The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney Page B

surprise.
    “Colin,” he repeated, “Thierry. The man with whom you went to Moscow. Where is he, please?”
    She left a little silence. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”
    At these words her interlocutor grew mournful in aspect, nodding minutely to himself. Once again, he seemed to say, his small hopes had been defeated by the forces of fecklessness and obstinacy, everywhere abundant. “Why do you make trouble for yourself,
dushka?
This man is a dog. Don’t get involved in his stupidities.”
    But already Odile’s anxiety, her anger and resentment, had begun toshift in character, so that from being on the defensive, detained against her will to fend off questions and threats, she now became detached. “I told you,” she said, “I’ve never heard of the person you’re looking for. What else do you want from me?”
    The man slapped the seat with the flat of his hand and cursed in Russian. He ordered his driver to pull over, and the locks popped open. “Consider carefully,” he told Odile. “You are creating bad atmosphere. Our next meeting may not be so pleasant.”
    She got out, the car sped off.
    Waiting at the taxi stand in the Place de la Bastille, watching the traffic swirl around the monument, Odile tried to recall when she had started lying for Thierry Colin, or about him, and why. None of the obvious answers satisfied her.
    “A thief’s not a thief,” he had told her in Moscow. “The police aren’t police.”
    In the taxi she allowed her thoughts to grow abstract. Bits of music passed through her mind, just phrases at first, but gradually filling out and cohering until she recognized the work, a small Biber sonata she hadn’t heard in years.

CHAPTER 5
    MAX AND JACQUES SAT in the studio one rainy morning watching some footage of Rachel that Max had shot over the past few days. On the screen, Dorothy struck the Cowardly Lion on the nose and rebuked him for chasing Toto.
    “An homage,” said Jacques. “Who would have guessed?”
    Max ignored him as the camera pulled back to reveal that the Oz sequence was playing on TV, and that a little girl of about five was seated on the floor watching raptly. The reverse zoom continued until it took in the nearby kitchenette, where Rachel was preparing dinner and talking nonstop, apparently to the child.
    “She makes most of her money babysitting,” Max explained, “so I asked if I could come along the other night. The little girl doesn’t know a word of English, and Rachel’s French is, shall we say, modest.”
    Here the soundtrack brought Rachel’s monologue to the acoustic foreground. She was talking about her childhood in California.
    “So whenever my parents got, like, really confused? We’d all pack up and go to Disneyland. It was their holy city, you know? People make pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Mecca, Oz, whatever, but my folks would go to Disneyland. I still don’t know why. One thing, though: it definitely wasn’t for me, it was for them. Whenever they needed spiritual guidance or reaffirmation or just some kind of emotional boost, boom, Disneyland here we come. This happened so many times, and I was so young, that I thought Disneylandwas a real place, a city with extra-good zoning laws or something. Seriously impaired, right?”
    As she spoke, the camera showed Rachel moving around the kitchenette, chopping vegetables, tending the stove, throwing a hand into the air for emphasis. The length of her limbs gave her movements an elastic, oddly centripetal grace that compelled the eye and engaged the mind. It was as if her physical presence in the frame reduced everything else to subtext.
    Jacques was impressed. “I’ve never seen her like that before. Is she acting?”
    “Hard to say,” Max admitted. “But I don’t think so. Watch this.”
    Again the camera showed the TV screen in frame-filling close-up. The Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion were hiding outside the Wicked Witch’s castle, mustering their courage to rescue