The Merde Factor: (Paul West 5)

by Stephen Clarke

‘Ah, Pool, you have found me!’ He grabbed my outstretched hand and almost dragged me across the table.

  ‘Yes, well, you gave me the address,’ I admitted modestly.

  ‘This young Englishman knows me very well,’ he told the girl in the kind of soft French accent that makes English ladies go gooey at the knees. ‘Too well.’ He laughed loudly and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘This is Amandine,’ Jean-Marie announced, and before I had time to wonder whether I should shake hands or kiss her on the cheek, she held out a slim, perfectly manicured hand and gave me the briefest of squeezes. ‘Amandine is my, how do you say, stagiaire?’ Jean-Marie said.

  ‘Intern. Hi, Paul,’ she said in a slightly transatlantic accent. I guessed Mummy and Daddy had probably sent her to an American business school.

  ‘Yes, intern. There is no need to trouble yourself with your terrible French, Pool,’ Jean-Marie said. ‘Amandine speaks perfect English. She is only an intern now, but she is already the new star in my company.’

  Starlet more like, I thought. Poor girl. I tried to smile sympathetically at Amandine but she had her eyes cast down, and seemed to be fiddling with something under the table.

  Jean-Marie was smugger than ever, if that was humanly possible. Even at normal times he wore an expression that suggested he’d just shagged a Hollywood actress and found a winning lottery ticket under her pillow. Now he looked as though he’d discovered how to turn Parisian pigeon poop into gold.

  He was looking good, though, I had to admit it. Slimmer than when I’d last seen him, and sleeker, with his balding pate carefully shaven, giving him a slightly menacing edge. In the past he’d just looked sleazy. Now he was dangerously so.

  ‘How are things at VianDiffusion?’ I asked, and had the malicious satisfaction of seeing him twitch. Jean-Marie had never forgiven me for pointing out that the brand name he’d come up with when he’d decided to go international had not been quite right for a food company: VD Exporters.

  ‘We supply the meat for this diner, you know,’ he said. ‘And with Amandine’s help, we will conquer the world.’ He patted Amandine’s hand again.

  This time, though, with me as a spectator, Amandine didn’t laugh so hard. She went through the motions, but her eyes caught mine and I got a sudden flash of ‘don’t think I enjoy having him do this’.

  ‘Talking of meat, why don’t we order?’ she said, impressively deadpan.

  ‘Ah yes.’ Jean-Marie held up a heavily Rolexed hand and waved to the guy standing by the till. ‘Kevin is the owner of the diner,’ he told me. Of course, Jean-Marie wasn’t going to deal with any underling.

  Kevin came over. I saw immediately that he wasn’t a Kevin. He was a ‘Kev-EEN’, a French guy with an Anglo-Celtic name, like the many Brendans (‘Bren-DAN’) and Dylans (‘Dee-LAN’) I’d met. And, like all trendy Parisian guys between about eighteen and thirty-five, he had bushy hair, a boyishly unshaven face, and the air of being unsure whether to be gay or straight.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur Martin,’ he gushed, shaking Jean-Marie’s hand with all the gratitude of a café owner towards his meat supplier. We were introduced, and he lingered just a little when it was Amandine’s turn. Not gay then.

  ‘Alors, que prendrez-vous?’ Kevin asked, pen and pad at the ready. ‘Voulez-vous juste coffee and toast, ou pancakes avec bacon? Ou peut-être le total breakfast?’

  I was stunned. I’d never heard French and English slapped together like that by anyone except Jake.

  ‘Moi, je prends pancakes avec maple syrup,’ Amandine said without batting an eye. ‘Je n’ai pas pris de breakfast ce matin.’

  I hadn’t eaten anything before going out to meet Jake, so I decided to join in with the culinary Franglais.

  ‘Deux slices de toast, s’il vous plaît,’ I said, ‘avec beaucoup de butter. Et scrambled eggs avec deux pieces of bacon, très well done.’

  ‘OK.’ Kevin simply wrote it all down.

  Even more weirdly, Jean-Marie didn’t react at all. This was the man who’d got himself elected as a local councillor on an extreme right-wing platform of obligatory pétanque at school, no mention of Waterloo in history books, and defence of French traditions like shooting any endangered species of bird that flew into its airspace. I expected him to insist on seeing a French-language menu but he simply ordered ‘toast avec butter’, adding that he had to watch his weight, ‘unlike the lovely Amandine, who is naturally perfect’. He squeezed her upper arm, and again I saw her messing with something under the table. A Taser, I hoped.

  When Kev-EEN had gone, Jean-Marie began to reminisce fondly about the last time we’d both discussed Anglo-French menus. Fondly for him, that is. For me, it was ripping out the stitches in a deep financial wound.

  ‘You remember, Pool, when you got that immense, what do you call it – amende?’

  ‘Fine,’ I grunted helpfully.

  ‘Yes, thirty thousand euros, wasn’t it? Hoo!’ He grimaced in badly acted pain. ‘When Pool started his tea room,’ he told Amandine, ‘his menu had too much English with no translation. You see, on this’ – he held up the diner’s double-sided plastic menu – ‘they are careful. They translate everything in little French letters. French letters? Isn’t that something naughty?’ He exploded with laughter.

  ‘Yes, it means condoms,’ Amandine said, managing to smile. ‘What we girls need to protect us against careless men.’

  ‘Oh, you are right,’ Jean-Marie said, suddenly serious. ‘I hope you carry them with you. Do you have some in your bag?’

  Instead of Tasering him or poking a fork through the back of his hand, Amandine smiled as if her boss was being oh-so-witty. What these French office girls have to put up with, I thought.

  ‘Pool did not translate his menu at all,’ Jean-Marie went on. ‘They attacked him for, what was it, “cup of tea”?’

  ‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘They were afraid that if I didn’t put “tasse de thé”, French people might confuse it with “mug of sulphuric acid”.’

  ‘Thirty thousand euros for that?’ Amandine looked genuinely shocked, as well she might.

  ‘Luckily, I saved him with money,’ Jean-Marie trumpeted, and paused as if he expected me to get under the table and show my gratitude. ‘Pool was not very happy at first, but, what do you say in English? Every cloud has a golden shower?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jean-Marie went on, ‘since I have bought half of the business, we are in the position where today, we want to expand.’

  This was why we had been due to meet – to discuss opening a second tea room, an idea I loved but couldn’t afford.

  ‘Is that why you wanted to meet here?’ I asked him. ‘To show me how to write a menu?’

  ‘No, not at all. Well, almost not. I wanted to present you to Amandine, who will work with us on the dossier.’

  ‘Great,’ I said sincerely. With two of us there, meetings with Jean-Marie might be easier. A pain shared is a pain halved, although he was also capable of doubling it.

  ‘Yes, I hope it will be fun,’ Amandine said, with just a tad too much emphasis on the hope. ‘We must think what to call the second tea room. I had some ideas—’

  A grumphing noise came from Jean-Marie’s corner.

  ‘We will talk about this at our next meeting,’ he said. ‘Today I want you to think of something different.’ He lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘You know about this American businessman who decided no more olives in the airline salads?’ We nodded, remembering the famous story of the guy who saved millions with this one menu change. ‘He was called a genius, yes? But he was not. He did not, how do you say, think without his box?’ I didn’t correct him. ‘The answer was not to take out the olives,’ Jean-Marie went on. ‘It was to cut the whole meal. No more free food on aeroplanes! That was the genius idea.’ He sighed at the brilliance of it. ‘Now they want passengers to stand up, and they take away the toilets, even. Soon they will take out the pilot, no?’

  ‘Yes, and then probably the wi
ngs,’ I agreed. ‘So what you’re suggesting, Jean-Marie, is a tea room with no seats, no toilets and presumably no tea?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ he said seriously. ‘But I want you to think of this principle for our next meeting.’

  Before I could ask him what the hell he was talking about, Kevin came over with the food, reciting a porridge-like mixture of English and French as he slid each plate on to the table. I tucked in, and had to admit it was good. Not as tasty or generously portioned as a real diner in real America, but definitely edible. I understood why the place was full.

  ‘Voilà. Tout va bien?’ Kevin asked.

  ‘Très bien,’ Jean-Marie answered, putting one arm around Amandine’s shoulders and the other on my hand. ‘Tout est parfait.’

  ‘I have a question,’ I told Kevin in English. ‘Why did you call it American’s Dream? Why not American Dream?’

  ‘Ah yes.’ Kevin smiled philosophically. ‘We ’ave decided eet is mush more rich in signeeficance. It is American’s Dream, so is it ze dream of an American, or by an American, or maybe about an American? Who is ze dream’s subject and who ze object? And what is ze dream?’

  Ask a Frenchman a silly question and you’ll get a silly French answer.

  ‘You see?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘All too clearly.’ As Kevin left, I looked across at Amandine and we shared a moment of eye contact before Jean-Marie leapt in.

  ‘By the way, Pool,’ he said, ‘you are searching for work, yes? And you don’t want to help at the tea room?’

  I nodded. There were five staff, and I didn’t want to steal one of their jobs.

  ‘Well, call this lady.’ With a flourish, Jean-Marie produced a large white business card and slid it croupier-style across the table. There was a multi-barrelled name on it: Marie-Dominique Maintenon-Dechérizy, and a French government logo: the tricolour, decorated with the profile of Marianne, the symbol of the Revolution, who was looking fresh and wrinkle-free, as if the République was a frisky teenager rather than a haggard 200-year-old.

  ‘Ministry of Culture?’ I read. ‘What would I do for them?’

  ‘Call Marie-Dominique and ask. Oh.’ He put a finger to his temple in a bad mime of pretending to remember something. ‘And Benoît told me some interesting news.’ Benoît was Jean-Marie’s son. He was managing the tea room. ‘Apparently he saw Alexa photographing the place.’

  I dropped my fork.

  ‘Alexa is Pool’s ex-girlfriend,’ Jean-Marie informed Amandine. ‘She left him for … who was it? An Irishman? Or a Japanese lesbian? Oh no, it was both, wasn’t it?’

  In fact he was Irish-American and she was Cambodian, but I couldn’t be bothered to argue.

  ‘Is Benoît sure it was her?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes. He talked to her.’

  ‘Why would she be taking photos of the tea room?’

  ‘I don’t know. She hasn’t called you? Perhaps she is too busy with her boyfriend and girlfriend? That must take a lot of energy, no? No?’ Jean-Marie gurgled suggestively towards Amandine, and suddenly I had to get out of the diner as fast as possible.

  Why, I thought as I stepped outdoors into a group of loudly flirting teenagers, does every meeting with Jean-Marie leave me feeling as if I’ve just been minced in one of his meat machines?

  III

  I hardly had time to cross the street before my phone started ringing. I took a grudging look at the screen. It was a number I didn’t recognise. Or was it? I pulled out the business card Jean-Marie had given me. And there was the number – the woman from the Ministry. Bloody hell, I thought, she’s keen. Or maybe Jean-Marie had just told her to call me. Either way, I decided to play hard to get, and thrust the phone into my deepest pocket as I chose a narrow, car-free street and headed towards the river.

  I was aiming for the île de la Cité, the macaroon-shaped island in the middle of the Seine where the city of Paris was born. It has come a very long way since it was inhabited by a small tribe of mosquito-bitten Gauls, and today it houses not only a Gothic cathedral but also surely the most impractically positioned flower market in Europe. If you want to buy an immense potted olive tree, where better to come than a market in the very centre of a city where it’s impossible to park?

  I’ve always been very fond of the Marché aux Fleurs, though, with its long glasshouses and miniature jungle of urban plants. Whenever you cross the Seine, it’s always worth a detour to sniff the orange blossom, fig leaves or whatever is in season. And today I knew I was going to need several nostril-loads of perfume to get me through my ordeal.

  I was on my way to the Préfecture, just opposite the flower market, to swap my UK driving licence for a French one. The changeover was compulsory, so I’d been reliably informed (by Jake), if I wanted to avoid having to retake the test in France, as he’d had to do. It had taken him months of revision for the fiendish French highway code exam (‘When approaching a red light, should you (a) brake, (b) accelerate, (c) what’s a red light?’), and three failed attempts at manoeuvring his way through Parisian traffic jams. In the end, he’d found a driving school out in a new-town suburb ringed with wide boulevards and American-style roundabouts, and taken the test with an examiner who was a ‘good friend’ of his driving instructor. And Jake came from a country where they drove on the right. I preferred to do the licence swap. The only bad news, Jake had told me, was that it meant a visit to the Préfecture.

  This news alone was enough to make me want to get drunk and crash a Citroën. The Préfecture was the scene of my first brush with French civil servants just after I arrived in Paris, about two years earlier. I’d been sucked into the familiar whirlpool of ‘you can’t get a residence permit without a recent electricity bill’ and ‘you can’t get an electricity bill without a residence permit’, and had ended up photocopying so many documents that Xerox offered me shares in the company.

  At least this time I needed only my driving licence, passport, two photos (which, the official website said, had to be ‘identical’, as if someone might turn up with one picture of themselves and one of their dog) and a completed driving licence request form, which was available from the Préfecture. I guessed that putting the form online would have made things much too easy. Still, I reasoned, I ought to be able to ask for a form and fill it in while I waited. France is a logical country, n’est-ce pas?

  After an energising sniff at the tangy leaves of a potted kumquat tree, I crossed the square towards the imposing, double-towered grey chateau that houses Paris’s police HQ. It looked as though Napoleon had wanted a building grand enough to represent his ideal of imperial order, but had told the architect that it also had to embody the spirit of French bureaucracy: impenetrability. I joined the line of suitably gloomy people standing outside the fortified main entrance.

  For the next twenty minutes I edged closer to the two security men in blue blazers who were rummaging in people’s backpacks and handbags. From what I saw, the secret to smuggling a gun or bomb into Paris’s central police station was to hide it right at the bottom of your bag, where the guards wouldn’t bother to delve. Either that or be a reasonably attractive female. Girls with cute faces or curvy figures seemed to be beyond suspicion.

  After the symbolic terrorism test, an arrow sign directed me into a room that had obviously been decorated by psychologists to be as soulless as possible. Colour scheme: pus yellow and hypothermia blue; seats arranged in two facing semi-circles so that everyone was staring at everyone else and multiplying their misery; ceiling hanging low over the scene like stormy cloud cover. Here, thirty or more stressed-out men and women were waiting, their eyes flicking from watch to phone to neon countdown sign. A red number flashed every time one of the two consultation windows was free. I took a ticket from a machine on the wall. It was number 888. Held on its side, the ticket read three times infinity, a pretty long wait even by French waiting-room standards. The neon counter was flashing 851. Brilliant, I’d have time to grow a beard.

  A few peopl
e, I noticed, were going straight up to the windows to ask a question. A Parisian attitude I’d seen before: ‘You expect me to queue? Moi? There must be some misunderstanding.’

  All of them came away frustrated, though, and were forced to sit down, staring in disbelief at their number as if it was a death sentence.

  A mere twenty games of solitaire and ten or so ‘guess what I’m doing’ text messages later, 888 came up. I made for the glass window, trying to banish all impatience from my mind. In my experience, you only get one chance with a French civil servant. Lapse into exasperation and you’re out the door for ever.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I said to the middle-aged Caribbean-looking lady sitting behind the fingerprint-smeared glass window.

  ‘Bonjour,’ she replied. So far so good. As she checked and then crumpled my 888 ticket, she looked quite friendly. This was going to be a doddle.

  ‘Je viens changer mon permis de conduire anglais,’ I told her, smiling as though in three minutes we’d both be at Saint-Michel having a celebratory cocktail.

  ‘Ce n’est pas ici, ça,’ she told me. It’s not here. So much for our kir royal.

  ‘Pas ici?’

  ‘No, you have to go to your préfecture,’ she said.

  ‘Mais ici, c’est la Préfecture,’ I argued.

  ‘Oui, ici, c’est la Préfecture.’

  By some miracle we seemed to be in agreement.

  ‘Well, here I am.’

  She groaned and gave a quick glance upwards for divine help.

  ‘No, this is la Préfecture,’ she said oh-so-slowly. ‘You want votre préfecture.’

  ‘But I live in Paris. This is my préfecture.’

  ‘No, your local antenna is in your arrondissement. Where do you live?’

  ‘In the Eighteenth,’ I told her. I was currently subletting Jake’s tiny apartment, which he’d vacated to move in with one of his girlfriends.

  ‘OK.’ She typed something into her computer, copied down an address on the back of a police-recruitment flyer and pushed it through the slit underneath her window. ‘You have to go here,’ she told me.