A paragraph below the panorama window confirmed that this was indeed the apartment before the murder, documented by a web-savvy student of Aristide’s—obviously using Panorama Tools and a fish-eye lens, Naomi noted—as part of a master’s thesis connecting the Evolutionary Consumerist philosophy of the Arosteguys with the couple’s own ascetic—relatively—lifestyle. The writer of that paragraph dryly noted that the wretched candidate, Hervé Blomqvist, had been denied his degree in the end. Naomi had come across an internet forum conducted by students of Célestine that had the tone of a sixties French New Wave movie. Blomqvist was a frequent contributor who positioned himself as a classic French bad boy along the lines of the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. He hinted that as an undergraduate he had been the cherished lover of both Aristide and Célestine and was later punished for daring to use his place in the private lives of the Arosteguys to anchor what he confessed was “a pathetically thin and parasitical thesis.” Naomi emailed herself a note to connect with Blomqvist, a mnemonic technique that was the only one that seemed to work. Anything else got lost in the tangle of the Great Nest, as Nathan called the cloud of chaos that enveloped her.
The third window on Naomi’s screen was an interview shot in the oddly shaped basement kitchen of the couple who were responsible for the daily maintenance of the Arosteguys’ entire apartment block. The room was dominated by an immense concrete cylinder which suggested that half the casing of an exterior spiral staircase was bulging into their space. It was against this pale-green stuccoed column that a short, stout French woman and her shy, mustachioed husband stood speaking to an off-camera interviewer. The sound of the woman’s surprisingly youthful voice was soon mixed down to allow the voice of a translator to float over it. The translator’s voice, more mature, more matronly, seemed a better match for the woman’s face.
“Never,” said the translator. “No one could come between them, those two. Of course, they both had many affairs. They came here, the boys and girls, to their apartment just upstairs above us. We could sometimes hear them here behind us, laughing on the staircase, coming down as Mauricio and I had breakfast in the kitchen. He’s my husband.” A shy smile. “He’s Mexican.”
With a sweet, excited embarrassment, Mauricio waved directly at the camera. “Hello, hello,” he said in English.
The woman—only now, clumsily, identified as “Madame Tretikov, Maintenance” by a thick-fonted subtitle—continued. “They slept here. They lived here. Sometimes, yes, their lovers were students. But not always.” She shrugged. “For the students, it was a question of politics and philosophy, as always. The two together. They were in agreement. The Arosteguys explained it to me and Mauricio, and it seemed very correct, very nice.”
Naomi maximized the video window. With the screen filled, she could feel herself inside that kitchen, standing beside the camera, looking at that couple, the chipped enameled stove, the cupboards of moisture-swollen chipboard, damp kitchen towels spilling out of open cutlery drawers. She could smell the grease and the under-the-staircase dankness.
As if in response to the newly enlarged image, the cameraman zoomed slowly in to Madame’s face, zoomed because he saw moisture welling up in her eyes, like blood to a shark. Madame came through for her close-up, biting her quivering lip, tears spilling. Mercifully, the translator did not try to emulate the tremor in Madame’s voice.
“They were so brilliant, so exciting,” said Madame. “There could be no jealousy, no anger between them. They were like one person. She was sick, don’t you see? She was dying. I could see it in her eyes. Probably a brain tumor. She thought so hard all the time. Always writing, writing. I think it was a mercy killing. She asked him to kill her and he did. And then, of course, yes, he ate her.” With these words, Madame took a deep, stumbling breath, wiped her eyes with the threadbare dish cloth she had been holding throughout the interview, and smiled. The effect was startling to Naomi, who immediately began to analyze it in the email window she had left open in the corner of the screen. “He could not just leave her there, upstairs,” Madame continued. Her smile was beatific; she had a revelation to deliver. “He wanted to take as much of her with him as he could. So he ate her, and then he ran away with her inside him.”
THE MEDICAL GOGGLES were getting in the way. Nathan could barely see through the viewfinder of his ancient Nikon D3, the plastic lenses projecting too far from his eye, the goggles slewing and popping off his nose when he pressed the camera close, their elastic band pulling at his hair and crumpling his baby-blue paper surgical cap. “Everything changed after AIDS,” Dr. Molnár had just explained to him. “From then on, blood was more dangerous than shit. We realized you can’t afford to get it into your eyes, your tear ducts. So, we put on ski goggles in the operating theater and we schuss”—here he made slightly fey hip- and arm-twisting motions—“over the moguls of our patients’ bodies.” Now Dr. Molnár bent close to the Nagra SD voice recorder hanging around Nathan’s neck in its bondagestyle black-strapped leather case, and into its crustacean-like stereo cardioid microphone breathed, “Don’t be shy, Nathan. I’m notoriously vain. Get close. Fill your frame. That’s rule number one for a photographer, isn’t it? Fill your frame?”
“So they say,” said Nathan.
“Of course, you wrote to me that you were a medical journalist who was forced by the ‘swelling tide of media technology’ also to become a photographer and a videographer and a sound recordist, so perhaps you are now somewhat overwhelmed. I will guide you.”
Naomi had also, quite independently, bought one of the recorders, hers a now-discontinued ML model (it would kill her when she realized that), at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Electronics stores in airports had become their neighborhood hangouts, although more often than not they weren’t there at the same time. It got to the point that they could sense traces of each other among the boxes of electric plug adapters and microSD flashcards. They would trade notes about the changing stock of lenses and point-n-shoots at Ferihegy, Schiphol, Da Vinci. And they would leave shopping lists for each other in emails and text messages, quoting best prices spotted and bettered.
“I’d really like to take the goggles off, Dr. Molnár. They weren’t designed for photographer-journalists.”
“Call me Zoltán, please, Nathan. And of course, take them off. You’ll have your huge brick of a camera in front of your eyes to protect you anyway.” Dr. Molnár laughed—rather a phlegmy, unhealthy laugh, Nathan thought—and swirled away to the other side of the operating table, past the array of screened and opened windows which let in the muted insect hum of the street below and a few splashes of early morning light that painted the room’s grimy and crumbling tiled walls.
Nathan took some shots of Dr. Molnár as he danced, and the good doctor’s body language conveyed his pleasure at being photographed. “Unusual to have open windows in an operating room,” Nathan couldn’t resist observing.
“Ah, well, our infrastructure here at the hospital is in disarray, you know, and so the air-conditioning is not functioning. Fortunately, we have the window option. This building is very old.” The doctor took up his position at the side of the operating table, flanked by two male assistants, and waved his arms over the table as though invoking spirits. “But you can see that the equipment itself is beautiful. First-rate, state-of-the-art.” Nathan dutifully began to take detail