2.8 Ada: Triumph and Transit
2.8.1 Madame Cava Convenes
L'Espace Taillevent, Restaurant Le Gardon Frit
1:00 pm Friday 27 September 1987
Events as reported the following day in the International Herald-Tribune
including (in brackets) material excised from the official version and restored by Wikileaks
...The meeting was called at [L'Espace Taillevent, Restaurant Le Gardon Frit] Pouzay by Indre-et-Loire Representative Her Extreme Lowness Madame Catherine Cava for a confidential exchange of views on the Department's progress in the War on Substances. Present were: Her Lowness Dr Ada Lynch, President of the Prohibition-boosting lobbying group NixTwinkies; His Excellency Chef Jean-Paul Picpoul; local PROFATPOL chiefs and their bodyguards. At the conclusion of the meeting, Mme Cava reported "useful progress."
[Only when pressed did she mention a curious discrepancy--two fewer attendees came out of the meeting room than went in. The missing were Dr Lynch and Chef Picpoul.
A detailed search failed to turn up any sign of the missing persons, and none of the surviving attendees were able to offer any account of the mystery more informative than "bizarre," "incroyable" and the like. "Coquine," contributed by certain of the bodyguards, seemed to refer to nothing more to the point of the inquiry than the personal characteristics of a young waitress who was on hand to assist the chef with the buffet planned for the conclusion of the meeting.
Stoked by the tabloids, public interest in the disappearings at Restaurant le Gardon Frit quickly rose to fever pitch, and it attracted widespread attention when a video record of the meeting was disseminated throughout u by means of the popular new medium, YouTube.
The video was hardly a masterpiece of cinéma vérité. The image was not only blurred and jerky, it was intermittent. For the first few minutes, and occasionally for shorter periods thereafter, the picture space was filled with a white expanse with hints of texture not unlike that of cloth--a technical glitch that left the experts baffled. But the sound was reasonably good, and in the end everyone agreed that the video provided the raw material for the best possible account of "L'Affaire de l'Espace Taillevent."
The substance of it, as reconstructed by a consortium of technical experts, is as follows:
The meeting having been late starting, Mme Cava announced that the buffet lunch that was originally planned to follow the business proceedings, would instead be taken at the beginning. Accordingly, Chef Picpoul had the waitress bring the various offerings from the garde-manger and set them out on a large table that had already been placed in readiness.
Initially the buffet was greeted with general approval. To clinks of cutlery, pops of Champagne corks and murmurs of "bon appétit," and "félicitations au chef," the party fell upon the comestibles with deliberate eagerness.
But the mood sharply negative when Madame Cava rudely called Chef Picpoul to account for certain items of the buffet that were below normal standards for PROFATPOL entrapment operations (the word she used was "infect," rotten). She took particular exception to the Collation of Salmon Steaks Louis XVI, voicing the suspicion that the salmon itself had been taken, not from the ocean off the coast of Scotland, but from a fish farm!
At this point the image came up for the first time, and it revealed the short, fat chef standing effortfully on tip-toe before his tormentor as he admitted between sobs that the salmon was indeed farmed. Farmed, and all that word implied--contaminated with growth hormones, antibiotics, artificial color.... Under the burden of remorse additional to that of his already weighty person, his legs wobbled out of control and he collapsed to his knees, yet he continued to protest his innocence of any wrongdoing or of any slackening in his determination to apply himself with all his might to the achievement of the aims of the War on Substances. He struggled to explain how as a result of the successes of the War in recent years, particularly those successes resulting from the participation of the French Navy, fishing had become a dangerous occupation and fishermen naturally demanded more and more money. Wild Scottish salmon was plentiful, but compared to the farmed imitation its price had escalated to a point impossible to meet at current funding levels.
His protests were ineffectual. His voice petered out. Tears ran down his plump cheeks.
Madame Cava resumed in a barely audible snarl: Nobody seemed to realize how hard it was to squeeze extra money out of the legislature to support the War or enforce Prohibition. The so-called Mothers bloc held the purse strings, and they wanted health care, education, symphony orchestras, not vital PROFATPOL protections like entrapment operations. The chef's job was to raise the necessary funds himself, by whatever means.
She never said the word, but her peau lisse gesture--palm of one hand brushed by fingertips of the other--left no doubt of the means she had in mind: extortion. And as an extortionist, Le Cèpe had failed dismally. He was a disgrace to PROFATPOL!
The PROFATPOL chiefs stared contemptuously at the disgraced chef, now weeping with abandon. Madame Cava smiled thinly. And Ada was suddenly unable to contain her indignation.
"No, no no! No, Extreme Lowness, you are mistaken!" she burst out. Distraught, palms pressed to temples, she scrambled up on to the buffet table, drawing raucus laughter when she accidentally stepped in a platter of Ballotine of Thanksgiving Turkey Left-Overs en Chaud-Froid and paused to clean off a soiled sandal, but she was not deterred. "No" she repeated, shushing her audience with an emphatic gesture. "No, Your Extreme Lowness, you are mistaken! Le Cèpe has not failed! He is not a disgrace! He is an accomplished blackmailer, a cold-blooded calculating swine. Far from a disgrace, he's a credit to PROFATPOL!"
The PROFATPOL chiefs shifted in their seats, relaxed a little. One even lifted his hand in a sign of approval, as if accepting that the chef was one of them after all.
"I know how good he is," she continued in a voice that was quieter yet trembled with conviction, "because I am a victim. He threatened to expose me as a user and derail my most cherished political ambition, the Czarinaship. I was--he was so menacing!--I was frightened out of my wits. To keep him quiet, I gave him my 2CV plug-in. Then, a true professional, he was nice again. Without further prompting, he prepared for me a dish of beef imported from the vast grasslands of the Southern hemisphere, not the flaccid oleaginous grain-fed muck that is by financial necessity his default offering. For me he prepared Steak Paul Cézanne, beef slathered with black-olive tapenade and seared au feu de bois so it's red and oh, so-oo juicy, with a black crunchy salty crust that crackles when you bite into it and its blood squirts in your mouth and floods over your tongue--"
She paused for moment to regain control of her emotion, and concluded in a plangent tone: "Le Cèpe is not only a vicious blackmailer, he's a great chef! In La Belle France--oh, I know that voluptuous plexus of gastronomy has been cast aside and forgotten by many, but it will rise again--in a renascent Belle France, all sensual pleasure permitted, Le Cèpe will be feted--yes, feted!--for his manifold culinary talents."
Her audience found this amusing, but Le Cèpe, visibly moved, struggled to his feet, saying: "Ah, chère amie, how you are kind, and how I am wishing I would be in la Belle France!" But no one paid him any attention, all eyes were on Ada.
"Cher ami, I too am so wishing!" she responded, briefly turning to him but continuing to address Madame Cava. "I too am wishing to be free of the cares of this cursed War! Not just the War, but its rationale--Prohibition itself. Prohibition's aims are good, and it has achieved many of them. It has shielded us from the scourge of CHAOS AND OUCH. It has served to reduce excessive fertility, with consequent enhancement of women's power and influence in society while helping to contain a potential population explosion. It has helped preserve the environment.
"But it is a negative rather than a positive force, seeking to block harmful elements instead of simply promoting a whole food, plant based diet rich in nutrients as estimated on a per-Calorie basis. And with that negative agenda pressed too far, as in engaging in the War on Substances, is become little more than a price-support system for enterprises that are profitable for no other reason than their illegality!"
Madame Cava frowned and, half rising, signaled curtly--shut up! But Ada went on, "I too am wishing to be free, not only of the War, but also of the constraints of Prohibition, for which the antidote is--is--hang on, I'll think of it in a minute--yes I've got it-- Repeal!"
Repeal--the word was anathema! After a moment of dead silence, Espace Taillevent exploded in angry shouts and gestures. Ada recoiled in confusion--until she received a confidence boost from an unexpected quarter. One of the minor figures of the video up to this point, ostensibly a bodyguard for one of the Departmental PROFATPOL chieftains, suddenly whipped off her reflective sunglasses and let out a penetrating cry: "Yes, Repeal! Yes! Yes! Yes!"
In the sudden silence that followed, Willa 't Hellenbach, media superstar, writer and interviewer extraordinaire, leaped lightly up on to the table at Ada's side and leaned toward her supportively, her numerous sharp, pointy shark's teeth arranged in a smile that was, as nearly as possible for her, cordial. Ada, startled, froze for an instant, then the two women joined in a fleeting embrace before turning back to face a stunned Madame Cava and her minions.
"Repeal!" cried Willa, thumping palm on forehead. "Why didn't I think of that! Repeal, there's my book title right there! 'Repeal,' another Pulitzer practically in the bag! Thank you, Dr Lynch! You are right! Prohibition is counter-productive, and Repeal is the cure. As Czarina in the next administration--don't worry, I'll plug you on HV, you'll be a shoo-in! You'll--"
"Thanks," Ada cut in, "but I don't want to be the fracking Czarina!"
She may have said more, but Willa had already resumed her speech, elaborating on the repeal theme with the same hypnotic intensity with which she routinely grabbed the attention of her HV audience. Displaying her famous steely logic, she ticked off the advantages of repeal: First, prohibition is not necessary, since commerce in substances can be deterred without criminalizing it, simply by taxing it at a rate adjusted to compensate for its collateral damage to human health and to the environment. Second, prohibition is not desirable, since it takes away from the people their Gaea-given right to make personal diet choices in accord with their own informed conception of science and reason. Third, prohibition is not--
No one noticed when Ada turned away, stepped down off the table, made her way to her lover waiting in the shadows. Only the camcorder noticed.]
***
Leo Barton's warnings were well founded. Alenby and Olympe were indeed arrested and held accountable for their crimes. But Leo's timming was off; distracted by the unexpected events of l'Affaire to