“Consequences?”
“She publicly attacked one of the main industries of this part of the world, which means she attacked people’s jobs and their livelihoods, and those people are going to fight back. The mayor and the council are running a media and political campaign against her, and they won’t care about her good works in Africa.”
“If she withdrew herself from this whole foie gras case, wouldn’t that help? She knows she made a big mistake.”
“Perhaps if she’d done it yesterday, but it may be too late. I’ve been tied up on this security business so I’m not up-to-date, but I think there’ll be some nasty stories in tomorrow’s newspapers. As far as the mayor’s concerned, St. Denis is fighting for its life.”
“Annette said she’d had a call from someone at Liberation who is doing some kind of story. She said she was shaken by the questions.”
Bruno nodded. The mayor had sent him an SMS message telling him to be sure to buy a copy of the paper.
“You can fix this, Bruno, the mayor listens to you. And once she recuses herself from the case, you’ve won. What more do you want?”
“He listens, but he makes up his own mind, and he has to get reelected. So he’ll be thinking about the voters, which means the farmers and the people who work in the foie gras trade and the shops and the restaurants, and the accountants and businesspeople who depend on them-it’s most of the electorate.”
“So what do you think we should do?”
“In her shoes, I’d apply for a transfer to another district, somewhere urban where she can make a fresh start. I’m sorry, Fabiola, but short of her agreeing to eat foie gras on TV and say she likes it I’m not sure there’s an alternative.”
26
Strapped in tight, with his feet hard against the floor and his arms braced on the dashboard, Bruno was certain the car was going to hit the tree. But Annette twitched the steering wheel and seemed to be braking and accelerating at the same time as the small Peugeot went into a brief skid and then rocketed forward to the next turn. Over the howl of the engine he could hear the stones from beneath the trees being exploded against the untouched tree trunk. He was glad to be wearing the helmet that Annette gave him because his head slammed into the roof every time she flew over a bump. His neck muscles tired from resisting the constant g-forces. He was impressed by the obvious strength in Annette’s forearms as she kept the car under control at what seemed like insane speeds.
“God, that makes me feel so much better,” Annette said as the car rocked backed and forth after a hand- brake turn that left Bruno dizzy. “Would you like to try another circuit or shall we head back?”
“I think I have to get to work,” he said. “But thank you, it’s been a revelation. Where did you learn to drive so fast?” He was delaying the moment he’d have to get out of the car, not sure whether he was too disoriented to stand up straight.
“In Madagascar. Most of the roads are like this, and there’s a lively culture in rallying.”
“Do you kill many people-pedestrians, I mean?”
“None yet.” Her face was flushed, animated. She still looked as if she were in her teens, but there was a self-confidence in her eyes from the display of her driving skills.
“You love this, don’t you?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” she said, grinning. “For once in my life, it’s me that’s in charge, with everything depending on me and my own abilities and on the training I’ve done. And of course it depends on the car, but I’m responsible for that too.” She turned out of the motor-cross circuit and onto the lane that led back to the road and then to Pamela’s house, where Bruno had left his car. “Do you mind if we stop in town to pick up a copy of Libe? They called me yesterday for an interview on this foie gras business. They were pretty hostile, which surprised me. I thought they’d have been sympathetic.”
“I’d like a copy, so pick up two, and I’ll buy some croissants and we can have breakfast with Fabiola,” he said.
Annette was tight-lipped and her face white when Bruno came back to the car with his bag of Fauquet’s croissants and baguettes. He was feeling rocked himself after looking at a message on his phone that had landed after he’d gone to sleep. From Isabelle, it had said she had dropped by his house after her dinner with the brigadier and Carlos, but was surprised to find it empty and no Gigi. She hoped he had a good night. What had she meant by that, he was asking himself when Annette, silent, passed him a copy of the newspaper and drove away fast before he could even fasten his seat belt.
Fat Jeanne’s surprised face whished past as Annette’s tires squealed on the roundabout. Now the whole town would learn within the hour that Bruno had been seen in a car with St. Denis’s public enemy number one and was buying her breakfast before presumably racing back to the love nest where they had spent a night of passion.
“Merde,” he said, but not about Fat Jeanne. He was looking at the front page. It was all about Annette.
It showed a picture of her taken the previous day as she spoke to the TV reporter, looking cool and professional with not a hair out of place, and a screaming headline that read “Poor Little Rich Girl.”
Beneath the photo was a copy of a caterer’s bill for thirty-two thousand euros for a luncheon for forty people. It was made out to a Monsieur Meraillon with an address in Neuilly, the plush inner suburb of Paris. One of the items on the bill, costing twenty-eight hundred euros, was a course of foie gras aux truffes. The newspaper had circled it in red ink. Just below it was an even higher charge for caviar.
“Billionaire’s daughter and magistrate Annette Meraillon has declared war on ‘barbaric foie gras,’ but hedge- fund king Papa spends more than the average French annual income on a single lunch, with 2,800 euros for foie gras alone,” read the caption at the bottom of the page.
Page 2 was dominated by a big photo of Maurice and Sophie at the door of their farmhouse. “It takes three months for the foie gras farmer she is hounding to earn as much as Papa spends on the stuff for a single course to treat his fat cat friends.”
“And rich Papa wants YOU to pay for his foie gras fun” was page 3’s massive headline. It was all about Papa and his hedge fund, and the tax dispute that had put his lunch bill into the public domain as one item in the evidence. Apparently he had declared it as a business expense.
“I don’t think I’ll join you for breakfast,” said Annette, as he turned to page 4’s headline, “War Against Foie Gras,” and its long article about PETA’s campaign, with a photo of Gravelle’s demolished showroom.
“I’m sorry. This is… it’s unbelievable,” he said. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s guilt by association.”
“I hardly ever talk to my father,” she said. “I only go home at Christmas and birthdays because of my mother, and he’s usually away in New York or London or somewhere.”
Page 5 had photos of Papa’s other houses-one in the Caribbean, his penthouse in London, his chalet in Gstaad and his chateau in Compiegne, just north of Paris. Each of the photos carried a price tag. The sums added up to over twenty million euros.
Page 6 had a large photo, which must have been taken by Philippe Delaron just after the hose was turned off, of Annette standing on the steps of the gendarmerie, doused in manure. Below it was Papa’s lunch bill in full. More than half the total was for wine. Bruno could not take his eyes off it. He had paid over ten thousand euros for a case of champagne, Krug Clos du Mesnil 1985, followed by a 2006 Puligny-Montrachet Chevalier at over three hundred euros a bottle, and twelve thousand euros for a case of the 1992 Cheval Blanc. Bruno had always assumed that some people lived like that, but he’d never seen it spelled out in black and white. And Papa wanted a tax deduction for it! He felt the kind of anger at the ways of rich financiers that was probably being felt all across France as people read their paper in disbelief.
“Papa will not be pleased,” said Bruno.
“On the contrary, he’ll probably be delighted,” she said as they turned into Pamela’s courtyard. She braked hard and sat with her hands clasped on the wheel, staring straight ahead, much as she had done on the day Bruno had first seen her.
