LITMIR.BIZ

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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,

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