Round white tables were set like water lilies on a rippling pond; a low contented murmur rose up and echoed against the painted ceiling, eighty yards of military victories, and the political, economic and artistic triumphs of the long-gone France of the Sun King. And then there were the mirrors, which gave this gallery its name, three hundred and fifty-seven of them facing the windows, that evening reflecting long dresses, dinner jackets, rivers of diamonds, gleaming white teeth – all thought they could see in their reflection the fleeting image of a member of a ruling family.
Enter Sergei Louchsky. Forty years old today, with a falsely ecstatic grin on his face, his square head sitting hard and cold on his well-maintained body. His wife held his hand: she was ten years younger, with fine pale skin enhanced by the plunging neckline of a spangled midnight-blue ball gown. “Dior,” a jealous murmur went up among the other wives. Not many young people there that night.
How they were envied, for their youth, their riches and the glamour they brought with them from a Moscow that had hitherto only exported ancient carcasses in Soviet uniform or bearded dissidents. Everybody stood aside to let them pass, a double hedge of people such as used to form at the passage of great noblemen. There had once been a masked ball held here after the wedding of Marie-Antoinette to the Dauphin; they had been mere children – their combined age was less than thirty – terrified at the thought of ending the evening alone together, naked under their nightshirts, behind the curtains of their four-poster bed. They didn’t yet know that their heads would be cut off. Kings nowadays were more relaxed, the Revolution was well behind them, and now the Republic was paying court to them, drawing up contracts – all they had to do was enjoy their power. And on top of all that Elton John was going to sing that night.
Louchsky advanced, greeting his guests. He tried to show warmth, even though everything in him breathed only power, business and predatory attack. His table was at the centre of the room. The palace historians had suggested placing it at the end of the gallery, by the Salon de la Paix; that was where the king’s throne was installed on great state occasions, but the organizers had decided that the centre would appear more convivial, more modern. Tonight was the celebration of a new world, which borrowed nothing from the old one except its splendour. Louchsky continued his advance, clapping the shoulders of an important Champs-Élysées jeweller, a big American industrialist, the Minister of Defence Douchet (Mrs Louchsky snapped at him: “So where’s the President?”) and the Chelsea centre forward; he kissed the hand of an actress still glowing from her Oscar, and attempted a hearty joke with the number two in French luxury goods. He knew what good photos would come out of all this, little vignettes tossed to the press like crumbs or remains, for humble folk to pore over in the Métro.
But he was always looking elsewhere, busily scanning the crowd, that other mirror of power. They were all there, too, his future oil revenues, in the shape of the vice-president of the Brazilian oil company; as were the fund managers, the clever bloodhounds of the emerging economies, those “financial Mozarts” as Paris Match had described them, the twenty top names from the Financial Times’s most recent list of the hundred most powerful financiers in the world.
Governor Finley’s smile was as wide as a chunk of trans-Saharan pipeline. He wasn’t hard to spot, he was one of only ten black faces at the party, if one was only counting the guests. Of course the proportion was greater among the staff. That evening they had recruited waiters with big shoulders who were supposed to look like bodyguards and effortlessly whirled trays of champagne above the heads of the guests.
Finally Louchsky reached his table and sat down, a signal for everybody else to find their places. You could tell a lot from your position in this particular solar system. Vandel – the ex-president of the European bank who, since he retired, had been hired to advise the oligarch – had been punished by being placed close to the door, to his wife’s fury: he should have anticipated the collapse of Grind Bank. French ex-golden boy Dellant realized then that he would now never get control of the Lagos container terminal, despite the fact that he ran forty other African ports. If he had been placed below Finley, it was because Louchsky wanted it that way. All he could do now was put up with his neighbour, a princess with a long nose, who was warmly congratulating him on his foundation against illiteracy. She seemed to know a lot more about it than he did.
Further away two art dealers who were famous enemies found themselves at the same table. “We’ve quarrelled, haven’t we?” said one of them. The other answered: “Well, we’ve got one friend in common, I suppose.” Anne Vuipert, the French President’s special adviser and linchpin of the special relationship with Louchsky, would have preferred it if the photographer had not immortalized her proximity to the head of Goldman Sachs, whose compensation had just been made public: twenty-two million dollars for a year’s work. She stiffened. At least she wouldn’t be smiling in the picture.
Finally the President and his wife arrived, crossing the room with all the confidence of people delayed by important affairs of state. They sat down at Louchsky’s table, alongside the British Prime Minister; Germany had sent its finance minister. The President wasn’t going to speak at this birthday party that looked like a summit conference. He had done that earlier in the day in the Élysée drawing room when he made Louchsky a Commander of the Legion of Honour, and had declared “for the attention of cynics” that “just because you’re friends doesn’t mean your relationship is in any way unethical”. Louchsky had much appreciated this blank cheque. He carried on insistently patting the President’s shoulder, while the two official photographers bombarded them with their flashes.
It was the Foreign Minister who made the speech. For this occasion he chose to recall Peter the Great’s visit to this palace. He launched off, his voice imitating the vibrating tones of television documentaries about royalty: “On the morning of the twenty-fifth of May 1717, the Tsar sailed on the Grand Canal. He visited the Menagerie and then the Trianon. He observed everything and noted all the things he wanted to reproduce in St Petersburg. One of the features he was most struck by, apart from the splendour of the palace, was the layout of the town itself. He reproduced the chessboard design with the three avenues radiating outwards. He also noted the width of the streets, at that time lacking in Paris itself…”
The boss of France’s largest civil engineering company sat at his table devouring the bread rolls on his side plate just as he had devoured the public markets in St Petersburg. He smiled to himself – his cement was flowing over there, as though perpetuating the greatness of France. Beside him, Metton, a top consultant on the Parisian stock market, wondered how to tell him that he had poppy seeds stuck in his teeth. The Foreign Minister was now recalling the historic friendship between the French and Russian people, who had so often found themselves thrown together by the vagaries of history. It was the old diplomat’s trick – putting “the people” in places where they had never been invited: “Was it not here, in this very gallery, that the Treaty of Versailles was signed, putting an end to the First World War?” The Minister was getting carried away; his face was turning scarlet.
“The Russians were Bolsheviks in those days, not quite the same thing as this!” snarled an old Goncourt-prize winner. His remark was met with severe looks from his table companions, who would not tolerate bad manners.
When the speech ended there was polite applause and the hors d’oeuvres began to arrive. It was eight-thirty.
“Osetra caviar, poached langoustines! Truffled egg mousse!”
Everybody began to concentrate on their plates and their neighbours. The wine waiters began their ballet. The women very soon became bored. Their shoulders, some better concealed than others, were glued to the backs of the chairs in order to allow the men on either side to talk across to one another. They sat there with vacant smiles and lost stares. They had trained themselves for this, having bought happiness through their husbands’ business dealings; but they still cast envious eyes at the voluptuous Oscar-winning actress sitting right at the centre of the Louchsky solar system. She had declared just the other day in Elle: “I don’t belong to the union of women who grow old.” They would have loved to be able to say the same.
It was the self-made men who gave the loudest roars of laughter. They let themselves go more easily than those who had merely inherited their fortunes. Their conversation generally followed an autobiographical theme, summing themselves up: “My headmaster always told me: you’ll end up either in prison or a millionaire. And I’ve done both!” said an American soft-drinks tycoon. And his French neighbour, who had made his fortune through hotlines and mobile phones, confessed through a mouthful of caviar that he had almost simultaneously received a Businessman of the Year award and a summons for fraudulent receipt of social benefits. They laughed comfortably together, savouring their success and crafty know-how.
“You know, we’re only intermediaries,” interrupted a banker at the same table. “He’s the real thing.” Pointing at Louchsky.
Every now and then the sound of a mobile would insinuate itself into the conversation. Nobody paid much attention, everybody had their own, in their jacket pocket or the evening bag that matched their dresses. It would ring, they would get it out, look at it, put it away. Sometimes they would look at the screen without it ringing, to read the latest messages, or to see how the stock markets were doing, the latest headlines, the Bloomberg alerts, the Twitter account. They were like pocket mirrors, one more reflection in this Hall of Mirrors. And so when the unknown Tweet arrived simultaneously on a dozen mobiles, nobody was particularly worried.
Rassmussen was the first to understand that something was happening. His eyes widened as he looked down at his screen, and he turned towards Louchsky, whose antennae immediately picked up the danger signal. Gradually, from table to table, conversations turned to whispers; people eyed one another nervously, seeking confirmation. Phones were now ringing everywhere, and everywhere the same message appeared: