Merde Happens Page 7

  "The wrong flag?"

  "Yes. Why didn't you just send over a picture of the flag we wanted?"

  "He said he was going to find it on the Internet."

  "He did find it on die Internet. And he found the flag you told him to find."

  "So he found the right flag?"

  "Yes, but it was the wrong flag."

  "Sorry?"

  "You told him to find the Union Flag when what we needed was the Union Jack."

  "Oh my."

  "I'm going to have to leave the Mini in New York and get to Boston some other way, OK?"

  "OK," she said, sounding bemused by these new developments.

  "Look, Serena, I know you're probably dealing with Jack Tyler, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "And am I right in saying that he's not always there when you need him? Not all there, if you get my meaning?"

  "Well. . ."

  "Perhaps you should have a word with Lucy Marsh."

  "Who?"

  "Lucy Marsh. You don't know who she is?"

  "No."

  "Holy dingbats, how big is that new building of yours?" But I was breaking the first rule of self-assertion, which is, of course, stick to the bloody point. "In a nutshell, this is a major cock-up. And I can't afford cock-ups, or I'll be in the merde in more ways than you can imagine."

  "In the what?"

  "It's French. Didn't you learn French swearwords at school?"

  "No, we didn't do French."

  "What? I thought all schools did it. You can't ignore French, you know. I did, and that's what got me into this merde."

  "This what?"

  "Nyaarrgh."

  Boston

  Digging for Victory

  1

  I SOMETIMES THINK THAT WE Europeans have a patronizing view of Americans' grasp of history. It's not really our fault, though—we're basing our opinion on TV shows in which King Arthur talks like a cowboy and war films which suggest that the Battle of Britain was won by a bunch of USAF pilots who destroyed the whole Luftwaffe in an afternoon.

  Deep down, we're convinced that Americans have no real concept of what went on before 1945, and that they see British history like this:

  Stonehenge-1776: A time of castles, kings V shit.

  1776-1945: Crushed by the loss of its American colonies, Britain gradually shrivels up until it is so powerless that it almost loses a war to a vegetarian with a silly mustache.

  1945-present: Saved from destruction by the USA, Britain becomes a trusted ally, as vital to the balance of world power as, say, Bermuda.

  Meanwhile, most French people, especially the politicians, are sure that America views France like this:

  Jurassic period-1940: An area of the planet devoted solely to the production of wine, cheese, prostitutes, and body odor.

  1940-present: Supposedly a friend, but in truth as reliable as the wedding guest who sleeps with the bride.

  In fact, though, many Americans have an acute sense of history. For instance, they can tell you what happened in America on practically any day between 1775 and about 1790. Which goes some way to explaining what happened when I tried to put on an event in one of the country's most history-conscious cities.

  2

  "Oh!" Alexa gave a typically French puff of outrage, as if a complete stranger had just walked up to her restaurant table and helped himself to her slice of foie gras.

  I looked around to see who could be causing such fury. We were at Penn Station, two implausibly expensive train tickets to Boston in our hands, and had just arrived down on the platform.

  "The train," Alexa huffed. "It is a TGV! They say it is their new American high-speed train and it's French."

  She was right. The blue and silver locomotive, like a snobbish snake looking down its nose at you, could have been the Paris-Marseilles express.

  "Even more French globalizing," I said.

  "Only because they need our technology. What is better? Globalizing with fast trains or fast food? In fact, France is giving America aid." Alexa had forgotten her outrage and was now looking insufferably smug.

  Inside, the train had been adapted to American tastes. Amtrak was obviously keen to kid us into thinking we were about to leave the ground. The carriages had overhead lockers, reclining seats, and business-class amounts of legroom. A little leaflet tucked into the seatback by my knees explained that our maximum speed was likely to be 165 miles per hour.

  When we pulled out of the station, though, the airplane fantasy was dispelled—our initial speed was less like a jumbo jet than an elephant. At first I didn't mind this at all. Crossing the East River, we swung past a classic poster view of the distant Manhattan skyscrapers impaling a low-slung canopy of clouds. The train was so much quieter than a plane, too. Totally silent, in fact, when it ground to a halt ten minutes out of Penn.

  We were perched high on the tracks above a depot full of gleaming red fire engines. A wave of unrest rippled along the carriage. Alexa and I looked at our watches. The meeting with my Boston contact was scheduled for two. We were due to arrive at one thirty. It would soon be time to start sending out distress signals.

  Right on cue, a voice came over the PA system, informing us that there was an electrical fault with the locomotive, and that the driver just had to reset it. It sounded simple, like rebooting a computer. But the guy sharing the foursome of seats with us didn't look so sure. He hummed mournfully, as if to say, "Don't you believe it." He was around sixty, with frizzy gray hair slicked back over a high, deeply wrinkled forehead, and had a naturally hangdog expression. His jowls could have been transplanted from a bloodhound.

  "Do you think we'll be held up for long?" I asked.

  "Hmmm." This could have meant anything from "Yes, hours," to "Sorry, my dentures are stuck together so I can't answer."

  "At least they tell you what the problem is," Alexa contributed. "In France, we can wait for hours with no information."

  "Hmmm," the old guy repeated. "Here the problem is different. You try to get on a train to Montreal and they tell you that there's no service because the windshield is cracked. Or that the train hasn't been shipped down from Albany yet. They're very informative, it's just that the information is so much bullshit."

  Something about the way he said this made us all laugh, and we introduced ourselves.

  He was Joseph, a semiretired furniture wholesaler, and he was on his way to Connecticut to meet up with some hunting pals.

  "Not to blast the heads off coyotes with an M-62," he said. "We're real woodsmen." He took a magazine out of his bag, a kind of suede fetishists' monthly full of ads for tas-seled jackets and crotchless chaps. "We get into costume, head up into the woods, and then it's just us and the animals. You get one shot with your musket, and if you miss, that's it. Nothing for the campfire. And if you wing the animal, you have to track it and finish it off with your knife. It brings out the marksman in you." It all sounded very romantic in a bloody kind of way. "It wasn't only Washington's army that got rid of the English, you know, it was the woodsmen. People forget that. And we owe a lot to the French, too." He smiled at Alexa as if she personally had helped to kick the redcoats into the Atlantic all those centuries ago. "Some Americans say that France is ungrateful to us for liberating them in 1945. But we ought to remember, the French helped to liberate us. Back in 1781, your fleet captured an entire English army at Yorktown." Now that his teeth were unglued, he couldn't stop them opening and shutting, or so it seemed to me.

  The train began to hum, then jolted into movement.

  We still didn't get many of those 165 miles per hour we'd been promised, but at least the short surges of acceleration were sending us in the right direction. Soon we had left the city behind and were whirring past wide, sunlit bays with frosted reed beds, clusters of clapboard houses and narrow sand beaches. Scandinavian-looking towns came and went, some of them looking as if the old whaling fleets had only just left. It was incredible, these open seascapes and drowsy harbors so close to the
frenzy of New York.

  "How far you going?" Joseph asked.

  "Boston," Alexa said.

  "Bunker Hill!" Joseph pronounced the name as if it was a military order. "June seventeen, 1775. Colonel William Prescott and his small band of resistance fighters held off the massed ranks of the English, and all thanks to good marksmanship. A few brave men, almost no ammunition, but they knew how to use a musket and the English got their asses shot off whenever they tried to storm the hill. That's where they coined the expression 'Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.'"

  "So if they'd been wearing sunglasses, you would have lost?" I asked. I hoped my own visit to the city wasn't going to be quite such a debacle.

  "Hmmm." Joseph opened his magazine again, and began to examine an article on the best way to gut a moose.

  3

  Boston's South Station was an airy, well-lit place compared to the subterranean Penn. Standing by the concourse bookshop, as arranged, was a tall blondish guy, about my age, but with longer, thicker sideburns and a two-day beard.

  The kind of bloke they choose to model chunky knitwear in catalogs. This was my Boston contact, Mike.

  "Paul, Alexa? Hey." Mike shook our hands and gave us a huge smile. The one he extended to Alexa was all welcoming, but mine wasn't 100 percent genuine, I thought. Mixed in there was a small percentage of amusement.

  "Sorry we're so late," I said.

  "No worries. You're Europeans, so you won't mind walking a short way?" he said. "We could get a taxi, but with the Big Dig it'd take hours to get where we're going."

  "Big Dig?" Alexa asked.

  "Where are we going?" I wanted to know.

  Mike took Alexa's rucksack and answered her question first.

  "The Big Dig, yeah, for the last ten years at least, the city's been trying to dig tunnels to relieve the gridlock downtown. But the engineers were too ambitious and the foundations are unsuitable, and basically it's just made driving around the city a nightmare for a decade. Good time to get shares in a construction company, though— they still got years of work in their order books. Even more since the fire."

  "Fire?" Alexa asked.

  "Yeah." We were crossing part of the inner harbor, a still, brown canal, and he pointed to the next bridge down, which was blackened and swathed in scaffolding. "Hit by lightning. That was the museum wharf, too. The site of the original Boston Tea Party. You know all about that?"

  "No," Alexa said, only just preventing herself from adding, "Fill me in, you fascinating hunk."

  "Well," Mike continued, "on the night of December 16, 1763, Bostonians decided they'd had enough of paying English taxes on Indian tea and emptied three shiploads of the stuff into the harbor. This was more than ten years before the revolution took hold. It was kind of the spark that lit the slow-burning fire." His eyes were aiming sparks at Alexa. He probably did pouty calendar photos as well as knitwear catalogs. "One of the ships, the Beaver, was preserved here as a permanent reminder of their heroism. But it's all burned out now." Manfully, he held back the tears.

  "So your Beaver was hit by lightning? Ouch." My low-grade quip made Mike twitch, and then his smile returned, with the percentage of mockery a little higher this time, I noted.

  He led us across a complex mud trail of roadworks and between shiny, medium-size skyscrapers. The streets were short and at European angles, and took us over a low knoll.

  "So where are we going?" I asked again.

  "Not much further," Mike assured Alexa. We dropped down past a bustling square with what looked like a Greek temple in the middle, and then suddenly we were in an English pub.

  Well, no, there was one major thing tJiat differentiated it from an English pub, and that was the group of three men in long waistcoats, neckerchiefs, and knee breeches, and two women in thick woolen dresses, lacy skullcaps, and shawls. New York fashions hadn't quite reached here, it seemed.

  "Hey guys," Mike greeted them. "This is him."

  "Hey!" They all broke off from their loud, laughing conversation to come and say hello. They, too, had that friendly but amused look in tJieir eyes.

  "So, you want to organize another Boston Tea Party," one of the men said, a dark-haired giant whose ponytail looked real.

  "Yes, though we won't be throwing any of our drinks into the harbor," I said.

  "And you're planning to do it like your friend Serena said, are you?" Mike asked.

  "Er, yes." Though something in his voice made me suspect I ought to say no.

  "An outdoor tea party, by the river, in February?"

  "Outdoor?" I asked. "Are you sure?" Serena hadn't mentioned that. I could see that a picnic in subzero temperatures might not be the best way of attracting visitors.

  "Oh, yeah." Mike and the knee-breeches crowd had a good laugh at this. "An English tea party, on the site of the original Boston Tea Party, where America first rebelled against English rule. You don't think the city's opinion-makers might see a kind of historical insult in there? Like holding a British barbecue on the site where Joan of Arc was killed?" He flashed a smile of complicity at Alexa, who was starting to look at me the same way she'd done when I got lost on my way back from the toilets in New York.

  "But we're all allies these days," I tried to object. "A lot of tea has flowed under the bridge since 1763."

  "Allies, right." Mike laughed. "Did Serena really think that the best co-organizer for your show was the vice-president of the Boston-Ireland Association?" Mike pointed a thumb at his chest. "I mean, Paul, some of our older members still haven't forgiven the English for the potato famine. And you thought we'd give the OK to help publicize England as a tourist destination?" I got the distinct impression that he'd been practicing his barbed speech in the bath. "Believe me, you're lucky the site of the Tea Party was hit by lightning. At least it gives you an excuse to hold yours indoors. So I suggest you have a glass of great Boston beer, and then get on with organizing your event. You've got twenty-eight hours or so to do it."

  This earned him a small cheer from his historically challenged friends.

  "So do I take it that you're backing out of the agreement to help me with this, Mike?" I asked.

  "Well, I wouldn't say there ever was an agreement," he said. "I mean, at first we said send us details, so we could find out what all this business with the tea party was, but then your people seemed to assume we'd agreed to help, and the faxes and the e-mails just kept coming. So I thought the least I could do was meet with you and explain what was going on."

  "Yes, thank you for that," Alexa said, giving me a stare as if to remind me of my manners.

  "Yeah, thanks, Mike, you've been more than helpful. Excuse me, I just have to go and yell at someone." It was fast becoming my catchphrase.

  "Hello Mister West Visitor Resources Britain Serena speaking how—"

  "I'm in Boston," I interrupted.

  "Good."

  "No, not good at all. Mike, our contact here, isn't going to help me set up the event."

  "What? But he—"

  "And anyway, what on earth were you thinking of, organizing an English tea party in Boston? An open-air one, too. Don't you read the weather forecast before you arrange events?"

  "Yes, of course. If I remember correctly, on Boston's own city website it said that the minimum January daytime temperature is fifteen degrees."

  "Yes, Fahrenheit, Serena. That's below freezing. Don't you know—" I broke off in midsentence. An awful thought had occurred to me. I'd just realized what had been bugging me all along. The fact that she didn't know Lucy Marsh. The screw-up with the flag. Not learning any French at school. There was something about her voice, too, her way of speaking. "Serena?"

  "Yes? How can I—?"

  "What color are the fish in die pond outside the Visitor Resources building?"

  "Pardon?"

  I repeated my question.

  "Gold?" she answered.

  "There is no fishpond, Serena," I said, suddenly feeling as if I was making up for missing
that murder mystery on TV There was no fooling West of the Yard. "Where are you really?"

  "Oooh." Serena made a noise like a kid who's just blotched ink on a new pair of jeans.

  "I know you're not in London. And I bet your name's not Serena Hart, is it? What's your real name?"

  For a few moments I heard only the swishing of the satellite that was relaying our fraught conversation, and then she whispered, "Suraya."

  I asked her to spell it out for me.

  "Pleased to meet you at last, Suraya. And where exactiy are you?"

  There was another radio silence. "Please don't tell anyone you know," she finally whispered, her voice wobbling. "But. . ."

  "But?"

  "We're in Chennai."

  "Wales?"

  "No, Chennai. You know, the new name for Madras." She pronounced it "Mut-raas."

  "India?"

  "Yes."

  "Visitor Resources: Britain has outsourced its national tourism campaign to a foreign country?"

  "Yes. We already handle all their phone inquiries."

  "What, even a question like, What are the opening times of the Aberdeen Museum of Wet Fish Processing?"

  "Winter or summer?"

  "Pardon?"

  "Sorry, I am joking. But yes, everything. This is why you have perhaps had the impression that things are being organized from rather a long way away."

  "From the moon, yes. The dark side."

  "I am sorry, but it is difficult for me when the management in London communicates information late, and some of them do not agree with the outsourcing policy, so they deliberately hold up information."

  "Right, so you're saying I have to distrust practically everything you tell me in case it's late or misinformed?" Suraya's silence spoke volumes. "I mean, Suraya, what must the mayor of Boston have thought when he received an invitation to an outdoor English tea party in winter? He has been invited, hasn't he?"

  "Yes, of course. The mayor and the director of tourism, and journalists from the local press."

  "And none of them reacted strangely?"

  "No." There was a pause. "None reacted at all, in fact. Not to anything that I sent them. I am sorry, but I am also dealing with the events in China and . . ." She started to sob.