‘No,’ I said, ‘I am a passenger.’
‘Well it is very difficult to hear you. Honestly, it is impossible to have a conversation.’
Well why did you bloody call me, then, I thought, but managed to apologize politely. I’d recognized the voice. It was Bonne Maman. The first woman must have been Moo-Moo, playing secretary. They seemed to have confiscated Valéry’s phone.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked.
‘You know about the President?’ Bonne Maman said, sounding slightly gruff. She had been outwitted, after all, forced to agree to the date she didn’t want.
‘Yes, excellent news. What an honour for your family.’
‘It is an honour,’ she conceded. ‘And the reception must be à la hauteur.’ Meaning, of an appropriately high standard. ‘So I am obliged to ask you whether you are capable of organizing a wedding of this calibre?’
Incredibly arrogant, but straight to the point.
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I am driving to the Camargue now. My staff in Paris are beginning preparations.’
‘But do you have enough people to organize an event of national importance?’
National importance was right, I thought. If I couldn’t persuade Léanne to keep the President away from the wedding, it was going to go down in French history. It’d be listed on the web alongside Faure’s blowjob.
‘Certainement,’ I said. ‘We are going to employ many, er, employees.’
‘And what about the tables?’
Ah, yes, the non-vulgar furniture.
‘We will find excellent tables, classy ones, with wooden legs,’ I promised her. ‘But what I must know is the number of guests. Valéry told me two hundred. Is that correct?’
‘Ha!’ She barked a laugh as though she had just seen Valéry fall out of the hammock again. ‘Two hundred might have been enough for his little private arrangement, but he has seventy cousins and second-cousins, you know, and half of them are married with children, and now that the President is coming, we must say, oh, at least three hundred and fifty.’
Wow, I thought. I’d have to give Benoit the bad news pretty damn quick. And Jean-Marie, too. As father of the bride, I assumed he’d be footing the food bill.
‘I will do the table plan myself,’ Bonne Maman said. ‘I, of course, will be placed next to the President.’
‘Of course,’ I said, thinking that if the poor guy actually survived till dinner, Bonne Maman would have to watch where she put her feet. One false move and she might kick Ludivine the spokeswoman, who’d no doubt be under the table keeping the head of state amused between courses.
It wasn’t till we stopped to have a sandwich in the Roman amphitheatre at Arles that I managed to get in a quick call to Léanne.
Despite its antiquity, the amphitheatre is a living stadium, and blood is still shed there – these days it’s bulls who get sacrificed to the crowds rather than gladiators and Christians. For this reason, inside the old walls, there are towering metal grandstands around a modern sandy arena. I clanged to the top, telling M I wanted to get a good view of the city. She stayed down below, stretched out on one of the original stone steps that still serve as seating.
As soon as I reached the highest point in the metal grandstand, I took out my phone as if I’d just received a call.
‘Ah, Valéry,’ I announced loudly, to test whether this was one of those ancient theatres where you could hear someone farting from a hundred yards away. No, my voice trailed off towards the blue horizon.
Turning my back to M so that I faced the thick grey arches of the outer wall, I speed-dialled Léanne. She answered straight away.
‘You are going to stop the President coming to the wedding?’ I asked.
‘No.’
I felt a stab of panic.
‘But you must. He does know what’s going on, doesn’t he?’ It struck me that secrecy is such an integral part of French life that the police might not warn him until the gunman actually had him in his telescopic sight.
‘Naturally he does. Do you think that he accepted to go to this marriage because your friend Jean-Marie invited him? It is our plan.’
Of course. How stupid of me to think that any of us mere citizens of the world might be influencing events. Just looking out over Arles, you could see that France never really changed. The ancient square-topped spires, the distant blue of the Rhône, the low horizon of evergreen trees. There were modern details in there, but the view had probably changed little in two thousand years.
‘My plan was that he wouldn’t turn up.’
‘That would not work. Criminals are not stupid. This way we are sure that the criminal will come.’
‘But the President might get shot,’ I said.
‘No, no.’ She laughed. ‘His plan is, he will go there, survive, then tell the media of his courage. At the moment he suffers a little in the sondages.’
‘The polls?’
‘Yes. He will win ten, twenty per cent for this.’ She laughed again. ‘Chirac had this when he was attacked. And he did not know of the attack on him. A President who knows the danger, and takes the risk? He will be a hero. Impossible to defeat in the next election. It is an intelligent tactic.’
Bloody hell, I thought, these politicians really will do anything to get elected.
‘So you, Pol, you must simply stay with M, yes?’
‘I’m trying.’ I turned to make sure M wasn’t watching. Which she was. Damn. I waved down, and shrugged an apology that I was on the phone. Again, I hoped I hadn’t overdone the naturalness.
‘Do not follow her if she goes to a meeting, please. It is more interesting for us to see the people she does not meet. Maybe she will pass a man, just look at him, you know, eye-to-eye, to give a signal. Maybe in a hotel or restaurant, a man who says nothing, just like when I was there in Collioure, you know?’
‘Yes.’ I remembered those naive days when I thought that she was simply a lonely woman who was coming on to me.
‘It is difficult, I know, Pol. It must be hard to stay with her now that you know everything about her. Especially at night, yes?’
‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘Bloody difficult.’
‘I know, and I regret this, honestly. I would prefer really that you were not forced to play Mata Hari for us. Especially because …’
‘Yes?’ I didn’t like the way she had trailed off in mid-sentence.
‘Well, you know the way it went for Mata Hari.’
‘No.’ I knew she’d been an exotic dancer and a bit of a high-class hooker, but I didn’t think I was in danger of becoming either of those.
‘Ah. Well, when she was a spy for France, she was arrested.’
‘By the Germans?’ No danger of that, either, in my case.
‘No, by the French. She was a – how did you say? – a caterer?’
‘She was arrested for catering?’
‘No, no, how do you say, you know – someone who is un traître.’
‘A traitor?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Léanne laughed at our old confusion.
‘So what happened to her?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ Léanne said dismissively, ‘she was shot.’
2
I came down from the Arles skyline feeling somewhat light-headed.
‘Problems?’ M asked me when I joined her on the warm stone steps.
Yes, a big one, I wanted to say – you.
‘Oh, it’s Valéry,’ I told her. ‘He’s coked up again. I just hope he comes down for the ceremony. We want it to be a great day for Elodie, don’t we?’
I looked closely into M’s eyes to see if she would flinch. She didn’t disappoint.
I wondered again why the hell she was doing this. She didn’t strike me as profoundly evil, or violent. She seemed to like sturgeon more than people, but I’d never heard stories of the President torturing fish or filling jacuzzis with illegal caviar. And surely no one would kill a French leader for political reasons – they hardly seem to bother with politic
s. They’re much too busy enjoying their presidential chateaux, getting their photo in Paris-Match and going on sunny foreign trips.
So why the sudden need to off the chef d’état?
It would have been so wonderfully simple to ask.
On the western side of the Rhône, the shadows seemed to lengthen, as if they had more room to spread out in the flat, expansive landscape of the Camargue. The straight road ran between empty, swaying beds of wispy-headed reeds. To right and left there were boggy rice paddies and meadows. Milky-grey horses, grazing hoof-deep in the swamp, looked up to watch us pass. One of them was being ridden by a gleaming-white egret, pecking insects from the horse’s back. A huge cloud of starlings swirled across an immense flat sky that was like a sheet of blue-tinted glass propped up on the horizon. It was a good, moody background for a heart-to-heart, I decided.
‘Do you mind me asking about your dad?’ I asked, studying M’s profile for a reaction.
She continued to stare out of the windscreen for a few seconds before answering. ‘What about him?’
‘How old were you? Three, you said?’
‘Yes. I can hardly remember him. Most of my memories come from photos.’
‘It was an accident, right?’
‘I’d rather not talk about it.’ She shook her head. ‘But in case you’re wondering, he’s the reason why I won’t use black pens any more.’
I remembered that she’d insisted on using a blue one in Collioure. ‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Well, before his, er, accident’ – she obviously didn’t like the word – ‘he wrote a letter. My mother got it after he died. She showed it to me when I was old enough to read. And it was written in thick black felt pen. So now I only use thin blue pens.’
‘And what did it say? If you don’t mind my asking.’
‘The ink had soaked through the paper, you could hardly read it any more. But basically he was saying that he missed me and Maman, and—’ She stopped speaking suddenly. She’d given away too much.
‘Maman? She was French?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘So that explains how you knew those crap French songs in Bandol,’ I said, teasing her.
She laughed. ‘Yes. My mother’s record collection would make you weep.’
‘And that’s why you speak such good French.’
‘Yes.’
I didn’t remind her that she’d explained away her excellent French by trying to tell me that it was the language of international oceanographers, or some such bullshit.
‘Why was your dad writing to you?’ I asked. ‘He was away somewhere, was he? On his boat?’
‘Yes. On the other side of the world. But it wasn’t his boat. He was a photographer.’
‘Underwater photography?’ I hazarded, but it was a question too far.
‘I really don’t like talking about it, Paul, sorry. Now where are we headed exactly?’
I studied the map and let out a whistle of admiration. The chateau was such an important landmark that it warranted a little rectangle of its own, with its name alongside, the Mas des Chefs. The Bonnepoires were an integral part of French geography.
We saw it coming from at least a kilometre away, when a jungle suddenly sprang up in the flat emptiness, hemmed in by a high, moss-covered stone wall. There were more trees in the family’s grounds than in the rest of the Camargue put together.
A faded sign, gold on green, pointed us to a gap in the wall. The gates were open. This time, there didn’t seem to be a second driveway, so M turned in, and once we’d broken through the ring of trees, the grounds opened out to reveal what looked like a Mississippi plantation – a huge house set on a river bank, surrounded by a patchwork of meadows and deep drainage streams. A lone black bull with long, pointed horns, grazing in a fenced-off enclosure, observed our arrival.
‘Bloody hell,’ I said. ‘The Saint Tropez bastide was a cottage compared to this.’
‘Do we just drive up to the front door?’ M asked.
‘Why not?’ There didn’t seem to be any other option.
She edged the car respectfully along the gravel driveway that was lined not with closely planted date palms but with tall, airy plane trees.
‘If anyone asks,’ I said, ‘don’t call all this the garden, will you? It has to be a park at the very least. The old bat probably calls it her savanna or something.’
‘Where will you hold your barbecue?’ M asked. She was looking right and left, taking it all in, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was being an idiot. How could I have been mad enough to let her case the joint?
‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. The least I could do was keep her guessing about where exactly her man would have to aim his rifle.
Beside an outbuilding bigger than most French family homes, we saw a leaf-strewn tennis court – no doubt Uncle Babou’s contribution. And then, a mere kilometre or so later, we pulled up outside the chateau and got a close look at it.
It was a proud triple-cube of a building, three storeys high and made of sand-coloured stone, with a small central tower that was festooned with chimneys shaped like castle turrets. It was too bulky and angular to be especially beautiful, but it was somehow very sure of its importance. A lot like most of the Bonnepoire family members I’d seen.
Getting out of the car, I saw that the house had humorous little touches – grinning, clownish faces carved into the façade and, sticking out at roof level, long gargoyles in the shape of cannons – or maybe penises. Poor Moo-Moo probably got hot flushes every time she came here.
Lizards were scampering up the walls and diving behind the spiky palms that were growing in huge pots on either side of the double front doors. There was a large metal bell-handle set into the doorframe, but before I could grab it, there was a crunching sound on the driveway behind me, and a bull-like roar.
I turned to see some kind of cowboy marching towards me. He was wearing tight black trousers, a black shirt and a trilby hat.
‘There’s no visit,’ he shouted.
‘No, we’re not tourists,’ I answered.
‘It’s private property.’ He rolled his Rs and pronounced every bit of every syllable. His was the strongest southern accent I’d heard so far.
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘we know.’
‘There’s no visit,’ he repeated, as if I was deaf. He walked right up to me, and came to breathe horsily in my face. Or my chest, anyway. He was a little barrel of a man, about sixty years old, red-faced and red-eyed. The only thing preventing him from coming any closer was his stomach, which stuck out above a thick belt and held him at bay. I saw now that his bulging black shirt was in fact white, with a crowded motif of tiny black bulls. He was eyeing me as though I was an Apache walking into his saloon.
‘We have come for the wedding,’ I said.
‘What wedding? There’s no wedding.’
‘Hasn’t Madame Bonnepoire called you?’
‘Madame Bonnepoire?’ He looked doubly suspicious now. I was not just an intrusive tourist. I knew things about the family.
‘Yes, Bonne Maman,’ I said, and he blanched. Like Moo-Moo, he clearly thought the use of the nickname was blasphemous. ‘Valéry will marry here on Saturday,’ I added quickly. ‘I am the traitor, er, caterer. I would like to look and see where we can have the barbecue, the place for the tables, everything.’
The cowboy shook his head.
‘It is new news,’ I said. ‘Ask Bonne – er, Madame Bonnepoire.’
He puffed like a bull about to charge. ‘Madame tells me everything. If she has not told me there is a wedding, there’s no wedding.’
Time for a diplomatic change of tack, I thought.
‘You must be the guardian of the chateau,’ I said. ‘So I understand your, er …’ I didn’t know how to say caution, but it didn’t matter, because he was puffing even louder.
‘I’m not a guardian. I’m a guardian,’ he said, somewhat confusingly.
‘Ah.’
‘You understand???
?
‘Yes. Er, no.’
‘I’m a guardian.’
‘Right.’
‘You understand?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘You don’t understand anything, do you?’ He called me tu, as if I was one of the lizards peeking out at us from behind the plant pots.
M stepped up to save the day.
‘He’s not a gardee-an, a concierge,’ she explained. ‘He’s a gardee-on, a Camargue cowboy.’
So it was an accent thing.
‘Biyeng, biyeng,’ he congratulated M. ‘You understand now?’ he asked me, his mouth still only a few inches below my chin.
‘Yes, I understand,’ I said. ‘Now can we look at the chateau, please?’
‘Non, foutez le kang,’ he said, the local way of telling us to get lost.
It was my own fault. I should have asked Bonne Maman to call the guy and set him straight.
‘Well, can you recommend a good hotel?’ I asked him.
‘What do you take me for, the tourist office? A travel agency? The chamber of commerce?’ He herded us to the car, savouring every word of his parting speech. He was still listing possible sources of hotel information as we drove back towards the road. I just wished he could have recited the phone numbers as well.
We headed towards Saintes Maries de la Mer, the nearest coastal town.
‘That’s where the commando told me he’d seen a sturgeon,’ I reminded M.
‘Yeah.’ She didn’t seem especially excited.
‘Will you be going out to have a scout around?’
‘Maybe,’ she said. Her mind was clearly on bigger fish.
Only a few clicks down the road, we found a hotel. It was a typical Camargue place, a huddle of low white buildings on an oasis of solid ground in the marshes. The driveway was a ribbon of tarmac between two lakes, and flamingos were wandering around on either side of the track, squeaking and grunting like a gang of impatient parking attendants. They strutted along on their stiff, gaudy-pink legs, their long necks hoovering up food from the inch-deep water. As we passed, one of them flapped its wings, showing a sudden flash of black and blood-red.
Behind the main hacienda-style building, there was a horse-training enclosure, and a faint whiff of dung was blowing across the car park. I was afraid that we were in for another cowboy-style welcome, but the guy at reception was incredibly pleasant, and said he had a perfect little room looking out across the nature reserve.