Consumed

2

NAOMI THOUGHT SHE WOULD end up meeting Hervé Blomqvist at a little brasserie somewhere near the Sorbonne, something appropriate to a Truffaut film, something with small marble-topped tables and in keeping with the Léaud French bad-boy image she had taken from Blomqvist’s various web manifestations. Instead, she found herself sitting in L’Obélisque, one of the restaurants of the Crillon, the only place the kid would meet her once he heard she was staying at the hotel. Fortunately, he did not seem to know about the hotel’s other restaurant, Les Ambassadeurs, which used to be the ballroom of the dukes of Crillon and was even more expensive. L’Obélisque was described as informal and bistro-like in the hotel’s brochures, but for Naomi its wood paneling and black-suited waiters with their gold Crillon pins—an art nouveau capital C topped by a crown—were intimidating and a bit of a strain, wardrobe-wise. She had unrolled her emergency no-name black cotton T-shirt dress and dug out her strappy, wedgy heels, the ones that weren’t stilettos and didn’t get trapped by Euro cobblestones and grates. And now she sat there, burning.

Earlier that day, she had been standing just outside the ornately formal entrance of the hotel, leaning against what she thought was a green metal electrical junction box across the street from the American embassy compound, madly texting Blomqvist about their imminent meeting, when she felt her shoulder being nudged. She turned to find herself facing a French cop carrying a submachine gun. He had walked across the narrow road behind her from his post at the corner of the embassy and now stood, just off the curb, forbidding and incongruous in his sunglasses and his dark-blue uniform complete with bulletproof vest and lobster-like body armor covering his shoulders, legs, and feet. Lying against his collarbone were two looped plastic zip-tie handcuffs held by flaps on his shoulder plate, ready for instant action. All that was missing was a helmet, but instead he wore a soft canoeshaped garrison cap. “What are you doing, standing there playing with your cell phone?” he asked. He was very young and very handsome, and he smiled, but he was not friendly. A white-and-red shield-shaped emblem on his chest plate read “Police Nationale, CRS.” Their specialty was riot control, Naomi knew, but the street, which ran into the Place de la Concorde, was absolutely serene, and the square was thronged with oblivious tourists. There was even a farcical group of Americans balancing uncertainly on two-wheeled gyro-stabilized Segways, listening to a briefing from their Segway tour leader before setting off into the crazed traffic.

“I’m waiting for a friend,” said Naomi, her French more hesitant than it would be in a week’s time. “I’m staying at the hotel, the Crillon, right here,” she added lamely, gesturing behind her, and then was immediately angry with herself for giving him anything for free.

He took one hand off his weapon and made a flicking motion, shooing her away like a child. “Wait for your friend over there, on the other side of the hotel entrance. Away from this control box.”

Naomi now realized that she had been leaning against the controller for a huge steel cylinder that would rise out of the tarmac at the swipe of a security card, blocking all traffic from the side street between the hotel and the embassy. The American embassy compound, ringed with metal barriers and tightly spaced concrete bollards topped with brass acorns, was a wasp nest. Agitate it at your peril. In silent revenge, Naomi had taken many long-lens photos of the windows of the embassy from a corridor window on her floor at the Crillon. Most of the embassy windows were opaqued, but she had a shiver that soon there’d be a kicking-down of her attic-room door and a brutal arrest, complete with those no-nonsense plastic handcuffs and perhaps a hood over her head. The incident had rattled her for some reason, but did it have to do with America in France, general outrage against authority, hot policemen, or just bondage/victim/humiliation fantasies? She resolved to research a piece on the eroticism of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité. There was a glossy Paris-based gay magazine that would die to have it—if they hadn’t done it already.

The Jean-Pierre Léaud clone swept into her space and sat down. He smiled and—of course—swept back his unruly lock of straight dark-brown hair. To her shock, he was wearing a narrow-fitting suit and a skinny tie. And a white shirt. And he was carrying a conservative dark-brown valise, which he carefully placed on the floor, propping it against the table leg. He watched her closely for a moment, then stuck his hand out across the table, weaving it neatly through the red- and yellow-tinted water glasses and the candles to reach her. She was not surprised at the tentative, intellectual’s handshake. “Hello,” he said. “You are Naomi Seberg—that’s a nice moviestar name. I’m certain you have guessed that I’m Hervé Blomqvist.” They had agreed, in the text messaging that had followed their first, relatively public, contact on the Célestine A. forum, that they would speak English. He needed the practice, he said, and would not speak French.

“I didn’t have to guess,” Naomi said, “because I’ve seen videos of you. In fact, you sent me a couple.”

He withdrew his hand, unweaving it carefully. His brow furrowed in mock intensity and his lips pouted. He knew how to work his cuteness. “I always had the illusion that I was impossible to capture on video. My essence, I mean.” He felt so young to her, even though she was only six years older than his twenty-five. He had had a precocious passage through French academia, but, as was often the case, maturity in other matters had not kept pace, had most likely been sacrificed. All this from the forum, delivered to him by well-wishing but critical friends and to any troll who cared to absorb it. Like Naomi.

“I think you’re right about your essence,” said Naomi. “I have no insight into that. But your face… I recognize that. What I don’t recognize is the suit and tie. You’re always in jeans and a T-shirt on the net. Did you dress up for me?”

“I’ve never even walked past the door of the Crillon before. I was afraid they would discover me and throw me out. I borrowed the suit from my brother. He’s an advocate. It’s unusual for a journalist to stay at the Crillon, isn’t it?”

“It would be unusual for a journalist to pay for a stay at the Crillon, yes.”

“You don’t pay?”

“Not with money.”

“With sex?”

Naomi laughed. It was her best laugh, the one she always hoped would come out when she laughed. It was husky and genuinely mirthful, and it was like that because Hervé was so appallingly, boyishly hopeful. “No, not with sex. With photography.”

“Ah, yes. Photography.” Hervé pressed fingers to his temples and closed his eyes. “Is that a coffee you’re drinking?” he asked.

“Yes. Double espresso. Do you want one?”

“I’d like just a sip of yours, if you don’t mind. I need something, but not too much.” He opened his eyes and smiled. “A touch of migraine.” He pronounced it “meegraine,” like the English.

She shrugged and pushed her cup across the table. “Be my guest.”

He picked up the cup and made a show of inhaling the fumes. “Mm. It’s dangerous. I get too hyper.” He did pronounce it “eepair,” but there was no way Naomi was going to comment, even though in his texting he had expressed enthusiasm for “ruthless linguistic corrections.” He sipped with exaggerated sensuality, his lips and tongue working overtime, looking her deeply in the eyes as he did it. Naomi closed her eyes and shook her head. She felt like his mother. When she looked up at him again, she affected a stern, flirtation-killing look. She pulled her voice recorder out of her bag, switched it on, and placed it on the table.

“Hervé,” she said, “I’m recording you now, as we agreed, and my first question to you is: Is this how you were with Célestine Arosteguy?”

He froze for a beat, then put the cup down. “How I was? I was just me, as always. I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You’re being very seductive with me. Did you seduce your professor, or did she seduce you?”

“I see,” he said. “You want to play the role of Célestine with me. You identify with her.”

“No, I’m really not playing at all. I want to know how it was with them, with the Arosteguys. From someone who knows. From you.”

“It was full of sex with them, but more than just sex. But you’re just interested in the sex, aren’t you? You want to make a sensational conversation. You want to hurt them, don’t you?”

“Why do you think that?” Naomi was genuinely thrown by this, and Hervé could see it. “We went through all that on the net. I thought you understood me.”

“I understood you,” said Hervé. “But I never believed you. How sympa you were, how you loved them, how their philosophy and their love story so inspired you.”

“Then why are you here, drinking my espresso?”

A compact Gallic shrug. “I wanted to see what a room in the Hôtel de Crillon looked like.”

THEY ENDED UP ordering room service. While they waited, Hervé agreed to pose for some stills, sitting on the chaise longue in the bedroom by the open balcony doors while Naomi squatted with the camera, shifting from side to side, trying to find the revealing angle. She was using the Nikon D300s, the cousin to Nathan’s D3. It was more compact and lighter, and she prized unobtrusiveness and mobility above all things. The muted light was soft, diffused by the pigeon netting and the trapped bounce of the courtyard, and it brought out the femininity of the boy’s face. He played the lens expertly, as Naomi expected he would, given his self-promotion on the Arosteguy forums, which involved endless videos and stills documenting the many moods and musings of Hervé Blomqvist. His general approach was coy/mysterioso, and Naomi knew just how to use the natural light and her angles, the brow, the dark, full eyebrows, the liquid brown eyes in the thin face, to make that pop.

“So, Naomi, what are you going to use these photos of me for?” He spoke between shots, timing her rhythm so that he wouldn’t be caught in an ungainly mouth move. “Are you planning an Arosteguy picture book? Maybe for the coffee table?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Hervé. Do you have any suggestions?”

“I do have a suggestion. I think you will be afraid of it.”

Naomi paused and rested her camera on her knees. She felt strange in her dress, but at least she was now in bare feet. She looked up at Hervé, who smiled down at her with benign, unfocused eyes, like a priest. Annoying.

“Go,” said Naomi. “Let’s hear it.”

Hervé stood up and began undoing his tie. “I propose a book that shows every lover that the Arosteguys ever had, starting with me. And they will all be in the nude. And they will say what their experience in fucking them was. And they will talk about the influence that Célestine and Aristide had on their lives.”

Naomi sat on the floor, her back against the foot of the bed. “Are you taking your clothes off ?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Hervé.

“You want me to shoot pictures of you naked?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to have sex with you. Really. I’m not.”

Hervé had taken off his tie, jacket, and shirt, and was working on his belt, a fussy alligator-patterned thing with a dual-pronged buckle and a double row of holes which seemed to be giving him trouble. He was hairless and thin through the chest, just as Naomi thought he would be. All those New Wave movies. “If you have sex with me, I will show you something special that Célestine liked very much. It’s unusual what she liked.”

Naomi lifted her camera and casually began to snap away.

“Oh, I like your camera,” said Hervé. “It looks like it’s carbon fiber. Is it?”

“No. Magnesium body.” She stopped shooting, hefted her Nikon, juggled it from hand to hand. “I have a feeling carbon fiber is next, though. It would be nice if it were even lighter.” Then back up to her eye, shooting again. “And what about Aristide? Was there something special that he liked?”

Hervé finally got his belt undone and his trousers down. He was wearing black Calvin Klein bikini briefs. She had hoped for something more exotic. “Yes, certainly,” he said, stepping out of the trousers. “It will be a little more difficult, but I can show you that too.”

DUNJA LAY PROPPED UP in a bed in the Molnár Clinic’s basement recovery room. There were a dozen beds, skeletal and primitive, creepy, but she and Nathan were alone in the room. He sat in an unstable plastic chair beside her bed, his camera on his lap, his voice recorder still hanging from its lanyard around his neck, its jewel-like red power light staining Dunja’s sheet, so dark was the room. Dunja was still dreamy, but Nathan suspected it was emotional exhaustion more than the effect of the anesthetic. She nodded towards him. “I didn’t expect the camera. In the operating room. I thought you would just take notes on a notepad, like a proper journalist.”

“We’re all photojournalists now. It’s no longer enough just to write. We have to bring back images, sound, video. I hope you don’t mind.”

Dunja stretched, and it was somehow voluptuous despite the depressing threadbare hospital gown and the shunt in her arm. “I don’t mind. Soon, that’ll be all that’s left, so the more the merrier. Something to remember me by.”

“Why do you say that? Don’t you have confidence in Dr. Molnár?”

Dunja laughed. “Look at this place. This is my strategy of last resort. No one else in the world would commit this operation on me. Only Dr. Molnár was arrogant enough. And you can quote me.”

“I will quote you.”

“And you? You were so impressed by Dr. Molnár you came from New York to write about him?”

Nathan’s turn to laugh. “I saw him in a documentary about illegal organ transplants. He was very defiant and very engaging. I came to talk to him about the international organ trade and then discovered he was a practicing breast surgeon. I’m not sure yet what the piece I’m writing is really about, but that’s not so unusual for me.” He lifted his camera. “May I take a picture?”

“Why not? Send these images of me through the internet out into the universe, where I will continue my out-of-body existence.”

Nathan checked the light metering through the viewfinder, then cranked the camera’s ISO up to its maximum of 25,600. (The new D4s, the one he didn’t have, could shoot at a surreal ISO 409,600—it could see in the dark—but that didn’t bear thinking about.) The photos would be extremely noisy, grainy and splotchy, but would have a painterly quality, pointillist, perhaps, or impressionist. The camera somehow felt even more sensuous, more instrument-like, at that setting. He began to fire.

Dunja sighed. “Of course, for all eternity I won’t look my best. Is there any pose you’d like from me? I’m not shy.”

Nathan thought of what Naomi would say to that. She was a fashion photographer at heart, maybe even a celebrity shooter—a paparazza?—and wouldn’t be shy about directing a subject as pliant as Dunja. “I don’t really want you to pose. We’re pretending that you don’t know I’m here.” Nathan stood up and moved around her, shooting with the lens wide open, with little depth of field, the floating images of her face driving right into his brain. Her eyes had a creamy darkness, and she seemed able to look into the lens without actually noticing it. Stunning.

Nathan paused and went back to his camera bag. He dug around in it for his flash. “Just to be on the safe side, I’ll take a few with some bounced flash. There’s not much light in here.” He slid the foot of the flash into the hot shoe and locked it. “We can just do the same thing you were doing.” He pulled up the flash’s little plastic bounce card for eye light and began to fire.

“Oh, but now, with that flashing, I feel like a movie star,” she said. “And I want you to see the best part of me.” She pulled open her gown and presented her breasts, which were bruised and peppered with tiny swollen red dots. Nathan immediately stopped shooting. “What’s wrong?” she said. “Too ugly? Too horrible?”

“No, on the contrary. It’s, um, too sexy. In a fetishistic way. Or something. Maybe too Helmut Newton. I don’t think I’d know how to use it for, you know, a medical article.”

“Then just take some for yourself,” said Dunja. “So that you remember me afterwards in a nicer way.” She smiled the warmest smile at him, and then tears began to seep from her eyes. She did not wipe them away. “And can that camera function under water?”

DUNJA SPLASHED WATER at Nathan, targeting his camera but missing it, soaking the knees of his jeans. Somehow she still managed to look voluptuous in her clinical gray one-piece cotton bathing suit, in part because it was thin and unstructured, clinging. A white medicinal rubber bathing cap hid her hair completely. “I was sure they wouldn’t allow you to take photos in here,” she laughed. “And you’re wearing jeans!”

Nathan was squatting next to a stylized stone lion-head fountain that drooled complex mineral water into the pool. He stood up and followed her, warily snapping, as she waded along the edge of the shallow end of the pool. “I got Dr. Molnár to pull some strings. Getting me in with jeans was the hardest part, apparently. But what about you? Every other woman here is wearing one of those blue plastic shower cap things. You’re not in regulation dress either.”

“The matron in the locker room is very strict, but she’s also half Slovenian, from my father’s town of Jesenice. I told her why I needed a special hat to keep the water out of my ears. I made her cry. I think she’s in love with me now.”

They were in the main swimming pool room of the Hotel Gellért, on the hilly Buda side of the Danube. The room was vast, more like an opulent art nouveau ballroom than a pool, and was bordered by a series of twinned, intricately tooled marble columns, arcades, and ornate balconies bearing potted ferns that projected from the spacious upper gallery. Thin morning light drifted in through its arched yellow glass roof.

“And what about that bathing suit? Is that yours too?” asked Nathan.

“You don’t like it? They rent them here. I think they were designed by Stalinists.”

Somewhere deep inside the pool’s mosaic-tiled heart, motors fired up, and the entire pool became a frothing, sulfurous Jacuzzi. Dunja ducked under the effervescing water and disappeared, leaving Nathan to stalk along the edge of the pool, tracking her among the other swimmers as they churned out their slow, orderly laps or clung to one of the many pulsing jets on the pool’s floor. He dodged the columns and the fan-backed plastic chairs strewn randomly along the arcaded hall. When she surfaced, laughing, the bathing suit a sexy-astringent commie second skin, he started shooting again, the shutter rattling like a submachine gun, ignoring the wary looks of swimmers who got in the line of fire. Playing the camera all the way, Dunja pulled herself out of the pool and sat in one of the chairs—her chair, evidently, because she pulled around her the towel that had been draped over its back. Nathan pulled up another chair and sat close to her.

“So, you’re actually staying here, at this hotel?”

“Part of the Molnár Clinic package,” she said. “It included business-class tickets on Malév. Flying me right from my hometown deep in the wilds of Slovenia. Where are you staying?”

“Holiday Inn. My expense account is limited.”

“Is it nice?”

“Well,” said Nathan, “you can park a bus there. Great if you have a bus.”

Dunja peeled the bathing cap off her head. She let it flop into her lap like a jellyfish and combed her fingers through her black crop. “You really should stay here. Would you like at least to see my room? For your writing? And of course you could take pictures. It’s very… proto-Hungarian.”

“Aren’t you going to try the thermal baths? They’re supposed to be very healing.”

“Oh, I did that when I first got here. I really don’t think they’d be very good for me right now. Besides, Dr. Molnár forbids it. I think those little pellets will come popping out of my breasts like blackheads if I get all steamed up. He’s seeing me again tomorrow. I wouldn’t want to upset him. I won’t even tell him I went swimming.”

DUNJA’S SUITE WAS A DISAPPOINTMENT. It was large and blandly comfortable, with a nice partial view of the historically strategic Gellért Hill and the sinister, sprawling stone Citadel that topped it, but Nathan had been hoping for something more exotic than just bourgeois familiarity. He had, he realized, hoped for the swimming pool, the florid thermal baths, converted into a hotel suite.

But Dunja was not a disappointment. She was wearing a waffle-pattern bathrobe, looking at herself in the mirror over the writing table. The bathrobe was open, and she was holding her breasts, one in each hand, palpating them expertly, clinically, without sensuality. Nathan sat on the bed and took photos of her through the mirror.

“So? My breasts are now officially radioactive. I’m not allowed to hug pregnant women for at least three months. What do you think of that? Journalistically.”

“I don’t know. Can you hug non-pregnant men?” Still firing. The constant clucking of the camera had become part of their repartee, Nathan rolling his firing finger over the shutter release as exclamation, as rimshot, as query.

Dunja turned to him, her bathrobe still fully open, hands still holding breasts. “Nathan, I’m a very sick woman. Does that turn you on?”

Still firing. “Well, I told you, I’m a failed medical student. Now I’m a medical journalist. So, yes, I guess sickness does turn me on in a way.”

She approached him and gently took the camera out of his hands and placed it behind her on the writing table. “What about death? I could be dying. Is that exciting to you?” She took his hands in hers and placed them on her breasts. “They ache a bit, you know. After all, they’ve been penetrated by two hundred and forty tiny titanium pellets. Like asteroids and a cosmic dust shower. Look. Look at all those needle marks. I’m like some weird junkie, crazy for titanium.” She laughed. “Don’t be shy. They feel better with some pressure on them.” He squeezed her breasts tentatively and kissed her.

After a beat, she pulled her mouth away. “I’ve discovered that most men are repulsed by disease, especially when it starts to be visible.” She took up his hands again and placed them on her groin. “You feel those lymph nodes, how big they are? My shape is changing. It’s really starting to become a not-human shape. I had a boyfriend in Ljubljana, you know, for eight years. When he felt those, he told me it creeped him out, his exact words—well, the Slovenian equivalent. Then he noticed these.” She took his hands and placed them around her throat, then pushed them up under her jaw. “You feel those? They’re hard, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” said Nathan. “I noticed them when you were swimming.”

“They spoil my jawline, don’t they? It used to be very strong, very elegant. Now it’s lumpy and I look like an old toad. No, worse, because they’re not even symmetrical. A lopsided old toad. And so my boyfriend left me for a German tourist he was showing around the city. He worked as a guide in the summers. Now he lives with her in Düsseldorf. They go hiking. Marike’s a very healthy woman. He sent me a book of poetry by Heinrich Heine, who was born there. He says his German has gotten quite good, and he hopes I’m getting good medical treatment. That’s thoughtful of him, isn’t it?”

Nathan slid his hands down around her throat and kissed her deeply. Once again, she pulled away, this time laughing. “Maybe you’re not normal. Or is this part of your research? Do you always have sex with your subjects?”

“You’re not my subject. Dr. Molnár is my subject, and I’m not going to have sex with him.”

“Maybe you can ask him again why I have these swollen lymph nodes. He tells me it’s the cancer but that no one really knows what causes the swelling. I think he’s being evasive. I think I have cancer everywhere, not just my breasts. Look at these.” She twisted away from him, shrugged off the bathrobe, and held up her arms. “You see these? Near my armpits? They’re so big, they’re almost like two more breasts.” She dropped her arms and shrugged. “But maybe four tits is nice for you, who knows?”

Dunja turned and strolled over to the bed. “If you make love to me, who will be shooting the photos?” She lay down on the bed languorously, head propped up on one hand.

“There’s always a way, if you really want that. There’s a self-timer on the camera.” Beside the writing table stood a large armoire that held the TV aloft, flanked by miniature fluted wooden Greek columns, presenting the screen as though it were an oracle. Below that was a pair of doors, which Nathan now opened to reveal the scuffed, refrigerated minibar; sitting on it was a wooden tray that held snacks and sundries. Nathan slid out the tray and started rummaging through its chaotically scattered contents. He picked up a black cardboard box with red stripes and turned it over, looking for a label. “It would be tricky to get the best porn angles, though. We’d have to ask the concierge for help. Or maybe see what the doctor is doing right now. He seems to be a connoisseur of nude photography.”

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“I think they have something here called a Pleasure Pak. Has gels and condoms and things.”

Dunja sat up on the bed. “Nathan, forget that, please. I’ve had enough technology shoved into my body.” She spoke softly.

“Really? But aren’t you…”

“I’m not anything. In the last two years I’ve been irradiated from head to toe, inside and out. Nothing inside me has survived. Believe me. And besides, I don’t have much of a future to worry about, so if you have the clap, or even something worse, I don’t much care.”

HERVÉ SAT CROSS-LEGGED on the chaise longue with Naomi’s old MacBook Pro on his lap. He was wearing his white shirt and loosened tie and his Calvins. On the bed, Naomi used her BlackBerry to email a certain Dr. Phan Trinh, Célestine’s personal physician, whose address had just been given to her by Hervé. The boy was proving useful beyond her wildest imaginings. She was beginning to suspect that he was some kind of police asset at the Sorbonne, and that he had been informing on the Arosteguys, who were, along with everything else, contrarian political activists. “Dear Dr. Trinh,” she tapped. “I wonder if you would agree to speak to me in confidence about the medical condition of Célestine Arosteguy. I believe that many destructive rumors have tended to damage the reputation of this wonderful woman, and I, a woman myself…”

Hervé jumped up unexpectedly from the chaise and started fanning his crotch with a copy of Les Inrockuptibles, an amusingly unruly French movie/culture mag he had brought with him in his brother’s valise. He was very proud of a short movie review he had written for the magazine, his first ever published, and had read it out loud, very slowly, to Naomi, cracking up at every delicious instance of his own insolence. “Shit. Something in your computer just tried to grab my balls.”

Without looking up from her screen, she—mother Naomi—said, “I told you not to sit that way. I always feel some weird magnetic-field hot tingling when I have it on my lap and the hard drive’s spinning, and I don’t even have balls. If you thought your Peyronie’s was bad, wait until you try testicular cancer.”

“If it was good enough for Lance Armstrong, it’s good enough for me. A lot of people in France believe that his cancer treatment turned him into a sci-fi monster super-racer, even before the normal sports drugs.”

“If you say so.” All Naomi could do was shake her head. Lance and cycling had loomed large in Hervé’s failed attempt to seduce her. It turned out that his secret sex weapon was Peyronie’s disease, which he believed he had acquired by riding his carbon-fiber Colnago bicycle along the entire arduous route of the Tour de France two summers ago. Certainly, for a skinny kid, he had amazing quad muscles; they were so out of proportion to the rest of him that they looked like implants, or maybe CGI sweetening. They were a pleasant shock to Naomi when his trousers came off, but really not enough of a novelty to get her into bed. Nor was his mildly bizarre penis.

Hervé had already researched his condition, could at least name it—François de Lapeyronie had been surgeon to King Louis XV (what resonance!)—but Naomi found him to be very selective in what he retained, more romantic than medically astute. She did her own quick web search, which revealed that Peyronie’s involved the mysterious growth of a hard, inelastic fibrous plaque along one side of the penis just under the skin, causing it to bend alarmingly when erect. Hervé’s particular version of the condition had his long, thin, uncircumcised organ making an almost full right turn of ninety degrees two-thirds of the way up from its root, its tip thus looking at his right hip. Was it scar tissue caused by trauma? The idea of a scarred penis, that it had been through the wars of sex, had its rough charm. Was it an autoimmune system assault? Not so appealing.

Hervé felt it was a cycling problem. He had first asked to use her laptop because he wanted to show her his bicycle, whose photos were posted on one of his many websites. Still naked, he turned the screen towards her to show a loving shot of an ornately painted racing bicycle hanging from rubber-coated hooks screwed into the living room wall of his flat. “This is the machine that did it. It’s so beautiful, it’s hard to believe it would do that to me.” He flicked through the detail close-ups. “You see that threeleaf-clover symbol, like in playing cards? That’s the Colnago logo. The seat isn’t original equipment. I had it fitted. It’s carbon fiber too. It’s not very merciful, but it’s incredibly light. I’m addicted to the carbon fiber.”

He had described to her the evolution of his attitude to his new sex organ, whose altered form had apparently just appeared one morning, no warning, while he was showering and thinking erotic thoughts. At first, of course, he was appalled. His sex life was obviously over, laughable. “I kept getting these spam emails about lengthening your penis and making it harder and thicker. I used to mock of those. Then suddenly I found myself hoping to see one about straightening it out. I would have been tempted, even if I had to FedEx my cock to Nigeria.” That was the first laugh he had gotten intentionally from Naomi.

He had been abstinent from that morning on, ashamed not only of his warped tool but also of the bourgeois embarrassment which gripped him. Even masturbation had become abhorrent. It was the Arosteguys who rescued him from sexual despair, though it was a side effect that came from their work with his more dangerous philosophical despair. At times, the Arosteguys gave a lecture together, normally in the modest Amphithéâtre Turgot, with its steeply raked floor and simple wooden desks. But occasionally they would hold court in the magnificent sky-lit Grande Amphithéâtre, its hundreds of green-baize-covered seats and benches jammed and bristling with students, and it was at one of these that Hervé first conceived the idea of attacking his new problem through the medium of a philosophical treatise concerning the body as commodity, a concept at the core of the Arosteguys’ politics.

Inevitably, his huddle with the couple at the end of the lecture led to an invitation to a private tutorial at their flat, something for which they were deliciously notorious. They were genuinely excited by the boy’s use of his own physical reality to leap into the powerful waves of Arosteguyan speculation. They were also excited by his sex, which Célestine called her “bat penis,” although further net-searching by Hervé did not come up with any validation of her pet name. The images he found revealed that bats, especially fruit bats, or flying foxes, had very humanoid, long, straight cocks that put his to shame with their fearful symmetry. The bats were also capable of licking their own glans to keep it clean while hanging upside down, and looked rather joyful doing it, too. This first sexual encounter, which announced the potent presence of Hervé in the lives of the Arosteguys, was sketched in some detail on the boy’s Facebook page, but the chiropteric element had been excised.

Hervé now kneeled on the floor in front of the chaise, the malignant laptop safely at arm’s length in front of him. “Okay, Naomi. I now have something wonderful for you.”

Naomi was finishing off her plea to Dr. Trinh, whose photograph she had just found. A posed office photo of the type meant to sell the compassionate competence of a private medical clinic presented a small, neat, perfect Vietnamese woman in an elegant tailored suit who smiled out of Naomi’s phone. “What would that be, Hervé?”

Hervé rolled sideways on the carpet so that he could lounge with studied cinematic insouciance against the sill of the balcony doors. “I’ve just told Aristide Arosteguy all about you. He wants to meet you in Tokyo.”

THERE WERE SEVERAL IMMENSE, empty tourist buses in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. Nathan schlepped his way past them, camera bags over shoulders, iPhone in hand, having just been dropped off by the hotel’s shuttle. Naomi had texted him to call her ASAP, but for some reason the reception on the minibus had been poor. He had dialed her the second he stepped off. “How’s your beautiful, expensive hotel?”

“Appropriate. How’s yours?” said Naomi.

“I’m looking at it as we speak. Let’s just say… functional. More appropriate.”

“More?”

“Yeah. ’Cause I know that yours is too good for a journalist.”

“It’s that darn rich-girl problem again. And speaking of girls, how was she? Your patient?”

“Beautiful. She was really beautiful.”

“In a doomed beautiful sort of way?”

“In a Slavic sort of way.”

“That sounds dangerous,” said Naomi. She meant it.

“She was dangerous. Literally radioactive. The seductiveness of decay. What about Arosteguy? I’ve seen him in interviews. Pretty devastating. Gorgeous, in that irritating French intellectual way.”

“I’ll let you know when I find him. Nobody seems to know where he is, including the prefect of police.” For some reason, Naomi wanted to hold back her new contact with Arosteguy, even though that was the reason she had called Nathan. Was it the Slavic-beauty comment? “I think Célestine is really our September cover, though. She’s even more seductive. Beautiful but dead is always killer.” Killer was what they loved at Naomi’s primary magazine, Notorious, whose editor, Bob Barberien, was himself notorious for drunken office rants that somehow became sensational articles that you had to read; they generally involved unimaginable acts of murder. Notorious mimicked the 1950s scandal mag Confidential in its starkly aggressive cover graphics and even its retro typography. Naomi loved its recklessness and its ironic naïveté; it provoked her own.

“Yeah, and will he really have anything interesting to say? ‘I murdered my wife and then I ate her.’ How do you follow that up?”

“Nobody seems to want that to be true,” said Naomi. “There’s a weird national protectiveness about that pair. It’s all denial, even from the police. From what I can see here, it’s possible that one of her student lovers killed her out of jealousy.” It had occurred to her that Hervé might know something about that. Or might even be the killer himself.

“And students are notorious for not eating properly. I’m getting into the elevator now. If I lose you, I’ll call right back.” His room was on the third, and top, floor, and he did lose her, and waited until he was in his room to redial. “So I guess the only photos you’ve taken with my macro lens are shots of your laptop’s screen.”

“Very funny. And what about you? Are you going to send me shots of your beautiful doomed patient?”

Just the slightest pause from Nathan, but it hurt Naomi. “I only got a few during the operation. But basically, she wouldn’t let me. She felt diseased and ugly.”

“You’ve never let that stop you before,” said Naomi, fishing.

“I got stopped this time. Stopped in my tracks.”

A big pause from Naomi before she said, “I can’t wait to see you. Amsterdam or Frankfurt?”

“I need Amsterdam. My connecting flight to New York’s already been paid for. I land on the fourteenth. Work for you?”

“The fourteenth works for me. Bye, darling.”

“Bye, darling.”

Nathan thumbed his phone off. That was life with Naomi—disembodied. Nathan realized he had almost no awareness of getting to his room other than the disconnect in the elevator. No smells, no sights, no sounds. He had been in his phone, Naomi a voice in his brain. On his laptop, he scrolled through the photos he had taken of Dunja—the operation, the spa, the sex they had together in her hotel room. It did not bother him that the photos aroused him in a weirdly objective way, as though he had stumbled upon a stash of celebrity sex photos that hadn’t hit the mainstream yet. Nathan was a connoisseur of his own sexuality, and its twists and turns amused and delighted him. And speaking of pictures, Dunja did look beautiful but doomed, and never more so, oddly, than in the snaps he had taken later in Molnár’s restaurant on the Pest side of the river. It was perverse of her, he had thought, to want to go there, to a restaurant owned by her cancer doctor, where nude pictures of his patients covered the walls, and while she was in the middle of an intense cancer procedure. And worse, Dr. Molnár himself had threatened to greet them there, to fuss over them and introduce to them in excruciating detail each dish, which he would personally serve them; perhaps, he hinted with a twisted twinkle, he would hover over their special corner table until they had each opened their mouths and, with exquisite care and sensuousness, tasted.

Molnár had not been there when they arrived. The maître d’ could not give them the corner table and had no record of special treatment to be accorded them, no reservation in fact. It was a relief—even to be forced to leave for some other restaurant would have been better—but there was a table, or at least two chairs side by side along a run of small square tables pushed together. Dunja and Nathan were on the outside, facing a framed mirror and a pair of solitary eaters who paid no attention to each other. The mirror made it possible for them to eat and talk and watch each other’s responses as though they were characters in a charming Czechoslovakian movie from the sixties. The seating lottery also absolved them of any need to study Molnár’s wretched and scandalous photographs—the opposite wall was blocked from view by a thick stuccoed pillar—which were all portraits of his patients shown in the most vulnerable, if not drugged, circumstances, with a clinically salacious eye for nakedness, both emotional and physical. Nathan had to reluctantly flash Dr. Molnár’s card at the maître d’ to get permission to use his camera in the dumpy restaurant, which was inexplicably called La Bretonne. His first attempts to document the good doctor’s artwork were intercepted by two waiters and a busboy, certain, no doubt, that the photographs were a rich treasure in danger of illicit duplication and dissemination. As he framed the Molnár photos in his viewfinder, Nathan was disturbed to find himself responding to them with a profound and hopeless sadness. One or two of the shots he had taken of Dunja could have fit seamlessly among those of the women—all women—nailed to the rough-hewn dark wood of the walls, and it allied him with Dr. Molnár in a way that made him queasy. The large black-and-white prints, Nathan had to admit, were gorgeous; the fine grain of medium-format film, with its deep contrast and subtle shadows conveyed by silver gelatin on rag paper, produced a startling hyperreal effect.

Nathan made his way back to Dunja from the far end of the restaurant. She was cradling a glass of red wine in her beautiful long-fingered hands—bigger than his own, he had noted; he felt the oddness when they held hands. He immediately swung the Nikon around on its strap and fired off a few shots, the crack of the shutter easily swallowed by the surrounding boisterous murmur and cutlery clatter. But Dunja snapped her eyes up at him in anger, and it surprised him. Thus chastised, he sat beside her and stuffed the camera into its bag, which he jammed between his feet on the floor, not trusting the raucous flow of patrons and waiters behind him. And it would be those snaps, taken solely by the light of the candles on the table and the warm incandescent sconce lights on the wall in front of her, that revealed a pain and despair that Nathan had not seen in photos of her taken in much more vulnerable circumstances. She was going to die soon; she knew it in a profound way, and now that awareness had been reignited by the camera and was hot in her mind.

“Nathan,” she said, “will this be the first time you’ve made love to a dead woman?”

Nathan fumbled for his own glass, which he had not yet touched. “You mean you?” he said, taking a sip. The wine was very rough. Not good. “You’re not dead. I can personally confirm that.”

“No, but I mean, after I die, you’ll have memories of sex with a woman who’s now dead.” She smiled a dangerously innocent smile. “Will that be a first for you?”

“Except for my mother, yes. She died when I was fourteen.”

“Different kind of sex, then. The Freudian kind. Doesn’t count.” She paused. He sipped again to fill in the gap—nervously, he was surprised to note. Weirdly giddy. “While I was waiting for you in my hotel room,” she said, “I watched a nature show. A young deer fell into a deep snowbank and couldn’t get out. A grizzly bear found it and jumped on it from behind. The deer tried to look around. Its eyes were wild and excited. The bear gently grabbed the deer’s muzzle in its mouth. It was so sexual. Sex from behind. The bear loved the deer, it was obvious. It ripped the deer’s throat out, and then licked the dying deer with the most passionate affection. I thought of you and me.”

DR. TRINH KEPT BECOMING Japanese. It was Hervé’s fault, of course. The possibility of meeting Aristide Arosteguy in Tokyo had enormous gravitational density, enough to warp every nuance of Naomi’s day. And here, in Dr. Trinh’s perfectly elegant office on the medically chic Rue Jacob in the Sixième, this warping manifested itself in a subtle shifting of the doctor’s delicate Vietnamese features and her complexly accented English towards the rougher features and Japanese schoolgirl diction of Yukie Oshima, Naomi’s old Tokyo friend. Naomi had already calculated that Yukie would have to be a major ally in any Tokyo/Arosteguy initiative she might undertake and was finding it hard not to think of the constantly morphing Dr. Trinh as, well, Yukie in Paris. But Dr. Trinh was not an ally.

“Please put away your camera,” she said, as Naomi set her Nikon on her lap. “I regret every moment that I allowed myself to be recorded or photographed. I am talking to you only to undo the damage which that demented cleaning lady has done by talking about Célestine Arosteguy. I will probably regret this too.”

Naomi gently caressed her camera as though demonstrating its innate harmlessness. “It’s really just proof that I actually spoke to you. You’d be surprised how many interviews are just patched together from things on the internet and presented as face-to-face conversations.” Naomi imagined Nathan chuckling and shaking his head over her shoulder as she said this. Somehow, Naomi was of another, newer, generation than Nathan, despite the fact that they were the same age. Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling and scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon. To not be photographed daily, even by oneself, to not be recorded and videoed and dispersed into the turbulent winds of the net, was to court nonexistence. She knew she was being disingenuous with Dr. Trinh as she talked to her about proof, but the only effect her awareness of this had on Naomi was to make her feel more completely professional. It was the way of the net, and it was liberating.

Dr. Trinh was tougher than she looked. “Even photographs and recordings can be easily tricked these days, so what you say makes no sense here in my office. Put your camera and voice recording device away, that little thing hanging around your neck which I see advertised in all the chic fashion magazines, or you can leave right now.” Her face and tone were absolutely neutral as she said this, and Naomi could feel her own face start to burn, her skin telling her that she had been deeply, instantly unnerved before her brain or gut knew it.

“Well, off the record is certainly one way to do it, if that’s what makes you feel comfortable,” said Naomi, unclipping her rarely used Olympus micro-recorder, glossy black like a little piano and reserved for stealth recording, and packing it and the camera into her camera bag with as much nonchalance as she could muster. She hated her own volatility, the cycling so easily between manic confidence and crushed, hopeless insecurity. Maybe drugs would help. Probably not. Naomi had a sudden suicidal urge to ask the doctor if she had any bipolar patients, but Dr. Trinh was not designed to be natively helpful, at least not to Naomi.

“There’s nothing about this situation or about you that makes me feel comfortable. Let’s talk about that cleaning lady, that Madame Tretikov, the Russian.”

“Yes, yes. That maintenance woman… she seemed certain that Célestine Arosteguy had brain cancer.” And now Naomi could look up from fussing with her camera bag and jab back, however delicately. “Now, Dr. Trinh—I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly—Dr. Trinh, you’re not a cancer specialist, not an oncologist, for example, are you?”

The doctor took a deep breath. “What’s that pin you’re wearing? What does that designate?”

Naomi was completely thrown. Pin? Oh, yes. “This pin?” She unclipped the gold Crillon pin she had been given by her hotel contact and tossed it onto the leather writing pad on the doctor’s desk. “It’s the symbol of the Hôtel de Crillon. I’ve been staying there. It’s held on by this big round magnet. You see? They’re very nice at that hotel. Not snobbish at all.” Dr. Trinh picked it up and examined it with weird intensity. The doctor’s paranoia was suddenly exciting to Naomi, comforting rather than insulting, helping her to cycle back up. It meant that the doctor had something to hide, or at least to protect. “Were you… were you thinking it might be a microphone?”

Dr. Trinh tossed the pin back on the pad and immediately forgot it existed. “There was nothing medically wrong with Célestine Arosteguy. Nothing beyond the normal complaints of a woman of her age. I was her personal physician. I was the one who sent her to specialists when she needed them. Something like cancer… I would have known.”

Naomi desperately wanted to pull her notepad out of her bag, the one that was spiral-bound at the top, had a montage of newspaper pages decorating its cardboard cover and labelled itself “Reporter’s Notebook/Bloc de Journaliste”—naturally, Nathan had given it to her—but she could feel the fragility of the situation through her skin and didn’t dare. “What would you consider the normal complaints of a woman of her age?”

Dr. Trinh actually smiled, though there seemed to be some pain involved in the act. “Perhaps you will simply look up menopause on the internet and your question will be answered.”

A small, intimate explosion went off in Naomi’s brain, triggered by the unexpected mental juxtaposition of “menopause” and “crime,” two things she had never remotely linked before. She needed to remember this tiny epiphany somehow, and she needed to delve into the most heavy realities of menopause and womanness, a place she had never thought to go before. She generated a marker in her mind, one that would pop up whenever Célestine’s age was mentioned. “Why do you think the Arosteguys’ landlady thought that Célestine had a brain tumor? Isn’t that an odd thing for an ordinary person to just invent?”

“Have you ever met this woman, this Tretikov?”

“I’ve seen an interview with her.”

“Yes, of course.” Dr. Trinh stood up, brushing the front of her suit with her tiny hands as she did so, as though Madame Tretikov had covered her with breadcrumbs. “Yes, she’s an ordinary person who has unconsciously used the power of the internet to create a new reality concerning Madame Arosteguy. And it has caused me and my medical colleagues a lot of anguish, I can tell you.” A contemptuous snicker. “She’s the kind of superstitious old woman who believes that thinking too much, or even thinking certain thoughts, can give you brain cancer. And I want you to correct that. That is why I agreed to talk to you.” Having made her statement, this figurine of a woman sat back down and resumed exactly her former position. “The media have now accused us of negligence in our treatment of a woman who was considered a national jewel. They talk of misdiagnosis, of carelessness, of political pressure on us that forced us to ignore her deadly condition, and so on.”

“And none of that is true?”

“None of it.”

“And Célestine didn’t tell her husband that she had brain cancer, and she didn’t ask him to kill her?”

At this, Dr. Trinh produced a sad smile, and it struck Naomi as a genuine smile at last, one which illuminated the doctor’s eyes and altered her breathing, which summoned the earthy presence of Célestine Arosteguy into her fussy, controlled office. “Célestine always used to say that she was doomed and that she had a terminal illness. She said that to her students, to me, to everyone. It was not a complaint, you see. It was almost a promise. But then, anyone who read her writings deeply would know she didn’t mean anything medical.”

The smile was still on Dr. Trinh’s face as she looked down at her doll-like hands, lost in secret memories of the doomed, womanly Célestine, and Naomi found herself wanting to destroy it, to punish her for it. In particular, Naomi was annoyed with herself for not having read even a précis of the Arosteguy oeuvre and could not therefore call the doctor on this evasion. The necessary weapons, however, were close at hand. “And would she ask just anyone to kill her?” It occurred to Naomi that she had very recently fallen back on the expression “just kill me” in a conversation with Nathan in which he had again carped about his missing macro/portrait lens—the lens on her camera right now, sitting in the bag at her feet—but she doubted it would be part of Célestine’s lexicon.

“Of course not.”

“But someone did kill her. Who do you think it was?”

“I have no idea. She had many friends.”

“That surprises me. You think a friend killed her?”

“She knew many people.”

“You don’t think a stranger killed her.”

“These are things I know nothing about.”

“She would say to you, her personal physician, that she had a terminal illness, and you felt that she was being philosophical? You didn’t take it seriously?”

Dr. Trinh had been talking to her hands, but now she raised her eyes to Naomi, searching as she spoke for verifying signs of Naomi’s stupidity, her profound American ignorance. “It was an existential statement,” said Dr. Trinh, “about the death sentence we all live under. She had an affection for Schopenhauer, which led her at times into a kind of fatalistic romanticism. I tried to get her to revisit Heidegger, not so different in some ways, the Germanic ways, but at least a shift away from that sickly Asian taste for cosmic despair.” As if summoned from the ether by that last phrase, a tiny silver crucifix hanging from a bracelet around the doctor’s left wrist caught the raw daylight bouncing onto the desk from a corner mirror and caught Naomi’s eye. Naomi’s friend Yukie was also a Christian, an anomaly that was somehow a disappointment to Naomi. Shintoism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, perhaps. So much more interesting. What bracelets would they wear then? Dr. Trinh continued: “But she couldn’t get past the man’s politics, the Nazi associations, the anti-Semitism. We disagreed on that point, that a man’s politics should negate the value of his philosophy. She could not see how a separation of that kind was possible. A perfectly French attitude, of course.”

Naomi met the doctor’s eyes and her inwardly directed smile with a smile of her own, but she had no confidence that she could disguise the evidence of her immediate downward spiraling, brought about by her intense regret that she had initiated talking to another human being, live. If she had been in front of her laptop, she could google these two Germanics, get a feel for them, but in a strictly oral context she had no idea how to even spell their names, much less respond intelligently to Dr. Trinh. It was one thing to toy with Hervé, bright though he was. Nathan was the one with the classical education, or whatever you called it. He was the reader. Where was he? Naomi was struggling to keep her head above water with the doctor. A street brawl was the only way out.

“Has anyone done an autopsy on Célestine’s brain to see if she had a tumor?”

“Based on the diagnosis of a cleaning lady? I doubt it.”

“Are you aware of the report that Célestine’s severed head was cut open and that her brain was removed by her murderer or murderers? Why do you think they did that?”

A smile was still there on Dr. Trinh’s face, but it was no longer the same smile. It had become a smile that said, “I knew you were my enemy when you walked in here, and now here is the proof, and it makes me happy to see how right I was.” Dr. Trinh stood up and with special force brushed some more crumbs from the front of her suit, this time very dirty, greasy, ugly crumbs that had been sprinkled by Naomi herself. The little silver crucifix—had Vietnam been converted by French Catholic missionaries?—bounced at the end of its chain like a freshly hanged man. And still Naomi couldn’t help herself. “Dr. Trinh, off the record, did Célestine ask you to kill her and then eat her? As a kind of womanly, compassionate sacrament, perhaps?”

Dr. Trinh came out from behind her desk for the first time and walked to the door. She opened it for Naomi without a word. Naomi noticed the doctor’s shoes. They were stilettos with an ankle-strapped bondage component, very severe in their stitching and their shape, but shockingly colorful—red, yellow, blue, green, black—like rare Australian parakeets. As Naomi left the office, she could not help thinking that Dr. Trinh’s shoes were somehow significant.