The Same River Twice (45 page)

“Two million five,” intoned the auctioneer. “The current bid is two million, five hundred thousand francs.” He seemed to contemplate the very nature of pricing, of sales, of ownership—a solemn business, he appeared to indicate, perhaps the only thing worth thinking about. Then, coming to himself, he leaned forward and spoke into the microphone with practiced restraint. “Who will say three million?”

Yet another silence, deeper than before. The auctioneer began to fiddle with the hammer. “May I hear three million? Will anyone say three million?”

Then, to Turner’s astonishment, Kukushkin rose to his feet and said, in a voice neither smug nor falsely modest, “I will bid four million francs for this item.” He sat back down again.

Excited whispers broke out across the room, and even the auctioneer looked momentarily stunned. Such aggressive bidding wasn’t unknown—its purpose being to scare off the rest of the pack—but Turner had never before seen it used so casually.

The auctioneer recovered. “The bid is four million francs. Will anyone say four million five? Four million five?”

The silence was total.

“Fair warning then, at four million.” He looked around the room. “Going once, going twice—” And then, just as the auctioneer was about to bring the hammer down, Wieselhoff called out, in a perfectly neutral tone of voice, “Five million even.”

Everyone turned to look.

When Kukushkin recognized Wieselhoff, he smiled and shrugged, and the Swiss nodded his thanks. The auctioneer said what was required of him, although it was obvious now to everyone that the sale of lot six had reached its natural end. The hammer came down at a price of five million francs.

Turner discovered that he was perspiring. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief, then, not quite able to stop himself, turned to cast a glance at Kukushkin.

This time Kolya was waiting for him, his smile no longer the least sardonic. The two men locked eyes for several seconds before Turner nodded in what he hoped was a congenial fashion. Kukushkin nodded back. Then Turner, filled with foreboding, forced himself to look away.

“LOOK AT ME!” Odile commanded, shaking Dominique by the arm. The party continued to swirl around them, a smear of color and sound. When she’d gazed once more into the girl’s eyes, she thrust her away in outrage. “Ecstasy?” Odile cried. “Are you crazy?”

Dominique shook her head tolerantly and smiled. “It’s just a party drug, you know. Not like smack or anything.”

“Allegra too, I suppose?”

With a shrug, Dominique attempted to explain. “It just happened, more or less. When we got here, these three really nice guys asked us if we wanted any of what they had. Everything just seemed so
right:
the timing, the place, the—” Abruptly, her thoughts caught up with her words, and she fell silent.

Odile looked around the bunker. New guests were emerging from the entry crevice in a steady stream, and it was clear that the party would go on for hours. “Fine, then. I’m going to think about this,” she told Dominique. “Meanwhile, I want you to stay right here, where I can find you. Understood?”

“Of course, Odile. I promise.” She laughed. “It’s okay that I use your first name? Because, you know, I just feel so close to you.” Giggling. “Maybe we were sisters in another life!” And with that she began dancing, holding her hair up off the back of her neck with one hand and pursing her lips in a pout that soon became a frozen smile.

Odile sighed with exasperation. “Stay here, okay? Don’t move! I’ll be right back.” Then she plunged into the crowd.

“You get it, don’t you?” Dominique called after her. “We can never lose each other now! We’re completely connected!”

She didn’t look back. The number of revelers had by now increased sufficiently that she was forced to devise a new system for her search, passing first through the middle of the party, then prowling some distance along its edges before crossing the center again. The lighting, provided by miner’s lanterns, flashlights, and candles, wasn’t much help. Several times she thought she saw Allegra dancing with Fabien, but in each instance she was mistaken, deceived by shadows and her own anxiety.
I can’t let this happen
, she told herself, pushing on.
I refuse
.

Minutes passed before, in an accidental synchrony of the party’s movements, a channel of free space opened up, and she glimpsed Allegra, dancing with abandon—loose hair flying, arms raised high, sweat pouring from her brow. She was at the center of a ring of other dancers, both male and female, who were urging her on, and for a moment Odile found herself transfixed, as if this were a half-remembered scene from her own adolescence. Prancing out to the ring of spectators, Allegra teasingly chose a partner and resumed her dance, this time just the two of them. Then the crowd shifted again, abruptly cutting off Odile’s line of sight. At once she began to press forward, squeezing between these total strangers.

By the time she got there, the music had changed and the dancers had re-sorted themselves accordingly. She quickly found Allegra and Fabien seated on a dilapidated sofa by the limestone wall, Allegra on his lap, the two of them laughing and trying to catch their breath. Since Odile hadn’t yet decided what to say, she simply stood there in front of them.

When Fabien noticed her, he got to his feet so quickly that Allegra nearly fell to the ground. They displayed identical clenched smiles for a moment before he stepped politely forward to greet Odile. She ignored him.

“I hate to interrupt this no doubt
urgent
dialogue, but getting here was hell, and my patience is running low. So let’s go, Allegra. I’m taking you and Dominique home immediately.”

“Home? What for?”

“What do you mean, what for? You lied to your father and me about the party, you’re on drugs—no, don’t bother, Dominique told me everything—you’ve been crawling around in the dark and dirt with people you don’t even know, risking your lives. So now I’ve come to take the two of you home. End of story.” She grasped Allegra by the upper arm and began steering her toward the spot where she’d left Dominique.

“Wait! I can’t believe this!”

“Believe it.”

“And I didn’t
lie
to you and Dad. Dominique and I just … we just had a change of
plans.”
She turned to Odile in appeal, pupils dilated, face flushed. “Don’t you ever do that? Change your plans? Your mind?”

“Save your breath, Allegra. We’re going.” To her relief, Odile saw Dominique, still some distance away, dancing by herself right where she’d left her. Now all that remained was to find Chantal, their underworld guide, and persuade her to lead them back to street level.

“I know you’re not really mad at me, Odile. You have such a beautiful soul. I love you, don’t you realize that?”

“At seventy-five francs a pop, everyone’s soul is beautiful. Until you come down, that is. Then you pick up where you left off.”

“Odile, it’s not like that.”

“Everything’s like that,” she surprised herself by saying.

They continued to edge sideways through the crowd. When they finally reached Dominique, the girls embraced as if they hadn’t seen each other in years, squealing, laughing, talking. Odile had forgotten that at their age you could somehow speak and listen simultaneously, and she found the sight of them exercising this skill unexpectedly reassuring.

“Good,” she said at last. “Now, you two will stay right here while I find Chantal and get us out of here. Understood?”

They nodded solemnly, looking for the first time somewhat frightened.

Odile set off. She hadn’t gotten very far, however, before she saw exactly what she’d feared and hoped to see ever since leaving Chantal’s apartment. Gathered in a shallow niche in the bunker’s wall, not a hundred meters away, were Thierry, Gabriella, and Tregobov, locked in close conversation.

She hesitated. Then she thought,
Tonight’s the night
. She was not sure herself what she meant by this.
Tonight has got to be the night
.

When she reached them, she stepped up and tapped Thierry on the shoulder.

“Hello,” she said as casually as she could.

Both Thierry and the doctor turned to look at her in astonishment, but Gabriella seemed strangely unsurprised—part of her style, Odile thought. She decided to match this indifference of affect for the next several hours; and if it worked, she’d keep it.

“You were at the slide lecture, weren’t you?” Gabriella said. “I was almost certain I saw you, but
he
”—she continued, indicating Thierry—“said that was impossible.”

Odile ignored this question. “Right now,” she said in her best faux-festive
voice, “what I’d most like is a word with your leader. Alone, if that’s possible.”

“Alone in a crowd,” said Gabriella, as if singing to herself, but she made no move to intervene. Meanwhile the doctor had assumed the expression of polite confusion with which, Odile had noticed, he tended to veil his true opinions. Thierry threw a quick glance at each of them, then stepped several feet to the side.

Odile joined him. “What would you say, Thierry, if I told you I can get the three of you out of Paris tonight? In total safety.”

“I’d say, great, fantastic, let’s do it. But what’s the catch?”

She waited a beat before replying. “The catch, as you put it, is that I require the truth from you, the whole truth this time, with no inventive feints and flourishes. If you lie to me in one single detail—and I’ll know right away if you do—I will pick up the phone and have the Russians on you so fast that your scheming little mind will spin until it stops for good. Which in this case shouldn’t take very long at all, I’d imagine. What do you think?”

Thierry looked out over the crowd. The recorded MC, now female, was singing very fast, over and over:
Nu-oh / We’ll never go / We’ll never go / Cha-ching! / Cha-ching! / Nu-oh / We’ll never go / We’ll never go…

Throwing a quick glance behind her, Odile saw that Allegra and Dominique remained where she’d left them. They were talking and hugging and giving off a glow.
Good
, she thought. The night, she was beginning to suspect, would be long. She turned back to Thierry.

“Why would you want to help us now?” said Thierry. “And what if you don’t like the truth?”

“The truth is not to be liked or disliked. It simply is. I want to know it, and I want all the rest of this to disappear from my life forever. By dawn at the latest, I definitely will have made this happen in every particular. So, if you care at all for your safety or that of your friends, you’d better choose how you want to play it. Immediately. Right now.”

Thierry produced a pack of American cigarettes and offered her one that she refused. He took it for himself. “As I said before,” he reminded her, “the more you know, the more you’ll be at risk. You understand this isn’t about a few flags, correct?”

She waved his words and cigarette smoke impatiently away. “We’ve been through all this. Don’t you get it?
I don’t care.”

He nodded past her to Gabriella and the doctor, smiling to indicate that all was fundamentally on track. “If you say so. But then how do I know you’re not working for the other side now?”

“You mean the Russians? Because in that case I would’ve fed you to them long ago and washed my hands of this whole embarrassment. Besides, did I not bring you the thirty thousand?”

Someone was distributing glo-light necklaces, a gesture that lent the proceedings a suitable retro touch. As Odile surveyed the room, she saw that chemical goodwill was much more prevalent among the guests than she’d first thought.

“I like your haircut,” Thierry said.

“I like yours,” she answered evenly.

“So,” he asked, scratching his neck, “how do I know this escape plan you’re proposing is real?”

“You don’t. But consider the alternatives.”

“And what I tell you will remain only with you? Nobody else? Not even your husband?”

“You have my word.”

He exhaled smoke lengthily, waiting out one last moment of doubt before he began. “All right. Everything I said at your house is true. Except there was no passport to be delivered en route to Moscow, not then. And the refrigerator unit really was a refrigerator unit.”

“Containing human egg cells, perhaps?”

“Yes.” He looked troubled, as though about to qualify what he’d just said, but he let it stand.

Odile inspected him closely. “Egg cells you were taking to your doctor friend, yes?”

Thierry sighed massively. “You really are too smart for your own good, you know.”

“My own good’s my own business. Tell me what the original plan was,
and
what it is now. Or, you know—or else.”

“The plan.” He scratched his head pensively. “Well, without getting too technical, I will tell you that Dr. Tregobov has perfected—”

“Get technical. As you said, I’m a smart girl.”

“So you know what stem cells are, I assume?”

“Of course. Pluripotent cells is the technical term, I think, something like that. They’re the ones capable of growing into just about any kind of human tissue. The idea is to use them for therapeutic purposes, organ repair in particular. Right now they’re more or less the holy grail of genetic research. The big problem, as I recall, is how to direct them to grow into the exact kind of tissue you want—Nobel Prize guaranteed for whoever figures it out.” She felt herself growing irritated again. “I do read the newspapers, you know.”

“And you’re familiar with the whole idiotic uproar over using human eggs, with their DNA replaced by someone else’s, to produce these stem cells? The so-called moral dimension?”

“Of course,” she snapped. “But all that was taken care of a year or two ago. When they figured out how to use skin cells, I think it was, instead of embryos to start a stem-cell line.”

“No,” Thierry said. “It wasn’t taken care of. Because the truth is that the younger the starter cell, the better the results. And what’s younger than an embryo?”

At that moment a black-clad kid, dancing wildly and wearing pink prism glasses, crashed into Odile from behind. Pushing him violently away, she shouted after him, “Fuck you, monkey boy!” She knew she wasn’t contributing to the sought-after atmosphere of peace and tolerance, but she didn’t care about that either. “Hurry up!” she told Thierry, who was laughing despite himself.