“Let me explain it clearly. I am going to present you to my client, M’greet.”
The car rolls past La Madeline. A month earlier I auditioned for them. I wore a wine-colored sarong while all the other hopefuls dressed in moth-eaten furs. I told the men who owned the theater that I had traveled from India to share the dance of my people with the citizens of Paris. I danced without music, imagining the sounds of a gamelan, the strum of a sitar and surmandal. I was exotic. Too exotic.
“Thank you. We’ll be in touch,” they said and rejected me.
“He is a very rich client and a very respected man. I will tell him that you are Indian, that you were born in India, and you are going to behave as if everything I say is true. I can make you famous. But you must follow my advice and never lie to me. Ever.”
After La Madeline’s rejection I went to L’Ete. A shack where the poor entertain the poor, everyone’s last stop before trying something desperate. At L’Ete the girls stank of alcohol and poverty. It was my last audition, and where I met Clunet. He watched me perform with his fingertips pressed over his lips. As I danced, I thought he looked out of place in such a rundown playhouse. His suit was immaculate. I tried to guess his age. Thirty-three, thirty-five? I focused on him rather than on the men who were judging me from behind a wooden table as I spread my arms like the mother goddess and moved my hips to the silent gamelan. But I was “too dark and too slow” for L’Ete. “Too,” one of the men at the table said, waving his hand to search for the right word, picking fruit from trees, “Eastern.” They wanted blonde girls; they didn’t want me.
Clunet sought me out immediately afterward.
The sun had begun to dip behind the Sacré-Coeur and I had braced myself against the side of the theater. If I couldn’t dance, I told myself, I could sing or play piano.
Clunet interrupted my thoughts, introduced himself, and said he had a client, a man who had built an expensive library dedicated to Asian art, and that this individual desired something spectacular for its opening.
“Why should he think that I’m spectacular? No one else does,” I said, stinging with the humiliation of failure.
“Because this is a man with class and taste. Someone who will appreciate your art.”
I catch my reflection in the car window now and smile. My art.
“What other languages do you speak?” Clunet asks.
“French, English, Dutch, Malay. I learned some Hindi,” I say, “but not enough to call myself fluent. I was taught German in school.”
“Well, mademoiselle—or are you madame?”
“Mademoiselle.”
“Tell me where you learned to dance.”
“Java.” I paint the picture for him. Gamelan orchestras playing in the night. White orchids floating in private pools. Parties so lavish the queen of Holland might have attended. “There was a woman who danced at these affairs. Mahadevi.” I describe how she taught me to dance and I can see him struggling to decide whether or not I’m telling the truth. But he doesn’t say anything. He must believe me.
“Here we are.” He parks in a suburb I’ve never visited before, in front of a magnificent villa that soars five windows high. The magnolias lining the street are in bloom. We walk to the front steps and immediately a bellman opens the door, expecting us. The man ushers us inside, into a hall lined with paintings of stern-looking men. At the end, in a small circular room, a woman smiles at us.
“Mathilda.” Clunet tips his hat to her.
She blushes a little and fumbles with her papers. “Monsieur Clunet.” She looks in my direction, but Clunet doesn’t introduce me.
We climb the stairs toward Clunet’s office: two desks and half a dozen glass and mahogany bookcases. I know that he is watching me, waiting to see if I am impressed. I take a seat and keep my expression neutral.
“There are things I must tell you, M’greet, about my client, Monsieur Guimet. About this engagement and what it will mean for you—and me—if you succeed.” He sits behind his desk and folds his hands. They are perfectly manicured, like the rest of him. “I’m not an agent,” he says. “My field is international law. But my client has a very special request and it occurs to me that he might not be the only one interested in the Far East.”
“Are you changing professions, then?”
He laughs, and I feel foolish. Of course he isn’t—look at his office. The leather chairs, the Persian carpets.
“No. I’m pursuing something that may be interesting for a time. There’s a great deal of money to be had in this, M’greet. But first, Monsieur Guimet has to believe that you are truly exotic, the daughter of a temple dancer in India. So when my client asks what your name is, you are going to say—”
“Mata Hari.” I embellish, “My mother died giving birth to me in a temple.”
He nods, impressed. “Good. And your age?” He reaches behind his desk and takes out a box.