The phone in his hand started to ring. It was Liem or Travis, or at any rate, it was the office number. God, he wasn’t ready. Sitting here alone at the back of the café, he wasn’t prepared for a work call. He muted it, preferring them to leave a message. He placed the phone cautiously on the table, almost scared to touch it. After a little while he picked it up again and listened to the voicemail. He played it twice to make sure he didn’t miss anything. He tried to interpret the tone of voice. Liem and Travis had been his partners for only eight months, but they were already behaving in a disconcertingly patronising way. Ever since they had hurled that hurtful remark, something had snapped, in Franck’s mind at least. In fact, now he wanted only one thing: to catch them out.

Liem was again talking about that blessed meeting in Paris. The Netflix people had in the end decided to do a tour of Europe in the hope of finding partners. They had offices in Amsterdam and Dublin for tax reasons and had agreed to come to Paris, but only had two dates free. Franck knew perfectly well that Liem and Travis wanted to hand over the library, his library of the fifty or so films he had produced over twenty-five years, his war chest in some ways, a demand he would never give in to. By proposing a meeting, were Liem and Travis indicating that, unlike him, they were not on holiday? They were quietly reminding him that they hadn’t stopped arranging important meetings just because it was August. They were showing him that at twenty-eight and thirty years old, they hardly even thought about the sacred rite of going on holiday, the obligatory August at the seaside. What’s more, they had managed to slip in that, in the American production world, only an idiot would take holiday in August.

Liem and Travis were the kind of ambitious young men who were confident they could regenerate the French production industry, thanks to their considerable experience in digital and video games. They had done part of their studies in the US; Travis had been born there, and both had got their first jobs in digital technology before going into video-game development and editing. They didn’t understand how Franck could go away for three weeks; for them, being a producer meant working day and night. He returned the call, and straight away they presented him with yet another brilliant idea, but he immediately put the brakes on it.

‘There’s no way we’re doing that, guys. Or at least I’m not.’

‘But, Franck, it’s a no-brainer, it’s genius!’

‘It’s completely ruthless!’