Chapter 2 #3
I walked, instead, the corridor that ran behind the row of hospitality units.
The service spine. Narrow, dim, cinder-block utility you only ever saw at a Grand Prix on the third or fourth day, when someone had finally needed to drag a generator past the front of house.
At ten in the morning it was clean and empty.
I walked it because I wanted to see the building from the inside out, the way I always wanted to see any structure I was about to be the largest financial interest in.
Long fluorescent strips. The corridor ran the length of the Orion unit and the Aetheris unit beyond.
Bins set into recesses along the wall. A fire extinguisher every twenty meters.
Two emergency exits onto the sea side, both alarmed.
A pinboard halfway down with the laminated schedule for the cleaning crews, issued Tuesday, already two amendments out of date.
The names on the schedule were Filipina. The surnames repeated. I gave the corridor another five seconds and moved on.
At the end of the service spine, the corridor opened into a small back lot that fed onto the pit lane through a personnel-only gate.
Two men in Orion overalls were smoking against a wall, not talking.
A third, in a hi-vis vest, was checking off a delivery on a tablet.
Past them, the pit lane proper: scrubbed, banner-lined, team garages standing open along the inner edge.
I hadn't stepped onto a pit lane in eleven years. The last time had been with my father, at Spa. I'd been wearing a school uniform.
I didn't step onto it now. I turned, instead, and went back the way I'd come.
Halfway down the service corridor, the door to the rear of the Orion unit opened from the inside, and a man came out walking toward me, not looking up.
He was in a half-zip the color of the team's blue, the tablet now under his arm instead of in his hand.
He was eating something out of a paper napkin in three short bites.
The light in the corridor flattened the planes of his face.
In the moment I registered the shape of him before I registered the identity, what I saw was a man who walked with the same economy Sofia had spoken with.
Nothing wasted. The body moved only as it needed to.
He looked up.
The corridor was barely wide enough for two people to pass without acknowledgment. He was Andre Silva. I'd recognized the face by then, from the team's commercial deck and the British press last year. He registered me as a person in his path. He didn't break stride.
Neither did I.
The pass took less than three seconds.
In that interval he looked at me. Not at the badge.
Not at the coat. Not at the folder under my arm.
At my face. Whatever he saw he didn't signal.
His eyes were the kind of dark brown that read as black under fluorescent strips, and his expression held nothing I could decode in the space of a corridor's width.
He held the look for exactly the duration of the pass, no more.
Then he was past me and I was past him, and the door at the end of the corridor closed behind him with a quiet click and I was alone again in the cinder block and the strip-light.
My pulse, which usually had the courtesy to ask before it moved, didn't.
The hand I'd been holding the folder with was warm. I switched it to the other.
That, I told myself, was a corridor pass.
It had been a corridor pass.
Don't.
Don't make it anything else.
I went out the way I'd come, through the front of the Orion unit, past the espresso bar where the Portuguese mechanics were now gone and a single junior was wiping down the steam wand, past Larroque's desk where Larroque nodded at me without looking up, past the junior at the door who said “Mademoiselle” and opened it, and back out into Avenue d'Ostende.
The barricades had been repositioned during the hour I'd been inside.
Thursday foot traffic had begun to thicken: photographers with two cameras each, accredited journalists in the unimpressed half-dress code of people who'd done every race weekend on the calendar, a handful of guests in country club whites who wouldn't be allowed past the second gate.
I checked the phone. Two messages.
The first from Hélène:
Sofia has been in touch directly. Says you handled the access clause well. Did not say how. Should I worry?
I didn't reply.
The second from Beatriz Roca:
Looking forward to tonight. Eight forty-five at the tender. I have you on my right. We need to talk about the Sunday morning.
I read it twice.
The Sunday-morning carve-out had been, until forty minutes ago, Beatriz's leverage.
Sofia had given it away, or at least given me the room to negotiate it down without Beatriz in the loop.
That meant Beatriz would walk into the dinner believing she had a card and would discover, somewhere between the soup and the main course, that the card had already been played.
The discovery wouldn't happen in front of the table. Beatriz was too good for that. But she would log it, and the version of me she sat down across from on Friday morning wouldn't be the version she'd been planning to sit down across from on Thursday night.
Good, I thought. Let her log it.
The walk back up Avenue d'Ostende took the same eight minutes, in reverse. Up the slope, past the same cafés, the same line of police, the same fa?ades. At the corner where the avenue turned onto the small private street that led to the building, I looked back once.
The harbor was visible between two buildings.
The salt-and-diesel air came up the slope on the breeze, mixed now with the heat of the morning and the first faint trace of someone's cigarette.
Across the water, the Orion-chartered superyacht was being washed down by a crew in blue overalls.
By eight forty-five tonight, the yacht would be lit, the deckhand waiting in the harbor slip, the dining room set, and Beatriz would smile at me from the head of the table with the calibration of a woman who had not yet been told what she'd lost.
I put the phone back in my pocket and went up the rest of the slope, the folder still under my arm. The term sheet inside it now smaller by one clause than it had been at six this morning, and worth, by my count, three more.