of you naked?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to have sex with you. Really. I’m not.”
Hervé had taken off his tie, jacket, and shirt, and was working on his belt, a fussy alligator-patterned thing with a dual-pronged buckle and a double row of holes which seemed to be giving him trouble. He was hairless and thin through the chest, just as Naomi thought he would be. All those New Wave movies. “If you have sex with me, I will show you something special that Célestine liked very much. It’s unusual what she liked.”
Naomi lifted her camera and casually began to snap away.
“Oh, I like your camera,” said Hervé. “It looks like it’s carbon fiber. Is it?”
“No. Magnesium body.” She stopped shooting, hefted her Nikon, juggled it from hand to hand. “I have a feeling carbon fiber is next, though. It would be nice if it were even lighter.” Then back up to her eye, shooting again. “And what about Aristide? Was there something special that he liked?”
Hervé finally got his belt undone and his trousers down. He was wearing black Calvin Klein bikini briefs. She had hoped for something more exotic. “Yes, certainly,” he said, stepping out of the trousers. “It will be a little more difficult, but I can show you that too.”
DUNJA LAY PROPPED UP in a bed in the Molnár Clinic’s basement recovery room. There were a dozen beds, skeletal and primitive, creepy, but she and Nathan were alone in the room. He sat in an unstable plastic chair beside her bed, his camera on his lap, his voice recorder still hanging from its lanyard around his neck, its jewel-like red power light staining Dunja’s sheet, so dark was the room. Dunja was still dreamy, but Nathan suspected it was emotional exhaustion more than the effect of the anesthetic. She nodded towards him. “I didn’t expect the camera. In the operating room. I thought you would just take notes on a notepad, like a proper journalist.”
“We’re all photojournalists now. It’s no longer enough just to write. We have to bring back images, sound, video. I hope you don’t mind.”
Dunja stretched, and it was somehow voluptuous despite the depressing threadbare hospital gown and the shunt in her arm. “I don’t mind. Soon, that’ll be all that’s left, so the more the merrier. Something to remember me by.”
“Why do you say that? Don’t you have confidence in Dr. Molnár?”
Dunja laughed. “Look at this place. This is my strategy of last resort. No one else in the world would commit this operation on me. Only Dr. Molnár was arrogant enough. And you can quote me.”
“I will quote you.”
“And you? You were so impressed by Dr. Molnár you came from New York to write about him?”
Nathan’s turn to laugh. “I saw him in a documentary about illegal organ transplants. He was very defiant and very engaging. I came to talk to him about the international organ trade and then discovered he was a practicing breast surgeon. I’m not sure yet what the piece I’m writing is really about, but that’s not so unusual for me.” He lifted his camera. “May I take a picture?”
“Why not? Send these images of me through the internet out into the universe, where I will continue my out-of-body existence.”
Nathan checked the light metering through the viewfinder, then cranked the camera’s ISO up to its maximum of 25,600. (The new D4s, the one he didn’t have, could shoot at a surreal ISO 409,600—it could see in the dark—but that didn’t bear thinking about.) The photos would be extremely noisy, grainy and splotchy, but would have a painterly quality, pointillist, perhaps, or impressionist. The camera somehow felt even more sensuous, more instrument-like, at that setting. He began to fire.
Dunja sighed. “Of course, for all eternity I won’t look my best. Is there any pose you’d like from me? I’m not shy.”
Nathan thought of what Naomi would say to that. She was a fashion photographer at heart, maybe even a celebrity shooter—a paparazza?—and wouldn’t be shy about directing a subject as pliant as Dunja. “I don’t really want you to pose. We’re pretending that you don’t know I’m here.” Nathan stood up and moved around her, shooting with the lens wide open, with little depth of field, the floating images of her face driving right into his brain. Her eyes had a creamy darkness, and she seemed able to look into the lens without actually noticing it. Stunning.
Nathan paused and went back to his camera bag. He dug around in it for his flash. “Just to be on the safe side, I’ll take a few with some bounced flash. There’s not much light in here.” He slid the foot of the flash into the hot shoe and locked it. “We can just do the same thing you were doing.” He pulled up the flash’s little plastic bounce card for eye light and began to fire.
“Oh, but now, with that flashing, I feel like a movie star,” she said. “And I want you to see the best part of me.” She pulled open her gown and presented her breasts, which were bruised and peppered with tiny swollen red dots. Nathan immediately stopped shooting. “What’s wrong?” she said. “Too ugly? Too horrible?”
“No, on the contrary. It’s, um, too sexy. In a fetishistic way. Or something. Maybe too Helmut Newton. I don’t think I’d know how to use it for, you know, a medical article.”
“Then just take some for yourself,” said Dunja. “So that you remember me afterwards in a nicer way.” She smiled the warmest smile at him, and then tears began to seep from her eyes. She did not wipe them away. “And can that camera function under water?”
DUNJA SPLASHED WATER at Nathan, targeting his camera but missing it, soaking the knees of his jeans. Somehow she still managed to look voluptuous in her clinical gray one-piece cotton bathing suit, in part because it was thin and unstructured, clinging. A white medicinal rubber bathing cap hid her hair completely. “I was sure they wouldn’t allow you to take photos in here,” she laughed. “And you’re wearing jeans!”
Nathan was squatting next to a stylized stone lion-head fountain that drooled complex mineral water into the pool. He stood up and followed her, warily snapping, as she waded along the edge of the shallow end of the pool. “I got Dr. Molnár to pull some strings. Getting me in with jeans was the hardest part, apparently. But what about you? Every other woman here is wearing one of those blue plastic shower cap things. You’re not in regulation dress either.”
“The matron in the locker room is very strict, but she’s also half Slovenian, from my father’s town of Jesenice. I told her why I needed a special hat to keep the water out of my ears. I made her cry. I think she’s in love with me now.”
They were in the main swimming pool room of the Hotel Gellért, on the hilly Buda side of the Danube. The room was vast, more like an opulent art nouveau ballroom than a pool, and was bordered by a series of twinned, intricately tooled marble columns, arcades, and ornate balconies bearing potted ferns that projected from the spacious upper gallery. Thin morning light drifted in through its arched yellow glass roof.
“And what about that bathing suit? Is that yours too?” asked Nathan.
“You don’t like it? They rent them here. I think they were designed by Stalinists.”
Somewhere deep inside the pool’s mosaic-tiled heart, motors fired up, and the entire pool became a frothing, sulfurous Jacuzzi. Dunja ducked under the effervescing water and disappeared, leaving Nathan to stalk along the edge of the pool, tracking
