I sat down. I told myself that relenting would buy me several days left alone.
He took down my shorts, and soon his warm breath was against my crotch. I knew what to expect. The tongue on my vulva was a prelude, a service that was mostly a request. It went on for only so long, and then there was the grand theatric of me wanting and begging for “the real thing.” I was supposed to ask him to fuck me. Everyone needs something and that’s what Lucien needed. And then there was the “Oh yes,” portion of this scripted sequence, after he put it in, my reaction meant to make him feel like he’d been holding out on me, delaying the declaration that it was Christmas, and “Oh God!” it was Christmas, and he was piling into me.
Our script was boring and unpleasant. Sometimes, physically, it hurt. I was not attracted to Lucien, but that afternoon in the hotel, by closing my eyes and concentrating, by pretending I was masturbating with a tool, even if the tool was the body of another person, I came, which enabled him to do so, also, since he was “a gentleman,” after which I was free to leave.
The Plage des Catalans was a few steps from the hotel, just around the curve of the waterfront. I ducked into a catty-corner bar, ordered a white wine, and glanced at messages concerning my subminister.
It seemed that Platon would be making an appearance in Vantôme.
I asked when and was told more details were forthcoming.
There would be a confrontation between him and the Moulinards, my contacts declared, suggesting without stating: it was my job to make this happen.
The wine was bad, but I ordered another, settled my bill, and crossed back toward the entrance to the beach. I could hear children laughing, people splashing in the water. “Get Lucky” wafted from portable radios, all tuned to the same station, forming one disco-scroll.
We’re up all night to the sun… we’re up all night to get some… And over it was the sound of someone shrieking.
CRS vans—the French riot police—were parked along the road above the beach.
As I approached the steps down to the sand, families were leaving. Or more like fleeing in a mad rush. People were snatching up towels and effects and racing up the stairs from the beach, coughing and covering their eyes. I started to cough also. More police vans maw-mee’ed their way toward the Corniche, lights flashing. The cars in front of them refused to budge. The police sirens wailed.
Several people were being arrested.
The Plage des Catalans is a proletarian beach, a family beach.
As I learned the next day on our hotel TV, two brothers, frolicking in the waves, had engaged for family fun in trying to drown a cop.
It wasn’t clear how they got him in the water, but they were holding him under when more cops stormed the beach and gassed everyone, including babies.
That scene later stayed in my mind. The waves, the waist-deep water, the families, those brothers, and the riot cops who tear-gassed everyone. Cops whose vans were stationed at that beach, in order to harass and rough up beachgoers.
That environment helped me to understand something. It gave me an idea, a plan.
Paul Platon, my deputy minister, could be, for instance, the cop in the waves.
And the people trying to drown him, the Moulinards.
Pascal would be blamed.
It was time. Time to make something happen. Time to finish this job.
OUR SECOND NIGHT IN MARSEILLE we attended a dinner Lucien’s producer was hosting, a woman whose family ruled a handbag dynasty in Paris.
We were at a private swimming club, walking distance from the hotel, and next to the Plage des Catalans, aka Tear Gas Beach.
Guests were gathering on the club’s large terrace as we arrived. Lucien pointed out the Château d’If, a fortress of stone and caked concrete out in the blue. The air was sweltering, with just the faintest wind. The sun was dissolving into the watery horizon. The boulders and makeshift jetties that ringed the harbor glowed pink.
Lucien and I located Vito and Serge. They were leaning on the patio railing but turned inward, assessing not the sea and late-day light but the arriving guests.
The women, Vito observed, were dressed in expensive fabrics of muted colors, beige or gray, while the men were like peacocks, outfitted in explosive combinations of banana yellow and neon green, or melon pants with a turquoise polo shirt.
“These people,” Vito said, as a man in a peach silk shirt and white slacks embraced a man in a pink linen suit, “they all look dressed to fly on the Concorde. While you, Sadie, look ready for Sunday dinner with the in-laws, in your little silk blouse and your fitted silk skirt. Tasteful, but sexy enough to pique the interest of the father-in-law, which is a French daughter-in-law’s filial duty.”
Luckily, I’d had no interaction with Lucien’s family, since both of his parents were dead, and he was an only child. There were a couple of aunts and uncles and some cousins in Paris to whom he wasn’t close, and I made sure I was “working” whenever any of them invited us over. He had his aunt Agathe, not too far from Vantôme, whom he wanted me to meet, but I intended to avoid her and maintain my winning streak. Relatives interfere, or try to, when a family member attaches to a stranger.
“My grandfather took the Concorde,” Lucien said. “I remember him bringing me a model of one.”
“Serge, did your grandfather take the Concorde?” Vito asked. The question was a taunt. Serge wasn’t from money, like Lucien, and sometimes he made a stern point of this.
“My grandfather was born to French shopkeepers in Algeria,” Serge said. “At eighteen, he joined the colonial army as a census taker. He roamed from village to village on foot, knocking on the doors of people’s homes, sometimes their tent, and he counted their canned foods and recorded the number in a ledger. He counted the chickens pecking in their yard. He wrote down how many bolts of Berber cloth they possessed, and whether they sewed by hand or on a machine. How many pounds of rice they kept in dry storage. How many of their children they had buried so far.
“After his army service, he took over his father’s shop, a tabac on a busy corner. In ’62, when Algeria declared victory in its war of independence, my grandparents fled. Coffin or suitcase was the choice. A million people left. My grandfather abandoned his shop and the home he and my grandmother owned. They were French nationals who had never been to France, petits bourgeois who lost everything. They landed in Marseille by military barge, at the old port—there, where I am pointing—and were treated like stateless refugees.
“My grandfather was offered dock work. Later, he became a janitor at a hotel in Fréjus, where my grandmother cleaned rooms. Embittered over the lost colony of Algeria, he and my grandmother devoted themselves to reactionary politics and the National Front. When I read the novel that Lucien has adapted, which features wounded bigots who remind me of my grandfather, I signed on.”
Dinner was lobster served in its bright shell, a labor-intensive saga that required guests to bend over their plates and toil with specialized tools, their napkins tucked into shirt collar or cleavage.
I talked to a woman across from me named Amélie, a location scout from Paris based here in Marseille.
As blancmange was brought around for dessert, each bowl containing a molded D-cup of stabilizer-thickened cream in a lake of berry glaze, the lead actress that Lucien had cast came over to our table to say hello. She was young and beautiful, her own D-cups jellying from her dress when she bent over to introduce herself.
Amélie and I ate our blancmange. “Get Lucky” came on over the swimming club’s outdoor speaker system. Waiters replaced carafes of rosé in clear plastic bags of ice. The rich men in bright colors reached for the wine. Their faces had softened into drunkenness, their collars and lapels still starched. Lucien’s producer was trashed, her makeup running, her words slurred, her hand on Lucien’s thigh.
She was in her seventies. Old people should not drink, but watching her, and these men, their minds partly trained on the level of rosé in their glass, on how much was left in the shared carafe, their awareness of the waiter’s location on the terrace, gauging the degree of his attention to their table and their need of replenished rosé, I had the thought these people were gorging on joy, as Bruno had described this ancient instinct.
THE NEXT THREE DAYS, while Serge and Lucien were busy prepping for their shoot, Vito and I returned to the private club to swim, with passes arranged by Lucien’s producer.
Serge said that the primary function of clubs like this one, and those of the Côte d’Azur, where he had spent his childhood, was to protect the upper crust from poverty and from North Africans. “But go ahead and enjoy it,” he told Vito. “My family would have done anything to join a club like that. Instead, they scrubbed floors and were mistaken for Portuguese.”
