Hotel Pastis (6 page)

The men smoked and thought about money, and the General cut himself a slice of pizza. Next to him, Jojo fidgeted impatiently. Getting into the bank was the part he knew about; getting out and getting away, that was the big problem.

“Alors,”
the General went on, “we have amused ourselves in the strong room, cleaned out all the boxes. It is now Sunday morning, and there is the market. The town is packed; the cars are stuck like nuts in nougat. But, as agreeable as it is in the strong room, we must leave.”

The General eased his stomach away from the table,
belched, and picked a shred of anchovy from his teeth with a matchstick. “There are two little inconveniences.” He held up a stubby finger. “The first is that some time between noon and one o’clock every Sunday there is a security check. I’ve watched it four Sundays in a row. Two cops, just routine, but they always come as the market is finishing, count the flowerpots on the bank steps, and go home to lunch. Anyway, we need to be out well before noon. And
évidemment
, we can’t leave the way we came in. Even in July, it would look odd to see men coming out of the river waving bundles of five hundred–franc notes.” He paused for a drink. “No, the way out is through the back, into the park.”

Jojo’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. “Through the door?”

“Of course through the door.” The General raised two fingers. “
Voilà le deuxième problème
. Because, as we know, the door is wired.”

“And the alarm will go off,” Bachir said. “And we’ll be back in the
pissoir
for ten years. No thanks.”

The General smiled. “You haven’t changed,
mon vieux—
still the happy optimist. But you’re forgetting something. We have time to get away. Not much—two or three minutes, maybe more if the traffic’s as bad as it usually is on market day.”

Claude’s moon face crumpled with the effort of thought. “But if the traffic’s that bad …”

“It will be bad,” said the General. “Bad for a car. But we won’t be using a car. Who wants some pizza? It’s good.”

Jean the pickpocket made his longest speech of the morning. “
Merde
to the pizza. How do we get away?”

“Simple. By
vélo
.” The General brought up his left hand and smacked it with his right. “In two minutes
we’ll be through the traffic and out of town while the cops are still sitting on their klaxons.” He gave his moustache a satisfied tug. “It works.”

He held up his hands to stop the babel of questions and did some more explaining. Each of them would take into the strong room his
tenue de vélo—
the shoes and shorts and caps and brightly coloured, multipocketed jerseys that all serious cyclists wear. Their pockets would be bulging, but a cyclist’s pockets are often bulging. Who would suspect that the bulges were bank notes? Who would even bother to look? With thousands of cyclists out on the road every Sunday, they would be anonymous. They would disappear. It was the perfect disguise, one of the most common sights of summer. And it was fast.

“Mais attention.”
The General wagged a warning finger. “There is one detail: you must be
en forme—
fit enough to ride twenty or thirty kilometres at top speed without puking over the handlebars. But that’s nothing, just training.” He waved a hand airily. “We have months for that. One hundred kilometres every Sunday and you’ll be ready for the Tour de France.”

The pastis was finished, and the General went behind the bar for another bottle while the men round the table looked at each other, then started to talk. He’d let them chew it over, commit themselves before he suggested the split he’d worked out.

“General?” One of the Borel brothers was grinning. “When was the last time you did one hundred kilometres?”

“The other day. The way I always do—in a car. God made some arses for saddles, but not mine. Let me ask you a question.” The General unscrewed the cap and pushed the bottle across the table. “When was the last
time you had some money in your pocket? Some real money?”

“A shitload of
fric
,” said Jojo.

Borel said nothing.

The General reached over and patted his cheek. “Drink up,” he said. “One day it’ll be champagne.”

S
imon left the hotel early to do battle with the Parisian rush-hour traffic, the kamikaze pilots in their Renault 5s, wired on caffeine and determined to assert French superiority over anyone foolish enough to be driving a car with foreign plates. He had chosen the most relaxed of his three cars for the trip, the Congo-black Porsche convertible with a top speed of 160. It was, as he knew, a ridiculous machine to have in London, where it rarely got out of second gear—an advertising man’s toy. But out on the autoroute he could let it go, and with luck and a heavy foot on the accelerator he should be down in the south in six hours.

The cars gave way to trucks as he cleared Paris and
left the jam of the
périphérique
behind him, and he nudged the speed up to 120. The phone, which in London would be almost continuously beeping to announce news of a client crisis or a changed meeting, was silent. He pressed the call button to see if he could reach Liz. No Service. There was nothing to do except drive and think.

Unattached, healthy, and paper-rich with agency shares, he was in a position that many people would envy. As long as the business prospered, he would never be short of a few hundred thousand pounds, despite Caroline’s unlimited enthusiasm for spending money. He remembered the time when her American Express card had been stolen. He hadn’t reported the loss for weeks; the thief had been spending less than she normally did. Although she was going to be a continuing source of trouble and expense, she could always be paid off.

His business life was less straightforward. The challenge of building an agency was over. It was built, and now it had to be maintained and fed constantly with new clients. A five million–pound account, which in the early days would have been the excuse for euphoric celebration, was now just another bone to toss to the City. The excitement had gone, to be replaced by well-rewarded drudgery.

And then there was New York, and Ziegler. When Simon had been forced to follow the Saatchis and Lowe into America, he had done a share-swap deal with Global Resources, one of the most aggressive of the advertising conglomerates, run by one of the most unpleasant of men. Nobody admitted to liking Ziegler, but nobody could deny that he was effective. He seemed to be able to bully clients into the agency, to overpower
them with promises of more sales and bigger profits. Simon had seen him in operation dozens of times, brutal to his subordinates and almost manic in his pursuit of clients. Fear was the club he used within the agency, overpaying and then terrorising his staff. Fear of a different kind—the fear of losing market share—was always the basis of his presentations. He could deliver a sixty-minute tirade on his favourite topic, “Selling is war, and those bastards are out to get you,” which was usually successful in making even the most sophisticated clients look nervously over their shoulders before increasing their budgets.

Simon’s relationship with Ziegler had been described (not within their hearing, of course) as two dogs sharing a kennel that was too small. Each was jealous of his own territory. Each wanted the whole kennel—which in this case was the world—to himself. Their mutual dislike was camouflaged with the corporate politeness that fools nobody, carefully phrased memos bristling with needles and a stilted camaraderie whenever they were on public view together. The moment wasn’t right yet for a decisive fight, but it would come. Simon knew it, and the thought of it, which once would have stimulated him, just made him weary.

Like many advertising men, he thought often and vaguely about leaving the business. But to do what? He had no desire to go into politics or to become a gentleman farmer or to jump over the fence and become a client, running a company that made beer or soap powder. Besides, what else paid like advertising? He might be in a rut, but it was a rut of considerable luxury, hard to give up without an overwhelmingly attractive alternative. And so he dealt with these moments of discontent as many of his colleagues dealt with them, by finding a
new distraction—a faster car, a bigger house, another expensive hobby. Living well is not only the best revenge but the easiest.

He had reached the long, rolling hills of the Burgundy countryside, and thought about stopping at Chagny to have lunch at Lameloise. Dangerous. He stopped instead at a service station, had a cup of bitter coffee, and looked at the map. He could be in Avignon by mid-afternoon, sitting in the shade of a plane tree with a pastis, the back of the journey broken. He filled up the Porsche and continued south.

As the names flicked by—Vonnas, Vienne, Valence—the light became brighter and the sky seemed to expand, blue and endless, the countryside harsher with rock and stunted scrub oak. In the vineyards cut out of the hills, small, scattered groups of figures, their backs bent under the sun, were gathering the first grapes of the harvest. This was Côtes-du-Rhône country, producing solid wine for people with outdoor thirsts and appetites. Simon looked forward to his first bottle.

The sign for Avignon came up and flashed by while he was trying to decide whether to go down to the coast as he’d planned or to take Murat’s advice.
Prochaine Sortie Cavaillon
. Why not? He could always move on tomorrow if he didn’t like it.

He turned off at the Cavaillon exit and crossed the bridge over the Durance, more of a trickle than a river after the summer drought. As he came into town, he saw the café tables under the trees, brown faces, cool golden glasses of beer. He parked the Porsche, eased his back, and went through the minor acrobatics necessary to get out. After the tinted glass and the air conditioning of the car, the glare and the heat came like a sudden shock. He felt the sun hit his head with a force that
made him wince. In Paris, it had been autumn; here it was still like August.

He could have closed his eyes and known from the smell of the café that he was in France—black tobacco, strong coffee, and the sharp tang of aniseed from the glasses of pastis on the bar. The men playing cards at the table, most of them in sleeveless vests and faded, shapeless caps, looked up at him through the smoke of their cigarettes, and he was aware of his clean, out-of-place clothes.

“Bière, s’il vous plaît.”

“Bouteille ou pressiong?”
The barman’s voice was throaty, his accent thick. It sounded like French, but not the French of Paris, or even the coast. It twanged.

Simon took his Kronenbourg and sat by the window. Every other vehicle passing by seemed to be a huge truck, grunting and hissing its way through the traffic, loaded with the fruit and vegetables that Provence grew with such abundance. Simon listened to the voices around him and wondered how his French was going to cope with the swirling verbal syrup. He realised that for the first time in years, nobody knew exactly where he was. He himself didn’t know where he was going to be spending the night, and it pleased him to think that he was just another anonymous stranger.

A boy came into the café selling newspapers, and Simon bought a copy of
Le Provençal
. The main story on the front page was a
boules
tournament, and the rest of the paper was filled with news of the local villages—a
fête
in Lourmarin, a wine tasting in Rognes, more
boules
tournaments. Despite its modern layout and excitable headlines, it had an old-fashioned, almost sleepy air about it after the British press.

Simon finished his beer. Where had Murat told him
to head for? Apt? He left the coolness of the café, watched again by the card players, and went back to the Porsche. It was being inspected by three boys, and he saw one of them stroke the fat curve of the wheel arch tentatively, as if the car might bite. The boys stepped back as they saw Simon, and watched him open the door.

“Ça gaze, monsieur?”
The bravest boy craned his head to look inside the cockpit.

“Oui.”
Simon pointed to the speedometer.
“Deux cent quarante. Même plus.”

The little boy shook his hand as though he’d burnt his fingers.
“Ça boum, alors.”

As Simon drove off, all of them shook their hands at him, three brown, grinning monkeys. He eased into the traffic and followed the road under the railway bridge towards Apt. On his right, behind the forest of billboards that sprout on the fringes of most provincial French towns, he could see a low, grey-green shape that rose away into the distance, the lower slopes of the Lubéron mountains. He turned off the air conditioning and pulled over to take the top down. It was four-thirty, the sun warm on his shoulders, the breeze in his hair. He’d have dinner on a quiet terrace somewhere. Life was getting better.

He turned off the N-100 road to escape from local Grand Prix drivers determined to overtake a Porsche, and followed a narrow road that twisted up into the hills. He could see, far above him, the bleached stone and old tiled roofs of a village, and he dropped down a gear to accelerate. Maybe there would be a little
auberge
with a fat cook and a terrace overlooking the mountains.

As he rounded a blind, steep bend, he had to stamp on the brake to avoid running into the tractor that was
taking up the centre of the road. The tractor’s driver looked down at Simon, his brick-red face impassive beneath his cap. He jerked his thumb at the large container he was towing, filled with a purple pile of grapes. He shrugged his heavy shoulders. He wasn’t going to reverse.

Simon backed off the road into a field, and heard something grate under the back of the car—a noise that any Porsche owner knows and dreads, an expensive noise. Shit. The tractor driver raised his hand and drove off while Simon was getting out of the car.

He looked at the remains of his exhaust pipe, mangled and hanging by a strut, jammed against a rock half-concealed in the grass. He continued up the hill gingerly, in bottom gear, the dangling exhaust scraping noisily against the road.