Consumed by David Cronenberg Read Free Book Online Page B

second he stepped off. “How’s your beautiful, expensive hotel?”
    â€œAppropriate. How’s yours?” said Naomi.
    â€œI’m looking at it as we speak. Let’s just say … functional. More appropriate.”
    â€œMore?”
    â€œYeah. ’Cause I know that yours is too good for a journalist.”
    â€œIt’s that darn rich-girl problem again. And speaking of girls, how was she? Your patient?”
    â€œBeautiful. She was really beautiful.”
    â€œIn a doomed beautiful sort of way?”
    â€œIn a Slavic sort of way.”
    â€œThat sounds dangerous,” said Naomi. She meant it.
    â€œShe was dangerous. Literally radioactive. The seductiveness of decay. What about Arosteguy? I’ve seen him in interviews. Pretty devastating. Gorgeous, in that irritating French intellectual way.”
    â€œI’ll let you know when I find him. Nobody seems to know where he is, including the prefect of police.” For some reason, Naomi wanted to hold back her new contact with Arosteguy, even though that was the reason she had called Nathan. Was it the Slavic-beauty comment? “I think Célestine is really our September cover, though. She’s even more seductive. Beautiful but dead is always killer.” Killer was what they loved at Naomi’s primary magazine, Notorious , whose editor, Bob Barberien, was himself notorious for drunken office rants that somehow became sensational articles that you had to read; they generally involved unimaginable acts of murder. Notorious mimicked the 1950s scandal mag Confidential in its starkly aggressive cover graphics and even its retro typography. Naomi loved its recklessness and its ironic naïveté; it provoked her own.
    â€œYeah, and will he really have anything interesting to say? ‘I murdered my wife and then I ate her.’ How do you follow that up?”
    â€œNobody seems to want that to be true,” said Naomi. “There’s a weird national protectiveness about that pair. It’s all denial, even from the police. From what I can see here, it’s possible that one of her student lovers killed her out of jealousy.” It had occurred to her that Hervé might know something about that. Or might even be the killer himself.
    â€œAnd students are notorious for not eating properly. I’m getting into the elevator now. If I lose you, I’ll call right back.” His room was on the third, and top, floor, and he did lose her, and waited until he was in his room to redial. “So I guess the only photos you’ve taken with my macro lens are shots of your laptop’s screen.”
    â€œVery funny. And what about you? Are you going to send me shots of your beautiful doomed patient?”
    Just the slightest pause from Nathan, but it hurt Naomi. “I only got a few during the operation. But basically, she wouldn’t let me. She felt diseased and ugly.”
    â€œYou’ve never let that stop you before,” said Naomi, fishing.
    â€œI got stopped this time. Stopped in my tracks.”
    A big pause from Naomi before she said, “I can’t wait to see you. Amsterdam or Frankfurt?”
    â€œI need Amsterdam. My connecting flight to New York’s already been paid for. I land on the fourteenth. Work for you?”
    â€œThe fourteenth works for me. Bye, darling.”
    â€œBye, darling.”
    Nathan thumbed his phone off. That was life with Naomi—disembodied. Nathan realized he had almost no awareness of getting to his room other than the disconnect in the elevator. No smells, no sights, no sounds. He had been in his phone, Naomi a voice in his brain. On his laptop, he scrolled through the photos he had taken of Dunja—theoperation, the spa, the sex they had together in her hotel room. It did not bother him that the photos aroused him in a weirdly objective way, as though he had stumbled upon a stash of celebrity sex photos that hadn’t hit the