“I would end anybody that tried to make me.” Then, “Look, more soldiers.”
Noah watched them pass outside the windows, one a ponytailed blonde, like some Botticelli with an assault rifle. “Well, I suppose right here is where the attack happened.”
“The Nazis?”
Noah shook his head and lowered his voice. “This was just a couple of years ago, a street party for Bastille Day—that’s like the French Fourth of July. Right after the fireworks this man drove a truck into the crowds, zigzagged along for over a mile, hunting people down.”
“Holy fuck.”
For once, the kid’s word choice seemed justified. “They had to cover the bodies with tablecloths till the ambulances could get to them.”
Noah jerked slightly as their waiter slapped down a basket of baguette rounds, a slim bottle of mineral water, a glass of red wine.
“Where’s the butter?” Michael wanted to know.
“This is how they serve it here.”
“Dry? Don’t they have any butter?”
“They just don’t spread it on their bread at lunchtime. Tell me, what kinds of things did your grandma cook for you?”
“Depends on the time of the month.”
That startled Noah.
Michael snorted. “Not that! You’re sick, dude.”
“Well, what was I supposed to think you meant?”
“First of the month, the welfare check comes in, and Grandma’s—” He stopped, fumbling for the right tense. “She always cooked up a storm, ribs and stuff.”
Noah got it. “Whereas four weeks later…”
“A week or two, max.”
“What would you do then?”
“Well, snap.”
Was this a catchphrase of some sort? “What does that mean?”
“Duh—SNAP, the card for buying food? But that runs out fast too, because me and Cody are always hungry.”
This had to be some modern form of food stamps. “So, ah, then?”
A shrug. “It’s all about what’s left at the food pantry. Soup, pasta sauce, puddings. Some people go early in the month to get the better stuff, but Grandma never wanted to till she had to.”
Noah understood that. He looked into his wine so his face wouldn’t show what he felt.
Then he went off to wash his hands, though the toilet was nasty enough that he regretted it. It was almost comforting to find France had refused to change in this respect.
When Noah got back to the table, Michael was huddled over his phone again. “What game is that?”
The boy shook his head. “That crazy-ass guy in the truck. Killed eighty-five! A third of his vics were Muslim like him.”
“Keep your voice down,” Noah whispered urgently. “Lots of people here understand English.”
Michael put the screen up to Noah’s face. “Is that a leg?”
Blurred footage—taken with a phone right after the attack, it looked like, by someone stumbling along the Promenade. “Turn it off.” Noah stabbed his finger at the screen but couldn’t get it to pause. One long, low-res nightmare; grainy shapes all over the sidewalk, like broken mannequins.
“Game over,” Michael was saying with a kind of awe. “People throwing babies over fences—”
“Shh!”
The boy finally turned off the screen.
“Our waiter might have been here that night,” Noah told him. “It’s not a goddamn movie.”
“Mom’s going to get me a better phone when I give her this one back.”
The kid’s pivots in topic and mood made Noah dizzy. He wondered if this device would be entirely obsolescent by the time Amber got out, in more than two more years.
“When’s our food coming?”
“When it’s ready,” Noah told him. “Have you had some bread?”
“It’s stale.”
“You’ve heard ‘The customer’s always right’?”
“Sure.”
“Well, that’s in America. Not here.” Noah tried a slice of baguette, but it was indeed hard. (Their fault for lunching so late.)
Michael watched the tennis match showing on a silent TV.
Then the waiter was sliding rectangular plates in front of them. Noah’s cod looked perfect, with an assortment of spring vegetables.
“What the crap is this?” Michael demanded.
Noah sighed. “Is it that French burgers don’t come with buns? For a starch, you have the fries.”
“No way is this a burger. It’s all raggedy and bleeding.”
Noah had forgotten to warn the waiter that Americans liked their meat broiled into submission. “They mince the meat up fresh, on the day, and cook it rare—for less time—so it’s more tender. Try it.”
“Not in this fucking lifetime.”
Noah reminded himself how the kid must be feeling: off-balance, out of his depth, at sea. He beckoned the waiter over: could the young man’s steak haché possibly be cooked a little more?
It seemed rude to start his cod until Michael’s meal came back. “Would you like some of these vegetables in the meantime?”
The boy curled his lip and stared at the tennis on the TV.
So Noah ate in silence.
The waiter returned Michael’s plate a couple of minutes later with barely veiled disdain: the meat brown, the fries even harder-looking.
Michael pinned the burger with his fork and sank his knife into it. Then threw the cutlery down. “Still bleeding.”
Noah said, “That’s just the juice of the meat.”
“It’s blood, dude! Like the juice of your meat would be if I stuck this in you.” Michael snatched up the steak knife again.
Noah looked away from the jagged blade and carried on eating. “It’s only pink. That degree of doneness is called medium.”
“Well, I call it dog food.”
Bereaved, Noah reminded himself. Jet-lagged. Culture-shocked.
Michael tasted a fry. “I need ketchup.” He darted off.
For a moment Noah thought he was running out of the restaurant.
The boy came back with a cage of bottles from an empty table: mayonnaise, mustard, even genuine Heinz ketchup.
Well, one point for problem-solving. “Are the fries all right?”
Michael shrugged. “This is like a kiddie portion. They’re cheap, the French.” He ate all the fries except two that had touched the puddle of pink juice.
While Noah was paying the bill, Michael went off to the bathroom. He came back to announce, “Some lazy-ass pissed on the seat.”
Outside the restaurant, turning back along the Prom, Noah told him, “In my day it was mostly squat toilets.”
“Huh?”
“Two footpads over a hole, and you crouched down—” Noah held onto a gold-painted fence and tried to mime it.
“Ew!”
“Well, at least there was no seat to get dirty. But drunks did tend to pee down their legs.”
“Where are we going now?” Michael asked.
“Just strolling.”
The boy let out his breath loudly in protest. Then, “How come that blonde’s got horns?”
Startled, Noah spun around, but it was only a poster for Marine Le Pen on a lamppost. “Somebody’s drawn them on to say that she may look nice, but her party’s ideas are like Hitler all over again.”
The boy’s head turned to follow a car. “Another Maserati.”
That reminded Noah. “Oh, a legendary accident happened on this street.”
“A big pile-up?”
“No, one car. An American ballet dancer, Isadora Duncan, she had on this long scarf and it got caught in one of her wheels.”
“That couldn’t happen, dude.”
“Picture an old-timey convertible, with its big wheels sticking up above the side panels, and no mudguards. She got yanked out and dragged—” Noah made a strangulated face. Then wondered what Rosa would think of his choice of topics. Well, let her try keeping up conversation with this kid all day without resorting to t
he vulgar and the macabre.
“Was she more famous than our Nodaddy Ding?”
“Far more famous. Isadora’s fans used to break the windows of restaurants to get at her. She said we should dance barefoot, the way our bodies told us to. She sunbathed before anyone else…” Noah was flicking through A Life’s Work, trying to find the iconic close-up of the dancer doing a backbend on the strand, the sea sparking through gaps in her draperies.
“This ballet woman was white?”
“Ah…yes.” He showed the picture.
“Called it,” Michael said with a snort. “Back in Africa people’ve been sunbathing and dancing barefoot like forever.”
“Fair enough.” Discomfited. “I suppose all I mean is that she made it fashionable.”
Michael asked for his ice cream in a waffle cone but Noah said no, because the add-ons were always overpriced. So then Michael chose some strange product out of the freezer: tiny pellets of ice cream that he knocked back like peanuts.
Made in USA, Noah read on the discarded packet. So much for educational stimulus in a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old city; really this week was about junk food in a different time zone.
Tourists passed in Carnival masks, all sequins and feathers, with strings of beads. Michael was goggling at a man on a recumbent bicycle. “They’re good for the back, apparently. They spread the weight,” Noah told him.
“Wouldn’t get much respect, though,” the boy said, frozen dots almost escaping out the side of his mouth. “But I’d go in one of those, all right.” He nodded at a passing rickshaw.
“As the cyclist or the passenger?”
The boy grunted at Noah’s stupidity. “Passenger.”
Noah read the price on the pedicab. “Eighteen euros for half an hour? What a rip-off. If you did the pedaling, how much do you think you’d make in, say, an eight-hour day?” He waited. “Do the math.”
“You do the fucking math. I’m on vacation.”
It’s going to be a long week, Joan said.
They passed a palatial casino with hordes filing through its grand Deco doors. Sloganed T-shirts and ball caps rather than black tie these days. France still got more visitors than any other country in the world, Noah had read. Tourists were never attractive, en masse, but he supposed they were an index of peace and all its mundane joys.
“Can we play?”
“What, baccarat?” Noah joked. “Blackjack, roulette?”
“Just the slots.”
“Ah, I don’t think they let minors in.”
As they walked on, Noah mulled the notion of gambling, of fortune good and bad. Victor with his excellent prospects and lousy luck. “There’s a story about a guy who wins the lottery.”
“Oh yeah?”
“His neighbors say, ‘Lucky you!’ The guy tells them, ‘Wait and see.’ He goes out to celebrate and gets in a crash, breaks his leg. Everybody says, ‘Bad luck!’ He says, ‘Wait and see.’ Then he—”
“Something good this round?” Michael asked.
Noah nodded. It seemed as reliable a measure of intelligence as any other, that the kid could spot a sequence by the third term. “He falls for the doctor and she marries him, lucky man! He says, ‘Wait and see.’ At the wedding he chokes on a fishbone—”
“And he doesn’t say anything after that.”
“You get it. Every silver lining has a cloud. As my mom used to say when we were fretting over the chances of something, ‘Qui vivra verra.’ If you live, you’ll see.” He fumbled for a better, less literal translation. “Time will tell.”
“Yeah,” Michael said, “but if you’ve had seventy-nine years of silver linings already”—he turned on Noah, finger cocked like a pistol—“you’ve got no right to bitch even if you drop dead today.”
“Your logic is impeccable, young man.”
Noah was tired again, but they had to do something, anything, before going back to the hotel; all they’d achieved so far was eating.
He paused every time they passed a famous painting reproduced on ceramic at the very spot the artist had stood to work. Most of them had been badly cracked; he wasn’t sure whether this meant that people resented art or that drunks would hit anything.
A headland, in front of them. Where the Prom curved around its base, a gigantic sundial was embedded in the sidewalk. “Kind of cool, right?”
“Kind of lame,” Michael said. But he stood on the right spot and held his head stiff. “Does my shadow say the right time?”
“More or less, allowing for Daylight Savings.” Noah walked to the concrete barrier; the seafront was high above the waves at this point. He was startled to see young people diving from the rocks. “About fourteen miles to our left is a tiny country called Monaco—blink and you’ve missed it—and then Italy,” he told the boy. “The ancient Greeks settled here first, back before the time of Christ, and they named Nice for Nike, goddess of victory.”
“Like my Jordans?” Michael tilted up one sneaker.
Noah studied it with confusion till he spotted the swoosh. “Oh, Nike. Right, same goddess. We could go see where they fire the cannon from,” he said, craning up at the green bulge of the Colline du Château. “It’s called the hill of the château—the castle—because it used to have a castle on top.”
“And now it doesn’t? Big whoop.” Michael’s tone was deadpan. “Got to check that out ASAP.”
“Well, it’s a significant absence. This was the most impregnable fortress on the Mediterranean, till the King of France blew it up and said it was never to be rebuilt.”
“Wait up, isn’t this France?”
“Ah, now it is, but until 1860, Nice was”—how to explain the complex dynamics among the dynasties of Savoy, Anjou, Piedmont-Sardinia?—“ah, swapped around between different bosses. There’s actually another theory about how the city was named. In Niçois—the local dialect—‘ne za’ means ‘neither here,’ so the name might mean that Nice is neither here nor there, an in-between place, not really in one country or the other, see?”
Michael only rubbed his eyes.
“My point is, without the fortress there was no military stronghold, so as a sort of booby prize Nice got to become a tourist mecca instead.” Which was why Pierre Personnet had brought his wheezing Isabelle here on the train, this formerly isolated town between mountains and sea, between countries and principalities, where he could metamorphose into Père Sonne. Ergo Margot, ergo Noah and Fernande, ergo Victor, ergo Michael. So many other dots on the map; other ways it could have gone. Maybe history really boiled down to how the hell did we happen to happen?
Michael let out a leonine yawn.
“It’s a lovely climb to where the fort used to be, and a famous view.”
“Of what?”
“Well, this, but more, farther,” sweeping his arms through the air.
“Pass. Unless we can go in that little train.”
Noah turned to see. Le Petit Train de Nice, it said along the side of one of the crammed trailers strung like beads. “That’s not a train, just an open bus, pretending.”
“I know that.”
“And anyway, we don’t need a ride, we’ve got legs.”
“Can we just go back to the hotel?”
Give the kid a break, Joan advised.
Noah didn’t let himself nap again, but he did lie down to look at more pictures in A Life’s Work. The early “Valétudinaires” series of celebrity invalids struck him as being much more about death than convalescence. A wan Katherine Mansfield, fingering the crumbling stonework of the arch that enclosed her like a tomb; old Renoir painting in his wheelchair in a garden, brush clutched like a last weapon in a fist deformed by arthritis. Stunted little Toulouse-Lautrec, mugging in drag. Chekhov with drink and pipe outside a café on the Prom, eyes shut against the sunshine: an ancient statue, or a sleeper, or a corpse.
On the narrow camp bed that had replaced the crib while they were out, Michael lay sphinxlike, propped up on his belly. His eyes shifted from side to side
, thumb tapping the screen in an uneven, staccato rhythm.
Noah read the caption under the night shot of a young woman called Marie Bashkirtzeff, wrapped up in furs; according to the caption, that weird glint in her eyes was the reflection of the first Casino Pier burning down. How typically perverse of Père Sonne to turn away from the big news of the fire to the watcher; he’d always been committed to the individuals, and to his view of them rather than their own. He never took a fee, preferring to keep a free hand, according to Max Harstad; he supplemented his family money by selling prints and books of his work instead of taking commissions.
“Here’s one my grandpa took in 1883, on that hill you wouldn’t go up.” Getting off the bed with an effort, Noah showed the boy the picture of a man hunched over a walking stick, gazing down at the panorama. Again, the observer being observed. “This fellow’s a German philosopher called Nietzsche. He used to hobble up that hill every day.”
“Can’t see his face,” Michael said. “He could be anyone.”
Noah was reminded of the couple on the bench in his mother’s photo, snapped from behind; also the woman with coiled hair; the dandy in profile, who might have been her lover. But on the other hand Noah might be making up the whole thing with the paranoia of a motherless child. “Yeah, Père Sonne was fascinated by celebrities, but he made fun of them too. Maybe here he was suggesting we’re all the same when we’re facing death?” Noah was winging it now, trying to keep the kid interested.“This guy was such a junkie, by the time he came to Nice, he was faking prescriptions for himself and signing them ‘Dr. Nietzsche.’”
Michael grinned at that.
But Noah was thinking of Victor. Should he have said addict, or struggling with substance abuse? Not that he was clear, even now, on what or how much his mercurial nephew had been taking. The thing that had destroyed Victor by twenty-six—could it be called his business, or his illness, or both?
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