‘The flamingos will be your alarm clock,’ he said.
‘We won’t need one.’ M laughed, and I was reminded that in the past, she had been my wake-up call, climbing on board for one of her dawn quickies.
Our simple, whitewashed room was in one of the outbuildings. Its windows faced out across an unbroken expanse of grassy banks and sea-blue lake.
‘You can walk for miles out there,’ the hotel owner said. ‘Right up to the main road or down to the sea. When I was a boy we used to go out and hide in the marshes, and no one would ever find us.’
‘It’s perfect.’ M was gazing thoughtfully at the horizon.
Too damn perfect, I thought. I was making the business of assassination all too easy. Not only had I given her the President on a plate, I’d done it in the middle of a perfect getaway zone. He was going to be a sitting flamingo.
3
Since arriving at the Camargue ranch hotel, M and I had made love twice.
The previous evening, it had been a kind of consolation shag, like the last time before you break up, an intense flash of closeness and emotion before you start trying your best to be indifferent. I got the feeling that we were both doing it to relieve our stresses, too, plunging ourselves into physical sensation to forget the mental complications.
That, in any case, was how I interpreted M’s noisy, Tour-de-France-style wake-up quickie this morning. My body was an exercise bike, and she pedalled herself – and me – to exhaustion. We didn’t use her new dolphin, I must stress. It stayed in her toilet bag. I fished it out while I was brushing my teeth, and couldn’t resist giving its tail a twist so that it started its manic headbanging.
‘Hey!’ M called out from the bed.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ It was like when I’d touched her laptop that time. She really hated people meddling with her things. I switched it off and put it back in the bag. As I did so, I saw a small brown bottle in there. It looked as though she’d bought some flavoured oil from the sex shop, to go with the vibrator. I was tempted to open the bottle and sniff. If it was a tropical flavour, I thought I might annoy M by asking her whether she shouldn’t have bought something with a smaller carbon footprint.
She barged into the bathroom, a bundle of (literally) naked anger.
‘Paul, please!’ She reached out, grabbed the little brown bottle and her toilet bag and took them into the bedroom.
Not a good time to make a joke about eco-friendly sex oil, I decided.
The wedding arrangements suddenly gathered momentum, and I started to feel like a novice water-skier. I was constantly on the brink of disaster, but if I slowed down I would sink.
I had a long, absurd conversation with a furniture-hire company. They couldn’t understand why I needed to see close-up photos of their table-legs before I would agree to the hire. In the end I had to play things the French way and tell the woman I had ‘une cliente chiante’ – a customer who was as annoying as shit. This she understood, and sent me photos of some perfect, snooty-legged tables. Now all I had to do was hope they arrived in time.
I had a much shorter, but equally absurd, conversation with Jean-Marie, who was livid about the sudden doubling of the guest list. He wanted me to call Bonne Maman and ask how many kids there would be, so he could reduce the amount of food accordingly. Sure, I told him, and I’ll ask if any of the nuns in the family have taken a vow of starvation.
Back at the tea room, Benoit was infuriatingly calm. He talked me through the latest attempt at my fig pièce montée. I could almost feel the caramel hardening in real time as he spoke. Well, did it bloody work or didn’t it, I wanted to scream, but he just kept on saying, Wait, wait, before describing the next step in the process.
At last, after ten tooth-grindingly slow minutes, he ended the suspense. It had worked. The tiny kitchen at the tea room was home to a metre-high mound of caramelized figs that was too big and wide to get up the winding stairs to street level. He would have to dig a tunnel to get it out.
Before he could go and buy a pneumatic drill, I told him not to worry. He should just get himself and Gilles the cook down here, and pick up some figs on the way. They could make a new pièce montée at the chateau.
Valéry resurfaced, like a dolphin coming up for air before diving back down into a drug-infused sea. He seemed to have been thrown into a total panic by the idea that his wedding was actually going ahead, and that he might, for the first time in his and probably anyone’s life, be about to win a battle against his tyrannical granny.
He phoned me from his car. He was driving to Marseille to pick Elodie up from the station. But I was afraid he’d never get there. He had plugged his iPod into the car radio and wanted to play snatches of music for me. He seemed to think that as well as getting married, he’d also have time to DJ at his reception.
Between each burst of disco, chanson française and horrific vintage French rock ’n’ roll – and the accompanying hoots of the drivers around him as he took his eyes off the road – I tried to tell him to forget it and book a professional, but he just whooped and told me to ‘check out this’, and put on another song. In the end, I lost my temper. I yelled at him to hire a DJ and tell the guy to cue up at least one waltz to start the evening, because Elodie had been practising.
‘One what? Wulss?’ he chirruped.
‘A waltz. Une valse!’ I shouted.
There was a screech of brakes, a frantic hooting, and he rang off.
I didn’t have time to call back and see if he’d survived. I’d find out when – if – he turned up at the chateau with Elodie.
Apart from the spat about the toilet bag, things with M were relatively peaceful. In a matter of days, we’d gone from box-fresh love to adulterous suspicion to reconciliation, and now we were like middle-aged, long-term marrieds who hardly bothered talk to each other.
During one of my marathon phone sessions, she announced that she was going for a walk. It was only when I noticed the breeze that I saw she’d gone out the window, straight into the marshes. She was striding purposefully along a track towards the main road and the chateau, her small laptop backpack swinging from one shoulder.
I went to the wardrobe and looked down at her soft kit bag. The padlock was on it, but that didn’t stop me having a feel. Without pulling the bag out of its nesting place, I probed and prodded like a pianist looking for the right chord. And yes, I could feel the hard outline of her laptop in there amongst the clothes. I remembered what Léanne had said about the money taking up so little room. M was probably carrying it with her now. To hide it or deliver it?
I called Léanne and told her about this new development. She said that M was being watched from the road, and begged me not to go arousing suspicion by following her.
‘We still do not see any sign of the man she will meet,’ she said. ‘He is not here yet. You must not fry her.’
‘Fry her?’
‘Effrayer.’
‘Frighten. No, I don’t intend to frighten her away.’ Though I wished I could.
Léanne told me that Bonne Maman had arrived, and that I should go and visit the chateau. Her men were having to keep a low profile, and she wanted me to make a list of all the entrances to the main house and the outbuildings.
‘Bon courage,’ she told me. It’s what French people say before someone does something unpleasant like go to the dentist or host a birthday party for fifty kids with attention-deficit disorder. What I was doing felt like a mix of the two.
‘Chateau? Chateau? It is not a chateau, Monsieur, it is a gentilhommière.’
I’d made the mistake of trying to compliment Bonne Maman on the beauty and size of her house, and been put in my place yet again. I’d never realized there were so many nuances of French chateau-ness. It was as bad as their business with vous and tu, and when to say the ‘de’ before Bonnepoire. Nothing in France was ever simple.
‘It is the home of a gentleman,’ Bonne Maman went on. ‘In this case, my dear, late husband.’ She held out a pale hand towar
ds the portrait hanging in the hall. It was a painting of a white-haired guy in a dark suit. He was sitting on a velvet armchair with a brown speckled dog at his feet, both of them looking very pleased with life. In fact, Valéry’s granddad looked like quite a mischievous old bloke, and probably gave the servant girls the runaround. He was even giving the eye to the painting on the opposite wall, an ornately framed picture of the Virgin Mary, who bore a suspicious resemblance to Bonne Maman herself.
She was showing M and myself around the house, giving us a rundown of where she wanted various things to happen.
I had intended to drive over alone, but on my way I’d come across M walking by the roadside. I’d waved hello, not planning to stop, but she’d flagged me down and climbed into the passenger seat. She was obviously keen to have a snoop around inside the chateau, and I’d dished up the opportunity on a plate. Not a good move.
The salon, Bonne Maman said, was where she would receive the President. No one else was to be allowed in here.
This news appeared to interest M a lot, and she went over to the window as if to inspect the thickness of the glass. I could imagine it shattering into the President’s eyes as a bullet crashed through. I’d have to tell Léanne not to let him admire the view.
‘Can we see the kitchens?’ I asked.
‘Of course.’ Bonne Maman led us into the corridor again, and past a gigantic carved staircase. Lodged beneath it was a wire-fronted, wardrobe-like gun cabinet, stocked with half a dozen rusting old shotguns. No danger to the President there, I thought. Pull the trigger on one of those and you’d probably lose your face.
We went through a double door into a cool, chequer-tiled zone of the house. First there was a square serving room with a long wooden table and, against one wall, a chunky metal safe.
‘For the silver,’ Bonne Maman told us. ‘We won’t be using it for Valéry’s wedding. Except at the President’s table, of course.’
There was also a large panel of bells, maybe twenty of them, each labelled with the name of a room. Grand salon, petit salon, salle à manger, several chambres – there were even bells for the bathrooms.
The kitchen was dominated by an immense fireplace, maybe ten feet wide. It was basically a giant rôtisserie under a chimney. There was also a central range with at least ten cooking rings. In its heyday, the kitchen could have served up a dozen different types of porridge to the family every morning.
Off the kitchen was a door with an ancient keyhole big enough to get two fingers in.
‘The wine cellar,’ Bonne Maman said. ‘Only I have the key.’
‘Can we get directly from the kitchen into the, uh, park?’ I asked, and was relieved to find that I’d actually used the right word for once.
‘Yes, come.’ Bonne Maman led us through a glass-paned door, and we emerged at the back of the house, in a small kitchen garden. There was a path around to the grounds at the side, where I intended to put the barbecue. It would be relatively easy to transport food to and fro during the reception.
‘And that is the chapel.’ Bonne Maman was pointing beyond the kitchen garden to a cuboid building with a small cross at the centre of its pyramid roof. ‘That is where Monsieur le Président will perform the ceremony. The civil ceremony, that is, which will be followed by the religious ceremony. We are lucky,’ she added. ‘Until recently, we Catholics had to go to a town hall first, then to a church. These days, God still comes in second place behind a bureaucrat, but fortunately the rules have eased about where one can hold the civil ceremony, so we no longer have to go to some administrative office.’
‘You will all be in there?’ I asked. The chapel was tiny, no bigger than a bandstand. Knowing Elodie, there would hardly be room for her dress.
‘Yes, the President, the curé and the immediate family.’ The old girl seemed to be delighted at the way the architecture of her house was going to impose the required elitism on proceedings.
I was pleased, too. No one was going to pop the President during the wedding vows. Unless the priest had agreed to do the job. I’d have to remind Léanne to frisk his cassock.
‘Excellent,’ I said. I thanked Bonne Maman, and told her we would leave her in peace for now.
‘Oh, would it be possible to take a short walk around the park?’ M asked. ‘It is so beautiful.’
Bonne Maman smiled at her, clearly appreciating M’s perfect French, and – I thought – assessing her suitability as a potential source of new gene material for the family. There were probably dozens of horny young male Bonnepoires who would love a blonde wife like her.
‘No, no,’ I told M in French. ‘You must come with me. I need your help.’ I took her arm and escorted her gently but firmly from the scene of her future crime.
‘What was that about?’ she demanded as we got in the car. She was looking suspicious again.
‘Let’s quit while we’re ahead. We’ve got to keep in the old bitch’s good books,’ I said, pretty convincingly. ‘Besides, I really would like you to come along. I want to go and taste some oils. I mean olive oil, of course, not one of those perfumed oils you’re so fond of.’
She pretended not to know what I was talking about.
When we got back to the chateau, Benoit and Gilles the chef were being given a hard time by the cowboy, the gardian, whose name, we found out, was Monsieur Yena. No one had told him to expect two strange men bearing crates of figs, and he was trying to hold them at bay with a long pole that ended in a pointy, crescent-shaped metal tip.
I sidetracked him by asking what he thought the weather was going to be like on Saturday, a question that had him almost bursting out of his bull-motif shirt with self-importance. He launched into a long speech about the way the bull was facing, and how far from the river the egrets and herons were hunting frogs, and concluded that the weather would be sunny and ‘tranquil’, adding that his favourite TV weather girl agreed.
All of which gave Benoit and Gilles ample time to colonize the kitchen with their fruit and equipment.
Monsieur Yena and I unloaded the olive oil, and I gave his wife a couple of bottles as compensation for usurping her in the kitchen.
When I came out again, I saw that M was making use of her free time to inspect all the main house’s exits. I even thought I caught sight of her filming something with her phone. A trickle of sweat chilled my spine.
I interrupted her research by asking her to check out the large green van that was heading slowly towards us down the drive. She went and met the driver and pointed him towards me. It turned out to be the champagne-maker. He’d driven all the way down with my order. Not very carbon-neutral, but it was worth it to see the smile on the guy’s face.
I realized, of course, that he hadn’t come just to meet his satisfied English customer. As he said hello, his eyes were flicking around for signs of presidential presence. And he told me that he’d been interviewed by a man at the gate, who said he’d come to take photos of all the wedding guests and suppliers as they arrived. The guy had asked him if he knew when the President was arriving.
Oh merde, I thought. The photographer hadn’t been there – or hadn’t shown himself – when M and I came in. He must have been hiding. He might not be a photographer at all. I asked M to show the champagne guy to the wine cellar, and snuck off to call Léanne.
She wasn’t in a good mood.
‘You have told everyone that the President is coming?’ she snapped.
‘If I hadn’t, most of the suppliers would have told me to get lost. They would have said it was too short notice. Do you know who the guy is on the gate?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘a photographer from the local newspaper. Others will come soon. Probably TV. In a way it is not bad, because now we can put visible police there. Everyone will think it is normal security. But you must not discuss the President’s visit with anyone else, please, Pol. We must not give M or her associates the idea that there will be too many police around the chateau. They must not be afraid to come.’
&n
bsp; I agreed and apologized, but I was thinking the opposite. Wouldn’t it be great if the place was so overrun with guests, media and security that the killer called the job off? Elodie and Valéry could simply get married, have a dance and a meal with their family and friends, and not spend their wedding night being interviewed by police and forced to watch security footage of the President getting his head blown off.
I wondered how Elodie would feel if she knew that her only chance of marrying Valéry on Saturday and pocketing his inheritance was by exposing the President to possible assassination.
Actually, I could guess her answer.
Let him get shot, she would have said, as long as he marries us first.
THE BEST MARRIAGES END IN DEATH
The Camargue
1
IT WAS FRIDAY, the day before the wedding. For the past twenty-four hours, family members had been turning up at the chateau in vast numbers. I quickly stopped saying ‘Did we meet in Saint Tropez?’ because except for Valéry’s closest uncles and aunts, I had no idea who was who.
As soon as Moo-Moo arrived, she attached herself to Bonne Maman, and the two of them toured the grounds dishing out kisses and head-pats to family, and showing the deliverers of furniture and food who was boss.
Dadou, meanwhile, dressed up in gardian gear and went off riding, his too-clean trousers bouncing up and down on his shiny saddle as he and Monsieur Yena disappeared into the marshes.
That was where M had disappeared, too. After two days of trying to keep her in my sights, I’d had to give up and concentrate on getting things organized. In any case, the only people she was likely to be exchanging furtive glances with now were Bonnepoires, and none of them were going to whack the man who was about to bestow the ultimate honour upon their family.
Dial M for Merde Page 23