The Art of French Kissing (6 page)

Chapter Five

M
erci
,
”
Poppy said quickly as the cab screeched to a halt in front of KMG’s office building, which was just a few blocks from her own office in the sixth. She thrust a handful of bills and coins at the driver and piled quickly out of the cab. I scrambled after her, trying to compose myself. I was afraid I was failing miserably. I was exhausted, confused, and utterly disheveled. I was fairly confident this was not the best way to make a good first impression on Véronique, who, according to Poppy, was currently waiting to brief us inside.

As I hurried a pace behind Poppy toward the building, the enormous brick-colored front door flew open, and in the entryway a slender, dark-haired woman in inky black skinny jeans, a crisp white blouse, and a pile of pearls stood framed there, her arms crossed over her chest.

She said something in rapid French, her voice low-pitched and confident, then, glancing at me, she seemed to realize that she needed to translate.

“You are late!” she exclaimed, her French accent thick as strong espresso and her words coming in sharp staccato. “Where is Marie?” She glanced at Poppy and then back at me. “And who are you?”

“Um, I’m Emma,” I replied nervously. I took a step forward and extended my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

She looked at my hand but didn’t shake it. I stood there for a moment, feeling foolish, then lowered my arm back to my side. I wondered what I had done to offend her in under ten words. Poppy patted me on the shoulder.

“Emma, this is Véronique, our boss,” she said smoothly. “Véronique, this is Emma, the new publicist I’ve mentioned to you.”

“Well,” Véronique muttered, looking at me with what appeared to be suspicion. She looked back at Poppy. “Marie is not responding to my calls,” she said crisply.

“Marie quit last month, remember?” Poppy said wearily. She glanced at me. “Marie was my business partner,” she said softly. “The one I mentioned to you. You’re sort of, er, replacing her.” I suddenly realized that there must be more to Marie’s departure than Poppy had initially led me to believe.

“Quoi?”
Véronique said sharply. “Well. This is
monstrueux.
This means that you and the new girl must take care of this on your own!”

“What exactly is happening, Véronique?” Poppy interrupted.

She heaved a weight-of-the-world sigh and rolled her eyes. “Come with me,” she said.

The moment Véronique turned her back to walk back into the building, Poppy shot me a look of concern and shrugged.
Guillaume
, she mouthed. I shook my head, not understanding yet what the handsome rock star could have done in the middle of the night to leave Véronique so panicked. After all, Guillaume was practically a saint, wasn’t he?

We followed Véronique down a long corridor into a big open-floor-plan office that looked out of place in such an old building. I’d expected ornate, tiny rooms that had belonged to businessmen centuries earlier. Instead the room felt oddly reminiscent of the Boy Bandz offices back home.

Fluorescent lighting, just as unflattering here as it was stateside, poured over a dozen desktops, which were separated by cubicle walls into work spaces almost too small to turn around in. The desks were white and modern looking, and the swivel chairs looked like they had come straight out of Ikea—not at all the ornate antique desks and chairs I had anticipated. The walls were decorated with twenty-by-thirty framed posters of the bands on the KMG label. I glanced at each of them, familiarizing myself with the names. Le Renaissance. Amélie Deneuve. Jean-Michel Colin. Jacques Cash. TechnoPub. République de Musique.

“Where’s Guillaume Riche’s poster?” I whispered to Poppy as we hurried to keep up with Véronique.

“He’s not up there yet,” Poppy explained. “His album cover won’t be final for another week. Then we’ll add him to the wall. Believe me, it will be quite the distraction. He’s shirtless on the cover.”

I raised an eyebrow. That sounded like nice workplace scenery.

We followed Véronique into her office, where Poppy and I sank nervously into side-by-side chairs without taking our eyes off her. She was standing before us with clenched fists, looking as if steam might begin shooting from her ears at any moment.

“This is a disaster,” she said, staring first at Poppy, then at me. “Your
Guillaume
is at it again. You must take care of him! What are we paying you for?”

Poppy sighed, and I looked at her in confusion. I was feeling more and more out of the loop by the moment. Just then a phone rang in the outer room, and Véronique made a face.

“Don’t move,” she said, fixing us with a glare, as if we might be tempted to climb out a window in her absence. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

She hurried out of the office. I turned to Poppy.

“What exactly is going on?” I demanded.

Poppy averted her eyes. “Oh, yes, Guillaume Riche,” she said with forced casualness. “There
may
have been a few things I forgot to mention about him.”

“A few things?” I repeated slowly.

“Er . . . yes,” she said, still not meeting my gaze. “Guillaume sort of has a, um, certain propensity for getting himself into trouble.”

“Trouble?” I was starting to get a bad feeling about this.

“Er, yes,” she said. “You might say that. All sorts of messes.”

“For example?” I prompted.

Poppy sighed. Her eyes flicked to me and then away again. “He’s gotten locked in a wine cellar in the south of France,” she said quickly. “He’s gotten trapped in the dolphin tank at the aquarium in Brittany; he even tap-danced through the prime minister’s backyard in the middle of the night. He’s a bit batty, you might say.”

“But . . . I’ve never read about
any
of this!” I exclaimed.

“Good,” Poppy said with a wry smile. “That means I’ve been doing my job. Most of the stories were reported in some capacity, but my old colleague, Marie, used to do a wonderful job of coming up with logical explanations for everything.”

My heart—and my hopes of an easy stay in Paris—were sinking like a stone in the Seine. “But I thought you said he was some kind of saint!”

“That’s not
quite
what I said,” she replied, eyes down. “What I said was that’s how KMG has decided to market him. They did a ton of research with focus groups and all sorts of psychological studies and found that women in our target audience are getting tired of the stereotypical rock-’n’roll bad boy. The market is ripe for something new. Our research showed that positioning Guillaume as a nice guy, the kind of guy you want to take home to your mother, was the best way to make him an international star.”

“Except he’s
not
exactly a nice guy?” I filled in flatly.

“No, it’s not quite that,” Poppy said quickly. “He’s nice enough. He’s just . . . well, let’s just say he has a screw or two loose. Which doesn’t
exactly
fit with the image we’re trying to project.

“So far,” she continued, “we’ve managed to spin all his little mishaps to make them look like innocent mistakes. The press hasn’t caught on. But he can’t seem to stop getting himself into trouble.”

Before I could reply, Véronique bustled back into the room, a handful of papers in her hand.

“Faxes from just about every reporter we’ve ever had contact with,” she said sharply, holding up the stack. Poppy and I exchanged glances. “They all want to know what Guillaume is doing.”

“What
is
Guillaume doing?” Poppy asked, quite sensibly, I thought.

“You mean you don’t know?” Véronique demanded. She mumbled something in French that sounded a lot like an expletive. “Well, I’ll tell you then! He’s shut himself in a hotel room up in Montmartre with four girls—all of them seemingly underage—and a pile of drugs. It seems a room-service waiter called the press, and they’re there in droves, waiting for him to come out and get caught.”

Poppy swore under her breath and stood up quickly.

“I expect you to take care of this,” Véronique continued sharply, thrusting a piece of notepaper at Poppy. “Here’s the information about where he is. If Guillaume Riche gets arrested—or winds up looking like he’s coaxing young girls into getting high—it’s going to be KMG taking the fall. And you’ll both be out of a job.”

“I can’t lose this job, Emma,” Poppy said, white-faced, as we sat in the back of a cab on the way to Montmartre, the bohemian quarter of historic Paris that sat atop a small hill and was famous for its miniature windmills and winding roads. She knocked on the divider separating the driver from us. “Can you go any faster?” she asked loudly. The driver cursed back at her in French and threw his hands in the air. Poppy sighed, leaned back in her seat, and closed her eyes.

“Poppy, everything will be fine.” It was disconcerting to see my normally cool, calm, and collected friend so shaken. “I’m sure that whatever is happening with Guillaume isn’t that bad. We’ll work it out.”

She opened her eyes and stared at me bleakly. “You don’t know Guillaume,” she said. “He’s a complete disaster.”

I shrugged. “I’m sure you’re exaggerating.”

Poppy shook her head. “No, I’m not. That’s why Marie quit last month. She’d finally had enough. She was great at this, though. Every scrape he got into, she somehow talked him out of. All I had to do was basically translate whatever nonsense she said and keep the English-speaking journalists happy.”

“So you never had to talk him out of anything yourself ?” I asked.

Poppy looked away. “I’m crap at inventing stories, Emma, I really am. I begged and pleaded with Marie to stay, but she was sick of this and sick of being yelled at by Véronique. I don’t know how I’m going to handle this on my own.”

“You’re not on your own,” I said softly. I took a deep breath. “Look, I’ll help you.”

Poppy glanced at me. “You think you can make something up to talk Guillaume out of this?”

I paused. “Well, I’ve had to talk the boy-band guys out of some ridiculous situations in the past,” I said. There was, for example, the time Robbie Roberts was arrested for shoplifting three pairs of women’s panties. Or the time Justin Cabrera was caught naked with his young, blond high school math teacher. Or the time Josh Schwartz was caught smoking pot with the rabbi at his little sister’s bat mitzvah.

Poppy nodded slowly. “I just don’t know what I’d do if I lost this job. I’d have to close my agency.”

“That’s not going to happen,” I said more firmly than I felt.

“You’re my only hope,” she said bleakly. I could see her blinking back tears. We rode in tense silence for a moment. “Oh, no,” she moaned softly as our taxi turned a corner and pulled up at a red light. “It’s worse than I thought.”

My eyes widened as I took in the Hôtel Jeremie, which looked more like a paparazzo cloning factory than a hotel. Spilling out into the street, a whole gaggle of nearly identical-looking disheveled men toting large cameras with complicated-looking flashbulbs stood jostling one another.

Even with the cab windows rolled up, I could hear their excited chatter, the clamor of a group of hungry wolves waiting for the kill.

The light changed, and the cab started moving forward again, closer to the hotel, closer to the hungry pack of predators. Poppy groaned and closed her eyes.

“Can you take us around to the back entrance?” I suddenly asked the driver. My mind was spinning, and I had no idea what sort of situation we’d find this Guillaume in, but it suddenly occurred to me that if we were going to have to explain his way out of things, it might be better if we weren’t seen entering the building. We could be his alibi—but only if we could make it look like we’d been there all along.

“Comment?”
the driver asked, still appearing as if he was going to turn into the hotel drive, therefore mowing over several paparazzi (which didn’t sound like such a bad idea at the moment).

Poppy quickly translated my request into French. The cabdriver snorted and said something back.

“He says there is just one entrance,” Poppy said, turning to me worriedly.

“Impossible,” I said. “There has to be a service entrance in the back. Tell him to just drive around the building and we’ll find it.”

Poppy hesitated for a moment, opened her mouth as if she was going to say something to me, then shrugged. She spoke quickly to the driver, who glared at me for a moment in the mirror then, shaking his head, twisted the wheel sharply to the left and turned down the side street just before the hotel.

“Voilà!”
the cabbie said, screeching to a halt at the curb of a dark alleyway.
“Vous êtes contente?”
He smirked at me in the rearview. Obviously, sarcasm translated.

“Yes, very content, thank you,” I chirped back. Poppy shot me a look and paid the driver. He screeched away the moment we tumbled out of the cab into the darkness.

“Why did you want to find the back entrance?” Poppy asked as we made our way toward the hotel. “Shouldn’t we just go in and face the music, so to speak? No point in delaying the inevitable.”

“We may need to claim that we’ve been with Guillaume all along, and therefore the things he was accused of can’t possibly have happened,” I said slowly. “If that’s the case, we can’t be seen arriving.”

Poppy was silent for a minute. “You know,” she said. “That just might work.”

We found a back door that was slightly ajar and made our way into what appeared to be the hotel kitchen.

“Is there anything else I need to know about Guillaume?” I asked as we hurried through a silent, dimly lit space filled with massive refrigerators, industrial-size stoves and ovens, and a series of prep stations, toward a small sliver of light behind a doorway that I figured was the hotel lobby. “Other than his apparent clinical insanity?”

Poppy chose to ignore the last half of my statement. “Just that he’s actually pretty nice once you get past all the craziness,” she said, hurrying along after me. “And wildly talented.” She paused and added, “I know this must feel ridiculous to you.”

“That’s an understatement.” I stifled a cry as I smashed my hip bone against the edge of a counter that I hadn’t seen in the dark.