"You see," I told Alexa, "America's not the only country that's globalizing."
"Yes, but France does it with Matisse instead of McDonald's."
The Americans I met in Paris and London always tried to tell me that theirs was a classless society, but Elodie's building was several million social strata above the tenements we'd passed coming in from the Bronx. It was within sight of the misty treetops of Central Park. There was ornate art-nouveau stonework running up the facade, and a long green awning stretched from the doorway to the edge of the sidewalk. You were meant to arrive in a limo, not dragging your luggage, as we were.
A uniformed doorman rushed to open the heavy brass-framed door. He was middle aged, with a greased-back Elvis haircut, and examined Alexa and me as if we were young squatters planning to sleep on the shiny white marble floor of his lobby.
Elodie swanned majestically past him, pausing only to ask if he could help Alexa with her rucksack.
"Give him a dollar when we get to the lift," she told me in French.
Elodie's apartment on the fourth floor was, as she had said, "quite big." The wood-paneled lounge had a half-size cinema screen on one wall, and the dark corridors leading off it seemed to go all the way to Queens.
I was just about to ask how on earth she'd wangled this fantastic house-sitting deal when a gnome appeared and answered all my questions. He was about two hundred years old, five feet tall, with a face like a polished walnut and a blond wig as convincing as a Chinese bottle of "Channel Nomber 5." This had to be the rock star Clint. He was dressed as a Napoleonic general—presumably a French translation of the Beatles' look circa 1967.
"'Allo, beb," he croaked, and Elodie bent forward to allow him to insert his tongue into her mouth. I exchanged a look with Alexa. We'd both figured out what the "house-sitting" deal was. The house was probably not the only thing she was sitting on.
Clint nodded indifferently up at me, but Alexa seemed to ignite some kind of firework under that wig of his. He flared his nostrils at her and trotted over.
" 'Ey, beb. You lahk pardee?" he slobbered.
"Non, Clint," Elodie said in French. "She is not—"
"Ah." Clint pouted in disappointment. Another of Elodie's household tasks seemed to have been explained. She procured party partners for him.
"My friends need a hotel," she told him, sticking to French. "That room your record company keeps for you. Could they have that?"
"Record company?" Clint frowned, adding a few extra wrinkles to his wrinkles, in an attempt to remember where he'd heard this phrase before.
"Yes. They have a room at the Chelsea."
"Ah, the Chelsea? Yeah, man. Less go pardee!" His tongue seemed to want to go on ahead and get the drinks in.
"No, Clint. They're just amis," Elodie said. "They need a place to stay. No party, Clint. Don't worry," she told me. "We'll sort it out. You know, the Chelsea is where English rock stars kill their girlfriends. It will be perfect for you at the beginning of your American stay. What are you doing here, by the way?"
She sat us down in her railway-station-sized kitchen and I talked her through my insane interviews, the World Tourism Capital competition, and my chance to relive The Italian Job right across America.
"And which cities will you visit?" she asked.
I told her, and she repeated the list to herself.
"And what are these promotional events that you must organize?"
"Ah." This was where my story ran out of steam. The one thing London hadn't been able to tell me was exactly what I'd be doing in each city. Details were still being finalized, they said, but not to worry. I didn't have to set the events up from scratch. I'd be cohosting them with local partners, and I'd be getting all the necessary info well in advance of each event. Although forty-eight hours seemed to me to be cutting it fine for Boston.
"They are Her Majesty's secrets, are they, Paul?" Elodie teased.
"For the moment," I lied.
"Well, when you feel free to reveal all, maybe you can send me some invitations. I'd love to come. Especially to Miami—it will be wonderful at this time of year."
"OK, great." I was flattered by this show of solidarity, especially from someone who was theoretically on the opposing team.
Elodie made a couple of phone calls and told us that the room would be ready after lunch. Seemed there had been a bit of a "pardee" there the night before, at which Clint had been a star guest, and the wreckage was still being cleared away.
She said we should leave our bags at the apartment— unlocked in case Clint tried to shoot the lock off. He'd already been sued by a couple in the next building, she told us, because he'd used a Magnum on the stubborn door of the refrigerator and the bullets had pierced the wall and taken out the neighbors' collection of fish-shaped serving dishes. And this was just to get at a bottle of champagne. If he thought there were drugs in our cases, he'd probably use a grenade launcher.
We arranged to meet at the Chelsea later on. Elodie was heading up to Columbia University, she said, for a seminar. It was part of a course she was taking, a masters in emergency and disaster management.
"To help refugees from floods and hurricanes?" Alexa asked.
"Yeah, kind of," Elodie said in her most American accent. "You know, refugees from any sort of disaster, they're the biggest captive market you can imagine. Federal government isn't really interested in taking care of refugees, so tJiere are some great business openings there."
There was no mistaking Jean-Marie's opportunist genes powering that brain of hers.
We accepted Elodie's offer of a lift uptown. I had to go to Harlem, which was on her way. And Alexa decided to go to the university so that she could interview some students on "their awareness of the damage done to the outside world by American foreign policy." Oh well, I thought, if she gets arrested for subversion, at least there'll be more room in the Mini for my luggage.
The vehicle that pulled up outside Elodie's building was a black limo—not a stretch but a Lincoln all the same—with a dark-suited chauffeur.
"I charge them to Clint's account," Elodie said when I whistled my appreciation. "He can never remember when he took a bath, never mind a car ride."
On the way uptown, she told us Clint's tragic story.
Until ten or so years ago, like all aging French stars, he'd been able to make a fortune out of talk-show appearances, the kind of program that is inflicted on French audiences every Saturday night, in which a hysterical male presenter shows clips from old TV shows and then gets the half-dead stars to mime their hit song or read an anecdote from the teleprompter.
But then Clint had got big ideas and decided on a comeback tour of France, which was where it all went wrong. During an encore of "Je Suis Une Tarte Aux Fraises," some nostalgic members of the audience had held up their cigarette lighters and begun to wave them in the air. Opinion was divided on what happened next. Some said that, blinded by his sunglasses and the drugs, Clint had tripped and fallen headfirst into the crowd. Others were sure he had tried a stage dive. Either way, he'd flown into the audience, the cigarette lighters had set his wig on fire, and his terrified fans had tossed him around the venue like a lit match until he finally landed back on the stage, where he was quickly extinguished by the roadies. He had only been saved from third-degree burns because his pancake makeup had baked solid and protected his skin.
However, when they peeled off the charred hair and solidified foundation cream, he looked like a pickled walnut. And even French TV doesn't invite pickled walnuts onto its prime-time shows. So now, Elodie said, he recorded the occasional song, but mainly he just lived, very comfortably, on the royalties from all the plays of "Je Suis Une Tarte . . ." on French radio. Luckily for him, it seemed that strawberry tart really was forever.
4
I was disappointed to see that the Harlem address I'd been given didn't lead me to a car showroom with polished display models glinting under neon lighting.
In fact, the address didn't seem to
lead anywhere at all, because the building had vanished. In its place was one of those typical American parking lots, a demolition site that was now so crammed full of parked cars that you'd need to be an expert at Rubik's Cube to extract one. In the middle of this tapestry of vehicles was a wooden hut.
I looked inside. It was a tiny, brightly lit living room, complete with a velvet easy chair, a radiator, and a TV. In place of family photos and vases, there was a poster of a girl only just managing to stop her enormous breasts falling out of her bikini top, and several equally huge bunches of car keys.
"We full." The guy who had come up behind me didn't seem to like having someone peer into his lounge. He was African-American, with a camouflage parka and a battle-worn expression. The hood of his parka ringed his face with fluffy fur but it didn't make him look cuddly.
"Sorry, I wasn't actually looking for a parking space, I was hoping you'd be able to tell me where I might be able to find the Mini I'm due to pick up tomorrow." I was halfway through this sentence when I realized that the guy couldn't understand what the hell I was talking about. We southern Brits think we speak "pure" accent-free English, but of course there's no such thing. Everyone who opens their mouth has an accent. And the parking-lot attendant was totally bewildered by my middle-class English tendency to express what I want by apologizing for being a nuisance rather than just getting to the point. This was probably why people in New York limited their questions to barked monosyllables like "Latte?" and "Check?"
He replied with a strong (for me) Harlem twang, which he probably thought was totally accentless too. I saw that we were both equally confused by our conversation.
"Fa di da ra la tata ha ha Mini?" I had asked.
"Bang lang a nang bo sang karang Mini," he answered.
"Er, popo froofroo looloo Mini?" I pursued.
"Cum a hum dum muthafuggin boondong Mini," he concluded, and made it clear he wanted to get inside his hut and out of the cold.
"No, look, this is the address." I read it out to him from my piece of paper.
"Oh, yeah, back there, see?" He pointed to a door at the rear of the lot.
"Ah, thanks," I said, but I was talking to the closed door of his warm log cabin.
There was, I now saw, a kind of trail through the maze of cars, leading to the back of the lot. It ended at a dark-red sliding door with orange light filtering out underneath it. There was a smaller entrance cut into the door. I knocked, and opened it very slowly indeed. Again, my ooh-I'm-in-die-ghetto prejudices kicked in. What kind of things went on in a workshop at the back of a demolition site in Harlem, they wanted to know. Dismanding stolen cars? Discount gun sales? A crack factory?
I'd never actually seen a crack factory, but I didn't think diat the equipment on display in this place was drug apparatus. It would, for example, have been fiendishly clever to hide a crack oven inside an electric-blue convertible Cadillac. And it would have taken a long time to smoke one of the fat black tires stacked against the wall. This was, it seemed, a car-conversion workshop, a cluttered, oily, paint-smelling garage that was currently rocking to the beat of a rap record and hammer blows.
"Hello?" I called out.
The hammering and the rapping stopped and a small, stocky black guy with goggles around his neck emerged from behind the Cadillac.
"Hi," I said. "My name's West. I'm looking for—er, sorry, can you understand what I'm talking about?"
"Dunno," he said. "What are you talking about?"
A good question, I realized, and spoken in an accent I understood.
"Sorry, look." I gave him the piece of paper where I'd written his address. He frowned, no doubt distracted because the most legible writing on the paper was "Join our Air Miles scheme and win two free nights at a luxury hotel."
"The Mini ordered by Visitor Resources: Britain?" I said. "For Paul West?"
"Oh yeah." He laughed, clearly relieved that this foreigner wasn't inviting him to share a luxury room for two nights. He introduced himself as Dwight. "Sorry, Paul, but your Mini ain't ready yet. I didn't know what to paint on it. I only just got the confirmation."
"Paint on it? I thought you were just giving it a service before I picked it up?"
"No, I gotta paint an English flag on the roof. They was going to send me a color scheme and all. I didn't get it till this morning."
A mental picture of Jack Tyler flashed into my head. He was giggling manically at a website called AMillionWaysToPissOrrPaulWest.com.
"Shit." I was supposed to be driving to Boston in the Mini in less than forty-eight hours' time.
"Hey, no problem," Dwight said. "I'll start on it as soon as I'm done with the Caddy. It'll be ready on time. You just want the paint job?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Oh, 'cause I could do some other English stuff for you. How about I cover the doors with Astroturf, stick some cricket balls on there? Or no, I embed the balls in the door like you've just been hit by them."
"You know about cricket?" I asked.
"Oh yeah. I come from Brooklyn. West Indian guys got a cricket club there. Every summer they beat the hell out these English teams come over to play."
"You understand all the rules?"
"Nah," he said. "But I do know, some of them fellas from the West Indies, they just love throwing hardballs at English guys. What did you do to them back in the colonial days? Oh man, they'd sure like to embed your head." As far as I could see, he'd understood the rules of international cricket perfectly.
5
The Chelsea loomed above me like a blood-red gothic mansion. I'd heard about the hotel where Hendrix used to stay and where Sid Vicious allegedly knifed his girlfriend to death, but I didn't expect it to be quite this forbidding.
The shops on the ground floor of the building seemed to hint at the eccentric activities within—a vintage guitar shop, an acupuncturist, a tattoo parlor, and, bizarrely, a fishing-tackle store.
On plaques by the hotel entrance there were quotes by or about some of the famous literary residents. One read, "Dylan Thomas sailed out of here to die." Very reassuring.
In the lobby, the first thing I saw was a fat lady hanging from the ceiling on a swing. She was not one of the eccentric guests but an almost life-size sculpture. The whole lobby was an art gallery, its lurid yellow walls hung with modern portraits and abstract splashes. Adding a period touch was a pair of gothic urns on a mantelpiece, implying perhaps that being dead didn't exclude you from hanging out at the Chelsea.
People (most of them alive) were hunched in armchairs, computers open on their laps. There was no sign of Alexa and Elodie, but that was probably because I was on time and they were French women.
I took off my scarf, gloves, hat, and three or four layers of outer clothing and went to wait in one of the armchairs. No one bothered me, although the laptoppers seemed to be confused as to how I was managing to e-mail people with no visible computer. I considered pretending to type on to my shirt sleeve just to freak them out that their laptop might not be the latest model, but finally contented myself with slumping low in the chair and closing my eyes.
Next thing I knew, Alexa was grinning down at me, running a video camera along my body.
"And here is the typical position of the dynamic Englishman who has crossed the Atlantic to follow his dream, and instead he is fantasizing about English beer and naked women on the beach. Where is the car, cheri?"
"It's not quite ready yet."
"And when will it be quite ready}"
"Before we go to Boston."
"And have you found out about the Boston event?"
"No, that was next on my list."
"After your siesta."
"After my closed-eye brainstorming session, yes."
When we'd dumped our bags, Elodie took us across town for a drink at a revolving bar. By that, I don't mean a mini-bar that swiveled when you tried to grab a glass. No, this bar gave everyone a perfect panoramic view of the city, if they waited long enough for the view to come round.
A posh, mobile version of Jake's rooftop on the fiftysome-thingth floor of a hotel.
The bar took an hour to do a full circuit, and as we drank we got two looks at the most famous skyscrapers—one just before sunset and another when the night sky was black and the multicolored, multilayered jumble of city lights seemed to splash like electronic surf against the tower we were sitting on.
Alexa was as bubbly as the Long Island sparkling wine, which was better than a few real French champagnes I've tasted. She was telling us about the filming she'd done at Columbia, and the cameraload of idealistic young American students who shared her views on the big NATO bogeyman. She'd even found a few who, to her astonishment, were actually left wing and believed in the redistribution of wealth and other such un-American things.
"In France, we think all Americans are capitalists at birth," Alexa said. "We don't believe that socialists even exist here."
"Oh yes, there are lots of socialists in the USA," Elodie said. "Around a hundred in New York, fifty in Seattle—the eco-socialists—and probably one at Harvard in the political science museum." Elodie's view of politics was colored by her father's total lack of any principles except self-advancement.
"How is Jean-Marie doing, by the way?" I asked.
"Ah, that is a funny thing!" Elodie laughed and almost inhaled her glass of wine, though I didn't think my question had been quite that witty. "I called Papa this afternoon," she said when she had cleared her lungs of bubbles, "and he told me all about your problems with the French government. Is it true that you might be going to prison?"
Alexa looked at me as if I had been hiding something from her.
"No, that's bollocks," I said as categorically as I could manage. "I've just got a stupid fine to pay, which I'll be able to do with the money from this American contract."
"But it is a lot of money," Elodie said.