Ellie had never seen a white Christmas. She tried to think of her mother, the promise she’d made and the disappointment if she didn’t go. But Blanchard’s stare had a hypnotic power, a gravity that skewed everything beyond its field. Other obligations seemed only dimly important. She started to answer, and realised she’d already begun composing the excuses to her mother.
Christmas brought out the German side of the Grand Duchy. In the Place d’Armes in the heart of the city, a giant fir tree loomed over the Christmas market that filled every corner of the square. Wooden cabins festooned with lights and fake snow offered a psychedelic array of brightly coloured sweets, obscenely long sausages, carved nativity scenes and ornaments. Steam rose from vats of mulled wine, mingling in the air with the smells of gingerbread and frying onions, the sound of carols and fairground music and laughter.
Inside the conference room at the Ministry of Finance, the only concession to the season was a plastic tree with a few tired baubles at the back of the room. No one paid it any attention. There were no smiles in that room, only tense faces and brittle anticipation as the rival bidders milled about, waiting. Blanchard was there, Christine Lafarge as well, and a number of the bankers she’d met doing the due diligence. Across the aisle, Ellie saw Lechowski. His jaw rose and fell as he worried at a piece of gum.
An official called the meeting to order. The Ministry people sat at a long table across the front of the room, fat men with thin hair and shiny suits. No one looked at them. All eyes were on the double-padlocked metal box that stood on a lectern in front.
The official invited representatives of the two bidders to come forward. In turn, Lechowski and Christine Lafarge each went up and undid one of the locks. The official opened the lid and turned the box upside-down. Two sealed envelopes fell on to the table.
The president of the panel handed one envelope to each of the men beside him. They ripped them open and read the letters inside, then swapped with each other. The audience waited. The president collected both letters and confirmed their contents for himself. They conferred. Ellie twisted Blanchard’s ring on her finger. She hadn’t expected to be so nervous.
The president switched on his microphone. ‘The winning bidder is Groupe Saint-Lazare, three hundred and forty-seven million euros.’
In an instant, the Monsalvat team were on their feet, applauding and congratulating each other. Across the aisle, Lechowski and his backers sat stony-faced, the glares of men narrowly beaten and suspecting a foul. The men from the privatisation commission didn’t look much happier: they must be wondering why the sale had failed to attract a higher offer.
‘Well done, Ellie. Without you, we could not have done this.’
Blanchard kissed her full on the lips, the first time he’d ever done that at work. He must be pleased. Embarrassed and surprised, Ellie kept her eyes open, and so saw Christine Lafarge watching in the background with a knowing smile on her face. She remembered Blanchard’s story about Christine and Lechowski, and wondered if Christine and Blanchard had ever been lovers. The thought made her absurdly jealous.
Blanchard turned to murmur a few words to the commission president. Christine took her arm.
‘Vivian tells me you are going to Mont-Valois for Christmas. Michel Saint-Lazare’s chateau.’ Ellie nodded. ‘You are very lucky. It is a magical place.’
Ellie must have drunk more champagne that night than in all her life previous. The Monsalvat team drifted from bar to bar, hotel to hotel, ordering by the magnum. The group became a living organism: new faces appeared whom Ellie had never seen before; others disappeared, only to reappear two stops later with yet more hangers-on. The hotel clock had turned past 3 a.m. by the time she and Blanchard returned to their room. Blanchard ordered more champagne from room service, then set about demonstrating that it did nothing to impair his physical functioning. Ellie didn’t get to sleep until five. At eight, the telephone rang with an alarm call. When she opened her eyes, Blanchard was standing in front of the mirror tying his tie, shaved and dressed already.
‘What time is our flight?’
‘As soon as we get there.’
The airport was crowded with families heading off on holiday and ex-pat workers trying to get the last flight out before Christmas. Ellie thought she might faint if she had to queue for more than five minutes, but Blanchard pushed past all of them to an unmarked door at the back of the terminal. Inside was a parallel airport universe of friendly staff and no queues: an immigration official who glanced at their passports and wished them merry Christmas; a security officer who carried their bags to the gate; and finally a simple door that led straight on to the tarmac, up a flight of stairs and aboard a small jet.
It was like no other aircraft Ellie had seen. The eight seats looked more like leather armchairs than anything that belonged on an aeroplane, with seatbelts discreetly recessed out of sight. Ellie sank back into the chair and fell asleep to the sound of turbines and Blanchard talking on the phone in French.
At Lausanne a black Range Rover was waiting for them on the runway. They climbed in, their bags were thrown in the back, and before Ellie realised it they were on the motorway climbing towards the mountains.
‘Shouldn’t we have shown our passports or something?’ she wondered.
‘Mr Saint-Lazare has an accommodation with the Swiss authorities.’
Ellie supposed that he would. According to Fortune magazine, he was Switzerland’s seventh richest man. Despite diligent research, that was almost as much as she knew about him. The combined weight of Who’s Who, the Lexis/Nexis database and the World Wide Web supplied little more than a reputation as a generous charitable benefactor and a ruthless corporate raider, buying and selling companies the length and breadth of the continent. ‘Who is Michel Saint-Lazare?’ a plaintive article in The Economist had asked a few years ago. ‘Behind an impenetrable wall of shell companies and cross-holdings, Groupe Saint-Lazare is reputed to be one of Europe’s largest privately held companies. Yet its owner, Michel Saint-Lazare, is so reclusive some claim he died years ago.’ The only photograph she’d found was fifty years out of date, a black-and-white playboy on a post-war beachfront. Nowhere did it mention his connection with Monsalvat Bank.
The Range Rover turned off the highway, following a twisting road ever-upwards. Mountain peaks loomed in the near distance. Snow began to appear — at first small patches in the hollows of the bends, then spreading across the landscape until it drowned it completely. It dazzled Ellie; she wished she’d brought her sunglasses. In the grey, tired atmosphere of London, it hadn’t occurred to her.
The car turned again, this time onto an unploughed road through a forest. The chauffeur engaged the four-wheel drive. The trees started to fall away: when Ellie looked out the window, she saw they were on the edge of a precipice that plunged to a foaming river far below. She looked the other way for reassurance, but the mountain had disappeared. They were driving along a ridge, a thin spine of land along the top of a promontory. Ellie peered anxiously through the front window, looking for any glimpse of the house, but the low winter sun shone straight in her eyes. She hoped the driver could see where he was going.
And suddenly they were there. They rattled over a bridge, through a gate where portcullis teeth still pricked out of the arch, and into the courtyard of Michel Saint-Lazare’s home.