The Same River Twice (9 page)

The others went on talking.

“I can’t complain,” Turner replied. “We’ve got some first-rate antiquities coming to the block this spring. Not that we couldn’t use a good death or divorce, as always. But that’s the auction business: part salvage operation, part grief counseling.”

“Is good, such business. Death and divorce never out of style. Same for beautiful objects.” Again he raised his glass.
“Na zdorovie!”

“Na zdorovie!”
Turner was beginning to feel the liquor. “What about you, Kolya? Got anything big in the works, or do I have to read about it in the newspapers with everybody else?”

The Russian waved these words impatiently away. “My projects are of no interest, even to me. Maybe I make change.”

“Really? What kind of change?”

But Kukushkin appeared not to have heard. Grimly he poured them yet another round. “In Russian we have expression,
smekh skvoz’ slyovzy
. You know what is meaning, this expression? Least-bad translation: ‘laughing through tears.’ True Russian concept. Is saying in life tragedy and comedy exist always side by side. Is saying they are
inextricable
, okay? You believe me?”

“I believe you,” said Turner.

“Hah! Excellent!
Na zdorovie!”

“Na zdorovie!”
Seeing that Wieselhoff, Baxter, and Balakian were still caught up in their own conversation, Turner leaned forward and said, in a quieter voice, “Kolya, I’d like your opinion on a small business matter.”

The Russian widened his eyes.

“Ordinarily I don’t involve myself in these things, but the case is special. One of the couriers I sent to pick up the flags tells me that since she got back from Moscow she has been followed by two Russian guys, a little coarse, maybe, who know about the flags and ask her questions she can’t answer. They mention Interpol. This is troubling to her and, by extension, to me. As you can imagine.”

“Yes, yes. Go on.”

“Well, I’d like to put a stop to it, to be perfectly blunt. But I don’t really know how. Who are these guys working for, I wonder. Is there someone to call?”

Kukushkin frowned. “Paris situation now is difficult. Too many amateurs, lousy communications. What is it these bastards want to know?”

“Nothing specific, as far as I can tell. But they’re fishing in my waters. It’s annoying.”

“And you are sure she has nothing to tell them?”

“Close to certain.”

“Okay. Then I will look into it.” He shrugged and once more filled their glasses. “Always there is a way.”

Turner thanked him, and they drank without toasting.

“But I will tell you frankly,” the Russian added, his eyes now alive with Slavic mischief, “sometimes, also, the way is too far to go.”

BACK AT HIS HOTEL
, a postmodern study in pinpoint lighting and computergenerated curves, Turner took a seat at the bar and continued to drink. The clientele was young, sleekly good-looking, and, it seemed to him, mostly local. To his right, two women in black cocktail dresses were drinking cosmopolitans and planning a putsch at a well-known fashion magazine.

It had been several years since he’d lived full-time in Manhattan, and although he returned frequently on business, he no longer pretended to himself that he might one day come back for good. To him New York was like a dream of beauty ruined, but the dream had begun long before he’d set foot here, and the ruin had preceded the dream.

He had worked out of his loft in TriBeCa, dealing fitfully in objects that, though genuine in themselves, had unexplained gaps in their provenance, gaps that suggested they were stolen. While such irregularities hardly detracted from their artistic value, they did make resale difficult, and when talking to inexperienced buyers, people who often paid with cash of similarly doubtful origin, he wasn’t always forthcoming about this drawback. One August night, he returned to the loft with his lover, a woman whose capacity for self-invention exceeded even his own, to find an unhappy customer ensconced in his Régence chair, pistol in hand. The man held the gun to Turner’s head while Turner wrote him a check for the object in question—a Cycladic fertility figurine in limestone, circa second century BC. Seemingly appeased, the man pocketed his refund and left. Turner waited until he heard the street door slam shut, five stories down, then picked up the phone and stopped the check. The next afternoon, his lover, who didn’t possess a driver’s license, was involved in a single-vehicle traffic accident in Queens, where she never went. He was informed of her death by her sister, calling from the morgue. He waited then for the police to contact him, waited for their questions and, with his useless answers, for his own exposure as a careless trafficker in the rare and impossible. But no call came. And it was shortly after these events that the idea of moving to Paris suggested itself to him.

“Excuse me,” said a woman hovering behind the barstool to his left. “Is this seat taken?” She was attractive, dressed in a backless dress split to mid-thigh, and when sitting down she allowed him a lengthy flash of leg. She was, he realized at once, a prostitute. Chagrined to be taken for an out-of-towner, particularly since that was what he was, he bought her a drink.

“Bad day?” she said, sipping her kir royale and searching his eyes. “You look maybe a little depressed.”

“Do I? It’s probably jet lag.” He finished his drink and absently rattled the ice in his glass. “Because my day was good. I did business and tended friends, and tomorrow I’ll be back in the City of Light. Where I make my home.”

She raised an eyebrow. “But tonight you have a room here at the hotel, right?”

“Exactly.” He realized he was drunk. “Would you like to come up for a nightcap?”

“That depends,” she said. When she had recited her rates and ground rules he called for the check. They left the bar and together took the elevator to his room.

In bed she was professional but unhurried, and Turner found himself unexpectedly in tune with her, as if she really were someone he knew. Her movements anticipated his by half a beat, teasing him, luring him on, and he imagined himself pursuing her through the Tuileries, in dappled light. When he began to come, she gripped him tightly from inside, releasing the pressure only gradually, until he saw stars.

After she had showered, dressed, and left, he experienced a moment of plunging sorrow. It occurred to him that he’d mismanaged his life and would doubtless die alone in a place very much like this room, perhaps not so long from now. He was already half resigned to such a fate, and part of him even looked forward to it: what happened to other people would happen to him.

But there was also this—and it was like a glimpse of the world made good—that though he was cynical, even contemptuous, of people and their motives, although he was rarely disappointed because he seldom allowed himself to hope that there was more to things than met the eye, he’d lately come to imagine a scenario of deliverance, vague but encompassing, that seemed to promise him not just another chance but another existence, one in which everything that was counterfeit or used up would be swept away and a new order of being revealed. In his mind this deliverance was not for him alone, but whether it included everyone or not he was at a loss to say. Sometimes he thought it would have to.

He switched on the television, and watched a scarlet-haired woman in her twenties race frantically through the streets of Berlin. If she didn’t raise a hundred thousand deutschmarks in the next twenty minutes, her boyfriend, who was supposed to deliver the money to his gangster boss, would be killed. Small obstacles in her path—a flock of nuns, a boy on a bicycle, some workmen carrying a sheet of plate glass—kept delaying her and made it seem certain that she would fail to get the money to him in time.

Turner watched without sympathy. Just before the woman arrived on the scene, the boyfriend panicked and pulled a gun. Already he was robbing a grocery store.

“Smekh skvoz’ slyovzy,”
Turner told the two of them, switching off the set in disgust.

LATE ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, Max emerged from his studio to find his anarchist neighbors taking spring inventory
en plein air
. Spread out on the cobblestone courtyard in front of their apartment were quantities of scuffed motorcycle helmets, gas masks, police batons, shin guards, goggles, life vests, gloves—all the accoutrements of violent and total dissent. A pale blond girl he’d never seen before was noting the amount and condition of the equipment on a clipboard while her comrades brought out still more.

“Planning a major action?” Max asked.

She looked up sharply. “But of course! We’re going to Maastricht for the trade summit!” Studying him, she appeared to take his measure, right down to his wedding ring. “You and your wife should come also.”

“No doubt. What is it exactly you’re protesting?” He guessed her to be eighteen, nineteen at most.

“We protest, but never exactly,” she said. “Our struggle is against all that is the case. We oppose everything. To do less would be incorrect and shameful.”

“Yes, I see your point.” He shook his head in neighborly sympathy over the state of the world.
“Vive la lutte.”

“La lutte,”
she said, returning to the clipboard.

At home, upstairs, Odile was preparing a lamb tagine for the party that Rachel and Groot were giving that night aboard the
Nachtvlinder
. A light sweat moistened her face and arms, and she seemed irritated.

“Our anarchists are mobilizing,” Max said.

“I saw.” She handed him a jar of pickled limes she’d been struggling with; he wrapped a dish towel around the lid, gave it a sudden twist, and returned the open container to her. “You have an e-mail from Allegra,” she told him.

Surprised, pleased, apprehensive, Max poured himself a beer and sat down at the computer they kept in an alcove off the kitchen. When he had located his daughter’s letter and printed it out, he brought it with him to the kitchen table.

Hi, Dad
, it began.
I hope you’re not still mad at me. Mom says I’m just as stubborn as you, so we’ve got to be friends, no choice. That’s logical, I guess. Like logic has anything to do with it
.

Max winced and drank deeply of his beer. Lately Allegra’s communiqués disturbed him only slightly less than her silences. She was dismayingly expert at manipulating him.

The big news here is that Alison—remember Alison? my friend you liked so much?—she just got kicked out of school for drugs. What really sucks about it is that the pills weren’t even hers. She was just keeping them in her locker for this odious guy she’s been hanging out with all semester, and he didn’t even get caught. Now we’re going to have “drug awareness week.” What a joke. I mean, hello? We’re already “aware” of drugs, thank you. Most kids know ten times as much about psychoactives as the so-called experts who come in to lecture us. Really, adults can be so clueless
.

Max reread these words, compulsively examining them for lacunae and subtexts. The thought of Allegra on drugs, as she well knew, filled him with panic, even though by her age he himself had ingested every controlled substance that he could get his hands on. She was so vulnerable to the world, his daughter, but the days when he could hope to protect her from it were fast receding, possibly gone.

“What does she say?” Odile was cutting the lamb into cubes and dusting them with turmeric.

“I don’t know yet. Adults are clueless.”

Anyway
, the e-mail went on,
I was thinking about this summer. Mom kind of hinted that you were going to invite me to spend it with you and Odile in Paris, which is really cool of you. But would it be okay if I don’t come? Upper school starts in the fall, and I just really need to be with my friends
.

There was more, but the gist was clear: a summer in Paris would not only turn her into an instant social outcast but might conceivably ruin the rest of her life as well. Despite himself, Max was surprised and hurt. He tried to remember when she’d acquired veto power over his plans for her.

“It’s completely normal,” Odile said after he read her the e-mail. “At her age I was much worse.”

“Worse?”

“More self-conscious.”

“Really? You think that’s what this is?” Max could barely contain himself. “She tells me straight off that her friends deal drugs, then she says she wants to spend the summer in New York so she can be with these punks full-time. Why is she punishing me?”

Odile blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Maybe she enjoys it.”

Her tone of voice startled Max. He’d been expecting comfort, or at least comforting words, but this was something else. His features hardened. “You sound as if you know all about it.”

“No. But you do make it easy for her.” Odile gathered the cubes of meat in her hands and dropped them into the skillet, where they sizzled and popped and sent up a plume of yellow smoke. “Why don’t you call her, Max?”

“That’s exactly what I will do,” he said. But he made no move toward the telephone, and he was no longer thinking particularly about his daughter.

THEY ARRIVED
just after dark at the quai de la Tournelle, where the
Nachtvlinder
was docked. Strings of amber lights festooned the houseboat, and as Odile and Max hurried up the gangway—she with the tagine, he with his HD vidcam—the quavering tones of Algerian
raï
drifted up from belowdecks. Topside, half a dozen guests smoked and talked.

“We’ve already had a visit from
la fluviale,”
Rachel told Odile and Max after kissing them hello, “but I bribed them with fresh sardines and a bottle of Sancerre. If they come back, I’ve got
tarte tatin.”

“Where’s the skipper?” Max asked.

“Groot? Oh, he’s just checking a fuse or something. Let’s go below. I’m so glad you two are here.”

They followed her through the companionway and down three steps to the main compartment, twenty feet long, where more guests stood in clusters, eating bouillabaisse from enameled metal bowls. Most of those present were in their thirties or younger, and several had been introduced to Max and Odile on previous occasions: a black performance artist from New Orleans, a Dutch photographer, a pair of Iranian journalists, an editor from a French publishing house. The conversation was animated and rose easily over the music.