. We’ll do what’s necessary, no matter what.”

“I know,” he said. “Because you require it, and I won’t fail you.”

She laughed and embraced him. “By daylight tomorrow, everything will be fine.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “You’ll see.”

But what Max saw over her own shoulder was Thierry Colin emerging from the companionway. Max watched him go to the quai-side rail and lean against it, watching them.

“This light is just exquisite,” Odile said, unaware of Colin’s presence. “Almost like the light of a new world, you know? A place where a new existence could really be possible for everyone. Wouldn’t that be something?”

Meanwhile, Jacques had taken up position on deck, facing the quai-side rail and gangway, just out of range of Max’s unmanned camera. He was shooting Colin, Max saw, from about a forty-degree angle, covering both him and the gangway’s open gate. It crossed Max’s mind that Jacques was allowing for the possibility that Colin might make a run for it.

“How well do you know this Thierry Colin?” he asked.

“Thierry?” She broke from his embrace. “He doesn’t matter. It’s the doctor we have to think about. His safety. Because—”

Max waited.

“No,” Odile said decisively. “No questions. Even to ourselves. Otherwise, we’ll fail to do what’s ours to do, and everything will be lost. So, no questions.”

Max didn’t answer. When she looked up into his eyes and saw them fixed on the gangway, he felt her mood shift—radically, dangerously. “No!” she cried out, even as she was turning to see what had engaged his attention. But it was clear that she already knew.

“I told you not to come here!” she shouted. “Ever, ever, ever! Why are you so stupid?”

Turner, who’d been striding forcefully up the gangway, a man with a mission, stepped on board and immediately came to a halt. He and Colin looked at each other with utter distaste. Then Turner scanned the deck
methodically, taking in Jacques, the two active cameras, Max, and, lastly, Odile, to whom he nodded with visible concern. An unhealthy vigor seemed to be animating his every movement.

“Good evening, Colby,” he said, “I hope you enjoyed the auction.”

“Probably not as much as you did. But there were some compelling moments, I have to say. And the company was good.”

“This man,” said Turner, pointing to Colin without taking his eyes from Max. “Do you know who he is?”

Max stole a look at Odile, who, arms crossed over her heaving chest, was just barely containing herself, a study in sheer will. “Pretty much,” he replied. “True, I still have a few blank spots that need filling in, a few questions.”
Reason, care, and discipline
, he reminded himself. “But I have the feeling you’re about to fix all that for me.”

“Thierry Colin works for a man,” Turner said evenly, “who intends to have your wife killed. And me too, if that makes any difference.”

Odile gathered breath for speech but before she could utter a sound, Max placed a palm gently across her mouth. “Don’t,” he whispered. “I told you I’m with you.” Eyes shining, she exhaled a humid warmth between his fingers. When he removed his hand, she had grown calm again, her silence as sure and fatal as a vow.

“This guy you’re talking about,” Max said to Turner, “this guy who wants people killed, his name’s Kukushkin, right?”

Turner looked guilty, worried, confused.

Jacques repositioned the camera and continued to film.

“Well, after the auction I spent almost two hours drinking vodka with Kolya, at his private club. He didn’t mention wanting to kill you. Or my wife either, for that matter. But I guess anything’s possible.” He paused. “Right, Thierry?”

Colin shrugged. “Some things perhaps more than others.”

“Odile!” Turner took a step toward her. “You’ve got to come with me! It’s a trap. Remember what I told you on the phone? It means we’ve got to go now, before it’s too late.”

Max turned curiously to his wife. Cool, even arrogant, in stance and posture, she met Turner’s gaze and shook her head no. This refusal left Max suddenly certain that it was Colin, not Turner, who was her lover. She was leaving Turner to fend for himself, having arranged Colin’s escape.

“I won’t leave you here,” Turner said. And with that he began marching toward her, obviously intending to remove her bodily from the boat. Max’s mind was still racing to grasp the situation when, halfway across the deck,
Turner slipped on a patch of diesel, skidded, and went down flat on his back. Simultaneously, an object spun away from him across the deck with disconcerting speed. When it came to rest and all present saw what it was, there was a moment during which no one reacted. Then Max and Turner and Colin dove for the gun.

Much later, Max would recall Odile standing against the river-side rail, arms crossed, watching them struggle over the weapon, and wonder at her calm. He would wonder, too, at Jacques’s composure as he filmed. And at the absence of the others, still below. He would wonder at so many things. But all this came back to him only much later, when everything that mattered had been settled.

Now was only turmoil.

Turner, though hardly recovered from his fall, was the first to get his hands on the gun. Colin and Max grabbed him and worked methodically to pry his fingers from it—he had both hands around the grip—but when they at last succeeded, the gun slipped loose once more, sliding across the newly varnished deck like a hockey puck. Both men went for it, reaching it at the same time.

Max got one hand around the trigger guard, and Colin, who was stronger than he looked, had it by the barrel, gripping it hard and pushing it away from himself. Apparently, thought Max, his intuition had been correct: he and this man weren’t at all on the same side. With his free hand, he made a fist and punched Colin repeatedly in the face. It took several blows before he finally relinquished the weapon, fell over, and, when back on his feet, retreated to the quai-side rail. There, curiously, he stood side by side with Turner, his accuser, who was still catching his breath. Training the gun on them both, Max backed slowly to the opposite rail, next to Odile, still impassive, watchful, dire.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

He was panting for breath. “No questions,” he managed to say.

Jacques filmed.

The fog was thickening, so the light, while just as bright, wasn’t quite as limpid as before. Belatedly it occurred to Max that the gun hadn’t gone off during the struggle. He felt for the safety and found it firmly engaged. So Turner hadn’t come aboard intending to fire, at least not right away. Max switched the safety off and held the gun out at arm’s length, aiming it alternately at Turner and Thierry. Neither man, fearful no doubt of drawing fire, made any attempt to escape. Finally Max’s eye—and, with it, the pistol—settled decisively on Thierry Colin, who was dabbing at his bloodied nose with a handkerchief.

Time came to a stop, as if it had never been anything but a rumor. A nothingness inside a rumor.

From within that nothingness, Odile said, “No.” She rested her hand lightly on Max’s hand, the one holding the gun. “Not him.” Then very gently, so gently, as if to correct Max with the least possible affront on a nicety of table manners, she moved his hand a few inches to the right until the gun was aimed squarely at Turner’s chest. She released the wrist. “Him.”

And Max squeezed the trigger.

SO THIS IS WHAT it’s going to be like
, Turner thought. He knew, the moment the bullet entered his chest, that he would die. Knew not because of the pain, vast and terrible though it was, but because already the pain was becoming a thing apart from him, superfluous and unclaimed. Knew not because of the blood, which was spurting from him in quantities he’d never seen or imagined, but because he understood he must leave it behind, wanted to and could leave it behind. And, above all, he knew not because he was alone now, aware that the others were standing deliberately apart from him, making no effort to help him, afraid of what they’d unleashed, fearful it might take them too. Rather, he knew he was dying because in life he had always been alone, like absolutely everyone else, in every possible place or time. And now that solitude was coming to an end.

The woman had betrayed him, but he felt no bitterness. His love for her only grew—touched, as it now was, by pity. Pity not for her, but for the innate clumsiness of the living, who meant one thing and did another over and over again, time after time, every moment they drew breath. Fleetingly, he wished he’d known as much from the start. But then that wish, too, fell away. Not just because its fulfillment would’ve done no good, though it wouldn’t have, and not because, knowing, he would’ve lived his life differently, making different choices at every opportunity, though he would’ve done just that, and those choices, too, would’ve been clumsy and his life no better. The wish fell away because he was leaving the world of wishes,
which now stood revealed to him as an empty series of inventions, desperate and comic, that helped a person believe more fervently in the illusion that better things lay just ahead, almost within sight, perhaps around the corner, if only one persevered.

Persevered.

And now, he was starting to see, better things
did
lie ahead, but things so different from what people ordinarily strove for that no foreknowledge of them could possibly make a difference—even the slightest difference—in something as random as a life.

He felt events moving faster now. The part of him that had not yet let go was angry that his death was being filmed by that boy with the baseball hat turned backward, who could only be working for Odile’s husband, the filmmaker. To what possible end was his dying being filmed? Not one iota of what was really transpiring here, nothing even remotely important about his passage, could ever be made visible to these people or any others.

Or any others.

And now Rachel had a mop. She was mopping up his blood. Did they think he was
already
dead? For just a fraction of a moment he struggled to come back to their level, if only to correct them on this point. But he was going too fast, drawn with increasing urgency toward what before had been unimaginable but now lured him on and on and on.

He could move no part of his body, not even his eyes. Still, he thought he could hear sirens in the distance. Two, three, then several more. Converging. Had they been summoned for him? He certainly hoped not. He didn’t want anything like that now, not at this point.

And it was precisely at this point that he passed through an invisible membrane, or maybe it was a baffle, since he knew he wouldn’t be back this way again. A flash of regret. Gone. Then everything became clear to him.

Odile had loved him. She had struggled against it, but to no avail. And he, despite his fears, had loved her. Of course the verdict on fear was that, yes, it did keep you alive, or he wouldn’t be dying now. But it was more usefully deployed on behalf of others. That much he’d learned, even if it had taken him this long. He had learned it at the last minute. Just in time.

And the sirens were not sirens, he realized, but music. He strained to make it out.

He was beginning to know everything. It was true that your whole life passed before your eyes as you died, but not like a movie, as people always said. More like a flashbulb going off.

The light from the flashbulb expanded, radiating outward to include
other lives. He saw what lay ahead for the people on deck with him. Pity and love, love and pity—all his other feelings had fallen away from him like misbegotten, flightless birds that had clung to him until he could carry their weight no more. Or had forgotten how to.

And just as the dazzling, pearlescent white prepared to engulf him, making it impossible for him to tell up from down or locate himself in space at all, he finally recognized the music he was hearing: it was the passacaglia from Biber’s
Mystery Sonatas
. He hadn’t heard it in years. But it was right—and always had been—about the essential nature of things. All things. How he loved it.

So this was what it was going to be like. Deliverance. An event long anticipated by everyone, now finally about to unfold in all its alien splendor. And he was grateful in a shy, almost childish fashion to be part of the proceedings. To have been invited. Given a role. Included.

Odile had cared for him. And there was music.

It was enough.

GROOT TOUCHED TWO FINGERS to Turner’s neck, at the carotid artery, and shook his head. Apparently, Odile thought, he, too, had decided to ask no questions. For that she was grateful.

Jacques filmed.

Rachel was still mopping up blood, her eyes wide with disbelief. Thierry, his hands trembling noticeably, lit a cigarette. Everyone avoided looking directly at Max, who held the gun loosely around the trigger guard, the barrel pointing at the deck. He was staring straight ahead at nothing.

Without a word Groot took the pistol from him, wiped it down with a rag, and heaved it overboard, some distance upstream from the boat. Only then did Odile remember that her own fingerprints had also been on the gun, artifacts of the night she’d taken the weapon from Turner and thrown it into his laundry basket. It occurred to her that she must now be in shock—something else to be grateful for.

“Hey, Dutchman!” It was the man from the neighboring boat. “Did you hear that just now? It sounded like a gunshot.”

Noticing the bullet casing lying on deck, Groot picked it up and put it in his pocket. “Yes, I heard it. But I often hear things like that down here. Anyway, there’s nothing to see.”

“Good. Then I’ll return with pleasure to my bunk.”