News item: Hillary Clinton and Francophile Canadian novelist Louise Penny are co-authoring a work of fiction, a thriller featuring a young secretary of state saving the world from the deplorables. Slated for October release, they must be hard at work. Surely what follows, found on a couple of greasy sheets of paper in the dumpster behind the Hawk ‘n’ Dove bar on Capitol Hill, couldn’t possibly be from an early draft:
“Merde,” said Hilaire Rodier. The jacket of her best white pantsuit was the only thing keeping the funiculaire from falling, the only thing saving the cable car from tumbling down to Old Quebec’s Lower Town.
At the first ominous lurch of the glass-enclosed conveyance, Rodier had known what was happening and knew just what to do. She threw off her overcoat and climbed out into the sort of April storm you only get in Quebec, a crapfest of winter precipitation: Blinding snow blew sideways; a pelting ice pelted diagonally; freezing rain froze. Rodier was undaunted. She squinted, searched, and finally found where, but for a few stretched strands of steel, the cable had given away. She stripped off the jacket from her pantsuit, revealing biceps so buff that even Michelle Obama envied her. Rodier tied one sleeve of the jacket above the compromised spot on the cable, and the other below. And she did it just in time.
The last bit of cable gave way with a terrible twang, but the pantsuit patch bridging the gap held.
The cable car leaned out over the side of the steep bluff. If the jacket didn’t hold, they’d all be goners, and they knew it: Sid Fleur, the most feared operative in the halls of Foggy Bottom, was curled up in a corner of the carriage, blubbering. Hugh McBedding was frantically emailing for help. Victoria Nouvelle-Terre steeled herself for impact.
“Merde, merde, merde,” Rodier repeated. Faced with a crisis, she would normally have cursed in English. But Rodier didn’t get to be the United States’s most admired and desirable woman secretary of state by committing diplomatic faux pas. She knew better than to offend her Quebecois counterparts by slipping into the despised language of the centurieslong British occupation.
Rodier made a quick assessment of the situation. How was the pantsuit jacket holding up? Hand-stitched with silk thread, the sleeves were not just elegant, they were stronger than any mere machine-sewn synthetic. But the funiculaire, Rodier guessed, must have weighed a ton or two — she corrected herself and calculated the cable car’s metric weight.
The sleeves were slowly coming apart from the jacket’s shoulders. They wouldn’t hold much longer. The fabric made a sickly low ripping sound as it began to tear. With each thread that snapped, the glass car slipped another 20 feet — pardon, another half-dozen meters.
Just when hope was nearly gone, a heavy roll of fire hose came tumbling down out of the snow and sleet.
“Tie it to the funiculaire,” came a voice from above.
Rodier would later learn the voice had been that of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec. Later that day, she sat across from him as they drank Fin du Monde beer and each ate a tartelette au citron.
“It had to be Les Deplorables,” Rodier said. “You saw the way they rioted.”
“Peut-etre,” Gamache said. “Although, be glad they weren’t as practiced at violence as Quebec separatists,” he said with a rueful laugh. “Have you considered that the mob might have been worked up by a YouTube video? That the whole thing was spontaneous?”
“No one would believe that for a moment,” scoffed the secretary of state. “It was planned.” Rodier took a thoughtful sip of the cloudy potent beer and said, “I mean, it doesn’t just happen that a funiculaire crashes. It had to be a plot.”
“I don’t know,” said Gamache. “There was, after all, the crash in ’96. It burned down in ’45. Frankly, you couldn’t pay me to ride on that thing. I don’t know what you were thinking.”
That’s where the text ended, though there were these notes in blue pencil: Louise, we still don’t have enough emphasis on how buff the secretary is. Maybe something like, “makes Gal Gadot look frumpy.”
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
