Consumed (3 page)

“You have medical photos hanging in your restaurant?”

“No, no. Yours would be the first. You think it would derange the eating?”

“It would derange my eating, I can guarantee you that.”

Dr. Molnár burst out laughing. His surgical mask pumped in and out with the pneumatics of his hilarity. He bent at the waist with laughter. Nathan thought the mask would pop a seam. He scanned the others in
the room. One of them winked and shrugged. It was just Doc Molnár. No worries. Molnár straightened up and gained control with some effort. “Do I shock you? We are very playful here. It's a good tone for an operating theater. It is a theater, after all.”

“Yes,” said Nathan, “so you've told me.” He put the camera up to his eye, regretting the absence of the macro lens. He would get as close as focus would allow and crop into the shot later. When you got close, the breasts became complete animals, possibly marine, attached, perhaps, to auto-feeding tubes. Nathan began to think that some anesthetic fumes were floating around the room, affecting his perception. He shook it off. “Do you want to shock me, Dr. Molnár?” he said, moving gently over the woman's multi-penetrated breasts, rolling his finger on the shutter with delicacy. His nose was mashed, as always, against the camera's rear LCD screen—he used his stronger, left, eye—and he spoke out of the right side of his mouth, the way smokers swiveled their lips away from you while exhaling their smoke. “I have a feeling that you do.”

“I want to be entertaining,” said Molnár, picking up a small stainless-steel bowl. He fished around in it with his index finger, like a prospector panning for gold. “For your big
New Yorker
article. I've always wanted to be the subject of a piece in the ‘Annals of Medicine' section. It's good for business, good for my vanity.”

Still shooting, Nathan laughed. “
The New Yorker
's a long shot. I'm doing this on spec.”

“A ‘long shot,' yeah, sweet expression, but we must all live in hope. I hope for
The New Yorker
.”

“Frankly, I have the same hope. Unfortunately, my credits aren't quite up to snuff. I never did make it through medical school.”

Molnár stopped fishing and looked up into Nathan's lens. “Well, neither did I. That hasn't prevented an illustrious career. I'm sure it won't stop you either.” Nathan couldn't help glancing over at Dunja to see if she
had heard. Her head was rolling dreamily from side to side, and her mouth kept morphing into various modes of smiles, but her eyes were closed. She was somewhere else. Molnár picked this up immediately. “She knows all about me. I learned my medicine during a turbulent era in Eastern Europe. Things were … regularly irregular at that time. North Americans never understand. You want to see this? Would make a nice shot.”

Molnár held out his bowl so that Nathan could see the dozens of tiny metal pellets in it. He rocked the bowl back and forth and the pellets glittered and rattled. It
was
a nice shot—for the 105 macro that Naomi had. Nathan cranked his zoom out to 70mm, then back wide to 24mm, knowing that either way he couldn't get close enough for the ideal portrait of whatever it was he was seeing. If Nathan stayed wide, though, Molnár's hands in the shot were interesting, especially as the doctor scooted the pellets around with his finger. Discernibly gnarled and arthritic even in their gloves, the grotesquely swollen knuckles and finger joints looked like goblins wearing translucent latex dresses. (Were there anesthetic fumes in the room?) Yes, the hands really were the subject of the shot now. How subtle could those stricken hands be during an operation? Nathan wondered if there was a Nikon dealer close to the hotel. Probably get screwed on the price, but when would he see Naomi again? He needed that macro lens. He found himself more and more drawn to the macroscopic level of medical endeavor, though he wasn't sure what he could do with it. There were plenty of medical specialists in the field, their stuff mundane, workmanlike, ugly. They weren't artists. But was Nathan? “It is pretty, but what is it I'm seeing, Zoltán?”

“I am preparing to perform a multiple lumpectomy. The patient has many discrete tumors in her breasts, but they are not very aggressive, and so, flying the pink flag of breast preservation, I shall remove only the tumors, thus sparing the breasts. Accordingly, I am about to inject one hundred and twenty radioactive pellets, which are radioactive iodine
isotopes—iodine-125—encapsulated in these titanium seeds, into each breast, surrounding the tumors that are growing there.” Molnár gestured expansively at the machines and monitors surrounding the table. “This is our three-dimensional ultrasound guidance system. We must locate each lump to within hundredths of a millimeter of exactitude within a chaotic inner space. I feel like I'm flying an airplane with only radar to guide me.”

Nathan worked his way around behind Molnár. He found a lovely angle which included Molnár's hands and the shimmering pan in the foreground and Dunja's bewebbed breasts in the background. The light over the table combined with the D3's exquisite low-light sensitivity gave him enough depth of field that he could just hold both the foreground and the breasts in focus. As he fired off his shots, the Kevlar/carbon-fiber composite shutter hammering echoes off the blasted tiles of the room, Molnár shouted out for all to hear, “It's a good thing you are not shooting film, I must admit to myself. Her breasts will soon be radioactive, and your film would be fogged as a result!”

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 “
mee
graine,” 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 “
ee
pair,” 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?”