Chapter 2 #2
“A clause on the sponsor calendar that gives me visibility, not control.
I want to see his Sunday morning. I want to see when he is in the car, when he is in physio with you, when he is in the drivers' room.
I don't need to be there. I need to know. If our title sponsorship is going to mean anything inside this building, I need to be able to answer to my father about where his investment is in the four hours that count.”
She considered this. The espresso on the table between us had stopped steaming.
“That is not the standard exchange.”
“No.”
“I will think about it.”
“That's a yes.”
“It is not a yes. It is a position.” She picked the cup up again, drank the cold half of it in one go, and put it down. “The contractual side of this is not my call to make in the room. Camille handles the commercial language.”
She tapped her phone once and held it to her ear. “Camille. Two oh four. Now.”
She set the phone back down.
The knock came inside ninety seconds.
The woman who came in carried a tablet under one arm and a slim folder under the other.
She didn't look at me until Sofia had pointed her to the chair.
Mid-forties, tailored gray, hair pulled back in a way that took five minutes once you knew how.
The earrings were small, gold, the kind handed down rather than bought.
Watchless, like Sofia, but I could see the faint indentation on the inside of her left wrist where the band had been until the building opened for the day.
“Celeste Moreau. Camille Aubry. Camille has been managing the commercial since January.”
Camille extended her hand. The grip was professional, exact. “Mademoiselle Moreau.”
“Madame Aubry.”
“Camille. We are going to be in each other's calendars for four years.”
Noted. Her French was Loire, not Paris. The vowels carried the kind of education that had not been advertised. She sat, opened the tablet, did not open the folder.
“Sofia and I have negotiated a calendar position,” I said. “The Sunday-morning carve-out comes off, in exchange for a visibility clause on Andre's race-day schedule. Sponsor calendar, no control, full information. The commercial language to follow.”
Camille turned a single page on the tablet.
She didn't look at Sofia. “The exchange is acceptable on our side, subject to the form of the clause. Visibility, not control—agreed. We can hold the language to a notification right rather than an exclusivity. I will have the redline to Hélène by the end of the day.”
“Thank you.”
“What else?”
I had a list. I went through it.
Social media language. Camille had a position.
Settled in three minutes. Arbitration venue.
She had no position. Deferred to the lawyers.
Logo placement on the race suit. Sofia had a very specific position involving the angle of the seam on the left shoulder, which I hadn't expected, and which I conceded within forty seconds because it was clear she'd been waiting for the right person on the Moreau side to argue with about it, and I didn't need to be that person.
Eighteen minutes. At the end of it, Camille closed the tablet, gave Sofia a small nod that was less subordinate than colleague-to-colleague, and turned to me.
“I will have the redlines to your firm by eighteen hundred. I'd like ten minutes with you tomorrow morning on hospitality. Camille's office, oh-nine-thirty.”
“Camille's office, oh-nine-thirty.”
She stood, extended her hand again, and left, the slim folder still unopened under her arm.
Sofia waited until the door closed. “She is good. You will not be friends. That is the appropriate distance.”
“Understood.”
Sofia stood, picked up her phone, and offered me her hand.
“You are quicker than I was told.”
“Thank you.”
“It is not a compliment. It is a logistical observation.”
Noted again, I thought, on my way out. She does that.
I left the room with the sense that I'd passed the first of several auditions, each of which would be administered by someone whose name I'd already learned and whose particular silence I had not yet calibrated.
The corridor outside 204 was empty. I walked the length of it slowly, logging doors. 205 (closed, light above it red). 206 (closed, light green). 207 (open, two analysts inside in front of three monitors, one eating a banana while the other typed).
At the far end, the corridor opened into a glass landing that overlooked the pit lane below.
From here, I could see the front of the Orion garage.
Two of the four cars on jack stands. The orange hood of an engine cover catching the light.
A mechanic running orange tubing from the wall to the rear of the car.
Another on his knees with an electronic torque wrench.
A third at the back of the garage with a tablet and the posture of someone waiting.
The third one was tall, dark-haired, in a half-zip the color of the team's blue. The angle was wrong for his face, and the tablet was held the way drivers held tablets, which was without seeming to read it. He was waiting for the data engineer to bring up something specific.
The driver next to him, shorter, broader, white teeth visible from this distance, was Malik Johnson.
I'd been at the same Senna foundation gala as Malik three years ago. He'd been the only American in the room who knew what a forint was, which had made him the only one I could speak to for the seven minutes before dinner. He hadn't remembered me afterward. Few people did. I preferred it that way.
I didn't move from the landing. Watched the back of the man with the tablet for a count of ten. He didn't turn. No reason to. He couldn't see me at this angle, and even if he could, I wasn't yet a face in the building.
Don't, I told myself. Don't catalog him. Not yet.
I cataloged him anyway. The way the half-zip pulled across the shoulders. The way he held his weight on his back foot, not his front. The way the right hand, the one with the tablet, hung lower than the left.
Behind me, the staircase released someone. I didn't look. The steps were light, fast, female, in a kind of sneaker that wasn't standard at any luxury hotel. The voice that followed them said, in English with a faint German edge, “You are Celeste Moreau.”
I turned.
The woman had her phone in her hand and a press lanyard slung over one shoulder.
Black blazer over a Zenith team polo. Jeans.
The trainers I'd already cataloged. Hair up.
The expression on her face was the kind you could only achieve by working in PR.
It gave you nothing about what she actually thought until she'd decided what she wanted you to think.
“I am.”
“Maya Keller. Zenith comms. I asked at reception where you were.”
“You found me.”
“You are easier to find than people think. I wanted to introduce myself before the dinner tonight because Beatriz is going to seat you next to someone whose mother knew your grandmother, and the dinner will become about that. I wanted you to have at least one face in your head that was not on a list of accounts.” Below us, the man with the tablet still hadn't turned.
Maya's eyes went the same direction mine had gone, then back.
“That one is a different kind of patience. We do not see it often.”
Shit, I thought. She saw that.
I looked at her. She'd said this in one breath, with the precision of a woman who'd timed a number of difficult conversations against a stopwatch. She was watching to see whether I'd react to the grandmother sentence.
I didn't.
“Thank you,” I said.
She nodded once. “Also, you should know that the Orion paddock café does a spritz that is not bad if you find yourself needing one between five and seven. I will be there at six. If you want to be.”
“I'll see what the day looks like.”
“That's the right answer.” She smiled, briefly, professionally. Then her phone went off and the smile shut down, and she was already moving past me to the staircase before she said, over her shoulder, “I am glad you came in your own coat.”
“I'm sorry?”
She paused on the top step. “Your father told Beatriz to send a car. You walked. The whole hospitality knows. That was the right call.”
She went down the stairs at the same speed she'd come up. The door at the bottom closed. The landing was quiet again.
I stayed at the railing a moment longer.
Below, the man with the tablet still hadn't turned.
The data engineer had arrived with the laptop.
The man was now leaning over it, one hand braced on the bench, the other holding the tablet at his side.
Malik had moved to the front of the car and was speaking to one of the mechanics in what looked, from the body language, like the kind of joke mechanics liked and drivers told only to mechanics.
Maya was, I registered, the first woman in the paddock who had come to find me without an angle.
Every other woman in this world had been a Moreau by proximity—my mother's sister, my grandmother's social circle, the wives of my father's clients—or the working antagonists who'd been calibrated to me before I'd entered the room.
Maya was the first stranger who had walked the staircase to introduce herself with nothing of mine that she wanted.
I'd decided to accept the introduction. I didn't yet know what accepting would cost.
I watched the rest of the garage with the same attention I'd given the espresso bar and the carabiner. The inventory of a building I hadn't yet decided whether to belong to.
Then I went down the stairs and back out into the morning.
The Orion paddock café was on the harbor side of the hospitality row. Glass-walled box, seating for thirty, a coffee bar that did, as Maya had said, a spritz that wasn't bad.
I didn't go in.