He sprang off the ledge with terrific force, his arms outspread. He sailed toward the water in that position, like a Christ on his cross, flying in a great arc. At the last moment, before hitting the water, he brought his hands together overhead, palm to palm, hurled his body downward, and cut into the surface, a perfect dive.
He emerged from the water, rivulets streaming off his belly, which now looked like his power source, a tank or reservoir where he kept his phenomenal courage.
“That was unbelievable,” I said to Aurélie.
She shrugged.
“He does that every single time we come here. We’re all a bit bored by it.”
MY NEW FRIENDSHIP with Aurélie was delicate. It felt provisional.
If the women in these groups get mad, they might start comparing notes. That was what happened with Narc Cutler, who had not understood a basic rule, that if you want to evade suspicion, indiscriminately having sex with the people you’re infiltrating is a bad idea.
I stayed discriminate and had sex only with René.
I had not been certain it was wise to let things continue after that first episode at the lake. In fact, it was reckless. But I got used to our secret meetings. I began to rely on them. Perhaps not unlike how I had come to rely on Bruno’s letters. All the little habits one develops on a job, habits that are temporary and yet answer to something real, because even as I maintained a fraudulent persona, within that persona I found methods to meet real needs.
René came to the Dubois house. That was our arrangement, and so I had to put away and conceal all my surveillance equipment and computers and phones, my files and notebooks and research materials, high-powered binoculars, cameras, recording equipment, the weapons I kept on hand—a Glock 43X with a custom fifteen-round magazine, a Sig Sauer 365, a .22 North American Arms minirevolver, and a fixed blade everyday carry. I also had a Walther P38—classic and easy to use—that I could hand off to some self-sacrificing recruit, if escalation was called for.
In these sweeps of my headquarters prior to René’s visits, I ended up washing about a hundred cups, if not carefully, to get them out of sight, and I cleared out all the empty beer cans and spent wine bottles in the living room as well, as if the dishes and my empties were further evidence I wasn’t who I claimed to be.
René arrived in the later evening, usually around ten, in the battered truck that belonged to the commune.
He would park on the road in the woods beyond the house and knock twice. I would let him in and lock the door behind him with its heavy crossbar, and within minutes we’d be into something. We often did it right there in the front hall, him standing, my legs around his back. Only some men are strong enough and skilled enough to manage that. René was one of them.
In his exertions, a powerful smell was released from his armpits, which I found pleasant. (I never once thought of Lucien while I was with René, but the sweet scent of Lucien’s pits, in contrast, had all but made me gag.) René’s smell, which issued forth in a kind of wave, was redolent to me of hydroponic weed, and of a bust I’d helped coordinate at a massive grow facility in Idaho. That this scent of René’s, so strongly like the concentrated smell of industrially farmed marijuana, was natural, animal and innocent, somehow touched me.
He would stare at me, his gaze focused and direct. This never felt intrusive, on account that it wasn’t quite real. He had stared at hundreds of women, I understood, with those light-filled eyes. René knew his own beauty, used it as a tool, would have stared at whoever he was making love to in order to stir up a sense of urgency. His gaze wasn’t about love. It was about him and what he was after. It had nothing to do with me.
After, I’d bring him a beer from the refrigerator.
He would sip his beer and light a cigarette and begin to talk. He had a low voice. It rumbled along, and if he had me in the crook of his arm as we lay on the sofa, my head against his bare chest, I felt the vibrations of his stories as much as I heard them. He did not ask me anything. I didn’t talk much. I never drank in front of him, and he seemed not to notice that I brought cold beers only to him, and never one for me. He was like someone living in the year 1950. Pleasure was for men. Beer was for men. Talking, also for men. This was fine and kept things simple.
René was from a Hicksville town in Alsace. Before Le Moulin, he’d been living across the border in Germany, he told me in one of his spells of postcoital talking. He had worked the assembly line at a Daimler plant outside Stuttgart. He didn’t speak German (as it was, he seemed barely literate in his native tongue). He said it didn’t matter that he didn’t speak German because few on the assembly line at Daimler did. None of them were German. The workers were mostly Greek and Turkish. René’s job was to stamp metal panels that would become car doors. The panels came down a very long track, he said. At his station, a tall stamping machine swung down and pressed the metal piece, and he stood there and oversaw the process. During his shift, at some point, the assembly line would suddenly cease moving. This happened regularly. The factory floor went quiet, the machines halted, production seized. Then you heard the ambulance.
Somewhere on the line, he said, someone had lost fingers, or a hand. But in order to activate the compression for stamping, he said, you had to have both of your hands on the outside of the machine. There was no way to accidentally bring the stamper down on your own hand or arm. To get one hand into the stamper, and bring the stamper down with your other hand, this required skill, he said. These accidents, which happened every few days, could only have been planned and deliberate. People started drinking schnapps at five a.m., he said, when their shift began. They drank schnapps all day long. By the time a worker decided to pull down the stamper with a single hand, having fitted his other arm into the machine, the magic moment when this worker was ready to sacrifice a functioning limb, he was good and drunk, René said, numbed up, and he would not feel much when the stamper swung down with great and smooth and unstoppable force, to crush his hand.
Why would someone do that? I asked.
“To buy an E-Class Mercedes,” René said, as if this were obvious. He sipped his beer. “With the compensation they give you, you can buy a nice car. Plus, you get a pension for life. You never have to work again.”
And this was what had activated him, he said. He had looked down the assembly line and thought, if sacrificing a perfectly good hand was an improvement, if that could elevate the quality of a man’s life, something was wrong.
The company was always angling to chip away break time, to lengthen shifts, to trim bonuses. The union pushed back. There were strikes. René started talking to the more political guys on the line, the strident ones. The radicals. He learned a lot. The union organized a work stoppage. It lasted a couple of weeks, and then Daimler fired everyone. By that point, he didn’t give a shit. He’d become a subversive.
I HAD SURREPTITIOUSLY taken photographs of lots of the Moulinards to send to my contacts, including one of René that I did not intend to send them, but had spontaneously captured because it showed off his attributes. He was on the couch, having fallen briefly asleep before going back to Le Moulin.
Vito would appreciate René, I knew.
I texted him one night, hoping to get intel on what was happening in Marseille. I’d worried that Lucien would show up in Vantôme in some misguided attempt to surprise me. I had not heard from him since the day before. I figured he was busy with the film shoot, and that Vito would say exactly that, but Vito wasn’t in Marseille. He’d left.
—I’m in Rotterdam
—why
—Conference on Jung. And I have to confess that despite being here, I don’t know where Rotterdam is.
—no one does. it’s a global mystery. even they don’t know. the rotterdamians.
—Rotterdamerung.
—the ring cycle of geographical confusion.
—Serge and I had a fight.
—what happened?
—Lucien will tell you all about it. I was asserting a cultural value to do with my nation and my ethnic heritage and that’s my final word on what happened.
That night, hoping René might show, I pretended I wasn’t waiting by reading more of The Life of Céline. I didn’t have a page marked. I opened the book at random and took in details. Céline was a leg man, obsessed with chorus girls. He once attended a dawn execution. He denounced, in addition to Jews, sloth, overeating, and “low IQ-ism.” He did not drink and preferred watching sex to having it.
It was a chilly night, but I had the windows wide open, on alert for the commune truck. I’d put a six-pack of beer on the floor, cans I could slide under the bed if the truck appeared.
When Hitler’s troops reached Paris, Céline and his wife, Lucette, were caught in a bombardment in the town of Gien, in the Loire Valley. As incendiary bombs rained down, leveling neighborhoods, they took refuge in a movie theater and stayed safe. Céline’s good luck, like when his ship had plowed into another, seemed to be holding.
The movie house was filled with patients who had been evacuated from a psychiatric hospital, nutcases who shrieked all through the night. I was thinking I would call this “mixed luck” when my phone rang. It was Lucien. He wanted to tell me all about what had happened with Vito.
“We were scheduled to shoot in the Alpilles. We’re driving up there to set up. It’s a national preserve and it was closed for fire danger, so it took several days and a lot of bureaucratic layers for Amélie and her assistant to get us access. We’re on our way, with Vito at the wheel—why Serge let him drive, I don’t know—anyhow a black cat crosses the road. Vito stops the car and refuses to continue. There are five cars and a truck behind us, all part of the crew. What’s happening, everyone wonders, fire? Accident? Road blockage? No, just an Italian man behind the wheel. Vito says it’s bad luck to keep going after a black cat has crossed your path and that we have to wait for, get this, a white cat to cross the road. It’s baking hot and we’re blocking the road. Serge and I would have had to physically pull him out of the driver’s seat. We sat there, and guess what happened?”
