“There is a problem with the signal on the tracks today. You must go to Rouen first and then transfer to a new train. Follow the signs of RER—see?”
She pointed at a blue circle in the distance behind him, her fingernail hitting the glass in a way that reminded him of his dream.
“Take RER to Gare du Nord, transfer to Gare Saint-Lazare by Métro, take the train to Rouen and then transfer to Dieppe, d’accord?”
He nodded. Great. He needed to get into Paris so that he might get out of it.
He had not expected to be so instantaneously infatuated with Paris, quite literally, from the ground up. He knew the Métro did not inspire enthusiasm in the people who rode it daily, but he could feel the pull of the city each time the train stopped to admit a new flock: blue-haired French ladies with cheekbones parallel to their temples, smartly dressed gay men in wire glasses, bald black men with sweatshirts he couldn’t read, men in turbans and suits, housewives and businessmen, private school students, elderly Algerian ladies, impossibly beautiful girls in drawstring tops, middle-aged ladies wearing black as if it were bright red. One of the impossibly beautiful girls smiled at him. Victor nearly looked over his shoulder, bewildered that her gaze would stop at his face. She got off at the next stop, turning her head back as she walked along the platform.
In one bolt, he thought, he could undo everything, forgo his mission, follow the signs to sortie, catch up with the girl, mail the sketch to Felix with an explanation, and forget all about Guy de Maupassant. But he was determined to stay focused. He could almost guess Guy’s reaction. No need to go following the first girl on the Métro. “Women are like pigeons,” Guy wrote. “It’s never just the one that comes pecking.”
So Victor boarded the train at Saint-Lazare.
He didn’t realize he was sitting backward until the train began to move. He saw people smoking in the open spaces between cars. So far France was making good on its promise of public smoking. Victor pulled down his duffel from the overhead racks and shoved his passport and Johanna’s sketch in his back pocket.
He whacked a big green button and the door slid open. It was mostly men and one woman. The woman muttered something the moment Victor pulled up, glaring at him and heading back to her seat.
“She thinks it’s too crowded,” explained her companion, lighting a new cigarette with the butt of the old.
FUMER TUE, shouted his cigarette pack. It had to shout here, in France, where Victor had clearly landed among his compatriots in vice.
“How did you know I was English?”
“You are American, no?”
“How did you know I spoke English, I meant.”
“Do you not?” the man said, not unkindly.
“You live in Rouen?” Victor asked just as the man inhaled.
“Ouais.” He turned his head to push smoke into the whipping air. “On Place des Carmes, west of République. You know it?”
“No, sorry.”
“Our apartment looks down into a little waxing spa. It is wonderful. I see all of the legs and hear none of the screaming.”
He gave Victor a friendly smack on the arm, lurching across the shifting metal plates at their feet.
“She does not like when I look.” He nodded in his girlfriend’s direction.
Victor looked out on the blur of flat-roofed row houses, highways with little cars and soundproof barriers that gave way to cordoned rectangles of farmland, bound at the edges with rows of spindly trees. Occasionally the legitimate countryside encroached in waves of green that lasted for seconds.
“I’ve never been to Rouen, actually.”
He had not yet said the name of the city aloud, but he knew he was putting too much guttural muscle into the “R.” He sounded like a talking cartoon baguette.
“Ah! You must see the whole thing. There is a church Monet painted three hundred times.”
“That’s a lot of times. But I’m going to Dieppe.”
“Dieppe is a shithole. You cannot go to Dieppe from Rouen.”
“I’m sure it’ll be a letdown, but maybe”—Victor brightened at the truth of his suggestion—“I can come to Rouen on the way back.”
The two other smokers hovering in the wings, two men in pinstripe suits, tossed their butts overboard and went back inside. The sliding door freed a wall of stale train air.
“No, I mean to say you cannot go. It is Thursday today. No trains to Dieppe on Thursdays, I do not think. I have not been in years. Because it is a shithole.”
“No, no.” Victor could feel the glitter of panic. “The schedule . . .”
He patted his pockets for the train schedule he had grabbed at Saint-Lazare but it was back at his seat. He knew he might bump up against logistical problems but he thought he had already paid his dues. Even when he first sat on the train, an irate teenager had done a nice job of harshing his treasure-hunting high and emasculating him by kicking him out of his seat.
“Is it orange?”
“What?”
“Is the paper for which you are looking orange?”
“Maybe.”
“That is the holiday schedule. You will take a bus. But I will be surprised if more of the buses are leaving today. Compris?”
All it took was one guy who sounded like he knew what he was talking about to override the entire French rail service.
“Do you know where the bus station is?”
“Maybe ask the conductor—you say this too, conducteur?— when you exit?”
“Thanks. Thank you.”
The guy said his goodbyes, pointing for a moment at Victor to ask if he had his lighter, only to feel the lump in his own shirt pocket.
“Do not worry.” He smiled warmly. “’Twill be okay.”
Victor shook his pack of cigarettes to see how many he had left. He supposed he didn’t have to keep such close count now. Where there were bus terminals, there were alcohol and nicotine vendors. He held the door, watching the long strips of grass zoom beneath the train. Had he been in Portugal this morning? He had barely slept since the day before yesterday and not particularly well in the decade prior to that. He inhaled deeply, visualizing the oxygen hitting his red blood cells. ’Twill be okay. The thought of spending the night in Rouen, paying for a hotel he couldn’t afford when he could have just paid for a hotel he couldn’t afford in Paris, made his head spin. What would Guy do? he thought. Probably find a prostitute to sleep with in Rouen and not worry about it.
Victor watched the countryside sweep by, worried that he might involuntarily remove the drawing of the necklace from his pocket and throw it onto the tracks. It was the same feeling he got when he stood too close to the subway platform edge as a train arrived. Not because he was suicidal, not really, but because of the clear potential for doom.
THIRTY-FOUR
Kezia
Claude Bouissou’s factory was located on the top two floors of a stone building in the sixth, accessed from the street via an Yves Klein–blue door with lion-head knockers. She entered the building just as another tenant was exiting, assuming Claude—or someone who worked for him—would be waiting for her. The entrance to the factory office was at the end of a dank corridor. The other doors she passed, those not belonging to Claude, were outfitted with modern surveillance cameras and featured freshly painted fonts. Clearly recent tenants compared to Bouissou.
She knocked repeatedly, eventually pushing open the door. The receptionist was either nonexistent or hadn’t shown up to work yet. Apparently Paul had a point about Parisian punctuality.
Kezia paced around the cluttered reception area. Saul would be dead in a minute if Rachel let him off his leash in here. There were watch faces in clear bags, mildew-dotted sketches in matte frames, towers of empty velvet sachets, jeweler’s pliers piled up like toucan beaks, cracked molds that only a hoarder would keep. The wide floorboards let in light from the workshop below. The floor was littered with metal shavings, jars of silver polish, and cleaning cloths covered in dark streaks where tarnished
chains had been squeezed and yanked. There was also a tall wax plant by the door. It looked healthy. Kezia wondered if the plant hadn’t started off farther back in the room but was gradually trying to make its escape.
She sat on a sofa that emitted a wet-dog scent. Odor aside, to have a patterned sofa with deep canyons between the cushions when one worked with small jewels was just, well, dumb. She had a sudden metallic taste in the back of her throat from which she would normally deduce “brain tumor,” but on a table next to her were sheets of freshly sawed silver and brass, wrapped loosely in plastic with the ends open.
She wiped a scrim of sweat from beneath her hat. She yawned and blinked her eyes, instructing them to widen. Listening to the footsteps of workers below, she considered going downstairs and asking them if they had an ETA on their boss, but even if they did—how would that affect her subsequent actions? It wouldn’t.
At 11:42 a.m. the door swung open and Claude plodded past her. He had an absolutely unique physique: A practical hunchback, with a stocky torso and long legs made longer by a strangely high waist, to which he drew attention by tucking in his shirt. Like a pumpkin on stilts. His eyes protruded in an almost glandular fashion, caterpillars of fluffy hair resting above them. He took notice of Kezia only when he emerged from his office to retrieve a porcelain jar of sugar cubes from the receptionist’s desk. He apologized in a weak way that made her suspect he did a lot of apologizing.
Claude’s office was designed with the same tactics as the reception area, only tidied for sanity. The shelves were dusted, there were spore-free sketches framed on the wall, and the floor was clear of debris. Kezia sat in one of two studded oxblood chairs. A bonsai in a cloisonné planter blocked her view of Claude, so he moved it aside. He folded his fingers together, as if he were the one who had been kept waiting.
She explained the problem just as she had explained it over e-mail. He listened silently. From her bag, she produced two broken Starlight Express necklaces, each with missing segments of stars or moons. Claude, in turn, smacked down a padded display board. Kezia laid the necklaces, limp, injured, atop the velvety surface. Sophie would be delighted, she thought—Kezia had brought the thingies to the doll hospital like a good bauble mommy.
Claude flicked the magnifying glass of his loupe like a switchblade. “Now, let us see what we have.”
He leaned over the necklaces.
“I did not understand your e-mail and I do not understand now.” He spoke with his head down. “At what is it I am supposed to be looking?”
He unlatched and latched the clasp in a manner harsher than Kezia ever had. She could hear the scraping of the broken box tongue inside. She cringed but also knew that he was doing her a favor. Best to get it to break while she was sitting here with Claude, Doctor of the Diminutive.
“Well, I’m sure you can see the tongue isn’t making a clean connection.”
“Non.” He frowned in a bemused way. “I do not see that.”
“It’s not visible, but you can feel it.”
“I know. I am saying the same thing. English is not my first language.”
“Right.”
“Nor yours, I suspect.”
“Um.” She absorbed the slight and began again. “If you pick them up, the weight of the necklace pulls on the clasp. The metal bends upward and the magnets never meet. They get stuck. So what’s happening is that it gradually undoes itself.”
“It is absolutely not our responsibility if Madame Simone wants to take my clasps and attach the rocks to them.”
“Of course,” she said, unsure if this was true, “but if they all have the same problem . . .”
He was burrowing a hole in her forehead with a metaphorical push drill. She could feel the spiral bit of his disgust driving into her gray matter.
“It’s just that Rachel wanted me to get a look at the actual process.” She gestured at the floor beneath them. “So that we could . . .”
“Ferret out the bad ones.”
For someone whose first language was not English, “ferret” was impressive.
He was punishing Rachel through Kezia, taking advantage of the fact that her company needed him. Kezia was moving from intimidated to irritated. It’s not as if Rachel hadn’t paid for these clasps—150 of them, to be exact. She simply hadn’t come back for the remainder of the production order. What was Kezia supposed to do? Walk across to the Place Vendôme and ask the nice folks at Boucheron or Mauboussin to please stop working on that tiara for the queen of England because there was a mid-range American necklace named after an eighties roller-skating musical that needed everyone’s attention?
Claude dropped a sugar cube in his tea and licked his fingers, which were murky beneath the nail beds. Her vague suspicion that he had blackballed Rachel for duping him was becoming less vague.
“All right,” she said, “what about the enamel problem?”
“What enamel pr—”
“Oh no, honestly. Look.” She picked a necklace up by the scruff of its neck like a cat moving her cub. “This one has an entire segment missing. It’s not supposed to look like a paint-by-numbers kit.”
He leaned forward. She could see the blackheads dotting his nose. She and the Starlight Express were in the shit together and she was not going to fail it now.
“It sounds to me like you already know the technical aspects here because apparently you are a jeweler disguised as an errand person, so if you please, forgive me if I offend your knowledge as you have offended mine . . .”
Kezia started to speak, but he casually waved her attempt away.
“It is necessary for the clasp to be flat on top so the pigment can flow and set. You see? When Madame Simone ordered her samples, she specified the cloisonné go around the edge like so. You see? I personally myself advised her against this decision. I said to her that it would lead very easily to chipping.”
“You told her that?” Kezia gulped.
“Of course I told her that. Also, I told her the clasp was not the good shape inside and magnets are very complicated. And now? I am sitting in my place of business, which I have operated for twenty-six years, and I am getting lectured by a child who is dressed like Madeline.”
Evisceration complete, he scanned Kezia’s face for signs of tears. But she had not flown across the globe to cry.
She put both palms against his desk. “So, can you fix it?”
“Hold on.” Claude pushed himself from his chair. “Stay here, please.”
He rose quickly and walked ungracefully out of his office, his pumpkin torso staying level. Kezia exhaled and faced forward. She touched the necklaces, soothing them as Sophie would.
“The mean man’s gonna kiss it and make it better,” she whispered.
After a few minutes, she heard muffled voices and rattling downstairs, the sound of Claude speaking to his employees as he hunted for something. She took a stroll around the office, mindful for sounds of Claude returning—which, if this morning was any indication, would be in about six weeks.
There were rolls of chain hanging from spools in a corner, like a knitting shop run by masochists. There were in-boxes filled to the brim with carbon copies of orders. She touched the lens on a spectroscope. Then she moved to where Claude had been sitting. The desk was covered in circular tea stains. The only superfluous objects were two hefty wooden picture frames. The first photograph was black and white with Claude and another man playing pétanque, bocce’s ladylike little sister, on the Île de la Cité, the silver balls gleaming in grayscale, Claude’s partner winding up to take a shot. Something about the way Claude stood, examining the second man’s actions with a combination of affection and judgment: these two were lovers.
The second picture frame had a borzoi in it. A young chestnut-haired Claude was crouched down in the street with the dog’s lanky paws on his knees and a poster for the 1982 Paris Open on an advertising column. She picked up the frame, wiping dust from the corners, but put it back down when she caught sight of the sketc
hes framed on Claude’s wall.
There were six of them, each a drawing of a different piece of jewelry, each done on brown paper and viewed at a slight angle— the undersides of the rings and settings just visible—so that one expected them to start spinning at any moment. A set of rings, a cross, two cameos, a necklace, another necklace, and a brooch. Kezia had seen this style of documentation before.
In the past, most good jewelry was custom made, drawn out for an individual buyer in painstaking detail (unlike Rachel’s sketches, which were more like cocktail napkin renderings). They also had all their information right there on the same page—the weight of the stones, the origin and name of the jeweler, the year of fabrication. But there was something off about these. For one thing, they all seemed to be done by the same artist. Yet the jewelry itself was so different. An impossibility confirmed by the spread of the dates: 1814, 1843, 1856, 1874, 1883, 1890. What septuagenarian has a steady hand since birth? And in so many different places: Calcutta, Dublin, some place called Warwickshire, which she guessed was not in the continental United States.
The rings were brushed gold set with rubies, almost like championship rings and meant for a male hand. In the margin, along with the date and dimensions, someone had drawn a skull and crossbones.
The brooch was gaudy, a cluster of diamonds in the shape of a trotting greyhound. There was no break in the shape or clarity of the stones except for the fact that the diamonds got smaller at the snout and tail . . . and the star-cut one in the belly was 15.37 carats. Meant for someone who wanted others to know she could afford it.
The cameos were plain and what she would expect of cameos— carnelian with neoclassical profiles of white people.
Even the necklaces were different. Both were huge but the first was formally structured with each diamond serving as a kind of arrow, pointing at the substantial drop-cut sapphire in the middle. The second was like a maharaja’s idea of medieval chain mail with hyacinth opals and padparadscha sapphires hooked to gold filigree, extending from chin to sternum.
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