A Murder of Magpies (15 page)

It was all very straightforward, but given the tiny amount of time I'd given to anything other than worrying about Kit, there was an awful lot of it, and it filled the journey to Paris nicely. It was only as we were rumbling through the outer suburbs that I reached the e-mail from Breda, and we had arrived at the Gare du Nord before I looked up from it. It was very civil, as always from her, but she had a problem with the jacket copy that had been sent to her—the stuff that would go on the cover, to entice readers to buy the book. She wrote:
I know, Sam, that this isn't your department, but I thought I'd better discuss it with you, as it's a bit awkward. The person who wrote the blurb has missed the point of my book, and I don't know how to tell her. She hasn't realized that the book is a spoof, and has written it as though it were a chick-lit novel. What shall we do? Is it best to ask her to do it again, or, given that she has no sense of humor, is it better just to give it to someone else quietly?

Spoof? I stared, dazed, at the passengers shrugging into their coats and collecting their bags. The
blurb writer
had no sense of humor? Where did that leave the rest of us?

As I moved through the usual rugger scrum masquerading as a taxi queue, sidestepping the thin blonde women of indefinite age with small dogs in Vuitton carry cases, I was operating entirely on automatic pilot. Every time I go through the Gare du Nord I swear I'll learn to use the Métro, but every time I get there, I can't face it and tell myself,
Just this once more.
And all the while, I turned the e-mail over and over in my mind, trying to figure out where we'd gone wrong. Breda had written a comic novel? Why had none of us laughed? Was it not funny, or had we just not expected it to be funny? Was she a bad writer or were we stupid? I had a feeling that I knew the answer to that last one. I rang Miranda once I was in a taxi and read her the e-mail. She was doubtful. “We can't all be wrong, can we?”

“Can't we.” I was grim, and it wasn't a question. “Look, print out a couple of copies of the manuscript without the author's name on them and give them to your friends. Tell them it's a new comic novel that's just come in and you think it's great.”

“I have to tell my
friends
that I think it's great?” Miranda saw social death looming.

“You can tell them the truth afterward if they start to treat you like a leper. None of us can read this book fresh, and we need to know if we've all had total sense of humor failure. Did we just misread it because we know Breda?”

She was un-persuaded, but it meant she could stop working on it while her friends read it. “If I pay them a reader's fee, I can ask them to do it in a couple of days.”

“If there's anyone in the world who will read that stuff in forty-eight hours for £35, go for it. But find people who will give you a real response, not what they think you want to hear. Make sure you don't include the title page. I want them to read it without any preconceptions based on the author's name.”

She said she'd get straight onto it, which left me free to think about the coming afternoon.

Kit had told me the drill, so I didn't worry about getting to the Palais des Sports in good time. The show was called for two thirty, and he told me it wouldn't begin before three, probably not until three thirty. So I went to find some lunch. There's a restaurant that I like, but I never take anyone I know there, because it is too ordinary. For me that's its charm. It is a neighborhood place, with a changing lunch menu of plats du jour, and a line of single tables by the door where men who eat there every day have their regular seats and napkins they fold up and leave for the following day. It serves basic food—roast chicken, stew—the kind of thing those solitary men would eat at home if only there was someone to cook it for them. The waitresses all wear white dental-nurse uniforms, and are large and forceful. If you don't eat enough of your chicken, they push the plate back to you and urge you on. It felt like a good idea to go there today and let a motherly bully tell me what to do. Pretty much like the rest of my life, now I thought about it.

I ate my chicken and sat thinking about the meeting with Loïc after the show. I wasn't quite sure why I had set it up, apart from the fact that they wanted to see me. What could I say? We know Alemán was murdered, that Intinvest has been laundering money through Vernet, now would you kindly tell us what you've done with Kit, and we'll stop publication? Apart from anything else, it probably wouldn't work. It would be good to know what they wanted, though. Vernet had been hugely obstructive, refusing throughout to talk to Kit. Now someone there was falling over themselves to talk to me. What had changed? It could only be Kit's disappearance. What I couldn't tell was whether they knew something about it, or whether they wanted to. Whichever it was, it might give me more to go on than we had now, which was zip. We knew Vernet was laundering money, which we'd known before, and we knew how, which we hadn't, but frankly I didn't care. Let them wash the entire contents of the Bank of England if it made them happy. I just wanted to know what had happened to Kit, and go back to publishing women's reads. Or, as it would now appear, comic novels.

That wasn't a route I wanted to go down, so I paid up and headed over to the Palais des Sports. I'd never been there before, but I knew that I was in the right place because it was besieged by a huge number of incredibly scruffy-looking people—much scruffier than me—all trying to push past the security guards. I held on tight to my ticket as I waved it in the air, joining in the melee. Kit had warned me about this. He said a friend of his had fainted at one of these shows, and the person who caught her as she fell stole her ticket and dumped her on the pavement. Eventually I squeezed through, and found myself in a sports stadium that had been covered with pink plush and roses to look like the Opéra. So, if they had used the Opéra, would they have ripped out all the plush and flowers to make it look like a sports stadium? I mentally shrugged. It was good to see a business that appeared to make even less sense than my own.

The bouncers inside were no less aggressive than those outside. The general feeling was,
Prove you deserve to be here.
Since I'd had a foul week, and couldn't care less about this, my basic attitude was,
Well, fuck you too sonny.
The weird thing was, it worked. I didn't even have to say it. Apparently just walking in a way that suggests
Fuck you
is the way to make people believe you're important. I wondered briefly if it would do the trick outside the fashion world, too. Something to consider.

Once inside the arena itself I was enchanted to find that the little gilt and red velvet chairs that I'd seen in movies from the 1940s were still in use. Everyone was squeezed tight, breathing in to ensure they fit. A quick look around was enough to show me that fashion people were on the whole no thinner or more stylish than the rest of the world. In fact, the bulk of the audience consisted of brisk middle-aged middle-sized women in sensible shoes, and the chairs—and the lack of space between them—were definitely not made to accommodate them.

I smiled at the woman whose lap I was about to almost sit on. It seemed rude to do so without introducing myself, so I did. She was fifty, with a wonderful quiff of gray hair, and a quizzical look for the seething, chattering masses. She told me was Mary-Kay Montgomery, the fashion editor of the
Chicago Times
. “Do you do fashion publishing?”

“Not really. I'm working with Kit Lovell on a book on Alemán.”

She was torn. The first part of the sentence had caused a pleased response—she obviously knew Kit and liked him. When I got to the bit about Alemán, she withdrew, like a snail shrinks back into its shell if you poke at it with a stick. “Yes,” she said flatly, “I heard about that.” There was no welcome in her voice now.

I changed the subject. “I've never been to one of these before.” I waved toward the runway.

“You'd better get yourself a drink,” she advised, deftly swiping a glass of champagne from a tray as it floated past. “It will be at least half an hour before we begin. The last show was nearly two hours late, and they'll wait for everyone to arrive.”

She was right, it was, and we chatted idly until the lights finally went down. Mary-Kay pointed out celebrities—all of whom I had spotted by their larger-than-life behavior, and all of whom I'd misidentified. She showed me Anna Wintour, the editor of
Vogue,
sitting in what the fashion world would regard as isolated glory, although to me she just looked bored and lonely. There was Manolo Blahnik, shoemaker to the stars and permatanned to the color of a pair of brogues, manically kissing everyone on sight. The Ladies Who Lunch—the women rich enough to
buy
couture clothes—sat in a little enclave, about a dozen strong. They passed up the champagne—those calories, my dear—and looked as bored as I would have at Marks and Spencer. I was fascinated by the whole thing. It was like entering an alternate reality. The beginning of the show was signaled by a shift in the music, from thunderous to deafening, and by the photographers, penned in at the end of the runway like particularly dangerous animals, loosing off a battery of flashes that would have been bright enough to land a 747 by.

I'm not quite sure what I'd expected, maybe something that looked like MTV. The one thing I hadn't expected, though, was—well, a fashion show. Which is exactly what it was. Incredibly tall, incredibly thin women clip-clopped like ponies down the runway, opened their coats, twirled their skirts, or just flicked their hair, then walked back. They were glazed over, both mentally and physically: their makeup was an inch thick, and birds' nest wigs meant that they all looked identical. I'd also expected the kind of clothes that you see in the newspapers the next day—bare-breasted women in nothing but a pair of lavender velvet jodhpurs and a necklace of cowrie shells, say. Those were there, but there were only two of them, and they were entirely for the cameras. The rest of the clothes were totally gorgeous, totally wearable. Even a peasant like me felt the urge. There was one yellow taffeta ball dress that was larger than my entire flat, and I wanted it so badly it was like a physical need.

Then the lights came up and I shook myself. What an extraordinary thing—not theater, as I'd expected, just naked consumerism. I said so to Mary-Kay, and she nodded, “You bet. The rest—” she stuck out her chin toward the Hollywood contingent in the front row—“that's just window dressing. Completely irrelevant, except as advertising.”

I'd spent so much time thinking about money laundering that I'd forgotten what big business fashion really was.

I asked Mary-Kay how I should find Loïc. She snorted, which I had quickly discovered was most people's response to him. “Have another drink,” she said. “There's no point going backstage for another half an hour at least: It'll be a zoo. After that the models will have left for the next show. Which,” she added, with a look at her watch, “is what I have to do. It was nice to meet you.”

I didn't have another drink, because I needed to be entirely sober for this meeting. So I wandered around, shamelessly eavesdropping. Most of it consisted of people kissing each other, then telling the next person how much they disliked the previous one. After twenty minutes I decided the hell with it, and began to search around for a way backstage. A very disgruntled bouncer finally let me through.

At best, “backstage” was a polite lie for a corridor. It actually wasn't quite as nice as that makes it sound—it was a gray, concrete area smelling of dead cigarettes and spilled alcohol. The clothes were gone, as were the models. All that was left was the Vernet office staff, standing around looking as gray as the walls, completely exhausted, while their friends stood beside them, telling them how fabulous it had been.

Loïc was in a corner making appointments for journalists to view the collection quietly the next day. He saw me, but felt that he couldn't maintain his status if he acknowledged me right away. He was right. If he'd behaved civilly I would have had to revise my opinion that he was a poisonous little runt. After waiting for ten minutes while he pretended I was invisible I grabbed a chair and pulled out a book. That got him—there is no fun in ignoring someone who is happy to be ignored. He slouched over. “Well,” he demanded.

“Very well, thank you for asking,” I said. The single glass of champagne that I'd had before the show had given me a headache, and I was cranky and back in fuck-you mode. He'd asked for—begged for—this meeting, not me. He could tell me what he wanted or I was going home. I stared, stony-faced, at him.

He was a small man—delicately built, and probably only about five foot five without the lifts, with dark skin, dark eyes, and platinum hair, razored in the center like a crop circle. His shirt was open to the waist, which was a deeply unappetizing sight, and his trousers rode low on what in a normal-sized person would have been his hips. You knew he'd spent an hour getting them to hang in the right place. He made me tired just to look at him, and I let my face reflect this. As with the bouncers, it was the right approach, and he suddenly became ingratiating.

“Monsieur Conway is looking forward to meeting you,” he said, although the words must have pained him. I made sure I showed no surprise, but I was astonished. Patrick Conway was the CEO of Lambert-Lorraine, the conglomerate that owned Vernet, among a huge portfolio of companies. Vernet turned over tens of millions, while Lambert-Lorraine probably saw that daily. What was he bothering with me for?

I nodded, and said, as though still exhausted, “I want to make some calls first. Is there somewhere quiet?”

He said, “The car's waiting, you can call from there.”

Sure, I was going to make my calls in front of him and the driver. I walked out to the car with him and gestured him ahead of me. Then I said, “I won't be a moment,” and slammed the door on him.