Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

Eduardo pressed on. “Lily and Katy,” he said, “were seen having a fight at Fuego on the night of Lily’s birthday.”

At this, there was some little sub-physical twitch in Sebastien’s face, some kind of barely suppressed psychomotor agitation. Eduardo stared at Sebastien long enough to let him know he had seen it. He never commented on changes in facial expression during interviews—if he did, it would become clear to the interviewee how ephemeral such things were, how easy it was to dispute another person’s perception, how quickly two people’s interpretations of an event became equal and opposing forces and canceled each other out. Leaving facial clues obviously registered and pointedly unremarked upon made people feel that they had revealed something significant but as yet unutilized. This threw them off and edged them closer to actually saying something valuable, which, of course, was all that could ever actually matter.

“You’re telling me that it wasn’t you they were fighting about?” said Eduardo.

“I assure you it was not,” said Sebastien, recovering mastery over his face.

“What, then?”

“I don’t know. What do women fight about? Bra size? Sexual dominance? Competing predictions about the likely consequences of Mercosur’s limits on trade restrictions? I don’t know.”

“Tell me what you heard of it. Maybe the two of us can piece it together.”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

“You weren’t at Fuego that night?”

“No.”

“You are telling me that you did not attend your own girlfriend’s birthday party?”

“As it happens, no.”

“We can check that, you know.”

“Modern police work is becoming so terrifyingly good.”

“Why did you stay away? Because it didn’t seem like a good idea to have to deal with Lily and Katy in the same room?”

Sebastien LeCompte raised his head. “I stayed away because I was not invited.” His voice had to be some new category of deadpan; it was his singular invention in this life, his sole contribution to this world.

“It doesn’t do you any good to lie to me about these sorts of things,” said Eduardo. This was actually true. The little lies could not possibly help.

“I marvel at your continued insistence on this point.”

“Why wouldn’t Lily Hayes—your girlfriend, the girl you were sleeping with—have invited you to her birthday party?”

“I think that’s probably a better question for Lily. Do let me know what you hear.” There was a fibrousness in Sebastien’s voice now, and Eduardo suddenly understood that he was not lying about this—and, though it might not be the only true thing he had said so far, it was the only true thing that actually meant anything to him. As such, it was a detail that would now need to be energetically pursued.

“That’s a pretty aggressive thing to do, wouldn’t you say?” said Eduardo. “To not invite your own boyfriend to your birthday?”

“Well, I might not say aggressive. It was certainly very emancipated of her. These twenty-first-century women, right?”

Eduardo knew by now that there was no tonal variation between sincerity and irony when Sebastien LeCompte talked, and he could tell that this strange speech characteristic—this sort of semantic monotone—was deep and ubiquitous and actually authentic to him, though, of course, perhaps somewhat amplified by the context of the interview. The implication of this was that even if Sebastien LeCompte was rarely serious, he was not absolutely always joking. Eduardo decided to try something new.

He leaned forward, then pulled back and shook his head a little and leaned forward again. “You know,” said Eduardo, making his voice sound confiding, conspiratorial, as though he were an actor who was tired of being in the same bad play as Sebastien and it wouldn’t hurt if they took a cigarette break backstage for a moment. “My wife is rather erratic, too.”

Sebastien’s eyebrows rose in studied amusement, but he said nothing.

“She gets angry at me every other day, and to be honest? I have no fucking clue what it’s about half the time. I truly do not. It’s a giant guessing game. Did you find that with Lily sometimes? No, it’s okay, you don’t have to answer that. Of course you did.” Eduardo almost added something like We’ve all seen her Facebook posts, after all , but he decided against it. Alluding to some widely known fact about Lily here might not be a bad idea—it might actually induce Sebastien to chuckle ruefully, naughtily—but referencing material that had been acquired in the course of the investigation could only snap Sebastien back away from Eduardo. If he’d bent to him at all already. Which, it was quite possible, he had not.

“But you know, Sebastien, the thing is, when my wife is angry with me and I have no fucking clue why and I have to guess—the thing is, sometimes I do actually guess right. If I really, really think about it. Maybe only a quarter of the time, but still, that’s not statistically insignificant, you know? So tell me. If you had to hazard a guess , why do you think Lily might have been angry with you that night?”

Still, Sebastien said nothing; his face was so blank that it did not even look like a blankness that was orchestrated to conceal. Eduardo would not have thought it was, if he hadn’t known better.

“And, of course, Lily was angry with you and Katy both,” said Eduardo. “We know that much. So that’s probably a clue. What might have made Lily angry with you and Katy at the same time?”

Still, on Sebastien’s face, an expression of total noninvolvement. It was not blatantly evasive—he did not look down, he did not look away, he did not fidget or blink too much or touch his hair. He sat with his hands curled lightly at his lap; his pose was one of total calm and attention and patience, as though he were the one awaiting the answers, not the other way around. He was pretty good at this, Eduardo thought. Maybe he should have gone into the family business.

“Well,” said Eduardo, standing up and handing Sebastien his card. “Think about it. Don’t worry. Sometimes it takes me a while to get it, too. But do get back to me with whatever you come up with.”

And at this, Sebastien—finally rousing from his fugue state and showing Eduardo to the door—responded that he assuredly, enthusiastically would.

Andrew and Maureen stood drinking on the hotel balcony and did not speak. A floor above them, in Andrew’s room, Anna was sleeping. Three miles away from them, in jail, Lily was waiting. Andrew and Maureen were sipping mini-bottles of vodka straight, letting the alcohol macerate their mouths. Across the street was an office building, dark except for a single room that glowed like an illuminated postage stamp. Above it, the stars were opalescent pinpricks, looking so cold and distant that Andrew couldn’t quite believe they were fire. It was not right that he could stand here and see these things when Lily could not. Once, years ago, while flying over the North Atlantic, Andrew had spotted an eerie pale dot in the black ocean below him. It had reminded him of that famous picture of the earth from space—tiny and luminous, like a glowing pearl in the void—which everyone had thought, for about thirty seconds, might bring world peace. Squinting at the dot, Andrew had thought it was an iceberg, or the reflection of the moon on a whale, or some heretofore undiscovered Arctic bioluminescence. Or maybe, he’d thought, just maybe, it was something else. Andrew was surprised at how ready he was to believe it might be something else—how ready he was, also, to keep quiet about it, to make it a secret between him and the universe. He’d been almost all the way to England before he realized it was only the reflection of the airplane.