Geneva noir

August 15, 2025

I’ve come to have a coffee with my mother at the Café du Théâtre when I notice the woman in the corner of the terrace. She’s dressed impeccably: beige slacks, white shirt, no bling. Fashion people call this “quiet luxury”, but it’s quiet only in the way that a dogwhistle is quiet. Linen, it turns out, can scream.

She’s in her sixties (quiet seventy); blond (quiet gray); and nervous, very nervous, obviously anticipating somebody’s arrival. Before her on the table are two glasses of citron pressé (quiet diet) and she is fidgeting with a watch or bracelet. Her eyes dart around. There’s something bothering her in her bag. She waits. Whatever’s going on, she wants it to end.

The coffee’s pretty good. I finish in fast. The woman sips her juice and looks at the second glass on the table. It’s glaring, conspicuous: three lemonsworth, freshly squeezed.

At last arrives a man. He’s tall, purple polo, pedo shades, earbuds. The kind of guy who never takes out his earbuds. Barrel chest, younger. Nothing quiet about him.

The man sits down next to her in the chair, which grates against the stone floor. His legs are too long, it’s not comfortable, and she’s twitching guiltily. They get closer to whisper things that I can’t hear. She’s obviously richer than him but he has a certain power: she needs him to solve a problem that she has. She touches him a few times on the arm. Her angst is overbearing.

Then begins business. She takes out of her bag two ordinary yellow envelopes and puts them on the café table. He removes from one envelope a thick wad of cash. As he thumbs the bills, which number the dozens at least, I can see from where I’m sitting that they are 1,000 franc notes. This makes them the world’s second most valuable kind of money, after a piece of paper from Brunei.

I have never had the pleasure with this particular denomination, but the Swiss National Bank reports that while these banknotes make up just 7 percent of bills in circulation, their value totals that of nearly half the existing cash. Many shops won’t accept thousands. You probably can’t use them to pay a mortgage or buy gas. This all suggests that their purpose is simple: to remain exactly what they are.

The CHF 1000 banknote, issued in 2019, is illustrated with a small globe and two hands shaking. That is also where this encounter is going. The man starts counting the money: straight up counting it like no-one’s watching, in broad daylight on the terrace of a café. He’s in his element. When he’s done counting, he puts the envelope in his briefcase, and his patron kisses his cheek with an odd tenderness. Then, he gets up and walks off. The woman softens. Visibly, a great weight has been taken off of her shoulders.

Her phone rings quietly in her handbag. She answers the call. It’s some business about a car in a garage, completely uninteresting, but her heart is so light that it sounds like she’s singing.

Then, the woman gets up and straightens her shirt. With her fixer’s forsaken citron, she approaches a table a few feet away, where a woman in her thirties has spent the length of the encounter obliviously toggling tabs on her laptop: on the one hand, a Petit Bateau sale, on the other, messages for her marketing job.

“It’s a citron pressé; nobody’s touched it,” says the older woman gently, leaning in.

“Have it. It’s refreshing.”