What’s more, it was six o’clock on the dot. No French woman turns up on time for a drink with a man. If she does, she’s being way too keen. A French guy will automatically assume she’s gagging for sex and probably suggest skipping dinner and going straight upstairs.
Being a Brit, though, and not at all on the prowl, I said good evening and told her she was looking beautiful. A gentleman could do no less.
She hopped off the stool and raised her face so that I could kiss her cheeks.
‘You’re drinking pastis,’ I said.
‘Yes, I’m a Susan girl,’ she replied.
‘A what?’
She laughed, and had another go. ‘A sudden girl?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You know, from the thouse.’
‘Ah yes.’ It was that old French chestnut, the problem of pronouncing ‘southern’ and ‘south’. They have the same problem with clothes – ‘clo-zez’. I gave her a short lesson and we laughed together at her lisping attempts to get the ‘s’ and ‘th’ in the right place.
‘I thought it was mainly a man’s drink,’ I said when we’d got her lip–tongue coordination more or less sorted out.
‘Yes, maybe I drink it because I work in a man’s world.’
‘I would have thought there’d be more women tourist guides.’
‘Oh. No, in the, uh, south, there are lots of men guides. What do you drink?’
I opted for a Muscat. We clinked glasses, looking each other in the eyes to ensure that we had ten years of good sexual luck (though not necessarily with each other, of course), and she suggested we move outside to the terrace.
‘There’s a bit of a wind,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to catch cold.’ Large areas of her ribcage and upper chest were bare.
‘I never feel the cold.’ She watched me, completely aware of where my eyes were pointing.
We went outside on to a wide terrace that overlooked a small swimming pool and the wrinkly sea. The sun was well on its way to the horizon for its evening dip, and the town opposite us was beginning to sink into shadow. Streetlamps were flickering like candles, as if the breeze could bend rays of light. It was amazingly peaceful. This was the jetski beach disco Côte d’Azur, half an hour from the big city of Marseille? Maybe, but off season there was only dusk and sea breeze.
‘Your girlfriend, what is her job exactly?’ Léanne asked.
I tried to summarize what M had told me about ocean ecology without revealing anything to do with sturgeon.
‘And for what institute does she work?’
I had to confess I didn’t know. I told her we hadn’t known each other very long.
‘An English university, I suppose, or a French one?’
‘I didn’t ask the name, I’m afraid.’ I felt stupid, not even knowing where my girlfriend worked. But then I didn’t think I’d actually mentioned the address of my tea room, either. ‘She’s a freelance, on a kind of mission down here,’ I said.
‘Ah? What mission?’
‘She’s working with French scientists at the oceanography institutes and aquariums. On some obscure ecological problem. Toxic algae,’ I improvised.
‘Algae?’
‘Yes, seaweed.’
‘Ah, algues. What is the problem?’
‘They suffocate fish, I think. And kill sea urchins.’
‘Oocheens?’
‘Yes. You call them oursins.’
‘Ah.’ Léanne nodded, apparently satisfied. ‘Now tell me about this marriage. Your, uh, cat-ring?’
‘Catering, yes.’ I gave her a run-through of the main characters in my gastronomic soap opera, starting with Elodie the emergency waltzer, going on to the farting bitch grand-mère, and even following up with a short portrait of Valéry winking at me in the police van.
As she listened, Léanne laughed, and something in her expression changed. It was like when I’d gone to get the iced water for the old lady with the bruised wrist. My story seemed to reveal things about me that didn’t quite tally with her preconceptions. I wondered what she’d assumed I’d be like. A typical businessman lothario, maybe, or a millionaire yacht owner, rather than a wholesale buyer of anchovies.
‘And how did you meet M?’ she asked. Léanne really was interested in her, I thought, which was very strange if she was trying to pick me up. Maybe she did just want company.
I told her how we’d bumped into each other by an aquarium in Las Vegas, met again on a pier in LA, and then hooked up as soon as I got back from America.
‘So you weren’t with her for the summer?’ she asked.
‘No, I was in California. What about you? Do you have a boyfriend or a husband?’ I looked pointedly down at her bare ring finger.
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I am alone at the moment.’
‘Oh.’
We spent a silent minute looking over towards the mainland. The streetlamps had won the battle for domination of the sky, and Bandol was glowing warmly, its ribbons of light festooning the dark landmass.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘no matter what you think about humanity, we are pretty damn good at electric lighting. In fact, Earth might even be the only place in the universe that has electric light. I mean, I know it’s overheating the atmosphere, but sometimes it looks fantastic, doesn’t it?’
Lucky M couldn’t hear me saying that, I thought. But Léanne nodded.
‘Yes, I am sure that these toxic algues can also be beautiful to some people,’ she said. Coming from M this would have been heavily sarcastic, but Léanne was simply joining me in my train of thought. Conversation with her flowed very easily.
‘Are you hungry?’ she asked, and without waiting for a reply, added, ‘Will you have dinner with me?’
‘Avec plaisir,’ I said, and escorted her indoors.
The hotel’s first floor was decorated with a mixture of medieval austerity and boutiquey excess. The lounge featured a stone fireplace and thick beams, combined with large panels of pure colour along the walls – tangerine, lime, blood and turquoise. Old armchairs and sofas had been re-covered with pale linen and scattered with pink and yellow cushions.
The restaurant itself was more formal, and although it was early, a few people were already dining, talking in hushed tones. Our table was covered with a thick white tablecloth and topped with a bouquet of fresh flowers.
The waitress brought us menus and I opened the wine list first.
‘You choose the wine before the food?’ Léanne was amused at this breach of restaurant protocol.
‘Why not? I like to drink the wine that was made closest to the restaurant. Look.’ I pointed to a name that had sprung to my attention – a rosé, Domaine de l’île des Embiez. ‘We should have that,’ I said. ‘It’s from the other Ricard island. It was probably delivered by boat.’
Léanne didn’t get the importance of this, so I explained my new-found obsession for reducing the carbon footprint of everything I ate and drank down here on the south coast.
‘Not that I’m trying to tell you what to order,’ I said. ‘I mean, feel free to have the Argentinian beef and a mango salad.’
‘Are you an ecologist, too?’ she asked. ‘What do you call them in English, a rainbow warrior?’
‘Eco-warrior? No, I’m not that active. I’m just an eco-worrier.’
I then had to spend about five minutes explaining the pun, with all the associated pronunciation exercises.
I realized that I was letting myself be drawn in by Léanne. Letting myself be seduced – there was no other word for it. She was making me talk about myself, making me feel important. It was a classic guy’s technique – by rights I should have been doing it to her.
The food came and we ate. She watched me eating, apparently thoughtful.
I was just staring at the menu for a third time, debating whether to follow my dessert with a digestif, when Léanne started rummaging in her handbag and produced a phone. She listened intently for a few seconds then turned to me, all seductiveness gone from
her face.
‘Sorry, I must go,’ she said, standing up. First M, now her. Every woman I met wanted to leave me.
‘What?’
‘It is very urgent.’ She paused and looked down at me. ‘See you later.’
‘OK,’ I said, though I had no idea when this might be. I got up, preparing to say a French goodbye with a kiss on the cheeks, but she was already on her way out of the restaurant. I saw her stop to talk to the waitress, no doubt explaining why she’d left. I wished someone would explain it to me.
The waitress told me that my bill had been settled, and then I was on my own at the table, wondering what the hell had happened. Maybe it was the toxic algae in the Med, I thought. It seemed to drive all the women down here crazy.
I wandered downstairs and into the night, expecting to see Léanne being whisked away in a speedboat or something similarly dramatic. But everything was peaceful. The distant lights were winking at me across the channel as if they knew what was going on and didn’t want to tell me.
I took a long, deep breath of the fresh night air, and was about to let it all out again when a black-clad arm clamped itself across my chest and pressed so hard that I thought my lungs might start bulging out of my nostrils. My hands were grabbed from behind and twisted up so that I had to bend forward to avoid snapping both my elbows.
I wanted to complain, but something warm and smooth was stuffed into my mouth, and I just had time to think, ‘Gross – that’s someone’s leather glove,’ before a French voice rasped in my ear that I was to shut my gob (difficult with a glove in it) and come with them. Not that I had much choice.
As I was (literally) frogmarched across the quay towards the fake Italian village, I tried to work out who could be doing the marching. The commandos, back for a second bite at the English cherry? Or, more likely, caviar bandits who’d heard about my snooping. Shit, they’d probably got M as well. But why? The closest we’d got to them was one alleged sighting of a fish somewhere in the Camargue.
We stomped between the cute fishermen’s cottages, and I was shoved into a deeply shaded courtyard. I looked up to see that we were outside the Roman temple. I gave up thinking about why this was happening and concentrated on being scared. Suddenly the island had stopped being tranquil and become eerily empty.
I was spun expertly round and pulled into a sitting position on cold stone. The temple and its grounds were in total darkness, but the moonlight reflected off a window and lit up the face that was now thrust close to my own.
I recognized it. It belonged to the plain-clothes cop from Collioure, the guy in the leather jacket who’d been thrown out of the gendarmerie.
He breathed a mixture of pastis fumes and stale cigarettes at me, and informed me that he was going to remove the glove from my mouth and that if I shouted he would take great pleasure in hurting me.
I nodded. This seemed a fair exchange.
The leather was pulled out from between my jaws, and I turned to spit the bad taste into a flower bed. I tried, and failed, to get a look at another guy, who was holding my right arm in a wrestling hold to stop me running away.
‘Bonsoir,’ I said. I read this book once which said that wishing a French person ‘Bonjour’ or ‘Bonsoir’ is a kind of Open Sesame. After receiving the greeting, they feel subconsciously obliged to be pleasant to you.
‘Ta gueule,’ the leather-jacketed cop growled. Shut up. He obviously hadn’t read the book.
Knowing that he was a policeman, though, made me feel slightly less afraid. After all, one of Valéry’s uncles had told this guy and his mates to leave us alone. And he’d been forced to obey.
‘How can I help you?’ I asked.
‘Ta gueule,’ he repeated, and my arm was twisted slightly higher.
‘Have I done something illegal?’
‘Ta. Gueule.’ This time he spat each word between clenched teeth. But – I noticed – he didn’t resort to violence, or get his colleague to do so. Someone somewhere had decided I wasn’t to be roughed up. This was very reassuring, and I felt my heart rate slow to under two hundred for the first time in several minutes.
The grin on Leather Jacket’s face was less reassuring, though. Seeing that I had apparently decided to shut up, he was looking decidedly cocky. Perhaps he was waiting for the person who had instructed him not to hurt me. Maybe they had told him that they wanted the pleasure of drawing first blood.
What was more, I now reasoned, there was nothing to stop a policeman moonlighting for the opposition. This guy could well be in with the caviar pirates. After all, M had said something about not wanting to tell the police, or anyone in uniform, about her search for illegal sturgeon. I heard footsteps behind me, and saw Leather Jacket look towards the entrance to the courtyard. My pulse started to pick up again. Here it comes, I thought, bracing myself as my heart neared explosion point.
But it stopped beating altogether when I saw who we’d been waiting for.
Léanne was standing in front of me, a denim jacket covering the top of her backless dress. She looked like a punk singer, half chic, half grungy. And her voice was as urgent as a punk song, too.
‘Listen, Pol,’ she said, before I could ask what was happening. ‘Everything I will tell you is true. So believe me. OK?’
But as she spoke in slow, clear French, I shook my head, first in disbelief, and then to try and wake up from the nightmare she was pulling me into.
‘Bollocks,’ I said when she’d finished.
‘Uh?’ She didn’t know the word.
‘Conneries,’ I translated. ‘Merde.’
‘No, it is true.’ She repeated the central facts again. ‘Your friend Gloria, or M – she is not a scientist. She has a very different job. She is visiting different criminals, trying to recruit an assassin.’
‘Bollocks.’ M was an expert on sturgeon, there was no doubt about that. She was obsessed with the poor, ugly brutes.
Léanne interrupted my thoughts. ‘You have not noticed that she does bizarre things?’
‘No. Well, yes. But of course she does bizarre things. She’s a scientist.’
‘She goes suddenly to all these meetings.’
‘With other scientists, yes.’
‘No, with criminals. We have listened to some suspect telephone conversations. We have followed her. We have followed you. This is why I was in Collioure. And the two men in your hotel there? They are police. And as you have seen, the man who interviewed you in the gendarmerie, he is in my team. Except –’ she turned to glare at Leather Jacket, ‘that he has not obeyed my orders. He was not supposed to interview you.’
The guy folded his arms and looked away. He was a bit of a maverick, it seemed.
‘It was comic, though.’ She lowered her voice. ‘What you said him to about the “big fish”, you know? He thought you were talking about a gangster. When you said the big fish was from Iran or Russia, he was convinced he had discovered the biggest secret in world crime.’ She laughed.
I saw the leather-jacketed cop straining to understand. Léanne didn’t enlighten him.
‘So you’re a policewoman?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Where’s your badge?’
‘In this dress?’ She ran her hands over her hips to illustrate the lack of pockets.
‘And you think M’s hiring a killer? No way,’ I said. ‘To kill who? A caviar pirate?’
‘No.’ Léanne took a deep breath. ‘We were not going to reveal it,’ she said. ‘But I must take a chance. We supposed you were the accomplice, but now I am persuaded that you are innocent. And maybe you can help to save him.’
‘Save who?’
She gulped. ‘The President.’
‘The President of what?’
‘The President. Our President. Le Président!’
If I hadn’t been choking, I would have laughed.
‘You’re nuts,’ I said. This was way, way beyond bollocks.
‘Nuts?’
‘Folle. Why the hell would M be
involved in a plot to kill your President?’
‘He has many enemies,’ Léanne replied. ‘The unions, the Mafia, terrorists …’
‘And he is way too friendly with the Anglo-Saxons,’ Leather Jacket chipped in, in French.
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘And M’s English, so why would she want to kill a pro-English President?’ What a steaming lump of merde. They’d got the wrong girl. She was hot-tempered, but not murderous.
‘It is normal to be shocked.’ Léanne stepped forward and started digging her nails into my biceps, staring into my eyes. ‘Please, Pol, listen. M is not really English, she is half-French. She is not who she says.’
‘Who is she, then?’
‘I have no time to tell you. M is returning now, on the ferry. This is why I was obliged to interrupt our dinner. She will be here in ten minutes. So I give you the choice. You can help me to save my President. And say nothing to M. She cannot see us together. She cannot know we have met ourselves.’
‘Met each other.’ I corrected her English in a daze of denial. ‘What’s the other option?’
‘If you do not promise to help, we must arrest you now, and her, and you will go to prison for twenty or thirty years.’
‘What?’ It was lucky she was holding on to my arms so tightly, because I felt like collapsing back into the flower bed. ‘But you just agreed I’m innocent.’
‘I think you are innocent. But I am not a judge. I do not want to arrest you now, because I need you. We do not know yet who will accept the contract, or who is paying M. We do not know exactly why they want to kill the President. So will you help us to find out?’
‘I …’ Until about ten minutes earlier, I’d been under the impression that my big dilemma of the night was going to be whether to give in and let this woman do naughty things to my body. And even that was going to be a toughie. This new set of options had come much, much too fast for my poor brain, which had been slowed down to even less than its usual snail’s pace by my generous share of our bottle of rosé during dinner. Yes, she’d got me half-pissed, too, I realized. What a sucker I’d been.