Anything Considered (5 page)

“A bit. They’re a little beyond my budget at the moment.”

Poe nodded in sympathy. “This past season, they were going at four thousand francs a kilo. My American friends find it hard to believe—four hundred dollars a pound. And that’s what the old rogue in Carpentras calls a friend’s price. Double that in Paris. The whole business is full of scoundrels. Fascinating. Ah, thank you, Shimo.” Poe lifted the wineglass, inspected the color, presented the glass to his nose and breathed in. Bennett imagined he was the sort of man who sent the wine back in his own house if it didn’t come up to expectations.

“Now then. Where were we in the Bennett life story? I seem to remember you’d been put off the idea of becoming a ballet dancer, but I’m sure you managed to overcome the disappointment. What happened next?”

What happened next had been an extended period of drifting, from job to job, from country to country. He had taught English literature with little satisfaction in a small private school in Connecticut, and then tried his hand at public relations in New York before taking a job with a film production company in London. That he had liked, and he’d been good enough at it to be sent to Paris as the head of the French office. He’d built the business up, acquired shares in it, and prospered.

Poe held up his hand. “Let’s leave you there prospering while we deal with these. It wouldn’t do to let them get cold.”

The serving girl had placed large white plates in front of them. On each plate, incongruous against the plain elegance of the porcelain, was a foil-wrapped packet a little smaller than a tennis ball.

“The presentation is a little homespun,” said Poe, “but it’s practical. Inside the foil is a single truffle and a slice of foie gras. As the truffle is warmed, the foie gras melts into it.” He unwrapped the foil and bent his head in appreciation. “Mmm. Smell that.”

Bennett followed instructions and took in the complex, ripely aromatic puff of warm air that escaped from the open foil. The black, lumpy shape of the truffle glistened with melted fat, ugly, delicious, and outrageously expensive. Bennett judged his to be a good quarter of a pound: a hundred dollars—at friend’s prices.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” said Poe. “Now put a good pinch of that on it.” He pointed to a small silver dish in front of Bennett’s plate. “It’s
fleur de sel
, comes from the Guérande. They harvest it every summer. Best salt in France.”

Bennett sprinkled the coarse grayish-white salt over the truffle, cut off a slice, and bit into it. He’d eaten truffles before, but never anything this big, this rich, or this self-indulgent. He loved it, and he noticed that Chou-Chou was attacking hers as though she hadn’t eaten for a week, mopping up the melted foie gras with scraps of bread.

Bennett and Poe finished, and both took mouthfuls of wine.

Poe dabbed his lips with his napkin and leaned back. “So. You prospered?”

He had, for some years. But with a certain amount of success and financial security,
Bennett
had started to suffer from the malaise of the business. He became restless, bored, irritated by the constant need to stroke his clients, to feign interest in their views on film and the creative process over endless lunches, to pacify directors and models. He felt he had turned into a highly paid nursemaid. And so, one fine day in April when the thought of spending another long summer working in Paris was weighing on him like a penance, he had quit. He sold his shares, sold his apartment, and headed south. It was there, in a harbor bar in Antibes, that he had met Edward Brynford-Smith, one of Eton’s less distinguished alumni.

At the mention of Eton, Poe smiled. “I was there myself—a little before your friend’s time, I imagine. Although there are so many double-barreled names there, it’s hard to keep track. I’m sorry. Do go on.”

Brynford-Smith liked to describe himself as a remittance man. He lived on sporadic checks received from a family trust, the occasional shifty deal in real estate, and his fees as a freelance charter boat captain. He was short, affable, and amusing, qualities that were immediately obvious. His eye for the main chance and his unscrupulous dishonesty were less evident, and Bennett found himself nodding in agreement one night as Brynford-Smith outlined a scheme that would provide them both with a comfortable life in the sun—summers on the Côte
d’Azur, winters in the Caribbean. All it required was a boat.

Bennett loved the sea—to look at, to swim in, to listen to. But he loathed boats. He found them uncomfortable and claustrophobic. He hated the lack of privacy, the fact that you couldn’t get off, and the personality change that transformed the skipper from a normally pleasant man into a bellowing paranoiac, a modern Captain Bligh, as soon as land was out of sight. Nevertheless, as Brynford-Smith pointed out, a boat that could pick up ten months’ chartering a year—“absolutely guaranteed, old boy”—was an attractive business opportunity. Bennett had taken the bait, put up virtually all his money for the boat, and arranged to fly out later and meet Brynford-Smith in Barbados. And then Brynford-Smith had vanished.

Poe’s brow was furrowed, either in sympathy or in disapproval of such slapdash commercial behavior. “You must have had some kind of legal agreement, surely?”

“Pages and pages,” said Bennett. “But legal agreements are designed for law-abiding people. They’re not much use if your partner does a bunk with the assets and you don’t know where he is.”

Chou-Chou had been listening attentively, toying with the gold chain around the slim column of her neck. “Can’t you go and look for him? How can he hide a big boat?”

“You can hide a small navy in the Caribbean. Besides, to be quite honest with you, I’m skint.”

“Skint?” Chou-Chou’s English failed her. “What is skint?”

“
Fauché
, my dear,” said Poe. “Broke. Well, Mr. Bennett, we must see what we can do about that. At least we can make sure that you don’t go hungry tonight.”

The next course was served, a dense, dark stew of beef and wine and bacon, onions, carrots, herbs, and olives, steaming, fragrant, the meat almost black.

“The cook’s winter specialty,” said Poe. “A four-day
daube
. It’s been marinating since the weekend. She steals my best wine for it, too, the wicked woman. You’ll find it’s terribly good.”

Bennett tasted the tender, piquant meat and wondered why the English of a certain class so often qualify their praise or approval with an ominous prefix—frightfully pretty, horribly clever, awfully nice. He put the question to Poe, who took a thoughtful sip of wine before replying.

“Interesting, isn’t it? You’d never hear a Cockney talk like that, or a Yorkshire farmer. Bernard Shaw would have had an answer for you. Maybe the English middle-class horror of unqualified enthusiasm has something to do with it.” He smiled. “But it
is
terribly good, don’t you think?”

Bennett felt that the evening was going well. Poe was a congenial companion and seemed to like him. But other than the reference to Eton, he had revealed very little about himself, and even less about the job. Bennett was about to bring up the subject of his future, when Shimo appeared behind Poe’s chair and whispered in his ear. Poe frowned, then nodded and stood up.

“Excuse me. Another of those wretched calls.”

Bennett was left alone with Chou-Chou, who had
demolished a serving of
daube
that would have defeated a lumberjack. He’d known French girls like her before—beautiful, slender, with appetites that could put a Michelin inspector under the table. Something to do with Gallic genes. He went back to their earlier, interrupted conversation.

“You were telling me about your modeling.”

“Oh, I was the girl for Étoile. You know? The big cosmetic company. They own your face for three years, exclusive. They pay you
une grosse fortune
, and then you can buy a horse farm and retire.” She smiled. “Except it didn’t work like that.”

“What happened?”

Chou-Chou took a cigarette from the silver box beside her, and lit it before Bennett had a chance to be gallant and possibly dangerous with one of the candles. She blew smoke up to the vaulted ceiling. “I met Julian when I was six months into the contract. He didn’t like me working.”

“So?”

“So he went to see the directors of Étoile.
Et puis voilà.
”

“What do you mean?”

“He bought the contract.”

Bennett’s estimation of Poe’s wealth, already high, went up by a few million. Top models with exclusive contracts, he knew from past dealings with them, made a comfortable seven figures a year.

“He seems to be a man who gets what he wants.”

Chou-Chou nodded. “Always.”

The serving girl came in to clear away, and by the time Poe returned to the table, Bennett, replete after fresh goat’s cheese and pears, was listening with fascination to Chou-Chou’s gossip about her old colleagues in the modeling business, most of whom seemed to be addicted to either heroin or their dermatologists.

Poe listened for a few moments, then looked at his watch. “Darling, I hate to interrupt this riveting catalogue of vice, but Mr. Bennett and I need to talk.” He smiled at her and brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “I’ll see you later.” He turned to Bennett. “We’ll be more comfortable in the sitting room.”

Bennett stood aside to let Chou-Chou through the door. “My regards to your dermatologist. He’s not called Monsieur Peau, is he?”

She giggled. “Good night, Mr. Bennett. I hope we meet again.”

Poe winced at the pun and led the way back to the sitting room, pausing at a table behind the couch. “Coffee? Cognac? Help yourself, and the same for me.” While Bennett busied himself with coffee cups and brandy balloons, wondering if his host ever did anything for himself, Poe went across to a large humidor in the corner. “Will you take a cigar? I can recommend them. They’re Cohibas—Castro’s favorite, before he gave up smoking.”

“I’d Jove one,” said Bennett. “Can you get them here?”

“I’ve no idea. Fortunately, he sends them over. We do business together from time to time. Cuba’s changing. Interesting
place.” He clipped two cigars and handed one to Bennett.

The two men settled in their chairs. Smoke drifted upward, blue wreaths against the firelight, and there was a contented moment of silence as the first sip of cognac slipped down, warm and smooth.

“One last question,” said Poe. “If we’re going to work together, I think we can dispense with the formalities. I can’t keep calling you Mr. Bennett. What’s your first name?”

“Actually, I never use it.” Bennett blew gently at the glowing tip of his cigar. “It was my mother’s bright idea. Bloody embarrassment at school, and I dropped it.”

“Let me guess,” said Poe. “Something Italian and inappropriate?”

“Luciano.”

“I see. Well, we’ll stick to Bennett.” Poe put down his brandy. “Now then. What I have in mind is not exactly conventional employment, but from what you’ve told me about yourself, I don’t think that will bother you. Don’t worry—it’s not seriously illegal.” Poe paused, and smiled. “Not from your point of view, at any rate.”

“THERE’S an interesting statistic,” said Poe, “that has a bearing on what I’m going to suggest to you. It’s this: something close to forty percent of the French labor force is employed by the state. You’re familiar, I’m sure, from your time in Paris, with what this means to honest workingmen like you and me.”

Bennett nodded. He remembered the torrents of complicated forms—paper diarrhea, he used to call it—the sullen laziness of self-important bureaucrats, the hours spent in poky offices, disputing the latest fiscal assault on his company’s income. “Yes,” he said. “It was one of the reasons I left; I was being buried in bureaucracy.”

“Exactly. And all those millions of irritating little paper-shufflers have to be paid, given subsidized medical care, five-week vacations, and index-linked pensions.” Poe tapped the ash from his cigar. “A delightful system if you happen to be one of the beneficiaries, but damned expensive for the rest of us. You’re aware of the French rates of tax if you commit the crime of making a decent income?
Sixty, seventy percent. Sometimes more.” He paused to nuzzle his brandy.

“That’s true,” said Bennett, “but everybody cheats.”

Poe smiled. “Quite. And with your help, I’m going to join them. Another cognac?” Bennett fetched the decanter, and watched the pale-golden liquid swirl into the bottom of the glasses. The thought of an almost destitute ex–house-sitter being in a position to help a man like Poe was strangely satisfying, and Bennett decided there and then to take the job, whatever it was.

Poe thanked him for the cognac and continued. “For some years now, I’ve kept a little place in Monaco, where the authorities take a much more intelligent view of income tax. But there are two snags. First, I feel about Monaco very much how you feel about boats—cramped and much too crowded. And second, despite all the bureaucratic nonsense, I love living in France. It’s tiresome and inconvenient to have to limit my time here to six months a year.”

Bennett’s knowledge of the tax restrictions on the rich was sketchy. “Why six months a year?”

“Anything over six months—even a day—and you’re assessed as a French resident for tax purposes, whether you like it or not.” Poe took a long draw on his cigar and blew a smoke ring. Bennett noticed, without surprise, that it was perfect. “Which brings me to my harmless little deception. As you know, there’s no official border between Monaco and France—no customs, no passports, no immigration checks. So it’s difficult for the authorities to know exactly how long you spend there.”

“And they’re not prepared to take your word for it, I suppose.”

Poe got up, stood with his back to the fire, and looked down at Bennett, shaking his head slowly. “It doesn’t work like that. You see, it’s not up to them to prove you haven’t been living in Monaco; it’s up to you to prove that you have. And in true French fashion, they will always give themselves the benefit of any doubt. You see the problem?”

“Sure,” said Bennett. “But how do you prove that you’re living there—call in to Prince Rainier? Report to the police station every day?”