“Not with money.”
“With sex?”
Naomi laughed. It was her best laugh, the one she always hoped would come out when she laughed. It was husky and genuinely mirthful, and it was like that because Hervé was so appallingly, boyishly hopeful. “No, not with sex. With photography.”
“Ah, yes. Photography.” Hervé pressed fingers to his temples and closed his eyes. “Is that a coffee you’re drinking?” he asked.
“Yes. Double espresso. Do you want one?”
“I’d like just a sip of yours, if you don’t mind. I need something, but not too much.” He opened his eyes and smiled. “A touch of migraine.” He pronounced it “meegraine,” like the English.
She shrugged and pushed her cup across the table. “Be my guest.”
He picked up the cup and made a show of inhaling the fumes. “Mm. It’s dangerous. I get too hyper.” He did pronounce it “eepair,” but there was no way Naomi was going to comment, even though in his texting he had expressed enthusiasm for “ruthless linguistic corrections.” He sipped with exaggerated sensuality, his lips and tongue working overtime, looking her deeply in the eyes as he did it. Naomi closed her eyes and shook her head. She felt like his mother. When she looked up at him again, she affected a stern, flirtation-killing look. She pulled her voice recorder out of her bag, switched it on, and placed it on the table.
“Hervé,” she said, “I’m recording you now, as we agreed, and my first question to you is: Is this how you were with Célestine Arosteguy?”
He froze for a beat, then put the cup down. “How I was? I was just me, as always. I don’t understand what you mean.”
“You’re being very seductive with me. Did you seduce your professor, or did she seduce you?”
“I see,” he said. “You want to play the role of Célestine with me. You identify with her.”
“No, I’m really not playing at all. I want to know how it was with them, with the Arosteguys. From someone who knows. From you.”
“It was full of sex with them, but more than just sex. But you’re just interested in the sex, aren’t you? You want to make a sensational conversation. You want to hurt them, don’t you?”
“Why do you think that?” Naomi was genuinely thrown by this, and Hervé could see it. “We went through all that on the net. I thought you understood me.”
“I understood you,” said Hervé. “But I never believed you. How sympa you were, how you loved them, how their philosophy and their love story so inspired you.”
“Then why are you here, drinking my espresso?”
A compact Gallic shrug. “I wanted to see what a room in the Hôtel de Crillon looked like.”
THEY ENDED UP ordering room service. While they waited, Hervé agreed to pose for some stills, sitting on the chaise longue in the bedroom by the open balcony doors while Naomi squatted with the camera, shifting from side to side, trying to find the revealing angle. She was using the Nikon D300s, the cousin to Nathan’s D3. It was more compact and lighter, and she prized unobtrusiveness and mobility above all things. The muted light was soft, diffused by the pigeon netting and the trapped bounce of the courtyard, and it brought out the femininity of the boy’s face. He played the lens expertly, as Naomi expected he would, given his self-promotion on the Arosteguy forums, which involved endless videos and stills documenting the many moods and musings of Hervé Blomqvist. His general approach was coy/mysterioso, and Naomi knew just how to use the natural light and her angles, the brow, the dark, full eyebrows, the liquid brown eyes in the thin face, to make that pop.
“So, Naomi, what are you going to use these photos of me for?” He spoke between shots, timing her rhythm so that he wouldn’t be caught in an ungainly mouth move. “Are you planning an Arosteguy picture book? Maybe for the coffee table?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing, Hervé. Do you have any suggestions?”
“I do have a suggestion. I think you will be afraid of it.”
Naomi paused and rested her camera on her knees. She felt strange in her dress, but at least she was now in bare feet. She looked up at Hervé, who smiled down at her with benign, unfocused eyes, like a priest. Annoying.
“Go,” said Naomi. “Let’s hear it.”
Hervé stood up and began undoing his tie. “I propose a book that shows every lover that the Arosteguys ever had, starting with me. And they will all be in the nude. And they will say what their experience in fucking them was. And they will talk about the influence that Célestine and Aristide had on their lives.”
Naomi sat on the floor, her back against the foot of the bed. “Are you taking your clothes off?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Hervé.
“You want me to shoot pictures 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.