Guy Marceau sat at a table in a quiet corner of the Brasserie Georges VI and watched the lunch-hour crowd of passersby hurrying along the rue Royale in the cold, biting March rain. Sale temps! Quel sale temps! he muttered to himself and picked up another Marlboro, carefully tearing off the filtered end before putting the cigarette into his mouth. Filtered cigarettes were his concession to his wife Margot’s nagging; when she was not there to see, he tore the filter off and threw it away. For the hundredth time, he made a mental note to keep the Marlboros for evenings at home and good, healthy, strong Gauloises for the office. Les jaunes. The strongest and best.
He checked his watch and leaned forward to look out the window down to the corner of the street. The pavement, the sidewalks, the buildings were a wet, slick, gunmetal gray. Even the people hunching behind their umbrellas. Gray. Nasty, filthy Paris weather. And the rain wouldn’t even wash the dog shit off the sidewalks.
Inside the Brasserie George VI the pitch of noise and bustle of lunch had begun to subside. Marceau looked at his watch again and cursed. Guichard never minded wasting any one else’s time. That was his style. Showing that he was the boss and that he could make his subordinates cool their heels for close to an hour after fighting their way through the umbrella-clogged sidewalk crowds and ending up with soaked feet and damp trouser legs. That was Guichard’s style. Making people uncomfortable. This brasserie, that was Guichard’s style, too. Old style France, gleaming copper and brass and leather and chic women and men from chic offices on the rue Royale and the Place Vendôme, coming in and throwing off their expensive Burberry raincoats and scarves, carelessly, just like that, as if they were cheap old things picked up for a few francs at Monoprix. The women showing a lot of leg as they slid into the leather booths. A slim young woman with a briefcase caught his eye and scowled, and Marceau swiftly looked away.
“Guy! Salut!” Bernard Guichard bellowed good-naturedly over the noise of the room. He unbuckled his raincoat and threw it over the back of his chair, carelessly. A Burberry.
Bastard, he sneaked up on me, Marceau said to himself, holding out his hand but not rising from his seat. Bernard Guichard sat down and rubbed his hands briskly together. He was a tall, round man with sleek, lustrous surfaces. Glossy eyelids stretched tightly over rather large, protuberant eyes, and he had a nervous habit of raising both hands and smoothing back the graying hair at his temples with the heel of his palms. “Sale temps, hein? Let’s see, what shall we have? Have you ordered?”
Marceau snapped out his order of a steak frites while Guichard went into a long discussion of his health problems with the waiter who stood tapping his pencil against his pad and nodding sympathetically. Finally, with a sigh, as if he were laying his head on a chopping block, Guichard ordered a steak frites, “to simplify things,” he said.
They ate efficiently, ordering a second carafe of red wine, and talked mainly of the dismal end-of-winter weather, the daily rains, the floods in Auch, dampness in their fuel lines, but it seemed to Marceau that Guichard had a gleam in his eye as they worked over the subject. They finished their coffee, and Marceau lit another cigarette.
“Alors . . . ,” Guichard said, grunting a little as he leaned over and fished through his briefcase. He pulled out a gray plastic Swiss Air ticket folder and a French passport and tossed them down in front of Marceau.
“Those are for you,” Guichard said.
“These are for me?” Marceau responded, picking up the airline tickets. Inside were three or four Swiss Air baggage identification tags and a packet of tickets. “What’s this? My secretary usually gets my tickets from the office upstairs. Is this something special?” He did not trust Guichard. It would be just his style to play some mean, nasty joke so that he could have a good dinner-party story. “Is this a joke?”
“No joke at all,” Guichard said solemnly, putting on that self-important, I’m-a-dignified-boss look that made Marceau’s skin creep.
Marceau dragged on his cigarette and picked up the passport. It was his passport with the same old photograph—his secretary always kept it in her desk—and about midway, on two pages toward the back, a visa with the flaming torch seal of Zaïre. The visa gave him the right to nombreuses entrées et sorties and the carte de séjour of a permanent resident. Back to Africa. Back to the good life, fancy cars, fancy houses, servants falling all over each other. Good-bye stinking hellhole Métro, gray skies and dog shit. Marceau clamped his jaws together. He was afraid that at any moment he would start to squeal with joy. And that bastard Guichard sitting there watching him. What if it was all a big joke anyway?
“And you want me to head up the office down there?”
“Something like that. But not really. We have people on the production side to supervise the operation. They’re in place. Or almost in place. By the end of June, that’s our target. No,” Guichard dragged out the word and glanced quickly about the room, where only a middle-aged man and a young blond dawdled over their coffee and spoke in whispers. All of the waiters had disappeared below. “No,” Guichard said again. “You won’t be heading up the office. But . . . this is more important. Much more important, in our opinion, and believe me, we have gone over and over your assets for this particular situation. ”
Marceau despised the way he threw around the “we” and the “our,” always trying to make it clear that Guichard was on the inside, where the big decisions were made, and that Marceau was not. He had to wait until someone came along and threw his passport and some airline tickets in his face.
“This particular situation may be a little tricky,” Guichard went on. “But knowing the way business goes in Africa—I learned a lot in Gabon, you can be sure of that—I think you can handle it and get the results we want. Basically, Petro-France wants you to represent us in Kinshasa.”
Guichard drew a folder of papers from his briefcase and began to go through them while Marceau sat smoking. “Let’s begin with Boketsu Bika—Boketsu is his family name—and you may have followed . . .”
“I have. Petit salaud, isn’t he? A regular bastard. Turncoat. Ratted on the whole gang down there, Mobutu in particular, and now he’s back lapping up the cream. Right? Petite crapule, hein?” Marceau tore off the filter of another cigarette. One thing he was good at was getting the number of these guys who supposedly “ruled the world.”
Guichard ordered another coffee, and Marceau a brandy and a pack of Gauloises. The middle-aged man and his blond companion had disappeared, and their waiter stood leaning against the bar reading a newspaper.
“Alors, quoi?” Marceau said, when Guichard had finished his dossier. “The usual payoffs, hein?” What was all this melodrama? “The same old African cha-cha-cha, hein?”
Guichard smoothed his glossy hair back from his temples and fixed Marceau with an icy glare. “No, mon cher ami, it is not the same old African cha-cha-cha. We’re talking here about an 800-million-dollar-a-year oil strike. One of the richest, potentially the richest oil strike Petro-France has ever made in Africa. And Boketsu Bika, according to our sources, is going back down there to be named Minister of Mines.”
“So . . . okay, okay. I’m reading you loud and clear. Do we rent this Boketsu, or is he a lease-purchase?”
“A rental. Hopefully, a long-term rental. And the situation is potentially promising enough for us to go back to one of our old policies. The company is tired of getting these guys on the payroll and then have them start to dick us around. We’ve got to have more control. Have someone who speaks our language. Someone who knows how to keep Africans in line, keep them from getting too greedy for their own good. This time we’re going after the black man’s white man, too. It’s been a good arrangement in the past. It’s up to you to make it work in Zaïre. Boketsu’s white man is his childhood friend, a Belgian businessman named Jacques Delpech. We want you to hit him first, soften him up, then go after Boketsu.” Guichard shot his wrist forward and glanced at his watch. “I’m late,” he said, getting to his feet. “New secretary. I have to go over some dictation with her.” It had stopped raining, and a hard wind buffeted scraps of paper along the gutter. “We have to talk again. And you want to check in with Robert. Time is of the essence. Essentiel. The company would like you in place within ten days.”
“Ten days! God Almighty, what will Margot say to that?”
“That’s another thing, Marceau. The company feels that you could negotiate this tricky situation better if not . . . encumbered, as it were . . . by your wife. If you could come and go as you please, get yourself into the swing of things in the expatriate community.”
Marceau cringed with embarrassment. The company didn’t think Margot was . . . very chic. Poor Margot. She was an earnest, hardworking Alsatian who liked nothing better than scrubbing the kitchen floor on a Saturday morning, peeling potatoes straight from the garden. Her hands were always a mess. Guichard was telling him that the company was sending him off to the tropics alone. Marceau lowered his eyes, afraid that Guichard would read the joy in them.
Marceau lit a cigarette and visualized a huge, airy house in a grove of palm trees, curvaceous girls in bikinis around a pool, canisters of Gauloise cigarettes, les jaunes, in every room of the house, day and night, especially the bedroom. And not a single, puny, puking filtered Marlboro anywhere.