“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.”