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 H?tel 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.
“But believe me, Emma, he’s going to be so big!” Poppy enthused. “He really has it all!”
“Including a mental problem,” I muttered as we slipped out of the kitchen and through the darkened dining room, which was closed and silent at this late hour. We silently hurried toward the lobby, keeping our faces turned away from the press mob and trying to look casual. But as soon as we rounded the corner and saw the elevator all the way across the room, we groaned in unison.
“We’ll never be able to get to it without the reporters seeing us,” I said.
Poppy nodded and rolled her eyes. She looked around for a moment. “There’s a stairway over there.”