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Also by Stephen Clarke

For more information on Stephen Clarke and his books, see his website at www.stephenclarkewriter.com

All the characters and events in this novel are completely fictitious, even those that might seem alarmingly real.

The author would like to thank everyone who showed him around, or talked him through, the darkest corners of the European Union’s institutions. For obvious reasons, it is impossible to name them, or even give both their initials.

And also, in no particular order, to J, A, J, R, W, T, O, D, K, S, V, B, C, L, S, F, H and M.

Thanks as always to N and to the UEA crowd for their support, and to SLA for getting things moving.

‘Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.’

Albert Einstein

‘Euro banknotes can make men impotent.’

Report in the British press, 2002

‘VIOLENT THINGS, OYSTERS,’ the Englishman said. I didn’t know why he was telling me this. We were just two drinkers sitting side-by-side at a bar in Brussels.

‘Really?’ My own encounters with oysters had all been pretty one-sided, usually ending in a twelve–nil victory in my favour. ‘You mean the way they can shred your fingertips if you try and open them yourself?’ I asked.

‘No, they’re evil little bastards. They sneak up on you. Didn’t you know?’

I turned my attention back to my nearly empty glass. I didn’t feel like listening to some drunkard’s paranoid rant about being followed everywhere by molluscs.

‘People don’t realise that it’s not always a bad oyster that makes you ill,’ he said. ‘It can be a good one that you haven’t killed cleanly.’

I tried to work out how you’d do this. A karate blow to the neck? Assuming oysters have necks. Or with a shotgun, perhaps? Might be a bit messy.

‘Yes, you have to chew the whole thing up into a mush, so it’s well and truly dead before you swallow it. If you don’t, it’ll slide down into your guts alive, and pump out antibodies until it finally dies.’

‘So what you’re saying is that oysters are intestinal terrorists sent on suicide missions to destroy humanity?’ I asked.

‘You may take the piss,’ he said, perceptively, ‘but if you’re not careful, a perfectly fresh oyster will redecorate your insides with its antibodies, and you’ll be sick as a dog for twenty-four hours. You can stay allergic for ever, too. You eat another oyster and you’ll be vomiting through the bathroom wall.’

‘Sorry, but that’s just the way they are. Evil, vindictive, slimy bastards.’

Luckily I hadn’t been feeling like dinner anyway. We were in a raucous pub in the centre of Brussels, and after several glasses of a thick, dark-brown liquid brewed by sadistic Belgian monks, I didn’t even fancy a plate of perfectly non-aggressive lettuce. Nourishing stuff, that beer.

‘Make outlaws of the little slimeballs. A new European law making them illegal.’

‘That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘If Europe went around banning anything that makes us chunder, schnapps would be outlawed in twenty-eight countries by now. And late-night kebabs would be a thing of the past.’

‘Well, maybe not ban them outright, but make them damn near impossible to sell. We might introduce a law whereby oysters have to be humanely killed before being served. You know, oblige restaurants to stun each one electronically before opening it. Or apply the old straight-cucumber principle, so oysters can only be sold if they have perfectly oval shells. That’ll have those Frogs weeping into their seaweed, won’t it?’

Even I knew enough about Brussels to realise that Members of the European Parliament were people who had the power to turn their personal crusades into law.

So my new friend was right about making Frenchmen weep. An embargo on oysters would scuttle the economy of a large slice of the French coast, as well as sabotaging the menus of some very chic brasseries in Paris.

‘Yeah, a few posh posers who don’t vote in European elections. We don’t care about them.’

‘What, outlaw the Belgians’ national dish? No, couldn’t do that to our generous hosts, could we?’ He gargled a laugh through a deep swallow of Flemish ale. ‘Anyway, mum’s the word on all this. You’re English, right?’

‘French?’ Suddenly he was sitting bolt upright, and looking as if a dozen oysters were pumping antibodies straight into his bulging eyes. ‘French? You’re joking?’

‘No joke. I usually live in Paris, but I’ve come to Brussels to do some work on protecting endangered local languages in France. You know, Breton, Basque, Corsican and all that.’

‘You’re not actually French, though? You haven’t given up your passport?’

‘No. But the woman I’m working for would be very interested in your scheme to ban the oyster. She’s the MEP for Brittany West.’

‘I think you mean merde,’ I corrected him. ‘Unless you were trying to speak Breton, in which case it’s kaoc’h.’

I must admit that I wasn’t being entirely truthful with my loose-tongued English friend. I wasn’t really working for a French MEP. Not yet, anyway.

In fact, I’d only arrived in Brussels that same day. I’d come at the invitation of my friend Elodie, the daughter of my former boss in Paris, Jean-Marie. Well, I say invitation, but it was more like a summons: ‘Reserved a room for you at the Hotel Empereur Napoléon Bonaparte in Bruxelles. Call me and I’ll tell you more.’

I’d asked for details, of course, but all she’d been willing to say was that she wanted to offer me a ridiculously well-paid job working on endangered languages. When I asked whether this would mean trekking through Amazonian rainforests, she’d laughed and said, ‘No, more like Breton pig-shit.’ But she’d sent me a first-class train ticket, and so here I was in Brussels, intrigued but wondering whether it might not be a very bad idea indeed.

I tried to convince myself that any doubts I had were symptoms of gross ingratitude. After all, Elodie had promised me a generous slice of Europe’s budget to come and work for her on a short-term contract. What was I worried about? She’d even paid me a sizeable chunk up front. Whatever happened, it was going to be a profitable few weeks.

The trouble was that I had been screwed by Elodie before, both literally and metaphorically.

We’d been (very briefly) lovers, but only because she wanted to shock her papa, who was my boss. Then a few months later she’d tried to sabotage a new job I had, promoting the UK as a tourist destination in America. That little rivalry ended in a vicious fruit-fight in Los Angeles that had left her dad smothered from head to foot in fresh strawberries. But since then we’d made up, and I’d even done the catering for her wedding to a filthy-rich Parisian banker. So I hoped I could trust her now.

My instinct was that her trustworthiness depended on whether her father, Jean-Marie, was involved in whatever scheme she had bubbling in her cauldron. Too often the pair of them were side-by-side in the family kitchen, cooking up mischief.

Jean-Marie was the député (Member of the French Parliament) for a country town in Mayenne, just south of Normandy, an election he’d won by promising the local farmers that they would be able to give up the tiresome business of growing things, and live for ever on the subsidies that he was going to obtain for them from Brussels. Although, come to think of it, that’s what most French politicians promise their farmers, so maybe Jean-Marie wasn’t so bad after all.

It seemed only logical that Elodie should follow her dad into politics and get herself elected as an MEP. What better way for him to obtain those subsidies for his farmers?

One: how did she get herself elected in the far west of Brittany where, to the best of my knowledge, she’d never been in her whole life?

And two: she’d studied at France’s most expensive business school and recently married into a Parisian private bank, so why give up sky-high earnings in the world of wealth management to go to Belgium and spend half her life listening to debates about the minimum size of haddock and whether to reclassify British chocolate as ‘sugary brown fat’?

Early next morning I was due to find out. So it was time to say ‘au revoir’ to the Brussels pub and its talkative English barfly, get back to my hotel and have a bit of shut-eye.

The only problem with that idea, I realised when I finally located the pub exit and emerged into a cobbled side street, was that Belgian beer seems to coagulate somewhere behind the knees, making the act of walking unusually difficult.

Worse, thanks to some quirk in the Brussels climate, the evening had suddenly become rather blurred. I found that I couldn’t recognise the street I was in, or see clearly enough to call up a map on my phone. I couldn’t even aim my fingers at the phone to unlock it.

I still had a vague idea of the name of my hotel, so I just needed to ask someone for directions. And there was a friendly-looking woman standing a few metres away on the street corner. She seemed to be smiling at me, as if she wanted to help.

‘Oh, one hundred per cent English. Not French at all,’ I replied, and laughed for some reason.

She seemed pleased to hear this, to judge by the way she thrust out her ample chest, which was, I now noticed, only half-covered by a tight, low-cut T-shirt. She began to totter towards me on perilously high heels, and I was afraid that she would topple over on the cobblestones and scuff her knees, which were totally unprotected by her tiny shorts.

‘Anything you want,’ she said, which was highly thoughtful of her, considering that we’d only just met.

‘Brussels to force farmers to give toys to pigs.’

Report in the British press, 2003

NEXT MORNING THERE was one reason to feel grateful, but only one. On waking up (or oozing back into the swamp of consciousness), I found a message from Elodie saying that she’d had to go to Paris, and would be arriving back in Brussels about eight hours late for our meeting. This was a huge relief, because my body was quivering at the idea of getting anywhere near vertical, never mind having to walk, think or speak.

As hangovers go, it was an astonishing 3D experience. A non-stop barrage of beer bottles was being thrown at my head by a stone-cold-sober Belgian monk. Those brothers certainly know how to make you feel guilty about over-indulging the flesh. I’ve never prayed so hard for forgiveness.

And through the shroud of physical pain, I got a vague sense that I’d sinned in more ways than one. I’d drunk far too much, that was certain, but hadn’t I also committed some other awful misdemeanour?

I devoted the whole day to foetal moaning, until about five o’clock when I dragged myself to the bathroom for a frostbite-inducing shower. After that, it only took a quadruple espresso to give me enough strength to crawl into a taxi and beg to be taken as smoothly as possible to Bruxelles-Midi station. A strange name, I thought, ‘Midday Station’ – was it just for lunchtime trains? Did they also have a ‘Bruxelles-Soir’ or a ‘Bruxelles-Petit Déjeuner’? I decided to ask Elodie, if I could still remember the question when she got there. Her train was due in from Paris at six fifteen.

As the taxi rattled through the busy streets, I closed my eyes and tried to force my brain to focus on the task ahead – namely, to appear sober, sane and employable. Despite all the dangers of associating with Elodie and her dad, I needed the money. The tea room I part-owned in Paris was doing well, but virtually all the profits were being re-invested in the business. We were also hoping to open up a second branch. Consequently, filling my empty pockets with cash was top of my to-do list.

I must have dozed slightly, because I opened my eyes to see the driver mouthing something at me.

I gave him some euros, asked him to wait and did my best to walk straight as I entered the station.

The new section, where Elodie was due to arrive, put Paris’s Gare du Nord to shame. The concourse running below the tracks was a bit gloomy, but this was a relief for someone with a blinding migraine. And there was nothing shabby about it. The shops were posh, wafting out fresh baking smells and chocolaty aromas that would have been highly attractive if I hadn’t had a force-nine hangover. There was a fresh-juice bar and even a flower shop. It was all a pleasant change from the Gare du Nord’s wind-blown, pigeon-pooped coffee cabins and its gangs of beggars on the hunt for open bags and loose pockets. It always seemed to me that the French had spent so many years whingeing because London’s original choice as its Eurostar terminal was Waterloo that they forgot to doll up their own station.

Bruxelles-Midi wasn’t bad at all, I decided. I even found a bench with no one living on it, so that I could relax while I waited for Elodie.

Her sudden appearance at the foot of the platform steps cut short my brief rest period. She looked as if she’d been drinking, too, though in her case it had been cocaine cocktails. She came charging at me, her black raincoat billowing behind her like a parachute. Oh no, I thought, this was exactly what I didn’t need in my fragile state – Elodie in supercharged business mode.

She was looking good, I had to admit – long-legged and lithe, her dark skirt hugging her hips affectionately. Her blonde hair was tied back classily to reveal a face that had matured in the year or so since I’d seen her. Her red lips looked determined rather than pouty, and her eyebrows were plucked and lasered into perfect symmetry.

‘Oh, we’ll have time for all that “hello, kiss-kiss, how are you?” stuff in the taxi. You did get a taxi?’

I trotted along beside her, walking twice as fast as my body really wanted to, and ushered her towards the chic black Audi with a yellow chequered stripe that was waiting outside the station.

We wasted a few seconds while she stood by a car door waiting until someone (moi) opened it for her, and then the taxi set off along a narrow, semi-pedestrian street.

‘Oh.’ She leant forward. ‘Au parlement européen, s’il vous plaît,’ she told him, almost politely. ‘Le plus vite possible,’ she added, with a note of girlish pleading that she turns on whenever necessary.

‘OK, madame,’ he said, and explained that there were lots of traffic jams, so he would have to take a route that would feel as though it wasn’t very direct.

‘Très bien, très bien,’ Elodie huffed, instantly reverting to her true impatient-diva personality.

The driver swung us deep into a criss-cross of narrow roads. Occasionally there came the shock of cobblestones that turned my aching skull into a cocktail shaker, so I tried to focus on the thrill of discovering a new city. It all looked like France, and yet it didn’t.

It seemed that Brussels architects had been told to design French styles in red London brick, but with all the Parisian curves knocked off. The bricks were often laid in horizontal lines, like hoops on a T-shirt, to make the slim, one-room-wide buildings look fatter. They were low-rise and individual in style, not like nineteenth-century Paris streets, where all the buildings come from the same mould. Here in Brussels there were balconies and bay windows all over the place, pointed Gothic next to flat-topped modernism.

It was all very cute and provincial for an international capital. Only the chicness of some of the shops gave away the fact that the euro is domiciled here. I guessed that you’d need a tax-free expat salary to pay for some of those makes of shoe or dress.

There was not much traffic in the side streets, and the only times the driver reduced his frantic speed were to let pedestrians cross the road, even when there were no red lights to stop him. This very un-Parisian habit naturally had Elodie seething with indignation.

‘Are you really obliged to stop at every crossing?’ she demanded in clipped French.

Right, I thought, and it’s attitudes like that that are making people say Brussels has got too big for its boots.

‘Oui?’ she said defiantly, as if it had been an accusation – which it probably was.

We emerged into a wide, congested boulevard, passing a medieval castle that looked like a miniature French chateau. The traffic jam gave the driver the opportunity to turn around and unleash a stream of conversation about the famous French tax exiles he’d had in his taxi. I could hear Elodie groaning with indifference, so I encouraged him with an interested ‘vraiment?’ or two.

‘And there’s another one, really famous, just arrived as an exile this week,’ he said, grinning. ‘Have a guess. A female singer.’

‘Edith Piaf,’ Elodie hissed, and never before had the legendary chanteuse’s name been uttered with such vehemence, except perhaps by someone discussing her dubious activities under the Occupation.

The driver took the hint and went into a sulk. I gave Elodie a reproachful look.

‘It’s his fault,’ she said to me in English. ‘He needs to concentrate on driving. I’m late.’

‘You think I would dash to Brussels just for you, Paul?’ She laughed. ‘You’re so cute. No, I have to sign the MEPs’ register before seven or I won’t receive my daily allowance. It’s more than three hundred euros. A poor MEP needs every cent she can get.’

‘So you’ve been working all day for the EU in Paris, have you?’ My question came out even more sarcastically than I’d intended, but Elodie just shrugged.

‘I’m an MEP. Every breath I take is working for the EU.’ She giggled and repeated the line to the tune of the famous Police song. It’s still very popular in France, and the French really know how to murder it.

I gazed longingly out of the car window at the neon-green cross of a pharmacie, which, being in Brussels, was also an apotheek. I guessed this was one reason why the EU administration was set up here – the Belgians were already good at bilingual signs before they had to add the twenty-odd new languages.

‘Oh, Paul, it’s so refreshing to see you again,’ Elodie said, in a sudden outbreak of friendliness. ‘No one answers me back like you do.’ She looked across at me, almost affectionately. ‘But what have you done to yourself? You look terrible. Have you been drinking?’

‘Oh no. Given it up,’ I said. ‘Haven’t drunk a drop since, ooh …’ I waved my hand about, as if trying to conjure up an abstinence of anywhere between six hours and six months.

‘Honest,’ I said. ‘I was up all night revising my irregular Breton verbs.’

‘That’s not what I’ve heard, Paul. What’s this about you and a prostitute?’ She gave me an accusing grin.

‘The manager called me at dawn this morning complaining about you. Honestly, Paul, a hooker? Haven’t you got a girlfriend at the moment? And why did you take her back to the hotel? I use that place all the time for my guests.’

Her barrage of questions stirred up some memories that my hangover had successfully blanked out. That woman on the street corner. The half a T-shirt. Those miniature shorts. Oh no, I thought, surely not?

‘I didn’t take her back to the hotel, she took me,’ I recalled, dimly. ‘And I’m sure I didn’t … I mean, I wouldn’t … I’ve never … not with a …’ I had to admit I didn’t sound too convincing, but I was sure that nothing untoward had happened, even with a brainful of Belgian beer. I’ve never paid for sex in my life. Well, not financially anyway. Emotionally, I’ve had to fork out a fortune, of course.

‘I know you didn’t take her up to your room,’ Elodie said. ‘The night porter stopped her.’

‘Oh yes, the night porter.’ I got an image of a snarling man in a grey waistcoat. Then one of the same man, suddenly lying down on the job. ‘It was his own fault she punched him. She wasn’t a happy lady. I’d just explained to her that it was all a big misunderstanding and then he waded in. But I had the situation under control.’

‘Under control? From what the manager told me, you were down on your knees while she was trying to pull your wallet out of your jeans. The porter gave her twenty euros and threw her out.’

‘Believe me, Paul, you should give him fifty as a reward. If one of those street girls had got into your bedroom, you would now have no credit card, no phone, no passport and probably no willy. They’re dangerous. Prostitution is legal in Belgium, but it doesn’t exactly attract the best people. I hope you’ll stay sober while you’re working for me.’

‘I told you, I’ve taken the pledge,’ I pledged. ‘And by the way, you still haven’t told me exactly what I’m meant to be doing with these endangered languages.’

The small street we were in looked just as shabby-chic as lots of others we’d driven along, but the parked cars were noticeably bigger, with international number plates. Then we hit a wide avenue and the architecture suddenly got glassy, its modern façades peppered with foreign banks and chic cafés.

We entered a small open square, presided over by a statue of an exhausted-looking politician. On two sides of the square were café terraces hosting a horde of office workers, male and female, all with drinks in hands and smiles on faces. Something about working at the European Parliament clearly made its staff pretty happy.

‘Merci,’ I said, filling in for Elodie, who paid wordlessly, grabbed her receipt and set off at a canter. Her low heels clicking, she jogged into an immense beige-floored forecourt that was ringed by a curved wall of billboard-sized photos publicising successful EU actions. These grateful recipients of euros were smiling even more widely than the civil servants out in the square.

There were more eurocrat-looking people in the forecourt, standing in gaggles or heading towards the cafés. Elodie weaved between them and began bounding up a wide staircase into what had to be the biggest glass construction outside of America or Dubai. Honestly, whoever got the glazing contract for the European Parliament building must have retired straight away to the Caymans. Or started up a window-cleaning business.

‘Allez, Paul, move, move, move,’ Elodie barked over her shoulder. Now she was my personal trainer.

At the first set of doors she had to dig into her bag for her badge, and begged the security man to let me through, using a mixture of official authority and shameless biting of her bottom lip.

Elodie bundled me into a revolving door, almost threw me through a metal detector gateway and then we were galloping across a wide, marble-floored foyer towards a reception counter, where she finally skidded to a halt.

The woman behind the desk was chatting amicably to the man she was dealing with, a casually dressed type in jeans – the sort of guy Elodie loves to push around.

‘Excuse me, but this is urgent,’ she foghorned in French. ‘I’m an MEP.’

‘Go ahead,’ he said in English, clearly used to being elbowed aside by Parisians.

‘I’m going to sign in. It’s not seven yet, n’est-ce pas?’ Elodie held up her wristwatch arm, so that everyone could witness that she fully deserved her daily allowance because she had arrived for work a whole two minutes before the end of the day.

‘Seven? MEPs can sign in after that, madame,’ the receptionist said, not quite managing to hide the satisfaction of seeing that Elodie had dashed like crazy for nothing. ‘Until eleven, in fact.’

‘Eleven?’ Elodie’s mouth dropped open in shock. ‘But I always sign in before seven. I missed dinner in Paris for this. Only with my husband, but even so … Why does no one inform us about these rules?’

As usual with Elodie – with almost anyone French, in fact – everything was someone else’s fault.

‘There is a document, madame,’ the receptionist replied. She turned around, opened a cupboard behind her and, totally deadpan, dropped a paving slab of paper on the desk. ‘MEPs’ regulations,’ she said.

Elodie reeled back as though she were being asked to take possession of a live badger.

‘Maybe Louis Vuitton does an MEPs’ regulations holder,’ I suggested. ‘You could claim it as an expense.’

‘Thank you, my assistant will read it and pass on any useful information,’ Elodie said, waving her arm in my direction. ‘Stay here while I go and sign in,’ she told me. ‘I don’t want to badge you through a hundred more security gates. Why don’t you get yourself a visitor’s pass while you wait?’

She left me standing with the guy she had barged out of her life. An embarrassing moment. He looked me up and down. I was almost as casual as he was – white shirt, jeans and a dark suit jacket – but I had an extra layer of dishevelment thrown in. And he was in possession of permanent plastic ID hanging from a well-worn strap around his neck, while I was just an interloper.

‘After you,’ I finally said, to break the awkward silence. ‘Sorry for pushing in. She’s French.’

Elodie returned to reception ten minutes later, all smiles, as you would be if you’d just received a few hundred euros in return for one squiggle of a pen. She thanked the receptionist and apologised graciously to the guy she’d pushed out of the way – though I’d since realised he was only there to chat up the receptionist, and would have stepped aside anyway.

Elodie took my arm like an old friend instead of an arresting officer, and guided me, dishing out smiles in all directions like a princess at a charity jumble sale, back through security and into the fresh air.

‘I need a drink,’ she announced as we descended the steps towards the forecourt and its circle of giant posters. One of them depicted a dusty toddler splashing clear water into his mouth, thanks to the EU.

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Something pure and fizzy.’ I was sure the photo of the toddler had been sponsored by the cafés just outside Parliament. You couldn’t walk past it without feeling parched. ‘Then maybe you can explain what you want me to do with these languages.’

‘Oh, nothing much,’ Elodie said. She performed one of those raspberries that French people blow when they don’t care a damn about a subject you want to discuss.

‘Nothing much is what brings most of us here, Paul. Didn’t you know?’ She laughed at her own witticism. ‘No, what I mean is that the languages project is what I’ve got a budget for, but it’s just a cover for something much more important.’

‘Yes.’ She pulled me closer, looking around at the groups of badge-wearing people in the forecourt to see if any of them were snooping. They weren’t – they all looked as though they were indulging in relaxed, end-of-the-working-day chat – but she lowered her voice anyway. ‘I’ve got a mission for you, Paul.’

‘Really?’ This sounded either great fun or, knowing Elodie, potentially catastrophic.

‘Yes.’ She released my arm and started striding across the beige flagstones towards the cafés out in the square.

‘Well, aren’t you going to tell me what it is?’ I asked, jogging after her.

‘You dragged me out of bed just to tell me that?’ My head started to pound again, clearly blaming me for making it work so hard when it could have been resting on a pillow.

‘Out of bed at six in the evening?’ Elodie laughed as she waited to cross the road to the nearest café terrace.

‘OK.’ She shook her head at me, her bothersome child, and leant in close again. ‘You’ve been following the news about the referendum to decide whether the UK leaves the EU or not?’

There had been nothing else in the news for months, with everyone trying to predict when it would happen and how it would end. Now that the date had been set, the coverage had risen to blanket level. Even the weather reports were smothered – how many millimetres of rain will it take to affect the turnout?

‘Well, anyway, I – or should I say we …’ She checked again that no one nearby could hear. ‘We, the French, don’t want Britain to leave.’

It seemed hard to believe. Back in Paris, people had been saying that getting rid of France’s hereditary rival in Europe’s power struggle was a highly attractive prospect. It was exactly what Napoleon had been trying to do 200 years ago.

‘No, we don’t.’ Elodie lowered her voice still further until it was little more than a tickle in my ear. ‘We need a strong Europe. To oppose the hegemony of the Americans.’

‘Ah yes.’ The French love using words like ‘hegemony’ when talking about their biggest bugbear, the Transatlantics.

I have no idea what it means, and I don’t think they always do, either, but it sounds good.

‘Besides, the British don’t realise what advantages they get from being part of a big European team,’ she said. ‘Britain would never be so powerful in isolation. It would be seen by the world as just another little island, like it really is. A sort of inflated Corsica. You English are closing your eyes to the truth of all this. You are – how do you say? – sticking your head in an ostrich?’

Only when she was really annoyed did Elodie’s excellent command of English desert her.

‘A dangerous thing to do,’ I agreed. ‘And where do I fit in? In your plans, I mean, not in the ostrich.’

‘You will help us to stop Britain leaving, of course.’ She stepped back and gave me a French grimace of incomprehension at my slow-wittedness, including a twist of the eyebrows and a crinkling of the nostrils that it would have taken a litre of Botox to smooth out.

‘Oh.’ This was a surprise. ‘And you think I might want to do that, do you?’

‘You don’t want Britain to stay in Europe, Paul? You live here. You’re a continental.’ She gawped at me as if I’d just announced I was going to leave a jacuzzi party before the bubbles had warmed up.

‘Well, I’m not entirely sure what I want yet. I’m still weighing up the arguments.’

‘That’s all very balanced of you, Paul, but weigh this up: I am paying you – very generously – to do a job, so I want you to do it.’

‘We have a plan, Paul. I will explain in full tomorrow. Now, come and get me that drink. You have started work already. We don’t want to waste Europe’s money.’

With this, she held up an arm and strode out in front of a taxi that screeched to a halt to let her cross the road. It was a move that would have got her killed in Paris. She had obviously acclimatised to Brussels very quickly.

‘EU to ban singing in pubs.’

Report in the British press, 2002

‘WELCOME TO PLUCKS,’ Elodie told me as we walked into the noise of a crowded café.

‘No, it’s a typically Brussels name. Everything is abbreviated here – except for my expenses, of course. “Plux” is an abbreviation for “place du Luxembourg”. That’s this square. It’s where everyone comes after work.’

By ‘everyone’ she didn’t mean bus drivers, waffle-makers and window-cleaners. She meant everyone who was anyone, the cream of the crop of eurocrats. From the look of them, the city’s clothes shops were doing as well as its cafés. Same for the hairdressers and hair-removers. The gyms, too – the café was full of trim waistlines, slim calves, tight butts. Even some of the middle-agers looked in good shape, with that upright stance they get from a mixture of Pilates and exaggerated self-worth.

‘Shall I get you a drink?’ I offered, though I didn’t much fancy the crush at the bar. ‘What would you like?’

‘No need,’ Elodie said, and held up two fingers towards someone I didn’t see. ‘I have my own private waitress,’ she added mysteriously. ‘Mineral water OK? I always start with that, before deciding if it’s worth staying on for something stronger.’

We went outside on to the immense open terrace, and while we waited for Elodie’s mystery waitress, she talked me through what was going on around us.

‘The older guys in suits and the older, uptight-looking women are mostly MEPs, lobbyists or diverse civil servants. The young girls with the guys are their “assistants”. An MEP can hire whoever he wants here in Brussels, and his wife will never see her, so cute women are in high demand, especially with the ugly guys. The younger guys in the chic suits are mainly MEPs’ assistants. Their female equivalents are the same, although some of the very chic girls are stagiaires – interns – hoping to get spotted by an important man and given a hand upwards, in all senses of the expression. The not-quite-so-chic people usually want a better job so they can get really chic. The bulges in their pockets are business cards. The eccentric-looking older ones are MEPs creating a personality for themselves. There are plenty of them here tonight, because Thursday is our last evening in Brussels, before we leave.’

‘On Thursday nights I usually go back to my voters, Paul. Well, nearer to them anyway, to Paris. But this week I’m staying here for the whole weekend, especially for you. Which means that I want you to look very different for me tomorrow morning. Get some new clothes. I’ll put them on the expense account. You can’t go around looking like a drunk English tourist, if you’re working for France.’

I only had time to nod before one of the très chic women Elodie had been talking about strode up to us, holding two tall glasses of deliciously clear liquid, topped with slices of lime.

So Elodie wasn’t using her married name. Good move, I thought – Martin was classless and easy to remember, whereas her husband was saddled with Bonnepoire, a posh name that meant something like ‘gullible idiot’.

‘This is Pol Wess,’ Elodie said, pronouncing my name as the French always do. ‘Pol, meet Manon. She’s one of my assistants parliamentaires.’

Manon’s straight dark hair was caressing her shoulders in that amazing ‘ceci n’est pas un style’ way that only Frenchwomen seem to manage, so that it looks as if it grew that way completely by chance and that nature is therefore a brilliant hairdresser.

She was gazing straight into my eyes, as if to make sure I strayed no further south than her tastefully made-up eyelids and full, dark lips. She had one of those lucky faces that don’t really need make-up but look even more natural with it, if that makes any sense. Which I wasn’t, because I was astonished that Elodie had chosen such a looker as an assistant. Too much competition, surely?

I opened my mouth to begin a bit of ‘Oh, you work with Elodie, do you?’ banter, but I must have been gawping for too long, because I missed my chance.

‘How would you like them to vote?’ she asked, and from the way she looked at me, I guessed there was only one right answer.

‘Well, like you, I’ll be working with Elodie, so we’ll be on the same side,’ I said.

‘Yes. Well, I must return to talk to Monsieur Cholpin.’ I detected hostility in her tone, as if I’d given the wrong answer. Or perhaps she’d just read my mind. Most men probably had exactly the same thoughts when they first set eyes on her.

The French usually think it’s hilarious when you mix languages like that, but she just gave a tepid smile and left.

‘Yes,’ was all she had to say on that subject, as if efficiency might be out of place in the European Parliament.

We both watched Manon walk stylishly back through the crowd towards a short man with thinning, floppy grey hair whose suit looked frequently worn, but expensive. He was grinning up at a tall thirty-something woman, apparently deciding where to start biting her. Instead, he took a business card out of his pocket and pressed it into her hand like a precious gift. It was a strangely seductive gesture, coming from this nerdy-looking guy who anywhere else would be just a little grey man. He then grabbed the woman in an excessive hug, as though she had just won the World Cup for France’s female football team. But there was no look of joy on her face, only sufferance. He released her after a good ten seconds and she backed away, nodding politely, like underlings do in films about Chinese emperors. As soon as she had gone, he turned his hungry eyes on Manon. He was obviously quite an operator.

‘Cholpin was Minister of Agriculture,’ Elodie said, as if in explanation. ‘Now he’s an MEP for Normandy.’

‘Ha!’ Elodie almost choked on her mineral water. ‘Pension, you mean. Two terms as an MEP and you are eligible for the full pension. Comfortable for life. French politicians get it as a reward. My team are already working on my re-election.’

‘Oh, Paul, surely you know it’s never too early for a French person to start thinking about a luxurious retirement.’

People kept wandering up and saying polite hellos to Elodie. MEPs were big-shots here, I realised. Another drink materialised in her hand, delivered by an ultra-classy guy in a sharp pinstripe. He was sickeningly slick, with a blond head straight out of a hair-conditioner advert and a suit that seemed ridiculously pleased to be wrapped around his tall frame.

The glass he brought was wine-shaped, and Elodie accepted it with a wide smile, handing me her half-finished mineral water. So that was what MEPs’ assistants were – glorified furniture. Manon was a drinks trolley, I was the mantelpiece.

The pinstriped newcomer granted me a brief, indifferent glance and then huddled in close to Elodie, almost literally shouldering me away. It was becoming only too clear how the Brussels class system works – no suit, nobody.

From the snippets I heard of the pinstripe’s opening gambit, I could tell he had a faint accent – Scandinavian, probably. He was saying that he’d heard Elodie speak at some meeting or other.

‘I was very impressed by your argument that grow and near should work closer together, without excluding regions,’ he said, whatever that meant.

‘Oh, I’m so glad you agree,’ she gushed. ‘Regions are very close to my heart.’

‘And I’m sure you have a very big heart,’ he said, and even without a hangover I would have felt a wave of nausea. That was a line straight out of a 1980s French film starring a Saint-Tropez lifeguard with permed hair, skin-tight Speedos and a fake-gold name-bracelet. But Elodie didn’t seem to mind. She laughed and said she was devoting her heart entirely to Brittany, no matter how attractive other regions might look.

Wondering how long I’d be able to survive in a place where nerdy guys mauled unwilling women in exchange for a business card, and smoothies with suits could spout sub-Casanova come-ons and not be laughed at, I moved away, intending to get myself a refresher. Something stronger than water, maybe.

My route indoors to the bar was suddenly blocked by what initially looked like a glamorous cannon.

It was a tall woman a few years older than me and dressed to impress, with a gunmetal-blue business suit and a blouse that seemed to be having a bad top-button day.

Aha, I thought. I’d only been on the scene a few minutes and already I’d been spotted. I told her that I was indeed ‘travailling avec Madame Martin’.

The lady’s friendly interrogation went on for a couple more minutes, rather like a TV panel game where a contestant has to work out the identity of the mystery guest. After a few questions, she knew everything I was willing to tell her.

‘Et qui êtes-vous?’ I asked her. In reply she gave me a short list of initials and abbreviations that I was clearly meant to recognise, ending with the only words I really understood – ‘public affairs’.

‘I like your style,’ she added. ‘A parliamentary assistant, but not too chic. Low-key, cool. There should be more like you.’

‘No, very private ones,’ she said, and raised her eyebrows as if to imply that this really was an outrageous come-on. I couldn’t believe it. Did everyone in Brussels attract groupies so easily?

I was trying to work out how to respond when I caught sight of someone over her shoulder. It was a guy with a dark, well-clipped beard who seemed to be eyeing me distastefully. Maybe this Sharker was his girlfriend.

He nudged another guy standing next to him and they both gave me a stare. The second guy nodded, as if in agreement with something unpleasant being said about me. I saw that they were wearing almost identical conservative suits and name badges. It looked as though they were deciding whether to expel this intruder who dared to chat up a classy woman while not wearing visible ID.

‘Who are they?’ my new female friend asked. So it wasn’t her bloke after all.

‘I don’t know. But I think I’ve seen the guy with the beard before somewhere.’

‘Not surprising. They look like assistants, too. You’ve probably seen them in the Parliament building.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, even though I’d only spent about fifteen minutes in reception.

‘Never mind them, let’s get a drink,’ she said, ‘and you can tell me how you’re enjoying Brussels.’

As we weaved our way towards the bar, she grabbed my hand so that we wouldn’t be separated in the crush, and I guessed that things were about to get even more interesting.

I’d split up with my Parisian girlfriend about a month earlier. Amandine was a business student who’d been working for Jean-Marie, Elodie’s dad. We got on really well at first, but then Amandine accepted a job in Shanghai, which kind of Peking-ducked our relationship (that’s Chinese rhyming slang, of course). She asked me to go with her, but I was too scared of turning into a desperate expat wife, and elected to stay in Paris.

Contents

Also by Stephen Clarke

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