The Same River Twice (36 page)

Finding his office empty, he shut the door, checked his phone for messages—there were none—and, reminded now of what he was unhappy about, sank without relish into his desk chair.

In the three years Gabriella had worked for him, she never before had failed to show up on time. Her truancy this morning, at first only irritating, now began to set off in him a series of faint alarms whose nature, though distantly familiar, he hoped very much not to discover.

Thinking back, he seemed to recall that on Friday, when asking him for the afternoon off, she’d hinted at a family crisis. Though he’d never really believed in this crisis, her request required no excuse, and he’d sent her off without a second thought. Still, supposing there actually had been an emergency, and that it had persisted over the weekend, surely she would’ve called him this morning to say so. And that, he realized, was what troubled him: not the absence, but the not calling in.

He went to her desk, located in a small alcove outside his office, and stood leafing through her phone log for nearly a minute, even though he knew he wouldn’t find anything there. Then, assuming a pleasantly quizzical expression for the benefit of whoever might happen by, he sat down and began to go systematically through her desk drawers.

Amid all the expected office supplies and personal effluvia, only two things struck him as possibly noteworthy, though neither one lent itself to easy interpretation. The first was a computer printout of a document titled “Traité Mondial de Coopération de Breveté”—Worldwide Patent Cooperation Treaty—a numbingly technical agreement that he couldn’t imagine Gabriella ever having the patience or occasion to read. After a moment’s thought, he dismissed its presence as almost certainly circumstantial. The other artifact to catch his eye, though, was more troubling.

Finely printed on a multiply folded sheet of onionskin paper were the particulars of a Swiss medication, itself nowhere in evidence, whose purpose was specified in French, English, German, and Spanish as “maximal ovulation induction.” At first Turner could make no more sense of this document
than of the patent treaty—surely if Gabriella were attempting in vitro fertilization, he’d know about it—but then he recalled his own strange question to her some weeks back, the day he had sold a flag to Wieselhoff and later bought the gun. “Are you pregnant?” he asked her, for no reason that he knew. And then her still stranger reply, delivered, it had seemed to him, with an unintended shading of sadness: “No, believe me. Pregnant would be the easy version of what I am.”

He sat awhile longer at her desk, sensing the convergence there of forces that might well have engaged him at his best, driving him to new prodigies of invention and craft, had he only been party to them and their possibilities from the outset, had he only been—and the word struck him with the comic force of a Zen blow to the brow—
younger
. He couldn’t help but laugh out loud at this insight. Every day he knew less than the day before. Perhaps, despite everything, he was getting somewhere.

He had just finished putting Gabriella’s desk back in order when a call came in on her line, the receptionist downstairs letting him know that the car service he’d requested had arrived. Before he could protest that he’d ordered no such thing, she corrected herself. The car had been sent by a Monsieur Kukushkin, who very much hoped Turner might join him for a celebratory lunch, if he was free. Turner, greatly relieved to know that he’d been restored to the Russian’s good graces, replied that he was indeed free and would be down directly.

THAT SAME MORNING
, at a boat chandlery forty miles downstream from Paris in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, Max stood crouched over his camera, filming the
Nachtvlinder’s
perilous ascent to dry dock. Visually, the scene was captivating to an almost biblical degree: a thirty-ton, century-old boat being hauled from the Seine onto a wheeled chassis that ran on railroad tracks into an enormous hangar, where it would be worked on nonstop for two days, to emerge, at last, in all its former glory, ready to return under its own power to the quai de la Tournelle. Meanwhile, like figures in a Breughel painting, Groot and the staff swarmed variously across the camera’s field of view, facilitating the boat’s transfer while seeming also to serve other purposes known only to themselves. Finally, there was the light: diagonal shafts of silver that emerged from charcoal-gray cloud cover with marvelous rectilinear clarity, like a mathematical proof of the ineffable. All this Max recorded gratefully. It would play very well on a big screen and moved the narrative along with a dispatch that no amount of planning could have improved upon. Yet his mind was already half elsewhere.

When, at length, the
Nachtvlinder
was safely ensconced in dry dock, he joined Jacques, who’d arrived at the site separately and had been taking sound throughout, to stroll the arc-lighted hangar with Groot and the ship chandler, a leather-faced Breton in a soiled blue captain’s hat. Max shot some close-up footage of the
Nachtvlinder
’s river-fouled hull and props, which hadn’t been out of the water in years, prevailing on Groot to provide a bit of commentary to go with it. Then he loudly thanked everyone present and pulled his assistant discreetly aside. “Well?” he demanded.

“I can’t swear to it,” Jacques said, “but this is what I think happened, in some version.” He cast a furtive glance about him. “It turns out that there were actually two different lines of bootleg DVDs coming out of the loft rented by this guy Sylvain Broch. One of them was, so to speak, legitimately illegitimate: in other words, duplicate disks of well-known movies being pirated for profit. Fine. Maybe we don’t like it, but we understand. It’s normal.”

“Was this operation Russian owned?” Max asked.

“Naturally, no one would say. But it’s possible.” Jacques paused to light a cigarette, and Max, looking reflexively around, blundered into eye contact with Groot, who veered toward them.

“We’re going out for lunch,” he said, “while the shop calculates what I must pay them for the job. I don’t think it will be too bad, now that I’ve seen what has to be done. You are coming, yes?”

“Definitely,” Max said. “We’ll catch up.”

They watched him go.

“Rachel has retired to her tent in righteous wrath,” Max told Jacques.

“Really? Why? What tent?”

“I’ll explain later. You were saying, two lines of bootlegs.”

“Right. The regular ones and then these Peau de l’Ours numbers.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Of those I found only the seven titles I left for you last night at the studio. Nice classic films, don’t you think?
Fanny and Alexander, Blue Velvet, The Marriage of Maria Braun, La Dolce Vita
, you saw what they were.”

“Knife in the Water.”

“Exactly. So maybe, you know, this part of the operation is more specialized—the films a little artier, less popular, not obvious moneymakers, but successful enough critically that they’ll sell steadily over time. And they have a certain prestige.” He paused, staring at the end of his cigarette. “I don’t know if you’ve had time to look at them.”

“My daughter’s here. I’ve been busy.”

“Okay. In short, then, all the Peau de l’Ours titles have had their endings
altered to about the same extent as the faux version of
Fireflies
—not grossly, just enough that you’d have to rethink the film, if you know it.” He seemed to consider the matter. “It’s interesting. There is a finesse behind the changes, a certain élan—a definite sensibility.”

“Sensibility,” repeated Max. “So they were all done by the same person?”

Jacques flared his lips moodily and then looked him in the eye, as though to put the question beyond doubt. “Yes,” he said, “the same person. This is what I think.”

“Sylvain Broch?”

“It’s possible. But, all things taken into account, I would say probably not.” He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his boot heel. “Broch was in it for the money, in my view. This other thing, it has more the feeling of a gesture, you know? Something one might do in protest, maybe. To make a point.”

Max squinted up at the overhead lights. They were too bright for his present state of mind and reminded him unpleasantly of antiquated movie sets. “What point?” he demanded. “To whom?”

Jacques shrugged. “Maybe,” he suggested, “it doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“Well, you’ll have to see the changes for yourself, and this is only my opinion, yes? But I think this guy wanted to show that anything, no matter how perfect, can always turn out differently and still be convincing. What looks inescapable can be replaced with something else that looks just as inescapable, just as foreordained. Essentially, another way, another life, another outcome is always possible. Something like that.”

Max looked angrily around the hangar. “Isn’t that kind of metaphysical for a petty criminal?”

Jacques watched curiously until Max’s eyes again met his own, then stirred himself to answer. “Maybe,” he said after a moment.

They held each other’s gaze awhile longer before Max capitulated. “You’re right. Whoever this guy is, he’s not petty.” He squinted at the boat, elegantly stranded beneath the lights. “But neither is he a director. Which is what you, I’m beginning to think, might very well end up becoming, by the way. And despite my best efforts.”

Jacques gave a short laugh.

Max said no more, and they gathered up their equipment and set off for lunch.

• • •

“THIS IS JUST PURE SPECULATION
, right? I mean, where’s your evidence?” Odile stood with the phone pressed to her ear, watching Allegra bop back and forth across the living-room floor, damp hair swinging, personal stereo in hand. She was wearing high-performance headphones, a lavender top, no bra, and a zebra-print miniskirt. Rachel was on the line.

“I just
know,
” Rachel said. “Where else would Groot get that kind of money?”

“Maybe his mother gave it to him.” Lowering her voice and turning her back guiltily to Allegra, Odile added, “Besides, you’re not exactly the poster child for a drug-free Europe yourself. Or am I missing something?”

“Personal use is one thing,” Rachel declared, “dealing is another.”

“We’re speaking of hashish, yes?”

“Well, I assume so. But actually I don’t even know that. Shit!”

Cupping a hand around the mouthpiece, Odile said, “Hashish is legal in the Netherlands, remember?”

“I’m losing my mind. Actually going bonkers.”

“Look,” Odile said, “where are you? Come for lunch.” She turned around to see Allegra mouthing something at her and pointing repeatedly out the window. Odile nodded, trying to understand her. “You’ve got to calm down,” she told Rachel. “It’s just not that big a deal.”

“But it is! I mean, I was so pissed off I wouldn’t even go see the
Nachtvlinder
into dry dock with him. I bet Max is really happy about that. He’s filming today, you know.”

“Don’t worry about Max.”

“My point is, Groot and I had an agreement not to get involved in this kind of thing. Ever. And he broke it.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Dealing dope! So how can I trust him now? And he wants me to marry him? No way. Absolutely out of the question.”

“Rachel, stop talking. You’ve lost perspective. Come here now.”

A titanic sigh. “I can’t,” she said. “I’ll call you later.”

Hanging up, Odile glanced reflexively at her wrist, but her watch was on Turner’s bedside table, where she’d left it on Friday—an infuriating lapse that suggested an ambivalence she was fairly sure she did not feel. Already Max had noticed the watch’s absence. Preempting his questions, she mentioned in passing that she’d taken it to the jeweler’s to be cleaned. Nevertheless it would have to be reclaimed soon, probably in person, and then she’d have to explain herself to Turner, something she had hoped very much to avoid. She was weighing the merits of calling him now, before he
fully understood that his assistant wouldn’t ever be coming to work again, when suddenly she realized she was alone in the apartment.

“Allegra?” she called, then went to the foot of the garret stairs. “Where are you, sweetheart?”

Sun falling through the garret skylight made a box of light midway up the stairs and Odile stared into it, trying to reconstruct what Allegra had silently mouthed to her while she was talking with Rachel. Then she remembered the cell phone. She got her own from her purse and punched in Allegra’s number, but the phone just rang on and on, as it sometimes did when the other person was out of range—in the métro, usually. Odile pressed end and began pacing.
Something bad is going to happen
, she thought. And even though she knew it was a childish notion, a superstitious attempt at warding off the unknown, she couldn’t get the idea out of her head. She went into the kitchen and made a pot of peppermint tea. The mail came. She leafed through a magazine. Every ten minutes or so she tried Allegra’s cell again.

Finally she went to the living-room window and cranked it open for a breath of air. Midway down the courtyard Chantal and two of her comrades were crouched over bedsheets, writing slogans across them in red and black spray paint. She hurried downstairs.

“Are you coming to the demonstration?” Chantal said, straightening up.

“What demonstration?”

Together they looked at the banner she’d just completed. “W
E
A
RE
ALL
I
LLEGAL
A
LIENS
!” it read.

“Tomorrow at three,” Chantal said. “Place de la République.”

“If I can,” Odile said, waving away the aerosol fumes. “But right now I’m looking for my stepdaughter, an American girl, thirteen, blond, I’m sure you’ve seen her. She tried to tell me where she was going, but I was on the phone and—”

“Oh, sure! Allegra!” Chantal’s eyes lit up. “She’s a treasure, you know—someone with a natural sense of justice. Fierce.” She put her paint can down. “Come with me.”

Odile had never been inside the anarchists’ quarters and wasn’t prepared for the row of glowing computer monitors that ran unattended along one wall of the ground-level studio, which, like theirs, retained its original dirt floor. Overhead, sagging bundles of color-coded electrical cable supplied power. The walls bore inspirational graffiti in several hands and, by the stairs, a grid of maybe sixty small snapshots, indecipherable from where she stood. At the back of the space, four teenagers, all of them wearing
knee-high rubber boots, together lowered a large circular tabletop onto its flared support. When they had the thing in place and the latches fastened, Chantal called out to them, “Where’s Allegra? Her stepmother’s here. Our neighbor and comrade.”