to be taken, that risk and failure had to be confronted. But cancer called, and its voice was compelling.
IN HER SMALL BUT SUMPTUOUS attic room at the Hôtel de Crillon, Naomi was stretched out on an ornate chaise longue beside a short, narrow pair of French doors leading to a door-mat-sized balcony. From that balcony, she had already photographed the courtyard, with its intricate web of pigeon-repelling wires overhead, paying particular attention to details of decay, comme d’habitude. No matter how deluxe the hotel in Paris, you could count on the imprint of time to surprise you with wonderful textures. Now, having made her habitual nest of BlackBerry, cameras, iPad, compact and SD flashcards, lenses, tissue boxes, bags, pens and markers, makeup gear (minimal), cups and glasses bearing traces of coffee and various juices, chargers of all shapes and sizes, two laptops, chunky brushed-aluminum Nagra Kudelski digital audio recorder, notebooks and calendars and magazines, all of these anchored by her duffel bag and her backpack, Naomi reviewed her latest photos using Adobe Lightroom while watching a new video concerning the Arosteguys that had just surfaced on YouTube. And in another screen window, next to a photo of the hotel window’s rot-chewed frame with its faded white-and-greenstriped awning, striped also with streaks of rust from its delicate metal skeleton, was another intriguing display: a 360-degree panorama of the Arosteguy apartment, which Naomi idly controlled with her laptop’s trackpad, zooming and scrolling, in essence walking through the cramped, chaotic academics’ home.
There was the sofa shown in the earlier video, now patterned with blocks of sunlight streaming from a trio of small windows through which Naomi thought she could see a slice of the Sorbonne across the road. Behind the sofa were the densely populated bookshelves, but now swing around ninety degrees and more bookshelves, and piles of papers, letters, magazines, documents, littering every piece of furniture, including the kitchen sink, including the floor. Naomi smiled at the absence of cool electronics: a tape player, of all things; a small 4:3 tube TV set (could it actually be black and white?); and a phone with a cord. This pleased her, because it felt right for a hot French philosophy couple who were closer to Sartre and Beauvoir than Bernard-Henri Lévy and Arielle Dombasle. The Arosteguys seemed to belong to, at the latest, the 1950s. (She could see Simone Signoret, with her heavy sensuality, playing the role of Célestine in a movie, but only if she managed to project the intellect of Beauvoir; she wasn’t sure who would play Aristide.) To drill into their lives was to drill into the past, and that’s where Naomi wanted to go. She wasn’t looking for a mirror, not this time.
A paragraph below the panorama window confirmed that this was indeed the apartment before the murder, documented by a web-savvy student of Aristide’s—obviously using Panorama Tools and a fish-eye lens, Naomi noted—as part of a master’s thesis connecting the Evolutionary Consumerist philosophy of the Arosteguys with the couple’s own ascetic—relatively—lifestyle. The writer of that paragraph dryly noted that the wretched candidate, Hervé Blomqvist, had been denied his degree in the end. Naomi had come across an internet forum conducted by students of Célestine that had the tone of a sixties French New Wave movie. Blomqvist was a frequent contributor who positioned himself as a classic French bad boy along the lines of the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. He hinted that as an undergraduate he had been the cherished lover of both Aristide and Célestine and was later punished for daring to use his place in the private lives of the Arosteguys to anchor what he confessed was “a pathetically thin and parasitical thesis.” Naomi emailed herself a note to connect with Blomqvist, a mnemonic technique that was the only one that seemed to work. Anything else got lost in the tangle of the Great Nest, as Nathan called the cloud of chaos that enveloped her.
The third window on Naomi’s screen was an interview shot in the oddly shaped basement kitchen of the couple who were responsible for the daily maintenance of the Arosteguys’ entire apartment block. The room was dominated by an immense concrete cylinder which suggested that half the casing of an exterior spiral staircase was bulging into their space. It was against this pale-green stuccoed column that a short, stout French woman and her shy, mustachioed husband stood speaking to an off-camera interviewer. The sound of the woman’s surprisingly youthful voice was soon mixed down to allow the voice of a translator to float over it. The translator’s voice, more mature, more matronly, seemed a better match for the woman’s face.
“Never,” said the translator. “No one could come between them, those two. Of course, they both had many affairs. They came here, the boys and girls, to their apartment just upstairs above us. We could sometimes hear them here behind us, laughing on the staircase, coming down as Mauricio and I had breakfast in the kitchen. He’s my husband.” A shy smile. “He’s Mexican.”
With a sweet, excited embarrassment, Mauricio waved directly at the camera. “Hello, hello,” he said in English.
The woman—only now, clumsily, identified as “Madame Tretikov, Maintenance” by a thick-fonted subtitle—continued. “They slept here. They lived here. Sometimes, yes, their lovers were students. But not always.” She shrugged. “For the students, it was a question of politics and philosophy, as always. The two together. They were in agreement. The Arosteguys explained it to me and Mauricio, and it seemed very correct, very nice.”
Naomi maximized the video window. With the screen filled, she could feel herself inside that kitchen, standing beside the camera, looking at that couple, the chipped enameled stove, the cupboards of moisture-swollen chipboard, damp kitchen towels spilling out of open cutlery drawers. She could smell the grease and the under-the-staircase dankness.
As if in response to the newly enlarged image, the cameraman zoomed slowly in to Madame’s face, zoomed because he saw moisture welling up in her eyes, like blood to a shark. Madame came through for her close-up, biting her quivering lip, tears spilling. Mercifully, the translator did not try to emulate the tremor in Madame’s voice.
“They were so brilliant, so exciting,” said Madame. “There could be no jealousy, no anger between them. They were like one person. She was sick, don’t you see? She was dying. I could see it in her eyes. Probably a brain tumor. She thought so hard all the time. Always writing, writing. I think it was a mercy killing. She asked him to kill her and he did. And then, of course, yes, he ate her.” With these words, Madame took a deep, stumbling breath, wiped her eyes with the threadbare dish cloth she had been holding throughout the interview, and smiled. The effect was startling to Naomi, who immediately began to analyze it in the email window she had left open in the corner of the screen. “He could not just leave her there, upstairs,” Madame continued. Her smile was beatific; she had a revelation to deliver. “He wanted to take as much of her with him as he could. So he ate her, and then he ran away with her inside him.”
THE MEDICAL GOGGLES were getting in the way. Nathan could barely see through the viewfinder of his ancient Nikon D3, the plastic lenses projecting too far from his eye, the goggles slewing and popping off his nose when he pressed the camera close, their elastic band pulling at his hair and crumpling his baby-blue paper surgical cap. “Everything changed after AIDS,” Dr. Molnár had just explained to him. “From then on, blood was more dangerous than shit. We realized you can’t afford to get it into your eyes, your tear ducts. So, we put on ski goggles in the operating theater and we schuss”—here he made slightly fey hip- and arm-twisting motions—“over the moguls of our patients’ bodies.” Now Dr. Molnár bent close to the Nagra SD voice recorder hanging around Nathan’s neck in its bondagestyle black-strapped leather case, and into its crustacean-like stereo cardioid microphone breathed, “Don’t be shy, Nathan. I’m notoriously vain. Get close. Fill your frame. That’s rule number one for a photographer, isn’t it? Fill your frame?”
“So they say,” said Nathan.
“Of course, you wrote to me that you were a medical journalist who was forced by the ‘swelling tide of media technology’ also to become a photographer and a videographer and a sound recordist, so perhaps you are now somewhat overwhelmed. I will guide you.”
Naomi had also, quite independently, bought one
