The Other Story (29 page)

Five o’clock on a sunny Sunday afternoon in July. One of those perfect, golden afternoons. A bomb is about to explode. He waits.

As usual, he does not hear Malvina walk out to the balcony. He picks up the crackling electrical rage emanating from her and spins around.

Her face is a tight white mask, her eyes two glittering blue marbles. Voicelessly, she hands him her iPhone in a smooth, fluid gesture that would look perfect in a video clip or an ad, he thinks absurdly. He glances at the phone, but there is no need to read the whole thing. He knows it is a copy of his explicit e-mail to Sabina, forwarded by Hans Kurz to Malvina via her Facebook page. He wonders how old Hans Kurz is. Probably in his fifties, he guesses. What does he look like? The balding type, with a beer belly, or one of those tanned, fit, spruce guys who watch their weight and work out?

“Nothing happened,” he mutters, giving the phone back to Malvina. He steps back into the room.

She follows him. Her voice rises to a screech. “What? Is that all you have to say? ‘Nothing happened’?”

Nicolas feels disconnected from the scene. It is as if he is sitting on the sofa, arms crossed, watching both of them. He is calm, stony-faced, almost placid. She is like a crazed moth, flitting around a flame, frying its wings.

“Nothing happened?” she shrieks. “Did you read this? Were you drunk when you wrote it? And the photo? Can you explain the photo?”

“What photo?”

The iPhone is once again held up to his face with the same slinky gesture, and he is confronted with the image of his erection photographed in the men’s bathroom of the Gallo Nero. The one he sent Sabina via his personal e-mail.

“Look Malvina,” he says with a sigh, “I know this is unpleasant, and a shock to you, but nothing happened with that woman.”

He is reminded, as he pronounces those words, of President Clinton, and what he had nebulously grasped of the Lewinsky case when he was a teenager, joking about it with François and Victor, aroused by the cigar element and the stain on the dress, and he now remembers Clinton’s reddish face on TV when the president stalwartly stated, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Hadn’t the public prosecutor then said snidely, “Define sex, Mr. President.” Sabina made him come five or six times, albeit virtually. But those orgasms were not virtual. They were due to Sabina, even if Sabina happened to be in another country. “Define sex, Mr. President.” Nicolas closes his eyes. He should have thought of the possible complications when he sent that e-mail from his private account. He should never have answered her first e-mail.

Malvina nearly spits at him with rage. Her tiny fist pummels his arm. “You keep saying that. ‘Nothing happened.’ How dare you!”

“But it’s true,” he insists. “I only met her once, at a book signing in Berlin in April.”

“Who is she?”

“She’s from Berlin. That’s all I know.”

“How old is she?”

“I don’t know.”

Malvina snorts. “Oh, yeah, sure, you don’t know. A cougar. The kind you can’t resist. One of those desperate housewife types who has the hots for you. And she came on to you, right?”

“She gave me her number,” admitted Nicolas. “We exchanged a couple of text messages, and, well, you know, it came to this.”

“To this!” howled Malvina, brandishing the iPhone, her face twisted in utter disgust, “It came to this,” she says, reading his message: “‘I’m going to grab your hips, Sabina, and I’m going to fuck you so hard, you will hear the sound of—’”

“But I never touched her!” shouts Nicolas, interrupting her, “I never kissed her. I never slept with her. I have never seen her since then. Nothing happened!”

“That is the most pathetic excuse I have ever heard. Nothing happened? You send this woman a two-page e-mail where you describe all the things you want to do to her, the most pornographic stuff I have ever read in my life, stuff you’ve never even done to me, your own girlfriend, and you dare tell me nothing happened? And meanwhile, you buy me a Rolex for my birthday and you act like Prince Charming. Shut up with your ‘Nothing happened.’ You sound like Valmont in that book and movie you love, repeating ‘It’s beyond my control’ over and over again. ‘Nothing happened.’ Shut up! Luckily, her husband seems to agree with me. He so kindly sent this to me, along with that gross photo. That’s what you are, Nicolas. Disgusting. Gross. You are revolting.”

“Oh, come on Malvina.” He sighs. “I know it wasn’t very elegant of me, but I wasn’t having an affair with this woman. I wasn’t being unfaithful.”

She pounces on the word
affair
like a wildcat with all its claws out.

“Yes you were! That’s exactly it. You were having an online affair. You were having an affair. It’s the same thing. You were cheating on me. You betrayed me. What would you have done if you had found that out about me? If you read dirty e-mails I sent some guy?”

He nearly says, I don’t think I would have minded quite so much, because I am not in love with you. He cannot bring himself to pronounce those words. But then he thinks of Delphine, and what he might have felt if she had been having an online affair, a virtual affair, with some man. The thought sobers him. He begins to feel guilty. Poor Malvina. It must have been a dreadful shock, reading that e-mail, seeing that photo. She is, after all, deeply in love with him.

“I’m sorry, Malvina,” he says softly. “I’m sorry I hurt you. The truth is, I don’t care about that woman. I care about you. I’m so sorry.”

Her back is turned to him, and he tentatively puts his hand on her fragile shoulder. He expects her to turn around, break into tears, and sob into his chest. Then they will kiss, probably make love, and he will be forgiven. Malvina shrugs off his hand and resumes her packing without another word. She goes into the bathroom, gets her things there, fits them into her suitcase, and zips it up. Her gestures are precise. She does not look at him once.

When she at last turns around to glance up at him, there is no softness, no forgiveness. Her face is still the stony mask. There is such hatred in her eyes that he takes one step back.

“It’s too late for being sorry,” she hisses, wheeling her suitcase toward the door. She takes her bag, places her iPhone in it, and slides a jacket over her dress. “I’m leaving now. I’ll take an earlier car and an earlier plane back to Paris.”

“What?” he says, bewildered. “Wait—”

“You heard me,” she snaps, her hand on the door handle. “I’m leaving. But remember this. I am carrying your child. I’m entitled to many compensations. I’m not talking about Rolexes. I mean as the mother of your child. Long term. Things will work out my way. We will have this baby and we will get married. You will be my husband. I will be Mrs. Nicolas Kolt. Whether you like it or not.”

She opens the door and walks briskly out of the room. The door swings shut.

N
ICOLAS KEPT SEEING LIONEL
Duhamel’s red eyes. He kept feeling the pressure around his throat. He went about his day, not mentioning the scene with his grandfather to anyone. He gave his tutorials, did the shopping, went to pick up Gaïa at school at four-thirty. While she was playing in her room, and before Delphine got home, as he prepared dinner, he called his mother and his aunt Elvire with the same questions. Did they know who Alexeï was? Had they ever heard of a letter he sent Nina? Emma was mystified. She could not understand what her son was getting at. She did not remember that name, or a letter. “Why?” she asked. He said it was a conversation he remembered from long ago, nothing important. He was blunter with Elvire. He told her that her father had mentioned this to him the night before. She was furious. The hospital had called her that morning. Lionel was not at all well; he had slept badly and was aggressive with the staff, to such an extent, they’d had to increase his medication. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said, her voice booming over the phone, and he could visualize her wide-jawed pink face, which looked very much like her father’s. “No, that name and a letter mean nothing to me, but let me be clear about this, Nicolas. Do not go back there again without warning me, and when you do visit, do not talk about those things, because that is obviously what upset him. I don’t care who that Alexeï was and what that letter said. My father is an old, confused man and he deserves a peaceful end. Do you understand?”

The last person he called was Brisabois. It took a while tracking him down. He hadn’t seen him since he had come asking for money a year after his father’s death, in 1994. The phone number in Théodore Duhamel’s address book was no longer in use. There were other Brisaboises listed, but not the one he wanted. He finally found a Brisabois on Facebook who happened to be Albert’s daughter. Nicolas had no memory of Brisabois’s having a child, but luckily, she remembered that her father had worked with a certain Théodore Duhamel in the late eighties and early nineties. She gave him her father’s number.

Brisabois agreed to meet Nicolas in a café on the place des Ternes. It was pouring, and it seemed to Nicolas that it had not stopped raining since he discovered his father’s real name. Brisabois’s ginger beard had gone white with the passing of time. But otherwise, he remained the same jovial fellow Nicolas remembered. They ordered tea and coffee, and Nicolas got straight to the point. He showed Brisabois the birth certificate.

“Did you know my father was called Fiodor Koltchine?”

Brisabois nodded.

“I saw it on some official paper when we were young. I asked him, but Théodore didn’t like talking about it. I knew he was born in Saint Petersburg. He used to show off with that. It made him exotic. Different from us. But tell me more.”

“My father came to France as a baby with his mother, in 1961. He was adopted by Lionel Duhamel, who had just married Zinaïda Koltchine, my grandmother. She was fifteen years old. Lionel was thirty. I found all this out when I had to renew my passport because of those recent governmental laws.”

“And so now you want to know more about your father. Right?”

“Yes. This is going to sound awkward, but what did my father do? His job, I mean.”

Brisabois stroked his beard. He smiled. “I knew you’d ask that question one day,” he said.

Nicolas pointed to the birth certificate. “I know nothing about his real family or how he died. It’s not unhealthy curiosity, Albert. It’s just me, his son, his only son, trying to work out who he was. And you were close friends. Weren’t you?”

“We were. Since our school days. Lycée Montaigne. Théodore was not a good student. He left school when he was seventeen. I found it amusing that he married a brilliant khâgne student, who then became a teacher.”

“So tell me about his job.”

Brisabois looked out to the place des Ternes, where cars waited, gridlocked under the rain. People scurried by in forest of glistening umbrellas. Up ahead, the Arc de Triomphe loomed, draped in humidity.

“Let’s just say your father had a gift. He was gifted at bringing people together.”

“A business angel?”

“No, it was more underground.”

Nicolas stared at Brisabois. The minutes ticked by.

“You don’t mean drugs? Or governmental secrets?”

“Not drugs.”

A pause.

“My father was a spy?”

“I don’t like that word,” said Brisabois, drumming his fingers on the table. “Neither did Théodore.”

“A secret agent?”

Brisabois chuckled. “Oh, come on, Nicolas. Do I look like a secret agent to you?”

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

Brisabois only grinned.

Nicolas felt the mystery shrouding his father become even more opaque. Brisabois was giving nothing else away. Nicolas discreetly peered around the café. Nobody seemed to be observing them. Was Brisabois afraid? He looked so normal, so quiet. A middle-aged man with a paunch. You’d think he was a professor or a historian. No one you would ever notice. Nicolas leaned forward. His voice was a whisper.

“Albert, do you think my father was in some sort of danger when he died? Do you think someone…” He floundered, not daring to voice his thoughts.

“Do I believe he was killed, you mean?” said Brisabois briskly. “No, I don’t. But your father always took risks, even if he had parents, a family, a young child, a wife. He couldn’t help it. That was the way he was.”

“Did my father ever mention the name Alexeï to you?”

Brisabois frowned. “I don’t recall him mentioning that name.”

“And do you remember my father ever talking about a letter from Russia?”

Another pause.

“A letter?”

“Yes, a letter.”

Brisabois played with his coffee cup. His fingers were short and square. There were stains on his jacket. He smelled rank. His glasses hung crookedly on his face. His hair was too long, curling over his collar. Where did Brisabois live? Nicolas imagined a dank apartment, ground floor, giving onto a sunless courtyard. Did he have photographs of Théodore Duhamel at home? Had he ever been jealous of his friend’s charisma? It must have been difficult for Brisabois to walk down the street next to Théodore Duhamel. All those eyes, those hungry eyes, not on him. Emma used to make fun of Brisabois, in the old days, when Théodore Duhamel was still with them. She’d ask her husband, teasingly, if there was a Madame Brisabois. Poor old Albert did look lonely at times, she said, and neglected, like a dog waiting for its master to come home, gazing yearningly at the door, pricking its ears at every footstep on the stairs.

“A letter … That’s interesting.…”

“Is anything coming back to you?” asked Nicolas eagerly.

Brisabois nodded, slowly. He took off his glasses and wiped them with a corner of his shirt. He slipped them back on.

“That last summer, 1993…” Brisabois hesitated.

“Yes?” said Nicolas. “That summer?”

“The last time I spoke to your father on the phone, the last time I ever heard his voice, he mentioned a letter.”

Nicolas looked at the thick fingers on the cup, then up to Brisabois’s face. “Can you remember what my father said, exactly?”

Brisabois exhaled sharply. “Nicolas, that was years ago.”

“Thirteen years ago. Just try, please.”