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shuttle to Paris to pick up the flight to L.A. And on that flight, she promised herself, she’d write her letter of resignation.

Chapter 5

    Reboul had offered to go with Elena and Sam to the signing—for moral support, so he said, with perhaps a little interpreting on the side. And so, promptly at 10:30, the three of them presented themselves at the offices of Maître Arnaud, in a well-worn building in the 6th arrondissement, a neighborhood favored by several of Marseille’s army of
notaires
. A secretary showed them into the waiting room—dark and cramped, equipped with half a dozen hard chairs and a selection of magazines that dated back several years.
    Elena was leafing through an ancient copy of
Paris Match
. “Do you think these guys ever wait in their own waiting rooms?”
    Reboul smiled. “It’s an old tradition. If it looked like they had money to spend on modern waiting rooms with comfortable furniture, their clients would think they were charging too much.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen worse.”
    They were warned by an approaching cough. The door opened, and there was Maître Arnaud himself, a large, untidy man with a large, untidy moustache and impressively overgrown eyebrows, smiling and apologetic as he explained that he had been detained by a phone call. “But all is well,” he said. “Madame Colbert has recovered from her voyage down from Paris, and she’s waiting for us.”
    He led the way to his office. Clutter had been allowed to flourish there unchecked, with every surface hidden beneath piles of documents and reference books. An oasis of order had been created to accommodate a semicircle of chairs precisely arranged in front of Arnaud’s desk, and Madame Colbert had already installed herself in the central, and thus most important, chair.
    She was small, birdlike, neatly dressed, and carefully made up. As Elena, Sam, and Reboul were introduced, she inclined her head and smiled, but kept her hands clasped over the ivory handle of her walking stick. Arnaud settled himself behind his desk and separated one pile of documents from the rest. He cleared his throat.
    There followed a long, dreary hour and a half of his monotone as he read aloud through every line of the sale documents, pausing occasionally to cock his eyebrows at Reboul to confirm that this vital information was being heard and, with a bit of luck, understood. On and on it went, with Elena and Sam nodding wisely from time to time while Madame Colbert remained motionless and impassive. Finally, Arnaud was finished. The sale documents could be signed—on every page, naturally—and the certified check could be closely scrutinized by Madame Colbert. A bunch of rusting keys was handed over, and Elena and Sam were the proud owners of a house in Provence.
    Reboul had insisted that there was only one suitable way to celebrate the occasion: lunch. Lunch in their new hometown, overlooking the Mediterranean. And so he had made reservations at Chez Marcel, a restaurant with, as Reboul put it, two irresistible attractions: a magnificent view of the Vieux Port, and a talented young chef who was a native of Marseille, and who therefore understood fish.
    During the short walk down to the port, Reboul did his best to explain why buying a house in France was such a prolonged and exhausting process. “The French find it very difficult to trust anybody when it comes to business, particularly property transactions. I suppose one can’t really blame them, because every old house has its history, and it’s not unusual down here to find that one room, or an outside toilet, or a part of the garden, still belongs to a distant relative who might easily cause trouble. Obviously, this has to be foreseen, and dealt with legally. But perhaps just as important is the French love of bureaucracy. We may throw up our hands and complain about it, but in the end we accept it. I think we find it comforting. Anything simple and fast would be deeply