“
What?
We’re getting more than what it costs to set up that whole floor of exhibits?”
Mamoun laughed. “Unfortunately not,” he said. “I refer to the much more modest largesse lavished upon the UN organizers to persuade them to move UNACOCS here. That, and what Bread & Circuses is receiving, is the advertising and promotional budget. The trade show, of course, is what is being advertised and promoted.”
“A trade show is itself promotion, Ariel,” Monique pointed out. “Figure that in the promotional budget, and it’s huge. The question is, where’s the payback?”
“Where else, Monique, but in selling what is being promoted?”
“Climatech, engineering services?”
“Bien sûr . . .”
“
Blue
climatech engineering services? Here? That’s like trying to sell thermal underwear in the Nebraska desert!”
“Monique, Monique, Paris is the
set
, not the audience! The audience is the world, and we are being paid to command
its
attention. What better setting for a mega-commercial than the City of Light? Do you imagine our task would be made easier if we had to do it from Dacca or Tripoli?”
“Well we certainly
would
have a lot more trouble luring the world press with all-expense-paid junkets to fabulous Tripoli . . .” Monique was constrained to admit. “But still . . .”
“You are young, you are in Paris, you have a suite at the Ritz and a generous expense account, ma chérie, so relax and enjoy it, as any number of disreputable phallocratic jokes advise a lady in your position,” Ariel Mamoun told her. “Do not complain if, as only the British could put it, there is no egg in your champagne.”
“Beer,” corrected Monique.
“Merde,” said Mamoun. “Even more disgusting.”
The restaurant to which she had been invited that night, La Cuisine Humaine, was anything but disgusting, though Monique imagined that if she had requested an egg in the Premier Cru that Avi Posner had ordered for aperitifs, the tuxedoed waiter wouldn’t have blinked, but probably would have inquired as to whether she wished chicken, duck, goose, or quail.
La Cuisine Humaine was a converted Seine river freighter that moved around; currently it was docked on the Quai de La Tournelle right across from Notre Dame itself, the cathedral dripping fragrant honeysuckle and cunningly illuminated in subtle mauves and oranges so as to seem to inhabit its own eternal tropical sunset.
The decor of the restaurant was as retroconservative as its cuisine was avant garde. Rose-colored walls, white linen with full silver and crystal service, candles on the tables and in sconces on the walls, not a bit of electric lighting, staff in tuxes, a sommelier with an actual key on a ribbon around his neck, the works.
The leather folder of the menu, however, concealed a screen and keyboard upon which you could call up something like a hundred pages of dishes from all over the world, and, moreover, there were hyperlinks so that you could concoct your own cross-cultural adventures.
How the kitchen managed to pull this off was as mysterious to Monique as how anyone not on a major expense account could pick up a tab at these prices, which made a meal at the world-famous clipjoint Tour d’Argent seem like a quick kebab from a street stall.
Ergo, Avi Posner had such an expense account.
Bread & Circuses had its own VIP security department, but no one took it very seriously, and it was not unusual for the organizers of an event like UNACOCS to hire a separate security syndic like Mossad, reputed to be top-of-the-line.
Nor was it unusual for the security chief to wish to coordinate with the honcha of VIP services before their joint charges started arriving.
What
did
seem odd was for Avi Posner to have the budget to fête her in a place like this with no VIP in attendance.
Posner was short, muscular, and had shaved a receding hairline into gleaming virility rather than fight it; on the surface, much like the syndic he represented, which provided bodyguards to the well-heeled and security forces to major events.
But just as Mossad, which everyone knew had once been the Israeli intelligence agency, was reputed to supply more sophisticated services for more sophisticated prices, Posner, elegantly dressed in a well-tailored pearl-gray suit, seemed a lot more sophisticated than mere muscle.
The champagne he had ordered was no obvious Dom Pérignon but some obscure marque Monique had never heard of, just as expensive, but much better. He knew his way around this extremely complicated menu like a restaurant critic, better certainly than she did. The suggestions he made when she appeared a bit lost were excellent—corn and smoked-duck salad with walnuts in some complex mélange of oils with Mexican and Oriental spices, a tagine of lamb and prunes baked with lemon, onions, and almonds in a thick and complex curry paste. He then proceeded to work his own order around hers—a pasta with smoked salmon, pepper vodka sauce, sour cream and beluga caviar, medallions of wild boar in Szechuan pepper sauce—so that the same wines complemented both meals, beginning with an unusual rosé from Georgia, and then a powerful Premier Cru Pomerol.
If the idea was to enjoy the expense account for all that it was worth, he had royally succeeded. If the idea was to impress her with the self-evident fact that he and his commission were more than their official description, he wasn’t doing too badly either.
“It’s a scandal an indigent outfit like the United Nations is paying for all this,” Monique ventured over the entree.
“The client is paying for it,” said Posner.
“But UNACOCS
is
the client . . .” Monique said ingenuously.
Poser gave her a faux world-weary frown. “Young as you may be, surely you were not born yesterday, Ms. Calhoun,” he said. “We are both professionals. We both know who the
real
client is.”
“The source of our funding . . .”
“By definition . . .”
“The Big Blue Machine . . .”
“Which,” said Posner, “by definition does not quite exist.”
“Which, therefore, by definition you do not quite represent.”
Avi Posner favored her with a thin little smile, perhaps the first sincere expression Monique had seen on his face. “I think we will work well together . . . Monique, if I may.”
He reached into a pocket and slid a ROM chip across the table. “This is the preliminary list of invited guests we will be jointly . . . handling,” he said. “Those whose meals, accommodations, and entertainment expenses the client will be picking up.”
“It’s a bit unusual for
security
to be handing the VIP list to VIP services instead of the other way around.”
Posner gave her a fish-eyed stare over the remains of the entrees. “You may add as many names to the list as you like, press, and so forth, but that comes out of the Bread & Circuses budget,” he said.
A tuxedoed busboy cleared the table. The waiter arrived with the tagine and wild boar. The sommelier removed the rosé and its setups and poured the Pomerol.
“Now that we’re finished with the entree,” Posner said in quite another tone of voice, “shall we get down to the main course?”
“By all means.”
“As you have surmised, I am here to provide a bit more than simple security, I am also your . . . shall we say
liaison
. . . with the client. . . . Are you following me, Monique?”
“Oh yes.”
“I refer the VIPs to you for . . . servicing. I from time to time may specify certain special services. In return for which, you have a chance to earn certain special favors.”
“Why do I not like the sound of that?”
“But you should.”
“Should I?”
“May I be blunt with you, Monique? One professional to another?”
“I think I can live with it, Avi.”
“You are not here by chance. Mossad was asked by the client to sort through the Bread & Circuses personnel according to certain parameters, and the Gardens of Allah deal popped your name out of the
profiles. We then prevailed upon certain circles within B&C, and voilà, here you are in gay Paris!”
“What’s the payback? Where are the strings attached?”
“Think of it as a courting gift from interests who wish to be your friend. Interests with the power to become even more friendly.”
“How . . . friendly?”
“Friendly enough to secure you the position of head of Bread & Circuses’ Paris branch. Friendly enough to gain your attention?”
Monique had already dropped her fork into her lamb tagine.
“Who do I have to kill?” she inquired.
“Not your department,” Posner told her. “What you have to do is whatever you are called upon to do to make sure that the conference succeeds. The client wins, you win. All that’s required of you is friendship to your own enlightened self-interest. Nothing sinister about that, now is there?”
The New Yorker in Monique finally came to the fore. “Look, Avi,” she snapped, “you know damn well I’m interested, but I damn well have to know what I’m interested
in
, so let’s cut the crap, shall we. The client wins, I win? Win what? And how? As near as I can see, the client is the Big Blue Machine, and the client is pouring money down a rathole. What the hell is going on?”
Posner shrugged. Strangely enough, he seemed rather relieved at this outburst.
“They don’t tell us any more than they think we have a need to know either,” he said in a harder voice. “And the fairy story is that they’re desperate because their tech side is convinced that Condition Venus is right on the edge of starting and that the fate of the biosphere is in their hands. It might even be true.”
“They’ve been saying that for years. . . .”
Posner nodded. “What we’ve found out ourselves is that their financial position really
is
desperate. They’ve pretty much already sucked the Lands of the Lost dry, meaning that they need new customers capable of paying their formidable fees. Thus their high-stakes gamble on UNACOCS. Thus Paris. Thus holding their fiscal breath and hiring Bread & Circuses. Where better to attract well-heeled syndics and sovereignties whose representatives would not be caught dead
at a True Blue event like this in the Lands of the Lost? Where better to wine and dine, to win contracts and influence planetary destiny? Who better than Bread & Circuses to sell cream puffs to diabetics?”
Monique’s jaw dropped.
“The purpose of UNACOCS is to get
Green
money to finance
Blue
projects?” she exclaimed. “After which, I suppose, we walk on water?”
“If they didn’t think they had
some
chance of succeeding, would they have spent all this money?”
“But how?”
Posner just shrugged. He smiled fatuously at her. “Don’t ask me,” he said, “I’m only muscle. I do my job to the best of my ability, and you do yours.”
“Which requires me to do exactly
what
?”
“Whatever special VIP services your friendly client desires. What friends do when called upon to advance the mutual interests of themselves and their benefactors.”
If this sounded a tad open-ended to Monique’s pragmatic side, the carrot being dangled in front of her certainly seemed juicy enough to justify it, and after all, in the service of VIPs, she had procured everything from ladies and gentlemen for the night to contraband substances, and was hardly an innocent.
And after all, it was all in the True Blue cause of planetary salvation, now wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
“You’ll start with something easy,” Posner said. He checked an antique stainless-steel-bodied Rolex. “Ah yes, it should be along just about now . . .” he said, nodding out the window in the direction of Notre Dame.
Here the Ile de la Cité, on which the cathedral stood, split the Seine into two channels, and westward, beyond the Pont de l’Archevêché, the sky was magically emblazoned with an impossible aurora borealis, sheets of neon green and lavender, moving toward the cathedral.
Then the bridge and the narrow channel leading to it were lit up by a mighty blaze of light, chiaroscuroing the vines overgrowing the
stonework of the quais, casting long shadows on the weeping willows overhanging the river, shadows that grew shorter and shorter as the source grew closer and closer. . . .
Even through the window glass, Monique heard it before she fully saw it, a mightily amplified acoustic Dixieland band playing “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
And then, there it was, coming up the lazy river like a great white ghost ship, its smokestacks puffing steam and coal smoke, far too tall to pass under the bridge, and even though she knew it was a holo effect, Monique’s breath caught for a beat as the riverboat passed under the Pont de l’Archevêché and the smokestacks passed
through
it.
And then the magical riverboat was passing right past La Cuisine Humaine, coruscating with lights under its own self-generated aurora, great paddle wheels churning white foam, its upper promenade deck thronged with revelers, music blaring, phantom fireworks proclaiming its glory, and Monique in that moment acknowledged the justice of its self-proclaimed title.
“
La Reine de la Seine
,” said Avi Posner. “
The Queen of the River
. Rent it for the duration. Get it as cheaply as you can, of course, but the client is prepared to pay whatever it takes not to get no for an answer.”