There was wi-fi, too, thanks to the nearby tourist office, and while I waited for Léanne to arrive, I bashed out a message to Jake, asking for the details of his poetry festival so that I could email Dadou.
In my inbox was a message from Benoit with news of the pièce montée experiment. He’d got Gilles, the tea room’s cook, to make a miniature fig pyramid, but it had collapsed and become a sort of leaky green beret that had taken them an hour to scrape off the base of the oven. I told him I couldn’t believe that pâtissiers cooked their traditional, three-foot-tall pièces montées in a giant oven, and asked them to try baking and caramelizing the figs first, then piling them up afterwards.
Once I’d zapped all the emails offering me watches, medication, sex and the opportunity to reveal my bank details to criminals, I started to wonder where Léanne had got to. I was on my second coffee, and she was half an hour late.
Even though it is not polite to hassle French women, I called her. She was in her car, and in a rush somewhere. Not to meet me, as it happened.
‘I am sorry, Pol,’ she said. ‘I cannot see you today. But anyway, you must return to Bendor.’
‘What?’
Léanne paused before answering, presumably to negotiate traffic. ‘We think that M has finalized the deal,’ she went on. ‘This is why she wants to leave the island and come to you. But she must not go away. She must take us to the organizers, and to the assassin. It is the only way to protect the President. So you must be with her, observe her. You must return to the island.’
‘Now?’
‘Tomorrow at the latest. Call her and tell her you are coming. I will talk to you before you go. Sorry I cannot come now. There is a special operation, I must go to Saint Tropez.’
As soon as she rang off, I speed-dialled Valéry – no answer. Elodie – no answer.
Shit, I thought, if this special operation was what I thought it was, they might not be getting married for a few years yet.
I folded up my laptop, ran to the car park and swung my car down the snail-shell road, trying my best not to take an accidental short cut through the olive groves.
What was more important, I wondered, saving the Bonnepoires’ favourite son from arrest or respecting their stupid code about which driveway I should use?
The entrance to the new tarmacked drive was blocked by an empty Renault Espace. My only option was to back up, open the big green gates and use the date-palm drive. There didn’t seem to be anyone about. With a bit of luck, the snootier members of the family would still be at Mass.
To reduce the actual time spent on the forbidden drive, I gunned the engine and kicked up a lot of dust, which probably explained why, when I came to the place where I had to manoeuvre between two palm trees, I saw a gallery of Bonnepoires watching me from the terrace. Arms were waving, heads were shaking. Too bad, I decided.
I pulled into the car park and dialled Valéry again, all the while shouting for Elodie in case she was in earshot.
‘Monsieur West!’ Someone was calling me, with even more urgency than I was managing.
It was Dadou, marching across the car park, followed closely by Moo-Moo, who was performing a sort of stately trot to keep up with her husband.
‘Have you seen Valéry?’ I asked.
Dadou opened and shut his mouth, as if to gobble my question away.
‘Did Valéry not tell you which driveway to use?’ he snapped. ‘And at such speed! Do you know how much damage you could do to the old drive, and to one of the date palms if you crashed into it? Do you think the bastide is a rally circuit?’
Moo-Moo gave her husband a congratulatory ‘ho!’ They might be totally different people – the religious prude and the shagger of golf-club gardeners – but they shared the same goal in life, to defend the famille.
‘The other way was blocked,’ I told him, pointing across the gardens to the large Renault which was now, I noticed, driving sedately up the tarmac towards us, as if to show me how it should be done. ‘Have you seen Valéry?’
‘Valéry? He went into Saint Tropez. Why?’
‘Oh shit,’ I said, and Moo-Moo’s gasp proved that she understood English swearwords. I saw Bonne Maman coming over, a look of satisfaction on her face, as if I had finally revealed my true colours.
‘Honestly, Monsieur, I don’t know what you are trying to do,’ Bonne Maman said. ‘You parade in your underwear in front of the children, you contradict us when we try to explain why this wedding is premature, you try to seduce poor Sixtine …’
‘Moi?’ I was going to defend myself, but gallantry got the better of me. There was no point revealing who’d invited whom for a morning dip.
‘And,’ Bonne Maman went on, frowning, ‘I don’t understand this affair with Dadou and Louisiana. You do realize that France sold Louisiana to the Americans in 1803? We can’t pay its bills any more.’
The three of them shared a self-congratulatory smile at this witticism, and Moo-Moo and Dadou went to greet the fresh batch of Bonnepoires arriving in the Renault. Bonne Maman held back to finish lecturing me.
‘I think you will agree,’ she said quietly, ‘that there is no reason for you to stay here any longer. Perhaps you will fetch your things and leave?’
‘Of course,’ I said, stopping myself from saying what a pleasure it would be to escape from her clutches. ‘But if you will permit, I would like to see Valéry and Elodie first. Have you seen Elodie?’
‘She went to the beach, I think, with Sixtine. But I don’t think you need to bother them.’
‘Sorry, but I must,’ I said.
I would just have to drive along the beach road until I spotted the girls, I decided. I couldn’t leave without warning Elodie about the police operation. I might not have won the contract to prepare a feast for her wedding, but at least I could do my best to ensure that her fiancé didn’t meet up with my old friend the leather-jacketed cop.
What happened next was a bit confusing.
Valéry’s parents and Bonne Maman had left the car park. I was trying one last time to get through to Elodie when I heard a squeal of brakes and the wrench of a badly timed gear change. Valéry’s red Mercedes came swerving towards me.
He slewed to a halt and started babbling. Drugs, panic or both were making him about as comprehensible as a gibbon on helium. I went over to his car to listen more closely, and gradually, words started to take form.
‘Police … Dealer … Cocaine … Merde’ seemed to be the basic gist.
‘The police are after your dealer? Or after you?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘Which?’
‘Both. I think.’ He stared down the driveway as if he was expecting an army of zombies to come chasing after him.
‘Have you got any drugs on you? Or in you?’ I asked.
In reply, he just started to twitch in the driver’s seat, as if he couldn’t decide whether to start up the engine again or jump out of the car and run for the hills.
I turned and saw what he was twitching about – a black BMW with impenetrably tinted windows had just come racing into the date-palm driveway, and was beating my own speed record on its crazed trajectory towards the car park. This, I presumed, was the dealer.
A good-looking young guy got out of the car. He was smartly dressed in a gleaming white shirt, clean jeans and designer sunglasses. He looked a pleasant sort of bloke, the kind with classic features and a square chin who could put on a white coat and play a TV surgeon.
His words, though, were less those of a lifesaver than a serial killer. He was swearing at Valéry, using images that I only half-understood but which sounded extremely painful. From what I gathered, the guy was under the impression that Valéry had brought the cops along to their latest meeting. Already, I thought I could hear sirens in the distance.
‘Non, non, je te jure que non,’ Valéry was saying, swearing his innocence.
But he was obviously not convincing, because the dealer cocked his ear towards the approaching si
rens, gave an especially wide grin, and produced a phone-sized plastic package from behind his back.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘a present for your family,’ and he threw it into the lavender bush.
I saw what was happening. The cops were going to arrive and search the place, and this dealer-sized pack of drugs was going to land Valéry, and his whole clan, in the merde.
The dealer wished us a ‘bonne journée’ and returned calmly to his car, which was still running. He did a quick tyre burn as a farewell gesture, and skidded away, peppering us with pieces of gravel.
The air was still thick with dust when, about two seconds later, we heard a loud thud, a blast on the horn, and then the metallic plonking sound of a small shower of dates landing on a car bonnet. The dickhead had driven into a date palm.
It took us a few moments more to realize that, given the lack of any activity from the BMW, the dealer had obviously knackered his engine, hurt himself, or both.
The sirens were still no more than a faint wail in the distance, but there was not much time to act. I jumped up into the lavender bed. I’d seen more or less where the drugs had landed, and the bush was so thick that the shiny package was resting in full view on top of a clump of purple flowers. Great marketing concept, I thought, lavender-scented coke – drugs that keep your nostrils fresh. Luckily, the bag was undamaged. I grabbed it and ran for the BMW.
‘Come and help me,’ I told Valéry, who climbed out of his own car, still in a daze.
Sure enough, the dealer hadn’t had time to put on his seat belt, and had knocked himself out on the windscreen. A bulbous red lump was pulsing at the bridge of his nose.
‘Pull him over to the passenger seat,’ I told Valéry.
With me shoving from one side and Valéry hauling from the other, it took only a few seconds to free the driving seat. The dealer moaned loudly, but didn’t wake up.
‘Now go and flush any other stuff you have down the toilet,’ I told Valéry.
‘OK, OK,’ he said, and sprinted into the house.
Praying that I had enough time, and that the car would work, I turned the key. The engine growled to life. Yes. It had only stalled. I backed gently away from the date palm.
The dealer had dented the brown tree trunk, which was a shame, but it was nothing compared to the dent in the Bonnepoires’ fortunes if I didn’t get the BMW and the drugs out of their garden – sorry, park – before the police arrived.
So, defying family policy yet again, I drove down the driveway as fast as I could, and pulled out on to the road, checking in my mirror to make sure there were no flashing lights in sight.
I resisted the urge to gun the engine, and set off on a sedate cruise parallel to the beach. I could hear sirens much more clearly now, but they didn’t seem to be following me. In any case, I told myself, I was just another daytripper out for a spin, with his friend enjoying a quiet nap in the passenger seat.
The next hurdle was to park without attracting attention. I didn’t want witnesses sending the cops after the tourist who’d abandoned an unconscious man in a dented BMW and gone for a walk along a beach that was completely free of hiding places.
There were plenty of cars parked along the seafront. Several of them were flash sports models, too. A BMW was nothing out of the ordinary down here. What’s more, no one on the beach seemed to be paying any attention to the traffic. The sunlit Mediterranean was way too good a spectacle.
I slid into an empty parking space, wiped my fingerprints from the steering wheel and the gear lever, checked that no pedestrians were coming my way, and stepped out of the car.
After a shaky start, I was getting good at this spying stuff, I thought.
The dealer was mumbling, as though he might wake up pretty soon. When he did, he’d find that his gift had been returned to him. If, that is, he searched under the seats.
5
We were sitting on the terrace, overlooking the scene of the family’s latest victory over history. It was well after two p.m., but Bonne Maman didn’t seem to care. She pointed to my empty cup, and Moo-Moo, trembling only slightly at the sinfulness of it all, was forced to pour out another dose of fresh coffee.
I, meanwhile, was having to re-tell the story of the drugs in the lavender, and the date palm that had saved the family, to a rapt audience of Bonnepoires. Adults only, of course – even Sixtine had been deemed too young for this little coffee party.
The all-knowing Bonne Maman had of course seen me driving away in the BMW, and demanded a full confession from Valéry. He’d been given a right aristocratic bollocking, and was now sitting, chastened but relieved, holding hands with Elodie, who was smiling for pretty well the first time all weekend.
After dumping the car, I had found her and Sixtine swimming, and told them about the narrow escape in the BMW. Elodie had immediately rushed to a call box to inform the police anonymously where to find a groggy dealer and his stash. Consequently, she was also a heroine of the hour, and had even dared to change into an above-the-knee skirt.
The police had arrived at the bastide, sirens blazing, mere seconds after I’d driven away. They’d received a tip-off, they said, that drugs would be found in the grounds of the house, and they had a search warrant that even the Bonnepoires’ good connections couldn’t override. A collection of shirt-sleeved men and women were now poking about below us in shrubs and flower beds, accompanied by straining dogs that would – Valéry had promised – go home frustrated.
‘It seems that you do understand the importance of family after all,’ Bonne Maman told me gravely, to a flurry of nods from the others. It would have been cruel to tell her that I’d done it for my friends, not her family. ‘You can imagine the potential scandal for us. Drugs are not well viewed by the Elysée …’ She held out a hand towards Ludivine the presidential spokeslady. ‘By the banking community …’ She nodded to Mimi. ‘Or by our government’s ministries …’ She smiled at Dadou. ‘Furthermore,’ she went on, ignoring the plea in Babou’s eyes to include the tennis-court industry in her little speech, ‘Dadou has kindly agreed to look into this Louisiana matter for you.’
‘I can’t promise anything. Send me an email,’ Dadou said. It pained him to offer, but he knew that family obligations couldn’t be overlooked.
‘Valéry has assured me that this will put an end to his bad habit,’ Bonne Maman said, and her grandson nodded in furious agreement. ‘He has been a young imbecile, but perhaps with this shock he will at last become an adult. And Mademoiselle, also, has proved her loyalty.’ She nodded gratefully to Elodie. ‘Now, I am not a snob …’ at this point, a thunderbolt really ought to have come down from heaven and welded Bonne Maman’s tongue to her dentures, but someone up there was clearly in an indulgent mood today, ‘so I am willing to overlook her, uh, humble origins …’ I glanced at Elodie, who was managing very well under the circumstances to control her desire to murder the old bat, ‘… and, on behalf of the family, to consider the viability of her marriage to my grandson.’
There was a little ripple of applause at Bonne Maman’s boundless generosity, except of course from Moo-Moo, whose body contained no positive cells at all. Valéry gave Elodie a discreet peck on the cheek.
‘Providing that you change the arrangements,’ Bonne Maman added. ‘It is unthinkable that a grandson of mine should get married anywhere but in one of our family homes. So the reception must be held aux Chefs.’
‘Their chateau in the Camargue,’ Elodie whispered to me.
‘And speaking of the reception …’ Bonne Maman turned to me. ‘If Monsieur West can guarantee that it will be of the required excellence, I think that he has proved himself a capable young man, despite his tendency to contravene certain standards of common decency.’
I smiled in acknowledgement of this glowing testimony. ‘It would be a pleasure,’ I said, only remembering when Moo-Moo whimpered that uttering this word was one of those indecencies.
‘Naturally you will agree, Valéry,’ Bonne Maman concluded, ‘th
at you are obliged to change the date.’
This froze the smile on Valéry’s face. ‘But I’ve sent out the invitations,’ he objected.
‘New ones can be sent,’ Bonne Maman decreed.
‘I’ve made an appointment at the town hall for the ceremony.’
‘It can be cancelled. We know plenty of people in town halls.’
‘But Bonne Maman, the date has been set.’ Urged on by Elodie’s elbows, Valéry was putting up a fight.
‘Do you still persist in trying to contradict me, young man?’ Bonne Maman inquired with acid calm.
‘Well …’
Grandmother and grandson locked horns in a new round of argument, while Moo-Moo and Dadou made diplomatic noises in both directions, siding with Bonne Maman and trying to appease their son.
I didn’t really see what the fuss was about. So what if Valéry and Elodie had to wait a few weeks or months to get married? It wasn’t as if they were desperate to end a lifetime’s virginity. Just give in, I wanted to tell them, keep the old girl happy and life will be much sweeter.
But it wasn’t my problem. I took a long, tasty draught of coffee. With the sun reflecting gently off the distant sea, the softest of breezes wafting through the protective date palms, and the birdsong almost completely drowning out the disheartened yelps of the police dogs below us, I decided that, after a few scares, things were on the up again.
All I had to do now was keep tabs on M, so that I could stop her whacking the President.
And, from the look of things, prevent Elodie hiring the same hitman to take out Bonne Maman.
THE BEST-LAID PLANS OF VIBRATING MICE AND MEN
Marseille
1
UNPLEASANT AS IT IS to admit it, some of the world’s most famous ballads started out as chansons françaises. ‘My Way’ was originally ‘Comme d’Habitude’, by the squawking French crooner Claude François, the man who would have won a worldwide contest to find the voice least like Frank Sinatra’s. And the song that we Anglos know as ‘If You Go Away’ is a translation of ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ by Jacques Brel.