The Clasp (33 page)

T
he police station smelled of stale tobacco. An unwelcome morning surprise, especially when mixed with the salty marina air pushing in behind them. Nathaniel shut the door. He took the lead, explaining why they were there, who they were, that they had come in peace. Kezia half expected to be turned away, to be told that they had the wrong place and the wrong guy and the wrong town.

“
Ah, ouais
,” the cop at the front desk said. “Monsieur Wexler.
Le chat cambrioleur
. I will take you to him.”

The cop looped an extra set of keys onto his belt and pushed back his rolling chair. Apparently there was only one man in America who would come to France to break into a château and Victor was he.

He was curled on his side, occupying the bottom bunk of his cell. Without anyone making a sound, he looked over his shoulder, panic on his face. He sat quickly and stayed for a moment on the cot, blinking and cracking his back. He looked at Kezia as if she were a mirage. He put one foot in front of the other, as if by
getting incrementally closer, he could better evaluate her realness. Nathaniel took a picture with his phone. The noise felt unusually loud and broke Victor's concentration.

“You'll want that.” Nathaniel looked at his screen. “Trust me.”

“What are you guys doing here?”

It was a question generally asked out of extreme excitement or extreme irritation but Victor clearly wanted to know. He hadn't shaved and his face was more gaunt than usual. Dark half-moons hung under both eyes. A bit of blood crusted near his ear, a bruise indented with nap marks on the right side of his face. There was also a Hitler scab above his lip. It had to hurt when he spoke. He looked less like he had spent the night in a French detention center and more like he had spent a month in a Turkish prison.

“We came for you, you idiot.”

“What happened to your face?” asked Nathaniel.

“What happened to
your
face?”

“My face is fine.”

Nathaniel leaned his arm on Kezia's shoulder but it fell as she bent down to be level with Victor, who had also crouched down and was holding the bars like a monkey.

“How on earth did you find me?” He looked at her with his big battered monkey eyes.

“It's a long story. Are you okay?”

“Can you ask them for a glass of water?”

“I got it,” said Nathaniel, starting down the hall.

“Seriously, how did you find me?” Victor croaked and fully sat on the floor.

“No way.” She shook her head. “You're the one behind bars. You start.”

“I don't know where to begin.”

“How's here: Did you really threaten Caroline?”

“She told you that? With what, a butter knife?”

Victor scratched his head. It occurred to her that this was not an act of contemplation but a possible reaction to lice.

“She accused me of stealing jewelry from Felix's dead mother—though, to be fair, she wasn't dead at the time—and I told her I didn't because I didn't. Come to think of it, I don't know why
you'd
tell Caroline anything, because Caroline despises me.”

“Ha.” Kezia exhaled. “Don't pin this on me. And she doesn't
despise
you.”

“She absolutely does.”

“But you did take something that night, didn't you?”

Before Victor could answer, Nathaniel returned with a small paper cone of water.

“I tried to find a plastic one but they don't believe in plastic here.”

Victor paused between greedy gulps. “That's because you can make a shiv out of plastic.”

“Look at this.” Nathaniel elbowed Kezia. “One night in jail and he's an expert.”

“I am.” Victor sipped. “For instance, I know that jail is the one place in France you can't smoke. And that it turns out there is no such thing as bail in this country. Instead they can hold you for sport for a little while. It's unethical
and
uneconomical.”

“Well, good,” Nathaniel said. “Because I didn't feel like negotiating with these people.”

“Oh, I hadn't realized you were here in a diplomatic capacity.”

“Will you guys stop it?” Kezia banged on the bars.

“Did you ask him about Guy de Maupassant yet?”

Kezia glared up at Nathaniel. She was planning on letting Victor tell his story, easing into what they already knew afterward. She wanted to hear it from him without upsetting him. But Victor bypassed embarrassment and went straight to enthusiasm. She had seen Victor enthusiastic maybe twice ever.

“You never answered my e-mail! I mean, I know you only
faked a concentration in French literature but we should have taken a whole course on this guy, I'm telling you. Did you know that he used to prank-send women baskets of frogs? I would have liked him. You definitely would have. He'd pick up any woman he saw reading his books. And he was like a sex machine. And funny. He once had a boy dress up like a woman and go into a woman's lounge and report back on everything he heard.”

“That sounds a little gay,” scoffed Nathaniel.

“Did you know that he had a parrot named Jacquot and he trained it to greet visitors with ‘Allô, my little whore. Ooort. Allô, my little whore'?”

Kezia gave Nathaniel a pleading look.

“Why would we know something like that, Victor?” Nathaniel spoke softly. “I like the story, too. It's a classic. But no one knows stuff like that.”

“That's exactly the point!”

“Victor—”

“No, I want to talk about hidden histories. No one ever lets me talk and I want to talk. I used to think information was symbiotic. I thought, on some core level, that there was a soul to information and that facts wanted to be found. I thought this necklace wanted to be found. But facts and objects don't give a shit about being found because they don't see themselves as lost. They know they are real without us. Right now, as I address you from this cell—”

“Let's not get carried away, Mandela.”

“—right now there's some eyeless albino crab species roaming the bottom of the ocean floor. And why don't we know about them?”

“Because they haven't been discovered yet?” Kezia guessed.

Victor made a buzzer sound. “Wrong! Because we have a dysfunctional relationship with information. Trust me, I have years of search engine experience.”

“Yeah, but you were fired, so there's that.”

“
Nathaniel
,” she scolded.

“He's going on about crabs and I get a ‘Nathaniel' for pointing out the truth?”

Victor didn't flinch. “Human beings are such self-centered freaks. Something is new to us and we want to shake it and say, ‘Holy Christ, do you have any idea how important you are?' But the fact has always known it's a fact. No one is hiding the crabs, not even the crabs. And
this
is what I've realized . . .”

A cop passed them, ushering a kid with eyebrow piercings. The kid was handcuffed and he spat at Nathaniel's feet. It splattered on the concrete. Nathaniel moved his shoe.

“Nothing is lost until people start claiming that they've found it.”

Victor beamed, waiting for them to be awed by the revelation.

Kezia softened her voice. “Victor, what does this have to do with the necklace?”

“I didn't find it. I thought I could. Maybe no one ever will. It doesn't actually matter. But it's the reverse of the story. Life isn't imitating art, it's better than art. The necklace is a real thing that actually exists.”

He kept talking, telling them about Johanna's dresser and the jewelry inside, about how she had told him the story of her aunt—the one he had tried to tell Kezia—about how he had swiped the sketch of the necklace and run with it in every sense, about how just because it wasn't where he thought it would be, that “doesn't mean it's not out there.”

“Okay,” Nathaniel said solemnly. “Show him.”

Kezia cued up the photo she had taken in Claude's office and passed it through the bars. “Victor, is this what you took when we were in Miami?”

He looked at the drawing like a boy seeing a ship in a bottle
for the first time, trying to figure out how the picture had gotten into her phone.

“How did you get this? Did Caroline find another copy?”

“Oy,” she blew out as she sighed, “the necklace isn't real, Victor. This is from a very old, very out-of-print book.”

“A book?”

He said the word as if she had made it up. He put her phone on the floor. She wished for some of Grey's hand sanitizer. He got up and faced the opposite wall. He started to pace, like he was trolling for something to punch. Instead he kicked the urinal hard. Then he hopped over to the cot to nurse his toes.

“Do you actually know there's no necklace?” He held his foot.

“Well, no. But there's not.”

“You know everything else.”

Now Nathaniel leaned on the bars. “Dude, she basically flew across the planet to track your ass down. I would be grateful if anyone did that for me. I can't imagine anyone in my whole life caring about me the way she cares about you.”

Kezia tried to catch Nathaniel's eye. She wanted to brush his fingers as he held the bars. But she thought, for the first time, not of Victor's reaction or Nathaniel's. It was herself she didn't want to give the wrong idea to.

Instead, she signaled to a passing officer. This was a gesture oddly reminiscent of signing one's palm at the end of a meal.

“Victor,” she said, “I know you wanted it to be real.”

“You're talking like it's Santa Claus. I'm not an idiot. I had evidence.”

“You may have had, but following through is . . . it's . . .”

“Crazy,” Nathaniel finished her thought.

“Neither of you get it.”

“Because of the crabs?”

“No, not because of the crabs. You . . . you don't know what
it's like to never get what you want, to go so far down a path that you don't even know what you want, but what you do know is that you just don't like yourself. Or maybe you never liked yourself all that much. I don't know. But you were
okay
with that and now you're just not. I'm sick of wanting the same old shit and not getting it. I'm sick of all my days bleeding together and nothing ever changing. I get how this sounds, saying it from in here, but, honestly? I don't care what that picture says. I can't remember the last time I felt this alive.”

She looked at Nathaniel, who, to her surprise, was caught in a kind of reverential spell. Of course she realized that Victor had wants and of course she realized that her name was on the list, but it had never occurred to her that his primary want was
not
to want. Like the reverse of wishing for more wishes.

Nathaniel cleared his throat. “In that case, in the spirit of honesty and sharing and more specifically in the spirit of truth replacing a space where before there had been lies . . . my show isn't getting made.”

“What?” Kezia said, stunned. “What are you talking about?”

“It's nowhere near close to getting made. No one will pay me to write the pilot. Most people won't even consider letting me pitch them to write the pilot. I can't get in the room.”

“I'd just like to get out of the room.” Victor looked at the bars.

She understood that this confession was meant to be appealing, to set Nathaniel free. But he had lied for no good reason. It did not make him more appealing. And he had only spilled because Victor went first.

“I'm sorry,” Nathaniel said.

“I don't even care,” she groaned. “I'm just realizing I'm the only one here who's not a big fat liar.”

“Probably,” Victor said, rubbing his toe.

T
he car kept jerking forward. Empty water bottles rolled out from beneath the seat and knocked lightly against Victor's shoes before retreating back to their hovel. Still, it felt good to be in a car. In the side mirror, he could see Kezia asleep behind him, mouth open, seat belt separating one breast from the other.

Victor watched the countryside differently now, with a sense that he knew every bend in the road. It was the same feeling he had the day Caroline picked him up on the side of a New England highway—only more scenic. Stone walls rushed by. Apple trees blurred into clumps. He played a game with himself, trying to focus on a single tree and then watching it speed out of sight. He flipped open his visor and a piece of scrap paper with pink ink came tumbling out.

“What's this? ‘
Est-ce que je peux garer ma voiture ici?
'” Victor tripped through the first column before moving on to the second. “May I park my car here? ‘
J'ai mes règles et j'ai besoin des tampons
.' I have my . . . my—”

“Period,” came a groggy voice from the backseat. “She needs tampons. It's Grey's. That must have been there for a while.”

He turned around and looked at her and she gave him a quick grin before looking back out the window. Nathaniel, meanwhile, peppered him with questions about his brawl in Rouen. Victor found himself answering honestly. He was afraid at the time and free of ego in the retelling. Now that Kezia and Nathaniel had seen him at his worst, he felt enabled to be his best. Or some approximation of it.

Nathaniel told him about his own adventures with Kezia. Something about the way he spoke, carefully glossing over what the two of them did at night, Victor was pretty sure something had gone on between them. This was nothing new. He had been pretty sure many times over the years, living in perpetual fear of confirmation. But now something had shifted slightly and Victor only felt as if he
should
be crushed. Guy once wrote that “one sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.” But Victor no longer felt like weeping over lost illusions.

As they drove into Paris, the Eiffel Tower rose in the distance. Whenever Guy was in Paris, he would eat exclusively at the base of the Eiffel Tower because it was the only place left in the city where he couldn't see it. Victor tried to adopt this exasperation but the view wouldn't let him. The road hugged the Seine, the “beautiful, calm, stinking river” Guy described. As suspected, it was more pleasing to the eye here than it had been in Rouen. The surface sparkled in waves of inky meringue. Granted, Victor was biased. To him, Rouen was hazy and abusive.

There were several crew boats on the water. From this angle, they looked like caterpillars that had been flipped over by some sadistic child, oars flailing. Guy used to race up the fog-veiled river. He would rest at major bends, at fishing towns with names
like Sartrouville, getting a second wind upon seeing the buttresses of Notre Dame rise in the distance. “He took up the oars,” wrote François, “and nodded to the thirty persons who had come to see him off. Then, imitating the motion of a large bird taking its flight, he plunged his oars into the water. A few minutes later, I could only perceive in the distance a black spot on the silvery sheet of the Seine.”

Victor could just see Guy grimacing behind his mustache, gliding down the river.

Then Nathaniel sped through a yellow light and the car jerked forward and backward and stopped.

Nathaniel glanced at the rearview mirror. “Sorry.”

No longer running parallel to the crew boats, Guy's imaginary boat pulled ahead too, vanishing. Victor felt a hand affectionately scratching at the base of his skull.

“You need a shower.” Kezia wiped her fingers gently on his shoulder.