Hotel Pastis

by Peter Mayle

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll get him before he leaves. See you in the morning.”

  “Goodnight, Mr. Shaw. Don’t forget your passport, will you?”

  Simon put the phone down, the mood of the past few hours gone. He felt angry at himself. Why hadn’t he just said no? Why didn’t he call Ziegler and tell him to get on with it? He was as bad as all the rest of them, full of talk about getting out until someone waved an account under his nose, and then he was off like a rat up a drainpipe. And for what? Money. And what would he do with it? Buy another house, which he’d visit to sleep in? Another car? Polo ponies, football teams, art collections, first-growth claret, ocean-going yachts? Toys and distractions.

  “You look sad. Is it bad news?” Nicole’s face was half in shadow. Simon wanted to touch the cheekbone that was thrown into relief by the slanting red glow of a traffic light.

  “It’s not bad. It’s just boring. I’ve got to go to New York tomorrow.”

  “You say ‘boring’ a lot.”

  “Do I? Yes, I suppose I do. Sorry.”

  “You say ‘sorry’ a lot too.”

  A taxi behind them sounded its horn as the lights changed. Simon pulled away and turned into Knightsbridge, past Harrods and into the crescent where Nicole was staying. She looked up at the lighted windows of the flat. Emma would be waiting, wanting to hear about the evening.

  Simon switched off the engine. “God, I almost forgot—the garage bill, and the tickets! Just call Liz. I’ll tell her tomorrow morning before I go. If you’d like to use the car while you’re in London, keep the keys. I’ll walk home.”

  “Emma has a car if I need one. But thank you.” She leaned across and kissed Simon on the cheek. “It was fun. Enjoy New York.”

  Simon watched her walk to the door and let herself in without looking back, and promised himself another trip to Provence once the panic was over. Just get New York out of the way, and then he’d start to make some sense out of his life. He’d think about it on the plane. Bloody Ziegler. He’d better get back and call him.

  Nicole heard the engine of the Porsche start as she was walking up the stairs, and tried to look bright for Emma.

  The two women, their shoes kicked off, legs tucked comfortably beneath them, shared the deep cushions of the couch and sipped at the absent Julian’s oldest cognac. Emma took off her earrings and massaged her ears. “Now then, darling. Tell me all. Is he Mr. Right, or just another dreary old businessman?”

  Nicole laughed. “I like him. He’s sweet, not at all pompeux, you know? I kept wanting to tidy him up. We had a nice time … except there was a woman he knew, very curious about us. Sophie something, one of his ex-wife’s friends. Sophie Lawson.”

  “Oh, God.” Emma rolled her eyes. “I met her at Queens last summer. An absolute cow—and she shouldn’t wear those silly little skirts. Legs like Boris Becker’s, my dear. I mean, Wagnerian.” Emma studied her own fashionably bony knees with satisfaction. “Anyway, what did you talk about?”

  “Oh, him mostly. He’s tired with his business, but he doesn’t know what else to do. I feel sorry for him, somehow. I don’t think he has fun in his life.”

  Emma hesitated over her cognac and then looked at Nicole with bright, inquisitive eyes. “You’re showing all the signs, darling—wanting to tidy him up, feeling sorry for him. Do you want to go to bed with him?”

  “Emma!”

  “Well, men and women have been known to do it.”

  Nicole felt a warmth come over her face as she realised that tidying him up was just an excuse. She wanted to touch him, and see him smile. She wanted him to touch her. “Oh, Emma,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve gone quite pink, darling. I expect it’s the brandy.”

  7

  Jojo was taking his role as the General’s second-in-command seriously, and enjoying the experience—unusual for him—of using his brain while his body went through the arduous motions of work on the chantier. It was practically finished, another old wreck of a farmhouse rebuilt, and his patron was casting around for the next job. He’d find something, Fonzi, he always did. He knew all the local architects, and they trusted him. After all, he was one of the few maçons in Provence who had never gone bust halfway through a job, never cheated on insurance payments, never took black money. Too honest for his own good, Jojo thought; but that was his problem.

  Jojo’s concern, as the trusty lieutenant, was the physical condition of two members of his team. Claude and the Borel brothers, and even Fernand at the garage, where he did demolition and panel beating, were kept reasonably fit by the demands of their work. But Bachir spent his days having surreptitious cigarettes behind the bar and ferrying cups of coffee around. And Jean—well, Jean was a walking catastrophe. Lifting anything heavier than someone else’s wallet brought him out in a sweat. Jojo had watched them both on the training spins. They invariably finished last, and with evident difficulty. One ride a week wasn’t enough. If they were going to keep up with the others, they’d have to be toughened up. Jojo decided to talk it over with Claude.

  They went off one evening after work to a bar in Bonnieux that Jojo liked because of its refusal to comply with the antismoking laws, and the good rump steak and frites that madame served up for fifty francs. They settled at a corner table and killed the first pastis without speaking. Jojo sighed with relief and nodded for two more. “Mother’s milk, eh?”

  Claude swirled the ice cubes round in his empty glass. “You know something? I’d rather have this than champagne.”

  “I’ll get you a crate when we’ve done the job. You can stick it in the back of your Mercedes in case you get thirsty going to the hairdresser.”

  The big man pushed back his hair, disturbing the fine dust that had gathered there while he’d been cutting stone that afternoon. His hands, like Jojo’s, were scarred and rough, the fingers thickened by years of labour, the nails blunt and split. “Might have a manicure, too,” he said.

  Madame came to their table with the second round of pastis. “You eating, boys?” Jojo nodded, and she went into her recitation. “Double frites, steak à point, don’t forget the mustard, and a litre of red—is that right?”

  “You’re a princess,” Jojo said.

  “Tell my husband.” The woman went back to the bar, yelling the order through to the kitchen.

  Jojo lit a cigarette and leant towards Claude. “Listen, we’ve got to do some thinking.”

  Claude’s face looked grave over his pastis, the uneasy expression that Jojo knew signalled the anticipation of mental effort.

  “It’s Bachir and Jean. I’ve seen them after training, and they’re completely crevé.” Jojo dragged on his cigarette and blew smoke at a fly that was threatening his glass. “The rest of us are going to be fine. We work, you know? We’re strong. But those two, they’re standing around all day. They’ve got no condition, no endurance.”

  Claude nodded. “Bachir chucked it last Sunday, remember? All over his front wheel. And Jean looked like a piece of veal, he was so white.”

  “Voilà.” Jojo leaned back, satisfied that Claude had appreciated the nature of the problem. “We’ve got to find some way to get them fit, or we’re going to have to tow them back.”

  The two men were silent, staring into their drinks for inspiration. “I don’t know,” said Claude. “Maybe they could work with us on the next chantier—digging, humping sacks. Fonzi always needs a couple of donkeys. Eh?” He shrugged. “Just an idea.”

  A smile spread over Jojo’s face as he looked at Claude’s anxious expression. “C’est pas con,” he said. “C’est pas con du tout.” He slapped Claude’s shoulder, raising a small cloud of masonry dust. “My friend, there are times I could kiss you.”

  “Do you boys want to be left alone, or are you ready to eat?” Madame unloaded her tray onto their table: the steaks, still spitting with heat; a plate piled high with pommes frites; an unlabelled litre bottle of red wine; a basket of bread; a pot of Amora. “There’s cheese or
crème caramel afterwards. You want water? Silly question.” She pushed a strand of hair from her perspiring forehead and cleared away the empty pastis glasses. “Allez. Bon appétit.”

  The following Sunday, Jojo took the General aside and talked to him, lieutenant to commanding officer. The General applied traction to his moustache and looked at Jojo approvingly. He liked it when someone else used his head. “Do you think Fonzi will hire them?”

  “If the next chantier’s big enough, why not? He can always use cheap backs. I could talk to him.”

  “Bon.” The General nodded. “I’ll break the bad news. We’d better get Jean a truss. Oh, and Jojo?” He winked and tapped his head. “Well done.” The little man swaggered as he went off to get his bicycle.

  At the end of the morning’s ride, the General called them together. The noisy reluctance of Jean and Bachir to give up sedentary work was shouted down by the others. Democracy, the General called it, and pretended not to hear Bachir’s suggestion about what he could do with it.

  “There’s one more thing,” said the General. “Very important.” He held up an authoritarian finger. “Don’t start talking among yourselves about what you’re going to do with the money, d’accord? Not even when there’s nobody else around.”

  Jojo shook his head sagely. You had to spell it out to some people.

  “I’ll tell you why,” said the General. “It becomes a habit—you start making little jokes about it, you don’t even realise you’re talking about it, and one day some petit merdeux with long ears will overhear something, and then—” the General pulled his finger across his throat—“foutu. So keep it behind the teeth.”

  8

  The offices of Global Communications Resources, Inc., occupied the top five floors of a steel and glass and polished granite monument on Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The employees, according to advertising gossip, were the most highly paid and most paranoid men and women in the business. Five years at Global were enough to drive any normal person crazy, so they said, but at least you’d have enough money to buy your own asylum. It was a reputation that the chief executive officer, Bob ($3.5 million a year, plus options and bonuses) Ziegler, enjoyed and encouraged. “The biggest goddamn carrot and the biggest goddamn stick in town” was the way he liked to put it to his staff. Get rich or get out.

  Simon took the express elevator that went nonstop to the forty-second floor, and was escorted past the matched pair of executive secretaries into the corner office that was exactly twice the size of any other office in the building. Ziegler was tilted back in his leather chair, the phone growing out of his ear, an elderly shoeshine boy at his feet. Behind him, on the oiled teak wall, hung a large black-and-white photograph which showed him shaking hands with ex-President Bush. Ziegler had many such photographs starring himself and eminent politicians of both parties, and they were changed according to the client of the day. Parker, of Parker Foods, was obviously a Republican.

  The shoeshine boy gave a final snap of his cloth and tapped the side of Ziegler’s gleaming black foot to indicate that he’d finished. He got up stiffly, nodded thanks for the five-dollar bill that Ziegler flicked at him, and looked enquiringly at Simon, who shook his head. The old man shuffled out of the office to attend to the footwear of other Global directors, and Simon wondered what he must think about the multi-million-dollar conversations that he overheard every day.

  Ziegler, by now satisfied that he had made Simon wait long enough, finished his call and stood up, smoothing the lapels of his grey silk suit over the wide red braces that he’d recently taken to wearing. Four inches taller and twenty pounds lighter, he might have looked well-dressed. Simon noticed that he had abandoned his attempts to grow sideburns, and his sparse, sandy hair was trimmed close to his head. His cold grey eyes were fixed on Simon as the rest of his face went through the motions of a smile. “So you made it. How was the flight?”

  “Not bad. Quick, at any rate.”

  “It needs to be. Goddamn sardine can. Okay, enough socialising. Parker’s going to be here in a couple of hours, and I need to fill you in.” Ziegler started to pace up and down in front of his desk. “He’s 99 percent in the bag. As long as he’s happy about Europe, my information is we’ve got it—three hundred mil, maybe more if we can get him to really stick it to Heinz. That’s the league we’re in.”

  “What’s he like, Parker?”

  “I’ve never met him. We’ve talked on the phone, but I’ve been dealing with his marketing guys. The word is that he doesn’t like spending too much time with agency people. I’ll get to that in a minute.” Ziegler paused to pick up a thick file, then tossed it back on the desk. “You’ve read the briefing document, right? So you know he started in some hole in the wall in Texas forty years ago and now he’s in the Fortune 500, and going up every year. He’s smart. Over the phone, he comes across like a good old boy from the boondocks—probably wears a string tie and one of those dumb hats—but he’s been in some rough takeovers and never lost. Now here’s a psychology lesson, okay?”

  Simon lit a cigar and saw Ziegler’s expression of distaste. Ziegler got up at six every morning to work out in his weight room, the only thing that saved him from being portly. He liked to get you to feel his biceps, and he was a firm believer in the theory that lung cancer could be contracted secondhand at a distance of six feet.

  “Jesus, I don’t know how you can smoke that shit. Do you know what it does to you? Just don’t die this afternoon, that’s all.”

  “I’m touched, Bob. What about the psychology?”

  “Right. This is important. From what I hear, Parker likes to think of himself as a simple guy, nothing fancy. Plus the fact that he’s not only American, he’s Texan. Are you hearing what I’m saying?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ziegler sighed. “I’ll spell it out for you. My reading of him is that he thinks most people in advertising are goddamn ballet dancers in disguise, and that Europe is a little village full of flakes.”

  Simon had a vision of Ziegler in tights and coughed on a mouthful of smoke.

  Ziegler shook his head. “Well, they’re your fucking lungs. Anyway, you get the idea. No smartass European crap about different cultural values, okay? The line to take is the McDonald’s line—American quality, American value, American efficiency, American …” Ziegler searched for another word that would do justice to this catalogue of virtues.

  “Money?”

  “You bet your grandmother’s ass, money. Do you realise what this will do to billings? To the share price? To your own personal net worth? You could buy fucking Havana and smoke yourself to death.”

  “You know, Bob? There’s a sweet, generous side to your personality sometimes.”

  Ziegler looked at Simon through narrow, unfriendly eyes. “Don’t kid around, Simon. I’ve been working on this one for months, and I don’t want it screwed up by any wisecracks from you. Save your jokes for next time you have tea with the Queen.”

  Ziegler strutted back and forth as he delivered his opinions on the conduct of the meeting, his bulky, pugnacious figure silhouetted against the floor-to-ceiling plate glass and the view down Sixth Avenue to lower Manhattan. Simon looked at his watch. It was seven p.m. English time, and he felt like a drink. If he’d been in London, he’d be getting ready to have dinner with Nicole, somewhere quiet, preferably somewhere like the flat where he could take her clothes off afterwards. He shook himself and tried to pay attention as Ziegler came to the end of his performance.

  “… So just remember that, okay? We give him one big fucking hammer of a campaign worldwide—no chintzy little special-market shit. The world is hungry, and we’re going to feed it.” Ziegler stopped pacing and jabbed a finger at Simon. “Hey, that’s not a bad line, you know? Who needs fucking copywriters?”

  Simon had declined the microwaved, gourmet-in-the-sky meal on the plane, and hadn’t eaten all day. “It worked on me, Bob. I’m starving.”

  Ziegler cocked his head suspicious
ly. He was never quite sure when Simon was serious and when he was making one of those snotty remarks that passed for the British sense of humour. In the interests of corporate harmony, he gave Simon the benefit of the doubt. “Sure. We’ll order in. Parker could be early.”

  But he was punctual to the minute, shadowed by a trio of large, smiling executives with booming voices and force-ten handshakes. After Ziegler’s remarks about Parker, Simon had been half expecting bandy legs and a Stetson, and was a little surprised to see a dapper man in what looked very much like a Savile Row suit. A loosely knotted bow tie; a lean face, dark and wrinkled from the sun; heavy-lidded eyes. Simon thought of a lizard.

  “Hampton Parker. Good to meet you, Mr. Shaw.” He had a dry, smoker’s voice softened by the pleasant trace of a drawl. “They tell me you came over from London for our little meeting.”

  “That’s right. Flew in this morning.”

  They sat down, and Simon noticed that Texans really did wear boots with their business suits.

  “Tell me, Mr. Shaw,” said Parker, “do you get to see much opera over there? That’s one thing I miss back home.”

  Simon saw Ziegler’s smile become a little more fixed. “Not as much as I’d like. I try to go whenever Pavarotti’s singing at Covent Garden.”

  Parker nodded. “Hell of a voice.” He took out a pack of unfiltered Chesterfields and leant back. “All right, boys. Let’s get to it.”

  The “little meeting,” as Parker had called it, turned into an inquisition that stretched over two more days before the Texans were satisfied. Friday morning found the two agency men sitting over coffee speculating on their chances, Ziegler’s cockiness tempered by fatigue, and Simon, adrenaline gone, anxious to get back to London. The faxes he’d been getting from the office had been the usual litany of problems.

  One of the secretaries put her head round the door. “Package for you, Mr. Ziegler.”

  A messenger appeared pushing a trolley, his head barely visible behind an enormous carton, which he lowered carefully to the floor.