The Same River Twice Read Free Page A

Odile was surprised and then dismayed by the vehemence with which these people besieged the ticket window. When she saw the object of their maneuverings—a lone gray-haired woman writing out each ticket by hand—she changed course, cutting across the throng to enter an adjacent hall, as large and dim as the first.
    Here two lines of passengers waited mutely before tables on which X-ray machines sat idle for want of electricity. These were the customs officers’ stations. Behind one, a uniformed man sat reading a newspaper; behind the other, his colleague stared off into space. They were waiting to be relieved, and neither gave any sign of noticing Odile as she took two declaration forms from a third table and started back.
    In her absence, Thierry had willed himself to life and with unsound energy was loading the suitcases onto a flat-bed trolley. Odile had no idea what he hoped to gain by claiming them as his own at customs.
    “Listen, Thierry,” she said as he heaved the last of the bags into place, “it would really be much better if I were the one to take them through.”
    He blinked, said nothing.
    “A woman attracts less suspicion, especially when the inspectors are men. And of course there’s always the insultingly simple male ego to work with.”
    A smile flickered across his face and was gone. “We could flip a coin.”
    “No need. I’ve already made up my mind.”
    He seemed about to protest but instead gave her a long, appraising look that made her flush. In the end he shrugged. “If you like,” he said.
    They filled out their customs forms accordingly. She took the trolley, and they split up without ado. Just as she was about to plunge into the crowd, some stray instinct made her look back over her shoulder. Thierry was smiling a real smile then, a private smile marking a private victory.
    She would have plenty of time to think about it.

CHAPTER 2
    ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, two days ahead of schedule, Max Colby flew into Charles de Gaulle. The visit with his daughter had not gone smoothly, and a project of his, now come unexpectedly to crisis, required his attention at home.
    He took the RER into town, sharing a car near the back of the train with some Algerian youths. None of them was older than fourteen, and they were dressed international style, in baggy pants, logo warm-up jackets, and loose-laced sneakers. Glancing at Max uneasily, the oldest-looking boy produced a plastic freezer bag. One of his friends squeezed a tube of rubber cement into it. As they passed the bag around, each fitting it over his nose and mouth for a couple of breaths, the boys grew animated. Their lustrous eyes were the color of ripe olives.
    From the Gare du Nord, Max took the métro under the Seine and southeast to the thirteenth arrondissement, where he and Odile lived in a small pocket of winding streets and cul-de-sacs that had inexplicably escaped urban renewal’s clean sweep of the area in the 1950s and ’60s. Made with materials recycled from the Paris Expo of 1900, their building was a two-and-a-half-story mews, laid out so that twelve ground-floor studios, each with an interior staircase leading to living quarters above, faced one another across a narrow cobblestone courtyard, at either end of which stood century-old chestnut and maple trees. Designed as low-income housing for artisans and artists, the mews remained a modest place, withalmost half the studios retaining their original dirt floors. Max and Odile rented two lightly renovated units on opposite sides and ends of the cobblestone walk. They lived together in one of them; in the other Max maintained a film studio. Inexpensive though this arrangement was, they sometimes had trouble paying the rent.
    “Odile?” he called once he let himself in. Upstairs, the bathtub faucet was running full force.
    Most of the ground floor was set up as a workspace for Odile, who designed clothes for a limited but adventurous clientele. She worked alone by preference, doing