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!”
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
